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"Artists receive fixed residuals for music sales based on individual contracts via their respective record companies," says Max Clingerman, a music executive for MixJam Records who explains "the staggering price increases are not for the artist interest, rather intended for executive pockets."While I'm sure the intention was very much for exec pockets, I was under the impression that most major label contracts included royalty rates based on retail price. And while most signed musicians never recoup their advance, and thus never see any royalties whatsoever (no matter what the price), I do wonder if it's really true that musicians don't get a larger cut of higher priced digital sales (at least in the fictional accounting systems the labels use).
Mr. Bali Hai of Goofbutton says this photo of a cute female nerd on a telephone pole is the "best picture ever." He might have something there.
UPDATE: Here's a picture of the ad with all the copy. It reads, in part:
Alana MacFarlane is a 20 year old from San Rafael, California. She's one of our first women telephone installers. She won't be the last.Additional research says that this was a full page color ad in Life Magazine May 12, 1972.
(Do you think this is the same Alana MacFarlane? I do.)
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Flickr user Andrew Colunga describes this awesome Lego ray gun as "X-maspunk." [via Boing Boing]
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Darling said in his speech that the UK "has a remarkable record of ideas and innovation. We’ve won more Nobel prizes than any country of our size. We need to do more to support this ingenuity and ensure this creativity is harnessed in this country. I want to encourage research and development in the pharmaceuticals and biotech industries. So, following consultation with business, I will introduce a 10% corporation tax rate on income which stems from patents in the UK."But all such things really do is encourage more patenting, but less actual innovation. That's because the tax rate on actual innovation -- actually bringing these products to market successfully -- remains significantly higher. So, if you do any research at all, you have every incentive in the world to try to just gain income from the patents directly (such as by threatening any company that actually does any innovation and demanding licensing fees) rather than doing the work of actually implementing the product yourself. After all, that's exactly what the government is telling you to do. It's saying that if you actually produce an innovative product, we'll tax you at a very high rate. If all you do is patent it and then squeeze money out of others, we'll tax you at a much lower rate. I don't see how that encourages innovation at all. It seems like it would do the opposite.
The 16-ft.-long "Work Sets You Free" sign was found cut into three pieces and buried under debris and snow in a wooded area. The theft probably wasn't the work of the far Right, police say. Rather, they've detained five people described as "common criminals", and believe the group was hoping to sell the sign to a private collector.
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Prepare you house for a visit from Jolly old St. Nikola with this Tesla Christmas Tree, by artist Peter Terren. I wonder what kind of presents he will leave? [via neatorama]
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This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I knew more about beer. My usual unit of measurement is the purely subjective, but relatively simple, MPS, or Maggie Preference Scale. (IPAs near the bottom, porters near the top, your mileage may vary.)
Full Chart via Flickr user John602, don't know if that's the original source though.
The 5-foot-7, 185-pound Harris said he tried later that day to lift other cars and couldn't."Kansas dad somehow lifts car off 6-year-old girl" (via Fortean Times)"But somehow, adrenaline, hand of God, whatever you want to call it, I don't know how I did it," he said.
"I didn't even think. I ran over there as fast as I could, grabbed the rear end of the car and lifted and pushed as hard as I could to get the tire off the child," he said...
There were no witnesses to confirm what happened. But Ottawa police Lt. Adam Weingartner said, "I don't have anything to dispute it."
Hough said Ashlyn told her Harris lifted the car off her, Weingartner said.
Weingartner, the first officer at the scene, said Harris "was amped up pretty good. The first words out of his mouth were, 'I lifted the car off the girl.'"
MJ: You also have a rep as a guy who fights with studios. I read an anecdote about how J.K. Rowling wanted you to direct the first Harry Potter film and Warner Bros. said no. I gather you were pissed?"Terry Gilliam's Three-Reel Circus"TG: No, I was relieved. I went out there because I got a free first-class British Airways flight out to L.A., which allowed me to spend some time with my lawyer dealing with problems about Don Quixote. There was no way I was ever going to get that job, despite the fact that Rowling wanted me, and also the producer, but I just knew the system was not going to be happy with someone like me.
MJ: They think you're unmanageable? TG: I think that was basically it. The irony is that the three films I actually did in Hollywood--The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing--were the easiest films I've ever made. There were no major fights, just the normal tensions. And yet I rail against Hollywood, and they're terrified of me...
MJ: In 2006, you renounced your American citizenship to be a full-time Brit. Seems pretty extreme.
TG: Well, I don't live there. I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world. Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America. The fact that Bush was there made it easier.
MJ: Did you get any shit for your decision?
TG: Not really. It was very funny, 'cause you have to go down to the US Embassy and say, I want out, and then they counsel you and you go away for a month and think on it. And then you come back and they beg you to stay. Sorry!
