Everyone knows that the worst part about baking bread is having to clean up the sticky floury mess from counter tops, bowls, and utensils. The gluey mass refuses to come out of sponges, and gums up anything it touches.
I always dreaded the prospect of trying to get the gunk of sticky flour or melted cheese out of a sponge or brush until I recently discovered a solution in the form of the netting that onions and other vegetables come packaged in. By cutting up the stiff netting bags from packaging into about 6" squares you can make reusable super scrubbing tools. A few bags will produce more than you'll need. Now when you're finished scrubbing you can toss or recycle the used netting (make sure to rinse off the gunk first) and marvel at your flour and cheese free sponges.
Note: As an avid fan of the previously reviewed No Knead Bread I can attest to the simple brilliance of this cleaning hack. No more ruined sponges! --OH
"In order to become a member of the Original Scraper Bike Team, you must: Be a resident of Oakland. Be at least 7 years old or older. Retain a 3.0 grade point average, create your own Scraper Bike… (It Has To Be Amazing, Or Else You Can’t Ride.) A single-file line when riding. After 10 rides The Scraper Bike King and his Captains will decide if your bike is up to standards and if you can follow simple guidelines. After your evaluation we will consider you a member and honor you with an Original Scraper Bike Team Shirt. Only worn when Mobbin’ Stay posted to our website for all upcoming Scraper Bike Rides..." -- The Scraper Bike King
The Original Scraper Bike Team of Oakland came to Maker Faire in San Mateo in May, and they were amazing.
My pal Luke Pebler was an unwitting PostSecret card, and he hopes the sender will get in touch with him.
On Saturday night, I received a frantic text from my wife instructing me to check postsecret.com "seriously right now." Although I was peripherally aware of the site, full of anonymous secrets collaged onto postcards, I had never visited.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the page loaded and the first postcard was me. Specifically, an old picture of me standing in my living room, wearing a Denver Broncos jersey and giving the camera a thumbs-up. The following handwritten secret had been overlaid:
To impress a girl
I rooted for the Denver Broncos
I hate myself for it
Over the next couple days I received many messages from friends and family, all ZOMGing over my appearance. The reactions broke cleanly into two camps -- about half thought it was hilarious and assumed that I or someone close to me had submitted it as a goof; the other half were convinced that a stranger had used the photo, and found that bizarre and slightly creepy. My wife, a media scholar, immediately pointed out that I was a "creator" whose work has been "poached and reinterpreted."
I wasn't sure what to feel, at first. Tickled? Flattered? Sketched out?
The more I think about it, the more I believe the author must be a stranger with an earnest secret, and not a friend playing a prank. As unlikely as it would be for a random someone to find and use the old pic (public on Flickr since 2006), it makes more sense than someone trying to tease me, through a site that I never read, by suggesting that I faked Broncos fandom (Preposterous!) in order to impress my (NFL-agnostic) wife.
I'm fascinated by the idea of someone using an amateur photograph of a stranger in such a fashion, when most PostSecrets make use of professional imagery from print ads or magazines. This person went to the trouble to find my picture online, print it out, add their secret, and snail mail it to PostSecret -- where it was rescanned and put back online, thus completing the social-media-compost Circle of Life.
I've gotten over my initial case of the willies. I'm dying to meet this person.
Which is, of course, antithetical to everything PostSecret stands for -- but I don't care. If you're out there, sir or madam -- I admire your sense of humor and taste in stock imagery. Please consider getting in touch.
Joey Anuff is selling off some rare and excellent old Topps trading card stuff on eBay. He says:
This stuff is all from before my time, tracked down and collected out of perverse fascination rather than any personal nostalgia. EC Comics has been fairly well-canonized for a few decades now, but outside of Wacky Packages, the work of the same gang for Topps in Brooklyn is barely known outside card-collecting circles. Especially when you consider that Topps' mid-'60s operation basically consisted of young underground comix scenesters like Art Spiegelman and Jay Lynch art-directing legends like [Wally] Wood, [Basil] Wolverton, and [Jack] Davis for a fairly non-trivial mass market (Glen Bishop/Bobby Draper), this era easily deserves the Smithsonian treatment. Or at least a few more Flickr galleries.
Curated by filmmaker/journalist Kristine McKenna, the exhibition closes this weekend— but some prints will still be available for purchase. Please contact the gallery for details. They also have copies of Summa's gorgeous large-format photo book, The Beautiful and The Damned, which is also available on Amazon.
