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| SPECIAL FEATURE: High Design | |
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In the world of design, urban mobility is much more than how you get from point A to point B. Urban mobility operates at the intersection of myriad innovation freeways, from architecture to infrastructure, technology to transportation, city planning to style. It's about feet, fashion, bikes, busses, automobiles, and yes, even cars that fly. Just ask Jens Martin Skibsted, co-designer of Terrafugia's new Transition Roadable Aircraft, aka flying car. |
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| Anti-Defamation League joins bigots in opposing Manhattan mosque | |
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The Anti-Defamation League has announced its opposition to the building of an Islamic community center (or mosque, as CNN and others put it) in Manhattan, near ground zero. It accepts that the builders have every right to do so, but believes that they should not because its presence there will cause offense and pain.
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| Submit to the Submitterator! | |
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| Largest hail stone in the US? | |
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| Stating the Obvious : If you don't have a house you don't need no sofa | |
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"empty home on Bloomington Ave S, Minneapolis" by Andrew Ciscel via CC
OK, so I'm not an economist. But as a venture investor in early-stage medical and technology companies I read the usual financial articles that come across my screen and I see the same statistics everybody is seeing. I listen to Obama and I watch the TV shows where pundits argue with Congressmen about the wisdom of this or that particular tax or stimulus measure to restart our sick economy. I have nothing to say about this, no statistics of my own and no fancy theory, so instead of taking sides in this particular debate I keep looking for the things that are missing.
What is missing is this: Over two million American families have now lost their homes; foreclosure figures are at an all-time high. Several million new families will be thrown into the street over the next year, no matter what happens to taxes or the stimulus. This is a given. Yet, among Washington and Wall Street experts this disaster is only reflected in the form of statistical figures they mix up and datamine alongside many other figures, where the numbers lose their special, tragic character.
It's not a very newsworthy disaster, either, so after a while it even fades from TV news: no dramatic shots of oil gushing up from a broken well or birds coated with black tar. No sense of urgency here, just a big spreading tragedy. The experts only know that the banks are off the hook: they have been given tons of new money to help with mortgages. The fact that this money sits unused and that many banks have not even appointed managers to deal with desperate homeowners does not come to their attention. My Bank of America branch won't even talk to you about mortgages - they send you to a faceless office downtown where nobody knows you.
In such complex situations, it is healthy for somebody to just state the obvious before trying to develop cute, complicated theories. You don't look smart by stating the obvious: Duh! Everybody knows that. You won't get invited on the CNBC morning show. You knew what I'm going to say all along but perhaps you hadn't thought it through.
So here is an obvious statement: if you have just lost your house you are not likely to go buy a new TV set for a while. If you just moved your family into a cheap motel, you probably don't think about ordering new drapes for the living room; and if you also lost your job (as thousands of people continue to do every day) and now live in your car in some urban park, you won't be shopping for refrigerators, sofas and camcorders for a long, long time to come.
Since nobody can find you because you don't have an address any more, the statisticians won't be asking for your opinion about the economy, which may explain the puzzling discrepancies in the mysterious tables called "consumer sentiment," a figure that is now at a five-month low. This "obvious" fact may also account for the lack of any serious recovery; or the probability that the economy will not be very robust for a while, no matter how "stimulating" the climate gets in Washington around election time; it may explain the chill over the Chinese industry, which makes all the refrigerators, the sofas, the TVs, the drapes and the camcorders you used to buy when you had a house to put them in; and the uncertainty in Europe, which makes the machines China needs to make TVs, camcorders, drapes and sofas. So that uncertainty travels around the planet in opposite direction to the Earth's rotation and comes back to hit us from the east, because we used to supply lots of goods and services to Europe to make the machines, etc.
No wonder Mr. Bernanke finds that things are "unusually uncertain." At least he still has his sofa. |
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| Markets of Britain, a short film by Lee Titt (via Serafinowicz and Popper) | |
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[ Watch video: view at YouTube or Download MP4. ]
Boing Boing Video proudly presents Markets of Britain, discovered by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz from the archives of a great and underappreciated documentary filmmaker named Lee Titt, who also never existed.
Earlier this week, we presented this Boing Boing Video interview with Popper and Serafinowicz about their "Look Around You" DVD, just been released in the USA. This film was presented at a recent launch event in Los Angeles, blogged previously on Boing Boing.
Mini emus!
Buy the DVD. Below, a trailer for the DVD produced by BBC America. The actual show is a lot weirder.
