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Monday, March 25th, 2013
Time |
Event |
5:59a |
| 6:00a |
Tell Me Something I Don't Know: Katie Skelly, creator of Nurse Nurse comic book http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/vKvguNRtGdE/tell-me-something-i-dont-kno-4.html http://boingboing.net/?p=220664
Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting Boing Boing's podcasts!
This is episode 4 of Boing Boing's newest podcast, Tell Me Something I Don't Know. It's an interview podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the reality/business side of how they do what they do.
In this episode Jim, Jasen, and Ed interview Katie Skelly, a cartoonist who lives and works in New York City. She has been making mini-comics since 2003, and has contributed to several comic anthologies including the Garo-inspired Secret Prison #7 and Thickness #1.
In 2012, Sparkplug Comic Books published her first graphic novel, the Barbarella-esque, psychedelic sci-fi Nurse Nurse.
She is currently serializing her girl-biker gang graphic novel, Operation: Margarine, as silkscreen-covered, limited-edition mini-comics. Number 2 debuts at MoCCA 2013.
Learn more at her website and follow her on Twitter and Tumbler.
TMSIDK produced and hosted by three talented cartoonists and illustrators:
Jim Rugg, a Pittsburgh-based comic book artist, graphic designer, zinemaker, and writer best known for Afrodisiac, The Plain Janes, and Street Angel.
Jasen Lex is a designer and illustrator from Pittsburgh. He is currently working on a graphic novel called Washington Unbound. All of his art and comics can be found at jasenlex.com.
Ed Piskor is the cartoonist who drew the comic, Wizzywig, and draws the Brain Rot/ Hip Hop Family Tree comic strip at this very site, soon to be collected by Fantagraphics Books.
Follow TMSIDK on Twitter
Subscribe to the Tell Me Something I Don't Know podcast | iTunes | 6:28a |
NY Mag feature on epic NBC "Today" Lauer/Curry cold war is backstab-o-licious http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/To0hjZWE6MI/ny-mag-feature-on-epic-nbc-t.html http://boingboing.net/?p=220780 Joe Hagan's New York Magazine feature on the bitter internal conflict behind the smiles of NBC's long-running Today show is a wonderful read, whether or not you give a shit about Today, or network daytime television in general. I don't want to spoil it for you, but that 9th graf down from the top is the ultimate "oh snap!" of media gossip writing. The piece is full of interesting dirt about Ann Curry, Matt Lauer, and the suits that run NBC, including this little nugget about the network's cockblocking of a compassionate gesture for a woman with cancer at a rival network: "When Robin Roberts left Good Morning America a month later to get treatment for MDS, Curry asked NBC if she could tweet a note of sympathy for the ABC co-host. NBC said no, afraid she was trying to aid the enemy." (Photo: Gillian Laub/NY Magazine) | 6:38a |
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The case of the poison potato http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/QxqVOWPmldg/the-case-of-the-poison-potato.html http://boingboing.net/?p=220790 Frying a potato is a tricky proposition. Doing it right isn’t just about your skill as a cook, but also your partner, the potato itself. Waxy potatoes — high in sugar, low in starch — brown a little too easily as the sugar in them is altered by heat. By the time the interior is cooked through, the exterior is burnt to a crisp.
Good potato chips come from starchy potatoes. But to get just the right chip color — that perfect, buttery golden brown — you have to pay attention to a lot of different factors, from the types of sugar found in the potato, to the internal chemistry that happens as the potato sits in a sack post-harvest.
In the late 1960s, researchers from the US Department of Agriculture, Penn State University, and the Wise Potato Chip Company teamed up breed a very special potato, which they named the Lenape. More than 30 years later, one of their colleagues still thought fondly of that spud. “Lenape was [wonderful],” Penn State scientist Herb Cole told journalist Nancy Marie Brown in 2003. “It chipped golden.”
Yes, the Lenape made a damn fine potato chip.
Unfortunately, it was also kind of toxic.
Despite an almost boring reputation as the squishy white bread of the plant kingdom, potatoes actually come from somewhat nasty roots. Their closest relatives are innocuous enough. Potatoes have strong genetic ties to tomatoes and eggplants. But their more distant cousins include tobacco, chili peppers, deadly nightshade, and the hallucinatory drug-producing flower, datura.
