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 Geekzone | Apple iTunes Getting New Movies Same Day as DVD DailyTech - Although the vast majority of all sales of movies are done on DVD, likely at mass market locations such as Wal-Mart, there is a slowly growing population of those who are playing for digital downloads. Apple’s iTunes Challenges The DVD Industry Apple to Take on Movie DVDs |
 Bigmouthmedia News | Google offers snapshot of VisualRank efforts CNET News.com - Google is starting to provide a fuller picture of the work it's undertaking to create a practical tool for image searches. On its Google Research blog Thursday, the company offered a brief introduction to VisualRank, a system that sorts out images by ... Google To Fine-Tune Image Searches Visually Impaired Search |
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 Earthtimes (press release) | Japan: April PSP Sales Top Wii & DS Combined Next Generation - By Tom Ivan Sony’s PSP outsold the DS and Wii combined during April in Japan, although Nintendo’s home console trounced the PS3 in the sales department. Sony PSP outsells Nintendo DS 2-to-1 in Japan in April Asus Working On Xbox 360 With Built-in Blu-ray |
 Sydney Morning Herald | The Giant Squid – An Agile Predator Of The Dark Antarctic Waters eFluxMedia - By Dee Chisamera The story of the giant squid captured last year in the cold waters of the Ross Sea has fascinated not only marine scientists, but also people all over the world, who tune in every day on Te Papa Tongarewa Museum’s website to watch the ... Colossal Squid Has Glowing "Cloaking Device," Huge Eyes Giant squid has world's largest eyes |
 GameSHOUT | GTA IV game smashes sales records BBC News - Critically acclaimed video game Grand Theft Auto (GTA) IV is on course to beat the record for highest first week sales of any video game. Video: Sex And Violence In Games (CBS News) GTA IV Review |
 Digitaltrends.com | Adobe opens up Flash on mobiles BBC News - Adobe has announced a plan to try to get its Flash player installed on more mobile devices and set-top boxes. Dubbed Open Screen the initiative lifts restrictions on how its multimedia handling software can be used. Adobe Drives "Open Screen Project" Adobe moves to broaden Flash reach |
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Today on Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits TechShop, an open-access public workshop that's kind of like a health club with heavy machinery and sparks instead of treadmills. Tinkerers, inventors, and hackers pay a membership fee, and in turn receive access to professionally-maintained gear, workshops, mentors, and a community of like-minded makers.
Link to Boing Boing tv episode, with discussion and downloadable video.
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Currently there is only one TechShop site in Silicon Valley, and it opened in 2006. But founder Jim Newton (a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster) plans to open a number of locations around the US -- and eventually, the rest of the world.
John Todd, who you'll meet in this episode, wrote this article about the membership-based machine and fabrication shop in a recent edition of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools zine. Snip:
I've been a member since before TechShop really even started, back when it was just some guys passing out flyers trying to gauge interest. For $100 a month, members can use any tool in the shop on which they've received training. MUCH cheaper than buying your own gear. The list of equipment is pretty extensive, too, and new items are arriving frequently (like a new hot-wire foam cutter).John shares an additional note with BBtv about the company's business model:
TechShop is unusual in the way it's funded - community members are the financial backers. To date, TechShop has been funded by taking loans from members and repaying them at a nominal rate. Typically backers contribute $25k and up, and are then paid back over several years. There is an "A" round being raised now to fund the nationwide expansion, and the first funding source again is going to be the community instead of focusing on traditional VC sources. It's an unusual way to keep members excited about what they do at TechShop, and to keep them focused on making the whole experience better. Jim Newton (CEO) and Mark Hatch (COO) are looking for additional interested people who want to become members and funders - contact TechShop for details.In part two of today's episode, we take a joyride in a three-wheeled electric car.
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 Canada.com | Aussie game charts: April 21-27 GameSpot - By James Kozanecki, GameSpot AU Wii owners pounced at Mario Kart Wii last week, giving it enough momentum to leap straight into first place in the overall Australian game charts for the week of April 21-April 27, according to data trackers GfK ... Review: Online play makes `Mario Kart Wii' a must-have Things That Make You Go Vroom |
 Bigmouthmedia News | The IBM-Google connection CNET News.com - LOS ANGELES--Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt gave a speech and chatted with IBM's CEO Sam Palmisano onstage Thursday at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference here. Google and IBM are bonding in a serious way IBM CEO Palmisano Says New Trends Will Spur Old Company |
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Joi Ito tells Boing Boing about an online game by human rights organization Breakthrough, called ICED ("I Can End Deportation"). The object of the game is to become a US Citizen. Joi says,
It's a game for kids teaching them about their rights and trying to stop abusive anti-due-process stuff the INS is doing. It's a amazing story and a great site.From the website...
