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I had two major motivations for writing my new book, Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. First, I wanted to provide readers with the logical arguments behind living a slightly dangerous life; and second, I wanted to research and document some interesting ideas for getting started. One easy idea is sampling absinthe. Now, it's true there is no real danger involved in imbibing any of the fine, modern absinthes now on the market, if done in moderation. But when living dangerously, reputation and history very important.
At one time, drinking the stuff could be pretty dangerous. The icon of the bohemian life, l'heure verte, or green hour was a daily event among hip European imbibers. Indeed, the image that often comes foremost to mind when considering absinthe is a streetful of dissipated Parisian intellectuals, some of whom sunk into poverty and madness by dancing a bit too closely with the Green Fairy.
Maybe the most well known absintheur is Vincent Van Gogh. Long unknown and impoverished, he became famous and successful only posthumously. Van Gogh was a clinically depressed epileptic, and a social outcast who also happened to drink a whole lot of absinthe. Famously, he shared rooms with Paul Gauguin in Provence for several weeks until he sliced off his ear in a fit of rage. In 1889 the townspeople of Arles forcibly sent him to a mental hospital to rid themselves of their frightening, alcoholic neighbor.
Was Van Gogh truly plunged into madness by absinthe? Maybe, but probably not because of any psychotropic chemical contained in the wormwood from which absinthe is distilled. Some researchers say it was the drink's extremely high alcohol content required to keep the natural oils in suspension that made it dangerous. Others claim it was the way the drink was manufactured. According to Scientific American, low-cost, low-grade absinthe, accounted for the majority consumed at the turn of the 19th century. And this was true rot-gut, often adulterated by cheap, poisonous chemicals such as antimony salts and copper sulphate.
The ban on absinthe was lifted a few years ago and absinthe distillation has reemerged as a boutique industry with several small distillers turning out handmade, small batches of the stuff. My personal favorite is called Taboo and it comes from, of all places, Canada! It's intensely anise flavored and the wormwood bitterness is pleasingly apparent at the start. Lucid is a well known brand and is similarly intense. Interestingly, both of these are considerably paler in color than typical French and Swiss absinthes but they do produce the well known "louche" or milky colored opalescence when water is added.
I'm glad it's Friday. I can hardly wait until 5 O'clock for my cocktail. A votre santé!
Wow, it's Mike Hargrove week here at BoingBoing. Yesterday, I wrote about the 35th Anniversary of the 10-Cent Beer Riots at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium. As baseball buffs may remember, rookie first baseman Mike Hargrove was a prime target of drunken fans, getting pelted with missiles of all sorts including an empty jug of Thunderbird. (As one commenter pointed out, who would in the world would smuggle in a bottle of T-Bird when beer is only a dime?) But Hargrove survived, and played well in the pros for the next 10 years.
I thought of Hargrove last night while watching the not-worth-watching fourth quarter of the Laker-Magic game. Now, you may be asking yourself, what does Mike Hargrove have to do with the NBA playoffs? Well , Hargrove had a nickname as a player. He was called "The Human Rain Delay" because he took soooo long to stand in the batter's box. He drove pitchers (and fans) crazy. Hargrove may be extreme but there seems to be a lot of waiting around in pro sports.
I'm making up a highlight reel of the least exciting moments in professional sports. It's for those nights when I need help falling asleep.
1. The point after touchdown. Why does this still exist? This is nothing more than an excuse to go get another beer.
2. The intentional walk. Wow, the excitement of watching a pitcher and catcher to stand up and lob baseballs to one another. Definitely something I can't get enough of.
3. Watching a relief pitcher throw yet more warm up pitches on the mound. Hasn't this guy been throwing in the bullpen for last 10 minutes?
4. Any NBA game where there's a 10 point difference with less than 3 minutes to play. Garbage time. (Okay, this isn't hard and fast rule. In 1977, the Milwaukee Bucks overcame a 29 point deficit with 8:43 seconds remaining. But that's pretty darn rare.)
5. The NFL instant replay challenge. When Ed Hochuli walks to the sideline and puts on the cans, you know you're in for excitement.
![[08-026] bartitsu.jpg](http://www.boingboing.net/%5B08-026%5D%20bartitsu.jpg)
[Moriarity and I] tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of Bartitsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds and clawed the air with both his hands. But for all his efforts he could not get his balance, and over he went.Britain's most popular literary character of the late 19th century, Sherlock Holmes was well known for his towering intellect and need for constant mental stimulation. To satisfy his intellectual needs, he engaged in a number of trans-Golden Third activities including sword fighting, boxing, and stick fighting, as well as frequent recreational narcotic use.
-- Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Empty House
From Drinking Learner Permits for Under Age Persons:
In more than 30 states, drivers aged 16 and 17 gain driving experience while holding special licenses that restrict when and how they may drive (for example, no late-night cruising). This permits a slow introduction to an adult privilege. The same concept should apply to drinking.I'm fully aware that this may seem ironic given that I've already posted stories on absinthe and the 1974 Cleveland Indians 10-cent beer night debacle. But I see too many people drinking too much booze way too often. Recently, I came up (over beer with friends, another irony) with an idea for a drinking license. Turns out, several others have had the same idea.
What could be the elements of a provisional drinking license? There could be time and place restrictions. The license holder could drink, for example, only in an establishment where at least 75% of sales receipts were for food (no bars, no liquor-store purchases). No service after 11:00 pm. Moreover, a 19- or 20-year-old could have to undergo formal instruction about alcohol and pass a licensing exam.
In the mail today arrived the 36 page schedule/flyer for this year's SolarFest. Based on the three I've been to in the past, this should be an excellent time as well. There are plenty of workshops, live music, and great vendors who have either made their own wares or are willing to share lots of information.
[Photo from Connors934 on Flickr]
Set in the hills of Vermont, many people bring camping gear and sleep out, but there are other options. The on-site campgrounds are mostly in the woods at the site. Food in the past has been excellent and prepared by vendors from the local area. If you would like to help with setup or breakdown, check out their volunteers page.
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I made this minimalist table lamp from three ready-made components: 1) a burner tripod lab stand from The Science Company, 2) a 5" globe incandescent light bulb, and 3) a socket extension cord from the hardware store. It works and looks great, and the total cost is about $20 US. The 5" globe light bulbs are also available as compact fluorescents (CFLs), rather than incandescents, which doubles the unit price but probably saves money in the long term due to the radically increased lifetime and efficiency of CFL bulbs.
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Playcrafter is a site where you can create your own game. Accounts on the system are free, and allow you to make and save your own games. There is also a paid level of account that will let you make games with more than 10 levels and some other features.
Games made with Playcrafter can be embedded into web pages, and can also be run on devices that are Flash 9+ friendly.
If you try this out with your students or kids, let us know about it in the comments.
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I don't purport to be an expert in things computer and Internet related. Usually I just read what people I respect say and go with that. Often, they point me me to Google's stuff (search, gmail, Picasa, youtube, etc) and I've always been pretty impressed with their services.
Microsoft just introduced Bing to compete with Google search. My friend Mark Hurst sent me a very interesting article he wrote about it.
Everything Microsoft has tried recently hasn't worked. They tried the "I'm a PC" ads, a knockoff of the Mac ads - didn't work. Tried the Zune, a knockoff of the iPod - didn't work. Tried redoing MSN Search again and again, as a knockoff of Google - didn't work. What's the world coming to, when Microsoft can't build a monopoly around a knockoff?Hurst's full post is at http://goodexperience.com/2009/06/microsoft-has-a-probl.php
It's those effing customers. They keep choosing the best experience.
I have to imagine this is tough on Ballmer and whoever else over there. No matter what they try, the customers refuse to take orders from Redmond. Sure, lots of people still pay the upgrade tax on Windows and Office every two years, but only because they have to. There's no love.
So what does Microsoft do? They launch - I'm still reeling from this - they launch a search engine. To compete head-on with Google. In search. I just need to type that again: Microsoft wants to unseat Google with a search engine.
Now here's where it gets really nuts.
Microsoft's strategy, to win market share from Google, is not to compete on user experience. No. Microsoft's strategy is to advertise the heck out of the thing and hope people flock to the site.
They are spending - wait, let me try my best "Dr. Evil" voice - one hundred million dollars to order the world to use their search engine. According to a Microsoft exec in charge of the launch, "The key will be whether we deliver a product and connect with people emotionally in the advertising."
A hundred million dollars to "connect with people emotionally in the advertising." If I've learned one thing in my customer experience work over 12 years, it's this: any online strategy built on emotional connection, based on flashy ads or a new font or color scheme on the website, is guaranteed to fail.
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Above, the first video I saw on this YouTube account about an hour ago. Here was the second, here was the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Wait, don't miss this one either. You kind of need to just take some time and watch all of them. Also this.
