Home / boingboing.com rss archive / October-01-2007


Run DMC on Reading Rainbow (video)
"From the front to the back, as pages turn; Reading is a real fresh way to learn." RUN-DMC appeared on the PBS children's television show "Reading Rainbow" in the mid-'80s, and this is the result. Video Link. (Jam Master Jay R.I.P!) (thanks, Will)...

LA Times on offshore personal aides
Los Angeles Times staff writer Julie M. Makinen explored different types of personal assistants that can be hired over the Web, reporting on the pros and cons of each. Naturally, I started with the cheap one, a new outfit called Sunday ( www.asksunday.com). For $29 a month, the assistants at Sunday would do 30 tasks for me. The rules were simple: Each task could take no more than 30 minutes, and each had to be something that could be accomplished, ahem, at a distance: These assistants, I learned later, are mostly in India. The assistance-at-a-distance model ruled a lot of things out. The assistants could not pick up my dry cleaning or go stand in line to mail a package. But I was surprised at how much they could do. Once I had registered at the website, I uploaded some personal data, such as my frequent-flier account numbers, and the names and phone numbers of my dentist, hairdresser and doctor. If I wanted an assistant to make purchases on my behalf, I could also load credit-card...

Supreme Court denies Alabama women mechanically induced orgasms
GordonUnleashed says: "Talk about sex toys is once again the buzz around Alabama. The United States Supreme Court refused to hear the Alabama sex toy case, ending a nine year battle for the right to keep and bear (well, more accurately, purchase) sex toys in the state. Sherri Williams provided the money quote in this AP article:" An adult-store owner had asked the justices to throw out the law as an unconstitutional intrusion into the privacy of the bedroom. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving intact a lower court ruling that upheld the law. Sherri Williams, owner of Pleasures stores in Huntsville and Decatur, said she was disappointed, but plans to sue again on First Amendment free speech grounds. My motto has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up, she said. Alabamas anti-obscenity law, enacted in 1998, bans the distribution of any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation...

Paul Boutin's GOOG-411 Test
Paul Boutin says: "While everyone else is pontificating on what the GOOG-411 billboards around the country must mean, I called the number a few dozen times during lunch to test it. I think of Cory every time it answers -- not with a hello but with 'Calls recorded for quality.'" I spent a half hour speed-dialing Google's new phone directory service, 800-GOOG-411. The verdict? Google's speech-recognition and geo-mapping algorithms outperformed Verizon and AT&T's humans this afternoon. GOOG-411 figured out that "Dover-Foxcroft" was a town in Maine rather than bouncing me to an operator. It deduced that "H H Brown Shoes" meant a store in nearby Dexter. It let me talk with my mouth full. But the service makes an irritatingly un-Googly first impression on callers. Link...

How to filter out press releases from your email
If you get too many press releases emailed to you, try Merlin Mann's trick of creating a filter that diverts or deletes emails containing the string "For Immediate Release." I just found 11,000 messages in my mail with that string in it. Merlin also shares a few other useful "Guerrilla Office Tactics" on his blog, 43 Folders. Link...

Water bridge created with high voltage
Physicist Elmar Fuchs and his colleagues from Graz University of Technology are investigating why water, when exposed to high voltages, forms this strange liquid bridge as the liquid moves from one beaker to another. They published their research in the Jouranl of Physics D: Applied Physics. The water bridge was cylindrical with a diameter of 1 to 3 mm and spanned as much as 25 mm. From PhysOrg.com: The groups analyses have shown that the explanation may lie within the nature of the waters structure. Initially, the bridge forms due to electrostatic charges on the surface of the water. The electric field then concentrates inside the water, arranging the water molecules to form a highly ordered microstructure. This microstructure remains stable, keeping the bridge intact. Link to Physorg article, Link to the scientific paper (Thanks, Sean Ness!)...

