Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
This came from an episode of Big Bang theory. They observed that Dec 25th isn’t actually Jesus’ birthday, he was most likely born some time in Sept, but it is Sir Isaac Newton’s Birthday. So it makes more sense to put him on the tree!
My wife thought this was awesome since we’re trying to establish Christmas traditions that are dictated by our lives, not our parents lives.
I approached a friend of mine who’s a very talented artist about the project. He liked the idea and agreed to take it on. The tough part was getting it to look nice without being unnecessarily flippant. It’s a wire armature covered in Sculpy, then painted white with a finishing layer of varnish.
Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
This year, as a Christmas gift to my family, I scanned the pages from my Grammy's recipe folio and turned them into a spiral-bound cookbook with the help of Lulu.com. The project took several months. But, through it, I feel like I was granted some extra time with the woman who was such an important part of my life. My Grammy is in that portfolio. The binder, held together with duct tape, has been around since my Dad and uncles were in high school. She typed the pages on her old typewriter and fixed the errors with correction fluid. She wrote notes into the margins—reminders about which recipes are best, what substitutions you could make, and what the measurements should be if you want to half or double the recipe. Looking at the recipes she chose to keep around, I see her. For instance, my Grammy was the kind of woman who collected no fewer than three recipes for spinach and bacon salads.
More seriously, the mix of recipes in this cookbook remind me that my Grammy was first, and foremost, a baker. Of the 315 pages, 106 of them are just bread recipes. If you look at all the baked goods, you've probably accounted for a good 2/3 of the cookbook. This is interesting to me, because while I love cooking, I am still at a level of baking that usually involves opening a box and adding an egg.
So I've set myself a challenge. Over the next year, I'm going to learn how to bake. And I'm going to learn from my Grammy. I haven't decided exactly how thoroughly I'm going to publicly document this process, but, suffice to say, a few of the recipes that work out particularly well are definitely going to end up here on BoingBoing. To kick things off, I'm starting with three cookie recipes that I baked for the first time yesterday and today—Cowboy Cookies (oatmeal-nut-chocolate chip cookies); Pumpkin-Nut Cookies; and Jam Thumbprint Tarts.
A federal- and state-designated homeland security agency in Michigan recently purchased 13 snow cone machines at a total cost of $11,700. A spokesperson for the agency explains why the purchase was essential:
"It is used to attract people so they can be educated and prepared for homeland security," Dey said from his office in Muskegon. "More importantly, they (homeland security officials) felt in a medical emergency the machine was capable of making ice packs which could be used for medical purposes."
Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
I hate to lend any dignity to this story by commenting on it, but it's making the rounds, so here goes. Two things:
2. Do not automatically trust anything you read on The Examiner website. The Examiner is a content farm that allows anybody to write whatever they want about anything with absolutely zero oversight or fact-checking. The guy who wrote the bogus story on Mayan artifacts in Georgia appears to have just made up the entire Mississippian/Mayan connection out of his own imagination. As archaeologist Mark Williams told ArtInfo, "No archaeologist would defend this flight of fancy." (Again, this is polite scientist speak for, "Oh, my god. That guy is full of it.") While you're at it, apply the same level of skepticism to anything that comes from Hubpages, which has a similar model to The Examiner and was the source of that bogus "There's a secret cure for cancer!" story earlier this year. In general, remember that just because it's formatted like a newspaper story, with a dateline at the beginning, does not mean it has been written according to any kind of standard of quality. Check the sources of the article. Check what you read against what Wikipedia and other people have written on the same subject.
Thanks to John Hoopes for bringing this foolishness to my attention.
Upcoming Appearances • April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP. •April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP. • April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs • April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere. • April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum • July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA
Mucus, chemically, is quite fascinating. Sugar chains are attached to a protein backbone in mucus cells, with the contraption released out into the open. These glycoprotein molecules rapidly and aggressively suck up water until they are plump, slick, and slimy. To an invader, this is a nightmare to navigate: tangled chains of protein and sugar, with every nook and cranny crammed with water molecules. (Boogers are when these chains become ever more tangled, finally resulting in a rubbery ball of partially dried-out snot. Neat!) The body adds antimicrobial enzymes to this mix, which digest the invading organisms as they slowly attempt to chew through this barrier and reach the thin underlying lining of cells.
Which reminds me: Over the years, I've stumbled across some interesting discussions about whether picking your nose and/or eating boogers is a psychological or biological phenomenon. That is, when people do this, does it reflect some kind of psychological or socio-cultural issue; or is there a biological reason why booger-eating could be beneficial?