ICED puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights. These laws affect all immigrants: legal residents, those fleeing persecution, students and undocumented people.
Whether Iron Man lives up to the standard set by movies like Spider-Man or flounders like an armor-clad Daredevil, the flick boasts a hidden gem for comics fans. Like most movies based on Marvel characters, it will feature a cameo by comic book legend Stan Lee.
Lee, along with artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, created many of the Marvel superheroes soaring across movie screens, including the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Incredible Hulk.
Wired.com talked with Lee about making his beloved cameos, competing with William Shatner and popping up with a bevy of blondes in Iron Man.
Wired: I understand you're a busy man, so I'm going to cut to the chase here. You obviously have an incredible body of work, but I'd like to talk specifically about your work in the field of cameos.
Stan Lee: Oh, that's my specialty.
Wired: There's a compilation on YouTube of your cameos in Marvel movies (see embedded clip).
Lee: Really?
Wired: Yeah, it's really fun to watch.
Lee: You know, thing that's good about it, it's a field that I seem to have all to myself. There's no competition.
Wired: Certainly not in the world of superhero movies. I assume you have a cameo in Iron Man?
Lee: A great one, wait till you see it. It's very funny, I think.
Wired: Do you have any lines?
Lee: Yeah, actually I have a line.
Wired: Do you want to tell?
Lee: I don't want to spoil your fun. I'll give you this much of a clue: I'm standing with my arms around three beautiful blond girls. You're saying to yourself, "What on earth can that be all about?" You'll have to see the movie to find out!
Wired: Did you get to pick the girls?
Lee: They were supplied to me. I tried to take as long as I could, we did a thousand takes. I kept making a mistake on purpose each time.
Wired: [Laughs.]
Lee: I'm only kidding. It was really great, and it went well. Usually you go to a movie set, sometimes the people are nervous, or worried or they're depressed. This was such a pleasant and happy set. Everyone enjoyed what they were doing, knowing that it was turning out great.
Wired: When you do a cameo, do they just zoom you in and zoom you out of there, or do you hang out all day with the stars?
Lee: I don't really hang out that long, because I don't have that much time. But it takes a few hours, and even though the cameo might be something that's on screen for a few seconds, they're so cautious. They think they'll need me at, let's say three o'clock. They'll ask me to get there at 11 in the morning so that they'll know I'm there.... So I go in my trailer, and I wait! And then, about an hour before the time comes to do the cameo, I go to makeup. And there's all kinds of makeup put on my face, as everybody does in the movie. As if it really matters if my nose is a little shiny or something.
And then I go to wardrobe, and it doesn't matter what the role is, it could be the simplest thing. I could be a guy walking in the street, but I'm not allowed to wear my own clothes. Wardrobe has to decide for me. It's really fun, it's a totally indescribable experience.
Wired: How did you get into this? Did you go to the people making the movies and say, "Hey, I created these characters, can I be in the movie?" or did they come to you?
Lee: Let's see, I think the first one was in the X-Men movie, I think Bryan Singer, the director, said, "Hey, how'd you like to be in one of the scenes?" I said, "I never say 'no.'"
Wired: That's why you're so busy.
Lee: And he put me in the background, selling hot dogs, so I was only in there for a second of the film. Then, somebody else got the idea. They're always asking, they were always asking me. Of course now, when I meet anybody who's in the movie business, the first thing I say is, "I'm available." I'm thinking of taking out a full-page ad in Variety.
Wired: Do you have a favorite cameo you've done?
Lee: Oh, I love 'em all. I particularly like the one I did in Spider-Man where I spoke to Peter Parker for a minute, I told him that one man can make a difference.
I liked the one I did in The Incredible Hulk where Lou Ferrigno and I came out of a building, and I was telling him not to worry, I'd protect him. And I liked the one that I did in The Fantastic Four where they didn't allow me to come to the wedding of Reed and Sue.
I liked where I was the postman in the first Fantastic Four movie. The more I can say and do the more I like it. I really am a ham.
Wired: You created Willy Lumpkin, that postman character in Fantastic Four. What was that like, playing a character you made up?
Lee: Well, I'm not sure I was happy with that. The way I had him drawn, he was even funnier-looking than I am. But it was fun.
