We're thrilled that everyone seems to be digging our new Submitterator! (More about the launch here.) Every day, folks are submitting a slew of wonderful links. Thank you! In fact, I browse it as if it's a group blog edited by a bunch of my most interesting friends that I haven't yet met. For those of you who missed the announcement earlier this week, the Submitterator is essentially a public submissions form. Every link you submit is shared with everyone else visiting the page. Vote 'em up or vote 'em down. We're keeping a keen eye on the Submitterator for front door posts and also getting a kick out of the stuff that doesn't end up here on the blog. We hope you are too! Got a link to share? Please submit to the Submitterator!
Anti-Defamation League joins bigots in opposing Manhattan mosque
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.
Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain --unnecessarily -- and that is not right.
Perhaps the Anti-Defamation League could produce some helpful maps to delineate the areas in our cities where Muslims may live, work and pray without causing more pain.
The original statement was linked to here by others, but it's not currently available. Via CNN. Discussion: Tablet, Wonkette, and TPM.
According to the Weather Channel, this is the country's largest hail stone. It's 8 inches in diameter and weights approximately 2 pounds. It fell in Vivian, South Dakota, during a hailstorm that apparently left damage like that seen in the image above right. "Record breaking hail"
Stating the Obvious : If you don't have a house you don't need no sofa
Jacques Vallee is a computer scientist, partner in a venture capital firm, and author of more than 20 books, including Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, The Network Revolution, and, with Chris Aubeck, the forthcoming Wonders in the Sky.
"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.
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. — Xeni • Comments: 6
San Francisco: Diana Gameros at this weekend's Bicycle Music Festival
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)
The Wunderkammer that is Webb Gallery
I've posted previously about the Webb Gallery, an immensely interesting gallery in Waxahachie, Texas that specializes in outsider art and the artifacts of secret societies, and overflows with an incredible (dis)array of curiosities, from tramp art to circus sideshow banners. I discovered Webb Gallery and met the delightful proprietor, Bruce Webb, last year when he sold me an artwork by William S. Burroughs who had exhibited at the gallery right before his death. The Texas art site Glasstire has published Christina Patoski's photo tour of the Webb Gallery and Bruce and Julie Webb's equally odd living space above. Glass Houses 21: Julie and Bruce Webb
Sea No Evil: Sea Shepherd benefit art show in CA
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)
Experiencing the re-invention of flight in St. Paul
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.
Elephants in Scotland and other odd animal translocations
![Blogs Intelligenttravel Translocation Elephant-Crossing[3]](http://www.codecrafter.net/dbb/dbb.php?http://www.boingboing.net/images/_blogs_intelligenttravel_Translocation_Elephant-Crossing%5B3%5D.jpg)
Via Submitterator, BB pal Marilyn Terrell shares with us the above photo of a magnificent elephant crossing a road between stone cottages in Scotland. Huh? This image is from Translocation, a new book by photographer George Logan, depicting African animals shooped into Logan's home of Scotland: a cheetah running beside a loch, water buffalo and celtic cross tombstones, and the like. National Geographic has a gallery of the photos. From NatGeo:
Logan, a gold medal winner at the Association of Photographers Awards, traveled to such locations as South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, and Botswana to photograph his subjects in their natural habitats before combining them with shots of his native Scotland, including the Isle of Skye. The idea for the book was inspired by Logan's own childhood fantasies of exotic animals being part of his familiar surroundings.The Elephants of Scotland
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." — Maggie • Comments: 17
What some are identifying as the Daft Punk score for Disney's Tron Legacy movie has been leaked. I blame Julian Assange. — Xeni • Comments: 13
Mutilated Afghan woman on cover of Time: Afghansploitation?
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)
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. — Xeni • Comments: 24
Markets of Britain, a short film by Lee Titt (via Serafinowicz and Popper)
[ 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.
How Tettix tried to design a T-shirt and ended up with a remix album
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.
