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Thursday, March 28th, 2013
| Time | Event | ||
| 2:40a | Cory's schedule for EasterCon in Bradford I'm heading to Bradford tomorrow for Eight Squared Con, the 2013 Eastercon. I'm appearing on several programme items: * Friday, 17h: Reading, Hawthorn Room * Saturday, 12h: "On Twitter, Everyone Can Hear You Scream," Boardroom (panel) * Saturday, 13h: Book launch for RAPTURE OF THE NERDS, Conservatory * Saturday, 19h: "Genre Get-Together: Science Fiction," Conservatory (signing) * Sunday, 12h: "Ready, Steady, Flash," Boardroom (live flash fiction writing) I'm also doing something in town on Saturday (details TBD) with the 1 in 12 Library Book Club.
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| 5:50a | Sailing is hard work Rome Kirby is an extreme sailor. When they tried putting him on a heart-rate monitor, they found he was burning 9,000 calories a day. (via Super Punch) 
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| 5:55a | Opponents Wanted: forgotten gaming mags find new life on the net The Internet Archive is one of the great treasures of the internet, housing content in every media; texts, video, audio. It’s also the home of the Wayback Machine, an archive of the Internet from 1996. I thought I had explored the site pretty thoroughly—at least according to my own interests—but recently came across runs of some of the great gaming magazines of the 1970s and 80s; The Space Gamer, Ares, Polyhedron, The General, and—temporarily—Dragon Magazine. These magazines represent not only the golden age of gaming, but expose the thrill and excitement of gaming when it was still new, still on the margins. It was a time when gaming still felt a little, dare I say, punk. Today, finding members of your particular community of interest is a Google search away, but in the 1970s the only way to be in contact with others who shared interests was through magazines. For many gamers, even finding the games could be difficult. Discovering the gaming magazines revealed an active gaming industry that still maintained a sense of being on the vanguard. The earliest issues show off their newsletter origins. The Space Gamer and The Generalstarted off on plain paper in black and white. Even the first issues of Dragon look like a teenager’s fanzine, but the enthusiasm and energy are infectious. Who couldn’t love the introduction of new monsters for your campaign such as the Gem Var, a creature composed entirely of gemstone and that cannot take damage from bladed weapons. The artists, editors and letter writers were the best friends you had never met. Gaming in the 1970 and 80s felt a little like being into punk rock. You knew it was offbeat, knew that outsiders didn’t get it, but you also knew that this was cool. Even the advertisements and listings of conventions expanded the universe of gaming a thousandfold. Not unlike ordering 45s of unknown bands from punk zines, was sending away for microgames, miniatures and supplements from tiny game publishers. Browsing through them now using Internet Archive’s terrific “read online” feature, it’s clear how important these magazines were to a fledgling hobby (and how wonderfully awful some of the artwork was). The amount of new gaming content these magazines offered is astonishing, and it was this very malleability of the rules that created a sense within the community of gamers that it was perpetually new, always reaching out towards the next idea. The first issue of Dragon Magazine from 1976 (then called The Dragon) admitted in its editor’s note that it was entering new territory, but managed to fill that pioneering issue with a story by Fritz Leiber, new spells, a discussion of science and magic in D&D, and introduced a regular section called “Mapping the Dungeons,” which was a list of the names and addresses of gamemasters looking for players (David Mumper of Henniker, New Hampshire, where are you now?). Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) put out Ares Magazine, and each issue offered a complete game including a map and a rack of punch-out counters. The PDFs currently at Internet Archive include scans of these elements and it’s painful to not be able to press out those beautiful little counters. The Space Gamer focused mostly on publisher Metagaming’s own properties. By issue #27, the magazine came under the auspices of Steve Jackson Games (SJG) and offered a much greater variety of content, with material for AD&D, Call of Cthulhu and computer games.
