Boing Boing

Motorcycle with camera on it crashes into truck (rider OK)

It looks like fun until the last two seconds, and then it becomes nightmarish. (Via Arbroath)

Have fun in a capsized ship at Machine Project in Los Angeles, 9/5/2010

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Mark Allen of Machine Project in Los Angeles says:

For a period of five weeks Josh Beckman’s Sea Nymph will be host to a whole series of nautical-themed events, performances, lectures, and workshops, as well as an opera by and for dogs. Inside the capsized hull of the ship there will also be a crystal cave. Join us at Machine for the opening on September 5th from 5-10pm, where you can gaze upon the wreckage with accompanying performances by Clay Chaplin, Ambient Force 3000, Ecce, OK Music, Chris Kallmyer, and Colin Woodford.

Josh Beckman’s Sea Nymph: A shipwrecked boat inside Machine

Historic artifact for a holiday weekend

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 4:24 PM Sat

This is the world's first frozen margarita machine, invented and built by Mariano Martinez in 1971 from parts of a soft-serve ice cream maker. His inspiration: A 7-11 Slurpee.

Today, it resides in the collection of the National Museum of American History, where a museum director once called it a, "classic example of the American entrepreneurial spirit."

Smithsonian: Top 10 Inventions from the Collections of the National Museum of American History

Sailing the Northwest Passage at night

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 4:12 PM Sat

Polar explorer Børge Ousland (How'd you like to have that as your job title?) is on a sailboat making its way through the Arctic Ocean. This has never been an easy place for boats, and this video gives you a good idea of why. The captain of Ousland's boat explains the hazards of this area a little more in-depth, while simultaneously making an important point—thanks to warming trends, traversing the Northwest Passage isn't has hard as it used to be.

It is obvious that the conditions met by the early explorers such as Vitus Bering, Fridtjof Nansen, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Roald Amundsen no longer exists. We passed through in a few weeks, while our predecessors were forced to overwinter once or even twice. Still, it is not an easy passage for any kind of boat or vessel. There is still ice, although not to the extent there used to be, but plenty to make conditions unpredictable for ships. In addition many of the seas you have to pass are very shallow. In the East Siberian Sea, the shipping lane is located 50 nautical miles off the coast, in order for there to be sufficient depth for bigger ships. Lights, buoys and nautical markings are scarce.

You can follow Ousland's progress on his blog. Today, he reached American waters and changed his underpants, and we learn that changing your underpants on special occasions is a fine, old Norwegian tradition. To which I can only say, "Good."

Via Climate Progress

A glut of acorns, or a bad case of The Plague?

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 3:46 PM Sat

What would you make of medieval historical records that prominently note the occurrence of large crops of acorns? It's a bit of a weird departure from the kinds of things these records normally care about, i.e. battles and the deaths of famous people. In fact, the people keeping these records didn't even eat acorns, and other, more useful, crops aren't mentioned at all.

But, sometimes, an acorn might be more than just an acorn, according to a 2003 paper by classicist David Woods. That's because the Latin word for "little nut" and the word sometimes used to describe the swollen lymph nodes caused by the Capital-P Plague are one and the same.

The Latin term glandularius is the root of our word for gland; etymologically, glandula means 'little nuts' because this is what they felt like when palpated. There is at least one other example of a plague record using glandulara as a descriptor. In c. 660 the Burgundian 'Chronicle of Fredegar' describes the 599 plague of Marseilles as a cladis glanduaria.

So "a spark of leprosy and an unheard of abundance of nuts", becomes the far more logical, "we've had some issues with leprosy and The Plague this year".

Contagions: Plague among the nuts

Image via Wikipedia user Twid, under CC

The Venn diagram of cardigans. (via Information is Beautiful) — Xeni • Comments: 3

Just look at this awesome banana skateboard.

Cory Doctorow at 1:14 PM Sat

Just look at it.