Powered by Nerd points out this project from Kevin Weekly, the Random Music Box uses a relatively low part count to generate a pleasant pseudo-random song. The cardboard 'kick drum' is a nice touch! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!
NPR has a story about why urinal manufacturers chose the fly as a target to reduce splashing.
Keiboom in Amsterdam says the original fly idea was proposed almost 20 years ago by Dutch maintenance man Jos Van Bedoff, who had served in the Dutch army in the 1960s. As a soldier he noticed that someone had put small, discrete red dots in the barracks urinals, which dramatically cut back on “misdirected flow.”There's A Fly In My Urinal (Via Nudge Blog)Two decades later, he proposed to the airport board of directors that the dots be turned into etched flies. According to Keiboom, Van Bedoff decided that guys want to directly aim at an animal they can immobilize. The ability to use one’s natural gifts and achieve victory over the foe while standing is the key, he explained. Guys, he felt, can always beat flies. That’s why flies are so satisfying.
Is that the answer?
Berenbaum, the entomologist, says she’s not convinced. More than a hundred years ago in Britain, bathroom bowls also sported insect images, she says. Back then, however, the favored target was not a fly, but a bee. And bees have stingers. It seems that men in the 1890s were willing to take more imaginative risks when peeing.
The International Space Station crew that blasted off from Kazakhstan early this morning will be the first people to eat sushi in space. I join Popular Science blogger Paul Adams in lamenting the fact that this Reuters story neglected important details such as the menu, and how one goes about preparing sushi in zero-g. My money is on the final product being some sort of fake crab hand roll.
As someone who plans on attempting to fly out of Minneapolis this Friday—in open defiance of the snow-filled forecast—these seem like a great way to pass the time while stranded at an airport.
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Our post on how to cut a bagel into two linked halves was so popular that we thought we'd show you some more mathematical food play: how to knot a bagel. (This also works with inner tubes, but they're very chewy.)
The bread of a bagel forms a simple loop, which mathematicians call "the unknot." But there are two easy ways to cut a bagel into a simple overhand knot, or "trefoil" knot. Above is a what mathematicians call "the (2,3)-torus knot toasted with cream cheese."
Another is the (3,2)-torus knot, shown here with a string following the path of the bagel, to make it clear how it's a trefoil knot.
Detailed recipes for both of these breakfasts are shown here.
More:
Math Monday: Playing card constructions
Introducing "Math Monday"
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Another great example of R. Sikoryak's admiration for the source material on which his Masterpiece Comics parodies are based. The lettering here really looks like Schulz'.
Laughing Squid has a fun, voyeuristic video of someone stealing a Christmas wreath from a home in San Francisco's fancy Pacific Heights neighborhood. It's about 2AM, and the woman walks up onto the front porch and examines the wreath for a minute. She then steps away, puts on a head wrap, and comes back to snatch it.
ED: Part of the experience I have of novels these days is that it seems like the more awake and aware and acute they are, the more they are aware of their own fragility in the face of other kinds of narrative technologies. The most obvious example is simulation -- immersive worlds that we can go into and reproduce behaviors that are more or less storylike. The fundamental character of a massive, open-ended, multi-player role-playing game is utterly different at this point than the character in a novel. How will novels stand up? We're all walking down the street conducting our self-Turning exams everytime we pass a homeless person, or greet our spouse at the breakfast table."Chronic Citizen: Jonathan Lethem on P.K. Dick, Why Novels are a Weird Technology, and Constructed Realities" (h+)JL: I'm far too close to one pole to illuminate. But I'll say that -- in the face of certain kinds of rival technologies and rival frameworks for experiencing what we might call self-admitting false realities -- novels are a class of virtual reality experience that has some very particular and innate bottom lines. And I happen to like those. As I see the rivals emerge, I feel that novel-making and reading becomes one option on a very large menu, and in some ways a rather antique or humble or lumpen example. But I also think some of the things that make it that are also deep strengths that are becoming more and more highlighted.
We talked about what makes Dick so compelling and personal -- what made us each take him so personally when we discovered his work. And in some ways, those are elements that are innate to this very strange technology -- this gigantic pile of sentences stuck between two hard covers, that someone makes this incredible commitment to read. It's a bizarre commitment, very unusual the first few times you make it -- to just sit and follow, in order, each of these sentences and make the artificial reality come to life yourself by reading. It's a crazy technology, very specific and weird. Now may not be the time to take it for granted. Instead, maybe we should point out that by doing this, you do achieve a kind of weird mind meld.
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This giant artificial Christmas tree can be found on Nanjing Road in Shanghai. It's made out of 1,000 empty full(?) Heineken bottles.
