Boing Boing

I didn't touch it.

The Wilderness Downtown: Chrome experiment by Chris Milk and Arcade Fire

Wildernessdownnnn
The Wilderness Downtown is perhaps the best browser-dominating Net art piece I've experienced since Jodi.org's best work more than a decade ago. An experimental, interactive film by Chris Milk, it's a tour-de-force for the Chrome browser and a lovely visual poem to accompany Arcade Fire's excellent "We Used To Wait" from their album The Suburbs. I won't give the "story" away, but I found it to be a deeply personal and moving experience.

Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering... this Chrome Experiment has them all. "The Wilderness Downtown" is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire's song "We Used To Wait" and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.

The Wildreness Downtown (Thanks, Jean Hagan!)

Thanks for reading and "May the scientific method always be with you."

David Ng at 9:47 AM Fri

David Ng (Twitter) is a science literacy academic based at the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. He is currently on sabbatical at London’s Natural History Museum, and encourages you to check out the PHYLO project.

201009021342
Phylomon cards: "EUROPEAN HONEY BEE, I CHOOSE YOU!"

I had a great experience here at Boing Boing, and want to send on a big thanks to Mark, Cory, Xeni, David, Rob and the rest of the crew for letting me spend some quality time here. I'm also grateful to the many museum folks who let me chat with them, and so graciously showed me their projects. Kudos especially to Bob Bloomfield for the warm welcome and the many discussions on biodiversity advocacy. Hopefully, my posts didn't dilute the overall awesomeness here at Boing Boing, and at the every least, I hope a few more people are interested in Nagoya COP10. Also, it was fun to do my part to increase the Chewbacca quotient (even if only slightly) here at the site.

With that, I'd like to end with two last requests. Both related to biodiversity: one is kind of worthy, the other a little goofy. One requires folks of the artistic bent, the other maybe a more scientific approach.

Read the rest

Nagoya COP10 Primer #4: with a reference to twitter

David Ng at 9:06 AM Fri

David Ng (Twitter) is a science literacy academic based at the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. He is currently on sabbatical at London’s Natural History Museum, and encourages you to check out the PHYLO project.

Continuing from:

Nagoya COP10 Primer #1: with references to Star Wars Nagoya COP10

Primer #2: with a reference to Kevin Bacon Nagoya COP10 sidebar: UNFCCC YOU!

Nagoya COP10 Primer #3: with a small reference to LOL cats

So what should be done at Nagoya? This is the 20 million species plus question. And for all of the criticism that I've (and others) have proffered, we should appreciate that the task at hand is going to be quite the challenge. If nothing else, this is immediately clear from the often anthrocentric (humans rule the Earth and are just playing our role on the evolutionary front, so deal with it!) commentary left on biodiversity pieces throughout the internet.

There is a somewhat official Strategic Plan document out there, one that (with a remarkable lack of brevity) highlights 2020 goals and attempts to identify the process and partners to be involved. It's worth a look, although probably best absorbed by taking in the tables shown on page 19 on. It involves a list of some 20 different target statements. Some of which are short, bouncy, although still vague like a twitter tweet:

1. By 2020, everyone is aware of the value of biodiversity and what steps they can take to protect it.

Others are more to the point:

11. By 2020, At least 15% of land and sea areas, including the most critical terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats, have been protected through effectively managed protected areas and/or other means, and integrated into the wider land- and seascape.

A few establish direct talking points for individual COP members:

16. By 2020, Each Party has an appropriate, up-to-date, effective and operational national biodiversity strategy, consistent with this Strategic Plan, based on adequate assessment of biodiversity, its value and threats, with responsibilities allocated among sectors, levels of government, and other stakeholders, and coordination mechanisms are in place to ensure implementation of the actions needed.

And this one, almost works as a haiku:

3. By 2020 Subsidies harmful
to biodiversity
are eliminat...

Read the rest

Crystal Jellybean Skull only $6 in Boing Boing Bazaar

Mark Frauenfelder at 8:58 AM Fri

201009030856

Who in their right mind wouldn't want a Crystal Jellybean Skull for only six dollars? Get yours now in the Boing Boing Bazaar.