This is a phylogenetic family that is ready to throw down, chemically speaking. Called Solanaceae, its members are known for producing a wide variety of nitrogen-rich chemical compounds, called alkaloids. Nicotine is an alkaloid. So are caffeine, cocaine, and a host of other plant-derived chemicals that humans have taken a liking to over the millennia. Depending on the dose, and on the specific compound, alkaloids can have effects ranging from medicinal, to far-out crazy hallucinatory, to deadly.
Potatoes produce an alkaloid called solanine. All potatoes have it, and it’s a feature, not a bug — at least as far as the potato is concerned. Like a lot of other plant-produced alkaloids, solanine is a natural defense mechanism. It protects the potato from pests. Think of potato blight, the fungus-like disease partly responsible for the Irish Famine of the 19th century. The more solanine a potato contains, the less susceptible it is to blight. When a potato is put into a compromising situation — when it’s young and vulnerable, for instance, or when tubers get uncovered and, thus, more exposed to things that might eat it — solanine production can rev up.
Those triggers aren’t always the most convenient for the potato’s human predators. A sudden frost, for instance, can stunt the growth of tubers and promote the growth of vines and leaves, which mimics a younger stage of development and is accompanied by higher solanine concentrations. And if you leave potatoes exposed to the sun for too long after harvest, they start reacting as though they just got accidentally uncovered. They turn green and they produce more solanine. This is actually why you’re not supposed to eat green potatoes. Those spuds, and especially their skins, are rich in solanine. How much solanine varies; it might just be enough to make your stomach a little upset. Or, it could lead to serious illness accompanied by vomiting, diarrhea, loss of consciousness, and convulsive twitching. In very rare cases, people who ate green potatoes have even died.
Poor post-harvest handling was not the problem with the Lenape, however. In 1974, after Lenape potatoes had been recalled from agricultural production and relegated to the status of “breeding material”, the USDA published results of an experiment where they grew Lenape, and five other potato varieties, at 39 locations around the country. They carefully monitored growing and harvesting conditions and then compared the solanine content of all the potatoes.
The conclusion: Lenape was genetically predisposed towards producing an extraordinarily high amount of solanine, no matter what happened to it during growth and harvest. The average Russet potato, for instance, contained about 8 mg of solanine for every 100 g of potato. Lenape, on the other hand, was closer to 30 mg of toxin for every 100 g of food. That made it nicely resistant to a lot of agricultural pests. But it also explained why some of the people who were the first to eat Lenapes — most of them breeders and other professionals in the agriculture industry — ended up with severe nausea, like a fast-acting stomach bug.
What makes the Lenape really interesting, though, is its legacy as a cautionary tale. I first learned about it from Fred Gould, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, whom I met while I was working on a New York Times Magazine story about genetically modified mosquitoes.
He used Lenapes as an example of risk and uncertainty. Often, people frame genetically modified plants as this huge open question — a giant uncertainty, of the sort we’ve never dealt with before. There’s this idea that GM plants are uniquely at risk of producing unexpected side effects, and that we have no way of knowing what those effects would be until average consumers start getting sick, Gould told me. But neither of those things is really true. Conventional breeding, the simple act of crossing one existing plant with another, can produce all sorts of unexpected and dangerous results. One of the reasons Lenape potatoes are so infamous, I later found out, is that they played a big role in shaping how the USDA treats and tests new varieties of conventionally bred food plants today.
In fact, from Gould’s perspective, there’s actually a lot more risk and uncertainty with conventional breeding, than there is with genetic modification. That’s because, with GM, you’re mucking about with a single gene. There are a lot more genes in play with conventional breeding, and a lot more ways that surprising genetic interactions could come back to haunt you. “You try breeding potatoes for pest resistance, but you’re bringing in a whole chromosome from a wild potato,” he said. “We’ve found interactions between the wild genomes and the cultivated genomes that actually led to potentially poisonous chemicals in the potato.”
In 2004, a National Academies panel on the unintended health effects of genetic engineering reported that conventional potato breeders continue to try to increase the amount of solanine produced by the leaves and vines of their potato plants in hopes of making those plants more naturally pest-resistant. Because of that, the USDA actually has a recommended limit for solanine content of new potato varieties — but that limit isn’t strictly enforced.
Gould’s point isn’t that genetic modification is always better than conventional breeding. It’s not. Instead, they’re both tools — imperfect technologies that could produce unintended side effects. Which one you choose to use depends on what you’re trying to do. But, either way, you can’t say that one is scary and one is safe.