Hack Job/Brian Tellock (via Neatorama)

Previously:

Craigslist's "adult services" section blocked after human trafficking/prostitution controversy

Xeni Jardin at 1:10 PM Sat

From today's New York Times:

Craigslist, the popular classifieds Web site, has blocked access to its "adult services" section and replaced the link with a black label with the word "censored."

Bizarre CNN op-ed accuses Craiglist of profiting from child sex ...

Demon children want you to eat

Cory Doctorow at 1:08 PM Sat

A pair of vintage ads featuring demonic children shilling comestibles: Stokely's Green Beans, 1953 and Swift Meats, 1957 -- both part of an engrossing kid-themed Vintage Ads contest.

Whiskey from diabetics' urine

David Pescovitz at 10:39 AM Sat

Resources Gilpinfamilywhisa
Gilpin Family whisky is a new single malt whisky made from the urine of diabetics. Creator James Gilpin doesn't sell the stuff, but rather gives away bottles as a public health statement. From the product page:

Sugar heavy urine excreted by diabetic patients is now being utilized for the fermentation of high-end single malt whisky for export. The Whisky market is growing faster then any other alcoholic beverage worldwide. With a prevalent genetic weakness being exposed in the northern hemisphere leading to a sharp rise in type two diabetes, economists have found a new exportable commodity to exploit and are keen to capitalize on this resource quickly.
Large amounts of sugar are excreted on a daily basis by type-two diabetic patients especially amongst the upper end of our aging population. As a result of this diabetic patients toilets often have unusual scale build up in the basin due and rapid mould growths as the sugar put into the system acts as nutrients for mould and bacteria growth. Is it plausible to suggest that we start utilizing our water purification systems in order to harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance?

Gilpin Family Whiskey from urine (JamesGilpin.com)

"Whizky, world's first bio whisky aged with granny whiz" (The Independent, thanks Carlo Longino!)

From the BB Archives: Charting The Frozen Continent

David Pescovitz at 10:20 AM Sat

Features Antarctica Pic2
As summer draws to close, I suggest a trip to Antarctica in this lovely Boing Boing special feature from our archives, Maggie Koerth-Baker's "Charting The Frozen Continent." When you get there, be sure to also scroll right to explore the photos! An excerpt:

"Oh, it's 32 and sunny here," says Claire Porter, a University of Minnesota graduate student working on the ostensibly frozen continent. "We spent the whole day outside hiking and playing around."
Antarctica, as it turns out, defies all sorts of expectations. Far from a blank, white canvas, the bottom of the world is a beautiful place, full of breathtaking peaks and stark, rock-strewn valleys studded with cerulean lakes. But the things that make Antarctica so fascinating—and such an important center for scientific research—also make it a difficult place to work. Porter is part of a team of scientists whose job is to make other scientists' jobs easier.

"Charting the Frozen Continent"

For more Boing Boing features, click here!

Zombies get "red light camera" tickets, too

Xeni Jardin at 8:36 AM Sat

Video artist and viral genius Joe Sabia, whose work we've featured before on Boing Boing Video and the Virgin America in-flight Boing Boing TV channel, shares word of a project he just completed for the energy drink company behind Zombie Blood Energy Potion.

"Red Light Fright was highly experimental, highly speculative, and the results were hilarious," Joe says.

"We basically loaded an intersection with zombies, intentionally blew a right light, and received a ticket in the mail with a ton of photos showing branded zombies in action. No arrests, no manhunts for us (we hope). just good, safe clean fun."

Did the zombies really get the parking tickets? Are they real zombies? Are they real parking tickets? He won't tell me. Either way, a clever viral marketing stunt on what I'm told was a very low budget.

REDLIGHTFRIGHT.COM

Teach your children to smoke ad

Cory Doctorow at 6:17 AM Sat

Parenting advice from another era: give your squalling children a pipe to smoke! Right up there with "Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes."

Smoke Duke of Durham

Abusive parenting brought on by bad coffee: vintage Sanka ad

Cory Doctorow at 6:12 AM Sat

Sanka: because your old man beats you when he's got the jitters.

Has his old man been hitting the coffee again?

