Jena Pincott writes about the quirky, hidden side of science — the shocking, subconscious, under-the-radar stuff. She is the author of Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?, which received starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal.
Spider Robinson writes in with an account of a visit to Wardenclyffe, Nikola Tesla's facility at Shoreham, NY, near the north shore of Long Island: "I stood, gobsmacked, within a couple of hundred meters of the base of the tower with which, some of us believe, Tesla accidentally caused the Tunguska Event. The same tower whose admitted purpose was to beam free electricity to the entire world. I wanted, badly, to get closer, to climb the barbed wire fence (at 63!) and stand at the base of that tower of power. But I didn't dare. Today it's a hazardous waste Superfund Cleanup Site, thanks to its most recent owners Peerless Photo Products and the Agfa Corporation, who both polluted it with photographic chemicals. A group called Tesla Wardenclyffe Project (and I've heard there are other groups, too) is trying to honour and preserve Tesla's memory--get the site cleaned up, get it declared a historical landmark, somehow find the money to buy it, maybe turn it into a Tesla museum and scientific tourist attraction--and they could use a shout-out."
— Cory
It has culture picks from The AV Club, an interview with cast members of Downton Abbey, a chat with the Australian comedian-writer-actor-director Chris Lilley (whose show Angry Boys just premiered on HBO) and Dan Deacon on how Conlan Nancarrow's compositions for player piano changed his life.
All-round slingshot badass Jörge Sprave demonstrates his latest lethalness: a zombie-killing sling-hammer with a skull-ejector to make it easy to knock away the shattered, punctured zombie-heads after you've dispatched the inconvenient undead.
Starbucks is raising the price of their coffee beverages by an average of 1% in the Northeast and Sunbelt regions of the US. This will affect cities including New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas and Albuquerque. In NYC, a 12-oz drink will cost you a dime more. More: Reuters. — Xeni
Hundreds of US prison inmates, including 43 who were serving life sentences, registered with the IRS as income tax preparers. "The IRS officials told auditors it would suspend tax preparer identification numbers already issued to prisoners and deny any future applications from inmates." USA Today via ABC News. — Xeni
"Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment" is a series of 8-bit Flash games based on the punishments visited by the gods on various naughty ancient Greeks: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Prometheus, Danaids and Zeno. There's something particularly awfully wonderful about rapidly pressing the G and H keys to writhe in agony and dislodge the eagle that is devouring your liver.
Did natural selection help African-Americans adapt to the harsh conditions of their new lives as slaves in the Americas? A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai report in the journal Genome Research that "certain disease-causing variant genes became more common in African-Americans after their ancestors reached American shores — perhaps because they conferred greater, offsetting benefits." Read more at the New York Times.
Image: The Africans of the slave bark "Wildfire"--The slave deck of the bark "Wildfire," brought into Key West on April 30, 1860. Library of Congress.
Update: Boing Boing reader Jennifer Forman Orth, Ph.D., who is an Invasive Plant Ecologist, says, "That's actually a scan of the seedheads of a Clematis vine. So not a flower, not anymore - already pollinated and gone to fruit. But a small technicality for that beautiful image."
Charlie Brooker presents an insightful, 5-minute mini documentary by Adam Curtis on Rupert Murdoch: how did the media baron come to be, what drives him, and where is he headed?
The Verge has a teaser video for HP's Envy Spectre, which appears to be an ultrabook-style laptop. The original Voodoo Envy was a good-looking alternative to the MacBook Air, with a distinctive style of its own; let's hope this new one isn't just another clone. — Rob
The Hugo Award nominations are open. Attendees of last year's World Science Fiction in Reno and next year's WorldCon in Chicago (as well as those who paid for "supporter" status) can nominate their favorite science fiction and fantasy stories, books, movies and other media for one of the most prestigious awards in the field.
Just in case you were wondering, my eligible publications for the year are:
Ars Technica's Chris Foresman reviews Polaroid's Z340 instant camera, and finds that it captures none of the charm of the classic models. "The novelty of getting a physical print of a digital photo nearly "instantly" quickly wears off. What you're left with is a fair-to-middling 14-megapixel digital camera with unwieldy ergonomics, poor battery life, and somewhat expensive printing capabilities." — Rob
Tiffiniy sez, "Whenever you search for how to record an mp3 or a song or whatever else, you get some old school options that you have to download. This is better - it's a webpage that lets you record on the page, save it and share with friends. Super easy."
Just click the button above to start recording. We will give you an mp3 you can save, and a link you can share with anyone. If you want better sound quality, connect a headset
Jena Pincott writes about the quirky, hidden side of science — the shocking, subconscious, under-the-radar stuff. She is the author of Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?, which received starred reviews from Kirkus and Library Journal.
