Welcome to the Gweek podcast, episode 32! Gweek is where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. In this episode I am joined by Boing Boing’s technology and coding maestro, Dean Putney. Our guest host for this episode was podcaster and technology journalist Tom Merritt.
UPDATE: Anders Kierulf, the developer of SmartGo Kifu says:
For the iPhone, there's SmartGo Pro ($12.99) as well as SmartGo ($2.99), both of which also include the tutorial. (There's also SmartGo 9x9 for $0.99.) My plan is to make SmartGo universal, so that there will be an alternative to the $20 Kifu version on the iPad for people who are just starting with Go.
For learning about Go, there's the free universal SmartGo Books app. It currently includes 26 books about Go that can be bought with in-app purchase, and both "Go: A Complete Introduction to the Game" and the five-volume "Learning to Play Go" series will give you a great intro to the game, to complement the tutorial built into the other SmartGo apps. Unlike a printed book or PDF, you can replay the moves in the diagrams.
Avi sez, "The Digi-Comp 1 toy kit was a cool hands-on way to learn the basics of computing. The Digi-Comp 1 emulator is an interim substitute for those who can't get their hands on one."
In essence the Digi-Comp I contains three mechanical flip-flops and provides an ability to connect them together in a programmable way using thin vertical wires that are either pushed, or blocked from moving, by a number of cylindrical pegs. The whole arrangement is 'clocked' by moving a lever back and forth. Different configurations of these cylinders cause the Digi-Comp to compute different boolean logic operations. With a three binary digit (3-bit) readout of the state of the flip-flops, it can be programmed to demonstrate binary logic, to perform various operations such as addition and subtraction and to play some simple logic games such as Nim.
See also the magnificent CARDIAC, the cardboard teaching computer produced by Bell Labs.
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
Henry Kaiser—filmmaker, musician, Antarctic research diver and BoingBoing guest blogger—took a series of infrared portraits of scientists and staff at the McMurdo Research Station. I really like the way these infrared photos feel like they capture the cold environment better than a normal photo would. Another bonus: I keep having to remind myself that, no, everybody in Antarctica has not dyed their hair blue.
Some holiday advice from the journal Veterinary Record. What's the best method to use for sewing up a turkey after you've stuffed it? Turns out, surgical staples might be your best option. (Actually, this is a trick question: The correct choice is to cook the stuffing separately and break the bird down so you can properly heat the dark meat through without turning the breasts into sad, dry lumps. But I digress.)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
In 1934, famed boxer Jack Dempsey, "The Manassa Mauler," claimed he could beat any robotic pugilist. Now that would be some sweet science! From Paleofuture:
In the April, 1934, issue of Modern Mechanix and Inventions the “mechanical robot” goes toe-to-toe with boxing legend Jack Dempsey. In the article Dempsey relays a conversation he had with a friend about what it would be like to fight a robot. According to Dempsey — who says he could tear one to pieces “bolt by bolt and scatter its brain wheels and cogs all over the canvas” — the main deficiency of a boxing robot would be its lack of brains:
"The reason is simple: Engineers can build a robot that will possess everything except brains. And without brains no man can ever attain championship class in the boxing game. It is true enough that we have had some rare intellectual specimens in the higher frames of boxing glory, but I can truthfully say that no man ever attained genuine boxing recognition without real headwork. The best punch in the world is not worth a whoop if the boxer doesn’t know what to do with it.”
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
KH-9 Hexagon was a series of Cold War spy satellites that the United States launched in the 1970s and 1980s. Declassified in September, the program, known as "Big Bird," fed as many as 1,000 people and their families in Danbury, Connecticut. The Associated Press recently sat with a group of retired Perkin-Elmers Corp employees who worked on Big Bird and now get together for weekly coffee. From the AP (images from Wikipedia):
"My name is Al Gayhart and I built spy satellites for a living," announced the 64-year-old retired engineer to the stunned bartender in his local tavern as soon as he learned of the declassification. He proudly repeats the line any chance he gets…
Waiting for clearance was a surreal experience as family members, neighbors and former employers were grilled by the FBI, and potential hires were questioned about everything from their gambling habits to their sexuality.