The truth is, there's not been a great deal of research done on this subject, at least from the biology angle. We know about booger-eating as a function of human behavioral development. There's been some research into it from the perspective of evolutionary psychology (i.e., why do people think this is gross?). But analysis of whether or not there is a biological reason people engage in booger eating has been lacking. Perhaps unsurprisingly. It would be interesting to see the responses you'd get if you tried to recruit volunteers for that study. Especially considering the fact that, as I think about it, you'd probably want your test subjects to eat both their own boogers, and those of other people, to see whether that had any impact on any presumed immune system response.
But I digress. If you are not totally grossed out yet, I'd recommend reading "Eating Snot – Socially Unacceptable but Common: Why?", a chapter in the book Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice. You can read most of that chapter on Google Books. Author Maria Jesus Portalatin focuses mainly on the better documented socio-cultural implications, but gets into a bit of the biology. One thing she points out, nasal mucus is about 95% water, so there's a possibility that you might expect more mucus eating in arid places. But nobody has ever done the studies necessary to test that hypothesis out. Her main hypothesis—also untested—is that eating mucus might help prime the body's immune system, allowing it to have more contact with weakened forms of potential pathogens so it can better detect and destroy those pathogens later. In other words, she thinks that eating your boogers is sort of like self-immunization.
Blame Tim Lloyd for sending me down this train of thought.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
As part of RU Sirius's Mondo 2000 History Project, he's posted a bit of a recorded conversation from 1989 between Timothy Leary and William Gibson. RU writes:
We were working on our first Mondo 2000 issue. It was going to be the cyberpunk theme issue and we’d gotten interviews with the major cyberpunk SF writers, except Gibson. Gibson’s management wouldn’t put us in touch with him. And then we heard that he was coming to the Bay Area and we turned up the heat, but his press agent had him set up for interviews with major outlets only and we were nobody and it was just a brick wall. So somehow, Mu wound up on the phone with Leary complaining about this and Leary offered to let us transcribe a tape of him and Gibson in conversation about ideas for the game spinoff that would accompany the release of the film of Neuromancer — all of this being planned then — back in 1989. Leary was going to lead the development of the game… at least conceptually. (Well, it was all conceptual, ultimately.)
So, the next day, we all showed up at a Gibson appearance in Berkeley radiating some kind of weird intense energy and Gibson was drinking warm beers and glancing nervously over at us while he signed books. We probably looked to him like some weird cult preparing a kidnapping. And after the line of autograph seekers cleared out, (Mondo 2000 publisher Queen) Mu strolled up with this insane bezoomny rictus grin that she has and told him that we were running this interview that Leary had done with him. And he literally held the side of the desk like waves were making him seasick and shouted, “That was no interview! That was a drunken business meeting!”
Wuffabet is a new Android app for small kids: an ABC book with great illustrations and music and really cute animations (it also has some very good nonstandard animal choices, like U for Urchin (sea urchins), F for Flying Squirrel, N for Narwhal, O for Octopus, and Y for Yaffle!). It was created by Chad Essley, who's done animations for Sesame Street. A nice option for post-present-opening lulls and new phones/tablets.
This otherwordly kite is made from "1700 3D-printed connectors linking carbon fiber rods that support cubenfiber aerospace fabric sheets." It doesn't look like it flies very well (at least based on this video) but it certainly looks good! (Thanks, Rob!)
GoDaddy just released a statement withdrawing its support for SOPA.
Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.
"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."
Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.
"As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy," said Adelman.
In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.
"Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.
It was a self-interested publicity stunt all along. But, nonetheless, a useful one for the rest of us.
Is the myth of Santa Claus inspired by tales of Siberian shamans consuming sacred mushrooms? Why do we decorate our Christmas tree with tinsel and a star on top? Was Santa an early psychedelic voyager?
I have written a song and made an accompanying video exploring these important questions!
Keyan sez, "FOGcon is a new literary-themed SF/F con in the tradition of Wiscon and Readercon, but based in San Francisco Bay Area. It was held for the first time in 2011. This year (2012) it'll be from March 30-April 1, 2012, at the Walnut Creek Marriott. The theme is 'The Body', with two wonderful Honored Guests, writer Nalo Hopkinson and writer and artist Shelley Jackson. It's a great con with a warm and friendly ambiance, a manageable size, and intelligent programming. And it's less than an hour from down-town San Francisco."
A federal- and state-designated homeland security agency in Michigan recently purchased 13 snow cone machines at a total cost of $11,700. A spokesperson for the agency explains why the purchase was essential:
Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.
spindelmann says: "Jonas Laberg made a 