Is it any solace to sentimental mothers that their babies will always be part of them?
I’m not talking about emotional bonds, which we can only hope will endure. I mean that for any woman that has ever been pregnant, some of her baby’s cells may circulate in her bloodstream for as long as she lives. Those cells often take residence in her lungs, spinal cord, skin, thyroid gland, liver, intestine, cervix, gallbladder, spleen, lymph nodes, and blood vessels. And, yes, the baby’s cells can also live a lifetime in her heart and mind.
Bloo sez, "David Byrne's Nonesuch Records has a great collection of artists, of course, but something that I really appreciate is Nonesuch Radio, where you can stream a sample of everything they have to offer, either in a random mix, or by genre. The player application is very well done, too."
Byrne's curation has been my most consistent source of kick-ass music discoveries since the 1980s, when I avidly began to acquire everything he put out on his Luaka Bop label.
The remarkable thing about Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson's debut essay collection, is that it was so long in coming, collecting two-and-a-half decades' worth of nonfiction, opinion, travelogue, memoir, media theory, speeches, criticism, and miscellania. Because although Gibson disclaims any title to being an essayist -- he says in his introduction that writing nonfiction always felt like cheating on his fiction work -- he's awfully good at it. Even when the pieces are slight -- as a few of these are -- they are always delightful, exquisitely written, done to a turn with both insight and that unmistakable prose that is just shy of spectacular (Gibson once told me that he is averse to spectacular prose, it strikes him as premeditated and ostentatious).
There are many different threads in this book, but they converge on a few themes: one is Gibson's relationship to the Internet. He is, after all, the infamous creator of the term "cyberspace" who even more infamously refused to use email (he preferred faxes) until well into the net era, a man who is (falsely) reputed to use a manual typewriter in preference to computers. Another is Gibson's relation to technology, design, aesthetics and culture, from the underground rock scene he found himself in as a slacker in his early twenties to the gaudy pulp science fiction paperbacks he reared himself on to the ancient military firearm he found in his parents' attic as a boy. These threads converge in a pair of essays on Japan -- a place of futuristic aesthetics, forward design, and odd history -- an essay on Gibson's early obsession with eBay and the vintage watches to be had there, and in a transcript of a speech on robots, cyborgs and digital brains that is a moving piece of memoir shot through with prediction and technological insight.
By many standards, Gibson is a slow writer -- his book publishing career is 27 years old, and consists of nine and a half novels, a book of short stories and this collection of essays -- but he is a very, very fine one. His work has been seminal to many key moments at the end of the last century and the start of this one, and it is a rare pleasure to read his direct reflections on society and his work, rather than inferring them from his fiction. This is a fine and even essential complement to the Gibson canon, and a delight to read.
Did you know that Nokia has a "luxury" subsidiary that makes phones for stupid rich people?
As the European cellular industry's supernumerary nipple, Vertu has long specialized in calculator-display brickphones that look like dragon poo rolled in gemstones. It lumbers along the dried slugtrail of progress, having just announced its first touchscreen Symbian handset--sure to be an LG Prada-killer!
Just in time for the 75th anniversary, some photos of the "first" science fiction convention, in Leeds (shown here, Walter Gillings, Arthur C. Clarke, Ted Carnell, in front of Theosophical Hall). Although the site pooh-poohs the idea that the first Philcon was the first-ever con, I'm somewhat loyal to the notion, for the completely ahistorical and biased reason that I was Philcon's guest of honor this year, 75 years after its first gathering.
In January 1937, the Leeds chapter of the Science Fiction League brought something new into the world: the first ever SF convention. (A counter claim is made for an earlier visit of New York fans to meet Philadelphia fans at the home of one of their number, but this is hard to take seriously - see THE FIRST EVER CONVENTION, link below.) At a time when travelling any distance was much more difficult than it is today, several of those attending travelled hundreds of miles to be there. Held in Leeds' Theosophical Hall, at 14 Queen Square, the main order of business was setting up the Science Fiction Association, the UK's first national SF organisation.
Avi Solomon: What first sparked your lifelong fascination with botany?
Avinoam Danin: My parents told me that when I was 3 years old I always said "Look father, I found a flower". My grandparents gave me the book "Analytical Flora of Palestine" on my 13 birthday - I checked off every plant I determined in the book's index of plant names.
Avi: How did you get to know the flora of Israel so intimately?
Aerodyne is Jeffrey Stephenson's latest hand-made Art Deco PC. In keeping with the (modern) times, it's a compact Mini-ITX affair in mahogany and aluminum, with an Intel i3 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB solid state drive. Stephenson plans to make no more than a handful of them, to order.