Sweet little steampunk automaton

Cory Doctorow at 6:11 AM Sat

Kamill1 sez, "My first attempt at an automata, I think it turned out pretty well! Super fun build. A little wink to Jake Von Slatt, sitting down to play the pipe organ. Huzzah!"

Steampunk Automata "Orchestra Von Slatt", Completed Friday, Sep 3 2010 (Thanks, kamill1, via Submitterator!)

Exec at troubled hedge fund busted for operating "complex" weed farm in her home

Xeni Jardin at 9:01 PM Fri

Teri Buhl at Forbes reports on a sign of the times:

"An executive at a billion-dollar Connecticut hedge fund was arrested on felony charges of allegedly running a huge year-round pot farm inside her home. But her boyfriend says the cops have it wrong, that they're goat farmers, not dope farmers."

(Image: A CC-licensed photo by Flickr user r0bz.)

A bill introduced in Canada's House of Commons would give US Department of Homeland Security officials "final say over who may board aircraft in Canada if they are to fly over the United States en route to a third country." (via @ioerror) — Xeni • Comments: 31

Mary Roach: Death In Space

David Pescovitz at 4:38 PM Fri

Deathspaceeee
For some uplifting weekend reading, I suggest Mary Roach's excellent Boing Boing special feature "Death In Space." From the intro:

The U.S. has plans for a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s. The ESA and Russia have sketched out a similar joint mission, and it is claimed that China's space program has the same objective. Apart from their destination, all these plans share something in common: extraordinary danger for the explorers. What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth?
Swedish ecologists Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak and Peter Mäsak are the inventors of an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation and burial, called Promession. The technique entails freezing a body, vibrating it into tiny pieces, and then freeze-drying the pieces, which can then be used as compost to grow a memorial shrub or tree.

"Death In Space"

Interview with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Witch of Hebron

Mark Frauenfelder at 4:14 PM Fri

Matt Staggs of Suvudu interviewed James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century) about his forthcoming novel, The Witch of Hebron, which is anther novel set in the same universe as his end-of-cheap-energy novel, World Made by Hand (which I liked and reviewed here).

Staggs: Both World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron take place in the world of The Long Emergency, which you’ve written about in the non-fiction title of the same name. Could you very briefly explain what the Long Emergency is for our readers?
Kunstler: The Long Emergency is the culminating crisis of modernity, growing out of the limits to growth, resource scarcity, and the collapse of the complex systems that keep us going — everything ranging from industrialized farming to oil-based transportation to electronic communication. It can also be described as the crisis of over-investments in complexity — resolving in a traumatic wave of sudden de-complexifying.
Staggs: Reading your novels, I find myself in some ways envious of the sense of community enjoyed by the residents of Union Grove, yet I remain aware of – and wary of – the incredible loss of life that our world would experience following a collapse of our oil-based infrastructure. On the whole, would you imagine that we’d gain or lose more in such a world?
Kunstler: It’s part of the tension of the story that we are constantly having to measure what’s been gained against what’s been lost. The losses are perhaps more obvious: comfort, certainty, and the whole prosthetic nimbus of technology that we are so used to. The gains are perhaps more subtle: making your own music, enjoying the sounds, scents, and sensations of nature much more directly, the blessed absence of cars and other motor-driven annoyances, unmediated relations with family, friends, and community members, a reconnection with the elemental ceremonies of birth, death, the harvest, the coming of spring, etc.

Interview with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Witch of Hebron

Adorable baby octopuses, living happy and free

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 3:16 PM Fri

To make up for the research kittens.

Note: This starts out somewhat depressingly, with the body of a female octopus that died after reproducing—as all octopuses, male and female, do. But it quickly gets past that, and on to the wee, baby octopuses, floating around the sea. Turn off the sound to block out the sad song, and focus on that.

From jenniel, via Submitterator

Research on horribly cute kittens is kind of horrible looking

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 2:50 PM Fri

"In order to study the way that experience can influence the brain, there has been a great deal of research done on the visual cortex of the kitten."

Oh, this is going to end badly, isn't it?

