"How can you be serious?" Not by wearing this T-shirt! The classic Mark Pawson T-shirt, updated for 2012.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:38 pm Tuesday, May 22
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Bits & Pieces has a fun collection of "double take" photos. Each one caused a fun moment of "huh?" in my mind, until reality snapped into place.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 6:10 pm Tuesday, May 22
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By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:25 pm Tuesday, May 22
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[Video Link] Follow the instructions on this video and prepare to be freaked out.
(Via Doobybrain)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:06 pm Tuesday, May 22
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Tadao Cern's portrait series is called "Blow Job."
By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:21 pm Tuesday, May 22
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We at macetech LLC are proud of our existence as an intra-spacetime provider of technology. Our goal is to insert technological developments into the time periods where they should exist, rather than where they were initially developed. The LED matrix shades project was successfully inserted into 1981 at considerable risk.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:25 pm Tuesday, May 22
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Here's a visual treat: photos that kids have taken of their projects on DIY.org.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:11 pm Tuesday, May 22
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[Video Link]Excellent video by Bill Hammock that looks at the accelerometer in a mobile phone, and how it's made.
Bill takes apart a smartphone and explains how its accelerometer works. He also shares the essential idea underlying the MEMS production of these devices.This video is based on a chapter from the EngineerGuy team's latest book Eight Amazing Engineering Stories.
(Via Cult of Mac)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:46 am Tuesday, May 22
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Jess Thorne says: "This week's culture recommendations on Bullseye come to us care of Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing and the Gweek podcast, who joins us to share a pair of his top picks: The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, as compiled by Charles Doyle, and the music video production iPhone app Video Star."
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:44 am Tuesday, May 22
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I haven't read much by science fiction author Jack Vance, but the one or two books I read, long ago, I enjoyed greatly. One thing that stood out about Vance's writing was the way he occasionally used fancy words combined with a deadpan delivery that would be very hard to imitate ("The Green Chasch loped up on their massive beasts, holding yellow and black flags afloat on their lances, signifying truculence and bellicosity. -- Planet of Adventure")
I'm not sure why I never read more of his work, but I've stored a mental note for years that said, "Read more Vance." Last week, I got the chance when I received this graphic novel adaptation of a classic Vance short story called "The Moon Moth," beautifully adapted by Humayoun Ibrahim.
The story takes place on a planet with a post-scarcity society in which everyone wears elaborately constructed masks appropriate to their social status. The inhabitants also carry a bunch of different musical instruments with them, because instead of talking to each other, they sing and play a particular instrument suited to the content and context of the conversation. (Ibrahim begins the graphic novel with a two-page spread describing a dozen or so of the musical instruments used on the planet Sirene. I referred to the spread several times as I read the story.) The characters' word balloons are rendered in a way that makes them look like they are being sung with a particular emotion.
"The Moon Moth" is about a man (I think he's from Earth), who gets sent to Sirene as a kind of emissary. He isn't prepared to live in this society, where a minor social gaffe can easily result in an instant beheading by the offended party.
"The Moon Moth" is the name of the story, but it is also the name of the low-status mask the Earthman ends up wearing. Initially he chose a high-ranking mask but was warned he would be killed quickly because he wouldn't know how to comport himself like a person worthy of such a mask. The society's paper-thin layer of over-the-top politeness, covering a draconian code of honor and punishment, reminds me of the Samurai culture (at least the way I understand it from reading James Clavell's Shogun.
From what I've read about Vance as an author (there's a good good forward in this book about Vance by Carlo Rotella), he's not interested in elaborate plots. Instead, he is able to create very weird, but completely believable, worlds, and write about them in such a way that you feel you are in them. This comic book version of "The Moon Moth" did that for me, and it also had a very satisfying conclusion. I'm not going to wait to read more Vance -- I bought Tales of the Dying Earth, an omnibus volume with four Vance novels: The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga and Rialto the Magnificent.
Buy The Moon Moth on Amazon
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:43 am Tuesday, May 22
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It was fun to see people expressing themselves at Maker Faire with colorful clothes and accessories. (See Part 1)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:00 am Tuesday, May 22
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Cartoonist Lars Martinson submitted the first installment of the Kameoka Diaries to Reddit. As a result, his website, which gets about 100 visitors a day, had 48,342 visitors in a single day. He thought he might sell a couple hundred more ebooks than usual because of the new influx of visitors. That was a gross overestimate.
I once heard something to the effect that when you offer a free webcomic, you’re lucky if 1% of your readership buys something from you. Now, I’m paraphrasing so I might be getting the exact details wrong, but either way, it’s a just a sliver of the whole.
So when I saw all the people that visited my website, I wasn’t expecting any miracles. But still, I couldn’t help but run the numbers: if just half a percent of the visitors bought something, that’d mean hundreds of sales… it was hard not to get just a little excited.
But alas, the 48,342 people that visited my site resulted in an additional 23 e-comics sales compared to the previous day. So about 0.048% of the extra visitors made a purchase.
Hey, don’t get me wrong; an extra 23 books sold is better than a kick in the seat of the pants. And I’ll admit: out of all the hundreds of sites I personally visit, only very rarely do I buy anything from them. So it totally makes sense, it’s just a bit sobering to see the hard numbers.
3 Things I Learned When My Site’s Traffic Increased 25,000% in One Day
UPDATE: Kameoka Diaries is now the #1 best-selling Graphic Novel in the iTunes Bookstore.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:03 am Tuesday, May 22
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"I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers. Build a great, big, large fence -- 50 or 100 mile long -- put all the lesbians in there, drop some food down. Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. And you know what, in a few years, they'll die out." -- Pastor Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina.
I didn't know people really said "I'm agin it."
(Via Cynical-C)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:57 am Tuesday, May 22
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UPDATE: Video restored. [Video Link] These parents thought it would be fun to give junior a short ride in a washer at the laundromat. But the door had an auto lock and panic ensued.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:57 am Tuesday, May 22
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[Video Link] Gator doesn't take kindly to having a towel placed over its head and being straddled by a bipedal mammal. (Via Arbroath)