At left: Exene Cervenka (X) at legendary punk club The Masque. Here's another reason to visit Track 16 in person: they have an actual door from The Masque on display, original "Darby Crash fucked your mom" graffiti and all.
Here's a related Los Angeles Times article.
Many thanks to both Ms. Summa and Track 16 for allowing Boing Boing to present some images from this historically important series.
Boing Boing readers: were any of you there, at any of these shows? Share your history in the comments.
Lesson 1: There are fish that live in the East River
Sure, New York City's East River has long been a punchline for jokes about industrial pollution and mafia homicide, but it's far from being a dead zone. That stereotype is one of Jonathan Colby's biggest pet peeves. There are many species of fish living below the water, he says, and diving birds, such as cormorants, that live above. You can even watch the cormorants--big, jet-black creatures with yellow beaks--doing their thing from the promenade along the Eastern edge of Roosevelt Island.
The River really was once in trouble, but it's rebounded in a big way since the 1980s. It's just that, until recently, Colby says, nobody had documented the results that successful clean up had on fish populations.
The impetus behind the East River's first wildlife study in decades: Hydroelectricity. Colby is a hydrodynamic engineer with Verdant Power, a company that's working on installing 1 megawatt of electric generation in the East River, using a system of spinning blades on posts--similar to wind turbines. To make sure the fish don't hit the fan, Colby had to document a baseline population and then monitor fish numbers and behavior over two years, while Verdant ran a 185-kilowatt demonstration project.
Monitoring happened round-the-clock, 24-7, using both traditional sonar and a new system called Dual Frequency Identification Sonar, or DIDSON. While basic sonar tells you that an object is in the water, DIDSON can show you what the object is--whether fish or plastic bag. The images produced by DIDSON look a lot like fetal ultrasound pictures. Suffice to say, the results might look a little abstract to you or me, but experienced analysts can get at least an Impressionist level of information out of it, including the direction the fish are traveling and, in some cases, what kind of fish are out there.
"There are like 1000 fish, per month, that just kind of live here [in the area surrounding Verdant's turbines] during the non-migratory period," Colby said. "During migratory periods, you can see upwards of 10,000 fish per month traveling through these waters."
This child, I think it's clear, is going to be who and what he'll be. But unlike many kids like him, he's not going to grow up thinking there is anything wrong with who he is. This kid is FABULOUS and nothing less! With all of the gay bullying, suicides and the general anti-gay bigotry going on in rightwing circles, Cheryl, Dean and their older song Dkobe, deserve admiration and gratitude from the rest of us, for being such an amazing, wise examples for other people in their situation, with their loving parenting of their "Princess Boy."
Reports are circulating that WikiLeaks will release close to 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War next week. Once again, this would become the largest military leak in U.S. history. Snip from Wired News:
Measured by size, the database will dwarf the 92,000-entry Afghan war log WikiLeaks partially published last July.
"It will be huge," says a source familiar with WikiLeaks' operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Former WikiLeaks staffers say the document dump was at one time scheduled for Monday, October 18, though the publication date may well have been moved since then. Some large media outlets were provided an embargoed copy of the database in August.
When you're done with the free Faygo refills there, read this Guardian UK interview with Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, which proclaims bluntly what's been tossed around online for some time: the duo say they are Evangelical Christians, and kept their faith in the closet for two decades.
They indulged in violent/shock/sexually explicit lyrics on the earlier records to attract a devoted cult of fans, the story goes— then dropped The God Shizz on 'em with "Miracles" and more recent material.
The Guardian interview is funny and disturbing, whatever the truth is—just like the band. As an aside: The interview takes place in Milwaukee. I love how the London-based writer feels compelled to hammer into our heads that ICP is violent by reminding us in the very first graf that Jeffrey Dahmer is from Milwaukee. Eye-roll. I bet he was getting ready for his flight to Wisconsin and Wikipedia'd that, and was like, "Aha! Got 'em!"
Hey, bub. Know who else is from Milwaukee? Laverne and Shirley. Also, Fonzie.
Anyway, it's a fun piece. For me, the news here is not that ICP are evangelicals seeking to convert fans to Christ. It's that despite all the frontin', they're emo souls: comment trolls and bad reviews on Livejournal get under their greasepainted skin:
"I get anxiety and shit a lot," [Shaggy] says. "And reading that stuff people write about us... It hurts."