CREDITS
• Photo: REUTERS/Hazir Reka
• Mendel In The Kitchen: A Scientist's View Of Genetically Modified Food [Google Books]
• Towards fewer handicapped children [bmj.com]
• Lenape: A new potato variety high in solids and chipping quality [springer.com]
• Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods: Approaches to Assessing Unintended Health Effects [nap.edu]
• Effect of Environment on Glycoalkaloid Content of Six Potato Varieties [Google Books]
• The Potato in the Human Diet [Google Books]
• A Review of Important Facts about Potato Glycoalkaloids [PDF, ucdavis.edu]
hFACTORS DETERMINING POTATO CHIPPING QUALITY [PDF, umaine.edu]
POTATOES' NATURAL DEFENCES [McGill.ca]
| 8:34a |
Generative music apps http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/PZsjn2vIh0U/generative-music-apps.html http://boingboing.net/?p=220806
At our sponsor Intel's LifeScoop site, I posted about "Music That Writes Itself":
In ambient music pioneer Brian Eno’s 1996 book A Year with Swollen Appendices, the composer wrote, “I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: ‘you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’” Eno was talking about generative music, a process by which a computer creates unique works from fixed parameters set by the artist. In its simplest form, you twist a few knobs (virtual or otherwise) and the computer takes it from there, creating music that can be credited to the system itself. The term generative art is most likely derived from “generative grammar,” a linguistic theory Noam Chomsky first proposed in his book Syntactic Structures (1965) to refer to deep-seated rules that describe any language. Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mosaics (1997), traces the art form to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s, when musicians like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis pioneered computer composition. Decades later, a number of generative music apps are bringing Eno’s vision to our smartphones.
" Music That Writes Itself" | 8:42a |
| 8:52a |
Veil of secrecy around Manning case makes a public trial "a state secret in plain sight" http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/-EOPVwglHnQ/veil-of-secrecy-around-manning.html http://boingboing.net/?p=220812 New York Times media columnist David Carr has a piece out today about how reporters covering the pretrial hearings for Pfc. Bradley Manning over the past year have encountered roadblocks in accessing even the most basic information. Even such routine items as "dockets of court activity and transcripts of the proceedings" have been withheld by the government.
"A public trial over state secrets was itself becoming a state secret in plain sight," Carr writes.
In response to a flood of FOIAs from reporters and pro-transparency advocates, the court finally agreed at the end of February 2013 to release 84 of the ~400 documents filed in the case; but even those grudgingly-released documents were redacted in ways "that are mystifying at best and at times almost comic," notes Carr. "One of the redacted details was the name of the judge, who sat in open court for months."
As an aside, this was the whole point of what Freedom of the Press Foundation was trying to do here.
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Disease superspreaders and the new coronavirus http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/7xqwePmTKSQ/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220829 Coronavirus — characterized by the halo of protein spikes that surround each individual virus particle — is the family that gave birth to SARS. Today, there's a new coronavirus stalking humans, especially in the Middle East. Scientists have documented 16 infections, and 10 fatalities. The good news is that there are probably lots of non-serious infections that aren't being reported, meaning the fatality rate probably isn't as high as it looks. Also, this coronavirus seems to have trouble spreading from person to person. But, in regards to that last factor, it's important to pay attention to a detail from the SARS outbreak that we still don't totally understand. Turns out, a handful of people were responsible for most of those infections. The Canadian Press' Helen Branswell writes about superspreaders and the scientists trying to understand how individuals can alter the course of an outbreak. (BTW: If you don't follow Helen Branswell on Twitter, you're missing some of the best infectious disease reporting out there.) | 9:55a |
| 10:06a |
| 10:30a |
Guatemala: Day 5 of Montt genocide trial; "They viewed us as if we were not people." http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/4kMKyNeI3Fs/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220844 Photo: From the Facebook page for Pamela Yates' film "Granito," a snapshot of a female Ixil Maya witness giving testimony on the genocide trial's third day. The genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Rios Montt, the Army general who ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983, and his chief of military intelligence Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, continues for the 5th day today in Guatemala City. Today marks the beginning of the second week of hearings; dozens of Ixil Maya witnesses have provided testimony of the atrocities committed against their families. This week is Semana Santa, or Holy Week, so this week's hearings will be truncated in observance of that holiday (it's kind of a big deal in Guatemala). But the trial continues at high speed: seven people testified today before the court broke for lunch. Watch live video from the courtroom here; listen to audio here. A Twitter list with accounts who are