Wired: You also do voiceover work, I remember very fondly your work on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. I think arguably that was the best part of the show.
Lee: Yeah, I've often narrated shows, or I do introductions to the shows, perhaps I even play a little role. In The Simpsons, I played myself in an episode. As I say, it is such fun. And if you're only doing little things, you don't have to worry about carrying the weight of the show. It's like you have all the fun and none of the responsibility.
Wired: Do you prefer doing voiceover work or cameo work?
Lee: Oh, both. In fact, I would love to be in a picture, I would love to really have a role in a film, but the problem is I don't have the time. You can't just come for a few hours then go home, it's day after day after day. So all I can do is get this hamminess out of my system doing cameos whenever they let me.
Wired: There's that Doctor Strange movie coming out -- I really think you could go out for the lead there.
Lee: [Laughs.] A few years ago, I sure would have loved to. A few years? Maybe 40 or 50 years. I'd have loved to have played any of 'em!
You know, the one role I always would have wished to play was in Spider-Man, J. Jonah Jameson. I always kind of modeled him after me: He's not too bright, and he's a loudmouth, and he's wrong about everything. I could have played that superbly.
Wired: I think if there is someone out there who is in the cameo biz as well, it would be William Shatner. I just want to say that if you two ever end up with cameos in the same movie, I will buy that DVD.
Lee: He had this television interview show for a while, and I was one of his guests. He interviewed me for a half-hour or so, and I found him to be the nicest guy, and a bright guy, and a very good interviewer. And that was the only time I had met him, but I was very impressed with him, and I would hate to think that I now gotta compete with him in these cameos. I'd better get an agent! He's probably already got one.
Wired: Thanks a lot -- I look forward to seeing Iron Man.
Lee: Sure thing, and if you hear of anybody who's looking for a cameo person, you now know my number.
I'll just get this up front: I enormously enjoyed Grand Theft Auto IV.
But here's the thing: It's kind of hard to explain why.
There's no single thing to point to -- no must-see scene, no gotta-do moment of gameplay, no deliriously fun weapon. No, the game's pleasures come in weird, subtle, unexpected moments.
Let me give you an example. At one point, I was having a typically thuggish day: I'd killed a few drug dealers with a semiautomatic, and while trying to flee, whoops -- I accidentally rear-ended a cop car. Then it was a car chase, all wailing sirens and shrieking pedestrians diving out of the way, before totaling my SUV in a brutal collision and escaping on foot. A total Hillary Clinton nightmare, in other words.
I finally escaped by ducking into a subway station, and while catching my breath, I decided to explore a bit. That's when I stumbled upon a lovely piece of artwork: A huge mosaic of a subway train on the second level. It looked precisely like the mosaics you see in the New York City subway, except even more ambitious and gorgeous. And I was thinking, "Man, who put this thing here? Who thinks of this stuff?"
Well, Rockstar Games did. The Rockstar developers are utterly in love with the idea of the American city: the riot of decay and grandeur, the garish commercialism, the violence and beauty, the architectural delights hidden in every corner. With GTA IV, Rockstar has produced an ode to urban life. Which is to say, they're not really giving you a game to play with -- they're giving you a city.
Rockstar invented the sandbox game, and with this GTA, it has pretty much perfected it. As with previous games in the series, you play as a minor thug climbing the crime ladder by fulfilling missions. But you can totally ignore the missions and simply go exploring, eavesdropping or conducting physics experiments by jumping motorcycles off rooftops.
Since this version of Liberty City is modeled loosely on New York City, the game is satisfying merely as a driving sim -- you can spend hours cruising around and admiring the garish fluorescence of Times Square, the corroded projects of the Bronx, the Russian mob scene flourishing beneath the rattling subway tracks of lower Brooklyn (neighborhoods that in the game are dubbed, respectively, Algonquin, Bohan and Broker).
The attention to street-culture detail is obsessive, practically Sistine. Each street corner is a piece of randomly generated theater: Primly dressed art students wander around with portfolio cases, homeless crack addicts mutter to themselves as they brush past hipster dudes toting Starbuckian sleeves of coffee. Like all the in-game voice acting, the ambient dialogue is both superbly acted and super weird. ("I forgot to tell you, I need more socks. They are all fucked!" brayed a Russian émigré into his mobile phone as I wandered by.)