Nadja over at Street Carnage says,
[He] looks like he might have Progeria, a terrible disease where your body is elderly even though you're only 8. Regardless of this disfiguring disease, he's a true gangster. He has the balls to go online and be like every other pre-teen boy on youtube, singing along to Papa Roach and generally being awesome. The fact that he does this, that it brings him some kind of happiness, and that he calls himself "chick3n little", is why the internet is amazing and why the world doesn't seem so shitty sometimes.I am not a doctor, and I do not know what condition the person in the video has that makes them look and behave differently. But here is the Wikipedia entry on Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome ("Progeria", or "HGPS"). Here is another entry for a different condition called Virchow-Seckel Syndrome.
Looks like the content was previously uploaded to YouTube under another name, deleted, then re-uploaded them under this new account name. His real name is apparently Justin?
He is already huge in France. Here's an english translation of that article.
Update: Some background on the meme provenance in this BB comment. Some have stated that the current YouTube channel is not controlled by the person in the videos, but was reconstructed by someone else. In other words, the videos appear to have been created and originally published online by this young person, but the "Tsimfuckus" YT channel, and the descriptions/titles therein, not actually his. Various accounts name the person in the video as Justin Tsimbidis; he called himself "tsimfuckis"/"tsimfuckus" in one of his videos. The uploads are fascinating, but it sucks that anonymous jerks on the internet are being cruel to this person.
(Thanks, Sean Bonner and Richard Metzger!)
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Health insurers want you to keep smoking, Harvard doctors say (via Consumerist)
Why is it a big deal? "If you own a billion dollars [of tobacco stock], then you don't want to see it go down," says Himmelstein, "You are less likely to join anti-tobacco coalitions, endorse anti-tobacco legislation, basically, anything most health companies would want to participate in."...But with $4.5 billion still invested in Big Tobacco, many insurers are reaping profits from a cancer-causing industry. As Himmelstein puts it, "Is this who we want running our healthcare system?"
(Image: cigarette, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from SuperFantastic's Flickr stream)
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Tavie sez, "My friend Sarah WINS at the internet. I've known her online (and eventually offline) for 15 years and her creativity never ceases to astound me. Now it's astounding Rolling Stone, who've picked up on the fact that her recent YouTube mashup of the band Phoenix's song "Lisztomania" meshes perfectly with clips from 80's brat pack movies. I'd never heard of this band before (I live under a rock), but this song makes me want to dance. Phoenix even added it to their official myspace page and have said it's their "best video yet". Her tribute is so good that it spawned a tribute-to-the-tribute. Dude. I'm so glad fans are still creating brilliant, beautiful things on the internet. Fandom rules."
Scenes from The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Footloose match up so perfectly with the Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix track, it's hard to believe the band didn't attempt to soundtrack John Hughes flicks in the studio a la Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. AvoidantConsumer did such a good job, the band even posted on their official MySpace page and, according to Swide, Phoenix have gone on record saying the unofficial Brat Pack version is "our best video."Flashback: Phoenix's "Lisztomania" Makes Ringwald And Cryer Feel Like Dancing (Thanks, Tavie!)
Newspapers that are turning to paywall plans today are gambling on a risky revenue stream that even the experts aren't predicting will provide a replacement to their lost advertising revenues (their biggest financial problem is the rapid decline in advertising rates, not the slow decline in print circulation). It's a "well, we've got to do SOMETHING" solution, not a logical, do-the-math solution. And since since most media companies are owned by shareholders, the resulting loss of confidence could be catastrophic.The newspaper suicide pact (via John McDaid -- an award-winning science fiction writer who also manages to put out an all-volunteer, top-notch political zine covering town-hall politics in his small town, about a thousand times better than anything you'd get from the ink-stained set)What will these media executives do when that reality hits them? When these debt-burdened chains, stripped of journalistic talent by a decade of profiteering, their web traffic reduced by 60 percent by their paid-content follies, their pockets emptied by the cost of the proprietary paywall systems offered by Journalism Online LLC and other opportunistic vendors, what will they do?...
They don't get it. They don't want to get it. And in many cases, they're literally paid not to get it.
America's journalism infrastructure - from corporate giants to non-profit foundations like the American Press Institute and the Newspaper Association of America - is funded by dying companies. So when you hear about efforts to save newspapers (and, by extension, journalism), understand that answers that don't return the possibility of double-digit profits and perpetual top-down control aren't even considered answers. They're not even considered.
They'll do anything to survive... so long as it doesn't involve change.
But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73 billion items downloaded each year, worth £120 billion. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. Now before we go anywhere, this already seems rather high. I am not an economist, and I don't know about their methods, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value. And someone downloading a £1,000 professional 3D animation software package to fiddle about with at home may not use it more than three times. I'm just saying.Home taping didn't kill music (Thanks, Richard K!)In any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that's still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax. Oh but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473 million items and £12 billion (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist. I can find no public correction.