live-tweeting the trial is here. It is difficult to listen, watch, or read the proceedings. As I publish this blog post, Rosa Santiago, the first female witness to testify today, is asked to speak about a massacre that took place on April 3, 1982 in her village of Xel, Chajul, Quiche. "The soldiers forced 96 people into the village church and hacked them to death with machetes; the soldiers later tossed their dismembered body parts under a bridge." Ms. Santiago's father and her twin sisters, who were around 8 years old at the time, were among those killed. "Babies were killed because their mothers were carrying them; all the corpses were tossed into two great holes dug in the ground; bodies piled one on top of the other." Efraín Ríos Montt, during the first week of the 2013 genocide trial. Photo: James Rodriguez. This trial matters to Americans, not just Guatemalans. Montt and his regime were trained and supported by the US during the Reagan administration; our government supplied weapons, helicopters, and personnel that directly enabled these massacres. CIA personnel participated in torture and extrajudicial executions of populations labeled as "subversive." The open nature of this trial, the first in history in which a former head of state has been tried for genocide by a domestic court, stands in stark contrast to another important trial taking place in relative secrecy now in the United States. "There was no genocide here," chant pro-military supporters of Montt outside the courtroom, to the accompaniment of military march music and the Guatemalan national anthem. According to reports, the pro-Montt campaign is organized by some two dozen retired military officers and their families. Guatemala's current president Otto Perez Molina is a military figure who was once closely tied with Montt: he is a former special forces soldier (the notorious Kaibiles), was director of military intelligence during Montt's regime, ex-inspector-general of the army, and was the head of counterinsurgency in the Ixil area in 1982-83. The outcome of this trial could change the course of his presidency. At riosmontt-trial.org, there are excellent daily recaps. From Friday: The court heard 11 witnesses for the prosecution, including 5 women, making 37 witnesses presenting testimony thus far... Many witnesses on Friday were deeply emotionally affected by recounting their stories, with the court stalled on various occasions to give witnesses an opportunity to collect themselves. Nonetheless, the trial continued to advance at breakneck speed. Photo: James Rodriguez of mimundo.org. Cemetery in Nebaj, Quiché, Guatemala; one of the sites of massacres at issue in this trial. NISGUA, the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala, has also been publishing daily recaps and transcripts of the trial. Here is an excerpt from the testimony on Friday of Ixil victim Juan Raymundo Maton: We had the custom of going on All Saint’s Day to put candles and flowers where our family members are buried. But as I said, we can’t do that because we don’t have a place to do that. Our ancestors have customs. All of this was destroyed when the military initiated their plan of scorched earth, all of it was destroyed. During this policy of scorched earth, they destroyed everything, not just our crops but our culture. People couldn't even speak in their own languages. No one wanted to leave their culture, their customs; it was only because of this situation. It’s hard. I came to give my testimony, they ask who made you testify but I came because of my own pain, my sadness. Maybe I didn't express myself well enough but all the people who came to do this to us, I saw it with my own eyes. Many neighbors were shot to death, I went with them to bury them. Some could only be buried in a hole like animals. At that moment there was only time to open up a hole and bury them. Or sometimes the poor people only had time to throw them in a river. PBS POV continues to offer free online streaming of Pamela Yates' film "Granito: How to Nail a Dictator" (the film's official website is here, Facebook here) and they're also streaming her earlier film "When the Mountains Tremble." They are both important and powerful documentary works. Footage shot by Yates in the 1980s, including interviews with Montt and other Guatemalan Army top brass at the time, has become an important element in the process of seeking justice and reconciliation for Mayan victims. In 2007, I produced a radio documentary series for NPR that included segments about organizations and people whose work is central to this tribunal. Listen: "Group Works to Identify Remains in Guatemala," about the Guatemalan Foundation for Forensic Anthropology (FAFG), and "Guatemalan Archives May Help Locate Missing," about the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN). From my visit to the once-secret Historic Archives of the Guatemala's National Police, in 2007: A document from 1931, the oldest this worker had encountered. | 10:30a |
Knife in man's back for 3 years http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/41BiuLPVK38/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220852 Billy McNeely of Canada's Northwest Territories was scratching his back when he noticed a pointy protrusion. Turned out to be the tip of a 7.5cm knife blade that was stuck in his back. For three years. Back in 2010, McNeely was stabbed in a brawl following an arm wrestling match. Since then, his back set off prison metal detectors and he's had pain, but he claims that physicians told him it was nerve damage caused by the injury. From BBC News: But this week, McNeely, 32, was scratching his back as usual when his fingernail caught on something. His girlfriend took a look. "I told Billy: 'There's a knife sticking out of your back.' I was scared. I was ready to pull it out with tweezers," Stephanie Sayine told CBC News. McNeely is considering whether to file a lawsuit against the local health department. " Knife taken from Billy McNeely's back after three years" | 10:31a |