[via Inhabitat]
Want to make a special edible Care Bears lunch for your kid (or yourself)? This is just one of many fun cartoon-themed bento box recipes in a new book by Face Food author Christopher Salyers called Face Food Recipes. Making neat, creative bentos is a Japanese tradition that has recently taken off as a web phenomenon; there are lots of blogs that showcase lunch boxes themed after everything from video games to traditional woodblock print art.
Visit the author's blog
Make: Online commenter Julian Cook wrote in about his spring shoes, boing!
In the Maker Shed:
CRAFT, Vol. 07: Shoe Time!
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Even if not reflected in accident statistics, Belwood Police Chief Robert Collins Jr. said he sees drivers being more cautious as they approach stoplights. "Driver behavior has definitely changed," Collins said...Changed for the worse, apparently. Are we to believe the police chief's anecdotal insistence or what the stats actually say?
Roger Pawlowski, a division chief at the Oak Lawn Police Department, said the benefits of red-light cameras can't always be extrapolated from crash statistics.Ah, then what are we to extrapolate the benefits of redlight cameras from? Checks cashed by the city?
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This question—which comes to us from an Anonymous reader, asking for his or her formerly toddler own self—may sound like a zen koan, but I assure you, it has an answer. And probably not the one you're expecting. It's really a prime example of why I love doing the Science Question from a Toddler series—I get these questions that, on the surface, sound very "Duh", but end up leading to complex places.
So, what do the blind see?
It depends on the blind person. But the stereotypical assumption—that blind people live in the sort of black nothingness the sighted see when we close our eyes—is actually the most rare of all the possibilities.
What the blind really see varies quite a bit, depending on the cause of blindness and its severity, said Dean Bok, Ph.D., Professor of Ophthalmology and Neurobiology at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute, and a researcher who's worked with the organizations Research to Prevent Blindness and the Foundation Fighting Blindness. Many people who are described as blind can perceive light. Even those who must use a cane or guide dog to get around are more likely to see the world around them as an indistinct fuzzy blur, rather than a formless void.
And that blur is likely to be in black and white.
You probably remember from grade school that there are two structures in our eyes—cones and rods—that enable us to see and perceive light. Rods are related to night vision. Cones to color vision and what we see during the day. But there's a bit more to it than that.
"Cones are extremely important, not only for color, but also for acuity," Bok said. "The ability to read fine print is from cones, not rods."
Basically, the worse your vision is, the less color you can usually perceive.
But what's really astounding is how new, high-tech treatments are changing what some blind people see. Cory Haas is a 9-year-old boy who lives in New York state. A couple of years ago, Bok told me, this boy was one of the people whose sight was limited to fuzzy, mostly colorless blobs. He couldn't read. He needed help walking. Today, Cory Haas can ride a bike and read books with large print. His sight is nowhere near perfect, but he's gone from being legally blind, to being just another kid who has to wear glasses.
The secret is gene therapy. Haas was born with a kind of degenerative blindness called Leber's congenital amaurosis. There are at least12 different kinds of LCA, but Haas' is caused by a defect in a single gene—rpe65.
"That gene produces an enzyme that bends Vitamin A into the form that we need for vision. Then it's ready to be attached to a group of proteins called opsins, and used by color and black and white photo receptors. That's what triggers the visual response," Bok said. "If you don't have the enzyme, you'll never see. Kids who have a totally non-functional rpe65 gene can't see at all. Some with a crippled gene have a semblance of vision but are really legally blind."
Because this type of blindness is based on a single, small gene in the retina, it's relatively easy for scientists to fix. They take an adeno-associated virus—a virus which is usually present in humans but not known to cause disease—remove most of its genes and patch a shiny, new, properly functioning version of the rpe65 gene into it.
Once injected into the eye, the virus goes to work doing what viruses do, i.e. invading cells and using their machinery to replicate its genetic information. But, in this case, that information is the rpe65 gene. Within a few weeks or months, the person has a supply of working rpe65 genes, churning out the enzyme they need to see.
Image courtesy Flickr user moriza, via CC
The groups had fanned out in pairs of two to track down an animal for the traditional festive dinner when the accident happened..."Man dressed in animal skin shot dead during hunt"Two unidentified men, aged 25 and 28, were detained and were being questioned.
Here's a neat kitchen gadget — a toaster that "prints out" toast. It allows you to feed multiple slices at once from the feeder at top, and spits out finished products from the bottom. It's a concept by Othmar Muehlebach, and it won second place at a design contest in Switzerland last month.
The ITP Winter Show, showcasing projects designed by students in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, opened last night in Manhattan. I had the pleasure of attending, and grabbed some photos of my favorite projects. The show is open tonight as well, so if you happen to be in town then you should check it out!
