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Friday, May 25th, 2012
3:54 pm	Arthur, Animated: Stop-motion progression of crocheted portrait (video) http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/cbeJr7AgQYU/arthur-animated-stop-motion.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163128 [Video link] Fiber artist Jo Hamilton says, This is a stop motion video I made to document my process of crocheting one of my larger than life portraits in yarn from start to finish. In my work I use a traditional basic crochet technique taught to me at an early age by my Gran. I work one knot at a time, from the inside out, row by row. In making the crochet portraits I always begin in the middle with the eyes and work out from there until the piece is completed. I work directly from photographs, using no sketches, graphs or computer imaging. Each piece is handmade, labour-intensive, instinctively composed. Nothing is planned ahead; I make it up as I go along. I spend a lot of time simply looking, unraveling, and reworking until I get it right. To make this video I photographed the work after each new yarn colour or two was added, and edited the photos into a sequence. This 30 second sequence contains over 300 photos of the work in progress. The portrait is of my dear friend Arthur Cheesman, who is sadly no longer with us. Music by Aikamusic/Goldcard. (via @craigwduff) Jo Hamilton , with her completed portrait of Arthur. Photo: Jenny Stapleton
4:13 pm	Steampunk bicycle from Roger Wood http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/2xdf8UbWSVk/steampunk-bicycle-from-roger-w.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162973 The latest from Roger Wood of Klockwerks: "I was asked to make a kinetic Steampunk sculpture for a show in New York; here it is."
3:16 pm	Tron: Uprising first episode online http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tpSZG3FS1tg/tron-uprising-first-episode-o.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163122 Tron: Uprising premiers on June 7 on Disney XD. They've posted the first episode, titled "Beck's Beginning, in its entirety to YouTube. I think Alberto Mieglo's fantastic art direction is in the tradition of Peter Chung's "Aeon Flux" and Bruce Timm's "Batman: The Animated Series." Mieglo posted some stunning production art on his personal blog.
3:24 pm	The secret world of swamp mud http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/56Ka5imVllI/the-secret-world-of-swamp-mud.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163033 Earlier this week, I showed you how scientists can use a simple, hand-operated tool to collect stratified core samples of mud at the bottom of a swamp. The deeper the samples go down, the older the mud is—until, eventually, you're looking at 6000-year-old muck, the remains of a lake bed that filled in with sediment and became swamp. The core samples are narrow logs, each 50 cm long. (In all honesty, they looked like less-colorful versions of the 3 pound gummi worm I ordered for my 30th birthday party last year.) For the most part, they're some variation on the shade of brown, with occasional streaks of red and burnt umber, until you get to the very bottom. There, the samples turn grey. Put a bit in your mouth, as I was encouraged to do by Harvard Forest director David Foster, and you'll taste clay and feel grit between your teeth. That's all well and good. But what do you do with core samples once you have them? For this installment of Dispatches From Harvard Forest I'm going to leave the woods and head into the lab, to see what happens to the parts of the Forest that scientists take home. Step one: Make dirt cupcakes We cut samples out of the samples. (Insert your "yo dawg, I heard you like samples" joke here.) Every 25 cm, so twice for each core, we cut off a little hunk from the side. We put the pieces into ceramic cups that had been weighed and labeled, so we'd know later where in the chain each sample had come from and what the samples weighed. Then we baked them. Seriously. The Marine Biological Laboratory (or MBL as it prefers to be known these days) has a great big industrial oven. The cups went in a roasting pan. The roasting pan went into the oven. Several hours later, all the liquid had been cooked off and we were left with dry samples. Out of all the little samples, there were really just three main types. Near the top, we had a lot of crumbly black earth, studded with roots and sticks and fibers. Further down, that petered out, and you ended up with solid lumps. The lumps had some stuff in them, but not nearly as much. By the time mud is this old, a lot of the biological material in it has decomposed. These samples looked brown when we first cut them off the mud cylinders. After baking, they turned greyish-green, mottled with brown spots. Finally, at the very bottom, was the grey clay. After baking, I could see that the grid I'd tasted was actually mica. It made the whole sample sparkle. Step 2: Record the color We weighed the baked samples and we wrote down a short description of what they looked like. This being science, "I think this lump of dirt looks kind of bluish-green" was not considered to be an accurate description. How do you take something subjective, like color, and bring it into the world of the objective? This