This short documentary from the 1970s explains, in depth, some research that I mentioned earlier this year in a BoingBoing article on fetal senses. Long story short: Kittens are born blind and do a lot of their sight-linked brain development in the first few weeks after birth. Because of this, they make a handy model for studying how the brains of human fetuses form neural connections and how our sense of sight develops in the womb. It's important research that has helped medical science better understand how to care for premature human babies, besides adding valuable details to our understanding of the brain, in general.

Unfortunately, because kittens are adorable, said very important research looks almost comically evil when filmed. Seriously, this video is one "Thittens" joke away from working as a segment of Look Around You.

So, thanks, blorgggg (Thorgggg?), for sending this video in via Submitterator. I'm sure the Moderators will be thanking you (and me) as well. I do ask that, as we get into the inevitable discussion on animal research, you remember that the scientists involved did not raise kittens in completely dark rooms for sociopathic shits and giggles, but because they thought the potential benefits of the research outweighed the (mostly temporary) damage done to the kittens' visual abilities. You may disagree with that calculation—and you're welcome to do so. In fact, I think that complex discussion about ends and means in specific studies is valuable. And interesting. Far more so (on both counts) than simply labeling anyone who uses animals for research as a for-kicks abuser of fluffy baby kitties.

What Things Do: excellent webcomics

Mark Frauenfelder at 2:48 PM Fri

Panels from "Unraveling," part 2, by Jordan Crane

What Things Do is a stunningly good webcomics site, launched by comics artist Jordan Crane and featuring some of the best independent comics artists around, including Gabrielle Bell, Abner Dean, Sammy Harkham, Jaime Hernandez, Kevin Huizenga, Ted May, John Porcellino, Ron Regé Jr., Steve Weissman, and Dan Zettwoch.

Many of the artists here seem to have been mildly influenced by Tintin's Hergé (and Joost Swarte). This is not a big surprise, since Jordan Crane selects all the artists for his site, and Crane himself shows a little Hergé in his work. (I can't think of a better artist than Hergé from which to draw inspiration.)

The comics in What Things Do all have the same yellow-gray color scheme (with a few exceptions) that give the site and elegant cohesiveness. The comics are large clear and readable.

In addition to showcasing the work of contemporary cartoonists, What Things Do, runs "decades-old work" from worthy but not-so-famous cartoonists, as well as articles about comics. What Things Do: excellent webcomics

The Imp, a great journal about comic books, now as free PDFs

Mark Frauenfelder at 2:28 PM Fri

The-Imp-Zine

Daniel Raeburn has done the world a favor by creating free PDF versions of his outstanding self-published journal about comic books, The Imp. Though he published only four issues (I have them all in hard copy) Raeburn's journal is regarded as a masterpiece of comic book criticism. Each issue covered a single subject: Daniel Clowes in Vol 1, Jack Chick in Vol 2, Chris Ware in Vol 3, and Mexican "historietas perversas" in Vol 4.

The Comics Journal called The Imp “One of the very best things to come out of comics.”

Here's what This American Life creator Ira Glass said about The Imp:

It was clearly the work of an obsessed person, in the very best way possible. A really smart obsessed person. There was a kind of Talmudic completeness to the whole thing, in a way that journalism rarely even aspires to. Not much journalism tries to be so emotional, and funny, and analytical, and thorough. There’s really very little like it out there. The closest you get is one of those big stories they used to do in the old New Yorker, where at the end you feel like there’s nothing else that needs to be said on the subject. I read it admiringly and jealously. In the years since I read the Chris Ware issue I’ve actually become friends with Chris Ware, real friends, we talk all the time, and probably a third of what I know about Chris still comes from that issue of The Imp. It was that complete and emotionally insightful.

Stefan Jones, who also bought The Imp in hardcopy says,

The issue about Jack Chick is an amazing piece of journalism. It makes you feel some sympathy for the loon behind all of those hate-filled comic tracts.
Much of issue 3 was reprinted in a monograph about Ware. I prefer The Imp version, which resembles one of Ware's big-format comic collections.
Volume Four was mind-boggling. I'd never heard of the Mexican comics in question. I keep meaning to get my hands on some.