This is the same self-regulating anarchy that inspired Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
So you could just street-watch. But once you engage the main "story," the plot line is so appealing that it's hard to stop. In GTA IV you play as Niko Bellic, a just-off-the-boat Serbian immigrant who is scarred by his experience in the Balkan wars. You're nursing some secrets, yet trying to start new. Starting new isn't easy, because you're immediately trying to pay off your ne'er-do-well cousin's debts, which means doing the bidding of various low-fi gangsters. Soon you're hip-deep in intrigue -- whacking drug dealers, stealing contraband and generally breaking the hell out of the law.
The game isn't a celebration of gangster life. GTA never was; for all their bad-boy reputation, Rockstar's designers are adept satirists of American excess. Indeed, they pretty much share Charles Dickens' moral view, wherein those in the big city who gain power are inevitably corrupted by it. (I nearly drove off the road several times while shaking with laughter at the parodies of right-wing talk radio -- complete with incoherent, anti-immigrant nativists, slavishly pro-government commentators on the Weasel News network and ads for "baby buying" services.)
GTA IV's men are filled with sexist bluster -- particularly when women aren't around -- and the Russian and Balkan gangsters are sloppy psychological messes, often because they spent time in war prisons abroad. (Rockstar's choice of Eastern European mobsters for this game, actually, adds a nice frisson, because this is the one criminal class left in America that hasn't been glamorized: They're simply scary as shit, in real life as in the game.)
Interestingly, Niko is the most likable hero in the GTA series. He's a curiously cordial dating partner -- and you'll go on a lot of dates. Indeed, in a Hollywood-like cellphone irony, your girlfriend will often call to chat while you're in the middle of a gunfight or car chase.
The game also lets you exercise a bit of your own moral code when you're given a few key opportunities to disobey your gangster bosses. (I chose to set free someone I'd been given a contract to kill, on the promise that he leave town -- though I'm wondering if that decision will come back to haunt me as I continue to play.)
As for the game's controls? Very little is new, but it's all improved. Executing your missions is more fun than in any GTA game before, because Rockstar has neatly tweaked some of the mechanics that annoyed many lightweight players like me in the past. You're much more accurate with your gun early on (a fact cleverly explained by Niko's status as a war veteran), and each time you fail a mission, you're given an option to immediately replay it, which speeds up the game immeasurably.
In previous games, the complexity of GTA's cities often left you maddeningly lost during time-sensitive missions. This time, an in-game GPS service highlights the fastest route to drive -- a trick that Rockstar copied from Saints Row, a game that itself was a copy of Grand Theft Auto. My one serious quibble with the gameplay is that the cars still control like tanks, and the camera hovers far too low on the hood, frequently obstructing your view unless you constantly fiddle with it.
Perhaps the best improvement of all, though, is that Rockstar has reined itself in. Those who played the most recent title in the series -- San Andreas -- confronted a game so sprawling that no normal earthling could finish it (not even a friend of mine who was confined to bed with a broken leg for three weeks could go all the way). But judging by my progress, you could get through GTA IV in about 50 hours, doable for an adult who goes to a job and occasionally showers.
Yet I may never finish the game. In a city this vibrant, it's hard to stop getting distracted. At one point, I finished a mission on the top floor of a decrepit apartment filled with crack-addled occupants. I started to head back downstairs to my car, then wondered: "Hey, what's up on the roof?"
So I headed up and, sure enough, it was a spectacular view: corroded water towers dotting the rooftops, bits of weather-beaten graffiti on the masonry, the distant hum and honk of pissed-off drivers below. Broken and beaten yet flailing onward: That's the world of Grand Theft Auto.
What a wonderfully seedy world it is.
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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
1887: The Rev. Hannibal Goodwin files a patent application for camera film on celluloid rolls. He beats the Eastman Kodak company by two years and sets off a 27-year legal battle.
Goodwin was an Episcopal rector in Newark, New Jersey. He liked projecting lantern-slides of Bible stories to his Sunday school classes and wanted to try making his own. However, he found the intricacies of glass-plate photography too daunting and decided he could invent a better medium for holding the photographic emulsion.
He was a 65-year old clergyman, not a professional chemist, but two years of tinkering in his attic laboratory finally produced a flexible film from nitrocellulose, a trademarked plastic introduced in 1869. Without a clear understanding of the chemistry involved, he filed a vaguely worded patent application.
Meanwhile, George Eastman introduced rolls of photographic film in 1888, but the rolls were made of paper. Developing the negatives was costly, time-consuming and often produced streaked or blurry images. Professional photographers and serious amateur first adopters would have none of it.
Eastman set his chemist Henry Reichenbach to develop a film medium that would be clear, light, flexible, capable of holding the photochemical emulsion, and resistant to folding, shriveling, stretching, wrinkles, blemishes, bubbles and streaks. Quite a task.