The General , published by Avalon Hill (makers of PanzerBlitz and one of the great war games of all time, Starship Troopers, among others), was geared towards the historical with smatterings of science fiction, but later issues had quite a bit of fantasy fare as well. The Generalalso offered articles on strategy and tactics employed during actual wars and a classified section called “Opponents Wanted” where lonely gamers posted messages in the hopes of finding other players: “Adult player looking for opponents (female players welcomed) to play AH non-wargames, especially RB, KREM, DIP, CIV. RB fanatics. Write me!” Having these magazines up at Internet Archive—or other easily-found online locations—corresponds perfectly with the old-school renaissance taking place in the world of role-playing games, as well as an overall nostalgia for ’70s gaming in general. The recent Kickstarter to republish Steve Jackson’s Ogre netted $923,680 (they were looking for $20,000). Wizards of the Coast recently made PDFs available the original rules and modules for AD&D, as well as a limited edition boxed set reprinting the impossibly rare “White Box.” And Gygax Magazine was just launched this January by Luke Gygax, Gary’s son. Those of us who gamed in the ’70s and ’80s are hitting middle-age and have kids of our own who couldn’t draw a dungeon map if their life depended on it. We are looking back at our lives, remembering fondly the things we deeply loved. When I was 12-years old, my older brother drove me down the mostly depressed Sterling Avenue in Hollywood, Florida to a nondescript storefront where there was a small variety store, a dry cleaner, and a shop called The Compleat Strategist. It was 1979 and I was just about done with my Legos and tragically losing interest in my Micronauts. We were there, of course, to check out Dungeons & Dragons. My brother chipped in and I walked out with the D&D Basic Set in the blue box, along with the Dungeon Geomorphs and the Monster and Treasure Assortment. I left with something else: a sense that I was about to be initiated into a secret order. Yet is was those magazines that created an idea of fraternity that would finally bring together so many aspects of my pre-adolescence: a love of fantasy and science fiction, an anxious imagination, and an almost righteous identity as an outsider. 
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| 6:01a | Super 8 music "video" for new Barn Owl song
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| 6:06a | Bro-on-Bro violence leads to tragedy, as penis drawn on roommate's face
A Virginia man was beaten on Saturday, March 23, for drawing a dick on his roommate’s face. Arlington County Police say 31-year-old James Watson passed out on his couch after a night of boozing. Around 5:30 AM he woke up to find, to his outrage, that a crude rendering of male genitalia had been scrawled upon his very face in permanent marker. From a local news report in Arlington: Police say that Watson, suspecting his roommate, ran upstairs to where the roommate was sleeping and jumped on top of him, repeatedly punching him in the face. The commotion awakened a third roommate, who managed to separate the two. The victim reportedly waited about an hour and a half to call the police while deciding whether or not to press charges. He did end up calling for help and police charged Watson with malicious wounding. The injured man’s eye was swollen shut and bleeding, so the third roommate drove him to the hospital for treatment, according to police. 
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| 6:10a | NYT op-ed: "On the Brink of Justice in Guatemala" Anita Isaacs, in a NYT op-ed: "I have spent the past 15 years researching and writing about postwar justice in Guatemala. I am encouraged that, a decade and a half after peace accords ended 36 years of civil war, Guatemala is being given a chance to show the world how much progress it has made in building democracy. The trial gives the Guatemalan state a chance to prove that it can uphold the rule of law and grant its indigenous Mayan people, who suffered greatly under Mr. Ríos Montt, the same respectful treatment, freedoms and rights the rest of its citizens enjoy." [NYTimes.com] 
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| 6:22a | Gentleman in Illinois accused of stealing 21 tons of Wisconsin Muenster cheese  Muenster cheese is not a crime. Image: Wikipedia  Veniamin Balika, 34, of Plainfield, IL, was arrested in New Jersey after cops caught him driving a refrigerated truck carrying 42,000 pounds of stolen Muenster cheese.It was definitely nacho average crime. The cheesy hot goods were produced by K&K Cheese of Cashton, WI with milk from Amish dairies. They were valued at valued at $200,000, which is a whole lot of cheddar. A portion of the contraband queso-cargo is shown here. The suspect is said to have faked paperwork to move the cheese. From a local TV news report:
New Jersey authorities say Balika was preparing to sell the cheese for well under market value to retailers on the east coast. Thanks to the gouda work of New Jersey's finest, the public can rest easy knowing the criminal will be brie-hind bars. He'll have to tread very Caerphilly in the future. A news report is below:
(channel3000.com via Washington Post HT for the extra puns, @CounterfeitGent @stoppableforce
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| 6:34a | Researchers show method for de-anonymizing 95% of "anonymous" cellular location data Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility, a Nature Scientific Reports paper by MIT researchers and colleagues at Belgium's Universite Catholique de Louvain, documents that 95% of "anonymous" location data from cellphone towers can be de-anonymized to the individual level. That is, given data from a region's cellular towers, the researchers can ascribe individuals to 95% of the data-points.