I asked what steps they took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of ten and were widely reported in news outlets around the world. SABIP refused to answer my questions in emails, insisted on a phone call (always a warning sign), told me that they had taken steps but wouldn't say what, explained something about how they couldn't be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after ten minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the whole call was actually off the record, that I wasn't allowed to use the information in my piece, but that they had answered my questions, and so they didn't need to answer on the record, but I wasn't allowed to use the answers, and I couldn't say they hadn't answered, I just couldn't say what the answers were. Then the PR man from SABIP demanded that I acknowledge, in our phone call, formally, for reasons I still don't fully understand, that he had been helpful.
Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities.
Sapolsky on Religion (Thanks, Avi!)
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At Maker Faire, we saw loads of really cool projects. The BeanCat was a clever one, a skid steer chair controlled by a Wii Nunchuck held by the user in a bean bag chair.
The Beancat is an all-wheel drive, battery powered bean bag chair, controlled by a Wii nunchuk. Getting a drink from the fridge has never been so much fun. The low profile drive, frame and controlling hardware are completely concealed so at first glance it's just a simple bean bag.
Imagine a bean bag chair that you could drive around, in or outdoors. A commuting vehicle, entertainment device and relaxation enabler all in one.
Why, you ask? Because we wanted to.
The real challenge here was fitting everything into such an envelope that would not be obvious when looking at the bean bag. We didn't want a bean bag that was simply sitting on top of a big, ugly frame. There should be some degree of mystery as to what exactly is going on here- as a matter of fact, how is that person driving around on a bean bag chair?
Their documentation includes some nice screenshots of the design files for the build. This chair was going nonstop for a good while with a long line of patient aspiring beanbag riders. I was surprised in seeing such a small battery performing so effectively.
The bean bag support frame was built entirely out of scrap wood, hardware and $2 worth of foam from the "House of Foam" in Palo Alto, CA. As you can see, it changed a bit from the rough sketch above. This was the least planned part of the project, as it was simple enough to just do as a last step. The back of the frame is tensioned with a steel cable that runs from one corner up to the top center of the backrest and down the opposite corner. In this way, we were able to keep the backrest super strong, flexible and lightweight.The bean bag was then stretched over this, refilled with beans, and we were driving!
English order-page
(Thanks Shibuya246
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Grammys drop polka album award
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
The Complete Ukulele Guide to the Moustaches of the World (Thanks, Dan!)The Ukulele Guide includes not only the standard moustache groups, but also exotic and endangered moustaches like the Shirley Temple and the LARP-stache. Recently cultivated strains of moustache such as the Octopus also feature prominently, and the headstock is graced with an inspiring moustache quote, sure to please any moustache fancier.
You may be asking yourself at this point you have survived without such a practical object, and what you can do to obtain one. If this is the case, please contact us.
Under this legislation, however, designers will need to consult with a lawyer throughout the design process to ensure that every new design created could not subjectively be found at a later date to be "closely and substantially similar" to one protected in the Copyright registry...Fashion-Incubator: a good idea while it lasted (Thanks, Miss Jess!)Further, young, up-and-coming designers would be susceptible to legal intimidation from designing anything new at all, as they would likely not have the resources to fight a legal challenge in court...
While the bill purports to keep all fashion designs that have existed in the past free and open for all to use, the legislation would allow the ability to copyright non-original design elements in the public domain if arranged in an original way.
Moreover, since there is no test for originality, the registry will begin to be populated with designs that from the public domain. Thus, a designer who draws upon inspiration from the public domain, can easily find himself/herself stuck in costly litigation.
Other rides include: chocolate ride, noobs on unicycles, yoga for cyclists, naked bike ride, surprise bike wedding, homeless hotspots bike tour, tour de goats, old French bikes, pun-ishment ride, trek-tosterone ride, pretty panty ride, dead freeways ride, unimproved road ride, Sisyphean cruller crawl, pedal powered pajama party, etc etc etc.
Pedalpalooza
(Thanks, Theo!)
Un día antes de la Maker Faire
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Here's a video excerpt of Adam Savage's wonderful talk at Maker Faire. He's telling the story of a life-changing experience that's helped form his character and how massively screwing up can sometimes end up as a positive.
MythBuster Adam Savage's Colossal Failures
[You can see additional clips from Adam's talk and watch the entire hour-long presentation on the link above.]
More:
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This guy's ladyfriend sure is lucky to have this bike frame customized with appliqued logos and powder coating. In this Instructable, user corwin shows you how to form and affix the logos after prepping the frame for the powder coater's.
