This is a picture of a wave crashing on the New Jersey shore. It glows because of dinoflagellates — little, single-celled plants, animals, and bacteria that float around on the water, moving about with the help of long, moveable protein strands called flagella. Some dinoflagellates are bioluminescent; that is, chemical reactions inside their bodies produce light. The result is glowing oceans. Or, as maker Caleb Kraft recently discovered, the dinoflagellates also make for a soft blue nightlight with really nifty special effects.

You can watch Kraft's nightlight project at YouTube. It's pretty simple to do at home. At it's most basic, all you need to do is purchase some bioluminescent dinoflagellates online, keep them alive in your home, and give them a good shaking occasionally to trigger the chemical reaction.

A couple more helpful links:
• Where Kraft bought his dinoflagellates
• A guide to other dinoflagellate dealers, and to the care and feeding of unicellular organisms
• Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who are studying dinoflagellate bioluminescence to better understand how it works and what role it plays in the ecosystem
• A detailed explanation of what dinoflagellates are and why they glow

Via Treehugger

When ocean scientist Andrew Thaler found an old, outdated water level gauge, he found a way to give it new life — turning it into a tool to measure public interest in sea level rise. Instead of tracking water, the Sea Leveler tracks how much people are talking about water on Twitter.

"Numerous Japanese teens, it seems, are uploading photos of themselves doing the Kamehameha attack from popular manga and anime series Dragon Ball," writes Kotaku's Japan-based correspondent Brian Ashcraft. There's a photo gallery and it's awesome. Brian had an earlier post at Kotaku about the broader trend in Japan of young women staging photos with manga-style martial arts. Below, one such image found on 2ch, Japan's largest bulletin board, with the heading, "Schoolgirls Nowadays lol".

(Thanks, Brian Lam!)

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/28/japanese-teen-trend-dragon.html/feed 21 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/14/celebrate-pi-day-by-throwi.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/14/celebrate-pi-day-by-throwi.html#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:07:37 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=218768 Buffon's Needle is an 18th-century experiment in probability mathematics and geometry that can be used as a way to calculate pi through random sampling. This WikiHow posting explains how you can recreate Buffon's Needle at home, by playing with your food. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/14/celebrate-pi-day-by-throwi.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/25/what-would-happen-if-3.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/25/what-would-happen-if-3.html#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:42:49 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=208344

Minute Physics tackles the greatest mystery in all the Internet and solves it with the power of science (and pedantry).

Children's literature is about the wonder of discovering new worlds, the power of imagination, and the all the little triumphs and defeats that make up a life.

It's also an excellent place to find hypothetical questions that test the laws of physics.

For instance, presupposing that one could grow a peach to the size of a house, could one also really sail that peach across an ocean? And then, presupposing that one could harness the power of 501 seagulls, would that number of seagulls be sufficient to carry said peach through the air?

These are the questions posed in "James' Giant Peach Transport Across the Atlantic", a paper published last fall in the Journal of Physics Special Topics.

The paper was written and researched by four physics master's students from the University of Leicester in the UK — Emily Watkinson, Daniel Staab, Maria-Theresia Walach, and Zach Rogerson. Based on the events in Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, the four set out to discover whether the book's fictional account of an adventure could stand up to serious scientific inquiry.

Turns out, it can. Mostly.

The team's analysis relied on two sets of equations — one to test the buoyancy of the peach and another to determine whether the 501 seagulls could produce enough lift force to overcome the weight of the peach and get it airborne.

In order for something to float, it needs to be less dense than the liquid it's meant to float on. Say you have the same amount — the same volume — of water and of rubber. That rubber will only float if it weighs less than the water, volume-to-volume. That's true whether you're talking about a rubber duckie or a giant peach. Or, for that matter, a boat. And this is where Roald Dahl made a very smart plot choice.