When [Rock] Santorum was in high school, "Everybody called him 'Rooster' because of a strand of hair on the back of his head which stood up, and because of his competitive, in-your-face attitude. 'He would debate anything and everything with you, mostly sports,' [a friend recalled]. 'He was like a rooster. He never backed down.'" That profile also contains this description of the young Santorum, before he met his wife, courtesy of a cousin: "Rick was a funny guy. He sported a bushy moustache for a time, wore Hawaiian shirts and smoked cigars. He liked to laugh, drink and call things 'horsey-assey.' He was very popular and fun to be around."
From an article my cousin, Molly Ball, wrote for The Atlantic, called "Who is Rick Santorum?"
[Video Link] I'm looking forward to Into the Zone, a documentary about the Cacophony Society, which was a pranksterish underground cultural movement from San Francisco that paved the way for Burning Man. There will be a screening on Saturday, February 4, 2012 in Santa Ana, CA, followed by a Q&A session with the filmmaker Jon Alloway and Cacophony instigators that I'll be moderating. Hope to see you there!
Mighty God King lives up to his handle with this fab series of truth-in-advertising shoops of old Atari game box-art, in which the true nature of the games is revealed in their titles.
In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion.
She wrote, “This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.”
American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever read.
Maybe there’s a legitimate law enforcement reason to strip a man naked, strap him to a chair, tie a “spit hood” around his mouth, put a hood over his head (see video at the link), and douse him with pepper spray until he dies. That’s what sheriff’s deputies in Lee County, Florida did to 62-year-old Nick Christie two-and-a-half years ago.
I certainly can’t think of any such legitimate reason. But Lee County State’s Attorney Stephen Russell apparently can. Because he cleared the deputies involved of any wrongdoing.
In Gingerbread Girl, a graphic novel by Paul Tobin, and illustrated by Colleen Coover, Anna Billips is a outwardly-cheerful and carefree 27-year-old woman who is convinced that her Penfield Homunculus was surgically removed from her brain when she was 9 years old.
Here is how one of the characters in the book (her off-and-on girlfriend Chili) defines the Penfield homunculus: "a physical phenomenon named after its discoverer, Wilder Penfield. It's right here in each of our brains, and it's a human-shaped template for your sense of touch. It's stunted and twisted but it's there. If I touch someone's hand, their Penfield Homunculus registers the sensation in its own corresponding region."
Anna claims her father removed her homunculus when she was 9 years old, around the time that her parents were having vicious arguments leading up to a divorce and her father's abandonment. Anna believes that her homunculus (which resembled a gingerbread cookie when it was removed from her brain) developed into a twin sister she named Ginger. When Anna was young, Ginger was her sister and playmate, but as she grew older Ginger drifted out of her life. Because Anna lost her original homunculus, she is unable to sense the world in a subtle way. A primitive homunculus grew in the void in her brain, but it only allows her to feel things in "black and white."
In Gingerbread Girl, Anna is always on the lookout for Ginger. In between searches through parks and shops, she dates a woman named Chili and a man Jerry, enjoying the fact that they are jealous of each other.
Author Paul Tobin's story is as complex and engaging as possible for a small-format 104-page graphic novel. It's a kind of story I probably wouldn't have enjoyed much as a text only novel, but I found this graphic novel to be enthralling. It's told in the fake documentary style of The Office, where characters occasionally address the reader to give background information. It's a gimmick, but an effective one that works well here.
I'm a sucker for Colleen Coover's art style: clean solid black-and-white art with monotone color shading. I want to seek out more of her work.
Because of the adult themes, Gingerbread Girl is probably best for readers 16 and older.
On the CBC Ideas podcast, a lecture by Ethan Zuckerman on the connection between LOLcats, Internet activism and the Arab Spring:
In the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture, Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, looks at the "cute cat" theory of internet activism, and how it helps explain the Arab Spring. He discusses how activists around the world are turning to social media tools which are extremely powerful, easy to use and difficult for governments to censor. The Vancouver Human Rights Lecture is co-sponsored by the UBC Continuing Studies, the Laurier Institution, and Yahoo.
A soldier carries ammunition on a naval ship during the Velayat-90 war game on Sea of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran December 31, 2011. Iran test-fired a new medium-range missile, designed to evade radars, on Sunday during the last days of its naval drill in the Gulf, the official IRNA news agency quoted a military official as saying. (REUTERS/Fars News/Hamed Jafarnejad - IRAN)
Alan Turing will get his own UK commemorative stamp in 2012. It will be fun to use it on sealed envelopes, as a kind of cherry-on-the-top for the traditional crypto argument that scrambling messages is the same as putting them in an envelope, as opposed to writing them on postcards.
The computer pioneer is one of 10 prominent people chosen for the Royal Mail's Britons of Distinction stamps, to be launched in February, which includes the allied war heroine Odette Hallowes of the Special Operations Executive, composer Frederick Delius and architect Sir Basil Spence, to mark the golden jubilee of Coventry Cathedral.
