friendly something

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/hw4kXEnbHNc/letterpress-edition-of-pri.html

http://boingboing.net/?p=162740

James sez, "The Bowler Press is taking on printing a letterpress, three-volume edition of Pride & Prejudice, and they are trying to fund the costs of getting the materials to do so with crowd sourcing. The link is to the IndieGoGo crowd funding site for the project, where folks can donate to the project and receive perks, such as hand-printed P&P bookmarks, or other letterpress ephemera that will be made during the project. The printer and binder have produced a video that explains the project and shows how the books will be printed letterpress (seeing the old press at work is neat) and bound by hand. It's a pretty geeky-cool (with a touch of crazy) project and could use the help of anyone who might like to help support it."

Pride and Prejudice: Limited in Letterpress (Thanks, James!)

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/QVApaEfZktU/ask-slashdot-why-not-linux-for-security

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://www.neowin.net/news/bbm-to-stay-exclusive-to-blackberry-devices

http://www.neowin.net/news/facebook-rumored-to-be-buying-opera

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/afXYJGCy8YA/critical-mass-20th-anniversary.html

http://boingboing.net/?p=162976

Hugh sez, "San Francisco muralista Mona Caron has created a stunning to poster to mark the 20th anniversary of Critical Mass in San Francisco this September."

Critical Mass 20th Anniversary Bike Angel Poster by Mona Caron (Thanks, hughillustration!)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/zROjoIuMuM0/lady-gaga-queen-of-demon.html

http://boingboing.net/?p=163147

Muslim women hold posters during a protest objecting to U.S. singer Lady Gaga's Indonesian concert, at Jakarta's business district May 24, 2012. Pop star Lady Gaga has been refused a permit to perform in the Indonesian capital on June 3 over security concerns, police said last week. Three Islamic groups have expressed their opposition to the concert, demanding it be stopped, national police spokesman Saud Usman Nasution said by telephone. More on the controversy: WSJ, AFP, Washington Post, NYT, AP, Jakarta Post. (REUTERS/Supri)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/nP5HnMz7pU8/youtube-launches-new-human-rig.html

http://boingboing.net/?p=163144

This week, YouTube announced the launch of a new Human Rights channel in partnership with advocacy nonprofit WITNESS, and social news-gathering service Storyful.

The new channel is "dedicated to curating hours of raw citizen-video documenting human rights stories that are uploaded daily and distributing that to audiences hungry to learn and take action," and "aims to shed light on and contextualize under-reported stories, to record otherwise undocumented abuses, and to amplify previously unheard voices."

Read the official launch announcement. And here's more at the NYT blog The Lede.

http://www.osnews.com/story/26002/WebOS_team_members_going_to_Google

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/MKlFhLRty8w/bittorrent-traffic-falls-in-the-us

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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."

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

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/qpNgyXSJX5k/

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/hp-enyo/

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/L_XSaHO942A/dark-days-ahead-for-facebook-and-google

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/ydfDyHVj-dI/

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/microsoft-visual-studio-free/

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/2bAH_RPMWMU/battle-brewing-over-labeling-of-genetically-modified-food

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/-ZMsxsydIHs/texter-not-responsible-for-textees-car-accident-rules-judge

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qwwTvWkEk8o/free-news-unsustainable-says-warren-buffett

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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.

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

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.

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