Becky sez, "The Boing Boing discussion of the woman who let her kid find his way home alone on the subway got me interested in comparing that risk relative to the risk of a child dying in a car accident. What I discovered en route is a treasure trove of car accident data, which can be sliced and diced any way you want it--click the Query tab for an array of very specific variables. (Want to know how many people died in car accidents in Tompkins County, New York, on Martin Luther King Day in 2004 while riding in the back seat on the right-hand side of a vehicle traveling at 23 miles an hour driven by a female living in zip code 60656? No problem. And that barely scratches the surface of the possibilities.) I answered my initial question, then played with the thing for hours." Link (Thanks, Becky!)

I love Wikipedia's chart of the video game Quake and its many descendants unto the nth generation. Link (via Wonderland)

Meredith sez,

There's a bunch of FUD going around the internets today about orphaned works, thanks to this article by Mark Simon of Animation World Network. He's urging artists to write their Congresscritters about eeeeevil orphaned works legislation and screaming about how it will effectively invalidate copyright for everyone except big evil registrars.

The problem? There is no such legislation before Congress (there was a bill in 2006, but it was never voted on; Marybeth Peters of the Copyright Office recently spoke before a subcommittee, but that's not a bill), and Simon is flat-out wrong about every concern he raises.

I've distilled his article down to six key misconceptions, and explained why each is wrong.

This is a really well-written piece. I've gotten a ton of email about Simon's bizarre rant, and it's nice to have a single, central place to point people to. Link (Thanks, Meredith!)

Greg Maletic's added another poster to his collection of wonderful fan-made attraction art for Disneyland rides; this one's for Space Mountain. Link

See also: Fan-made Disneyland attraction posters (Thanks, Greg!)

Today on Jon Taplin's blog, a sobering reality check on US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's irrational exuberance at the G-7:

Treasury Secretary Paulson, meeting with the G-7 Finance Ministers in Washington, tried to reassure them that the U.S. economic slump was only temporary.

He said he told his counterparts that checks from the stimulus package would go out in May and June and that they would add 500,000 to 600,000 jobs to the economy. He said that the federal government was helping more than a million homeowners keep their homes.

I worry that Paulson is engaging in reckless speculation about the future of the American job market. That somehow a flood of $600 checks next month from the government is going to lead to the creation of 600,000 new jobs is pure fantasy. That money is going to be used to pay down maxed out credit cards or keep cars from being repossessed. As Floyd Norris points out, the real jobless number (chart above) number for working men in America is not 4% but 13%. When someone gives up looking for work, the government no longer considers them unemployed–thus the huge discrepancy in the two figures.

Link

Boris sez, "A great video showing Bruce Sterling giving the closing talk at the conference 'Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign' in Potsdam, Germany. As usual, he creates a weird and wonderful vision of a technological and interface-driven future. The 'Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign' was one of the most important conferences on interaction design in 2007. All presentations from the conference are available as videos on the conference site."

Just listening to Bruce lay out the litany of devices that the mobile phone has replaced is a moment of sheer technological hilarity; and hearing him talk about why science fiction writers love talking computers (which all turn into Mr Clippy in the real world) is an eye-opening exercise in the difference between sensawunda and cognitive loading. Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

Lenore Skenazy, the author of the kick-ass column about letting her kid ride the subway alone, has started a blog called Free Range Kids, with a stirring call to action:

Do you ever... ..let your kid ride a bike to the library? Walk alone to school? Take a bus, solo? Or are you thinking about it? If so, you are raising a Free Range Kid! At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less. This site dedicated to sane parenting. Share your stories, tell your tips and maybe one day I will try to collect them in a book. Meantime, let's try to help our kids embrace life! (And maybe even clear the table.)

Link (via Making Light)

The Retro Robot built-your-own kit from JojoMangoes consists of panels that you stitch together with thread to make a handsome, Lost-in-Space-esque bot. Link (Thanks, Alice!)

Flavour Designs' "And the Dish Ran Away With the Spoon" bowls have a place to rest your spoon while you eat, sparing the tabletop/linen napkin between mouthfulls. Link (via Neatorama)

Red light cameras cause more accidents, and not just because drivers slam their brakes to avoid getting a robo-ticket -- also because the optimal money-making strategy for red-light cams is to make them less safe.