Projects featured above (clockwise from top left): Swig & Jig, The interactive triangle matrix, Organic Veals, Human Wind Chime
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A couple of days ago, Slate published a list of questions it received but didn't answer (because its researchers "felt either ill-equipped or unwilling to answer" them). Readers have been invited to vote for the question they feel is most deserving of an answer.
Here are a few of my favorite unanswered questions:
I have always wondered who played the characters of the Wicked Witch of the West's monkey army in Wizard of Oz. Were they the same little people who played the munchkins or am I missing something here?The Questions We Never Answered in 2009 -- Digging through the bottom of the Explainer mailbag.I don't care about NASA and the space station stuff any more. Am I the only one? Should I care?
is it leagle to own a phone sex company in new york state how do i protect my self what other things do i need to do i have girls lined up and ready to go ,,,,,,, just want to be leagle dan
How many human female eggs would it take to make an omelette?
My son plays drums in a band, they play 6 hours, he wears a black derby, his face is blood-red, heat escapes from the scalp, is he loosing his hair because of this? He is 33.
How about if I put some ice cream in my mouth, swirled it around to taste it, then spit it out? ... Do you have to swallow food to enjoy it?
The invention of cassettes, and 8-track cartridges was an incremental change - suddenly there were more ways of selling hard copies of recorded music. More places to play them, new machines needed, new possibilities for the length of music that could be issued in a single entity (90 minute cassettes were pretty standard, and some enterprising labels took to reissuing 2 albums as one on cassette, thus breathing new life into back catalogue.)But, of course, what we're seeing now is totally different. The internet presents a disruptive or transformative change.
The same happened again with CDs - more incremental change - the chance to pretend it was higher resolution than vinyl (a lie) that it was indestructable (a lie) and that you could take it anywhere with you (true). CDs were a breath of life to a fairly static industry - suddenly, all the people who were teenagers in the 70s at the dawn of stadium rock were now successful 30-somethings with disposable cash and a deeply fragile sense of self.
When you take an industry that has 4 big costs - recording, manufacture, distribution, promotion - and remove 3 of them, that changes everything. All of the assumptions about how much it costs to make a record, what infrastructure is needed to make a sales team effective, who needs to own the trucks and delivery guys who take your product to shops - they all disappear. They are all now choices that you make, not assumptions.The problem for the industry is that it structured its entire business around the idea that those four big costs are a big problem that any musician needs help with -- and they're willing to sign their lives away to get that help. But the transformative change that occurs with the internet is that much of that becomes significantly less expensive, and the need to sign your life away becomes not a need, but a choice -- and the businesses that were built to only work if musicians signed their lives away suddenly find themselves in trouble.
Here's product designer Nadine Jarvis' concept for a set of pencils made from the carbon of a cremated human body.
240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash - a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.Design for pencil set made from cremated human reamainsEach pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings - a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.
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Galleria Mar Doré (disclosure: a project on which I'm an advisor) has just launched an online exhibition of rare vintage photos from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, taken in 1956 by an engineer who loved technology, photography, and the rich culture of midcentury Louisiana. His name was John Mizenko, and he was also an avid ham radio operator. That's him at left, with his radio gear. His call sign was W5KAC. His daughter Mar Doré found a box of these, like a time capsule, after he passed away.
"I discovered my father's slide collection tucked away in a cabinet inside metal slide trays loaded with carefully written notations," says Mar. "It was as though after all these years he'd left me a gift."
She had them digitally scanned at very high resolution, and is presenting them online and in limited-edition giclee prints (you can buy them for $339 each, and the printed versions truly are stunning). I've asked her for permission to display some of them here on Boing Boing during this holiday week. Maybe Mardi Gras and Christmas/Hannukah don't seem like they ought to go together, but hey, why not? Fun, food, loved ones, reckless abandon, music, lots of sparkly decorations: there's a lot in common.
Today, we'll start with the photo presented above: Children in Mardi Gras costume, 1956 New Orleans Mardi Gras. Cowboy costumes for "Carnival" were popular in the mid-fifties. After the jump, a scanned 1956 advertisement which ran in the Times-Picayune for this very costume, offered at the now-defunct Maison Blanche New Orleans department store.
Here's the online store where you can purchase reproductions. More about the exhibit here. Members of Mizenko's family have shared their rememberances of his life and work here.
Here is a snip from his daughter, Mar, who recovered the images and is presenting them (and offering prints):
My father's photographs of the Mardi Gras take me back to the New Orleans of my childhood. I've returned to New Orleans in order to explore the history of my father's photographs and the extraordinary places I visited with him as a child; my grandmothers house and my aunt's house on Joseph street, the horse races at the fairgrounds, beignets at Cafe Du Monde, oyster po?boys, and Magazine Street. I remember perching on a wood ladder when I was six, arms outstretched in eager anticipation, ready to catch my share of Mardi Gras loot. I am happy and proud to present this priceless collection of photographs by my father John Woodward Mizenko and the radiant memories they contain. His love for New Orleans is manifested in every frame. It has awakened me and brought me home. No wonder we loved him.
