Monday, May 31, 2004
"There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
Boing Boing: Tokyo shop windows
Tokyo shop windows
Posted by MacDood
Wonderful gallery of Tokyo shop-window displays. God I wanna go to Tokyo.
Link
(via Waxy)
[Boing Boing]
Boing Boing: Law-and-Order-inspired art
Law-and-Order-inspired art
Posted by MacDood
Law and Order: Artistic Intent is a collection of fine art pieces inspired by the Law and Order franchise. Which reminds me of the Law and Order song, as written by the WELL's inestimable tpy:
Law and Order's on
Time for Law and Order
Law and Order's on
Time for Law and Order
Lenny was a drunk
Now he beats up pu-unks
Law and Order's on
Time for Law and Order
Link
(Thanks, Mitch)
[Boing Boing]
Saturday, May 29, 2004
Massively multiplayer thumbwrestling
Posted by MacDood
Last week in Vienna, I attended Monochrom's first-ever massively multiplayer thumbwrestling competition. Now the Monochromers have posted detailed descriptions for running your won MMTW events.
By forming a star, it is also possible to play the game with three or four participants. The left hands are also free to hook up with even more players. Again a connection with up to 4 players is possible. By Massive Thumb-Wrestling according to the rules described above unlimited amounts of players can connect to join a Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling Network. As the number of players is unlimited, global thumb-wrestling may emerge through self-sustaining peer-to-peer networks and ad-hoc socializing.
(Thanks, Johannes!) [Boing Boing]
Dance Dance Resurrection
Posted by MacDood
Jesus-themed variant of DDR (of *course* it's a hoax).
Update: BoingBoing reader Ross Payton says, "It was actually created by a member of the somethingawful.com forums who goes by the name None More Negative. It's a few years old."
Link; other recent BoingBoing posts on DDR 1, 2, 3. (millegrazie, mi piccolo snoodilio, also on Geisha) [Boing Boing]
Audio tour of the MacPlus
Posted by MacDood
Hey, my first computer was a good ol' mac plus...
Patrick sez, "Digging through his cassette tapes last weekend, this guy came across 'Macintosh Plus: A Guided Tour' and decided he should archive it onto CD for posterity (being a pack rat by nature). It's especially interesting in that it gives a good glimpse of the level of user education necessary at that point in Computer History: it patiently goes over how to interact with icons, how to use the mouse, etc..."
Put the floppy disk into the internal disk drive. Put it in with the metal end first...and the label up. Push it all the way in.
"For a real today-meets-yesterday experience, throw this on your iPod."
Friday, May 28, 2004
Red Mars: a very belated appreciation
Posted by MacDood
I'm pretty well-read in the modern sf canon, but there are some gaps in there that are almost embarrassing in scope. Take Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. This doorstopper, clocking in at nearly 800 pages, is the first volume in a trilogy of comparably-sized companion volumes, each of which depicts a different vision of the [dis|u]topiian establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. When Red Mars first came out, I was working at Bakka Books, the science fiction bookstore in Toronto, and there was something else in my queue that month, and one of my co-workers had already dived into it and was writing the shelf review, and it seemed like such a commitment that, well, I just never got around to it. With the publication of Green Mars and Blue Mars, it just got worse: if I couldn't clear enough schedule to read volume one, volumes two and three were impossible.
It wasn't that I didn't like Robinson's books. Quite the contrary, I adore them. Pacific Edge -- a gripping, rollicking utopian novel whose plot hinges on a zoning debate over the placement of a baseball diamond -- is one of my all-time favorite books. When Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom came out and the reviewers compared it to John Varley for the technology stuff, I was honoured, but the few reviews that compared it to Pacific Edge sent me over the moon: if Robinson could disrupt his utopia with a zoning fight and make it into a gripping tale, could I do the same with a fight over the politics of Disney ride fandom and design?
Like Red Mars, Pacific Edge is one volume in a trilogy that approaches utopia from three different angles. I haven't read the other two books in the trilogy, and that's a keen regret that I intend to do something about post-haste.