"Least talented band in the world," Violent J says. "No talent. When I hear that I think, 'Damn. Are we that different from people?'"
He looks as if he means it - as if he sometimes feels hopelessly stuck being him.
It's just a terrible twist of fate for Insane Clown Posse that theirs is a form of creative expression that millions of people find ridiculous. But then suddenly, palpably, Violent J pulls himself out of his introspection. They're about to go on stage and he doesn't want to be maudlin. He wants to be on the offensive. He shoots me a defiant look and says, "You know Miracles? Let me tell you, if Alanis Morissette had done that fucking song everyone would have called it fucking genius."
So next time a Juggalo tosses a bowling ball into your windshield and yells "faggot" at you, then blesses you in the name of Christ—before you scream back at him, remember that he is a sensitive person with deep feelings.
Update: Astute Boing Boing readers have identified the video as fake. Good comment thread.
Details are as fuzzy as the video, and I'm jaded enough to believe it could be an ARG or a viral promotion for online traffic school. But if this video is to believed, a policeman in Russia jumped into a stranger's car when he saw a large pack of wolves running on to the freeway (the cop was making a routine traffic stop). Wonder if he still gave the driver a ticket.
Via the Submitterator, Boing Boing reader qubitsu tells us:
My friends got married on Sunday, and the groom is a serious Star Trek fan. Our cake-baking friend made him an edible bust of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and the rest is history.
Leonid Korogodski's publishing debut Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale is a dense, hard-sf novella that takes a serious crack at imagining the priorities, miseries and joys of posthuman people. It's a tall order: creating believably nonhuman post-people means that you necessarily give up on a certain amount of empathy and sympathy for your characters who are, by definition, doing things whose motivations we can't purely understand.
Korogodski's solution is to garland the tale with a kind of scientific poesie -- a superdense rush of technical explanations for the atomic structure of the human -- and posthuman -- mind, written with the kind of passion that a pornographer might reserve for a detailed description of someone's reproductive organs, and the kind of lyricism that a poet might use to describe the same parts (albeit by allegory). This, for the most part, really works -- Pink Noise manages to be a story that sucks you in and spits you out again some 120 pages later, having somehow convinced your mind to care about the trials and tribulations of people who can't properly die and who are mostly made from computation.
The book comes with a series of technical appendices explaining the neuroscience, astrophysics, evolutionary computing and linguistic tricks that make the book hum, and when these aren't sufficient, the author has left sidebars and footnotes in the text of the story itself. These are fascinating little essays, but I don't reckon you need to read them to get the story.
What's the story? Nathi is a transhuman brain doctor, someone who can repair neurological insult in those people who stubbournly insist on having meat bodies. He is called in to rescue a comatose girl who has suffered a grave nerve insult, and so an instance of himself is inserted into her mind, whereupon he discovers that he is not who he thought he is, and neither is she. This leads to a daring escape, an epic space-battle, and a series of bizarre and imaginative flashbacks explaining the economics and geopolitical carnage left behind by the Singularity.
Silverberry Press have packaged the novella and its technical essays in a slim and handsome hardcover, with several black-and-white illustrations from Bulgarian artist Guddah. I'm sorry to say that these illustrations left me very cold, being the kind of computer-enhanced "futuristic" illustration that my eyes generally slide past at science fiction conventions.
I taught Korogodski at the Viable Paradise sf writing workshop some years ago, and it's always good to see a student doing well. This is a promising debut from a writer who isn't afraid to be as technical as he needs to be in order to tell his story.
Gabriel Nderitu is a Kenyan IT worker who devotes his off-hours to attempts to build an airworthy airplane out of junk. Here's his latest attempt: a small plane (with detachable wings), powered by a Toyota engine.
The strutted wing and ailerons are skinned with aluminum sheet. The engine itself turns up to 4,000 rpm, driving a 74-inch wooden propeller through a simple reduction belt drive. Nderitu says "a bit of it was a bit of reinventing the wheel ... not really looking and trying to copy." The aircraft is not yet finished and there is no guarantee Nderitu's craft will ever be licensed, or allowed to fly, or that it is even capable of flight (which seems unlikely). But that may not be the point.