Turing worked as part of the team that cracked the Enigma code at Bletchley Park, and went on to help create the world's first modern computer. This year marks the centenary of his birth.
Above, a PBS NewsHour report by science correspondent Miles O'Brien which I helped shoot, on the subject of tissue engineering. The goal in this field: Grow tissue or even whole organs to repair damaged or diseased human bodies.
The report focuses in part on Isaias Hernandez, a 26-year old Marine whose leg was badly injured in an artillery attack on his convoy, in Iraq. "It looked like a chicken, like if you would take a bite out of it down to the bone," he tells Miles.
Dr. Steve Badylak of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh harvested material from a pig bladder to grow replacement muscle in the young Marine's leg.
Writing in Wired, Adam Rogers tells the story of how Canadian mycologist James Scott started his career by tracking down an ancient fungus that had adapted to growing on whiskey fumes and had infested a town around a Hiram Walker warehouse. Relatives of the fungus had been found around Cognac distilleries in 1872, but it had never been systematically studied with modern techniques. It turns out to be an extremophile fungus that can grow on pretty much anything, even stainless steel.
But by then, Scott had become obsessed with discovering how Baudoinia worked. After all, his name is next to it in the books. How did the mold use the angels’ share? A genetic analysis showed that it was only distantly related to cellar fungus, and researchers at a Department of Energy genomics lab—always looking for potential new ways to turn plants into ethanol for biofuel—added Baudoinia to their list of fungi-to-do. Physiological studies suggested that the ethanol helps the fungus produce heat-shock proteins, protective against temperature extremes, which might explain how it can survive the wide range of temperatures in habitats from Cognac to Canada to Kentucky.
Even weirder, how does a fungus that’s millions of years old, older than Homo sapiens, find a near-perfect ecological niche amid stuff people have been making for only a couple of centuries? Presumably somewhere in the world, naturally occurring Baudoinia lives adjacent to naturally fermenting fruit—or maybe it’s everywhere, a sluggish loser until it gets a whiff of ethanol. Evolution is full of stories of animals and plants fitting into hyper-specific man-made niches, as if nature somehow got the specs in advance. “It’s an urban extremophile,” Scott says. Typically we don’t think of cities as being particularly extreme environments, but few places on earth get as hot as a rooftop or as dry as the corner of a heated living room. Fungi live in both. Now Scott sees urban extremophile fungi everywhere. The black smudges along roadsides and on old buildings that look like soot, he says, are usually some hardy fungus that tolerates (or loves) diesel fumes, smog, and slightly acidic rain. Baudoinia might have been a bit player on prehuman Earth. But then we came along and built distilleries, Baudoinia’s own bespoke microparadises.
5star'sLords of Graphite is a series of sculptures made from pencil segments: "The vision that haunts me still is a landscape of dark brooding mystic air - raw rough lines drawn forcefully throughout by the Lords of Graphite."
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
BB pal and former guestblogger Marc Weidenbaum, of the excellent Disquiet site asked 25 ambient musicians "who also enjoy using Instagram to create original short pieces of music -- call them "sonic postcards" -- inspired by each other's Instagram photos." He's posted the entire lovely collection of tracks and also a 58-page PDF of the Instagram images and background on the artists. From the Instagr/am/bient project page:
Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?
Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards.
It has culture picks from The AV Club, an interview with cast members of Downton Abbey, a chat with the Australian comedian-writer-actor-director Chris Lilley (whose show Angry Boys just premiered on HBO) and Dan Deacon on how Conlan Nancarrow's compositions for player piano changed his life.
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Bloo sez, "David Byrne's Nonesuch Records has a great collection of artists, of course, but something that I really appreciate is Nonesuch Radio, where you can stream a sample of everything they have to offer, either in a random mix, or by genre. The player application is very well done, too."
The remarkable thing about 
Mighty God King lives up to his handle with this fab series of truth-in-advertising shoops of old Atari game box-art, in which the true nature of the games is revealed in their titles.
From 
Maybe there’s a legitimate law enforcement reason to strip a man naked, strap him to a chair, tie a “spit hood” around his mouth, put a hood over his head (see video at the link), and douse him with pepper spray until he dies. That’s what sheriff’s deputies in Lee County, Florida did to 62-year-old Nick Christie two-and-a-half years ago.
The computer pioneer is one of 10 prominent people chosen for the Royal Mail's Britons of Distinction stamps, to be launched in February, which includes the allied war heroine Odette Hallowes of the Special Operations Executive, composer Frederick Delius and architect Sir Basil Spence, to mark the golden jubilee of Coventry Cathedral.
BB pal and former guestblogger Marc Weidenbaum, of the excellent 