Educational TV parody: Look Around You
Look Around You is a BBC program that parody's educational TV from the 70s and 80s. This episode about the brain is especially funny. The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin, filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind, or brain. Link (Via Eye of the Goof)...

Moon landing recreation as art
Artist Tom Sachs says that "Going to the moon was the best art project of the twentieth century." So he made it into an art installation. Space Program, on view for another two weeks at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, is an incredibly detailed recreation (and reimagination) of a lunar module, control room, astronaut suits, and the moonshot experience. Tom even wore the classic 60s NASA scientist "uniform" of a short-sleeved white dress shirt and tie. Supertouch and BB pal Tim Biskup were at the preview a couple of weeks ago where they were thrilled by a full performance and demonstration of the exhibit. From Supertouch: Featuring a life-sized replica of the Apollo 11 moon lander, mission control, and NASAs uniform room, all customized to his personal specifications using ordinary hardware store materials (including weaponry and hard-liquor delivery systems), the enormous display was the must-see big bang that announced LAs fall art season. From the Gagosian Gallery press...

Keep Your Copyrights: helping creators beat abusive contracts
My pal Tim Wu, a copyfighting attorney and law prof, is working on a new project to help authors retain control over their copyrights instead of assigning them to publishers, academic institutions, and other organizations, to stop copyrights from piling up into huge stockpiles controlled by greedy dinosaurs like the RIAA. Many of the problems of the copyright system come from copyright in the wrong hands. When copyrights get accumulated into large stockpiles, bad things often happen, things that often aren't in the interests of authors. Too often authors and other creators end up giving away their copyrights when they don't need to. The point of our site, keepyourcopyrights.org, is to educate lawyers and non-lawyers on what to expect. We have collected actual contracts with dangerous language to teach people what to look out for. Link (Thanks, Tim!)...

Differences between 1963 and 1991 editions of Richard Scarry kids' book
Kokogiak has a Flickr gallery with scans from two different editions of Richard Scarry's The Best Word Book Ever. The 1963 edition has references to Native Americans, a "pretty stewardess," "brave hero," and old-fashioned gender roles that were changed in the 1991 edition. I can understand the reasons for many of the changes, but some of the alterations are for the worse, if you ask me. Much of Scarry's absurdist humor, which gives his work appeals to adults as well as kids, has ben expunged from the more recent edition. For instance, on the page about fire fighters saving people from a burning building, a cat jumping from the window was labeled "jumping gentleman." In the 1991 edition, the label is removed. And the "beautiful screaming lady" was changed to "cat in danger." That's no fun. The example shown above is even more unfortunate. The earlier version says the bear cub "comes promptly when he is called to breakfast." My four-year-old daughter enjoyed this and it really...

How to make fake gash with bubblegum
Here's a video that shows how to make a fake wound with bubblegum and makeup. Link (Thanks, sacha!)...

HOWTO make medieval ink
The new issue of the journal Science In Schools presents an interesting project on how to make iron-gall ink, the same ink used by da Vinci, Bach, van Gogh, and countless medieval monks. The author of the project, Gianluca Farusi, and his chemistry students used a recipe written by Pietro Canepario in 1619 and published in his book De atramentis cuiuscumque generis (All Kinds of Ink). The ingredients consist of acorn galls, water, ferrous sulphate, and gum arabic. From the project page: Many mediaeval miniatures of St. John of Patmos demonstrate the importance of ink: they portray the Devil attempting to steal the saints precious ink. In the Middle Ages, two kinds of black ink were generally used: carbon ink (a suspension of carbon, water and gum) and iron-gall ink (obtained from oak galls). Carbon ink was used as early as 2500 BC whereas iron-gall ink was used from the 3rd century AD onwards, by individuals such as Leonardo da Vinci, Johann Sebastian Bach, Rembrandt van Rijn...

