A Russian actor's group called "Big Difference" (Bolshaya Raznitsa / Большая Разница) remade The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin silent film. (Via Neatorama)

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Somebody has made the dreamy floating wonderworld from the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle out of Lego. The details are quite impressive, and blogging about this is making me want to watch the movie again.

Imagine's Brickzone's Flickr via Japanator

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The radio dials shown here "represent only a small portion" of Michael Feldt's dial archive.

Gallery of antique radio tuning dials (Via Draplin Design)

Human-shaped root

Roootboyyy Zheng Dexun, a farmer in southwest China's Sichuan Province, recently found this anthropomorphic root. It's the tonic herb He Shou Wu, Chinese knotweed.
Human-shaped He Shou Wu (Shanghai Daily, via Fortean Times)

Harbin, China, home to the Institute of Technology's robot football research group, will host a robot olympics in 2010. According to the BBC News, "Entry to the competition will be restricted to robots resembling humans. They must possess two arms and legs. Wheels are banned."

Rosemarie Fiore: Fireworks paintings

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Artist Rosemarie Fiore paints with fireworks. Here's more about the process. (via Eric Wareheim, sort of)

9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

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(CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy)

Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.

Fake Steve Jobs points to the NYT's kid-gloves piece on Zynga, published the same week as bloggers exposed Zynga's scummy doings, as reason number one for Big Print's Decline: "The truth is, if newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing -- muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit."

Mind Hacks blog Googles the phrase "psychologist says", with headesky results. The problem: "Psychologist" doesn't always mean what you think it means. Some stories quoted from peer-reviewed research, others turned to therapists with little-to-no academic or research experience, and everything in between.

Pigeon Impossible

Lucas Martell's new animated film, Pigeon Impossible: "A rookie secret agent is faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase." (Thanks, Joaquin Baldwin)

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This menu from a Chinese and Japanese restaurant in Massachussetts invites you to try Item C14, "Beef Brisket in Wikipedia Flavor." (Consumerist via Susannah Breslin)

"The person-to-person donor-to-borrower connections created by Kiva are partly fictional. I suspect that most Kiva users do not realize this." The storm unleashed by a blog post exploring a model in which loans go to microfinance institutions, not necessarily the specific Mr. goat herder or Ms. cassava farmer upon whose face you click. (NYT)

"Malcolm X was bisexual. Get over it." A most provocative headline from the Guardian during Black History Month in the UK.

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Yesterday, my husband went hunting around the Internets for a new dining room lamp. This is one of the options he presented me with. Only $189. Cheap!

Sadly, no Battlestar model is available. Or a Death Star. I might have gone for a Death Star.

Star Ship Chandelier from eLights

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You spend a lot of time online. Maybe it comes with the job. Maybe your idea of a perfect weekend is to be perched in front of your computer reading blogs, buying shit you don't need on Amazon, Tweeting and Facebooking, or surfing YouPorn. But at what point are you considered a bona fide Internet addict? To find out, I called up a psychologist and a fancy rehab center who specialize in this type of thing.

I must admit there was a part of me that went into reporting this story with a smirk. Internet addiction? Aren't we all Internet addicts to some extent? And then I talked to Coleen Moore of the Illinois Institute of Addiction Recovery, who told me that 20% of all addicts who check into the rehab center are there for Internet addiction. Some of them use drugs along with the Internet so they can stay awake and online longer, and others get urinary tract infections or wet themselves because they don't want to take bathroom breaks. Carpal tunnel and eye strain are only the tip of the iceberg. For some, Internet addiction is a very real psychological issue that calls for medical help.


The Fables comics are an infinitely entertaining and moving series of comics about a world in which every fable, legend and belief of humanity has been chased from the worlds of fantasy to exile on Earth, hiding in a secret side-street in Manhattan. The chaser is The Adversary, an evil emperor, and his numberless goblin shock-troops. This is such rich material, as it allows for tellings and retellings of every beloved story of humanity.

In Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, writer Bill Willingham tells a key piece of the story in prose form, and proves that he's every bit as wonderful a prose-writer as he is a comics-writer. Peter and Max is the story of two brothers, Peter (Piper, also Pumpkin Eater) and Max (the Pied Piper), who grow estranged from one another on the eve of the Adversary's invasion of their homeworld, and lose themselves in a blood-soaked Black Forest, where they are both fired by the crucible of war and magic into men whose innocence will never be recovered.

Max is the villain here, jealous of Peter's inheritance of Frost, the magic flute of their father. Max acquires Fire, another powerful magic flute, from Frau Totenkinder, the evil witch of the Black Forest, and he and Fire warp each other into something monstrous.

Peter, meanwhile, is orphaned in Hamelin, where he becomes an accomplished thief, escaping from the worst circumstances with the help of Frost, and forever pining for his lost love, Bo Peep, disappeared into the evil woods.

The action moves from this mythic backstory to a contemporary tale in which Max has come at last to contemporary Fabletown, and Peter must hunt him, even though it means his certain doom.

As with the Fables comics, Willingham manages to merge the gentle, meandering feel of fairy tales with a breakneck, contemporary pacing -- a very clever trick indeed. The characters and stories are very engaging, the tension real, the mythos powerful. There's everything to like about Peter & Max, even if you've never cracked a Fables comic (though you probably will, once you've finished reading the book).

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel

3D printer jargon in action

This Shapeways tutorial on "Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing" is not only useful for 3D printers, it is a treasure-trove of 3D printing jargon.
If you have a model created from several objects or meshes, first make sure that each individual mesh is manifold (water-tight). You can tell this by going into edit mode, pressing A (once if any vertices are selected or twice otherwise) to select none, then hit ctrl-alt-shift-M (on a Mac it's ctrl-opt-shift-M).

Any vertices that get selected when you press that key combination are non-manifold vertices that have to be fixed. Often, fixing these is just a matter of creating new faces (F key) out of sets of 3 or 4 vertices. Sometimes these are stray vertices that are unattached to anything, or are attached to just one vertex by an edge. These can usually be deleted, unless they are intentional (such as those vertices uses to affect the shape while using a subsurf modifier), in which case you want to wait until after you've applied your modifier to delete them. Another possibility are vertices that are part of more than one overlapping faces...

Open the copy of the file, and select each object, one at a time. In object mode, apply all modifiers, then switch to Edit mode, hit A once or twice to select all vertices, then press ctrl-T to triangulate all faces. I don't know why, but Blender does a much better job with Boolean operations if the meshes are triangulated.

Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing (via Beyond the Beyond)

Color film of 1927 London

This early (1927) color film shows 10 minutes of remarkable vintage London -- especially the Petticoat Lane market scenes around 6:00, which are a rare glimpse into the life of everyday people (it's even cooler if you were actually down on Petticoat Lane yesterday, as I was!).

The Open Road London (1927) (via Making Light)

Dan Gillmor sez, "Slow food was a great idea. Maybe we need 'slow news' in an era of accelerating -- and wrong -- information."
Like many other people who've been burned by believing too quickly, I've learned to put almost all of what journalists call "breaking news" into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, "interesting if true." That is, even though I gobble up "the latest" from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it's unreliable if not false.

It's my own version of "slow news" -- an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day...

But this isn't about saving the old guard. It's mostly about persuading audiences to, among other things, "take a deep breath" before leaping to conclusions, as PaidContent's Staci Kramer tweeted. (I don't trust journalists to do this anymore, with too few exceptions.)

In a practical sense, we can help it along if we find ways to preserve a happy by-product of the manufacturing process. Or, as Clay puts it in an email, "the idea -- that we have to get back, by design, the kinds of things we used to get as side-effects of the environment -- is so important right now, and especially for news."

Toward a Slow-News Movement (Thanks, Dan!)
CCrawford sez, "Michelle Khine couldn't afford the $100,000 fabrication gear to make micro-fluidic chips needed for chip-based diagnostic tests. She turned to Shrinky-Dinks and found a new way to solve the problem."
To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn't view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. "I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place," she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. "I had no idea people were going to be so interested," Khine says.

A children's toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips (Thanks, CCrawford!)