If city planners want to reduce traffic accidents at intersections, the best practice is to make the yellow last longer and insert a pause between the red signal on one side and the green on the other. However, if the objective is to make as much money as possible from red-light cameras, the best thing to do is shorten the yellow signal, eliminate the pause, and enrich the city coffers (even as you kill its citizens).

Leftlane reports that six cities have been caught turning down the yellows to make more money. Link (via /.)

The amazing illustrator Jordan Crane has produced a beautiful cover for Michael Chabon's forthcoming book Maps and Legends. It's pure Crane, that dreamlike, old-timey (but still sharp-edged) style that makes books like The Clouds Above so memorable. The treatment is really elaborate and luscious, an object lesson in making the physical book into a piece of genuine desiderata, an artifact you want to own as well as read.

The black cloth (or paper that resembles it) wraps around the hardcover jacket with debossing and foil. Then there are three bellybands with Jordan Crane’s illustrations (has anyone seen a book with three different belly bands?).

Link, Link to Maps and Legends (via Making Light)

Here's a great Naughty Secretary Club project for turning dead watches into weird-ass wrist-art with a little spray-paint and patience. In the era of wristwatch obsolescence, why not turn a dead cheap timepiece into a brightly colored commentary on time itself:

After your several thin coats of paint have dried slap those babies on your wrist and sport them around town. I have a hot dinner date and art viewing with my lady friends this evening and I fully intend to work these bad boys into my outfit. I think I might even wear all 3 at once because I am crazy like that.

Link (via Craft)

Jayel sez,

We have been trying to raise awareness about British MP Austin Mitchell's crusade to protect photographers' rights in the UK in FlickrCentral. And we are trying to help him out via a write-in campaign to other British MPs. It is a slow start, but we are doing everything we can including asking your readers for help.

We need information about:

1) Names and contact information of MPs
2) Civil liberties group that we can contact
3) Other ways we can raise awareness about this issue.

Link, Link to They Work For You (all MPs contact details and more) (Thanks, Jayel!)

See also: Brit MP calls for photographers' rights

Brad Emerson uses some python code to stitch together his time-lapse photos into animated impressionist paintings (he uses the free program Imagemagick to process the images). Link (Thanks, Brad!)

The European Court of Justice is forcing the EU into publishing its top-s33kr1t list of things you're not allowed to take on airplanes. Oh noes! Now the terrists will have the complete, exhaustive list of all the devices it is possible to crash an airplane with. We are doomed.

The fight waged by the Austrian passenger, who had been ordered from a plane before takeoff because of his sports equipment, forced the European Commission on Thursday to agree to publish a secret list of banned items for air passengers...

The case arose from an episode in September 2005, when Gottfried Heinrich was stopped at the security control of Vienna-Schwechat Airport because his carry-on baggage contained tennis rackets...

The criticism of the EU policy came in an opinion from an advocate general Eleanor Sharpston, a legal adviser to the European Court of Justice.

In unusually tough language, she attacked what she described as the "fundamental absurdity" in the position of the European Commission, which had kept the annex secret but had issued a press release describing some of its contents.

The adviser said the error was so big that EU rules on aircraft security should be declared "non-existent."

Link (Thanks, Loren!)

Matt sez, "A researcher at my University is working on modeling the behaviour of fruit flies. Turns out they have something like a Free Will, or at least they are not completely random in their flying patterns. Check out the video of drosophila in the flight simulator."

Their results caught computer scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the University of Hamburg by surprise: “I would have never guessed that simple flies who keep bouncing off the same window otherwise have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance.” Previous studies have shown that in nature, flies do not buzz about aimlessly but forage according to a sophisticated search strategy (this is how they find our wine glasses). The new research now suggests that such strategies arise spontaneously rather than being induced by spatial cues.

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Dwiff sez, "Here's an article - with color CLIPS!!! - on the aborted 1930's Bob Clampett animated adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars. Looks like it would have given the Fleischer Superman a real run for its money."

Burroughs and Clampett wanted to make a serious since fiction adventure while the studios (in typical studio fashion that foreshadowed decades of missteps) wanted to make a sci-fi slapstick comedy. One is left wondering how Clampett's John Carter of Mars would have shaped the science fiction films to come. But take heart, Carter fans, for Pixar is picking up that torch!

Link (Thanks, Dwiff!)