Crystal Jellybean Skull

HOWTO: Tiny BBQ out of Altoids Sours tin

David Pescovitz at 8:47 AM Fri

Image Fohhahgft7Pk7Bg Altoids-Sours-Bbq-Grill
Instructables.com contributor vmspionage built a tiny BBQ grill out of an Altoids Sours tin and computer fan grates. My 4-year-old (and I) would love this for making s'mores, one bubbling, tooth-decaying marshmallow at a time. Altoids Sours BBQ Grill

Makoto Aida's Schoolgirls

FEATURE by Brian Ashcraft and Shoko Ueda

Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool, by Brian Ashcraft and Shoko Ueda, looks at how this archetype has become such a distinctive international symbol. Following is an excerpt, about the artwork of Makoto Aida, from the book. — Rob

Read the rest

Art, nature, the history of science, and whoa, aren't these are beautiful?

David Ng at 7:33 AM Fri

David Ng (Twitter) is a science literacy academic based at the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. He is currently on sabbatical at London’s Natural History Museum, and encourages you to check out the PHYLO project.

201009021321
Plate 73 of the John Reeves Collection of Zoological Drawings from Canton, China, 1774-1856. (© The Natural History Museum, London).

Reeves was an English tea inspector, but also amassed a wonderful collection of Chinese drawings of plants and animals during his time in Canton.

A few weeks back, I had a great conversation with Judith Magee, Library Special Collections Curator at the Natural History Museum. From this conversation, as well as others (thanks Peronel, Martha, Bergit), it soon became clear that there were many individuals within the museum that had a passion for things pertaining to the humanities and the arts (see also this previous post).

In particular, the museum happens to house a vast collection of illustrations and paintings, many of which were originally produced as a way to scientifically document new species, new cultures, and other things observed during expeditions. However, it's also clear that apart from their historical value, these pieces of artwork also have immense aesthetic value. They. Are. Beautiful.

And speaking to Judith, you can literally feel the enthusiasm and affection for such pieces. Judith talked to me about writer/artists such as Alexander von Humboldt, John Bartram, as well as the wonderful drawings collected by John Reeves.

Read the rest

Boneless, clubfooted French Connection model invades Melbourne

Cory Doctorow at 5:59 AM Fri

As seen tonight in the casino across from the Melbourne Convention Centre: a boneless, clubfooted French Connection model.

Club-footed rubber-band woman visits us from the French Connection dimension, Melbourne, Australia

Homeroom Security: book about the insanity of zero-tolerance classroom policies

Cory Doctorow at 5:41 AM Fri

Salon's got a blood-boiling interview with Aaron Kupchik, author of Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear, a close look at four very different US schools. Each school has a different demographic and different location, but the thing they all share is a set of zero-tolerance policies that turn them into Kafka-esque nightmares:

They started in the '90s, and they were spurred by the federal government's Safe and Drug Free Schools Act, which required schools to implement zero tolerance for certain things like weapons. What schools have done across the country in the last 15 years is to expand greatly what falls under zero-tolerance policies. So they extend to not just deadly weapons and drugs but sometimes fighting and prescription drugs and other types of substances. What they mean is that if you're caught violating this broad rule, there's no discussion and no elaboration of why you did this. No investigation. We just punish you with the one-size-fits-all punishment.
We're teaching kids what it means to be a citizen in our country. And what I fear we're doing is teaching them that what it means to be an American is that you accept authority without question and that you have absolutely no rights to question punishment. It's very Big Brother-ish in a way. Kids are being taught that you should expect to be drug tested if you want to participate in an organization, that walking past a police officer every day and being constantly under the gaze of a security camera is normal. And my concern is that these children are going to grow up and be less critical and thoughtful of these sorts of mechanisms. And so the types of political discussions we have now, like for example, whether or not wiretapping is OK, these might not happen in 10 years.

America's real school-safety problem

Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear

(Thanks, Pete_Darby, via Submitterator!)

Heavily stapled phone-pole

Cory Doctorow at 8:42 PM Thu

Behold, the glory of a thoroughly enstapleified telephone pole, snapped last week in Toronto.

Phone poles

Typewriter key jewelry

Cory Doctorow at 8:17 PM Thu

Etsy seller Buster and Boo does a nice line in vintage, moderately priced jewelry and decorative art made from vintage typewriter keys from the 1920s and 1930s.