SPECIAL FEATURE by David Pescovitz
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.
The 100 best magazine articles ever
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."
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.
Girls Like Boys With Skills - new song from Rocky and Balls
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."
Burmese protesters using "Team America" likeness of Kim Jong-Il on posters
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.
Wikileaks source suspect Manning transferred from Kuwait to Quantico, VA
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.
"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. — Xeni • Comments: 6
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." — Xeni • Comments: 3
DIY Kitty Crack: ultra-potent catnip extract
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.
A note about safety. Yes, it is safe to use this extract on cats. I have looked into it, and there are a number of studies (very interesting in their own right) using pure nepetalactone on cats in experiments trying to figure out why it causes them to go bonkers. The upshot is that it's pretty safe. In the last of the references below, the LD50 of nepetalactone was determined to be 1550 mg/kg (about the same as aspirin), meaning you would have to force feed your average 5 kg cat ~8 grams in order to cause it any harm. So as long as you are reasonable with the extract it should pose no harm.DIY Kitty Crack: ultra-potent catnip extract
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)
Kite-flying in a thunderstorm leads to pseudo-telekinesis
Maggie Koerth-Baker at 2:33 PM Thu 
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.
David Pescovitz at 2:21 PM Thu
Via our Submitterator, Fang McGee points us to this novel use of 3D printers: spitting out fabric structures for clothing. From Ecouterre:
"Are 3D-Printed Fabrics the Future of Sustainable Textiles?" (via Submitterator)...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.
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.)
— Maggie • Comments: 7
Win free tickets to Outside Lands 2010!
On August 14-15, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park will host Outside Lands, a massive music festival with several dozen excellent bands, food, wine, art, and a big dose of Bay Area culture. Main stage performers include Kings of Leon, Furthur featuring Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, The Strokes, My Morning Jacket, Al Green, and Cat Power. There are also a slew of killer acts throughout the day on smaller stages, from Gogol Bordello to Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars to Rebirth Brass Band. The best news is that our friends at Outside Lands kindly provided Boing Boing with two pairs of two-day tickets to give away to our readers! ($140/ticket value!) Want them? Tell us why. Or rather, sing it to us.
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.
Moresukine -- a comic book about a German cartoonist's experiences in Tokyo
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 blog, he invited readers to email him "assignments," which he dutifully carried out and reported in comic strip format in a Moleskine notebook.
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.
Tokyo's oldest man actually dead for 30 years
Sogen Kato was believed to be the oldest man in Tokyo. Officials heading out to congratulate him on his 111th birthday, however, met not an ancient gent but a corpse, mummified in his own bed for perhaps 30 years. [BBC; photo and cake by Ann Larie Valentine]
Bill Barol (email, Twitter) is a former senior writer at Newsweek and his journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Slate, and elsewhere. He also blogs at True/Slant and Pix365.
I like haircuts and I like Popsicles -- hell, who doesn't? But I will apparently never be an art impresario, let alone a performance art impresario, because it never would have occurred to me to combine the two, as the downtown Los Angeles gallery Actual Size is doing this Saturday:
Filmmaker Josh Lee will sell his inventively flavored popsicles to onlookers while they watch haircuts and buzz cuts performed by artists in the gallery space. The hair clippings will accumulate for the duration of the performance, resulting in a sculptural work. Walk-ins are welcome. No appointments are necessary.This comes via PSFK, which adds:
The project has the potential to lead to a meditation on human waste; however, the act of cutting people's hair builds on a set of power relations that allow artist and audience to forge a more intimate relationship as he/she manipulates the image of the viewer.Plus, come on: Popsicles!
Refutation of a children's book
Glenn Fleishman is a Seattle journalist who started one of the first Web-hosting companies in 1994, worked for Amazon in 96-97, and then decided he wanted a life. He writes for The Seattle Times, The Economist, and TidBITS, among other publications.