looks like a job for official color charts. The Munsell Soil Color Chart book is like Pantone for dirt. You just take your sample and match it up to one of the color chips. The number of the chip is what gets recorded. That way, other people can go back and verify (or challenge) your interpretation. Step 3: Burn off all the carbon Next, the samples go back in the oven and the heat gets turned way up—hot enough to burn away all the organic material. What your left with is stuff like minerals, metals, and rock. If you weigh the samples and then compare that to what they weighed after first baking, you know how much of the sample was organic material and how much wasn't. Naturally, the results changed as you moved from the surface down. Barely any weight remained in the uppermost samples. The lowest ones had barely changed. That's the difference between soil filled with plant material, and lumps of mica-filled clay. This is, to say the least, probably not a huge revelation. But it leads to something really cool. After the carbon was burned off, the samples looked amazing. Some were chalky moonscapes, others had turned into piles of dark red fibers. The fibers, pictured above, are what you should be paying attention to. Because they don't really make sense. We just burned off all the carbon-based material...which should include plant fibers. So, then, what in the sam hill are those things? According to Rich McHorney, one of my advisors in the MBL Science Journalism Fellowship, the red color is from iron oxide—rust. What you're seeing here isn't plant fibers, but a shell of rust that had formed around plant fibers that were on their way to fossilizing. We burned away the plants. But the iron oxide remained. In a way, it's a bit like the casts of bodies from Pompeii. How cool is that? Read the rest of my Dispatches from Harvard Forest
3:10 pm	If Tetris was a (stupid, Battleship-style) movie http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/oOnzK3zpXpI/if-tetris-was-a-stupid-battl.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162970 Warialasky's trailer for a big-budg apocalyptic science fiction movie based on Tetris is all too plausible in the era of Battleship: the Movie: "Official Tetris Teaser Trailer. The invasion is beginning. It is inevitable. You created them, you can destroy them! I did not create Tetris, I was but the messenger. Tell me how to stop them. This is an extinction level event. No, don't go! Let her go!" TETRIS - OFFICIAL TRAILER
2:51 pm	Robert Johnson meets the Devil, or not http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/WVDXBt0Ypns/robert-johnson-meets-the-devil.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163118 It's perhaps the most famous story in the history of the blues: In the 1920s, a mediocre guitarist named Robert Johnson went to a Mississippi crossroads at midnight where the Devil "tuned" his guitar in exchange for Johnson's soul. Assuming that the story may be, well, apocryphal, who made it up? Radiolab investigated. "Crossroads" (Radiolab)
2:37 pm	Philip K. Dick Festival coming to San Francisco, September 22-23 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/31ubJwmPlg0/philip-k-dick-festival-coming.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163114 The Philip K. Dick Festival, scheduled for September 22-23 in San Francisco, is sure to be a heady, reality-bending time. Organizer and Total Dick-Head blogger David Gill informs us that he's lined up presentations by Jonathan Lethem, Erik Davis, Paul Sammon, and many other big thinkers on such subjects as self-induced amnesia, computer simulations, mysticism, dystopia, and, of course, drugs. 2012 Philip K. Dick Festival
1:45 pm	Boars Gore and Swords Season 2, third best Game of Thrones podcast http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/7EukSAo_l0I/boars-gore-and-swords-season-2.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163079 I recently spent a couple of days catching up on my absolutely favorite podcast: Boars Gore and Swords. San Francisco based comedians and hosts Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott are back at making getting it wrong so very right. The dynamic duo started podcasting in Season One; half enamored and half bewildered by HBO's Game of Thrones. Never having read Geore R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice the two clumsily misinterpret names, places, events, customs and politics of Westeros to raucous hilarity. Season Two is stronger than ever. With a sparkling new Tumblr blog they are also posting up listener submitted content and corrections (praise to @mhunger for the comprehensive list every week!) Red and Ivan are both more comfortable, casual and just coming off a podcasted book club where they actually read the first epic novel! Boars Gore and Swords Season 1, Bookclub and Season 2 podcasts Also check out Leigh Alexander's Game of Thrones recaps right here on Boing Boing!
12:00 pm	Poland's future of copyright http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/qZjAb-dDyG4/polands-future-of-copyright.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162960 The Modern Poland Foundation held a future of copyright contest, which invited short stories about copyright's future. They've published the winners in a free ebook.