Reichenbach wound up developing a formula remarkably similar to Goodwin's, with one additional ingredient: camphor. He filed a tightly worded patent application in April 1889.
Goodwin's application had been languishing with multiple revisions required to get it in proper form and specificity. The Reichenbach patent was approved in December 1889. The new Kodak film went on sale the next year and was an immediate success.
Goodwin, now retired, contested the Eastman-Reichenbach patent. The case wound its way through the labyrinthine administrative patent process until 1898, when Goodwin was finally awarded his patent. Goodwin died on what is considered the last day of the 19th century: Dec. 31, 1900.
His widow sold the Goodwin company to Anthony & Scovill (which became Ansco in 1907). The new company produced a small amount of film based on Goodwin's original patent, and then it sued Eastman Kodak.
The big company's problem was that in order to improve its film and accommodate new manufacturing processes, it had reduced the amount of camphor in its formula until its product was virtually indistinguishable from Rev. Goodwin's original formula. After more than a decade of legal wrangling, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of Ansco and Goodwin's heirs (.pdf) in 1914.
Goodwin's patent was due to expire the following year, but Eastman Kodak had to pay out more than $5 million ($107 million in today's money, and 5 percent of George Eastman's net worth then) for past infringement and future license. Other film companies ponied up another $300,000.
Except for the substitution of acetate for celluloid, Goodwin's original technology dominated photography for a century before the advent of digital cameras. But he's hardly a household name.
(Source: Invention & Technology magazine)
: He started hacking action figures as a tot. Now Jin Saotome sells custom-modded superheroes for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. "I would take apart my G.I. Joes, swap arms and paint them with my mom's nail polish," said the 30-year-old resident of California City, California.
With the help of his dad's metal shop, Saotome built and deconstructed popular figurines as a hobby. His first set of custom figures was purchased by a traveling jeweler, who bought an entire set of Star Wars figures for his son.
Left: Saotome makes a living cranking out custom creations like this Hulkbuster Iron Man. "What if Iron Man crash-landed in this summer's Hulk movie? He'd be wearing this armor," said Saotome. He crafted the custom piece using the beefed-up exoskeleton of Iron Man's nemesis, the Iron Monger. Saotome says this figure sold for $520 on eBay.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: For this chromed-out version of Iron Man's first attempt at a flying suit, Saotome buffed all the joint holes for a smooth, retro look. He then carved out a hatch on the back and rigged an LED from a dollar store to illuminate the chest.
"I just love Iron Man," Saotome said. "I've probably made nine or 10 variations on the Iron Man character."
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
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Saotome is revving up his collection of Iron Man custom figures to coincide with Friday's release of the feature film. To ramp up for Iron Man, Saotome mostly created variants on the character's armored costume -- but a few were made to look like Robert Downey Jr.'s version of Tony Stark. "I'm also planning one with a tank top and a unit on his chest that'll light up," said Saotome.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: Blackout, one of the first Transformers shown on screen during the 2007 live-action movie, sold for the highest figure any of Saotome's custom figures have garnered to date. The Deceptacon went for a whopping $3,400.
"I don't think I could top that again," said Saotome, who's built up a large base of fans who appreciate his tweaked superheroes. "Those results aren't typical for this field.
Saotome sells all his custom designs on eBay, and prefers to let bidders decide what each figurine is worth rather than setting a minimum price.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: This figure is a parody of Xenu, the leader of the Galactic Confederacy in Scientology lore.
Saotome's work often touches on the lighter side of geek obsession with such gag figurines. "After I did the custom Xenu, I got tons of e-mails -- but no death threats," laughed Saotome.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: "In the [Iron Man] comic, Tony Stark was always battling the bottle," said Saotome of this artistic take on a boozed-up superhero. "That custom [figure] got about 11,000 views on eBay."
Though Saotome's joke figures are a big hit on the web, they don't tend to sell for as much as some of the other figurines. The Repulsive Armor Iron Man sold for about $150.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: Saotome cobbled together this action figure in the likeness of his namesake. "Jin Saotome" is a character from an old arcade game the artist played obsessively as a kid. He adopted the nickname used by friends who admired his skills playing the avatar, and now uses the pseudonym for his work. Of the 300-plus figures Saotome has created over the years, this is one of three he doesn't plan to sell.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: This Black Cat figure was inspired by an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. Saotome is quick to point out he's not crafting from scratch, but "building on what's already been done."