London-based artist Mandy Sutcliffe draws absolutely lovely artwork of children. Sutcliffe illustrates children's books and also sells prints of her wonderful art on Etsy, under the name of Belle & Boo. From an interview with Sutcliffe last year in Venus Zine:

When I asked Sutcliffe why she is interested in drawing children, she told me about time she spent in Paris during an exchange with her university. "The Parisian children had such an elegant, old fashioned charm about them, very classic clothes and hair styles. They reminded me a lot of the characters from my favorite childhood story books," she says. It is evident she has glorious memories of her childhood story books because the images she sketches are nothing short of innocent magic. She assures me that this inspiration goes deeper than just nostalgia and sweet sentiments. Even at a young age she appreciated the craft of illustrating. "I remember winning a book token when I was 9 and buying The Water Babies, illustrated by Mabel Lucie Attwell, purely because of the beautiful paintings. I still go back to it for inspiration."

Link to Belle & Boo shop on Etsy, Link to Venus Zine interview (Thanks, Kelly Sparks!)

Please indulge me. How often does someone get to wish their grandmother a happy 107th birthday?

(Here's a photo of my grandfather, who passed away at age 75 or so).

I'm curious -- how many Boing Boing readers have relatives 107 or older?

Johnny Lee, who wrote an article for MAKE 01 on making a $14 video camera stabilizer, demonstrated his awesome Wii remote hacks at the TED 2008 conference. Link

The Rules of Thumb website, created by Rules of Thumb author Tom Parker, is off and running, with thousand of user-submitted rules of thumb. Some are more useful than others, but they are almost always interesting.

DIRECTION CONVEYS TIME AND EMOTION
In advertising, art and photography, the direction the subject is looking or the flow of the composition can affect the tone of the image. Left is the past, right is the future, up is positive, down is negative. For example: a subject looking up and to the right is looking positively into the future. Submitted by: Jeremy Reid, Graphic Designer, Belleville, Ontario, Canada

MAXIMUM VALUE OF A SERVICE The value of any service is highest *before* the service has been rendered.

FINDING SMALL THINGS ON THE FLOOR To find something very small that you have dropped on the floor, lay a flashlight on the floor and rotate it. A small object looks a lot bigger when it has a shadow too.

WALKING WITH SMALL CHILDREN When walking with small children who are falling behind, the slower you walk, the slower they will walk, until they stop. If you maintain your pace, they will keep up with you, albeit somewhat behind.

Link

Erik says: "The Bush administration is planning to move its primary foot-and-mouth research lab to the continental United States. Foot-and-Mouth, you will recall, is incredibly contagious and has several times led to enormous livestock extermination campaigns to halt the spread of the disease. Yet, believe it or not, one of the top contenders for the research site is Kansas. And, if that’s not enough, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas actually wants the lab built in his state — 'It will mean jobs,' he says. I’m trying to persuade myself that this entire article isn’t actually a piece done by the Onion."

One such government report, produced last year and already turned over to lawmakers by the Homeland Security Department, combined commercial satellite images and federal farm data to show the proximity to livestock herds of locations that have been considered for the new lab. "Would an accidental laboratory release at these locations have the potential to affect nearby livestock?" asked the nine-page document. It did not directly answer the question.

A simulated outbreak of the disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called "Crimson Sky" — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages.

Link

Everybody's favorite space dog Laika now has a statue near Moscow's Military Medicine Institute! In 1957, Laika became the first living creature (from our planet, anyway) to orbit the Earth. Todd Lappin has more on Laica over at Telstar Logistics.
Link

Will Mann of LA Metblogs took this amazing photo of a passion flower being serviced by a carpenter bee.

There’s a bank of passion flowers blooms off the Ballona Creek Bikeway east of Sepulveda Boulevard that have been calling to me and my camera for about two weeks, but only on this morning were the timing and weather conditions right to find them soaking up the full illumination of the morning sun. As an added serendipitous bonus I was getting a macro shot of this blossom when the Biggest Fucking Loudest Bumble Carpenter Bee Ever that I named Maverick, buzzed the tower that is my head without proper authorization and came in for a landing to add to the already copious amount of pollen it was already packing on its back.

Link

Here are five great tips from Merlin Mann of 43 Folders on "getting unstuck" when you are procrastinating or don't know how to move forward.