Mr Simo's BoomCases are self-powered amplification systems built into vintage suitcases and briefcases. They run for seven hours on a single charge, and come with a built-in charging plug. Cost is $275 and up, which is steep, but here's a way to be stylish and audiophilic in one go, and they're hand-made by a skilled craftsman besides.
IO9's Annalee Newitz takes aim at the idea of the Singularity in an essay called "Why the Singularity isn't going to happen." Newitz's objection to the idea that technology will allow us to transcend human limitation and misery boils down to this: the vision of technological utopia is insufficiently weird. It is a "[vision] of tomorrow [based on] on fantasies from the past rather than what we can glean from factual accounts of history." It assumes that technology will solve problems but doesn't consider what new problems will emerge.
I think that this may be true of people who embrace the Singularity as a scientific prediction or even as a social project, but I don't think it's particularly true of literature about the Singularity. Novels like Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, Rudy Rucker's Postsingular and Karl Schroeder's Sun of Suns, are all about this idea of problems lurking inside the solutions. Charlie Stross and I have written two novellas, "Jury Service" and "Appeals Court," that are also about this notion (we're writing a third one now, "Parole Board," and Tor's going to publish all three as a novel called Rapture of the Nerds).
Indeed, it seems to me that in literature, the Singularity's role is to serve as a straw-man for critiquing technology as a one-sided panacea (see, for example, my interview with Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity as a literary device, a spiritual belief system, and a technological prediction).
But Newitz's critique of insufficiently weird technological prediction is spot on. She's identified a common flaw in futuristic prediction: assuming that technology will go far enough to benefit us, and then stop before it disrupts us. For a prime example from recent history, see the record industry's correct belief that technology would advance to the point where we could have optical disc readers in every room, encouraging us to buy all our music again on CD; but their failure to understand that technology would continue to advance to the point where we could rip all those CDs and share the music on them using the Internet.
What people of the industrial age didn't bargain on - didn't even know about - were all the ways that byproducts of industry would destroy the environment. And I don't just mean in a save-the-Earth kind of way: I mean that when Friedrich Engels walked through industrial Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century he was completely blindsided by how destroyed people's lives were by pollution and life in cities built around factories. In response, he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, a document that would have stunned reformers fifty years earlier, many of whom believed that industrialization would solve every social problem and remove the burden of physical labor from the shoulders of even the poorest people.
There's no denying that industrialization laid the foundations for a better, more productive society. It has led to countless innovations, and has improved the lives of many working people. But it also destroys life in ways that Adam Smith and Eli Whitney could never have imagined. It has transformed our entire planet, from its ecosystems to its atmosphere and beyond. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that we do not live on the same planet that people lived on in 1750. The environment - from megacities to airborne particles and space junk - has changed that much.
Singularity-level technology changes the world to the point where the things our ancestors wanted are not the same things we want. Today, we are trying to roll back the effects of industrialization. We are trying to undo the damage that penicillin did. If history, real history, teaches us any lesson it's that new technologies do not cause us to transcend. They fix some things, and then cause new problems we hadn't anticipated.
Rina Weisman from the wonderful SF in SF (science fiction in San Francisco) reading series sez,
Join SF in SF for an evening with authors Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club) and Claude Lalumière (Objects of Worship).
Doors and cash bar open at 6PM
Readings begin at 7PM
Each author will read a selection, followed by Q & A from the audience moderated by author Terry Bisson. Booksigning and schmoozing follows in the lounge.
Books for sale courtesy of Borderland Books; please feel free to bring your own from home as well.
SPECIAL PRIZES!! Get your game card at Borderlands at the F. Paul Wilson/Cheri Priest event beginning at 1PM. Bring it to SF in SF for a chance to win:
* a $50 Gift Certificate to Borderlands Books
* a signed advance copy of Dreadnought with the original cover art
* a copy of Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror
* Tachyon Publications T-shirt
This event takes place at The Variety Screening Room, The Hobart Bldg., 1st Fl., 582 Market St. @2nd St. & Montgomery, San Francisco.
Phone day of event - 415-572-1015.
Questions? Email Rina at sfinsfevents@gmail.com
There's also signings earlier in the day at Borderlands Books from F Paul Wilson, Dan Wells, and Cherie Priest.
Meg sez, "I was poking around at public domain cookbooks on Google Books and came across this excellent one from 1922, "The Stag Cook Book: Written for Men by Men." Featuring recipes from diplomats, actors and scientists, it answers awesome questions like "How did Harold Lloyd make lemon layer cake?""