Turns out, the flesh of a peach is actually more dense than seawater. Technically, it should sink. But Dahl took advantage of the same trick that allows steel boats to float even though the metal they're made of is more dense than water — you just hollow out the inside. That's because air is less dense than water, and a boat is just a shell of steel surrounding a pocket of air. Taken together, air and steel are a lot less dense than just the steel by itself. So the boat floats. And, as the Leicester team found, so does the peach — provided that, for a peach with a radius of 6 meters, the flesh was no thicker than 1.24 meters.

Next, the team turned their attention to the skies. Could 501 seagulls really airlift a peach that large? The answer: No. To make it work, James would have needed approximately 2,425,907 seagulls. (Assuming we're talking about Common Gulls. Different birds, different numbers.)

That's because of lift force — a calculation that compares the pressure over and under each bird's wings with the area of those wings and the density of the air. (You might also know it as Bernoulli's Principle) To get off the ground, just by themselves, each seagull has to have a lift force greater than their own weight. Subtract the weight from the lift force and what you have left over is the amount of lift each bird can put towards carrying other things. The sad fact is, 501 Common Gulls don't have enough leftover lift force to get that peach to rise. Two and a half million gulls, though? That'll do just fine.

So why does science care?

What's the point of all this? That's the really interesting part.

You're right in thinking that the plausibility of fictional scenarios isn't exactly a great problem of our time. But nobody ever said it was. That wasn't the point of this paper, or any of the other eight papers Watkinson, Staab, Walach, and Rogerson published last year.

Instead, this was about teaching them how to be better scientists.

The Journal of Physics Special Topics is, itself, a pretty special journal. It's written, edited, peer reviewed, and published by students of physics professor Mervyn Roy. Throughout the course of a semester, teams of students come up with problems they can use physics to solve. They get a week to research and write each two-page paper. Then they hand those papers off to their peers, who put them through a rigorous peer review process — critiquing the physics, demanding edits in grammar and style, and sending the students back over and over until they've polished up something that is worthy of publication.

It's a microcosm of the way academic publishing is done in the real world and it gives the students a chance to learn through trial and error both how to write a paper AND how to peer review one. That's important. Remember the story I wrote here a couple years ago, explaining how the peer review process works? One of the big critiques that scientists have of that system is that nobody is really taught how to peer review. You're just kind of tossed into it. Some people figure out how to do it well. Others ... not so much. The Journal of Physics Special Topics is an attempt to solve that problem by having physicists learn peer review before they actually have to do it for real.

They also learn how to handle the social fallout of peer review. "There were some awkward moments. One of my housemates was in a different group and when I was writing reviews of what he'd written it was sometimes a bit difficult," Daniel Staab told me.

The research also forced the team to learn how to research subjects far outside their own specific field. For instance, the density of peach flesh. As you learned earlier in this article, knowing that number is a pretty important part of knowing whether a giant peach would float or sink. But it's also not a number that your average physics student in England has easy access to. At one point, Staab said, they thought they might actually have to do their own study, opening and analyzing a bunch of peaches. But in the end, they found a reference — a 1948 paper by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

So, in the end, we learn the physics of giant peaches, students learn how to be better scientists, and it's pretty much a happy ending for everybody. Except, you know, magic and wonder and suspended disbelief. But Emily Watkinson isn't too worried about that.

"When we were writing this paper, some people wondered whether it would take away from the magic of the story," she said. "But, for me, Roald Dahl keeps the magic. We just wanted to see whether you could actually implement his ideas, because if you could it would be even more fascinating."

Read the fully study on the physics of James and the Giant Peach

Read all the papers from the fall 2012 edition of the Journal of Physics Special Topics — including papers on the physics of "Breaking Bad", Spiderman, lightsabers, and Katrina and the Waves' 1983 song "Walking on Sunshine".