Twisted game simulates running McDonald's
Today's review on the video-game review site "Play This Thing" is of a twisted and funny parody of life at McDonald's called McDonald's Video Game: Paolo Pedercini is a mad bastard, and the McDonald's game is his sharp, procedural satire of how fast food is a corrupt industry by necessity. The game is set up so that you cannot win without compromising. Try it, you'll see. While you can maintain mild growth without using hormones or genetically modified crops, your bosses will not be satisfied. To really succeed, you have to employ what some might call "unnatural" means, though at Corporate, they call it "McFriendly growth measures". The game is drawn with a crazy flair, the blood splattered happy meal at the title screen should be some indication. There are subtle touches, like the joint perpetually hung out the mouth of a marketer, or the fact that some of your customers are men with beards wearing skirts -- a byproduct of the randomly combinatorial nature of the character...

Man wants shared custody of other man's leg
Three years ago, John Wood's leg was amputated after it was injured in a plane crash. He kept the leg and dried it so it could be someday buried with him. Eventually the limb ended up in a barbecue smoker in a storage facility. After Wood stopped paying rent on the storage space, the items were sold off. Shannon Whisnant of Maiden, North Carolina bought the smoker and, unknowingly, the desiccated limb. This week, Wood is coming to Maiden to pick up the leg but Whisnant wants to keep it. From McClatchy Newspapers: Wood said he was livid when he got the request from Whisnant. "He's making a freak show out of it," Wood said. "He wants to go on 'The Tonight Show' and he wants to sell it to the National Enquirer and call Ripley's Believe It Or Not. He wants to put money in his pocket with this thing." After meeting with a lawyer this weekend, Whisnant decided his best move was to convince Wood to share custody. Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)...

iPhone hackers mix their own "Here's to the Crazy Ones" ad
Apple's old "Here's to the Crazy Ones" ad celebrates mavericks who broke the rules and challenged old institutions. iPhone hackers, frustrated by Apple's prohibition on third-party iPhone apps (and Apple's attack on unlocked phones in the form of an "update" that renders unlocked phones unusable), have remixed the ad, to celebrate the crazy iPhone hackers who dared to break the rules and write software to run on their phones. Link (via O'Reilly Radar)...

Studying global warming through old masters' paintings
Researchers are studying the painted sunsets by artists like Turner, Rembrandt, and Rubens to get a sense of how volcanic eruptions may have impacted global warming. The National Observatory of Athens scientists look at the colors the old masters used in their depictions to suss out the amount of volcanic ash was in the atmosphere. The historical data will then help populate computer simulations of global warming. From The Guardian: The results will feed into the scientific study of a phenomenon called global dimming, which is caused by air pollution blocking sunlight. Some experts believe this has acted as a brake on global warming, and that climate change could accelerate as air pollution from industry is reduced. Professor (Christos) Zerefos and his team looked at natural global dimming caused by volcanoes, the results of which can be severe. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 threw out so much material that it triggered the notorious "year without a summer",...

Disney kills its spy-on-your-kids phones
Disney has killed off its mobile phone service, which had the creepy "feature" of allowing parents to track their kids' movements and surveil their conversations. Apparently, they weren't able to scare enough parents into putting telephonic prisoner-anklets onto their kids. Disney said the service will no longer be available after December 31, but it might offer some of the specially designed software and applications through another wireless operator. Link (via Ypulse) See also: Disney to launch mobile phone service with Sprint...

Collapsible nifty dish-rack -- Boing Boing Gadgets
Joel on Boing Boing Gadgets just spotted this Splat dish-rack concept designed by Jill Davis: "Two pieces of plastic clip together to create a place to dry your pots and pans, then pack flat for easy storage when finished." Smart -- I don't have room for a dishrack in my tiny place in London, and something like this would be a treat. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets...

Self-assembling robot chair
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel has a great post on a "self-assembling robot chair" that, while, impractical, sure is promising for those of us who are heartily sick of Ikea's little hex-wrenches. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets...