(Image: Dave Lauridsen)

Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp's websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals

For months (years?) Rupert Murdoch has been waving his jowls around and shouting that Google is stealing from him by not paying to index his material. And all along, we've been saying, "Pffft, right. If you don't like it, just add a robots.txt file that tells Google not to index you. Until you do, s... more

How the ambient sound at Walt Disney World works

Noah sez, "An interview with the man who designed the ambient sound at Disney World, ensuring a constant experience rather than one that ends with the end of the ride. It was initially a little uneven, with sound changing volumes depending on where you stood, so they used algorithms to position 15,... more

Man walks into own funeral

On the Day of the Dead (Dia de Finados) in Brazil, Ademir Jorge Goncalves walked into his own funeral. His family had thought he had died in a car wreck but Goncalves had actually been out drinking. According to CNN, "the sight of... Goncalves alive shocked relatives, some of whom tried to jump out ... more

Sleep: more important than you think (Psychology Today)

"Getting enough sleep, on a regular cycle, may make us a better version of ourselves. And even though my greatest wish is usually more time in the day, I'd rather feel good and perform well than get to be a crankier, impulsive, sick version of myself for a few extra hours a day."... more

Hitler: football coach?

The Scottish veterans charity Erskine surveyed 2,000 young people between the ages of nine and 15 about World War I and II. Apparently, five percent thought that Hitler was a German football coach; sixteen percent believed that Auschwitz is a WWII theme park; five percent said the Holocaust was a ba... more

Ebook license "agreements" are a ripoff

In today's Observer Business column, John Naughton discusses what a ripoff it is for ebook vendors to "sell" you books with abusive, multi-thousand word "license agreements," pretending that because you bought your book over the network, it wasn't a sale, and so you don't get to own it. These "lice... more

Carrier bags made from Indian newspapers and Bollywood posters

These newspaper carrier bags are made in India by an NGO that provides education and shelter to street kids. The bags themselves are very sweet and good for several uses before they're ready for the recycling box, and make good use of the striking designs from the newspapers they're folded from (I ... more

Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing the elimination of copyeditor jobs

A copyeditor at the Toronto Star greeted the news that union copyeditor jobs were being eliminated in favor of freelancers by heavily editing the publisher's memo announcing same, pointing out all the ways in which the publisher could benefit from editorial aid. This is very funny stuff, but hav... more

Zoomquilt II: Flash zoom-through painting

The Zoomquilt II, a 2007 sequel to the jarring Zoomquilt of 2004, is an even more hypnotic Flash zoom-through collaborative painting with bits from more than 30 different artists. Zoomquilt 2 (via @Chris_Carter)... more

What MP3 player should I buy?

I'm in the market for a new MP3 player -- my second-gen iPod Nano is finally dead, and I don't want to buy another iPod, or any other player with DRM built in. I figure that any company that wants to devote its engineers to figuring out how to frustrate my desires doesn't really want my business. W... more

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  • "This is really freaking awesome. AND it's really good to see that she's good at traditional artwork, too (like her oil paintings). It feels like less of a gimmick, although if it WAS a gimmick, it would still be really cool...."
  • "The part I love best about this article is:"I can't engage the 9/11 issue on the same terms that a Truther does, because I'd have to be a Truther myself. " Yes. Why bother to argue with them? I can take evidence out of context from now til the next century to prove my fundamental hypothesis of doubt and paranoia (no such thing, by the way, see Brainspore's comment), and you and your so-called 'scientific method' and 'preponderance of evidence' can do nothing about it. I mean, who has time to go through..."
  • ""Compare this to "says mechanical engineer" -- the range of claims is dramatically smaller, and less wild. And here we see the difference between the hard and "soft" sciences..." None of us would want to live in a world where psychology is a hard science. Unpredictability is a good thing...."
  • "Double Boinged! http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/04/creepy-alien-springs.html...."
  • "Thanks for posting that link, Mojave. It was a real eye-opener. I never really understood until now why 9/11 conspiracy theorists put so much emphasis on the dancing mover guys. Now I see it's simple antisemitism. How very disappointing...."