"They wanted to make sure we couldn't be bribed," Marra says.
Clearance could take up to a year. During that time, employees worked on relatively minor tasks in a building dubbed "the mushroom tank" — so named because everyone was in the dark about what they had actually been hired for.
Joseph Prusak, 76, spent six months in the tank. When he was finally briefed on Hexagon, Prusak, who had worked as an engineer on earlier civil space projects, wondered if he had made the biggest mistake of his life.
"I thought they were crazy," he says. "They envisaged a satellite that was 60-foot (18-meter) long and 30,000 pounds (13,600 kilograms) and supplying film at speeds of 200 inches (500 centimeters) per second. The precision and complexity blew my mind."
Several years later, after numerous successful launches, he was shown what Hexagon was capable of — an image of his own house in suburban Fairfield.
"This was light years before Google Earth," Prusak said. "And we could clearly see the pool in my backyard."
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
From 1976, "Electronic Mind Waves" is the single LP from the awesomely-named Elektriktus. The name was a pseudonym for Italian avant-garde and free jazz composer Andrea Centazzo. The album has just been reissued on vinyl by Spanish label Wah Wah Records. From Wah Wah:
Originally released on the PDU label, the LP Electronic Mind Waves offers a collection of 8 synth fueled songs that sound very close to what kraut/cosmische heads were doing at the time, think of Conrad Schnitzler, Deuter or Cosmic Jokers, and also other European experimentalists like Richard Pinhas' Heldon, Spacecraft, Didier Bocquet, Seesselberg, F.G. Experimental Laboratory, Roberto Cacciapaglia or Hydrus. Along with Cacciapaglia and Hydrus, Elektriktus shows the most adventurous experimental sounds under a kraut/cosmische music influence to ever come out of Italy.
Centazzo was already a highly experienced musician when he produced this LP in his home studio in 1976. He had been the drummer on Giorgio Gasslini's Quartet, with whom he also recorded several LPs, and also on his own jazz band Ictus (actually the name Elektriktus came out of melting his electronic experiments with his former band's name). He's actually one of the key names from the italian improv / free-jazz scene and the driving force behind the ICTUS label.
Buy it from Forced Exposure or your local independent record shop
More background on Elektriktus in this 2007 post at Mutant Sounds
David Rusenko, co-founder of website hosting service Weebly.com, describes how GoDaddy wiped his domain name records, only restoring them after a phone call. All it took was a single complaint against a single user.
"They had received a complaint about the content of a site, and that they were removing the DNS entries for weebly.com because of it. I asked him if they had contacted us previously -- he responded that they hadn't. The site in question featured a bad review of a local business, and that business had complained."
Rusenko immediately transferred the domain away from GoDaddy to prevent it from happening again. Just think: if a complaint is all it takes to get GoDaddy to shutter domains now, imagine how tempting it will be to complain should its policies become the law of the land.
The Dead Sea's salinity of 33.7 percent makes it 8.6 times saltier than the ocean. Bordering Israel, the West Bank and Jordan, it is 423m below sea level, making it the lowest place on land on Earth. A tourist hotspot for millennia, more than 1m visitors a year visit on the Israeli & Palestinian side alone. The view from the shore is one thing, but from the air, the sheer strangeness of the salt formations in and around the lake become readily apparent. Photos by Baz Ratner, of Reuters, and others.
Aides for Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said the move was part of a wider attempt to eliminate violent Islamist extremist propaganda from the internet ... Twitter is reported to be rejecting the move after pointing out that unlike al-Qaeda, the Taliban movement is not registered by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organisation.
Lieberman seems not be targeting terrorists who plan attacks using the service, but rather Taliban propagandists famous for political hysterics, gloating, and bickering with NATO counterparts. It makes no sense at all except as censorious weight-pulling for its own sake.