Download The Imp here

Cannabis Catering

David Pescovitz at 1:53 PM Fri

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Cannabis Catering offers gourmet meals laced with pot. The delivery service isn't cheap, around $100/person, but damn those pot-atoes look tasty. And yes, you need a medical marijuana card to order. From Fast Company:

The idea for Cannabis Catering came to (Chef Frederick) Nesbitt when he learned that his friend's diabetic mother had been diagnosed with cancer. "I would bring back edibles [from the dispensary], but they're so high in high-fructose corn syrup that she was high off sugar rather than being medicated," he says. So Nesbitt began experimenting with his own pot food--starting with mashed potatoes.

"Meet the Personal Chef of Pot" (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)

WTF stamp

Cory Doctorow at 1:44 PM Fri

For all your puzzlement needs: the self-inking WTF stamp.

WTF Stamp (Thanks, Alice!)

Jewelry made from laminated, polished cross-sections of books

Cory Doctorow at 1:26 PM Fri

UK designer Jeremy May makes jewelry by laminating and polishing pages from old books together to make striking pieces: "The beauty of the jewels extends within the piece: text and images pass all the way though the object, only exposed at the surfaces - giving a tantalising glimpse of the book within."

LITTLEFLY (Thanks, Irene Delse via Submitterator!)

Flying carpet sofa

Cory Doctorow at 12:53 PM Fri

Tonio de Roover's East meets West sofa is meant to evoke flying carpets. I can't figure out how comfortable it'd be, but it looks great.

East meets west (via Craft)

Old tabriz rug becomes bear rug

Cory Doctorow at 12:49 PM Fri

An unnamed artist transformed a worn antique tabriz wool rug into a wonderful, fanciful bear rug. I imagine the reported "repaired knots and moth damage" just enhance its charm. 87" x 59", $1800 from CS Post.

Repurposed Antique Tabriz Wool Rug (via Make)

Resignation cake sender has invoice cake delivered to People.com

David Pescovitz at 12:41 PM Fri

Last year, I posted about how W. Neil Berrett quit his job by presenting his boss with a resignation letter on a sheet cake. Here's the story behind Berrett's latest cake document, a frosted invoice delivered today to People.com:

Today I sent an invoice on a cake to People.com. I'm demanding $500 from them after my Cake of Resignation photo was used without permission and without payment.
Here's a timeline:
On August 10 this year I received an e-mail from an employee of People Magazine requesting permission to use my cake resignation photo in an article. This is shortly after the Jet Blue Steward event, prompting many 'Weird ways people have quit their jobs' news stories.
I replied to People and said they needed a license to use my photo - meaning they have to pay me to use it. I did not receive a reply.
On August 11 my image was used without authorization and without payment on People.com, in an article titled "Take This Job and Shove It! 8 Memorable Quitters".
I sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding my image be removed from their website. Six days later I receive an e-mail stating my image had been removed from their website. I received an offer at that time of $75 for the use of my image. That may have been reasonable if my photo's copyright had not been willfully infringed and used for six days.
So, today I sent the photo director an invoice for a usage license of my cake resignation photo. This cake was delivered today, September 3rd.

Invoice Cake to People.com (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

"They're into everything, from the Russian prostitute rings in resorts like Cannes and St Tropez to gassing tourists in their villa and stealing everything they've got. Bosses are now based here permanently, with foot soldiers working for them, often flying in for set periods before returning home with their profits in cash. The numbers really are unprecedented at the moment."—a French police officer, on the "military-like precision" with which Russian mafia are said to be taking over the French Riviera. (Telegraph UK) — Xeni • Comments: 11

The Student Loan Scheme: gateway drug to debt slavery

Xeni Jardin at 12:33 PM Fri

Information designer Jess Bachman has a new piece out which isn't so much an info-graphic as a graphic article. Jess explains:

It deals with the nightmare that has become student loans. Default rates on student loans are worse than sub-prime mortgages, and the total debt is bigger than all our credit card debts combined. It's a huge issue than many people are keeping quiet about. College students are a hugely under-represented and unadvocated group in Washington, and what we and the government are doing to them is just wrong.