Buster and Boo

O_O

Dean Putney at 7:23 PM Thu

Video Link (via reddit)

Hurricane Earl IV

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 5:04 PM Thu

Xeni posted a great NASA image of the 2010 Hurricane Earl earlier this afternoon, which got me hunting around for some information on Hurricane Earls past. After all, this is not the first Earl. There've been three others, as well as some lesser Tropical Storms of the same name. The naming lists for these things are used again every seven years, and individual names are only retired after they've been attached to a particularly damaging storm. Earl, so far, has not.

When the names do get retired, replacing them isn't easy. According to Time magazine, there's a whole list of types of names that aren't allowed. Over the years, the meteorologists in charge of naming have resorted to flipping through the weirder end of baby name books and adding friends' names to the list.

Time: How are hurricanes and tropical storms named?

Above: Hurricanes Earl and Danielle in their 1998 incarnations.

Another oil rig explosion, and the science of dispersants

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 4:40 PM Thu

Another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded today. All crew members survived. Right now, nobody knows whether or not the explosion caused a leak in any of the seven wells that the rig collects from. There have been reports of an oil slick on the water near the fire, but that could just as easily be from the finite amount of oil stored on the rig—which would still a spill, but a significantly less problematic one.

Other than that, there's not really much information out about this right now. If anybody's learned anything from Deepwater Horizon it seems to be that you're better off, PR-wise, if you don't have to correct everything you say two days later.

To give you something to chew over in the meantime, though, Deep Sea News has been doing a really interesting series on the science (such as it is) of oil dispersants. It's interesting, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it gets into the details of why we don't know more.

Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle--once you've perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity.

Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome.

Part 1: How effective are dispersants on real oil spills?

Part 2: How toxic are dispersants?

Part 3: Do dispersants really promote degradation of oil?

Image of a random oil rig: Some rights reserved by kenhodge13

Preschoolers being radio-tagged

Cory Doctorow at 4:36 PM Thu

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Preschoolers in Richmond, California are being handed RFID jerseys when they get to school. The ACLU points out that in addition to the privacy concerns, these are not secure tags. It has the potential to make kidnapping and stalking very easy."

The editors of Scientific American said it well back in May 2005: "Tagging ... kids becomes a form of indoctrination into an emerging surveillance society that young minds should be learning to question."

Don't Let Schools Chip Your Kids (Thanks, Mary, via Submitterator!)

Cartoonist Pete Emslie posing with Julie Newmar

Mark Frauenfelder at 3:59 PM Thu

201009021524 I can't stop looking at this photo of talented cartoonist Pete Emslie posing with my favorite Catwoman, the beautiful Julie Newmar.

Pete Emslie at Fan Expo 2010

My Name is (Hurricane) Earl

Xeni Jardin at 3:36 PM Thu

How astronauts see Hurricane Earl. This image acquired by NASA two days ago:

The relatively placid view from the International Space Station belied the potent forces at work in Hurricane Earl as it hovered over the tropical Atlantic Ocean on August 30. With maximum sustained winds of 135 miles (215 kilometers) per hour, the storm was classified as a category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale as it passed north of the Virgin Islands.

Lowbrow Tarot Deck

David Pescovitz at 3:19 PM Thu

Images Images Large 00-Tarot-Backs Lg Diaz Images 4115 4925424367 Cd3B54121E B
Curator and artist Aunia Kahn selected a group of 23 lowbrow/pop surrealist artists to interpret one card each of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck. Hi-Fructose has a sneak preview of 14 of the cards, which will debut October 1 with a full show at Los Angeles's La Luz de Jesus Gallery, a book, and of course a deck of cards. Above left, card back by Daniel Martin Diaz; right, The Devil by Chet Zar

The LowBrow Tarot Card Project preview (Hi-Fructose)

LOWBROW + TAROT + PROJECT

UPDATE: You can see the entire show at the La Luz de Jesus site here.

Looking for Bigfoot in Minnesota

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 3:13 PM Thu

Yesterday, while flipping through my Minneapolis Continuing Education fall catalog, I noticed a class on the Great Mysteries of Science, which turned out to be lake monsters, Sasquatch and UFOs. The class was to be taught by a retired University of Minnesota professor who has since participated in an expedition to study said Sasquatch.

Now, this surprised me, because I had previously pegged Bigfoot as one of those coastal elites, who spent all his time in the Pacific Northwest and shunned the forests here in flyover country. But, apparently, Sasquatch is a Real American after all. In fact, sightings are common enough in northern Minnesota that the Bigfoot Field Research Organization recently organized a Sasquatch search party up there. Forty-two people went along, including my friend, travel journalist Frank Bures, who wrote about the experience of "'squatch hunting" for Minnesota Monthly magazine.