I admire Sheila C. Bair, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, more than any other official in government. Ms. Bair's actions during the financial meltdown in 2008 and in intervening years has shown a steady hand, remarkably free of partisan favor, that likely prevented a much worse banking and mortgage catastrophe.
Thus it is with a heavy heart I must reveal a book she's written that hasn't gained much notice, which is full of the bad ideas that led to low consumer savings, inflated investor expectations, and financial innumeracy.
Hallucinogen to be tested as cure for opiate addiction
Ibogaine, a hallucinogen derived from an African plant, is used (illegally) as a cure for opiate addiction. This month, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research will test the effectiveness of Ibogaine on heroin addicts.
Popular Science has a brief article about the upcoming trial.
“As great as ibogaine seems, no one knows exactly how effective it is as a treatment,” says Valerie Mojieko, the director of clinical research for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research (MAPS), a privately funded Massachusetts-based nonprofit. So starting this month, MAPS will enlist Clare Wilkins, the director of Pangea Biomedics, to run the first long-term study to gauge the drug’s lasting effects at her clinic in Mexico (where patients already pay $5,000 for the treatment). She will treat 20 to 30 heroin addicts and, for the next year, MAPS will subject them to psychological and drug tests to quantify ibogaine’s effectiveness.
Fighting Drugs With Drugs: An Obscure Hallucinogen Gains Legitimacy as a Solution for Addictions
Photo by Hive. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
MAKE Volume 23 is on newsstands!
MAKE Volume 23 is on newsstands now!
In this special GADGETS issue, we show you how to make a menagerie of delightful machines: a miniature electronic Whac-a-Mole arcade game, a tiny but mighty see-through audio amplifier, a magic mirror that contains an interactive animated soothsayer, a self-balancing one-wheeled Gyrocar, and the Most Useless Machine — the creepy mechanical box whose only purpose is to turn itself off (as seen on The Colbert Report!). Plus: how Intellectual Ventures made their incredible laser targeting mosquito zapper, how to use the industrial-strength microcontrollers called PLCs, and a lot more.
Project highlights in MAKE Volume 23 include:
The Most Useless Machine
Gyrocar
Squelette, the Bare-Bones Amplifier
Magic Mirror
Solar Car Subwoofer
College Bike Trunk
and much more, of course!
David Pescovitz at 10:08 AM Thu
Russian manufacturer Lenpolygrafmash makes the computer component equivalent of brutalist architecture. According to the Russian culture blog Metkere.com, the devices such as the printer and scanner above are designed for harsh mechanical and climatic conditions. Lenpolygrafmash (via Submitterator, thanks Metkere!)
Glenn Beck's website, it turns out, can be manipulated into doing strange and NSFW things by messing with the URL. An insecure PHP utility accessible at the site allows for shenanigans like directory traversal, exposing all sorts of things that should not be exposed. Like password files, and a user group named for Rush Limbaugh. [Thanks, Dean!]
Update: the discussion thread is down. Here's the Google cache of it. — Rob • Comments: 23
Cartoon about prohibition: The Flower
"The Flower" is a modern day version of The Sunshine Makers, with a sad ending.
Manning linked to classified Afghanistan reports
Investigators say they've found concrete evidence linking Pfc. Bradley Manning with the "War Logs" ultimately leaked to the Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel. From the WSJ:
A search of the computers used by Pfc. Manning yielded evidence he had downloaded the Afghanistan war logs, which span from 2004 until 2009, the official said. It's not clear precisely what that evidence is.The investigation is also looking at who might have helped Pfc. Manning provide the documents to WikiLeaks, a web-based group that earlier this week released 76,000 secret reports from Afghanistan.
Mike Senese shows you how to pirate vinyl by casting it in silicone. [Mike via Make] — Rob • Comments: 15
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High Design
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Moresukine -- a comic book about a German cartoonist's experiences in Tokyo
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Refutation of a children's book
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