Link to the full-sized graphic on CollegeScholarships.org.

Adafruit Industries has posted a pair of terrific videos in which Apple's "Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs talk about their short career building illegal telephone equipment, aka 'blue boxes.' Interesting how their two stories differ...the engineer and the marketer." Bonus: Cap'n Crunch! — Xeni • Comments: 3

Hai Karate

David Pescovitz at 11:57 AM Fri

Axe is for wimps. Hai Karate: "Be careful how you use it." (Thanks, Mark!)

Well, I know what I'm doing this weekend: here's a recipe for how to make sriracha hot sauce, the ubiquitous Asian restaurant condiment in that clear plastic bottle with the little white rooster on the side. (via Farhad) — Xeni • Comments: 22

Friday tunes: "Chola Maati Ke Ram," from the Peepli Live soundtrack

Xeni Jardin at 11:39 AM Fri

I drove south last weekend to a predominantly Indian suburb of Los Angeles to catch Peepli Live (Wikipedia) at a movie theater that plays only films from India.

Its was terrific, a poignant and LOL-filled commentary on the state of Indian news media, and the injustice and tragedy that rural communities face. Unsurprisingly, the soundtrack was full of great tunes. My favorite was the song embeded above, "Chola Maati Ke Ram," performed live here by Nageen Tanvir at a launch event for the film.

The lyrics of this song are about human mortality. Loosely and imperfectly: Time spares no one... death spares no one... our bodies are clay robes that will eventually disintegrate, so it is best to dedicate our lives to honoring Lord Ram, and all that is eternal.

Incidentally: Today, Kamla Bhatt will be interviewing the Indo-fusion rock band Indian Ocean, who performed several songs in the Peepli Live Soundtrack, at 12.30 pm PST on Stanford radio station KZSU. Listen online here.

The physics of breaking stuff with your fists

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:50 AM Fri

iO9 recently ran a story on how martial artists are able to break boards and cement blocks, using their hands rather than mystical powers. I thought it was pretty neat, but then I read an interesting counter-analysis by science journalist (and, significantly, martial arts practitioner) John Rennie.

iO9 is right about the lack of magic powers, he says. But they got the physics wrong. Key slip-up: Assuming martial artists strike like a cobra—fast punch, with a quick pull back at the end—when they have their smashing fun times. iO9's theory was that that movement caused the boards to bend and snap. But that's not how it works, Rennie says. In fact, martial artists are taught to follow through with their punches, aiming not at the board-to-be-broken, but at a point beyond it.

So how's the breaking really done? Rennie quotes an episode of the awesome old PBS show Newton's Apple:

One key to understanding brick breaking is a basic principle of motion: The more momentum an object has, the more force it can generate. When it hit the brick, [karateka Ron] McNair's hand had reached a speed of 11 meters per second (24 miles per hour). At this speed, his hand exerted a whopping force of 3,000 Newton's -or 675 pounds-on the concrete. A slab of concrete could likely support the weight of a few people weighing a total of 675 pounds (306 kilograms). But apply that amount of force concentrated into an area as small as a fist and the concrete slab will break.

The fact that martial artists also pick their materials very carefully doesn't hurt, either.

When breaking wooden boards, you use pine (not oak, not mahogany) that isn't marred by dense knots, cut ¾ inch thick and about 12 inches on the diagonal; you hit them to break along the wood's natural grain. (It's not playing by Hoyle but some breakers have been known to bake their boards in ovens before demonstrations to make them more brittle.) One good board, if held securely so that it won't move on impact, is so easy to break that even those with no training at all can be taught to do it in under five minutes.

P.S.: Rennie's blog, The Gleaming Retort, is part of a new family of science blogs, hosted by the Public Library of Science—a non-profit that publishes open-access science journals. I highly recommend checking out the entire PLoS Blogosphere.