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| San Francisco: Diana Gameros at this weekend's Bicycle Music Festival | |
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This Saturday in San Francisco, the largest bicycle-powered music festival in the world takes place in Golden Gate Park's Speedway Meadow and throughout the city. Bike powered? Think Gilligan's Island. In Golden Gate Park, more than a dozen bands will play through a 2000 watt pedal-powered audio system and a variety of crazy party caravans will travel through the streets during the day and night. All of the infrastructure for the event is haulable via bicycle and no cars or trucks will be involved in staging the festival. My family will be attending, and we're especially excited to see our favorite San Francisco singer/songwriter Diana Gameros. We first heard Diana perform solo at Roosevelt Tamale Parlor, a very old and excellent tiny restaurant in San Francisco's Mission District. At Roosevelt's, Diana mostly performs traditional Latin music but in her own modern, soulful, and passionate style. Diana's original music is enchanting indie pop infused with her strong Latin heritage. Check out Diana and her band at noon on Saturday or on her MySpace page. Diana's tune "Para Papa," listenable in her MySpace player, is one of my favorites.
Diana Gameros (MySpace) |
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| Sea No Evil: Sea Shepherd benefit art show in CA | |
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Opening Saturday July 31 (tomorrow night): The Sea No Evil art show benefitting the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Above, a piece by Gary Baseman from the show. The donating artist list is pretty incredible.
The opening night event features Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and focus of Animal Planet TV series "Whale Wars," who will give an update on the state of affairs in the world's oceans. The Crystal Method and artist-DJ Shepard Fairey will both perform sets.
(thanks, Gary Baseman) |
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| The Wunderkammer that is Webb Gallery | |
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| Elephants in Scotland and other odd animal translocations | |
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| Experiencing the re-invention of flight in St. Paul | |
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Last weekend*, I joined around 90,000 of my closest friends at the Twin Cities Flugtag in St. Paul. If you aren't familiar, Flugtag is an event that tests out the skyworthiness of home-built flying contraptions. For the most part, there's more of an emphasis on art and comedy than on effective engineering. Teams design their flying machines (and costumed skits) around a theme, they perform for the audience, and then push their craft off an elevated runway and (usually) directly into a major body of water below. It's entertaining. I had a good time watching giant purple narwhals (narwhals!) and open caskets piloted by zombies crash into the Mississippi River. But what really made Flugtag post-worthy is the moment captured in the video above. My husband called this before the flying even started. Walking around the "hangar" area, looking at the crafts before the show, he spotted what looked like an anorexic WW2 bomber on stilts. It wasn't the most elaborate craft. Or the most hilarious. But it was going to fly further than anything else, Baker predicted. Unlike some home-built aircraft, this thing actually had an airfoil. Later, we found out that it also had controllable flaps. And a for-real-real pilot&mdashMajor Trouble, her band of Dirty Dixie drag queens took care of the entertainment portion—at the controls. We'd already watched six or seven contraptions utterly fail to fly. We'd gotten used to a routine. The team pushes off. The team goes straight down. It is hard to describe the utter elation that swept the crowd when Major Trouble's plane came back up**. And flew. Really, truly flew. For a second, we all forgot that jet planes existed. For a second, we were all back at Kitty Hawk, in 1903, witnessing a previously unimagined miracle. Major Trouble and the Dirty Dixies flew 207 feet before ditching in the Mississippi. They broke—by 12 feet—a Flugtag flying record that had stood for 10 years. Everything happens in the Midwest. You are missing out. *I meant to post this Monday. Somehow, I forgot. Whoops. **Another thing it is hard to describe: The frustration that rippled through the crowd every time the RedBull announcers referred to the Mississippi River as "the ocean". This happened repeatedly. Guys, we get it, you're used to staging these things on the coast. But there's a freaking opposite bank, right over there. And the people on that side are rolling their eyes at you, too. |
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| Tron Legacy score contributions by Daft Punk leaked? | |
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What some are identifying as the Daft Punk score for Disney's Tron Legacy movie has been leaked. I blame Julian Assange. |
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| Mutilated Afghan woman on cover of Time: Afghansploitation? | |
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On the cover of the current issue of TIME: Aisha, an 18 year-old Afghan girl whose nose was cut off for "shaming" her in-laws. Her story blogged previously on Boing Boing here. The cover is sure to shock, and some criticize it as "Afghansploitation": an image used at a sensitive moment, to inspire support for endless war. (Thanks, Kristie LuStout) |
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| Wii, wii, wii—all the way back to the gym | |
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The good news: You're less likely to injure yourself while working out with Wii Fit than while working out at the gym. The bad news: The Wii is safer because you are doing less. "People tend to burn twice as many calories per minute doing an actual activity than when doing the same activity on the Wii." |
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| North Korean soccer team fails at "ideological struggle" | |
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The coach for the North Korean soccer team has been banished to a life of hard labor as a construction worker, because the team failed in their "ideological struggle" to succeed at the World Cup in South Africa. |
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| Kenneth Anger for Missoni | |
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Richard Metzger: "Rather astonishing news from the fashion and film world. Dangerous Minds’ fave filmmaker Kenneth Anger has released a two-and-a-half-minute film dealing with the fall/winter collection of the Varese-based house of Missoni, produced by filmmaker/Anger manager/Dangerous Minds pal Brian Butler and scored by French composer Koudlam." Watch the video here. |
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| How Tettix tried to design a T-shirt and ended up with a remix album | |
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Electronic musician Tettix just released A New Challenger, a remix album featuring tracks from his earlier T.K.O.E.P.. Alex Mauer, Derris-Kharlan, Disasterpeace, Hélas Techne and Minusbaby worked with him to create it.