My life path has led me to some exciting revelations and extraordinary experiences. It’s been carved out by indulging in – and being comfortable with – my own stupidity. Because stupidity is not a bad quality in a person, no matter how many people say it is. Peeking at a dictionary, we can define stupid as someone “marked by a lack of intelligence.” To me, that’s a perfectly reasonable attribute. We don’t just become intelligent one day.We’re in pursuit of cleverness. Many of us never get there. But we try.

Bravo! There is no better way to have fun than to be the dumbest guy in the room, when the room is, say, a TED talk.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/12/in-praise-of-stupidity.html/feed 35 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/05/iron-egghead-explain-biology.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/05/iron-egghead-explain-biology.html#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:37:04 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=198585

Scientific American has an awesome contest going on right now. They're challenging you to make a video explaining some part, process, or system in the human body using eight objects: Yourself, a writing surface, a writing implement, rubber bands, paper clips, string, cups , and balls. You have to use all eight items. You can't use anything else.

You can read the full instructions and rules online. And check out the sample video, made by Scientific American interns Isha Soni and Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato.

Bonus: The first 100 qualified entries all get a free digital subscription to Sci Am.

Via Bora Zivkovik

Sometimes, it's hard to find people interested in playing the role of guinea pig for the sake of science. And, sometimes, that job is not so hard. Like when what you want the guinea pigs to do is get real high. That's a good example.

Pot-based research isn't all fun and games. Given the interest in medical marijuana for cancer patients and people with AIDS, some of the studies require volunteers to, you know, have cancer or AIDS. Others are interested in the sociology — these scientists want to talk to you about your pot use and collect data about how it may or may not have affected your life.

But the mythical opportunity to "get high for science" really does exist, writes Brian Palmer at Slate.

The National Institutes of Health maintains an online database of clinical trials that are in the recruitment process. As of this writing, there are approximately 100 marijuana studies currently enrolling patients. Each listing contains inclusion criteria (the types of people the researchers are looking for) and exclusion criteria (characteristics that will remove otherwise qualified people from contention).

... there are a few trials that might interest someone looking for a free high. Consider the University of Iowa’s “Effects of Inhaled Cannabis on Driving Performance.” Participants will be dosed with varying amounts of alcohol or vaporized cannabis, then placed into a driving simulator to measure their performance. There are some restrictions. You must be a social drinker and marijuana user already, but you can’t have an addiction. People who are susceptible to motion sickness are out, and you must live near the driving simulator in Iowa. Keep in mind that getting into the study doesn’t guarantee free marijuana—two control groups will get no THC whatsoever. (Previous studies have shown that low doses of marijuana have little to no impact on driving performance.)

Read more at Slate.com

Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids, folded and twisted in on themselves to make incredibly complex shapes.

The human brain, it has been said, is kind of a pattern-finding machine — prone to spotting faces on the moon, fat bunnies in the clouds, and Jesus on slices of toast.

When the two meet, you get Protein Art. May K., a Russian-born artist who lives in Germany, takes actual protein structures, sees the other things those structures seem to look an awful lot like, and then draws cartoons based on the resulting apophenia.

For instance, take a look at the protein structure above. After the jump, you can see the picture that May K. saw in its folds.

Bonus: The protein pictured actually comes from a dromedary camel. May K. writes:

This small protein is called nanobody. Sounds cool, but what is a nanobody? It is a fragment of an antibody, in this case an antibody from a camel. Antibodies serve our immune system, they can bind pathogenic substances and protect our body from dangerous invaders. Antibodies are widely used in medicine and biology, e.g for passive immunization or targeting of substances (mostly proteins) of interest. In both fields nanobodies have their advantages. They are stabler and much smaller than conventional antibodies and can pass narrow holes. So literally, for this nanobody camel it is easy to go through the eye of a needle.

Read more at May K.'s Live Journal, where her protein art is collected

I absolutely love cheeky science cooking projects. So the Eat Your Heart Out bakery website makes me sincerely wish that I lived in London.

