Apple's alive, alive!
Posted by MacDood
Apple Computer's persistence defies the law of increasing returns, writes Bradford DeLong in a commentary from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
Friday, May 30, 2003
[Boing Boing]
I'm gonna line forever
Posted by MacDood
Researchers at the Institute for Stem Cell Research in Scotland have discovered a gene that turns ordinary cells into immortal stem-cells.
LinkDiscuss [Boing Boing]
The gene found in mouse ESCs and some human equivalents appears to be the "master gene", co-ordinating other genes to allow stem cells to multiply limitlessly while still retaining their ability to differentiate. It has been christened Nanog after the land in Celtic myth called Tir nan Og, whose inhabitants remain forever young."Nanog seems to be a master gene that makes ESCs grow in the laboratory," says Ian Chambers, one of the team at the Institute for Stem Cell Research (ISCR), Edinburgh, Scotland. "In effect this makes stem cells immortal."
Thursday, May 29, 2003
gasp choke arrgh
Posted by MacDood
Guru.com will join the growing ranks of sites for freelancers that have shut down. Seems predictions that a big portion of U.S. workers will become free agents won't pan out. By Amit Asaravala. [Wired News]
freakin sars!!!
Posted by MacDood
Los Angeles-based digital artist and illustrator Sean Bonner of sixspace gallery created a number of items for the BoingBoing SARS folk art series. Here's the first of several from Sean that we'll post over the coming days. Link to complete image.
(Earlier "SARS folk art" exhibits in this reader-contributed series: A,
B,
C,
D,
E,
F,
G,
H,
I,
J, K, L, and
M.)
"You're dead to me, can opener!" Fred shouts
Posted by MacDood
Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, is a new Cartoon Network show in the tradition of the classic Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, in which classic cartoon characters are reimagined as vicious, satirical criminals. This Salon piece on the show was intriguing enough that I've asked my TiVo to get me a Season Pass to it.
LinkDiscuss [Boing Boing]
Like a shotgun blast, "Harvey Birdman" explodes outward into postmodern reconfigurations. "The Dabba Don," referenced above, embroils the cast of "The Flintstones" in a mobster universe. Even minor characters, such as the various creatures that mundanely function as household appliances, are called to the witness stand to testify against Fred's illicit gambling and "white slavery" empires; "You're dead to me, can opener!" Fred shouts at one poor dinosaur that rats him out. Birdman himself, pressured by organized crime to defend Flintstone, ends up with more than one severed head at the foot of his bed; only one of them (Hanna-Barbera's Quick Draw McGraw), however, is a horse. Meanwhile, in the fan favorite "Shaggy Busted," Scooby Doo and Shaggy are unmasked as stoners, nabbed at the beginning of the episode in a live-action "Cops"-like bust as they drive down dank streets in their smoky van (Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke" anyone?) while blasting the opening riffs to the Doobie Brothers' (get it?) "China Grove." And that's just the beginning segment. We haven't even gotten to Birdman's opposing counsel, Spyro, a literal drama queen who phrases most of his arguments in Shakespearean meter (his version of Shaggy and Scooby's pot bust is titled, "As You Smok't It"). Or Hanna-Barbera bit player Magilla Gorilla propositioning Birdman in prison. Or the heavy-lidded montage featuring Scooby and company's various pizza binges and herbal appreciations. Or the bizarre resurfacing of a decades-old Tab commercial spotlighting Birdman's more-than-platonic relationship with his favorite one-calorie soda.
Then there's "Death by Chocolate," an episode that would make even McCaffery (who argues that a "bleak, absurdist comedy permeates the epistemological skepticism" of postmodern enterprises in "The Metafictional Muse") blush, this time starring Yogi and BooBoo Bear. While the plot line confirms Richter's assertion that "Harvey Birdman" is interested in telling straightforward stories, the episode is one extended, hilarious hallucination. Yogi's trusty (and usually much brighter) companion has metamorphosed into a Ted Kaczynski-type radical called the UnaBooBoo, and is nabbed in a government sting reminiscent of the Waco and Elián González debacles. The Waco jab may be a sly one; the government gives BooBoo 10 seconds to come out -- before launching an explosive at the count of two. But the Elián jab is more like a haymaker, replicating Alan Diaz's famous Associated Press photo of the closet invasion, with Yogi and BooBoo in the starring roles.
SEEEEEEEEEDs in SPAAAAAAAAACE
Posted by MacDood
Cool NASA photos and streaming movies of plant experiments on the International Space Station:
Link, Discuss [Boing Boing]
One month ago, these peas were full of life and vivid green. Now they're brown and dry; they've "gone to seed." It happens in gardens on Earth all the time. These seeds are special, however, because they were grown in space, inside the Russian Lada greenhouse onboard the International Space Station (ISS). On May 16th, ISS commander Yuri Malenchenko took the brown plants (pictured above is just one of many) and stored them whole in ziplock bags filled with silica gel. Later they'll be taken out again, the seeds harvested and planted to grow a second generation of space-peas. If all goes well they'll become the first legumes to reproduce in Earth-orbit. This is the fifth "seed-to-seed" experiment conducted by Russian researchers. They've grown Arabidopsis onboard a Salyut spacecraft, turnip greens and wheat onboard Mir, and now peas on the International Space Station.
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
free again at last
Posted by MacDood
On May 22, the judge who upheld the legality of the FBI Russian hacker trap and also issued a permanent injunction against the City of Medina free speech-stopping statute declared the Washington state law barring publication of law officers' personal information unconstitutional. [Kuro5hin.org]
Sure it smells really bad but...