11:10 am	Stalking the Paparazzi http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/JeKB0VpBdeU/stalking-the-paparazzi.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163055 [Video Link] A young celebrity lives four houses away from us, and our street is often filled with paparazzi. Two days ago, the cops came twice to deal with these jackasses. Vice made a video about them, called "Stalking the Paparazzi." (NSFW language)
11:25 am	Penn Jillette's rant against Obama's drug policy http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/fbF3mrZEFPc/penn-jillettes-rants-against.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163058 [Video Link] Penn's excellent rant against Obama's ruinous drug policy that keeps 750,000 non-violent people in prison. He points out that if Obama had been imprisoned for his admitted drug use, his life would suck right now. And yet, Obama supports a policy that make good people's lives suck, wastes billions of dollars, and nurtures a police state.
10:52 am	80-year-old skydiving first-timer falls out of tandem harness http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/dt_cg4q1P4s/80-year-old-skydiving-first-ti.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163039 [Video Link] She obviously didn't want to jump. I wonder if the skydiving company charged extra for the extra thrill. (Via Geekolgie)
11:00 am	Every Heath Ledger scene in Dark Knight http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/XnIddIFpL24/every-heath-ledger-scene-in-da.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162957 The Cussing Channel has produced a Dark Knight Joker supercut, featuring all the on-camera Heath Ledger scenes. It rather stopped me in my tracks -- Ledger really put in an astounding performance, something that is underlined three times in red by ten straight minutes of Ledger doing his thing. Rules: Just The Joker, just the on-camera dialogue. Now, there are many shots in this film over the Joker's shoulder, with the focus on the character he's talking to... those lines didn't make it... only the clips where the Joker is the focus of the shot (otherwise this becomes a 30-minute affair). The Dark Knight - Just The Joker (Thanks, Phillip!)
10:59 am	Chris Ware interview http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/yED6TgXHdJE/chris-ware-interview.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163049 [Video Link] An interview with Jimmy Corrigan creator, Chris Ware. (Via Drawn & Quarterly)
9:27 am	The modded musical Game Boys of Blip Festival http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/dqGIKqzBsEo/the-modded-musical-game-boys-o.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162981 I'm at Blip Festival in New York this weekend checking out all the bleeps and bloops people are making. Blip Festival itself starts tonight, but last night NY Pulsewave had an open mic night and I decided to grab a few of the artists to photograph their instruments: mostly custom modified Game Boys. I've included a few highlights here, and the full set is on my Flickr. Pictured above is Andrew Gould's (AKA andaruGO) GBM1 Game Boy Classic. It's a great example of the two most popular mods: He's got a custom backlit screen that helps him see the music in the dark, and a wiring modification called Prosound which bypasses the standard headphone jack and wires directly into the device's audio chip for better quality sound. He's using the LSDJ cartridge, pretty much the standard for the Game Boy Classic performers. There's also a custom blue screen protector he received as a gift from an internet friend. View the gallery here.
9:59 am	Sugar ad: your diet is depriving your kids of vital sugar! http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/oSRz6-apLHA/sugar-ad-your-diet-is-deprivi.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162953 Here's an undated ad from "Sugar Information, Inc" (our old friends), warning mothers that if they include their kids in their sugar-free, dieting lifestyles, they will be depriving the poor kiddlees of vital sugar and exposing them to "exhaustion." Obviously, this was before the cancer scares and other stuff about artificial sweeteners, because surely that's the major reason to keep your kids away from artificial sweeteners. I love the fact that they recommend sugar for dieters, too: "gives you the va-va-voom you need for all those exercises!" Sugar!