From white chocolate vertebre stuffed with dark chocolate cream, to cupcakes topped with beautiful red blood cells, to what I think is a cupcake but KNOW is an amazing cutaway of breast anatomy intricately rendered in fondant ... this stuff is seriously amazing.

Consider it a unicorn chaser against grotesque misogyny.

"The plan was simple. Take a nostalgic NES "duck hunt" Zapper, and retrofit it with a ridiculously powerful laser."

A project from North Street Labs. In case it's not obvious, this is dangerous, and could lead to death or blindness without safety precautions.

Components: "2.1A input buck driver, 2x 750mAh 35-70c Lipo batteries, M140 445nm diode, G2 lens. homemade custom heat-sink, turn key safety switch."

Learn how to build your own, here. But remember, kids, always wear protective safety goggles. And, wear the right kind for the laser you're working with. [Video Link].

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/25/homebrew-nintendo-laser-zapper.html/feed 23 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/07/instructions-for-legitimate-kn.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/07/instructions-for-legitimate-kn.html#comments Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:47:06 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=179932 this chart of knots and then direct all claims of new knots to the New-Knot Claims Assessment Committee, which will assess your knot and let you know whether or not the knot is new. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/07/instructions-for-legitimate-kn.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/29/burning-man-on-instagram-phot.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/29/burning-man-on-instagram-phot.html#comments Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:35:12 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=178630

I cannot get to Burning Man this year because I'm in cancer treatment. It's funny, too, because the experience of going through that has given me a new kind of fondness for the annual playa festivities. The freedom, the wide open spaces, the happiness of mutants.

Following long-time Burner Aaron Muszalski (@sfslim) on Instagram is the next best thing, and I recommend it strongly, whether or not you're going to be in Black Rock City in person. He's a talented photographer, and he captures the whimsy, the art, the beauty of those vast desert expanses with the comfort of one who knows them all intimately. Bonus: you don't have to get any dust up your gullet.

To all out there as I type this, have lots of sex and fire and drugs and candyraving and shirtcocking for me.

"SFSLIM," on Webstagram, or receive his photos via Twitter. Wish Instagram had a searchable web interface.

And if you'd like to watch the live video webcast from Burning Man, you'll find that here on Ustream.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/29/burning-man-on-instagram-phot.html/feed 16 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/whats-climate-change-ruining.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/whats-climate-change-ruining.html#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:06:10 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=178498 Read more Daily Climate. (Via Brendon Slotterback)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/whats-climate-change-ruining.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/14/what-is-climate-change-ruining.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/14/what-is-climate-change-ruining.html#comments Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:38:55 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=176417 In the case of chocolate, the cocoa its made from is grown in several countries in West Africa, a region heavily affected by higher temperatures and extreme weather patterns. By 2020, there will likely be a 1.5 million ton shortage in cocoa production. As for football, the problem is the fact that, across the United States, cool weather season is kicking in later in the year than it used to. That affects football practice. Specifically, schools are increasingly concerned about the health risks of forcing high school students to get really physical, while fully suited and padded, in today's warmer Augusts and Septembers. So I think it's safe to say that climate change hates fun. It's a fun-hater. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/14/what-is-climate-change-ruining.html/feed 18 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/07/the-human-jukebox-donations-t.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/07/the-human-jukebox-donations-t.html#comments Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:20:13 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=175301

[Video Link] The latest musical video experiment from Joe Sabia and friends at CDZA: "Donations as votes. A fun and democratic way for street musicians to receive money."

Charles Yang on Violin. Michael Thurber on Bass. Eddie Barbash on Alto Saxophone.