The ranty impulse is to suggest that he's got that Clash of Civilizations thing going on, or that he doesn't trust you with the liberty to hear what Helmand Harry has to say. If anything, however Lieberman seems smaller than that. It's as if he's simply embarrassed to see the enemy free to speak, and banning them from Twitter is his best idea to silence them.
I recorded a special guest appearance on Sex Is Fun, a podcast about sex education, sexual behavior, and dirty jokes. Naturally, I'm there to talk about science. Specifically, the science of animals having sex with other animals. Why is one species of Australian beetles having sex with beer bottles? How do a group of professional sex educators react to hearing about the duck penis story for the first time? Listen to the show! (Note: Show not safe for small children and/or coworkers.)
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 spent most of my childhood with books about dinosaurs that played up the ancient beasties as overgrown lizards. The connection between dinosaurs and birds, while kind of flipping obvious once somebody points it out, was not much discussed among laypeople until I was in my teens. (That would be the 1990s, FYI.)
But, among scientists, the idea of a dinosaur-bird relationship is nothing new. In fact, Thomas Henry Huxley was making that connection back in the 1860s. On the Dinosaur Tracking blog, Brian Switek tells the fascinating story of how Huxley started to realize that dinosaurs and birds were related—a discovery that's all the more impressive because he figured it out without the help of some of the key transitional fossils we have access to today.
Huxley did not suggest that birds were the direct descendants of dinosaurs. So much geologic time was unaccounted for, and so few dinosaurs were known, that Huxley could not point to any known fossil creature as the forerunner of birds. Instead he made his argument on anatomical grounds and removed the issue of time. Dinosaurs were proxies for what the actual bird ancestor would have been like, and flightless birds (such as the ostrich and emu) stood in for what Huxley thought was the most archaic bird type. (We now know that Huxley got this backwards—the earliest birds could fly, and flightless birds represent a secondary loss of that ability.) As Huxley went about collecting evidence for his case, though, he also gave dinosaurs an overhaul. They were not the bloated, plodding, rhinoceros-like creatures that Richard Owen had envisioned. Dinosaurs were more bird-like than anyone had imagined.
In October of 1867, Huxley met with John Philips, an English geologist and a curator of Oxford’s museum. As Huxley related in his 1870 paper “Further Evidence of the Affinity Between the Dinosaurian Reptiles and Birds,” Philips wanted to discuss details of marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs in his museum’s collection, but as he and Huxley made their way over toward the displays they stopped to look at the bones of the carnivorous dinosaur Megalosaurus. Then Huxley spotted something peculiar:
As Prof. Phillips directed my attention to one after the other of the precious relics, my eye was suddenly caught by what I had never before seen, namely, the complete pectoral arch of the great reptile, consisting of a scapula and a coracoid ankylosed together. Here was a tangle at once unravelled. The coracoid was totally different from the bone described by Cuvier, and by all subsequent anatomists, under that name. What then was the latter bone? Clearly, if it did not belong to the shoulder-girdle it must form a part of the pelvis; and, in the pelvis, the ilium at once suggested itself as the only possible homologue. Comparison with skeletons of reptiles and of birds, close at hand, showed it to be not only an ilium, but an ilium which, though peculiar in its form and proportions, was eminently ornithic in its chief peculiarities.
Earlier naturalists had made a mistake. They had misidentified the shoulder girdle, and one part of what was thought to be part of the shoulder was actually part of the hip. Another strange piece, previously thought to be a clavicle, also turned out to belong to the pelvis. This rearrangement immediately gave the dinosaur a more bird-like character.
If you look at the bottom of the image at the top of this post, you can see how much the re-arrangement of megalosaurus' parts changed our conception of what the whole creature looked like. Where other scientists saw a lumpy, obese crocodile, Thomas Henry Huxley saw a saber-toothed chicken.