Return to Antikythera http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/LZVVVgtsAhk/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220848 The Antikythera shipwreck — source of the famous ancient clockwork Antikythera Mechanism — has remained shockingly unexplored in the 100 years or so that we've known about it. In fact, other than a visit by Jacques Cousteau in 1970s, there hadn't been any official, scientific excavations until last year. Turns out, there's a lot of stuff left to find at the site, from a ship's anchor and storage jars to a collection of bronze fragments — which could either turn out to be something mundane, like nails from the boat, or more clues to the Mechanism. According to The Guardian's Jo Marchant, "little bronze fragments" describes what the gears of the Antikythera Mechanism looked like before they were detached from rock and cleaned of rust. | 10:45a |
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Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense: chart of woo http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/zpEPPpNjw9I/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220710 Sometimes, when confronted with woo, it is hard to know exactly what sort of woo you're dealing with. To simplify this challenge while sparing you the agony of enduring any more explanations of ear-candling or aromatherapy than is strictly necessary, Crispian Jago has compiled a handy Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense. The curiously revered world of irrational nonsense has seeped into almost every aspect of modern society and is both complex and multifarious. Therefore rather than attempt a comprehensive taxonomy, I have opted instead for a gross oversimplification and a rather pretty Venn Diagram. In my gross over simplification the vast majority of the multitude of evidenced-free beliefs at large in the world can be crudely classified into four basic sets or bollocks. Namely, Religion, Quackery, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. However as such nonsensical beliefs continue to evolve they become more and more fanciful and eventually creep across the bollock borders. Although all the items depicted on the diagram are completely bereft of any form of scientific credibility, those that successfully intersect the sets achieve new heights of implausibility and ridiculousness. And there is one belief so completely ludicrous it successfully flirts with all forms of bollocks. Religious Bollocks ∩ Quackery Bollocks ∩ Pseudoscientific Bollocks ∩ Paranormal Bollocks = Scientology The Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) | 12:21p |
Petition: force Congress to display logos of their corporate backers on their clothes http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Y8KnOceZrr0/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220716 The idea of forcing Congresscritters to wear NASCAR-style coveralls with the logos of their financial backers has been bandied about before, but here it is in official White House petition form. Since most politicians' campaigns are largely funded by wealthy companies and individuals, it would give voters a better sense of who the candidate they are voting for is actually representing if the company's logo, or individual's name, was prominently displayed upon the candidate's clothing at all public appearances and campaign events. Once elected, the candidate would be required to continue to wear those "sponsor's" names during all official duties and visits to constituents. The size of a logo or name would vary with the size of a donation. For example, a $1 million dollar contribution would warrant a patch of about 4" by 8" on the chest, while a free meal from a lobbyist would be represented by a quarter-sized button. Individual donations under $1000 are exempt. As funny as this is, it would be easy-ish to turn this into a browser plugin that looked for politicians' names in the pages you looked at, and automatically surrounded them with a semi-opaque halo of corporate logos that you could click on to see more. Require Congressmen & Senators to wear logos of their financial backers on their clothing, much like NASCAR drivers do. (via Beyond the Beyond) (Image: Bobby Labonte, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mulsanne's photostream) | 12:39p |
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Gigeresque corset: "Spine" http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/_cohBZLqN5k/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220729 Spine, an amazing, gigeresque corset, is a Shaun Leane design that was displayed at NY MOMA in the 2011 show Alexander McQueen show Savage Beauty. Shaun Leane: He was always fascinated by the spine. So he asked me to create a corset, which was the spine with the rib cage, so that the girl could actually wear this as a corset on the outside of her body, so we would see the beauty of these bone structures on the outside, attached to the dress. And as we were doing it, Alexander came to me and said, “Will you put a tail on this?” And where he got that idea was out of the film The Omen. When the mother of the omen was discovered—her skeleton—she was half-raven and half-dog, and he was quite inspired by this. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (via Kadrey) | 7:40p |
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