Money was sent to Wingspan Arts, a non-profit that aims to expose diverse and young groups of people to the arts.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/07/the-human-jukebox-donations-t.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/03/the-library-of-congress-welcom.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/03/the-library-of-congress-welcom.html#comments Fri, 03 Aug 2012 14:01:43 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=174697 an official standard for abbreviations of different languages. It's a long list, because, well, there are lots and lots of languages that might be mentioned in the Library of Congress. In fact, the standard is so thorough that it includes Klingon. (Via Hilary Mason)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/03/the-library-of-congress-welcom.html/feed 16 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/01/the-history-and-future-of-ki.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/01/the-history-and-future-of-ki.html#comments Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:27:57 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=174443

Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, my mom bought me a chemistry set. I was in grade school, but I remember thinking it was pretty cool. I also remember being slightly disappointed (particularly after being told that I could only play with it in the garage) that there was nothing in there that could actually blow up.

Many of us are nostalgic for the lost golden era of certifiably dangerous children's chemistry sets. Even if we weren't alive when that era occurred, we're still, sort of, vicariously nostalgic. At the BBC, Alex Hudson has a story about what was really in those misty colored chemistry sets that have lodged themselves into our cultural memory. Along the way, we learn that their demise was only partly to do with unfounded safety fears—some of the fears were founded, for instance, and in other cases, money and seemingly unrelated legal issues got in the way of fun.

By the 1920s and 30s children had access to substances which would raise eyebrows in today's more safety-conscious times. There were toxic ingredients in pesticides, as well as chemicals now used in bombs or considered likely to increase the risk of cancer. And most parents will not need to be told of the dangers of the sodium cyanide found in the interwar kits or the uranium dust present in the "nuclear" kits of the 1950s.

Most will know cyanide as a deadly poison, but one of its main applications is in gold mining. It can make gold dissolve into water.

...Used often to test the presence of starch, the iodine solution once seen in kits is now regulated as a list I chemical in the US because of its use in the manufacture of methamphetamine. It can also be lethal if more than 2g of pure iodine is consumed.

Read the rest of this story at the BBC

Plinian eruptions are named after Pliny the Younger and Pliny the Elder, who wrote about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and died during said eruption, respectively. This is one of several different types of volcanic eruptions, but it's also one of the most iconic. In a Plinian eruption, a column of magma, gas, and ash shoots straight up, with the gas and ash reaching all the way up into the stratosphere. These are the big, explosive eruptions, with mushroom clouds and rains of rocks and boulders.

Matt Kuchta, geology professor at the University of Wisconsin Stout, recently recreated a classic Plinian eruption using a 32-gallon trash can filled with water, 100 rubber ducks, and some liquid nitrogen. In slow motion, you can see the column of water and ducks rise straight up, fan out at the top, and fall back down to Earth. Just imagine the damage if all the ducks were boulders, and you get the picture.

Types of volcanic eruptions from Wikipedia

More on Plinian eruptions from the US Geological Survey

Watch several other videos of Kuchta's trash can volcano

Via Ron Schott

A work of fiction doesn't have to be scientifically accurate. It just has to make sense. All it has to do is maintain an internal logic and consistency strong enough that you, the reader, aren't inadvertently thrown out of the world. If you're frequently frustrated by detail accuracy in fiction, that's likely your problem, not fiction's. Chill out. Breath deep. Smell the flowers. Experience some imagination and wonder.

I fully endorse all the sentiments outlined above. And yet. And yet. There are some fictional details that drive me crazy. Like the seasonal shifts in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, where winter and summer last for years—sometimes decades—and nobody knows exactly when the seasons will change. It's not that I feel a burning need to prove to Martin that this can't work. Instead, it makes me ravenously curious. I keep wondering whether, given what we know about astronomy, there's any way that this could actually work somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away.

A couple of weeks ago, io9's George Dvorsky put together a little round-up of five possible scientific explanations that would make Westeros' magical reality make more sense. I chatted about Dvorsky's list with Attila Kovacs, an actual astronomer who has a postdoc position at the California Institute of Technology. They've got differing perspectives on how unpredictable and ridiculously long seasons might work. Thanks to both these sources, I feel like I better understand our universe, and can read Martin more comfortably.