We'd been split into 15 camps, and we were carrying an armament of investigative equipment: night-vision scopes, walkie-talkies, GPS, infrared cameras, thermal-recording devices, video and audio recorders, and more. Someone handed me a thermal imager, which would show bright heat signatures of the living things in the forest. I scanned the area around us but saw nothing except a few warm rocks and something that may have been a raccoon.

"We've got some activity here," came another report across the radio. "They're walking around our site." Whenever the group laughed, apparently, there was a rustling in the woods. When they laughed really hard, there was even more rustling.

Those lucky bastards!

Read the rest

Rob Cockerham's quest for a solid ice beer tray

Mark Frauenfelder at 3:12 PM Thu

201009021512

Rob say: "I spent way too much time making a solid-ice beer tray, but I still feel it was worth the effort. To be truly complete, I should have test floated it in a pool or hot tub, but the bottle opener kept short-circuiting my experiments."

The Quest for a Solid Ice Beer Tray

Kids' Rube Goldberg machine

Cory Doctorow at 2:58 PM Thu

Here's video of the triumphant success of an elaborate kids' Rube Goldberg machine, created at an "informal Rube Goldberg summer camp for kids ages 3-8." I know nothing about this summer-camp, but it seems like one of the great Good Things of our era -- especially judging from the awesome elation of the kids after the successful run!

How to Get a Beach Ball Into a Galvanized Bucket (the Hard Way)

White tiger turning black

David Pescovitz at 2:55 PM Thu

A white tiger cub born at the Vandalur zoo in Chennai, India is turning black. From The Telegraph:

Biologists believe a large presence of melanin, the dark skin pigment, is the likely reason for its unusual colouring.
Tigers' skin colour is determined by the presence of black and yellow pigments. In most tigers, the colour yellow dominates over black to give them their characteristic colouring.
"In this cub, the reverse has happened — black is the dominant colour," senior zoo biologist Dr Manimozhi told The Times of India.
"It is the dominance of yellow pigment that enables tigers to survive in the wild," he added. "In fact, this is the reason why most white tigers are found only in zoos and not in the wild," Dr Manimozhi said.

"White tiger cub in Indian zoo turns black"

Mario mural

Cory Doctorow at 2:49 PM Thu

JenG sez, "NBC4 offers a few great pictures of Columbus College of Art & Design students playing with this interactive 8-bit mural. The mural depicts classic moments from Super Mario Bros., positioned without Mario or Luigi so passers-by can hop into level 1-1."

CCAD Students Create Interactive Mural (Thanks, Jen G!)

(Image: Ken Aschliman)

Quiznos sandwich: reality versus advertising

Cory Doctorow at 2:45 PM Thu

Quiznos's food photographers and stylists are apparently some kind of latter-day sorcerers, judging from the ad-versus-reality photos of their "Baja Chicken Sandwich" product, as snapped by Sarah, a Consumerist reader.

Fast Food Advertising Vs. Reality: Quiznos Baja Chicken Sandwich

Wendy's restaurants beverage-handling training songs

Cory Doctorow at 2:40 PM Thu

Consumerist reader SteveDave has dug up a pair of 1990s-vintage Wendy's training videos explaining how to serve beverages. They're masterpieces of shitty, squirm-worthy industrial video, especially the insincerely rapped "cold beverages" short (they should have just licensed the kick ass G Love and Special Sauce song). Looking at the Submitterator queue, I see that Cassandra found this one last week, too -- thanks, Cassandra!

The Coolest & Hottest Wendy's Training Videos Ever

Mopion cargo bike

Mark Frauenfelder at 2:40 PM Thu

Our friends at Biomega designed this cool-looking cargo bike for Puma.

PUMA Mopion is rock steady for the daily grind. It mixes city bike features, and cargo bike features, making it a sturdy companion. It comes with a super-size innovative front carrier for heavy duty transport of your groceries or other needs. Developed for city dwellers, Mopion features a light aluminum frame, making it a one-of-a-kind lightweight cargo bike weighing only 22 kilos. The geometry holds the body in a slightly inclined, but still heads-up position for navigational ease and exceptional balancing.