A beautiful piece of glass-filled nylon jewelry, which I think was a senior design project, from Molly Epstein of Temple University. [via Boing Boing]
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Get your entries in, the Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest deadline is Tuesday, December 22 at 11:59PM PST!
MAKE is teaming up with the Penguin Group to present The Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest!
All of you adventure-seekers and gadget lovers out there are invited to join in. If you were Alex Rider, what gadget would you want in the upcoming adventure "Crocodile Tears"? Design your dream Alex Rider gadget, inspired by an everyday object (i.e. an iPod, toothpaste, a pen). The winning gadget will be built right here at the MAKE Labs. Send us a schematic of what your gadget is made from and how it works. (Your schematic can be a diagram, a drawing or an explanation by you). Remember that the winning gadget will be inspired by an everyday object that one could realistically build (as much as we wish we could create a pair of scissors that could fly us to the moon)!
Check out some of the entries at the Alex Rider Dream Gadget Contest Flickr pool. The above springboard shoes were designed by Cord Zwirner.
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(Click for super grande). I'm traveling in Central America. I took this snapshot in a K'iche' Maya village in Guatemala where people bathe using a traditional tuj (Maya sweat bath of hot rocks and steam and herbs). I think the family whose home this is in installed it for visiting aid volunteers from the US, a long time ago. But they only get running water a couple times a week for a few hours at a time, and it's full of pathogens, at that. Perhaps in part for that reason, the family themselves never ever use this thing. Guess what? I can assure you that I will never ever use it, either.
See how the electric wires go right into the incoming stream of cold water, to heat it up? Yeah.
A friend who lives in Costa Rica says they have 'em there, too, and they call them "suicide showers." Am I just a big old scaredygringa, or do you also find this gadget terrifying? Boing Boing readers, if you've seen these contraptions (or have used one and lived to tell), I'd love to hear your harrowing tales in the comments.
Image link, and here's another snapshot that kinda shows you the context (not terribly high quality photo because I shot on iPhone).
The publishers of Erik Bergstrom's Grimmer Tales: A Wicked Collection of Happily Never After Stories were kind enough to send me a review copy, which I've just had a very entertaining half-hour chuckling over. The book consists of a series of extremely nasty comic-strips telling the aftermath of the classic folkloric fairy tales. For example, one running gag has Pinnocchio telling polite social lies in panel 1, while panel 2 depicts his sprouted nose gouging out the eye of some innocent (i.e., "Cute baby! -- stab").
These running gags are pretty funny, but the really standout moments are the longer strips, especially the "What a Witch" strip, in which two witches standing over a cauldron extol the virtues of Kiddee Flakes, which are much more convenient for kidnapped-child-fattening than candy-houses. This is good, wicked humor at its finest -- if you loved Fractured Fairy Tales...
Grimmer Tales: A Wicked Collection of Happily Never After Stories
Here are the narrative parameters:Here's how you get to Mars: first, you boost for $A days at $F gees, which gets your ship really *moving*. Since there's nothing in space to stop it -- except a few stray hydrogen atoms and the odd gust of solar wind -- it'll just coast Marswards pretty much forever. So you switch the engines off and ride your momentum ever and ever Marsward. If you've timed it all correctly, Mars should also be moving toward *you*, swinging around the Sun at $B km/h and closing fast.
Once you're closer to Mars than you are to Earth, you flip the ship over, so that your main antenna array is pointed at the red planet, and reboot the ship's computers, bringing them back online running a Mars-compliant OS that runs on Martian time. Then, $C days later, you turn the engines back and boost *away* from Mars for $D days, because $B km/h and closing fast is *fast* -- fast enough to turn your rocket into a cloud of atoms and a giant shockwave if you run *into* Mars instead of going into a gentle orbit around Phobos Base for transfer to a ground-shuttle.
We were almost at turnaround, which meant that we were nearly equidistant from Mars and the Earth. That meant that almost no one was playing the game anymore, because it was at $E seconds of latency, meaning that a message sent to Earth took $E/2 seconds to get there and $E seconds to get back.
* the whole trip needs to take 90 days
* they have to stop boosting after an initial thrust, coast, reverse, and thrust again
* g-stresses from thrust can't exceed healthy limits for juvenile civilians
Given those parameters, what's the right answer for $A, $B, $C, $D, $E and $F above?
First correct answer will win, um, a signed copy of any of my novels (you choose), inscribed and posted to the address of your choosing (to be sent after I get back from holidays in the second week of September).
Update: In response to several commenters: you can put Earth and Mars in any plausible starting position that is justifiable from the point of view of a space-launch where the date can be picked far (a decade, say) in advance.