Anonymized Phone Location Data Not So Anonymous, Researchers Find [Wired/Kim Zetter]
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| 7:30a | Japanese teen trend: "Dragon Ball attack" selfies
"Numerous Japanese teens, it seems, are uploading photos of themselves doing the Kamehameha attack from popular manga and anime series Dragon Ball," writes Kotaku's Japan-based correspondent Brian Ashcraft. There's a photo gallery and it's awesome. Brian had an earlier post at Kotaku about the broader trend in Japan of young women staging photos with manga-style martial arts. Below, one such image found on 2ch, Japan's largest bulletin board, with the heading, "Schoolgirls Nowadays lol". (Thanks, Brian Lam!)
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| 8:04a | FOUR ASTOUNDING THINGS THAT BOING BOING READERS ARE DOING RIGHT NOW! Last week, we put up a post asking BB readers to tell us (and each other) about their projects. You-all upvoted your favorites, and herewith presented is a list of some of the coolest things you're up to (there's plenty that didn't make the cut but still fascinate -- have a look). There's so much awesome here that I'm going to split this into a morning and evening post. Come back at 5PM Pacific to see the second half (or go read the totally awesome thread for yourself). First up, Josh Zisson wrote:
Next, Alison Jardine told us about her paintings:
Here's lava, an architect, describing a catalog of modernist styles:
Grant Hamilton is trying to create a co-op brewpub in a derelict firehall:
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| 8:16a | Internet apocalypse? In the next bag o' chips Sam Biddle writes that this week's epic, internet-shaking DDOS was a lie. Spamhaus was indeed under a record-size denial-of-service attack, but the protection company it hired, Cloudfront, turns out to be the only source of the bigger story that went with it: that the internet at large was significantly affected. 
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| 8:29a | The classy and fascinating back story behind pink champagne This article at Lapham's Quarterly by Peter Foges has me rethinking my biases against rose champagne — a drink I tend to associate with undergrads and poorly conceived 7-Up cocktails. Turns out, the history (and the chemistry) of rose are totally fascinating. Traditionally the quaff of queens (and really, really, really high-class hookers), real rose is surprisingly difficult to make, relying on a process that could, with just a small error, go wrong and leave you with a drink that is red, brown, or even blue. 
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| 8:37a | The mathematics of tabloid news Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez have an interesting piece at The New York Times about DNA evidence in murder trials, the mathematics of probability, and the highly publicized case of Amanda Knox. What good is remembering the math you learned in junior high? If you're a judge, it could be the difference between a guilty verdict and an acquittal. 