The F.A.A. requires that before a plane can be approved as safe, it must be able to withstand up to 100 volts per meter of electrical interference. When EMT Labs put an Amazon Kindle through a number of tests, the company consistently found that this e-reader emitted less than 30 microvolts per meter when in use. That’s only 0.00003 of a volt.
“The power coming off a Kindle is completely minuscule and can’t do anything to interfere with a plane,” said Jay Gandhi, chief executive of EMT Labs, after going over the results of the test. “It’s so low that it just isn’t sending out any real interference.”
We always knew that if gadgets were really a threat to avionics, we would not be allowed to bring them into the cabin at all. We know that many travelers keep on using them anyway, on the sly. Thanks to Bilton, the bare lie shines through a little brighter. But it leaves the question: why do these institutions insist on clinging to this particular line of security nonsense?
It's as it the standards in use were defined by some bureaucratic committee in the mists of history, rather than any reasonable application of the science involved.
I always suspected that these rules are a vestigial tail of policies contrived to protect the old racket of in-air phone calls and paid in-flight entertainment. Though the market for that stuff is dead, the rules lumber on.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to have my tinfoil hat steamed.
I've been reading The Walking Dead comic series for years now, with the kind of sick, compulsive horror that is the mark of great dramatic tension in narrative. One of the surest ways to establish dramatic tension is to have a characters in bad situations who are trying intelligently to solve their problems, failing, and falling into worse situations. Key to this is that the characters have to try intelligent solutions to their problems, because otherwise the story becomes an exercise in watching a fly batter itself to death on a windowpane.
The Walking Dead is one of those zombie stories in which the intelligent solutions attempted by each character represents a kind of local maximum, the best action for that person at that minute, but disastrous in combination. In that sense, it's a kind of extended riff on the collective action problem, the age-old conundrum of figuring out how to work together for a common goal that will improve all our lives in the end, when there's always a good, immediate opportunity to pursue one's immediate advantage -- and when, at any moment, someone else in the group might seize on that opportunity and shut you out of it.
So previous volumes of Walking Dead have demonstrated the problems and promise of strong-man authoritarianism, family groups, nomadic collectives, fortress societies, limited democracies, individual autonomy, and every other variation and permutation, presenting the reader with the twin fascination and horror of watching a group of characters each acting (more or less) intelligently, but collectively behaving like a fly battering itself to death on the proverbial windowpane.
Now, after 14 volumes, we have the fifteenth Walking Dead compendium: We Find Ourselves, in which the characters finally, finally figure out how to work for their common interests, after years and years of slaughter and tragedy and horror. I read the book over Christmas, and it was like a holiday gift from the creators to their faithful readers -- a respite in the relentless grind that these infuriating and brave people have had to endure and that we've had to watch.
And of course, I'm already feeling mounting anxiety at the thought of what will befall this embryonic glimmer of hope in the volumes that are to come.
From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.
Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.
“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.
“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.
He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.
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In essence the Digi-Comp I contains three mechanical flip-flops and provides an ability to connect them together in a programmable way using thin vertical wires that are either pushed, or blocked from moving, by a number of cylindrical pegs. The whole arrangement is 'clocked' by moving a lever back and forth. Different configurations of these cylinders cause the Digi-Comp to compute different boolean logic operations. With a three binary digit (3-bit) readout of the state of the flip-flops, it can be programmed to demonstrate binary logic, to perform various operations such as addition and subtraction and to play some simple logic games such as Nim.
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
David Rusenko, co-founder of website hosting service 
I've been reading The Walking Dead comic series for years now, with the kind of sick, compulsive horror that is the mark of great dramatic tension in narrative. One of the surest ways to establish dramatic tension is to have a characters in bad situations who are trying intelligently to solve their problems, failing, and falling into worse situations. Key to this is that the characters have to try intelligent solutions to their problems, because otherwise the story becomes an exercise in watching a fly batter itself to death on a windowpane.