Also updated to make thrust a variable as well. Any thrust is OK, provided that it won't harm a ship full of baseline civilians, including juveniles.
(Image: Mars the Red Planet, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from jasonb42882's photostream)
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Our own Rachel Hobson spotted this awesome collection of papercraft real-life spaceship models from AXM Paper Space Scale Models, which are freely available for download. [via CRAFT]
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"Back to 500. Yess!!! "500" means where doing good. Way to Play Hard Guys."Seems like the sort of thing the NBA should be encouraging. It's a nice connection with fans, who feel that they're getting in on some of the excitement from a player they like. So, what was the problem? Well, the NBA "rules" say no Twittering until after the media sessions are done after the game. So, basically, he was too anxious to spread the excitement to his fans. And this is fine-worthy? It's hard to make sense of a policy that tells players not to connect with fans, and not to let them in on the excitement.
Contemporary African Art Since 1980, a new book by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, is the most comprehensive collection I've ever seen of modern art from or about Africa, by African artists.
A disclaimer first: my mother, Monica Rumsey, was the book's copy editor, and that's how I learned about it. I kept pestering her to share photos and details as the project took shape, and am now very excited to blog that we've obtained permission from the publisher and distributor (Damiani Editore, and DAP) to publish a large, exclusive gallery of wide-format images here on Boing Boing— these spectacular works are shown after the jump.
The book explores how political, social, and cultural changes over the past thirty years have shaped urban, indigenous, and globalized "diasporic" art forms. Contemporary African Art is a roadmap of change and of evolving identities.
(Image above: Guy Tillim, "Mai Mai Militia in training near Beni, eastern DRC, for immediate deployment with the APC, Army Populaire du Congo" 2002)
Important works by some 160 artists are included in this beautifully illustrated, 320-page book, which unfolds in chronological order and covers an array of mediums: painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, drawing, and collage. I've blogged before about some of the artists represented in this book, but when I saw the finished product, I was thrilled to learn about dozens whose work I had not seen before.
About the book's co-authors: Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor is Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute, and editor and founding publisher of the African art journal Nka.?And Chika Okeke-Agulu is Assistant Professor of Art and Archeology and African American Studies at Princeton University, and editor of Nka.
Many thanks to the artists, authors, and publisher, for allowing Boing Boing to share a collection of featured images here. Where possible, I've also added links to the artist websites, for your happy exploring.
Abu Bakarr Mansaray, "Sector A'Bubak," (1997)
David Goldblatt, "Saturday Morning at the Hypermarket: Semi-final of the Miss Lovely Legs Competition, Boksburg, Transvaal, 28 June 1980"
Samuel Fosso, "Le Pirate" (1997)
Kendell Geers, "Counting Out Song" (aka "Tyre") (1988)
Chéri Samba, aka Samba wa Mbimba N'zingo Nuni Masi Ndo Mbasi, "Les Pantalons sont Defendus"
Bodys Isek Kingelez, "Ville Fantome" (1996)
Willem Boschoff, "Kykafrikaans" (1980)
Yinka Shonibare, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Africa)," (2009)
Jo Ratcliffe, "Nadir no 15" (1988)
Lalla Essaydi, "Les Femmes du Maroc / Grande Odalisque" (2008)
Glenn Fleishman says, "My aunt saved this from her childhood, a book that was allegedly attempting to inform children about Hannukah. It's a little odd." Glenn adds that the book was published in 1943. Chanuko Book (Flickr photo set)
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What appear to be props from the latest David Cronenberg thriller are actually the work of Danish textile designer Magnhild Disington. [via Core77]
Portable electronics are often neutral in appearance and lack emotional appeal. They have become a more pervasive part of our lifestyle and are things we carry with us most of the time. People tend not to feel any connection with them and change them gladly as soon as something better and newer is on the market; there is an abnormal refreshment rate for these types of product. Do we really need a new phone every six months? It is my belief that the values within our digital interactions outweigh the value of the electronic devices we use to make them....For the collection of USB keys (flash drives) I have applied natural materials like wood, leather and fur. These materials provide unique character and sensory experiences which create emotional value within the physical product. This creates a more balanced connection between 'content of desire' (our files and interactions) and 'object of desire' (our electronic devices).Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Cellphones | Digg this!
What appear to be props from the latest David Cronenberg thriller are actually the work of Danish textile designer Magnhild Disington. [via Core77]
Portable electronics are often neutral in appearance and lack emotional appeal. They have become a more pervasive part of our lifestyle and are things we carry with us most of the time. People tend not to feel any connection with them and change them gladly as soon as something better and newer is on the market; there is an abnormal refreshment rate for these types of product. Do we really need a new phone every six months? It is my belief that the values within our digital interactions outweigh the value of the electronic devices we use to make them....For the collection of USB keys (flash drives) I have applied natural materials like wood, leather and fur. These materials provide unique character and sensory experiences which create emotional value within the physical product. This creates a more balanced connection between 'content of desire' (our files and interactions) and 'object of desire' (our electronic devices).Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Cellphones | Digg this!