Though he often takes requests for commissioned works, he usually looks to his favorite comics for inspiration. Each augmented action figure takes about three days to build, though it varies depending on the complexity of the design.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: Saotome usually starts with a simple base doll to build custom action figures like this Stealth Iron Man. Utilizing a prepackaged form allows the figurine to be fully articulated -- durable joints are nearly impossible to build by hand, says Saotome.
He prefers using the Silver Surfer to start, then sculpting clothes or armor from an epoxy. "I recently stepped up my game, from swapping hands, gloves and feet around to actually making my own parts," said Saotome.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: "I'm a customizing MacGyver," said Saotome. He estimated he has about three 10-gallon bins of spare doll parts for building figurines like this one, which is based on the Iron Man movie.
"Anything I have lying around is fair game," he said. Materials run the gamut from vintage figurines salvaged from a garage sale or eBay to a cellphone strap.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: "Painting, the last step, can either make or break your figurine," said Saotome, who learned his brushwork skills from various jobs and working on model replicas. This high-gloss Iron Man figurine is just one of the action figures Saotome has been working on to gear up for the Friday release of the feature film.
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
: Saotome confessed a love for all things robot and mecha, which contributes to his obsession with the various Iron Man armors and costumes, like this Silver Centurion model.
Though he's been focusing on Iron Man in anticipation of the silver-screen release, he's eyeing the rest of the summer comic-book line-up for inspiration. "I'm hoping to do some nice Hulk figures," said Saotome. "But Ray Park [who played Darth Maul in the new Star Wars movies] is one of my favorite actors, so I have to do Snake Eyes [his role in the upcoming G.I. Joe flick]."
He said he'll be skipping Speed Racer this summer, though: "Everyone's doing it and I pretty much only do Marvel Comics characters anyway."
Photo courtesy Jin Saotome
Regular Boing Boing denizens may recall Gabe Delahaye from a Boing Boing tv episode or two in which he and Max Silvestri lampooned late-night infomercials about "how to achieve the dream life of your dreams using the internet." Gabe is now producing internet funnynuggets for videogum, and in this episode, he takes on the dance-war/vlog-vs-vlog/troll-vs-troll activity that clogs so much of YouTube. I LOLled. Video Link. To fully appreciate the scope of this work, I recommend that you first watch Sexman's My Jumper Review. Warning, though, spoilers ahead!
Previously on Bing Bong:
Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.Stefan continues: "This rhetoric should be familiar to anyone who has read the 'The Wedge Strategy', a product of the Intelligent Design-advocating think tank The Discovery Institute. Yeah, sure thing Ben. Before The Origin of Species was published, there weren't any massacres, pogroms, slavery, forced conversions or torture. Especially by people with religious beliefs." LinkCrouch: That’s right.
Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.
Crouch: Good word, good word.
Who knew eBay was such a repository of avant garde art criticism? Steven (known to previous fine art collectors, or, bidders, whatever as an "A+++ Ebayer") writes about his, erm, nut:
I don't know why I stopped at this particular cashew as I was eating my Trader Joe's sweet, savory & tart trail mix, but as an artist the unexplainable happens often. My body is a vessel of creation and expression in tune with everything around me, including what you would see as "just another cashew"Link, he wants like half a mil for it. (via Sean Bonner)No, something about the shape of this particular cashew reflects the shape of our society. As the artist, I have split and re-glued the cashew as an expression of the “cracks” that have been “glued” in modern life. It is a complete work of art in every way. Famed art critic Richard Barokavov had this to say about the piece:
“Steven’s ‘Trader Joe’s Cashew #4’ is such a complete and absolute brutally dissecting view of the industrial conflict between capitalism and modernism that is is hard for even the most verbose of critics to add too. Regardless of Steven’s relation to me as a colleague and studiomate, the intense complexity I feel for this work is also complete and absolute.”
Again, I don’t expect most to fully understand the complexity of the form but as you can see it is quite powerful.
Hundreds of crafters, hackers and nerds are putting the finishing touches on elaborate contraptions for the Maker Faire: a huge, two-day gathering of people who love welding, soldering and sewing.
With almost 500 exhibits of homemade arts, crafts and electronics, ranging from the klunky to the sublime, the Maker Faire is probably the largest gathering of hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers in the country. It all happens May 3 and 4 at a suburban fairground site in San Mateo, California, and is expected to draw more than 60,000 people.
"It's sort of the engineering and art part of Burning Man, without the dust, raves and drugs," said Jeremy Faludi, a product designer and researcher who is attending the show. "It's pinnacle geek culture that you can't find anywhere else in the world."