Posted by MacDood
The world's largest-ever flower bloomed in Germany
Link, Discuss, (Thanks, Steve)
[Boing Boing]
sounds like I need a good scifi convention
Danny O'Brien, in the midst of a very funny rumination on science fiction conventions (I dragged him to BayCon last weekend), makes a very good point about following your weird.
LinkDiscuss [Boing Boing]
Baycon is a very costume-based convention... everyone looks like a freak. Especially people like me, who don't dress up. We look like the weirdest freaks ever. Even the hotel staff look like fairly normal freaks by comparison, because they're dressed up in waiter and maid's outfits.
And some people, look like incredible, dressed-like-Lara-Croft-only-with-chains-on semi-naked babelicious freaks. Not that I stare. Or even look, or think about them, or anything ever. I only know about their existence because when these people walk into a room, all the straight boys nearby give out this universal telepathic deflatory pained sigh. It's like the sound of a wolf-whistle, only backwards, sucked in. Ooohhhhhh.
The sigh has a meaning. All my life, it says, I have been told by my superego that dressing like a Marvel superhero will not get me laid. And, here, here and now in this temporary saturnalia, surrounded by other males who are - at best - my equals in the ugly league division table: here is my perfect woman. But the world knows that this mad girl's flickering eyes craves just one thing. A man dressed as Galactus, Eater of Worlds. And not only have I left my Galactus costume at home. I never made it. Worse, I threw those biro drawings of me in the Galactus helmet away the moment I'd drawn them, ashamed to show them even to (say) Dave. And now I know: I'm not a virgin because I'm a geek. I'm a virgin because I have pursued geekdom with a less than pure, directed gaze...
ties for the modern man
Freedom to Breathe Safe Clothing makes neckwear -- ties and scarves -- that are suppposedly good enough to filter whatever terrornoia phobia (anthrax, smoke, dirty nuke fallout) you're worried about. They'll sell you these garments so that you can look smart and businessy and still be prepared for the bogeyman's Orange Alert atrocities, wrapping them around your mouth and nose while you belly-crawl to safety. Kind of a duck-and-cover tool for your face.
(via SFGate Morning Fix) [Boing Boing]
Jean Panke of Mobile Tech News wrote a fun tutorial on "picture spamming" with the Sanyo 8100 phonecam:
Link, Discuss (via Gizmodo) [Boing Boing]
We've been sending so many pictures with our new Sanyo 8100, we've started referring to them as "picture spams." With the 8100, we can set up an e-mail listing and select one person, a select few, or everyone on our list to "spam" with photos. Here's a list of fun and helpful things the Sanyo 8100 has allowed us to do the past few weeks: 1) send photos of a grandchild blowing out his birthday candles to an uncle out West and a great-grandmother in the Midwest. 2) emailed a photo of a complex engine problem on our airplane to our mechanic in Virginia, 3) took lots of pictures during a recent beach week-end and spammed everybody in the Midwest we could think of (this technology is really fun!), 4) took a picture of a visiting grandson and emailed it to my PC so he could view his picture instantly, 4) sent pictures of a prospective house we were hoping to buy to family for their feedback and approval, 5) got a picture of a friend's lunch (a plate of Chinese food accompanied by chopsticks and tea) with a fun audio message attached. This is great stuff!
Hey now here's a way to make money with the six new kittens
Mr. Winkle, small dog and web celeb, now has a book. At left, he cross-dresses as Rosie the Riveter. From the publisher's notes:
"Mr. Winkle is a REAL dog, as genuine as the underdogs he celebrates in A Winkle in Time. He dedicates this book to all the world's underdogs who have struggled against long odds and high obstacles, and who have labored humbly in the shadows of others - not for fame or fortune, but for the love of their work, the faith of their vision, and the good of humanity."Update: BoingBoing pal John points us to some extremely cool vintage work in a similiar vein from Harry Whittier Frees, and says, "I scanned one little booklet of his here. I'm not sure if my favorite photo is the cat in pants riding on a hen, with reins and all, or the bunny with old timey headphones."
Online book preview, Discuss (Thanks, Susannah, via Geisha!)
[Boing Boing]
for you disney-philes, you know who you are
Good MSNBC piece on Disney's efforts to reinvograte itself and become profitable again. Here's my three-point plan for a Disney recovery:
- Be like Walt: invent a new, amazing thing (movie or ride technology) every year, so that the company becomes synonymous with innovation again (don't be like Roy: stop using IP to keep your competitors from cloning you, and invent new stuff to stay ahead of them)
- Be like Walt: fire all the McKinsey consultants involved in the running of Disneyland and hire back all the senior staff who were forced out as a short-sighted cost-savings measure (don't be like Roy: stop nickle-and-diming your staff; after all, they're in charge of putting the richest children on earth into threshing-machines for 12h a day)
- Be like Walt: rebuild Imagineering as an interdisciplinary skunk-works that creates brand-new, amazing, one-off stuff that builds your brand (don't be like Roy: stop subbing out your ride design and maintenance to outside contractors and buying off-the-shelf midway rides for your parks)
(Thanks, Gary!) [Boing Boing]
Saturday, May 24, 2003
they'll be back
Uber-Soldier Needs Much Debugging. Nanotechnology could help futuristic battle suits protect troops from bullets and chemical weapons. But for now, simply keeping grunts dry would be a big accomplishment for MIT's new Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. Noah Shachtman reports from Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Wired News]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