How did it come together?
Well, it's a funny story. Initially it was a project for Attractmode. Adam Robezolli over there contacted me about doing a shirt for Dragon Punch. He was going to get this guy Akutou to do the shirt, print it up, split the proceeds with me. I was totally down for that. Then he recommended maybe releasing an EP of Dragon Punch remixes to go with the shirt and had some remixers in mind. This was almost a year ago now.
That's an aeon in internet time!
Obviously things did not go according to plan. The shirt, it turns out, was a total creative block for me and I eventually gave up and told Adam it was too stressful to work a design job all day and then come home and try to design a shirt, so I was handing the reins back to him. Perhaps a shirt will one day be created, perhaps not. So it goes.
So you took over the remix project yourself?
I took over the remix project myself. Started contacting chiptunes musicians I respected about being involved. Decided it would be more fun to open up the entire album for remixing instead of Dragon Punch. I was surprised how responsive people were! Initially, it was still going to be called "Dragon Punch E.P." and was also going to feature the album version of Dragon Punch in addition to the remixes.
Did you get everyone involved you wanted?
I had the whole thing buttoned up and ready to release. And then minusbaby got back to me three weeks after I emailed him and wanted to remix Clothesline. Obviously, I wanted him involved so I decided to hold off the release. His sudden unexpected inclusion was also when I got the "A New Challenger!" idea. So what was once "Disasterpeace's Dragon Fist Rising Mix" became "Disasterpeace vs. Dragon Punch!" and so on. I wrote the interstitial tracks, which were a ton of fun. Might do an extended mix of Continue, too. And then rebuttoned the album up for release. I'm glad minusbaby was such a late-comer, I think the album concept is much stronger because of it. And his remix is sick.
So, somehow, this project started as a Dragon Punch t-shirt and ended up as a T.K.O.E.P. remix album.
Download A New Challenger free of charge at Tettix's website. |
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| The 100 best magazine articles ever | |
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Here are the top 5 (based on the number of people who have recommended them to Kevin):
David Foster Wallace, "Federer As Religious Experience." The New York Times, Play Magazine, August 20, 2006.
David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster." Gourmet Magazine, Aug 2004.
Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet." Wired, December 1996. On laying trans-oceanic fiber optic cable.
Gay Talese, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Esquire, April 1966.
Ron Rosenbaum, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Esquire, October 1971. The first and best account of telephone hackers, more amazing than you might believe.
My contribution to the list is Susan Orlean, "Orchid Fever." The New Yorker, January 23, 1995.
The Best Magazine Articles Ever
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| Girls Like Boys With Skills - new song from Rocky and Balls | |
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Rocky and Balls's "Girls Like Boys With Skills" is probably the dirtiest double-entendre ukulele ditty since George Formby sang "With My Little Ukulele In My Hand." |
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| Burmese protesters using "Team America" likeness of Kim Jong-Il on posters | |
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Team America lives on. Jeff Koyen sends this along and asks, "Anyone remember Evil Bert spotted alongside Osama in Bangladesh?" Indeed. At left, a snapshot of the original Kim Jong Il puppet from the Team America movie. I shot the photo during a visit earlier this year to South Park Studios. The little guy does get around.