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At Maker Faire, the crew used these Xtracycle Radishes to get around. They carry extra cargo than a normal bike and can even be fitted to carry an extra passenger. Xtracycle is offering a deal to makers in celebration of the Faire, so check out their site for reduced Maker pricing until June 14th. Their site also shows you how to make some cool mods to the Xtracycle to carry a surfboard and more. Maker Faire even had a tallbike Xtracycle floating around the grounds! The above pictures are by Kim Dow.
Eric started experimenting with processing and came up with GlowDoodle. A few weeks ago, he showed me the program and we messed around with some light. When we talked, he had the mac version running, and was still in development of the Windows version, which is also now ready for a free download. There are a bunch of neat samples on Flickr as well.
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This silly fella (in a good way) turned his mortarboard into a diorama of renewable energy, with a solar panel, a windmill, and a sun that rises and sets (waves) via his cellphone.
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While those bullet points may sound a little vague, they certainly are the key things he should be focused on, and the rest of the article details some of the details of where he may be heading on all of those points, and it suggests that he's certainly going beyond the soundbite style thoughts found all too commonly in political circles these days. For example, when most politicians talk about economic growth through innovation, they usually mean just dumping more money into research programs or increasing the number of patents. But, as we've all seen, those don't necessarily serve as an accurate proxy for real innovation. Instead, Chopra wants to focus on looking at actual data about how products are getting to market:
- Economic growth through innovation
- Addressing presidential priorities through innovation platforms
- Building the next-generation digital infrastructure
- Fostering a culture of open and innovative government
Rather than purely thinking about basic research, he said, the government should focus on investing in technologies that can be developed. A first step is to find ways to actually measure how much research is being commercialized.It's great to see that he's skeptical of the common wisdom that R&D automatically leads to economic growth, but wants to dig deeper into the data to see what the numbers really mean. He's also hoping to learn from how different universities lead to commercialization:
"There is an implicit assumption that R.&D. investment will lead to job growth and economic success," he said. "The measurement question will lead us to think about, how do we begin to assess the outcomes."
Mr. Chopra noted that among universities, there is a wide range in how effective they are in commercializing the work of their laboratories. He wants to take the practices used by the most commercial of universities and spread them to other research facilities.Again, this is good news. Many people falsely assume that things like the Bayh-Dole Act, which pushed universities to patent their research to drive commercialization was a good thing. But there's a growing amount of research suggesting that Bayh-Dole has actually harmed research and the ability to commercialize products. Hopefully, the data that Chopra is looking at takes that into account. Bayh-Dole caused many universities to set up "tech transfer" offices, but the vast majority of them are losing money -- in part because they've focused on the patents rather than the actual steps to innovation. The universities that have focused on enabling innovation rather than just collecting and licensing the most patents, have had the most success.
You're a super-villain and you want to prepare a transparency (the kind that goes on an overhead projector) with the key points of your plan for world domination so you can present them to the hero/superagent before you attempt to kill him in some ridiculously novel way. You don't want this information to fall into the wrong hands before you're ready. Smart villain that you are, you know you can share the information across several slides so that if the enemy agents capture any 2 of your slides, they won't learn even the tiniest bit of information about your plan. How?Super-villain transparencies
According to PayScale, a call center employee in India with 10-20 years experience makes about $6,400 a year. These folks might be able to afford one of the 1,000 tiny apartments being made by Tata, the company that makes the $2,200 car.
From Business Week:
Luxury flats in Mumbai can cost more than ones in Manhattan. But these apartments won’t be luxurious. The Tata apartments will be built on 67 acres in Boisar, an industrial area where many lower-wage commuters already rent. These apartments will be absolutely tiny. The carpeted area of the smallest units will be 218 square feet, too small even for most Manhattanites. The largest units would be about 373 square feet (Click here to see the floor plans). Can you imagine squeezing a family into one of these units? The community would have its own garden, post office, meeting hall, schools, and hospital.Tata's Nano Home: Company behind world's cheapest car to sell $7,800 apartments
I love these tiny toolboxes (as Father's Day gifts), made from Altoids tins, that Natalie posted next door on CRAFT. If the mint tin seems a little... er... impractical for holding tools, there's also a project on the same page for having kids color artwork for lids on mint tins to hold nuts, bolts, screws, etc.
There is one application for a toolset that would fit in such a tin, the emergency field soldering kit project we featured in The Best of Instructables (which can also be found here). I made one of these. Haven't had a call to use it yet, but it'd sure look cuter to show up on the scene with the kit housed in one of these red boxes.
Surprise Dad with the Smallest Toolbox Ever!
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