7:43 am	Fox sues Dish over commercial skipping, claims copyright infringement http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/GI8BUzTpIVY/fox-sues-dish-over-commercial.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162947 Dish Networks, the satellite TV provider, is being sued by Fox over its "AutoHop" feature, which automatically skips commercials. Fox alleges copyright infringement, which is a repeat of the claims over ReplayTV, which was bankrupted in similar lawsuits in the last decade. The networks claimed then that the whole program, including the commercials, were a single copyrighted work, and that by automatically enabling the skipping of certain sections, the device manufacturers were making derivative works. It's a really dumb theory of copyright and it's hard to imagine that it would hold up in court -- and if it did, it would mean that, for example, allowing screen-in-screen, or changing aspect ratios, or even custom color balances or audio mixes were also copyright violations, and that these violations took place when the feature was enabled by the manufacturer (who would therefore be liable) and not when the customer turned them on. A more likely claim from Fox is breach of contract -- it's easy to believe that Fox put a "no skipping the commercials" line in their deal with Dish (and if they didn't, you can bet they will). Moreover, the DRM used in satellite receivers is controlled by the big rightsholders, and the license agreement for that DRM (much of which is a secret) allows them to demand arbitrary control over features in devices that can decode it. Here's more from the LA Times and Meg James and Joe Flint: Fox filed its copyright violation and breach-of-contract suit against Dish on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Dish filed its suit in U.S. District Court in New York. "The suit asks for a declaratory judgment that the AutoHop feature does not infringe any copyrights that could be claimed by the major networks, and that Dish, while providing the AutoHop feature, remains in compliance with its agreements with the networks," the Englewood, Colo., company said in a statement. While consumers with digital video recorders can fast-forward through commercials of recorded shows, Dish's AutoHop takes it a step further. The screen goes black when a commercial break appears. A few seconds later, the program returns. The service can't be used on live programming, such as a sporting event, even after it has been recorded. With more than 14 million subscribers, Dish Network Corp.'s new technology may threaten the networks' ability to continue to charge premiums for their commercial time. Fox sues Dish over ad-blocking feature; Dish fires back (via /.)
4:56 am	Mondrian PC http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/BKgHaG-XL1s/mondrian-pc.html http://boingboing.net/?p=163003 Jeffrey Stephenson made a beautiful Mondrian PC enclosure. Mondrian is a fanless mini-ITX case design made from wood and hand-cut acrylic tiles. Fresh air is drawn into the case after passing through the exposed heatsink finning. An 80mm CPU fan is mounted under the heatsink and acts as a combo CPU/case fan. Specific inspirations (including the famous Yves Saint Laurent dress) and a build report at the above link!
6:00 am	NYC lawyer loses $100K suit over healthclub that stopped supplying yogurt and cereal http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/hHGz_aC1vL0/nyc-lawyer-loses-100k-suit-ov.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162941 Richard Katz, a NYC lawyer, has lost his breach-of-contract lawsuit against a pricey healthclub that changed its breakfast menu. Katz was a member of The Setai Wall Street Club and Spa, and he was upset when the yogurt and cereal normally provided by the club was discontinued. He sent a series of upset emails to the club's manager, who cancelled his membership. Katz sued, citing damages in excess of $100,000, and an additional $5,000 in damages for an alleged libel from the manager, who wrote an email in response and is alleged to have shown it to a third party. Lowering the Bar has more: To me, the great thing about this email is not that a lawyer got furious over somebody failing to dish up the yogurt and cereal. It's that even in the grip of this fury, he still wrote "two (2) weeks." Why do people do this? Maybe it made sense when things were written in longhand, but now that we have email and printers and whatnot there is generally not much controversy over what "two" is supposed to mean. If you haven't picked up this habit yet, don't... Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ellen Coin dismissed the case this week, according to the New York Daily News. While there seems to have been no written opinion, according to the manager's attorney the judge told Katz at the hearing that "he should be ashamed of himself" for filing the suit. That's hearsay, but the judge did order Katz to pay $440 in costs, which suggests what she thought of the case. The manager's attorney praised the decision for throwing out a case that was "embarrassing to the profession." Lawyer's Defective-Breakfast Suit Dismissed (Image: Yogurt freak, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dan4th's photostream)
Thursday, May 24th, 2012
6:00 pm	Illuminated manuscript cookies http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/WiK7jvZCc94/illuminated-manuscript-cookies.html http://boingboing.net/?p=162746 Anniina ("Scholar, Writer, Mother, Dreamer. Editor of Luminarium, an online library for English Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance") produced these delicious-looking and awfully lovely illuminated initial cookies: I wanted to share with you some Medieval manuscript cookies I made for my friend and colleague, Risa Bear, creator of Renascence Editions. I chose historiated initials from several manuscripts, printed them on edible paper with edible ink, attached them to square cookies and gave them gold edges. Who says love of literature and art can't fill a belly?! Medieval Illuminated Initial Cookies (via Making Light)