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| Wikileaks source suspect Manning transferred from Kuwait to Quantico, VA | |
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A press alert received by Boing Boing from the U.S. Army Public Affairs Office reports that PFC Bradley Manning— who is believed to have provided Wikileaks with a trove of classified data including the "Collateral Murder" video and the recent "Afghan War Diaries" archive— was today transferred from the Theater Field Confinement Facility in Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia. Snip:
Manning remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation into the charges preferred against him on July 5. Manning was transferred because of the potential for lengthy continued pretrial confinement given the complexity of the charges and ongoing investigation. The field confinement facility in Kuwait is designed for short-term confinement.
The criminal investigation remains open. Preferral of charges represents an accusation only; Manning is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty. The case will be processed in accordance with normal procedures under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
With this transfer to Quantico, Manning is now under the General Courts-Martial Convening Authority of Maj. Gen. Karl Horst, the commander of U. S. Army Military District of Washington. Manning will remain in pre-trial confinement as the Army continues its investigation.
An Article 32 investigation is similar to a civilian grand jury hearing or a preliminary hearing. The investigating officer will make findings and recommendations that the chain of command considers in determining whether to recommend the case be referred to trial by court-martial.
Earlier today, an announcement that investigators had found evidence linking Manning to the Wikileaks material, and Wired reported of previous conflicts Manning may have had with Army higher-ups, over YouTube videos the 22-year-old uploaded containing information about classified facilities.
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| Report: Army admonished Manning for YouTube uploads referencing classified facilities | |
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"An Army private suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks was admonished as a trainee in 2008 for uploading YouTube videos discussing classified facilities, according to an Army official with direct knowledge of the incident." Wired News has more. |
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| Google computer and Western media report China outage, actual humans in China beg to differ | |
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Rebecca MacKinnon reports: "Numerous major American and European news outlets are reporting that Google is blocked in China, based on the information appearing on Google's Mainland China service availability page. However no journalist has actually confirmed with a human being at Google that this information is correct. What's more, I've heard from several dozen people all over China who say that Google isn't blocked for them when they access it on their Internet connections from Beijing to Shanghai to Sichuan to Hunan." |
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| DIY Kitty Crack: ultra-potent catnip extract | |
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In this Instructable, talbotron22 shows how to make "Kitty Crack," an ultra-potent catnip extract containing nepetalactone, catnip's active ingredient. One pound of catnip yielded 143mg of nepetalactone.
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| When 2 dinosaurs become 1 | |
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Prepare to have your mind blown. Certain dinosaurs—physically disparate enough that we've always thought of them as different species—may actually be the same animal at different stages of its life cycle. Also: Those big, protective-looking bone formations surrounding some dinos' heads and necks probably weren't all that useful as a defense against predators. Case in point, triceratops. Or, maybe we should be calling it torosaurus now, I'm not sure. See, according to research done by scientists at Montana's Museum of the Rockies, the familiar triceratops is really just the juvenile form of the more-elaborately be-frilled and be-horned torosaurus. This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood. The only modern animal known to do anything similar is the cassowary, descended from the dinosaurs, which develops a large spongy crest when its skull is about 80 per cent fully grown. Scannella and Horner examined 29 triceratops skulls and nine torosaurus skulls, mostly from the late-Cretaceous Hell Creek formation in Montana. The triceratops skulls were between 0.5 and 2 metres long. By counting growth lines in the bones, not unlike tree rings, they have shown clearly that the skulls come from animals of different ages, from juveniles to young adults. Torosaurus fossils are much rarer, 2 to 3 metres long and, crucially, only adult specimens have ever been found. The duo say there is a clear transition from triceratops into torosaurus as the animals grow older. For example, the oldest specimens of triceratops show a marked thinning of the bone where torosaurus has holes, suggesting they are in the process of becoming fenestrated. There are other species this might apply to, as well. Some with even bigger shifts in appearance. While this is a Big Hairy Deal for dinosaur science, it also elicits a little bit of a "duh" moment when you go back and look at the animals in question. What you should really be getting out of this story is an illustration of how difficult it is to study a creature that's been extinct for millions of years. After all—as my husband pointed out—nobody would be shocked to learn that a baby chick, an adult chicken, and plate of parmigiana were all the same animal. But that's because we've experienced chickens. Were an alien to drop in on Earth for one afternoon, they might be just as amazed at the life cycle of poultry as we are now at the triceratops/torosaurus'. Paleontologists are tasked with reconstructing the lives of animals nobody has ever seen alive. And that creates a world where the obvious just isn't. New Scientist: Morph-o-saurs: How shape-shifting dinosaurs deceived us (Via John Taylor Williams) Image courtesy Flickr user lindseywb, via CC |
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| 3D-printed clothing | |
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Via our Submitterator, Fang McGee points us to this novel use of 3D printers: spitting out fabric structures for clothing. From Ecouterre:
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| Kite-flying in a thunderstorm leads to pseudo-telekinesis | |
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Kite designer Tim Elverston sent in this video through Submitterator, showing his friend making a piece of kite line move "magically" with the help of static electricity. Also, they got shocked. If you listen to the video through headphones, you can clearly hear an electrical buzzing every time their fingers get close to the kite line. Interestingly, the effect seems to have been dependent on the line material, and the bench the kite was tied to—both of which were made from plastic composite. The two other identical kites flying in the same conditions were not doing the same thing. They were flying on different line material, and tied off to different things, a person and a wooden fence. There was visible lightning and electrical activity in a storm that was about 1-3 miles to the West of us. The only other two times I have experienced this were both while riding in my kite buggy, and I started to get a shock through my leg to the metal frame of the buggy. |
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| Win free tickets to Outside Lands 2010! | |
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To enter our Outisde Lands 2010 ticket contest, please compose a song about why you want to go to the festival, and record it on video or audio. Your song can be as simple (a capella!) to as elaborate (orchestral!) as you want. If you make a video, please upload it to YouTube. Audio only recordings should be posted on Archive.org. Our own Dean "Dino" Putney is going to judge, so email dean at boing boing dot net with a link to your entry. The deadline for entries is August 4 at 11:59pm PDT. We'll announce the winners on Friday, August 6.
Good luck and we look forward to, er, hearing from you!
For more on Outside Lands, click here.
For Boing Boing Video coverage of Outside Lands 2008, click here. |
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| Maggie speaking in Albuquerque Aug. 16 | |
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I'm speaking Monday, Aug. 16th, at the University of New Mexico's INCBN IGERT Symposium, which focuses on the integration of neuroscience and nanotechnology. As the pre-symposium dinner entertainment, I'll be talking about "Those Fabulous Octopus Brains"—looking at cephalopod intelligence and brain structure. I fully admit that my topic choice is a blatant attempt to curry audience favor w/ cute pictures of octopuses. If you won't be attending, don't worry. It looks like I should be able to get video of the presentation, which will be posted here. (Unless I bomb, in which case we shall never speak of this again.)
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| Moresukine -- a comic book about a German cartoonist's experiences in Tokyo | |
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The assignments included eating fugu (blowfish sashimi that has a toxin that could kill you if not prepared properly), going to a capsule hotel, visiting the Ghibli Museum, riding a roller coaster on top of a building in a shopping center, reporting on the "coolest of the cooler things happening in Japan" (some kind of barrel with poles on it and tentacle-backpacks hanging from it -- I have to admit I had no idea what he was talking about here), eating okonomiyaki (a bowl of raw egg, red ginger, pork, squid, shrimp, and cabbage that you cook yourself), and so on.
Schwieger's art is funny and detailed, and his observations are insightful. Moresukine is an enjoyable, too-brief account of a Westerner trying to discover Japanese culture.
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We're thrilled that everyone seems to be digging our new 
![Blogs Intelligenttravel Translocation Elephant-Crossing[3]](http://www.boingboing.net/images/_blogs_intelligenttravel_Translocation_Elephant-Crossing%5B3%5D.jpg)
Kevin Kelly has compiled a list of the 100 greatest long-form magazine articles ever published. He has found links to the text of each article, and says: "I'd like to have folks start to vote up the best (although they can still add). There's a Top Five that has emerged. Maybe we can get a top 10."
...Designer-researchers like Freedom of Creation in Amsterdam and Philip Delamore at the London College of Fashion are cranking out seamless, flexible textile structures using software that converts three-dimensional body data into skin-conforming fabric structures. The potential for bespoke clothing, tailored to the specific individual, are as abundant as the patterns that can be created, from interlocking Mobius motifs to tightly woven meshes.
In late 2005 Dirk Schwieger, a German cartoonist, went to live in Japan for a year. He got an office job, and started keeping a journal of his experiences in Tokyo. On his 