Nicko from Sunlight Labs sez, "Sunlight Labs recently held an open house to bring members of the technology and transparency communities together over videogames and beer. Our systems administrator, Tim Ball, volunteered to create a photo booth for the event. A few days before the event Tim destroyed his arm in a terrible, unfortunate accident, nearly dashing our hopes for a photo booth. We had to honor Tim's memory (he's still alive) so rather than using an off-the-shelf photo booth software package, we hacked it up from scratch using Python, CSS3, WebSockets, and an iMac.
The result was a simple UI, a quick upload to our Flickr account and an easy way to share on screens at the party using an Apple TV."
Jon sez, "Back in February Lower Merion School District found themselves in a world of uncomfortableness when they got outed for remotely spying on their own students. [ed: Not just remotely spying; the district mandated that students had to use school-issued laptops running secret spyware that covertly activated the webcam to take thousands of still photos of students and their families on and off campus (including sleeping and undressed students). The spyware was designed to run without displaying any sign that the camera had been activated.]
Now they've settled. Two of the student's got a payout - one to the tune of $175k. But the real winner, of course, are the lawyers who're walking away with more than three quarters of the settlement. Also, it seems the only reason the School District decided to settle now was that their insurer came to the party and cover the school's legal fees - otherwise they'd still be slugging it out in court. Way to go, District."
On the plus side, the District has abandoned its use of spyware.
"A major impetus behind settling this matter now is the recent agreement by our insurance carrier, Graphic Arts, to cover more than $1.2M of the fees and costs associated with this litigation to date," Lower Merion School Board President David Ebby said in a statement.
"Although we would have valued the opportunity to finally share an important, untold story in the courtroom, we recognize that in this case, a lengthy, costly trial would benefit no one," he said. "It would have been an unfair distraction for our students and staff and it would have cost taxpayers additional dollars that are better devoted to education. We also wanted to be sensitive to the welfare of the student involved in the case, given the possible ramifications of what would have been a highly-publicized trial."
According to the suit, the district gave high school students computers as part of a technology initiative, but did not notify families that the laptops were equipped with Webcams that could be turned on remotely. The Robbins family alleged they did not learn of the capability until school officials accused their son Blake of "improper behavior in his home" and cited a photograph from the Webcam embedded in the laptop as evidence.
Aviso sez, "This is a cool way to stream live data and interact with a tangible Earth. Make your own Multi-Touch Spherical Display to connect with, learn about and care for Earth."
Morbid Anatomy's Joanna Ebenstein reports from London where she visited The Museum of Everything's "Exhibition #3," "a carnivalesque spree exploring all things collectory, side-show, circus, grotto, and taxidermological." The show includes a restaging of Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter's famously strange wunderkammer, the contents of which are now owned by the likes of Damien Hirst and Sir Peter Blake. The Guardian also covered the exhibit with more history of Potter's collection.
I've been using the BodyMedia FIT armband for the past 3 months and it is the only diet and exercise system that I've found that really works. The system works through the use of an armband that you wear on your left arm throughout the day. As you go about your regular routine the armband measures your caloric burn. The armband uses four sensors to track several variables from heat to sweat to steps to calories burned every minute of every day.
You can track your daily burn and steps taken through an optional display, but the real power is in syncing the armband to the BodyMedia web site which allows you to see charts of calories burned per minute, steps taken, exercise levels, sleep cycles, etc. You can also track your weight measurements in the tool. The great thing about the online tools is that it lets you enter your daily caloric intake (just search for a food and add it to a meal), and compares your incoming calories to outgoing calories. By entering your calories on a daily basis you can ensure a realistic caloric deficit which is guaranteed to help you loose weight safely. It's very helpful for making sure you don't starve yourself by eating too little, or conversely, that you don't go crazy and eat too much.
Since I started using the armband I've dropped 20 pounds that I've managed to keep off with almost no trouble. It's become pretty simple for me. I can eat a healthy but normal breakfast and lunch, then I check my calorie burn before dinner and make sure to eat the appropriate amount to ensure I maintain my target calorie deficit.