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| 8:37a | Raiders of the Lost Ark original brainstorming sessions  In 1978, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan had early brainstorming sessions around Lucas's outline for "Raiders of the Lost Ark." They recorded the conversations and had the tape transcribed. Here it is (PDF). Over at the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe provides a summary and excerpts some choice bits. The hero, Lucas explains, is a globe-trotting archaeologist, “a bounty hunter of antiquities.” He’s a professor, a Ph.D.—“People call him doctor.” But he’s a little “rough and tumble.” As the men hash out the Jones iconography, they refer, incessantly, to other films, invoking Eastwood, Bond, and Mifune. He will dress like Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lucas says: “the khaki pants…the leather jacket. That sort of felt hat.” Oh, and also? “A bullwhip.” He’ll carry it “rolled up,” Lucas continues. “Like a snake that’s coiled up behind him.”"Raiders of the Lost Ark: Story Conference Transcript" (Mad Dog Movies) "Spitballing Indy" (The New Yorker)
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| 8:38a | Urinal video games  Reuters' Joe McDonald informs us of a new hands-free gaming technology: "Play doesn't need to stop for sports fans taking a bathroom break at a Pennsylvania minor-league baseball stadium that has installed video games in men's room urinals." You can have a go yourself at Lehigh Valley IronPigs' Coca-Cola Park in Allentown. Photo: Reuters.
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| 8:46a | What makes monsters real Peter Stanford reviews Matt Kaplan's new book, an investigation into what's so intriguing about spooky, scary beasties of the night: Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: the Science of Monsters.
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| 8:51a | Basquiat ex-girlfriend's huge collection of his art/archives  In 1979, starving artist Jean-Michel Basquiat painted murals all over the walls of his biology student girlfriend Alexis Adler's apartment in New York City's East Village. The couple split up around 1980 but Adler held on to the apartment and eventually bought it. She had left Basquiat's wall art alone and also kept piles of his work, from notebooks to photos to drawings. Adler, a New York University embryologist, is now working with a team of experts to catalog the chaotic collection for an upcoming book, exhibition, and, of course, a sale. According to Artinfo, one of the contributors to the effort, Gracie Mansion gallery director Sur Rodney Sur "credits Basquiat’s sometime depiction of scientific formulas and compounds to his time with Adler, who was a biology student in those days. He said Basquiat was fascinated by her textbooks and copied much of the imagery." Basquiat's Ex-Girlfriend Reveals Major Trove of Unseen Works" (via Science Sparks Art)
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| 8:52a | Science at Fashion Week From bodices made of green beetle wings to a skirt studded with embroidered-on bits of meteorite, the clothing of designer Mathieu Mirano draws inspiration from the natural world and the obsessions of science. Popular Science's Susannah Locke went to the designer's show and has a gallery of photos that you should really check out. 
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| 8:52a | Eyeballs found in trash "Police say they are trying to determine how a medical box containing a pair of eyeballs ended up in a trash bin at a gas station in Kansas City," reports the Associated Press. 
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| 8:53a | Saboteurs caught trying to sever major undersea Internet cable to Egypt
Egypt: Naval forces capture 3 divers trying to cut undersea Internet cable [AP] (via /.)
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| 9:20a | The Namiki/Pilot Vanishing Point retractable fountain pen I used to carry a Parker 51. I'll never let that pen go, but like many fountain pens it was too risky to take on a plane. Pressurized cabins seem the perfect environment to cause a leak. I've tried and tried but many a jacket or shirt pocket bear the stains of my forgetfulness. Several years ago, I found the Pilot Vanishing Point fountain pen. It is a well-balanced and well-sealing writing instrument that has never let me down. A truly modern take on a the classic fountain design. The Vanishing Point has a retractable nib, like clicking a Bic. Uniquely, for a fountain pen, when the pen is closed it is closed! The ink and nib are surrounded in a sealed chamber. This has resulted in several hundred thousand miles flown without a single leak. But how does it write? I like a fine nib and the Pilot comes with a beautifully flexible 18 carat gold one -- it is super fine. The pen is really well balanced and feels solid in my hand. It is heavy but in the best way. Writing is a joy! I find Pilot's cartridge ink to be fast drying and the black is dark enough for me (I'm a long time Quink fan but we can discuss ink all day...) It is perfect for writing in a Boing Boing moleskine! The Pilot Vanishing Point retractable fountain pen
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| 10:07a | UK Open Rights Group is holding its first ever digital rights conference in the north Ruth from the UK Open Rights Group sez:
ORGCon North 2013 (Thanks, Ruth!)