Ian from weezey.com wired up a couple of Peggy2 light emitting pegboard kits to an Arduino and with a couple of tweaks to some existing code managed to get the display to run across both units. [via hackaday]
The code changes were actually quite simple, I made a second header and data array so that the second Peggy2 has a different header that it acts on to change it's state and then coded that into the sketch for the second Peggy2. I looked at changing the TWI address first but I think the Arduino code would need to be modified for that and right now it just spews data without modification and I didn't want to mess with that yet.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!
Orca Books sent me a review copy of Media Meltdown, a graphic novel about media literacy for kids, written by Liam O'Donnell and illustrated by Mike Deas.
The premise of Media Meltdown is to teach kids how to question the media they get, and to make their own. It follows the adventures of a group of kids who have discovered that the local monster-home developer is up to no good, and is getting away with it because he's a heavy advertiser with the town's only media company, which owns the newspaper, stadium, and TV station. Working together, they break the story on their own, using the Web, and along the way they learn to analyze the media they receive, to use that analysis in making their own media, and to work with others to get their message across (there's also a surprise appearance of this blog, which had me laughing aloud).
Media Meltdown is a good mix of instructional and narrative comic, using the medium's strengths to illustrate how media is made, and giving kids the tools they need to research media-making for themselves. The mystery plot is simple, but has some good tension and twists, and the resolution is really sweet. Understanding how media gets made and learning to make your own media are critical skills for kids, and this is a great starting-point.
MediaMeltdown.net -- more resources
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"...the Vatican has felt it necessary to declare that "it alone has the right to ensure the respect due to the Successors of Peter, and therefore, to protect the figure and personal identity of the Pope from the unauthorized use of his name and/or the papal coat of arms for ends and activities which have little or nothing to do with the Catholic Church."As the report makes clear, this is targeted at those who are using the symbols to "attribute credibility and authority to initiatives," so it actually seems more like a makeshift "trademark" (without the "trade" part) or maybe a "publicity right" rather than a copyright. That is, this is much more about preventing people from falsely suggesting that the Pope is endorsing something he is not. That said, it's unclear how such a rule is enforceable, since every country has their own laws that this shouldn't impact at all. I guess since this is likely directed at Catholic organizations misusing Papal symbols that they will then obey the Pope, but otherwise, this doesn't seem like a huge deal.
Wizzywig Volumes 1/2 (ZIP archive) (Mirror)Wizzywig is the story of Kevin "Boingthump" Phenicle, a fictional hacker who's part Mitnick, part Poulsen, and part mythological. Boingthump is a preternaturally bright, badly socialized kid who discovers a facility for technology that's egged on by his only pal, "Winston Smith," a would-be Abbie Hoffman who is obsessed with the potential to use Boingthump's discoveries to monkeywrench the machine.
But soon enough, their roles are reversed, as Kevin's relentless pursuit of knowledge and power scares Winston so much that he tries (without success) to put the brakes on Boingthump's crazy ride through the phone system and the nascent Internet. The story blends fiction and fact, dropping in a Blue Box-selling Jobs and Wozniak (Boingthump picks the trunk-lock on their car and steals a Blue Box) and Cap'n Crunch, along with plenty of fictional BBS scenesters and grumpy computer-store owners. The backgrounds are filled with nostalgia PCs -- Atari 400s, Apple ///s -- and old Bellcore manuals.
The illustration and storytelling style reminds me a lot of Harvey Pekar (with whom he's collaborated on American Splendor), jumping backwards and forwards in time, switching points of view, going inside and outside of the characters' heads. The first two volumes are PHREAK and HACKER, with two more (FUGITIVE and INMATE) planned. Piskor prints and sells the comics himself (the books are quite handsome) and he's got extensive free previews online. At $15 each, with all the money going straight into the creator's pocket, what's not to like?
Wizzywig volume 1: PHREAK, WIZZYWIG VOLUME#2: HACKER
(Thanks, Ed!
Upper Mismanagement (via Making Light)Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that's the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM's top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company's vaunted Treasurer's office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, "That's how you end up with GM rather than Toyota."
(Image: Venn Diagram - Happiness in Business a Creative Commons Attribution image from budcaddell's photostream)
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While no one knows exactly how large the illegal wildlife trade is, this much is certain: It's extraordinarily lucrative. Profit margins are the kind drug kingpins would kill for. Smugglers evade detection by hiding illegal wildlife in legal shipments, they bribe wildlife and customs officials, and they alter trade documents. Few are ever caught, and penalties are usually no more severe than a parking ticket. Wildlife trafficking may very well be the world's most profitable form of illegal trade, bar none.Asia's Wildlife Trade (Thanks, Marilyn!)