Hack your way out of writer’s block - “Literally. Put five completley random words on a piece of paper. Write five more words. Try a sentence. Could be about anything. A block ends when you start making words on a page.”

Solve problems by writing a note to yourself - “Seriously, open up your email program, type in your own email address, then choose a brilliant subject line that perfectly encapsulates your particular problem.”

Do a fast “mind-sweep” - “And as long as you let that stuff accumulate as chunky deposits on the edges of your perception, it’s very unlikely it’ll get done since — well — they won’t get done until they’re been captured and properly started, right?”

Cringe-Busting your TODO list - “Per cringe item, think honestly about why you’re freaked out about it. Seriously. What’s the hang-up? (Fear of failure? Dreading bad news? Angry you’re already way overdue?)”

Patching your personal suck - “Every patch that fails teaches you a little something that might come in handy some day. Mistakes, as they say, can be a buddhist gift.”

Link

According to Wikipedia, Raymond Zinke Gallun (rhymes with "balloon") "was born in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. He lived a drifter's existence, working a multitude of jobs around the world in the years leading up to World War II." At least a few people have said that The Planet Strappers is an underrated science fiction novel.

The Planet Strappers started out as The Bunch, a group of student-astronauts in the back room of a store in Jarviston, Minnesota. They wanted off Earth, and they begged, borrowed and built what they needed to make it. They got what they wanted--a start on the road to the stars--but no one brought up on Earth could have imagined what was waiting for them Out There!

Link to free ebook

KCET has a series of fantastic video interviews with LA cartoonists, including Jaime Hernandez (shown here), Johnny Ryan, Carol Lay, Esther Pearl Watson, and Mark Todd. Link

Lenore Skenazy wrote a piece for the April 4 edition of the New York Sun about letting her 9-year-old son find his way home from downtown NYC using the subway system. Many people were upset with her.

Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

Link

The Orlando Sentinel has an article and video about empty-nesters who buy monkeys and raise them as surrogate children.

Many self-described "monkey people" don't dare call them pets. They are playfully referred to as "monkids" and reared in a world of pierced ears, monogrammed clothes, a seat at the dinner table and their own bedrooms.

At Gemini Springs in DeBary recently, Johnson pushed "Jessy" around in a toy-filled red stroller, a sight that drew attention. "Hey, it's a real monkey," hollered one youngster, who did a double take.

Johnson replied with a grin: "That's not a monkey; that's my kid."

Link

This delightful set of psychonalyst finger puppets features Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Carl Jung, and, naturally, a shrink's couch. What perfect props for playing mind games! The set is $20 from UncommonGoods.
Link (via Mind Hacks)

Mother Jones has published an investigation of Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), a private security firm that the report claims was paid by corporate client to spy on Greenpeace, the Center for Food Safety, and other environmental concerns. Run by former spooks, the company allegedly employed police to help dig through garbage seeking intelligence on groups that may have included the National Environmental Trust, the Center for Food Safety, the Environmental Media Services, and others. Beckett Brown International dissolved in 2001. From Mother Jones:

According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

In addition to focusing on environmentalists, the firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), provided a range of services to a host of clients. According to its billing records, BBI engaged in "intelligence collection" for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided "protective services" for the National Rifle Association; it handled "crisis management" for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in "information collection" for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted "surveillance," and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.

Link

Quantum computing is getting quite the buzz, but there are other bizarre computer architectures bubbling and buzzing away in research laboratories. New Scientist compiled a survey of the "Ten Weirdest Computers," from reversible chips that recover energy usually lost with each operation, to magnetic (NMR) computing that leverages the dynamics of molecular interactions, to slime mold computers. From New Scientist:

Toshiyuki Nakagaki at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research in Nagoya, Japan, has shown that slime mould can work out the shortest route through a maze.

In his experiments, the masses of independent amoeba-like cells that act as a single organism would initially spread out to explore all the possible paths of a maze.

But when one train of cells found the shortest path to some food hidden at the maze's exit the rest of the mass stopped exploring. The slime mould then withdrew from the dead end routes and followed the direct path to the food.

Link

Sadly, a supplier of "hillbilly" teeth has recalled the wonderful product due to lead paint concerns. More on this alarming development over at BBG. (Mark F. used to wear a set of these frequently. Maybe that's why he makes so many typos.)
Link