PUMA Mopion

HOWTO: Organic, erratic gears

Cory Doctorow at 2:34 PM Thu

Here's a mesmerizing three-minute tutorial on cutting erratic "organic" gears that spin freely despite their odd shapes. After watching it, I was left wondering how you'd make a third (and fourth, and fifth) gear that could mesh with the system without repeating the earlier gear forms, to create an enormous, improbable Rube Goldberg display.

How-To: Make Organically-Shaped Gears

German "secure" ID cards compromised on national TV, gov't buries head in sand

Cory Doctorow at 2:30 PM Thu

A German TV programme showed hackers from the Chaos Computer Club using off-the-shelf equipment to extract personal information from the government's new "secure" ID card, which stores scans of fingerprints and a six-digit PIN that can be used to sign official documents and declarations.

In an interview with the show, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said he saw no immediate reason to act on the alleged security issue.
Meanwhile on Tuesday the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) rejected the Plusminus' criticism of the new ID card. The agency's personal identification expert Jens Bender said the card was secure and called the combination of an integrated chip with a PIN number a "significant security improvement compared to today's standard process of user name and password."
But a classic Trojan horse program that logs keystrokes remained a threat, he admitted, because users must use keyboards in addition to the scanners.

New government ID cards easily hacked (via /.)

The West Chester Guerilla Drive-In MacGuffin Quest

Mark Frauenfelder at 2:28 PM Thu

John Young says:

Boing Boing has mentioned us at the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In a couple of times now (here and here). We show 16-millimeter movies at secret locations that match the film, projected from the sidecar of my 1977 BMW motorcycle. In order to find out where and when the movies will be, folks must find the MacGuffin -- an AM transmitter hidden in a waterproof Pelican case.
This year, we raised the bar on the quest. The MacGuffin is hidden in public. In order to finish the quest, folks must memorize and recite Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias", the most metal poem ever written. Some of the folks present will know what is going on, but they will not let on that they know until the recitation is complete. And the reciter can't half-ass it, either. Unless they chew the scenery, unless they really SELL the bombastic majesty of the lone and level sands, the judges won't reveal themselves, and you won't even be sure that you're reciting in the right place.
To demonstrate a proper recitation, I asked Hunter Davis to do a reading. Hunter is the fellow who did the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" in the voice of Sir Ian McKellen. Here's the result, setting the bar for all our MacGuffin quest-ers. You must be at least THIS METAL when reciting the poem!

MacGuffin quest on the Guerilla Drive-In site

Laser cut and 3D printed decorative objects derived from geography

Cory Doctorow at 2:17 PM Thu

Fluid Forms is a 3D printing and laser-cutting company that produces a wide range of objects based on maps, satellite images, and other photos. They started off with topographical maps of physical places printed in sterling silver with pinbacks, and now they've expanded their repertoire. The new offerings include necklaces with steel charms based on your photos, or maps (inexplicably, these are marketed as "necklaces for men," though I can't imagine why they're not unisex -- the same charms are also available as earrings) and acrylic/wood clocks with finely cut lines reproducing streetmaps.

I love the idea of using "emotionally significant" places as motifs for jewelry and other decorative items. On the 3D printing side, it's a clever way of giving everyone a ready-made, personally important 3D mesh to use as the basis for an object.

Mad Men discover the laptop computer

Mark Frauenfelder at 2:12 PM Thu

201009021410

Mad Men's Ken Cosgrove and Harry Crane stumble upon a MacBook Pro about 40 years before its time. What did the web look like in 1965? From a terrific Rolling Stone gallery of behind-the-scenes Mad Men photos by James Minchin III.

Inside 'Mad Men': On Set and Behind the Scenes

Applying "ownership" to links, public domain material does more harm than good

Cory Doctorow at 2:01 PM Thu

My latest Locus Magazine column, "Proprietary Interest," talks about the way that our instinctive ownership claims over the stuff we find and post to the Internet do more harm than good. When we claim that public domain images, interesting links, or other net-fodder are "ours," we invite a muddle in which others make even more compelling ownership claims. For example, if the old public-domain Lysol ad you scan is "yours," then why shouldn't it be Lysol's?. This is a world in which we spend all our time arguing about whose interest is most legitimate, instead of sharing, discussing, criticizing and enjoying the world around us.

Any ethical claim to ownership over a scan of a public domain work should be treated with utmost suspicion, not least because of all the people with stronger claims than the scanner! To be consistent with the ethical principle that one should never use another's work without permission (regardless of the law or the public domain), every scanner would have a duty to ask, at the very least, the corporations whose products are advertised in these old chestnuts (the very best of them are for brands that persist to today, since these vividly illustrate the way that our world has changed - for example, see the very frank Lysol douche ad). For if scanning a work confers an ownership interest, then surely paying for the ad's production offers an even more compelling claim!
And the publishers of the magazines and the newspapers - to scan is one thing, but what about the firm that paid to physically print the edition that we make the scan from? And then there are the copywriters and illustrators and their heirs - if scanning an ad confers a proprietary interest, then surely creating the ad should give rise to an even greater claim?
We do acknowledge these claims, at least a little. A good archivist notes the source. A good critic notes the creator. But that is the extent of the claim's legitimacy. If we afford descendants and publishers and printers and commissioners their own little pocket of customary right-of-refusal over their works, we would eliminate the ability to keep these works alive in our culture. For these owed courtesies multiply geometrically - think of the challenge of getting all of Dickens' or Twains' far-flung heirs to grant permission to do anything with their ancestors' works. What a lopsided world it would be if ten seconds' scanner work with the public domain demanded 100 hours' correspondence and permission-begging to be ''polite!''

Proprietary Interest

From Arbroath: Student who electrocuted his nipples sues teacher and school for not warning him it was dangerous — Mark • Comments: 22

TipEx's clever, raunchy YouTube ad

Cory Doctorow at 1:53 PM Thu

TipEx (a Commonwealth analogue for Wite-Out and other correction-tape products) has an ingenious and engaging YouTube marketing campaign: a video called "NSFW: A hunter shoots a bear," branches off into a kind of video-text-adventure, where you are invited to type verbs into a box and see what the bear and the hunter do with one another (you can get funny results out of "fuck," of course, and also "gets high with" and "dances" -- I'm sure there's more). It's a kind of next-generation Subservient Chicken, and the (no doubt blisteringly expensive) creative reworking of YouTube's familiar user-interface makes it even more click-trancey than its forebears.

This is how to use YouTube to sell a product. (Thanks, Copyranter!)

Pedal-powered farm machinery for use in rural Guatemala

Cory Doctorow at 1:45 PM Thu

Maya Pedal is a Guatemalan NGO that works with international volunteers and local experts to remanufacture old bicycles to serve as "people-powered farm machines." The dozens of "Bicimaquina" designs include bike-powered washing machines, blenders, grain mills, water irrigation devices and animal-feed mills.

Up to ten volunteers from around the world take up residency in San Andreas Itzapas each year for several weeks at a time. Based on bicycle parts contributed by their partner organizations around the world, they work with Mr. Marroquin and his staff to produce between five and ten bicimaquinas a month, and up to fifty over the course of a year. Roughly half the working time at Maya Pedal is devoted building these machines, and the remainder is directed to an extensive bicycle maintenance program for the residents of the city. The bicimaquinas are sold locally for the cost of manufacturing. Several family-run businesses have developed from the bicimaquinas program including a shop that grinds different grains for customers, and a building contractor that uses a bicycle-powered concrete compaction machine at construction sites in the region.

Maya Pedal (Thanks, Hughadam, via Submitterator!)

Death in Space

FEATURE by Mary Roach

The U.S. has plans for a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s. The ESA and Russia have sketched out a similar joint mission, and it is claimed that China's space program has the same objective. Apart from their destination, all these plans share something in common: extraordinary danger for the explorers. What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth?

Read the rest

More free tickets available for special Boing Boing screening of CATFISH

Mark Frauenfelder at 1:07 PM Thu

201009021306 It turns out there are more free tickets available for the special Boing Boing screening of CATFISH in Los Angeles on Wednesday, September 8. Grab one while you can!

Read the announcement here.

Reserve tickets here.

Warning: LSD turns hot dogs into screaming trolls with 7 children

Andrea James at 1:03 PM Thu

Andrea James is a Los Angeles-based writer and troublemaker.

Case Study: LSD, a PSA produced by Lockheed Aircraft (!) in 1969.

Trailer for Walking Dead series on AMC

Mark Frauenfelder at 12:00 PM Thu

Here's the trailer for the AMC series based on the fantastic, long-running comic book series about a zombie apocalypse, The Walking Dead. It premieres on Halloween night!

Next 40 posts • Latest Submissions