Artists Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito demo their 6-ton, 20-foot-tall flaming sculpture Epiphany for Wired.com ahead of Maker Faire at their Oakland, California, industrial-arts space.
For more, visit video.wired.com.
Maker Faire is put on by O'Reilly Media's popular magazine Make and is dedicated to the do-it-yourself ethic in all its forms. In the two years since its inception, Maker Faire has drawn up to 40,000 attendees to watch robots, play with fire, and hobnob with the tech-savvy weirdos the event attracts.
Exhibitors have been logging hundreds of hours in preparation to perfect their creations. The mostly offbeat projects, like Bob's Electric Vehicle Corral, a solar-powered chariot pulled by a bobble-headed puppet that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, aren't always useful, but they're always thought-provoking and geeky -- and inspiring to other hobbyists and wannabes.
"What I'm looking forward to most is the camaraderie of being in the company of a bunch of DIYers who've been working in their garages until 1 or 2 in the morning getting stuff ready," said Brett Levine, co-founder of video software company Dovetail and a contributor to False Profit Labs, which has two exhibits at the Faire. "I have this feeling that there are all these garages right now with the lights on, drills humming, lathes turning, far and wide across the Bay Area."
Both of False Profit Labs' pieces -- Pyrocardium, which uses a stethoscope to send flames dancing in time with a person's heartbeat, and the Hydrogen Economy, which features exploding bubbles of hydrogen inside a clear plastic enclosure -- are being funded by Burning Man, highlighting the connection between the two events.
"Both have that breakaway spirit of, 'I can do this better if I do it myself,'" Levine said.
One couple has decided to do things not by themselves, but together. Hallie McConlogue, an independent programmer and designer, and Corey McGuire, a NASA Ames researcher, who together have contributed to a half-dozen Maker Faire projects, have decided to get married at the Faire.
The ceremony will take place on a self-propelled, three-story Victorian home called the Neverwas Haul. The hundred or so people attending the wedding will all be wearing costumes, including the bride and groom. McGuire will be dressed in a Napoleonic diplomat's coat while McConlogue will wear an early-20th-century creation. The bride's mother is attending in "full-up Sense and Sensibility style," McConlogue said.
While the location and costumes are decidedly steampunk, the wedding feast will be a bit more modern.
"We're going to have pizza, because we're geeks," said McConlogue.
McGuire said that he spent many hours volunteering his time on various Maker Faire projects last year, in an effort to woo his bride-to-be.
"You have to try really hard when you are trying to woo a woman with nerdiness," McGuire said.
For a vision of their future, newlyweds might look to husband-and-wife industrial-arts team Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito, who are bringing their 6-ton, 20-foot-tall sculpture Epiphany to the Maker Faire. (A preview video of the fiery creation is embedded above.)
The team considers the fire-spewing figure a manifestation of the current state of an oil-dependent economy.
"She could be fearful or hopeful, worshipping either a tree or oil derrick," said Cusolito, "but either way, she's engulfed in a state of fervor."
Fire technicians Danya Parkinson and Joe Bard of art collective Pyrokinetics were responsible for rigging Epiphany's pyrotechnics: They installed a pilot light in the cardiac region of her 20-foot-tall frame that, when triggered, radiates fire outwards through her hands. The blazes are supposed to mimic a fiery vascular system, and are rigged to a control board that regulates the intensity and frequency of the flame. The larger-than-life sculpture will burst into flames every half hour over the course of the Faire's two days.
The duo, along with their art collective, the Headless Point Artist's Retreat and Labor Camp, spent roughly two months crafting Epiphany using donated salvaged materials like hunks of steel, pulleys, gears and car parts.
Exhibiting (or getting married) at Maker Faire is clearly a lot of work, but the participants say it's a labor of love. For many, it's a way of rethinking how manufactured consumer products are used, reused or abused, a spirit shared by the members of False Profit, a registered limited-liability corporation.
"We decided that we were going to change the way that corporations work by focusing on the goal of creating joy, happiness and meaningful experiences instead of money," said False Profit member Stephen Trichter.