Nokia taunts Apple lockware phone with posters for "open" N-series
Nokia is plastering NYC (and elsewhere?) with cheeky ads taking aim at Apple's locked iPhones. Not only does Apple prohibit installing third-party apps on the iPhone, but some users who modded their phones discovered that Apple's latest "update" actually bricked their phones, rendering them useless (and Apple says that modding your phone voids your warranty). Nokia's N-series phones are designed to run third-party code, and Nokia encourages users to mod their phones (though, of course, Nokia's phones all come with a software switch that allows mobile companies to lock them to a single carrier). I've been seriously considering buying an N95, as I'm in the market for a new smartphone (my old N93 -- a giant hunk of junk to begin with -- is about to die). I've heard good things about the phone, except for battery life, which is apparently a real problem. The other phones I'm thinking of are the Neonode (looks good, but I can't find one to play with and that's a lot of money to spend...

Rudy Rucker's Postsingular: Wheenk!
Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular is pure Rucker: a dope-addled exploration of the way-out fringes of string theory and the quantum universe that distorts the possible into the most improbable contortions. In Postsingular, a mad scientist creates a race of nants -- nanites -- that digest the planet and turn it into a computational simulation of Earth, called Vearth. However, an autistic child memorizes a long string of numbers that poisons the nants and causes them to reverse themselves (luckily, they're engaged in reversible computation) and put the planet back. That's the setup. Some time later, another race of benign nanos are released on the earth, the Orphids. Orphids are mezzoscale computers that organize themselves into an intelligent global network, tapping into every human brain and giving people access to outboard cognition facilities, so that anyone can drop out, tune in, and become hyperintelligent. The orphidnetters are haunted by spooks from a parallel dimension,...

Archibishop of Mozambique: condoms and HIV cocktails will give you AIDS
Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio, the head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique, has been spreading fatal lies about condoms and anti-virals: he claims that condoms and life-saving drugs have been infected with HIV in order to kill Africans. "Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose," he alleged, refusing to name the countries. "They want to finish with the African people. This is the programme. They want to colonise until up to now. If we are not careful we will finish in one century's time." Link (via Making Light)...

Profile of Getting Things Done author
This month's Wired has a long profile on David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, a productivity book whose cultlike adherents (myself included) are incredibly passionate about. Since reading GTD two or three years ago, I've modelled my whole productivity regime around its advice, particularly the list of pending actions from other people, which has saved me more time and money than anything I've done before -- I've stopped losing projects and gigs because I thought someone else was looking after it and they thought I was. The profile gets into depth on Allen's background -- junkie, mental patient, trainer, consultant, bestselling author; stuff I'd never known. Allen's practical suggestions on how to turn thoughts into reality sharply distinguish him from his predecessors. His advice is so simple as to appear simpleminded. He insists that nothing should ever appear on a to-do list that is not a specific, concrete action expressed at the most practical level of detail. Do...

Mutating Pictures: using artificial selection to create faces
The Mutating Pictures project is striving to generate human likenesses out of random blobs -- 1000 random pictures have been uploaded to the site. We all go through it, ranking each one for the degree to which it resembles a human. The most human-like are used to spawn 1000 new offspring, mutated from their genome, and so on, until the perfect human face emerges. It's like the samurai crabs -- artificial selection to produce shapes pleasing to our eye. Link (Thanks, Phillip!)...

Ecko's Boba Fett hoodie
Ecko's got a new line of Star Wars-inspired clothes -- it's all pretty OK, except for this Boba Fett hoodie, which is soo-poib! Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Dalek cufflinks
I wear cufflinks approximately 0.6 times/year, but even so, I'm tempted by these Dalek cufflinks. Do you think I could wear them with a t-shirt? Link (via Wonderland)...

HOWTO make a robotic ElmoSapien chimera
The ElmoSapien project shows you how to eviscerate an Elmo handpuppet and stretch its skin taut over a RoboSapien robot, load an Elmo "personality" into the robot, and terrorize the neighborhood children. Link (via IZ Reloaded)...