Because now I've finally read Red Mars, and I am agog at what may be the finest sf novel I've ever read. Red Mars has all the hard-sf window-dressing that many of us imagine when we think of sf: great and accessible tours through speculative cog sci, geology, astronomy, rocketry, physics, biology, genetics, and so on, until the head swims with the sheer scope of the research task Robinson set himself in this book.
But the hard science is just the skin, and the meat of this book -- as with Pacific Edge -- is the "soft" science: the complex play of the community of his vast cast of characters as they set out to advance their competing agendas, writing the future of Mars.
Robinson doesn't just shine here: he glows. There is this hard question at the core of every story of violent social upheaval, which is, how does collective action materialize? How is it steered? How does it go off the rails? How, in short, does stuff get done? Can a speech change the world? Can a bomb? Who gets to construct the consensus reality, and how do you disrupt it?
This is the stuff of Robinson's books: big, social questions answered through skilful point-of-view switches, fantastic characterization and fearless exposition.
In the beginning, a lot of sf was just technocrat fantasy: here's a cool new technology I've thought of, with a minimal narrative around it as a kind of turntable so that it can be rotated 360' and you, the reader, can appreciate its cleverness from all sides.
Later, sf writers took on the more ambitious challenge of predicting the social upheaval that tech could create, an approach embodied in the cliche that "the job of the sf writer is to consider the car and the movie-palace and invent the drive-in."
But Robinson goes many steps beyond this: he extrapolates the drive-in, then the sexual revolution, then the Boomers' nostalgia for the drive-in where they lost their virginity, and finally, their grown childrens' disdain for that nostalgia. There's an eerie prescience to these books that tells you that what's being written here is a deep and broad tale of social reconstruction on the micro, macro, nano and mezzoscales.
I just finished Red Mars on a BA flight from Vienna, and I was bitterly disappointed not to find Blue and Green Marses on sale at Heathrow, but I'll have them in my possession by dusk. I can't wait to read them.
MoveOn PAC
Gore speech transcript
If you missed coverage of his NYU address yesterday, you can read the entire speech here. Link (Thanks, Patrick)
Posted by MacDood
MoveOn PAC
Art of being cold
Posted by MacDood
Amateur digital photographer R. Todd King has posted a set of startlingly gorgeous photos of the snow and ice festival in Harbin, China.
"The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, both farenheit and centigrade, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the cold, the residents of Harbin celebrate it, with an annual festival of snow and ice sculptures and competitions. The festival officially runs from January 5 through February 15, but often opens a week early and runs into March, since it's usually still cold enough. This is the amazing sculpture made of snow greeting visitors to the snow festival in 2003." Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)
[Boing Boing]
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Leonardo da Vinci
Posted by MacDood
"You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
Cory's Vienna photos
Posted by MacDood
I had a killer day in Vienna today -- I am here to give a couple of talks at the LinuxWeek event in MuseumsQuartier. My hosts took me through Prado Park, a cool old amusement park, and then to a beer garden in the old Swiss World's Fair pavillion where I got an entire roast haunch of pig (!), then Monochrom staged a performance of the world's first "massively multiplayer thumbwrestling tournament." I shot a ton of pix -- here they are.
Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles
Posted by MacDood
link
Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles After witnessing the Pentagon's inconclusive retreat from both Fallujah and Najaf without achieving the "success" of pacification or elimination of the local resistance, it seems that apart from incidentally killing several thousand Iraqis, causing lots of property damage, uniting Shias and Sunnis, and promoting minor clerics into major resistance leaders, today's Pentagon forces are quite ineffectual within dense urban areas. I am reminded of the words of the ex-Deputy PM of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq: People say to me, 'You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps' ... I reply, 'Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles.'. [metafilter.com]
Monday, May 24, 2004
How to Explain Everything
Posted by MacDood
link
Comment: promising title---
Part 1: Decisions, Decisions. Are you going to eat out tonight or cook at home? Will you watch a TV program or read a book? Will you study something tonight or will you go out with friend? Do you go out every night or do you save up for a car? Do you get into a relationship or keep things casual? All of these questions are the subject of economics. Do you just flip a coin every time you need to make a decision? Sometimes? Only when there's really no difference between the choices to you? How do you balance unlimited desires with limited resources? In the big picture, economics is the study of choices. While many think of it as the study of making money, it isn't. It's just that most choices hinge around money because of what money is, but that's jumping too far ahead. If you want to understand how the world works -- how you and everyone else make decisions -- economics provides a lot of insight. This is the first in a series. [Kuro5hin.org]
Christian Reconstructionism - The Foundation of Modern Conservativism
Posted by MacDood
link
"He presses the crown rights of the Lord Jesus Christ in every sphere, expecting eventual triumph." Christian Reconstructionism is a little heard of religious philosophy that preaches that every aspect of society must come under biblical law. In their view, secular governments are in opposition to the word of God, and therefore they seek to eliminate all legal barriers between church and state. Founded in 1973 by R.J. Rushdoony, it has had wide influence in the modern Republican party. The overriding goal of Reconstructionism is the absolute control of the reigns of government so that the world may be properly prepared for Jesus's return, and that achieving this goal will demonstrate the fulfillment of God's will. (Link) [Kuro5hin.org]
Chicago replaces cows with celebrity-designed Mickey Mice
Posted by MacDood
link
Comment: I just like weird disney themes---
Jim sez, "The new online magazine Chicagoist has an article on 15 giant Mickey Mouse statues that will be on display on State Street in downtown Chicago until the middle of July."
Link
(Thanks, Jim!)
[Boing Boing]
300 images from 1800 sites
Posted by MacDood
link
This lovely little website is the result of a sort of online pixel scavenger hunt:
I started gathering little, iconesque web images for myself so that I could compare, contrast, and study the techniques used by other graphic artists on the web. My initial pool of images looked so interesting that I decided to continue methodically hunting and capturing the icons for a public display piece. The purpose of this document is not to copy the intellectual property of others, but rather as a jumping-off point for your own unique web graphic projects. It's for Brainstorming, if you will.
I roughly estimate that for every six web sites I scoured, I was able to acquire one graphic image. I visited only Fortune 1000 company sites, major online retailers, well known blogs, top advertising, publishing, and design agencies, technology and software industry leaders, and the very largest online news publishers. Approximately 1800 web sites later, I have this collection of 300 of the most interesting, unique, and beautiful formations of pixels to display.
Link (Thanks, Sean!) [Boing Boing]
Thursday, May 20, 2004
CNN.com - Study: Dog DNA shows influence of man - May 20, 2004
CNN.com - Study: Dog DNA shows influence of man - May 20, 2004
That explains it, my border collie is a wolf.
That explains it, my border collie is a wolf.
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Spoony photoshoppery
Posted by MacDood
link
Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: creative use of spoons.
Monday, May 17, 2004
Other News: Intel Hits Thermal Wall
Posted by MacDood
link
Intel is having to think differently as it encounters difficult thermal problems with its processors. [MacInTouch]
Sunday, May 16, 2004
Saturday, May 15, 2004
Friday, May 14, 2004
Cyborg celebrities photoshopping
Posted by MacDood
link
More science-fictional photoshopping on Worth1000's daily contest: "Cyborg Celebs." Nice robot Tyra Banks.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Cute Japanese food
Posted by MacDood
link
Hello bento box! And other smiley-face food from Japan. Link (Thanks, JeremyT!)[Boing Boing]
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Boing Boing: Feebs' security advisory about kingpin who turns out to be a video-game character
Boing Boing: Feebs' security advisory about kingpin who turns out to be a video-game character
It just had to happen, so much security, so little time
It just had to happen, so much security, so little time
The FBI issued a terrorist warning after receiving a tip on an evil millionaire -- who turned out to be a character in a video game.