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 The Money Times | Study: Warmer ocean water means less oxygen The Associated Press - WASHINGTON (AP) - Low-oxygen zones where sea life is threatened or cannot survive are growing as the oceans are heated by global warming, researchers warn. Oxygen depletion threatens ocean habitats: study Study: Global Warming Responsible For Oxygen-Depleted Ocean Zones |
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 dBTechno | Blu-ray player sales down despite format victory CNET News.com - Looks like it wasn't the HD DVD/Blu-ray battle that was keeping potential customers away from high-definition video players after all. Analyst: HD DVD demise hasn't meant scramble for Blu-ray Paramount unveils initial Blu-ray slate |
If you encrypt your hard drive with strong crypto, it will be prohibitively expensive for CBP to access your confidential information. This answer is imperfect for two reasons—one is practical, the other is technological.Link (Thanks, Rebecca!)Practically, the government has not disclosed CBP's laptop search practices, despite our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for these documents. We don't know what a border patrol agent will do when confronted with an encrypted machine. One possibility is that the agent will simply give up and let the traveler pass with her belongings. Other possibilities are that the agent will turn the traveler and her machine away at the border, or that he will seize the laptop and allow the traveler to continue on. I suspect that on most occasions, CBP agents confronted with encrypted or password-protected data tell the owner to enter the password or get turned away, and the owner, eager to continue her voyage or to return home, simply complies.
If you don't want to comply, CBP cannot force you to decrypt your data or give over your password. Only a judge can force you to answer questions, and then only if the Fifth Amendment does not apply. While no Fifth Amendment right protects the data on your laptop or phone, one federal court has held that even a judge cannot force you to divulge your password when the act of revealing the password shows that you are the person with access to or control over potentially incriminating files. See In re Boucher, 2007 WL 4246473 (D. Vt. November 29, 2007).
See also: EFF and security experts to Congress: We need hearings on Customs laptop seizures and snooping
Indeed, a quick browse through Boing Boing's archives turned up this (incomplete) set of links to my YA section, the young adult books I've loved and blogged here -- most of them are not available on the science fiction shelves of your local store, only in the YA section:
Scott Westerfeld: Pretties/Uglies; Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm: Good As Lilly; Daniel Pinkwater, Scott Westerfeld, Peeps, Jonathan Strahan (ed), The Starry Rift; John Varley: Rolling Thunder, John Varley: Red Thunder; John Varley: Red Thunder; Scott Westerfeld: Uglies, Michael de Larrabeiti: The Borribles; Justine Larbalastier: Magic's Child; Justine Larbalastier: Magic or Madness; Ragnar: Got Your Nose!; Philip Pullman: Northern Lights trilogy; Scott Westerfeld: So Yesterday; Scott Westerfeld: Midnighters trilogy; Kathe Koja: Going Under; Ellen Klages: Portable Childhoods; Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Jane Yolen (eds): The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens; Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York;Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).
So while there's a personal motive to this post -- letting you know where to find Little Brother at your bookstore -- there's also a general tip for living the happy mutant life: check out the YA section at the bookstore and see what's been going on under your nose!
Here's a little more on the subject from Patrick:
We've all been neglecting to include a very important piece of information: *if you want to buy a printed copy, you're going to have to go into the YA section.*Some copies may wind up shelved in regular SF or general-fiction sections, but most bookstores are pretty rigorous these days: if it's published as YA, it goes into the YA section. As you know, Bob, we made a deliberate decision to publish it into the YA channel, not least because it's the kind of book we know *we* would have loved when we were 15. But it suddenly occurs to me that there are probably a lot of people who now have it in their heads to keep an eye out for *Little Brother* the next time they go into a bookstore...but that doesn't mean they're going to actually go into the section with all the chapter books, Narnia displays, Percy Jackson endcaps, and so forth.
Of course, if they do actually venture over that threshold, they may well discover a whole bunch of outstanding SF and fantasy that's been published onto those shelves in the last decade or so. Powerful SF novels like *Uglies* and *Peeps* by Scott Westerfeld, who John Scalzi calls "the most important contemporary SF author that most of the SF field has never heard of." Fantasy like Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy, or sui-generis novels of science and human character like Ellen Klages' *The Green Glass Sea*. It's almost as if there's an entire alternate world of good reading over there.
Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we boarded a binary kite and did turn-based battle with the world's first clamshell Blackberry. Japan got a steam-powered newspaper, nostril filters and pastel Eee PCs; China got a $12,000 CD player; and Kenya a domestic renewable energy business; Rob recorded it all on a DIY tape delay machine, while John ducked boomerangs in space.
In Sri Lanka, a mongoose unset us up the bomb; Pittsburgh plays with flesh-healing pixie dust; and here at home, hard drive crushers crushed drives hard.
International adventures done with, we announced the winners of the 1 kilobyte competition. Amazing stuff! 
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