Dusty Trice Submitterated this video and says, "I wedged my iPhone inside a bird feeder and recorded an hour of video. I captured this awesome HD extreme close-up of a woodpecker eating seeds and battling a red-winged blackbird." — Read the rest
You know what would be great for pharmaceutical profits? If there was a reason for women to need their own Viagra. Of course, there's no clear-cut, physical sexual dysfunction disorder prevalent among women the way erectile dysfunction haunts older men. But, when life hands you lemons, you can always make your own diagnostic tools and call them lemonade, anyway! — Read the rest
The winner of last night's seven-way New York gubernatorial debate was Jimmy McMillan, of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party. Remix, anyone? — Read the rest
Sort of a proto-J.R. Ewing crossed with Johnny Appleseed, Coal Oil Johnny was a folk hero/cautionary tale from America's first big oil boom (and, subsequently, first big oil bust). At the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes about how the real-life John W. — Read the rest
Instructables user ModMischief turned some junk soda-pop bottles, paint and ingenuity into an extremely tasty jetpack: "Who needs Howard Hughes or Peevy when you can build your own Rocketeer rocket pack from little more than the contents of your recycling bin?" — Read the rest
Dr Ben Goldacre's UK bestseller Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks is finally in print in the USA, and Americans are lucky to have it. Goldacre writes a terrific Guardian column analyzing (and debunking) popular science reporting, and has been a star in the effort to set the record straight on woowoo "nutritionists," doctors who claim that AIDS can be cured with vitamins, and vaccination/autism scares. — Read the rest
Here's a clever way from There I Fixed It to catch brick- and plaster-dust when drilling holes to hang pictures or shelves. Wish I'd thought of this last week when I was getting brick dust everywhere!
(via Make)
Building a PC? Why not throw in one of these 80 port USB charger-boards, so you can charge everygoddamnedthing you own? No data throughput, and it wants its own power supply (duh!).
80ãƒãƒ¼ãƒˆUSBãƒãƒ£ãƒ¼ã‚¸ãƒ£ãƒ¼ãƒœãƒ¼ãƒ‰
(via OhGizmo!)
Andy sez,
— Read the restRick Ross, A long time fan who had made items in homage to Blade Runner before, has been working on a chess set and table in the style of the one that was owned by J.F Sebastian in the film for the past 2 years.
This 1954 HOWTO from Mechanix Illustrated invites the reader to take apart the family TV set to make a remote-controlled mute button (called a "SHADDAP") (!). Remember, Zenith's first TV remote control was decried by the broadcasters as a tool of piracy, because it made it too easy to switch away from the commercials:
— Read the restARE some of those long-winded commercials spoiling your TV pleasure?
AE is a new Canadian science fiction magazine, named for AE Van Vogt. They're launching their issue one later this month:
— Read the rest
In the meantime, you can read our exclusive interview with Hugo winner Peter Watts and our printable microfiction zine AE Micro.
www.whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy.com is a project from Dan Hon and friends to generate random "transmedia" strategies for your business. Here are some I got:
Leveraging the power of event driven appointment to view broadcast to create continuous partial attention episodic social narrative dynamicsARGifying serious games through cross-platform brand-smart interactive narrative
Enhancing the gamelayer with interactive cloudsourced narrative
The scary thing is, I've actually heard people say stuff that's even weirder than this. — Read the rest
Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of right wing attack ads have been aired in this US mid-term election season, but for the most part, no one knows who is paying for these ads, as the payments are laundered through shadowy political organizations that are late (or negligent) in complying with disclosure rules. — Read the rest
German inflatable fetishware store Blackstyle.de sells these groovycreepy inflatable xenomorph suits for people who are, I suppose, into a kind of rubbery anti-furry.
(via JWZ)
The open hardware hackers Adafruit Industries have created a jobs board for "designers, makers, programmers, artists and engineers who are looking for great places work at & projects to work on" and the companies that want to hire them. Adafruit partner Phil Torrone sez:
— Read the rest
The job board has jobs for people in the world of embedded linux to programming Arduinos and teaching PCB production – anyone can use the jobs boards, no recruiters and they approve each one.
Dan Gillmor has the news that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's visionary Chief Software Architect, has left the company. Ozzie, whose P2P startup Groove was bought by Microsoft, is admired and well-liked in tech circles as someone who believes in the transformative power of technology to improve the world. — Read the rest
Urban explorers in Japan infiltrated the ruins of faded pop-singer Shouji Masakatsu's old home, and photographed the haunting abandoned gear and environs.
An old enka singer's house haikyo
(Thanks, Mike!)
MIT's Tech Review reports on a paper in the Stanford Technology Law Review, in which law/economic scholar Eric M. Fraser explains the anticompetitive aspects of the Google Book Search settlement that the Authors Guild has proposed. The Authors Guild — a collection of 10,000 writers who had the gall to negotiate this deal on behalf of every writer, living and dead, all over the world — completely ignored people like the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle, who urged rightsholders to make a level playing-field for book-search be a prerequisite for any deal. — Read the rest
From the apparently-defunct Channelbee website, via Roger Ebert. — Read the rest
In an online forum for pilots of the private jet charter service ExpressJet, Houston-based pilot Michael Roberts relates the disturbing tale of what happened when he recently refused to consent to an "Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) system" (aka "backscatter scan," aka "naked scan" aka "the porn machine") at the TSA checkpoint. — Read the rest