Educational Toy FAIL (Thanks, Madeline!)
A guest dispatch on cool things spotted at Art | Basel in Miami, from Kristen Philipkoski:
People often ask Seattle band Latitude x Longitude (YouTube link) to describe their unique sound, because as vocalist Rebeqa Rivers can attest, it's not exactly categorizable. But after giving it much thought, Rivers says Steampunk seemed perfect. No doubt once giving them a listen that seems pretty accurate. Rivers' gorgeous voice is layered over mandolin and toy piano sounds, as well as Spencer Smith's guitar and sometimes drums. They even have a visual artist as an official member of the band: Michelle Anders. From the bands press page: "Paired with LxL's inquisitive lyrics, Anderst examines the patterns and elegance of the machinery, anatomy, flora, and fauna that surround everyday life."[Photos: (c) Lanae Rivers-Woods, 2009]The band's interest in the visual arts can be traced to Rivers' sister, Lanae Rivers-Woods, who has an art gallery in Seattle called La Familia. The sisters were manning the gallery's booth at Aqua Art Miami hosted by GenArt recently in Miami. With Anders' art on display, Latitude x Longitude music playing, and the rest of La Familia's art on exhibit, it was the liveliest booth at the fair.
That's the biggest ever for a non-sequel. It earned $73m in the U.S, the rest abroad. The LA Times points out that many on the east coast were snowed in by the worst blizzard in a decade, and that it's yet to open in China and Japan. Subhead of the day, however, goes to Reuters: "BLUE PEOPLE WOW CRITICS."
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I found this awesome CD at my uncle's house, and had to blog it. It was released in 1963, and still holds up great. Here's a Wikipedia article about it. You can still buy used copies. Link to snapshots.
The idea of "live-action" Warhammer 40K is itself so ambitious that somebody needs to give this guy and his buddies a medal just for trying. Check out Flickr user Lt.E.Watt's photostream to see some more of the amazing props he/they have built to run their games. Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne! Spleens for the spleen pond! [via Propnomicon]
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A few years ago, I went on a trip to northern India to see the Dalai Lama. I traveled with a lawyer, a politician, a publicist, and a translator. One of the places we visited on the way up from Delhi was called Jalandhar — it's in the Punjab region and is home to a lot of sweatshops. While we were there, we met a bunch of kids who lived with no electricity but told us that, when they grew up, they all wanted to be computer scientists. So we whipped out our cameras and iPods — the closest things we had on hand to real computers — and showed them how technology works. We figured they would enjoy it, and thought it could be a valuable experience that would stay etched in their minds as something to aspire to as they continued their studies.
Later, I found out that one of my travel mates thought what we had done was cruel. We had seduced these poor kids with luxuries they will probably never be able to afford, and sullied their pure, technology-free lives with the temptation of electronics.
So who's right? Did we ruin these kids for life or give them hopes for a better future? Does it not matter? Is there even a right answer to this question? What do you guys think?
Advisor is a column about how to juggle technology, relationships, and common sense. Got a story to tell? Email me at lisa [at] boingboing [dot] net.
Craig Smith sent us this project on how to take apart a Magic 8-Ball to customize it with your own answers. Thanks, Craig! - Gareth
As a spa/hot tub service tech, I was convinced that one of my dingbat co-workers must be using Magic 8-Ball to arrive at his spa troubleshooting diagnosis. So, I thought it might be funny to actually make one customized for hot tub problems.
I used a Plexiglas cutter to cut the glue at the seam of the ball, about 1/8" deep. From there, I could pry it apart with a screwdriver. Inside is the clear plastic blue dye container. Three Phillips screws hold the "cork" in. Remove and carefully pour out the blue dye water and save it. CAREFUL, IT WILL STAIN. I was able to remove the entire top by prying bit-by-bit all around the edge until the lid popped off. Then I could remove the "bubble trap" and the 20-sided "ball."
I used a razor to slice off the letters, then medium sandpaper in a sander, then fine, then wet sand with superfine emery cloth. The smoother the surface, the less the marker will bleed. Then, with an ultra-fine sharpie marker, I carefully hand-lettered 20 common problems found in hot tub service calls. I then re-assembled the unit using Mr. Sticky glue on the cap. (A common pool/spa repair adhesive) The dye was put back in using a turkey baster with an injector tip. An eye-dropper got the last of it in. With the cork back in place and the entire unit re-assembled with some glue, I'm ready to use this diagnostic tool ONLY when eights years of experience fails me on a tricky malfunction.
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