What I love about this tool is that it eliminates estimation. Everyone has different basal metabolic rates depending on what they do during the day. Whereas most diet systems target a fixed number of daily calories, those fixed amounts could mean anywhere from a 500-2500 calorie deficit depending on the person. Anyone who's dieted knows that when you get into high calorie deficits you're body stops losing and you go into the so called starvation mode where your body actually holds onto the weight. With this that never happens. If I have a lazy day at work and am on target to burn 3200 calories then I know I can eat 2200 and maintain my 1000 calorie deficit. But say, I go for a long run on the weekend and do some yard work I could get up to 5500 calories burned. If I stuck with a 2200 calorie diet, my body (and my willpower) would rebel. However with BodyMedia, I know that on those 5500 calorie days I can eat 2000 more calories and still be on target for weight loss.
Long story short - I absolutely love this system.
-- Marc Ryan
[Note: There is an even more thorough review of the system over at Ars Technica.-- OH]
BodyMedia Fit System
$220 includes 12 month subscription to the BodyMedia site
This one's sure to ruffle a few feathers: Science Tarot aims to use the magickal mystery deck as a platform for illuminating real scientific concepts. The face cards profile different scientists and link them to specific neurotransmitters. According to the site, "Science Tarot is a group project, an exciting collaboration of professional talent including post-doc scientists, experienced tarot readers, graphic designers and published artists. We are united by our desire to explore and create at the intersection of science and art." From the description of the 7 of Wands - Expansion (seen above left):
The red giant is at a great, expansive stage of the star's life and has grown to thousands of times its original size. Inner creation defines this moment in your life story as well.
The shell around the giant's collapsing core becomes hotter and starts fusing its hydrogen into helium, making the star brighter and the outer shells expand and grow cooler and less dense. Although fiery pressures mark the beginning of your journey, these expansive later years allow creation with a wider reach and a dense inner core.
We speak of "finding your voice" to describe this mature state. Other duties and diversions may fall by the wayside as work consumes the days filled with creation and productivity.
Hero's Journey, Step 7: Return with new knowledge into everyday life. The hero reveals a deeper determination.
Conelrad is running Bill Geerhart's fantastic and utterly bizarre article about a mushroom cloud sculpture made by Robert Lewis -- the co-pilot of the plane that dropped the a-bomb on Hiroshima. (Lewis named his work "God's Wind," but I think he should have called it "This is Not a Phallus.")
Decades ago, Dieter Rosellen dubbed an unusual piece of art acquired by his best friend as “The ‘Shroom.” He still refers to the white Italian marble mushroom cloud sculpture by that nickname.The artist’s more formal (and thought provoking) title for the work is etched into its base: ‘God’s Wind’ at Hiroshima? The sculptor, Robert Lewis—the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb in warfare—died in 1983 and Rosellen’s pal, author and psychologist Glenn Van Warrebey, passed away twenty-one years later. The ‘Shroom survives both of them.
This is the story of the sculpture’s evolution: From its birth in the tortured imagination of an atomic veteran to its current state—an unsettling curiosity that has to be seen to be believed. It is also a tale of the intersecting lives of the man who created it and the man who exploited it.
My friend Monte Beauchamp is holding a booksigning in Chicago tomorrow for the Blabworld art anthology.
Intuit is proud to host a release party for the premiere volume of BLABWORLD (formerly BLAB! magazine), a 10 x 10 inch, full-color, 128-page, periodic hardcover of works by leading contemporary painters, print makers, illustrators, and sequential artists worldwide. Contributors, CJ Pyle, Fred Stonehouse, Michael Noland, Tom Huck, Teresa James, Travis Lampe, Kari Laine McCluskey, Larry Day, and BLABWORLD founder, editor, and designer, Monte Beauchamp will be available to sign copies.
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
756 N. Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago, IL 60642
phone: 312.243.9088
John Park of MAKE says: "Niklas Roy cannot be contained! He's built a curtain in his shop window that uses machine vision and fast linear positioning to block the view of nosy onlookers."
My workshop is located in an old storefront with a big window facing towards the street. In an attempt to create more privacy inside, I've decided to install a small but smart curtain in that window. The curtain is smaller than the window, but an additional surveillance camera and an old laptop provide it with intelligence: The computer sees the pedestrians and locates them. With a motor attached, it positions the curtain exactly where the pedestrians are.
The whole setup works really well. But in the end, it doesn't protect my privacy at all. It seems that the existence of my little curtain is leading itself ad absurdum, simply by doing its job very well. My moving curtain attracts the looks of people which usually would never care about my window. It is even the star of the street, now! My curtain is just engaged. And because of that, it fails.