It was the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. "Stand down," came the order from embarrassed national security types.
(via Lawmeme) [Boing Boing]
Monday, May 10, 2004
The Ten Best Science Fiction Film Directors
Strange Horizons, a weekly speculative fiction magazine
fascinating list of scifi greats
fascinating list of scifi greats
Sunday, May 9, 2004
Yahoo! News - 'Van Helsing' Wins Box Office Over Olsens
Yahoo! News - 'Van Helsing' Wins Box Office Over Olsens
Monsters win again, as well they should
a test
Posted by MacDood
Has it been 20 years already? "Andy himself stated that were he to fake his death, he would return 20 years later to the day. MAY 16TH 2004 IS THAT DAY." [metafilter.com]
Tuesday, May 4, 2004
Hypocrite watch: FCC Swamped With Oprah Indecency Complaints
Posted by MacDood
link
Ernest Miller sez: "Howard Stern has been the FCC's indecency whipping boy for some time. After the latest series record-setting fines, however, he asked his listeners to complain to the FCC about an episode of Oprah's talk show that included rather graphic descriptions of sex acts. The Smoking Gun has received copies of more than 1600 complaints about that episode thanks to a FOIA request. It is impossible to know which complaints are real, but many of them are downright hilarious: 'The Oprah show ... was so offensive that my child's head literally exploded. Please ban free speech so this never happens again.'" Link [Boing Boing]
Monday, May 3, 2004
"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
Buddhist Hell Theme Park in Vietnam
Posted by MacDood
link
height="329" width="275" align="left">Following up on this earlier post, BoingBoing reader Hostile17 says,
"Another example of an Asian site featuring the torments of hell. It's not in a museum though, it's in a theme park in [Vietnam]. I mean, three words: Buddhist Theme Park! I was a little baffled by the concept myself but it was a lot of fun. Rides and stuff, plus this animatronic display of the [twelve] torments of hell for people who'd committed particular crimes. It was a little like Pirates of the Carribean, only incredibly lame, tech-wise.
There was one specific punishment for gamblers, one for adulterers, another for drug-takers. It was kind of amusing how different members of the family I was with laughed nervously at different exhibits. If you're ever in Saigon, you have to visit, it's truly strange."
The park has a website where you can watch short MPEG movies of attractions, including the Hell exhibit. The whole park is surreal -- check out the wicked cool photos these gigantic swimming pools with faux-stone monuments of gods watching over. This one -- an old man with a waterfall beard -- is my favorite.
Link [Boing Boing]
Cool new Mars images
Posted by MacDood
link
BoingBoing buddy John Parres says:
height="143" width="200" align="left">
The Mars rover Opportunity has arrived at "Endurance Crater" revealing a variety of strata and rock formations and intriguing sand/salt formations at the bottom. At issue now is not whether Opportunity can roll in but whether she can climb back out for further investigations.
The Space.com bulletin boards are giddy at the possibility of investigating 'water seeps' One poster is reporting that a lead JPL scientists is predicting that Opportunity might last another six months. Another suggests that "the plan for Opprtunity is to head South/South West after it's done with Endurance Crater. The objective being the white area which would be an ideal area to look for fossils. If the rover can last as long as hoped though that puts some of the much larger craters within reach too!"
Image here,, and chat here. [Boing Boing]
Saturday, May 1, 2004
Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel
Buffy's Brendon Enters Rehab
Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel
Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel
The obesity racket
Posted by MacDood
link
The Guardian has recently published excerpts from a new book by Paul Campos entitled The Obesity Myth. The book argues that the claim so often repeated by your TV, that two thirds of the population of the United States is "overweight" or "obese," is an elaborate hoax designed to move the product. From the perspective of a profit-maximising medical and pharmaceutical industry, the ideal disease would be one that never killed those who suffered from it, that could not be treated effectively, and that doctors and their patients would nevertheless insist on treating anyway. [Kuro5hin.org]
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