Cock-touching forbidden in Kyoto

Mark Frauenfelder at 9:55 AM Fri

I didn't touch it.

The Wilderness Downtown: Chrome experiment by Chris Milk and Arcade Fire

David Pescovitz at 9:52 AM Fri

Wildernessdownnnn
The Wilderness Downtown is perhaps the best browser-dominating Net art piece I've experienced since Jodi.org's best work more than a decade ago. An experimental, interactive film by Chris Milk, it's a tour-de-force for the Chrome browser and a lovely visual poem to accompany Arcade Fire's excellent "We Used To Wait" from their album The Suburbs. I won't give the "story" away, but I found it to be a deeply personal and moving experience.

Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering... this Chrome Experiment has them all. "The Wilderness Downtown" is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire's song "We Used To Wait" and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.

The Wildreness Downtown (Thanks, Jean Hagan!)

"Behind the Work: Arcade Fire 'The Wilderness Downtown'" (Creativity Online)

Thanks for reading and "May the scientific method always be with you."

David Ng at 9:47 AM Fri

David Ng (Twitter) is a science literacy academic based at the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. He is currently on sabbatical at London’s Natural History Museum, and encourages you to check out the PHYLO project.

201009021342
Phylomon cards: "EUROPEAN HONEY BEE, I CHOOSE YOU!"

I had a great experience here at Boing Boing, and want to send on a big thanks to Mark, Cory, Xeni, David, Rob and the rest of the crew for letting me spend some quality time here. I'm also grateful to the many museum folks who let me chat with them, and so graciously showed me their projects. Kudos especially to Bob Bloomfield for the warm welcome and the many discussions on biodiversity advocacy. Hopefully, my posts didn't dilute the overall awesomeness here at Boing Boing, and at the every least, I hope a few more people are interested in Nagoya COP10. Also, it was fun to do my part to increase the Chewbacca quotient (even if only slightly) here at the site.

With that, I'd like to end with two last requests. Both related to biodiversity: one is kind of worthy, the other a little goofy. One requires folks of the artistic bent, the other maybe a more scientific approach.

Read the rest

Nagoya COP10 Primer #4: with reference to Twitter

David Ng at 9:06 AM Fri

David Ng (Twitter) is a science literacy academic based at the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia. He is currently on sabbatical at London’s Natural History Museum, and encourages you to check out the PHYLO project.

Continuing from:

Nagoya COP10 Primer #1: with references to Star Wars Nagoya COP10

Primer #2: with a reference to Kevin Bacon Nagoya COP10 sidebar: UNFCCC YOU!

Nagoya COP10 Primer #3: with a small reference to LOL cats

So what should be done at Nagoya? This is the 20 million species plus question. And for all of the criticism that I've (and others) have proffered, we should appreciate that the task at hand is going to be quite the challenge. If nothing else, this is immediately clear from the often anthrocentric (humans rule the Earth and are just playing our role on the evolutionary front, so deal with it!) commentary left on biodiversity pieces throughout the internet.

There is a somewhat official Strategic Plan document out there, one that (with a remarkable lack of brevity) highlights 2020 goals and attempts to identify the process and partners to be involved. It's worth a look, although probably best absorbed by taking in the tables shown on page 19 on. It involves a list of some 20 different target statements. Some of which are short, bouncy, although still vague like a twitter tweet:

1. By 2020, everyone is aware of the value of biodiversity and what steps they can take to protect it.

Others are more to the point:

11. By 2020, At least 15% of land and sea areas, including the most critical terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats, have been protected through effectively managed protected areas and/or other means, and integrated into the wider land- and seascape.

A few establish direct talking points for individual COP members:

16. By 2020, Each Party has an appropriate, up-to-date, effective and operational national biodiversity strategy, consistent with this Strategic Plan, based on adequate assessment of biodiversity, its value and threats, with responsibilities allocated among sectors, levels of government, and other stakeholders, and coordination mechanisms are in place to ensure implementation of the actions needed.

And this one, almost works as a haiku: