Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Today is a big day for shoes, the news is filled with stories of shoes around the world - so on a more constructive and positive note, here are some non-airbourne shoe projects... Learn two ways to mod Converse Hightops: knit one pair and swap the fabric on another. Fashion a pair of ribbon-tie sandals, open source shoes and build your own rollerskates... all in CRAFT 07.
Shoe Time by Arwen O'Reilly Griffith
Our view at history shows it's human nature: we gotta have shoes. Page 40.
Design-As-You-Wear Sandals by Amy O'Neill Houck
With Annie Mohaupt's wood-and-ribbon shoes, the wearer becomes the designer. Page 42.
Slip-On Style by Annie Mohaupt
Fashion new sandals that always match your whim. Page 44.
Hotshot High-Tops by Katie Tesarowski
Deconstruct and reconstruct your old standbys with new knitting. Page 52.
Baby Steps by Eve Oki Shirley
Make soft, pliable shoes for your favorite toddler. Page 55.
Roll Baby Roll! by Richard Humphrey, Luanne Teoh
Transform any shoes into hot roller skates and go on with your bad self! Page 62.
Shoe Mods Made Simple by Ivory Eileen
Check out these easy ways to make your shoes all your own. Page 66.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
From the MAKE: Flickr pool
Tom is designing a breath transmission system using a PC case fan as a optical interrupter -
"Breath" is a breath-over-IP phy2phy system. You blow on one fan (anemometer, whatever you want to call it), that data is sent over IP to the other side where a fan it turned on to match how strong you are blowing on it.Once a fan's internal coil is removed it'll spin freely, making it a suitable for measurement/interruption. Read more of his development process here - Opto-interrupters for Breath
- IR emitter/detector pair and fan on Flickr
More:
Blow Up - Breath amplifiers
Peggy Munson is the author of "Fairgrounds," a short story in my new Erotic Treasury.
Peggy's story is about a group of young perverts who work at the circus. Their world is informed by lifelong genderfuck and the profound physical disabilities of a couple of the main characters:
"This is not one of those postmodern Canadian sideshows," [Daddy Billy] warned, "with adorable, tumbling twins. The inbreeding here makes them ugly and mean. So stay close to Daddy and stay away from the octopus man."
SB: Have you ever won an award for any of your talents?
PM: I almost won the Lambda Literary Awards in Lesbian Debut Fiction -- but was disqualified in the finals because my work was "too straight."
I also won the spelling bee in elementary school, ultimately choking on the word "gangrene" at regionals.
SB: Tell me how you would cast the film version of your story... just for fun!
PM: Lead Girl: Chloe Sevigny
Daddy Billy - I would do a cattle call for a gruff no-name butch stud
Octopus Man - William H. Macy
Octopus Man's Girlfriend - Kathy Bates, wearing something spandex-y from Target
Octopus Boi - Rufus Wainwright playing a disabled tranny boi
Random Carnies - Other Wainwrights
SB: Your story has apparently became a big deal on a locked bulletin board for amputee fetishists... have you been able to find out what they're saying?
PM: As far as I could tell, amputee fetishists were doing untoward things with prosthetics while rolling around on a giant Braille scroll of my story -- or something like that. (Sadly, I never got in either!)
SB: Did you like carnivals as a child?
PM: My own experience with carnivals looked a lot like David Foster Wallace's essay on the Illinois State Fair.
Those Illinois fairs (the McLean County fair, the Kroger parking lot fair, the annual Corn Festival) spelled out my budding awareness: the 4-H tent with its neat stitches and carefully hemmed adolescent desires swirling around absurdly delicious cakes. The swine tent with its unapologetic grit and dropped corn dogs covered in carny cigarette butts.
My erotic sensibility is something akin to picking up the dropped corn dog, taunting the swine, eating as much cake as possible, and letting out those perfect seams.
What's hot at those fairs is the hemmed chaos about to break. The carnies lose their patience and do sadistic things with the ride gears. The cut-off jeans get snagged on teenage lust.
SB: Do you hear from people saying, "You're making our oppressed minority look bad, can't you be more sensitive?"
PM: Disabled folks never get enough recognition to even arrive on the p.c. radar.
I took a course at Oberlin called "Theorizing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Capitalism," where we sat around talking about the intersections of our oppression- but disability just did not exist.
Disability has always been in a fringe space, because it is about the aspects of the body that freak people out. Disabled people usually don't get worked up about radical sex because they're used to their bodies being put under a microscope- poked and prodded and subjected to telethon-esque social freak shows.
Even conservative disabled bodies are, on some level, living a queer sexuality.
When someone comes along and writes about disabled bodies seizing pleasure, disabled folks are generally psyched about the visibility and the notion (not often shared by social institutions) that sexual pleasure is their birthright.
In contrast, even the most open-minded sex radicals can flinch at the idea that some people find prosthetic legs as hot as prosthetic cocks. Or that insane levels of transcendence can bloom out of physical restrictions. Injured young veterans are damned well going to fuck their girlfriends when they get out of the rehab hospital.
I was just re-reading a 1999 essay by Patrick Califia in which he talks about how, when he became a sex writer with an acquired disability, people were "so overwhelmed by cognitive dissonance because of my disability that they've literally tried to take the cane away from me."
SB: Do you think limited mobility and kink have any special understanding together?
PM: Yes! My illness is characterized by immobility- and it's hot for me to hear a partner snarl, "hold still" or, "don't you dare move." -Or to simply move my limbs around like a ragdoll. I've studied all of the textures of stillness.
There is a discipline that can come out of sex with a disability, a honed Zen-like awareness.
Imagine you have pain all over your body. What does it mean for a lover to run a finger along the one place you feel pleasure? Imagine the increased valuation of that pleasure in contrast to your daily life. Disability often forces reinvention, which can just make even the most placid activity kinky.
SB: What comes to mind when you consider your ancestors?
PM: My aunt did some genealogy and discovered abolitionists as well as Amish in my family tree. That might explain why I think this Amish tradition called "bundling" is really hot (it involves lying with someone under a quilt and seeing how long you can resist temptation).
My recent ancestors on Mom's side were Germanic farm stock, John Deere to the marrow. I grew up the youngest grandchild of huge farm families who had amazing stories. My Dad was part of the local media ( the morning radio drive time shift) before everything went corporate. My aunt worked as a criminal pathologist at the L.A. County Coroner's Office, which handles most of the famous Hollywood autopsies. This always brought a freak element to holiday dinners, when it wasn't unusual to hear about an autoerotic asphyxiation case while Grandma was dishing out mashed rutabagas.
(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)
The impact of Gus Van Sant's biopic, Milk, inspires many viewers to ask, "What Would Harvey Do, Now?" Proposition 8's rotten victory took the stuffing out of a lot of us.
I know exactly what Harvey would've done this past weekend -- he would have been with me, and hundreds of others, pirouetting our asses off to The Dance-Along Nutcracker, performed each year by the band which was founded in 1978 to celebrate Milk's inauguration: The Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band.
Every December, the band takes over the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, opens the doors to all ages and species -- there were a couple tutu-ed puppies this year -- and plays the Tchaikovsky classic, while the audience leaps, skips, and crawls their way through "Arabian Coffee," "Chinese Tea," and the Russian Trepak. (Bring ibuprofen for the intermission).
Photos to make you squeal: here.
I especially like the sequence where a pack of four-year-old girls ambushed me with their Magic Wands.
When I was a little wanna-be ballerina, I could barely remain still at sit-down Nutcracker events; I ached to waltz with the other Flowers. In the 1960s, the kids in my parish would run around with fake swords and wild scarves as we recreated the whole shebang to the scratchy amplification of the nuns' beat-up record player. I think I peed in my pants one time -- please don't tell the Nutcracker Prince!
The Freedom Band's version is far better, with more room to take a flying leap, and an incredibly patient orchestra who play the entire show in costume while scores of little children sit at their feet with mouths hanging open. I am tempted to take up the piccolo again.
Incidentally, in the original edition, the Evil Mouse King is done in when little Clara expertly throws her shoe at the Rodent President, allowing the Good-Nut Prince to finish him off with a sword.
Hand me my slippers, darling!
(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Man, these wood handlebars for bikes are really appealing.... Andy (the maker) writes-
Each set of my handlebars, carefully crafted entirely by hand, is a unique piece of art that will set your bike apart from the masses. Made by bending and clamping thin strips of hard, durable woods together with adhesive inbetween the layers, sanded by hand to the perfect shape and then finished with polyurethane, these bars are made to last. I currently offer two different shapes of handlebars, a basic sweep design and a thicker grip shape I fashioned because I wanted something more substantial to grasp while riding. I offer handlebars both with standard 25.4mm diameter at the stem and the French sized 22.0mm diameter. Check out my inventory to see what bars are currently for sale.
More:
Check out the gallery here and photos on Flickr via A Whole Lotta Nothing.
Spotted on the MAKE Flickr pool, this Arduino-controlled two-servo walker, demo'd at the recent Dorkbot Bristol. Looking at the images close up, you can see this is an insta-bot, made with just the two servos, some coat hanger, and zip ties.
Dorkbot Bristol, December 2008
Related:
Speaking of servomotors, Solarbotics has just released some sweet-looking tiny (22.8x9.5x19.8 mm, 0.90x0.37x0.78 in) "pico servos." Only $16 each.
The GWS PICO+ servo (GWSPIC+F/BB/F) has a ball-bearing supported output shaft, and a Futaba connector (great for connecting to microcontrollers!). It comes complete in a blister pack containing all mounting hardware and servo output arm options.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!
Amon found the usual post party debris the one morning/afternoon and decided to Hook Up some of the stuff to his computer and make something useful. With some pizza boxes, cups, a computer and Scratch, he made a Skeeball type game. Just like the one at the arcade at the mall, but less hungry for quarters. Check out his Instructable for details on how to have your game create your pizza.
These steps will help you make Skeeball-inspired games from post-party materials (to satisfy the morning-after crafter in you). We'll recycle some party favors such as plastic cups, plastic bottles and pizza boxes to create something that gives you new ways to play and interact with your computer. The game that I use as an example in this instructable constructs virtual pizzas on a PC based on which hole a player rolls a ball into. Each hole has a label listing a pizza topping. When a ball rolls through a hole, the ingredient on its label is added to the on-screen pizza drawing.
Amon is one of the members of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab and involved with the development of Scratch. He also works with the Fab Lab group on creating new ways to make things.
As you look around your humble abode, what do you see that can help you invent a new game? How can you reuse materials for fun and adventure? Have you tried Scratch yet? Maybe your kids or students would like to learn to program with scratch. Since there is nothing in his design that you don't already have around you now, what could you do with this idea? Would you like to use fine craftsmanship or personal fabrication to improve on Amon's physical design and program and create something better? Add your comments, and post your photos and video in the Make Flickr pool.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gaming | Digg this!
(Flash video embedded above, Direct MP4 Link here).
In this week's edition of our weekly Boing Boing tv update...
? We take a sneak peek at the images in Imaginary Foundation's gallery show, which opened this week in LA, and we watch their iconic "astronaut drummer" guy rocking out IRL.
? New BB guestblogger Susie Bright checks in with a video report! (NB: she consults Brian Eno and Eric Schmidt's Oblique Strategy cards when in doubt -- and she shows us the Mac desktop widget version here).
? We take a look at the groups featured in Cory's "Boing Boing Charitable Giving Guide"
? Boing Boing is blogging over at GOOD Magazine, and we preview Pesco's first contribution -- about the psychological impact of Twittering/vlogging/lifecasting/Facebooking everything you do.
? At the end of this episode, BBtv remixes the already-excellent "Best Viral Videos of 2008" montage curated by our pals at Videogum. Enjoy. Crunk makes everything better.
Previous Weekly Boing Boing Updates from BBtv:
* Boing Boing tv Update: Econopocalypse, Julie Amero, Holiday Gifts, Mumbai.
* Boing Boing tv Update: Virgin WiFi, Obfuscated Code, Comment Poetry, Downfall Housing Remix
* Boing Boing tv Update: OFFWORLD, YES MEN, and THIS IS THE FIRST.
2 Player Productions posted this interview with Pete Edwards of Casper Electronics, discussing his views on the practice of circuit-bending and more. [via GetLoFi]
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Tim made an improvised gas mask he found from an old Popular Science article... via PopSci. Tim writes-
Inspired by some plans from 1942, I made my own gas mask from a snorkel, a tin can, and some charcoal I made from coconut husks. It works great!. I varnished my boat and didn't get a headache! I'm not wearing it now, I can smell the fumes from outside, and I AM getting a headache. This gas mask is very similar to the successful British Small Box Respirator used in WW1. Inside the familiar cloth hood with goggles it had a nose clip, a mouthpiece and a hose to a can full of charcoal and soda lime. My canister only uses carbon as the absorbing agent since I'm not concerned about "acid gases". If you need to filter out military poisons or chemicals similar to them, add the soda lime and other ingredients.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!
Gakken's little analog synth kit is turning out to be a great testing ground for control and interface. If antennae based theremin control should prove a bit too intangible for you, Denha's linear sensor may be more up your alley. [via Synthtopia]
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In 1948, the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were ratified by all the nations of the world. These 30 articles guaranteed a broad sweep of human rights across many human endeavors, from Life to Liberty to Freedom of Thought.Article 31 (Thanks, Steven!)Now, sixty years later, recognizing that over a billion people across the planet lack access to clean and potable water and that millions die each year as a result, it is imperative to add one more article to this historic declaration, the Right to Water.
We, the undersigned, respectfully call upon the United Nations to add a 31st article to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, establishing access to clean and potable water as a fundamental human right.
We believe the world will be a better place when the Right To Water is acknowledged by all nations as a fundamental human right, and that this addition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents a major step toward the goal of water for all.
Please join us. Water is a right, not a privilege.
Boing Boing TV will be traveling to Vegas for CES (Jan 8-11, 2009) with our colleagues over at Boing Boing Gadgets to do video reports from the show floor. Possibly with the assistance of hard-working investigative journalists like the guy you see above (who could frankly use a shave).
Our video crew will be joining Joel, John, Rob to walk through the maze of consumer electronics offerings, separating the junk from the gems, and trying to parse what's worth separating you from your heard-earned samoleans.
To get us started on the road to CES, and in planning our coverage on the blog in text, photos, and in video, I thought it might be cool to hear from you.
What are you expecting to see? What are you expecting to see more of, or less of? What devices and/or services would make computers, laptops, smartphones, or gaming devices for more fun, more productive, more -- whatever it is you want?
CES is historically the largest electronics trade show in the world. Why do so many people travel across the globe to um -- pounce on Las Vegas once a year for this, and what do we expect to be different this time? Extra points if you type in LOLcatese. We might read your comments out in a special BBtv episode we're planning to air tomorrow about our CES prep.
(A sponsorship note: BBtv's "Road to CES" episodes will be sponsored by Intel and Asus, who recently launched WEPC.com, a project to build the world's first "community-designed laptop.")
PHOTO: Something crashed on my computer! by Simon Davison, a CC-licensed photo on Flickr.
Lisa Laughly, aka Ninth Wave Designs, has done some absolutely stunning Moleskine art projects, including the Alchemy Notebook, seen here. Lisa incorporated her own modified versions of existing rune script, and then further obscured it by using a cipher wheel and grid (also built into the book). So the text has meaning, but good luck teasing it out -- she also changes the rules of encipherment as she goes. The book even has pop-up features. I want to draw like this when I grow up.
Alchemy Notebook: Moleskine Pocket Sketchbook [via BibliOdyssey]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read THE PAINS or I will shoot you in the face (Thanks, John!)Mr Norman Lux, nSF, woke up with a pain in his body that felt as if it might have been a soul gone bad.
He first perceived the pain as a toothache in the general area of the upper right quadrant of his mouth. But as he fixed on it and tried to determine which tooth it might be that was hurting, he experienced a swift vague transfer of pain from the upper portion of his mouth—by way of the right side of his neck, down the right side of his body, traversing his torso near his belt line—to a region just north and to the left of his scrotum, where it briefly ceased. Two seconds later he felt the sharp ingrowing of the pinky toenail on his right foot. That pain stopped after about five seconds and was almost immediately replaced by the crushing weight of the white linen sheet under which, exhausted from prayer, Mr. Lux had drifted to sleep only a few hours ago. By faint dawn light, the sheet, where it pressed upon the bad toenail, showed a small bloodstain.
Bonnie Powell, who covers the ethics and politics of foodover at the marvelous blog Ethicurean, says:
Obama still hasn't named a Secretary of Agriculture, which is one of the most important appointments in the Cabinet, overseeing a $94 billion budget that directly affects not just farmers, but public health, the environment, animal welfare, and so much more. For years this post has been held by shills for "Big Farma" and pandered to those corporations like Cargill, Smithfield, Monsanto, and Archer Daniels Midland with massive lobbying clout. As Nicholas Kristof wrote in his NY Times column "Obama's Secretary of Food?", appointing a reformer to head the USDA would send a "powerful signal" that U.S. food policy was finally about to become more palatable.Sign this Ag Sec petition: It’s worth a shot (Ethicurean)Kristof linked to a petition at fooddemocracynow.org that asks Obama's transition team to consider six candidates — all experienced, viable names of people who are ready and willing to serve — for Secretary of Agriculture who could potentially mend our broken food system. Already, after only six days, 36,000 people have signed the petition, including Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Bill Niman, and the Obama transition team appears to be paying attention. But for some reason, the current names still being floated in the media are not those of reformers at all.
Dave Murphy, a sixth-generation Iowan and the petition's organizer, tells me that he thinks if we can get the number of signers to 100,000 over the next few days, the pressure to choose someone from the sustainable agriculture and food community — not Big Farma – would be too immense to ignore.
Please consider signing the petition, blogging it, and/or forwarding this message to your personal networks and any list-servs you are on. Visit fooddemocracynow.org now to sign.
This blank ID card came with a wallet made in Japan. (Card was printed in China).
Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.
As I hand off the magic wand of guest-posting on the last minute and second of my tenure here, there's one Boinger I want to thank in particular: Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I remember, early this decade, when bB turned comments off because the haters and random trolls were simply too much, and it is a testament to TNH and her folks that the comments are back on and as good as they are, at an audience scale several times what it was in those days.
TNH gets this medium like Gretsky, which is to say she skates to where the puck is going to be. You could see this with her invention of disemvoweling in 2002, which Time magazine flogged as a hot new (uncredited) idea in 2008. Oops. And, as has been Time's MO since Phil Elmer-Dewitt put bogus net-research on the cover with no consequences, Time won't update the story to reflect what TNH understood about the value of visible governance, half a dozen years ago. (Fck Tm mgzn, I say.) Because of all of that work on governance (not just disemvoweling), reading the comments has been a real pleasure.
So in honor of TNH, I'd like to try an experiment, making my last post here a question to you rather than a pointer elsewhere. Here's the question: what do you think you know about the future that few other people understand yet? What's going to happen in the next five years or so that will catch most of the rest of us by surprise, but not you? (And no fair faking the timestamp and predicting financial meltdown.)
Thanks to BoingBoing for letting me guestblog, and over to you in the comments...
catmas cheer
tuba christmas
34 diy gifts
christmas stickers
snowy kitten
winter cranberry cupcakes
krampus
santastic 4
cute animal christmas song
previously on web zen:
chaoskitties in snowsuits
winter zen 2007
Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)
As blogged here previously, I'm contributing reviews and "appreciations" to Fancast.com of various TV and movies you can watch there, in entirety, for free (after sitting through some ads). As disclosed previously, I'm being paid to write the posts, but no one's telling me what to write about, or editing my content.
With that out of the way, here's a snip from my latest contribution to the project -- a post about one of my favorite movies ever, Koyaanisqatsi, directed by Godfrey Reggio and scored by Philip Glass. Snip:
Power plants, Nevada nuke detonations in the desert, and a spiderweb of powerlines follow, drawing us in to the awareness of human presence, and showing just how broken our own design of human experience has become. People do eventually appear in the movie, but they’re not so much thinking beings. They’re blurry, busy, insect-like clusters; humming and buzzing through life in a timelapse haze.Read the whole thing, and do comment over there, would you please? Koyaanisqatsi (1983): Xeni's review on Fancast, and watch the entire movie here with a few brief commercial interruptions. Here's a link to all of my contributions to Fancast's review blog so far.The "Microchips" chapter juxtaposes images of tiny computer chips (remember when those images were new to us?) with satellite photos of big cities (and these too, before Google Maps?). The microchips and the aerial city layouts are reflections of each other, and we are shown as captives of a chaotic, conflicted realm we have constructed for ourselves.
The film ends as it began, a long arc that reveals itself to be a circle. We return to the same melancholy prophecy with which the film began: a life out of balance is a life destined to disintegrate. The film, its score, and its message, were intended to be timeless — and they are.
An audio note: That Glass soundtrack was re-recorded and re-released in 1998, fifteen years after the film came out. It’s really wonderful music, and worth picking up on Amazon. Snip from the original New York Times review:
The range of instrumental colors is astonishing. If one particular timbre has come to characterize "Koyaanisqatsi," it is the dark, subterranean growl that opens and closes the score.
"He had a marvelous criminal vision," Colombian navy Capt. Luis German Borrero said. "He introduced innovations such as a bow that produced very little wake, a conning tower that rises only a foot above the water and a valve system that enables the crew to scuttle the sub in 10 minutes. He is very ingenious."In Colombia, they call him Captain Nemo...
Portocarrero was living well. Police, who reported finding $200,000 hidden in the spare tire of his car, say he had invested his reputed $1-million-per-vessel fees in the purchase of five shrimp boats.
Administrative Security officials allege that Portocarrero helped invent "semi-submersibles," as the narco-vessels are called, because they don't dive and resurface like true submarines, but cruise just below the surface.
Portocarrero's craft are difficult for counter-narcotics officials to detect on the open seas because their tiny wake creates a negligible radar "footprint." Also, authorities say, the exhaust is released through tubing below the surface, frustrating patrol aircraft's heat-sensing equipment.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Jake von Slatt built this brass bedside lamp, which incorporates an Aerolux glow bulb, as a night light. He also used the ammonia aging technique for the brass components (which Tim Lillis covers in his "Tricks of the Trade" comic in the next MAKE).
[BTW: Lyra is the little girl in The Golden Compass.]
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Furniture | Digg this!
From Arbroath: "At Christmas time we should always spare a thought for those less fortunate than us. After 20 years of bleeding the world, the global financial community has fallen on hard times. These people desperately need our thoughts, prayers and lots of our money. If you have any investments or savings left, or any money left over at the end of the month please, please give generously."
Automated bike parking system accepts your bike and sends it into the 7th dimension. Returns it to our world at your command.
Not sure what to make of the announcement that Twitter is becoming part of Google's federation. That could be the wrong way to describe it. Here's what I do know. You'll be able to use your Twitter ID to sign on to any site that supports Google's API and the relationships between you and your followers and the people you follow will somehow be reflected in the Google "social graph." It'll be interesting to see how this works because "follow" isn't mutual, if I follow you it doesn't mean that you follow me, where friendship in social networks is two-way.
Over at Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf's Quantified Self blog ("Tools for knowing your own mind and body") guest blogger Alexandra Carmichael explains how she keeps a record of 40 different things in her life every day, and what she's learned about herself from studying the data.
I track these things about my health and personal patterns every day:She's come to the realization that her mood is much better on days she exercises, and on days when her mood rating is low, she overeats.- sleep (bed time, wake time, sleep quality, naps)
- morning weight
- daily caloric intake (each meal, total calculated at end of day)
- mealtimes- mood (average of 3 positive and 3 negative factors on 0-5 scale)
- day of menstrual cycle
- sex (quantity, quality)
- exercise (duration, type)- supplements I take (time, dosage)
- treatments for vulvodynia (a chronic pain condition)
- pain of administering the vulvodynia treatment I take (0-5)
- vulvodynia-related pain (0-5)
- headache,nausea (0-5)- time spent working, time with kids
- number of nursings and night wakings (I'm a mom)
- weather
- unusual events (text)The mood factors I measure every day are:
1. Happiness
2. Irritability
3. Calmness
4. Sadness
5. Feeling beautiful / self-love
6. Feeling fat / ate too much
I hadn't expected my tracking to unearth such deep, emotionally charged issues. I did expect the optimization which often accompanies tracking, but when striving for an optimized ideal, the question becomes how to decide what "ideal" means. I just don't have an intuitive sense of what the data "should" look like. Are such wild swings in caloric intake normal? What do other people's patterns of mood, sleep, and exercise look like? I'd love to see some kind of comparable, to get some sense of where my patterns fit on the distribution curve. Part of my motivation in sharing my data is to encourage others to do the same. Let's learn from each other!It's fascinating stuff, and it will be even more fascinating when people start sharing this data and analyzing it in various ways. Quantifying Myself
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
My credit card account got hacked, leaving me in a sticky wicket when I got to NY. I was able to convince the credit card company to let me check in, just, and then when I got to the room they cancelled the card. As a result various services will try to bill that card and will fail (I've been through this before). Most of them come at the end of the month, but Netflix tried to bill the account the day after it was cancelled, and I was still in NY and hadn't received the new card yet. But they put my "account on hold" anyway -- which means if I thought of a movie to add to my queue in the meantime, tough noogies, no payee no queuee. No grace period, even though I've been a subscriber in good standing since 2001 or so. Assholes.
Here's video of drunken idiot British tourists disgracing themselves in Tokyo's legendary Tsukiji Fish Market -- licking and fondling fish, joyriding in the forklifts, and so on. Tsukiji is one of the most interesting places I've ever visited, and these dorks are behaving in a way that's dangerous, disrespectful and, well, embarrassing. Our pal Lisa Katayama adds, "The Japanese guy interviewed makes a valid point: he says they allowed tourists here because they thought it would be an interesting learning experience to see how the fish market operated; but at the point where they are blatantly disrupting operations, its time for an intervention."
Video of tourists licking fish at Tsukiji
GEEKitty Gear
(Thanks, Absinthetic!)
Lovely and functional wall antlers for your outlets via Crunchgear. Would make a fun remake...
These electrical outlet covers let you put your mobile phone on the wall as it recharges. The antlers for all three types of deer are already the perfect shape to hold things, so we hardly had to modify the forms at all. The tough urethane rubber we used for the cover holds handsets tightly, and also protects the antlers from breakage should you bump into them. Socket-deer can also be used as a cover for light switches, and the antlers make an excellent hook for keys or accessories.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gadgets | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Excellent mod - Soak It to Me: Inside Liquid-Suspended Gaming PC @ Wired-
Looking for a beefy gaming rig, and don't mind getting your hands a little wet? Hardcore Computer's Reactor might just be the 100-pound computational monolith for you.Crafted from 2.5mm-thick aircraft aluminum and packed with powerful hardware, the Reactor is already a fairly striking and competitive machine. But there's a secret weapon sloshing around in that unassuming tank: four and a half gallons of cooling oil.
PC enthusiasts looking to get the most power out of their machines have often turned to overclocking — pushing key components to perform faster than the manufacturer intended. This generates quite a bit of heat, which is traditionally fought using an array of fans or a maze of tubes pumping cooling fluid to select components.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Plushie: An Interactive Design System for Plush Toys via i make things. Software available at the site...
We introduce Plushie, an interactive system that allows nonprofessional users to design their own original plush toys. To design a plush toy, one needs to construct an appropriate two-dimensional (2D) pattern. However, it is difficult for non-professional users to appropriately design a 2D pattern. Some recent systems automatically generate a 2D pattern for a given three-dimensional (3D) model, but constructing a 3D model is itself a challenge. Furthermore, an arbitrary 3D model cannot necessarily be realized as a real plush toy, and the final sewn result can be very different from the original 3D model. We avoid this mismatch by constructing appropriate 2D patterns and applying simple physical simulation to it on the fly during 3D modeling. In this way, the model on the screen is always a good approximation of the final sewn result, which makes the design process much more efficient. We use a sketching interface for 3D modeling and also provide various editing operations tailored for plush toy design. Internally, the system constructs a 2D cloth pattern in such a way that the simulation result matches the user's input stroke. Our goal is to show that relatively simple algorithms can provide fast, satisfactory results to the user whereas the pursuit of optimal layout and simulation accuracy lies outside this paper's scope. We successfully demonstrated that non-professional users could design plush toys or balloon easily using Plushie.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!
Check out Ed Piskor's comics & stories - if you like old school hacking this is best comic series!
WIZZYWIG VOLUME 1: PHREAK - THIS 116 PAGE GRAPHIC NOVEL TELLS THE TALE OF HACKER AND PHONE PHREAK KEVIN “BOINGTHUMP” PHENICLE, AS HE BEGINS HIS FASCINATING CAREER WITH THE EASIEST ACCESSIBLE COMPUTER OF THE 1970S: THE PHONE SYSTEM. KEVIN’S UNQUENCHABLE THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE LEADS HIM DOWN A DARK AND CRIMINAL PATH OF CHEATING, CONNING, AND TRESPASSING IN ORDER TO GAIN DIRECT ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION HE SO OBSESSIVELY DESIRES.
WIZZYWIG VOLUME 2: HACKER - HACKING IS THE NAME OF THE GAME IN THE SECOND BOOK HIGHLIGHTING THE LIFE OF KEVIN "BOINGTHUMP" PHENICLE. FOLLOW HIM AS HE HACKS COMPUTER BBS'S, CREATES APPLICATIONS THAT RUN WILD, BRUTE FORCE PROGRAMS FOR STEALING PASSWORDS, PHYSICALLY RAIDS THE PHONE COMPANY HEADQUARTERS, AND WIRETAPS THE AUTHORITIES. WILL THE FED'S GET THE DROP ON OUR GUY? FIND OUT WITHIN THESE PAGES.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of “Internet Freedom” first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such “access tiering” risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance. If Google, for example, knew if could buy a kind of access for its video content that iFilm couldn’t, then it could exploit its advantage to create an even greater disadvantage for its competitors; network providers in turn could deliver on that disadvantage only if the non-privileged service was inferior to the privileged service.The made-up dramas of the Wall Street Journal
Update: David Isenberg does a hell of a job explaining, in detail, how the WSJ majorly blew this one.
Year In Ideas 2008 @ The NYTimes is a little tricky to navigate, but there is a lot to see, including our old favorite - the crow vending machine!
In June, Josh Klein revealed his master’s-thesis project to a flock of crows at the Binghamton Zoo in south-central New York State. The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he’d created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. The Binghamton crows quickly learned that dropping nickels and dimes into the slot produced peanuts, and the most resourceful members of the flock began looking for more coins. Within a month, Klein had a flock of crows scouring the ground for loose change.Cornell University and Binghamton University to study how wild crows make use of his machine. Although his invention might conjure Hitchcock-worthy visions of crows stealing the loose change from pedestrians’ pockets and hands, Klein’s conception is more benign. To Klein, the machine demonstrates the value of cooperating with “synanthropes” — animals that have adapted seamlessly to human environments. “Rather than just killing off a species, why not see if they can do something useful for us, so we can all live in close proximity?” he said. To pursue his research, he founded the Synanthropy Foundation this year. Someday, he hopes, similar techniques may allow us to train rats to sort our garbage for us.
More:
Back in 2007 I picked Josh Klein's "crow vending machine" as one of my favorite projects from the ITP show...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gowers is the expert who conducted the thoroughgoing analysis of the costs of extending copyright. Burnham is the politician who said that he didn't care if the facts said that longer copyright on sound recordings was bad for Britain -- he would extend copyright because of the "moral case."
All the respectable research shows that copyright extension has high costs to the public and negligible benefits for the creative community.There's lots more -- and every word of it dripping with learned, factual rebuttals of errant nonsense.Consumers find themselves paying more for old works or unable to access “orphan works” where copyright ownership is unclear. Small businesses that play recorded music such as hairdressing salons and local radio stations face a hidden extra “tax” in the form of higher music-licence fees. Do they really need this at this time?
Mr Burnham will no doubt find such arguments uncool. But even on his terms, the case for extension does not work. Twenty years’ extra earning power in 50 years’ time does nothing to put more money in the pockets of struggling performers now: two thirds of lifetime income from an average compact disc comes in the first six years after release.
And it will not alter the incentives for creation one jot. As Dave Rowntree, Blur’s drummer, told my review: “I have never heard of a single band deciding not to record a song because it will fall out of copyright in only 50 years. The idea is laughable.”
Copyright extension is out of tune with reality (Thanks, Glyn!)
We gave owl pellet dissection kits as party favors a couple of years ago - they're easy to put together and make great holiday gifts! We included a couple of owl pellets, dissecting forceps, a magnifier (we like the Private Eye loupe, you can nest them for higher magnification) and a Riker box to display the especially nice bones. It's fun if you can get pellets from different types of owls and from different geographic regions so you can compare the contents. Owl pellets are available from Mountain Home Biological, Owl Brand Discovery Kits, and Carolina Biological Supply. Kidwings has great information about dissecting pellets, and we got the bone chart from the Carolina Biological Supply site.
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The barley used in the new beer is a third-generation offshoot of the original plant stored for five months in a Russian laboratory in the station. The company has made only 100 liters of the new brew, named Sapporo Space Barley, which is not for sale. Sapporo says the beer is safe because it has tested microbes in it and did tests with lab animals and Sapporo employees, too. It also says that the space beer tastes just like regular beer.Sapporo to offer tasting of space beer (Thanks, Marilyn!)
This installation by Australian artist Ivan Argote is called "Tourist Trap" and consists of a large handmade wooden cage perched on a leg over a city pathway. When "tourists" walk underneath it, it traps them, although we think it's probably too easy to escape this beast.
Ivan Argote via Aram Bartholl Blog
Michael Wright explains his remake of the mysterious apparatus found off the coast of Antikythera island -
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek clockwork machine found in a shipwreck, that has taken more than a century to decipher. Wright's handmade reconstruction is the first to include all the known features of this complex device.- More info from the book, Decoding the Heavens
More:
World's oldest computer?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
?This project by artist Kevin Hamilton is called "Dept. of Rhythmanalysis: Dupage" and consists of 60 interconnected control panels with panel mount LEDs that signify local and global absurd conditions such as "INHALE / EXHALE, YOU'RE HERE / YOU'RE NOT, DEMOCRATIC WHITE HOUSE / REPUBLICAN WHITE HOUSE and BARBARA IS IN / BARBARA IS OUT". The indicators on each unit displays the current status of this logic and the machines audibly toggle back and forth in varying speeds.
via Rhizome
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!
Ricky disguised his syphon-based tree-watering system as a gift -
There are many benefits to decorating with live Christmas trees, but the daily watering can become a bit of a hassle, especially if your tree stand is difficult to reach. It's also impossible to travel for any extended period of time without getting someone else to water your tree while you are gone. This system will eliminate both those problems.- and oh won't the kids be psyched to tear open that package! … hmm, best to give fair warning on Christmas morning - Make a hidden Christmas tree watering system
More:
Make an automatic Xmas tree watering system?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This Tesla coil car alarm system will not only save your car from being stolen, but will also cook any potential thief as if they were BBQed on site. Check out the link for pics of the construction of this beast, and be careful next time you try to jimmy the lock on someone's ride. Of course, the giant swinging arm will probably give it away.
Tesla Coil Car Theft Protection via Environmental Graffiti
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!
From the MAKE: Flickr pool
Greg's using Arduino to create an auto-drummer -
Yesterday, I got my drum playing robot working with chop sticks screwed into rotary solenoids. It's powered by two 9v batteries wired in series and controlled by the arduino through transistors. I showed this off at the UrHo Talks 2 event last night. Operational detals here- Solenoid drumming robot
From the pages of MAKE:
Drumbot Activate! MAKE: 15: Music, Page 60. Subscribers—read this article now in your digital edition!
If you are going to make a Flying Spaghetti Monster, you might as well make it out of Spaghetti. At the very least, use several different kinds of pasta.
More about the Flying Spaghetti Monster - Portrait from Self
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!
Trains, even the paper craft variety, make a great gift for the holiday season. Canon has a cool paper craft model of a GG1-type electric locomotive that you can download for free.
The GG1-type electric locomotive was developed and owned by Pennsylvania Railroad, an American company. It was known throughout the world because of its sleek body by French designer Raymond Loewy and is considered Pennsylvania Railroad's "signature locomotive." A total of 139 locomotives were manufactured from 1934 to 1943 and they remained in service until the beginning of the 80s. Today, although they are no longer in use and many have been scrapped, we can still find some in museums, etc.
Get the paper craft file [PDF] and assembly instructions [PDF]
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Paper Crafts | Digg this!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
the cheapest gift: your old, flat tires for artistic reuse
"When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man's convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man's brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle."
~Elizabeth West, Hovel in the Hills
No matter how evolved you think our human-powered 2-wheeled creations have become, one thing's indisputable: they could always use something. Whether it's a tuneup, accessory, or part upgrade, bicycles are perfect for perpetual tinkering. Here are my picks for best Maker/biker gifts this year.
This instructable will show you how to make a long lasting 'AA' battery backpack for your Arduino. Why not use a 9V or lithium battery? Well, here's why this maker chose to use AA's instead:
I recently bought an Arduino Diecimila board. It's awesome and the applications, you can use it for or with is almost unlimited. However there's a problem when you want to use it in portable applications. You can use the Liquidware lithium backpack, which is a good way to power the Arduino. There's a problem with the backpack though, cause when the battery dies, you'll have to find an USB port or another external power source to charge it. You can't just replace the battery. You can also choose to power your arduino with a 9V battery and the built-in regulator of the Arduino board. The problem with this setup is that 9V batteries doesn't have a very high capacity, so they'll die faster.
Learn how to make an Arduino AA Undershield
In the Maker Shed:
Make: Arduino
Ok Makers this is the last week to order things to get them before the holidays, below is the schedule of shipping "safe days" and below that we've included many/most of our gift guides for 2008 to check out. Times are tight for everyone this year, give a gift that gives back - learning, building and making.
FedEx:
Ground - Dec 15th
3-Day Saver - Dec 17th
2-Day - Dec 18th
Overnight - Dec 19th
USPS (Any Method):
Due to the high volume of mail that the postal service deals with around the holidays, order by Dec. 10th, however, many packages are lost or delayed in transit and we do not replace or refund any orders lost using this ship method, we strongly encourage you to not use this method in December.
MAKE's 2008 gift guides:
Those with doctorates in artificial intelligence are never the best stewards of houseplants. Programmer Bryan Horling says he's killed whole swaths of greenery inside and outside his rural western Massachusetts home. But at least one plant will survive, thanks to a computer-controlled plant watering system -- a simple network of plastic tubing and an aquarium pump to keep the Wandering Jew plant in his living room alive.
"You can do this project even if you're too lazy to water your own plants," Horling says. His computer activates an aquarium air pump, which displaces water in a soda bottle, sending it to the plant. He started with an X10 appliance controller from RadioShack, an aquarium pump, length of tubing, 2-liter plastic soda bottle, and aquarium check valve. He drilled two holes in the soda bottle cap, inserted the tubing, and sealed them with a glue gun. A metal binder clip holds the tube in place, and the check valve keeps the water from backing up the pipe after the plant is watered.
Horling, 30, uses hobby projects as a release from his difficult studies. His research on multi-agent systems is funded by the U.S. Army, which wants to use software agents to help filter and analyze information received by commanders in the field. To take a break from his thesis, he created a recipe for baby wipes that involves paper towels, no-tears shampoo, and a table saw.
In this case, the houseplant waterer is controlled by a Linux PC in his den. A freeware application for Linux allows the computer to control the X10 device. Then Cron, a built-in application in Linux, lets him run scheduled tasks. The script tells the air pump to turn on for five seconds every day.
A 2-liter bottle holds enough water to keep the plants happy for two weeks. Originally, he got it because his wife Maura and he traveled constantly. Now it comes in handy because they're distracted by a new baby. "It created a whole other problem," says Horling. "It's just enlarged the scope of our forgetfulness. Now we forget to fill the water bottle."
>> Computer-controlled watering: makezine.com/go/plant
From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 8, page 22 - Bob Parks.
In the Maker Shed:
Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love.
It's 6AM here in London and I'm sitting in the living room with the baby, listening to the washing-machine hum away in the kitchen. The washing machine, a Hotpoint combo washer-dryer (jack of all trades, master of none, I'm afraid) started blowing the breaker every time we ran it about a month ago. On Saturday, we had a technician in from the manufacturer. After prodding at it with a multimeter for a while, he shrugged, pulled out a laptop and an EPROM burner, burned a new EPROM, took the old one out, and installed it. And now my washing machine is fine and doesn't trip the breaker. Turns out that all it needed was a more up-to-date version of the OS.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you use the Command+Shift+3 or Command+Shift+4 commands to save screen captures, you know how quickly your desktop gets cluttered with mysteriously named PNG files. A post on the Sneak blog points to a solution to this problem for Leopard users:
To change the default save location, open up Terminal and run the following command:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/Screenshots
Your screengrabs will be saved to the Screenshots folder on your desktop, which you can drag onto the dock and use as a Stack.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work for those of us who still run Panther. If you're a Pather user, your best alternative is just to use Command+Shift+Control+3/4. The image will be saved to your clipboard instead of the desktop, which you can then paste it into Photoshop. A File->New in Photoshop will default to the height and width of the clipboard's contents.
Save screen captures into a Stack in Leopard
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this!
On the heels (gettit?) of the now-notorious incident in which an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at some guy named George Bush, the world press has rushed to tell us that throwing shoes is a really bad thing in the Arab world. Not like here in the west, where it's a gesture of affection.
“In Arab cultures, throwing shoes is a grave show of disrespect.” —Bloomberg.comThose Mysterious Easterners, So Different From You and Me“The act is an Arab symbol of contempt.” —Christian Science Monitor
“Throwing shoes at somebody is a supreme insult in the Middle East.” —Reuters
“In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt.” —Associated Press
Other notorious examples of the Cupertino effect include an article in the Denver Post that turned the Harry Potter villain Voldemort into Voltmeter, one in the New York Times that gave the first name of American footballer DeMeco Ryans as Demerol, and a Reuters story which changed the name of the Muttahida Quami movement of Pakistan into the Muttonhead Quail movement.Questions & Answers: Cupertino (via Joho the Blog)It could be worse. Leave out one of the os from the beginning of co-operation as well as the hyphen and you might be offered not Cupertino but copulation. Now that would be an error to write home about. Or perhaps not.
I'm really excited to welcome our new guest blogger to Boing Boing: Susie Bright! I've been a fan of Susie's for over 20 years. She's a brilliant feminist sex writer, erotic forensics expert, and political activist with a big fountain pen instead of a sword.
She's been called: "#23 out of 62 Reasons to Love America," (behind Tofu Pups) -- and "a national treasure right up there with the Grand Canyon, the battlefield at Gettysburg, the Okefenokee Swamp, and the Smithsonian Nancy Reagan Memorial Dress Collection."
Lesser-known details include:
1958 - Born in Arlington, VA, conceived in Jakarta in by expat linguists. Raised all over California, and Edmonton, Alberta, attending eleven schools before dropping out in 1975, and moving to Detroit.
1966 - Wrote first political pamphlet in Crayola Orange-Red, begging neighbors to vote against Reagan in California gubernatorial race.
1974 - Joined notorious high school underground newspaper, The Red Tide, and sued the L.A. School Board for the right to distribute without prior censorship or approval- a struggle not without sit-downs, walkouts, and overturned police cars.
1975 - Co-founded the rank-and-file activist group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
1984 - Co-founded On Our Backs, the first sex journal by and for women, the first entirely-out-of-the-closet lesbian magazine, and the first print publication about anything produced with Macintosh Desktop Publishing.
1987 - Began publishing the first "real" film criticism of porn movies. Named the "Pauline Kael of Porn" by Alice Kahn.
1986 - Taught first university class on porn, "How To Read a Dirty Movie" at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.
1990 - Baby Aretha born; perfect happiness. Writes "Egg Sex."
1993 - Founded The Best American Erotica series; published ~400 short stories of literary erotic fiction.
1995 - Made everyone cry in The Celluloid Closet.
1996 - Inspired the lesbian lovers for the Wachowski Brothers' Bound and wrote the sex scenes.
2004 - Blog debut: Susie Bright's Journal. First Post: Moral Values I'd Like to Revive
2001 - Bought rental fleet Prius from disgusted dealer for $7,000. Still driving it. Started first audio program about sex that was FCC-free: In Bed With Susie Bright. Interviews with Betty Dodson, Erica Jong, and the last candid conversation with the late Jeane Palfrey, "The DC Madam."
2006 - Bong-Wrangler and Cameo on Six Feet Under
This appearance was the delayed result of a telling a talented writer to shut up. Jill Soloway wrote an early script where Susie's name was mentioned in an offhand remark by "Brenda."
A exec at HBO banned the line out from the script, vowing that Bright's name would never be allowed on the show. (Paging Andrea Dworkin!) Three years later, Soloway wrote her final season episode without censorship. Viewers may have wondered about the recurring joke, where every major character repeated the line: "Do you know Susie Bright? She's the feminist sex writer."
Now you know.
2007 - Chief Sewing Columnist at Craft magazine. Writes: The Case of the Missing Curve.
2008 - "Got my first mountain bike. Asked to guest-blog at Boing Boing; my Work is Done. Supposed to finishing memoir, but this timeline was easier.
Susie says: "I read Boing Boing every day, and would love to get tips from you on any of my favorite topics, which include: Sexual politics, writing and editing, cooking, sewing, labor, movies, drugs, pop culture queerities, photography, feminism, fooling around outside, raising teenagers, and words of all kinds. I'll try anything once. Email: susie@susiebright.com
Please give her a warm welcome!
Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.
Last post about politics and media, this one less about 2008 than 2012. My final assignment to my ITP class on amateur media and the election (i.e. created by political amateurs, not necessarily media amateurs) was to ask them write a memo with advice on the subject that would be relevant to the 2012 Presidential election The responses ranged in style from a memo to Schwarzenegger to a letter from a young Democrat to Republican friends.
One that became clear from reading those memos were the critical uncertainties -- issues that will matter enormously, but whose outcome we don't yet know, something I can describe best using an example the students brought up in class in the early weeks of the semester:
In August of 2008, a video called Sing for Change went up. Made by a Venice, CA music instructor, it featured a couple dozen kids, ages 5 to 12, singing a song their teacher had written about Obama. The video itself was fairly straightforward -- it was just the kids standing on stage, wearing "Hope" t-shirts made for the occasion, and singing a song about how wonderful Obama is.
As you might imagine from that brief description, the video is a horror. My class skews liberal, and we all watched it slack-jawed, animated by a single question: "What were they thinking?" When it launched, the Republican blogosphere went nuts, while the Democratic reaction was mostly a muted "Well, I guess she was trying to help..." The public feedback was so intensely negative that the makers quickly took it down, but the warranty ran out on that strategy long ago, and copies were instantly re-posted, many with explicit references to Hitler Youth or North Korea in the title.
The videomaker may have thought she was advancing the cause, but she was actually preaching to (and with) the choir; there was a "Look at me!" quality to the work that destroyed any intended political utility. It's clear that not one person involved said "Let's see...kids too young to vote, in identical costumes, singing words we've literally put in their mouths? Maybe we should re-think this..." before the video was uploaded. It takes a truly jaded mind to understand that people who disagree with you have to be engaged, not just emoted at.
So here are two key uncertainties for 2012 (Congressional as well as Presidential), extrapolating from Sing for Change and my students' work:
1) What happens to the motivational landscape? Amateurs differ from professionals in part because of motivation -- Barely Political's Obama Girl video was designed to get attention for...Barely Political; name recognition for Obama himself was a side-effect. In 2012, will the motivations driving amateur political media be more political and strategic, or will they stay largely personal and attention-getting?
2) Will the average quality of politically amateur media rise or fall? Average quality of amateur digital production rises over the long haul, but there are also periods where the in-rush of amateurs floods the zone with dreck (desktop publishing ca. 1990, web design ca 1995) before communities of practice can form.
Two uncertainties produce four possible futures. Consider the future where the motivation of amateurs turns political and average quality rises; we could label this "The New Agora", where online video becomes a key arena of political argument. The opposite of that world would be most amateurs making video for personal motivation, and falling average quality. In this world -- call it "Lost in the Noise" -- in-jokes and me-tooism would make amateur political video a sideshow, compared to 2008.
One can also imagine a world of mainly personal motivation by the creators, but rising average quality. You could call this "Obama Girl Nation" -- there's lots of great political material people tune into, but its effect on the campaign will be secondary to the pursuit of boffo laffs. The opposite would be more political engagement but falling quality. In this future, call it "A Few Gems", most of the work wouldn't be worth the time of day, but there could be a couple of game-changing works by amateurs. (You could also call this future "Status Quo Plus", since it's closest to the election we just had.)
That, of course, is just one set of uncertainties played off on each other (and of course different futures can come true for different groups of people.) There are several other open questions: How much more active will the campaigns be in trying to shape amateur production? (Too much and they risk buzz kill, the FEC, and being damned for work they didn't produce.) How much coordination will we see, away from media mostly produced by individuals and small groups, towards media produced and spread by large organized collectives? How much will mobile devices change the landscape? How much will new archives allow crowdsourced opposition research? And so on.
Some of my students have agreed to let me release their memos; they make good reading for politics junkies trying to think through what's next. As Don Derosby of GBN says "There's no data on the future. That's what makes it interesting."
Zipped file of 2012 Amateur Political memoranda. (The students whose memos are linked here are Alexander Reeder, Amanda Bernsohn, Amit Snyderman, Andrea Dulko, Cheryl Furjanic, Corey Menscher, Dave Spector, John Dimatos, John Randall, Kristen Smart, Matt Parker, Steven Lehrburger, Thomas Robertson.)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What will be big in 2009? Leather keyboards via Giz.
The Gakken Tea Serving Robot is designed to be a replication of the karakuri zui, an illustrated manual written in the Edo period (1603-1868). This mechanical doll has a tray that holds a cup of tea, and it is designed to approach the guest with the tea, bow his head, and then carry the empty teacup away. Using only springs as power, the term "robot" might at first seem a little strange, as there is no electricity used to make this doll do what it does, nevertheless, this doll has been called one of the original forms of the modern robot, in that it does follow (rudimentary) programmed instructions relating to variables such as if, then, and when. Check it out:
You don't have to be thirsty for a small cup of tea to see the appeal in this kit. Making the karakuri gives you a chance to experience what it was like for innovators and dreamers before the flood of modern technology, to see the trouble they went to as they carved their "code" into pieces wood, metal and other materials instead of uploading it onto microcontrollers like many makers do now. The karakuri is, by definition, a robot, but it is a robot that uses no electricity, and instead of using code as its instructions, it uses a series of mechanical processes to react to its physical environment.
View the Gakken Karakuri Tea Serving Robot in the Maker Shed.
From the MAKE: Flickr pool
How do you make the tour of holiday houses extra special for your Christmas-crazed son? Pull him in a little red wagon that's lit up with its own strand of 60 LED Christmas lights, like Rob Readings did. He powered it with an old motorcycle battery and a cheap power inverter. How about adding a sound system next year, Rob?
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!
imp558 at the Hacked Gadgets forums writes-
...I tend to do some wierd things being a long time technician and closet robotics enthusiast. Hopefully you guys will appreciate my portable desktop. After stuff I had laying around it cost me about $300. These pics don't show the chrome trim around the monitor (added later), and the switches and indicators are on a piece of aluminium under the monitor now. I still need a grill over the power supply vent, and some pretty little chains in place of the hunks of wire that help support the lid. The next step will be to install my device programmer so it just shows a socket and indicator, and some black paint on the monitor brackets. The monitor is safely behind a piece of Lexan but it's hard to see. The reason for this project is that I dual boot, which is easier from 2 seperate drives, and I need a third drive to use for storage of gigs and gigs of schematics. The drive in the middle was to be my windows drive but I found it had given up the ghost so a new WD3200 lives there now. The whole thing sends a little warm air out the back but nothing gets hot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
67 queries. 2.203 seconds