The wonderful videos of the speakers who present at TED conferences around the world can now be enjoyed on this free iPad app.
Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.
TED presents talks from some of the world's most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus and music legends. Find more than 700 TEDTalk videos (with more added each week) on the official TED app.
TEDTalks are delivered in high or low res formats based on your network connectivity. Curate your own playlist. Watch them later, even when you can't be online.
The TED iPad app features include:
+ “Inspire Me” button. Touching this icon reveals an elegant watch face and the question: “How much time do you have?” Dial up a time, choose the type of talk you want (Inspiring? Funny? Jaw-dropping?) and you’ll get a playlist of talks that fits your schedule.
+ “Themes” serves up curated playlists of TEDTalks around topics such as “The Power of Cities,” “How We Learn,” “A Greener Future” and “Unconventional Explanations.”
+ “Tags” breaks down TEDTalks topics into some 250 categories, from “insects” to “robots,” from “happiness” to “fish.” “Saved Talks” allows you to download and queue up several hours of TEDTalks for viewing offline anytime.
+ “Playlist Browser” lets you browse ahead in any playlist while watching a saved talk. It’s accessible by tapping the Info button.
This is a picture of Meers Fault in southwestern Oklahoma—the only place in the state where tell-tale signs of earthquakes are visible above ground. But, beneath the surface, the Sooner State is riddled with faults—far more than anyone could count, says Andrew Holland, seismologist for the Oklahoma Geological Survey.
Those faults are behind the moderately sized earthquake that struck near Norman, Oklahoma, yesterday morning—somewhere between 4.3 and 4.7 on the Richter scale. Thirty miles North, in Oklahoma City, it rattled my Dad's windows and scared the crap out of his cats.
I always knew earthquakes were possible in the lower Midwest, raised, as I was, on tales of the massive one that shook New Madrid, Missouri, in 1812. But I didn't realize that Oklahoma—and Kansas, and Arkansas—also had active faults. In fact, 2010 has been a banner year for Oklahoma earthquakes. More than 80 have been recorded, and more than 50 of those were felt by people—far above the state average.
I called Holland to find out why there's so much shakin' going on, whether this has anything to do with the infamous New Madrid fault, and how you get a fault in the middle of a tectonic plate, to begin with.
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On Saturday night, I received a frantic text from my wife instructing me to check 
The exhibit of 
Ralph Niese's fun cover art for 
Leonid Korogodski's publishing debut 
What people of the industrial age didn't bargain on - didn't even know about - were all the ways that byproducts of industry would destroy the environment. And I don't just mean in a save-the-Earth kind of way: I mean that when Friedrich Engels walked through industrial Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century he was completely blindsided by how destroyed people's lives were by pollution and life in cities built around factories. In response, he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, a document that would have stunned reformers fifty years earlier, many of whom believed that industrialization would solve every social problem and remove the burden of physical labor from the shoulders of even the poorest people.
Join SF in SF for an evening with authors Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club) and Claude Lalumière (Objects of Worship).
Doors and cash bar open at 6PM
Readings begin at 7PM
Each author will read a selection, followed by Q & A from the audience moderated by author Terry Bisson. Booksigning and schmoozing follows in the lounge.
Books for sale courtesy of Borderland Books; please feel free to bring your own from home as well.
Meg sez, "I was poking around at public domain cookbooks on Google Books and came across this excellent one from 1922, "The Stag Cook Book: Written for Men by Men." Featuring recipes from diplomats, actors and scientists, it answers awesome questions like "How did Harold Lloyd make lemon layer cake?""
Jon sez, "Back in February Lower Merion School District found themselves in a world of uncomfortableness when they got outed for remotely spying on their own students. [ed: Not just remotely spying; the district mandated that students had to use school-issued laptops running secret spyware that covertly activated the webcam to take thousands of still photos of students and their families on and off campus (including sleeping and undressed students). The spyware was designed to run without displaying any sign that the camera had been activated.]
Now they've settled. Two of the student's got a payout - one to the tune of $175k. But the real winner, of course, are the lawyers who're walking away with more than three quarters of the settlement. Also, it seems the only reason the School District decided to settle now was that their insurer came to the party and cover the school's legal fees - otherwise they'd still be slugging it out in court. Way to go, District."
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