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| 10:19a | The Shangri-Las perform "Out in the Streets" (1965) Bad girl group The Shangri-Las, best known for "Leader of the Pack," perform the far superior tune "Out in the Streets" on a 1965 episode of Shindig! For all you ever wanted to know about these talented young ladies, look no further than right here. (via Ben Gibbard)
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| 10:46a | RIM sells a million Z10s, climbs out of red ink Research In Motion today reported a surprise profit and "a comfortable cash pile for its fiscal fourth quarter," after strong first sales of its new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone. Also: Co-CEO Mike Lazardidis will be stepping down from the troubled mobile device maker's board. [WSJ] 
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| 10:54a | Officer linked to torture tapes' destruction advances within C.I.A. At the New York Times, Mark Mazzetti reports on the promotion of a C.I.A. officer "directly involved in the 2005 decision to destroy interrogation videotapes and who once ran one of the agency’s secret prisons." 
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| 11:01a | Dolphin funeral? Adult dolphin "carries calf around for days," but is it grieving? Participants on a "Captain Dave's Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari" off the coast at Dana Point, CA (I've been on a few of them, they're great) witnessed an emotionally moving form of bottlenose dolphin behavior this week: a deceased dolphin calf was being carried around on the back of an adult bottlenose dolphin. To onlookers, it felt like a kind of funeral procession, in the sea. "I believe this calf has been dead for many days, possibly weeks," said Captain Dave. "You can see the flesh is decaying. In my nearly twenty years on the water whale watching I have never seen this behavior. Nor have I ever seen anything quite as moving as this mother who refuses to let go of her poor calf." More video, and background, here. It'd be interesting to hear how marine biologists explain the science behind this apparent mourning behavior. Because it could also be a tasty fermented treat. [petethomasoutdoors.com via Brian Lam]
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| 11:20a | HOWTO improve your startup's chances Anil Dash has got ten dynamite top tips for people hoping to run a successful startup, based on his wide experience:
The other five are just as great! Ten Tips Guaranteed to Improve Your Startup Success
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| 11:22a | The science of screen time vs. face time, and human connectedness University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill psych professor Barbara L. Fredrickson had an interesting recent piece in the New York Times on what she and research colleagues argues is a concerning downside of "the instant electronic access" provided by smartphones and tablets and the like: "one measurable toll may be on our biological capacity to connect with other people." The theory isn't new, but the science she points to seems to be. 
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| 11:33a | Owner reunited with camera she lost in Hawaii after it washes up on Taiwan beach 6 years later  [via CNN]
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| 11:38a | Mapping Twitter tongues of New York City  8.5 million geolocated tweets. Above: a map created by James Cheshire, Ed Manley, and John Barratt, who collected 8.5 million geo-located tweets between January 2010 and February 2013. Fast Company Design reports: "To build the image itself, they placed a point every 50 meters across the city. Tweets falling in close proximity were translated into a grid that you see here." Among the revelations: Midtown is massively multilingual, "like a someone spilled a jar of confetti across the island." More: Infographic: The Languages Of New York, Mapped By Tweets
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| 11:42a | Prisoners in Scotland are "watching too much TV" The parliament's justice committee is concerned that inmates in Scotland's jails "have unlimited opportunity to watch television," and say "a reasonable amount of time to watch television is fair as part of a prisoners' relaxation time," but warns of the importance of establishing "guidelines regarding the appropriate amount of television viewing." [BBC News] 
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| 12:02p | TSA screener finds pepper spray on the floor, gasses five other screeners because he thought it was
Oops, TSA guy goes spray-zy! [NY Post/Josh Margolin] (via Digg) (Image: Pepper Spray Cop - White background, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from donkeyhotey's photostream)
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| 1:13p | What problem are we trying to solve in the copyright wars? My latest Guardian column is "Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet" and it looks at what we really need from proposed solutions to the copyright wars:
Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet
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| 2:02p | Equality
From the Boing Boing Flickr pool: "Equality," a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from Rich Renomeron's photostream.
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| 3:13p | Editorial board of Journal of Library Administration resigns en masse in honor of Aaron Swartz The entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration resigned en masse. Board member Chris Bourg wrote publicly about the decision, and an open letter elaborates on it, stating that their difference of opinion with publisher Taylor & Francis Group about open access, galvanized by Aaron Swartz's suicide, moved them to quit.
Pretty amazing that Taylor & Francis thought that they could convince authors -- who weren't paid in the first place -- to cough up $3000 for the right to use their own work in other contexts. Talk about being out of step with business realities of publishing!
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| 3:15p | LG Monitor Gives New Meaning to Color Precision ADVERTISEMENT This post is sponsored by LG Electronics. Discover the LG IPS Color Prime Monitor.
The picture quality even goes beyond the standard HD that you’re used to. In fact, the built-in Wide Quad High Definition (WQHD) is four times the resolution at 2560 x 1440, ensuring you can see all the detail necessary in everything you view. The LG ColorPrime makes multitasking a breeze, too, with it’s one-click 4-Screen Split feature, so you can work on multiple projects at once in various configurations without having to click back and forth. Whether you’re laying out design, editing video, or touching up an illustration, you can count on the LG ColorPrime Monitor for supreme color accuracy.
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| 5:09p | FOUR MORE ASTOUNDING THINGS THAT BOING BOING READERS ARE DOING RIGHT NOW! Last week, I put up a post asking BB readers to tell us (and each other) about their projects. You-all upvoted your favorites, and herewith presented is a list of some of the coolest things you're up to (there's plenty that didn't make the cut but still fascinate -- have a look). There's so much awesome here that I'm going to split this into a morning and evening post. Here's this morning's bunch (for an unfiltered view, go read the totally awesome thread for yourself). First in this batch: Matthew Heberger is translating "Where There is No Doctor" (an amazing book I relied on extensively when I was a volunteer school-builder in Central America) into Bambara for use in Mali:
Emojk runs a site called FindersKeepers:
avoision's site Spitshake makes it easy to produce formal-looking contracts for stupid bets:
Bok's running a Kickstarter for a comic-strip documentary:
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| 6:18p | Songwriting podcast with Richard Sherman of Disney's Sherman Brothers
Episode 38 – Richard M. Sherman (Image: "it's a small world" holiday, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from harshlight's photostream)
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| 8:28p | Disneyland Dapper Day: when Disney fans dress up
Dapper Day at Disneyland, the nattiest place on Earth [LA Times/Rick Rojas] (Photo: Christina House)
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Behold the beautiful grain of director Paul Clipson's Super 8 short film for San Francisco droneography duo Barn Owl's new track "Void Redux." Clipson shot the footage on trains in Zagreb, Geneva, and Berlin. "Void Redux" will be included on Barn Owl's forthcoming album "V," out April 16 on Thrill Jockey. 
“We show that the uniqueness of human mobility traces is high, thereby emphasizing the importance of the idiosyncrasy of human movements for individual privacy,” they explain. “Indeed, this uniqueness means that little outside information is needed to re-identify the trace of a targeted individual even in a sparse, large-scale, and coarse mobility dataset. Given the amount of information that can be inferred from mobility data, as well as the potentially large number of simply anonymized mobility datasets available, this is a growing concern.” 
Lindsay Scallan of Newnan, Georgia took photos on her Canon PowerShot during a vacation on Maui in 2007, and lost her new camera (in its waterproof case) during a night scuba dive. "The seas were really rough. There was a lot of sand stirred up. It was hard to see," 
"People are looking for an excuse to dress up," said Justin Jorgensen, who started Dapper Day in 2011 and has organized five of the events, all at Disneyland. The latest Dapper Day — the same Sunday as the Oscars, Hollywood’s own dress-up day — drew an estimated crowd of 10,000 to the Anaheim park and about 1,000 more at Florida's Disney World. 
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