Dvorsky's list starts with planetary tilt. Specifically, what would happen if the planet Westeros is on had a particularly wobbly tilt.

Earth's seasons are caused by the tilt of its axis of rotation - a 23.4° offset of the axis to be exact. The direction of the Earth's rotational axis stays nearly fixed in space despite the fact that we're also revolving around the Sun. As a result, depending on the Earth's location during its orbit, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, causing us to experience summer. Half a year later, when the Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun, the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, resulting in — yes, you guessed it — winter. The seasons are, of course, reversed for the southern hemisphere.

The seasons themselves are the result of shifting daylight exposures. In temperate and polar regions, the seasons are marked by changes in the intensity of sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface. The less sunlight, the colder it is. Makes sense. It's important to note that the Earth's axis of rotation is extremely stable. If it wasn't, the Earth's tilt would be very wobbly, resulting in inconsistent and unpredictable seasonal lengths like the ones portrayed in Game of Thrones.

But thankfully we have the Moon. Or more specifically, we have a very large moon. The Earth's moon is disproportionately large compared to other planetary satellites in the solar system. And without it, there might not be any seasons, or the seasons could be very different than what we're used to. The Moon has the effect of stabilizing the tilt of the Earth's rotational axis. Without it, Earth would be a wobbly mess.

Kovacs, though, says Dvorsky has this backwards. Our Moon isn't a stabilizer at all.

Rotational axes of planets are almost impossible to nudge (IO9's #1), unless by a powerful tidal force — such as the one exerted by our large and close Moon (short of a catastrophic collision with another planet). IO9 has this completely upside-down. Earth's rotational axis would be extremely stable were it not for the Moon. Because of the Moon, it is constantly changing — precessing — with a 26,000 year period.

Basically, Earth does experience some erratic, hard-to-predict changes to its orbit which probably result in changes to observable weather/climate patterns. In fact, it's a big part of some theories on why Ice Ages happen. It's just that, here, unlike on Westeros, those changes happen over thousands of years, not tens or dozens. Instead, Kovacs offers two potential causes for unwieldy seasons that weren't mentioned in the io9 piece at all. First, he says, you could get a very irregular orbit—and thus, irregular seasons—just by having there be two suns.

IO9's list is missing my favourite explanation, that of a disrupted planetary orbit, a.k.a the 3-body problem. Earth goes around the Sun on a nice regular orbit, only because the effect of all other planets on Earth's motion is tiny, so one really only needs to consider the Earth orbiting the Sun (2 bodies) or the Moon orbiting Earth (2 bodies again). However, things get hairy with more large bodies close by — such as with planets orbiting binary stars. Around binary stars, most orbits would be chaotic. So much so, that in the long run planets would tend to be either ejected or collide with one of the stars. But, perhaps, Westeros got lucky, and stayed around long enough by slim chance... And, the second object in the binary could be a brown dwarf (essentially a very large planet, that is just short of becoming a star itself), which would explain why it still only has one real sun still...

And, here is one more possibility, just for fun: What if Westeros' sun has a variable energy output? It could have structural instabilities (resulting from changes in its stellar structure, or from recently swallowing a large inner planet). Or, it could have a close binary companion from which it accretes material at an unsteady rate...

Of course, Kovacs' "three-body problem" explanation has implications for the seasons on Tatooine, as well. But that's a whole 'nother issue.

Read the full io9 piece on the theoretical astronomy that could cause weird seasonal changes like the ones depicted in Game of Thrones.

Read astronomer Attila Kovacs full response to that piece.

Image from a T-shirt Of the Day on RIPT Apparel

Tomorrow would have been the 94th birthday of one of the most influential physicists in American history.

Tonight: We play the bongos.

Video Link

Robogames, an annual robot hoedown, takes place this weekend in San Mateo. $25 for adults, $0-$20 for kids depending on age, free for active duty military. Bring hearing protection and a love of machines, noise, and mayhem. It's a ton of fun. I'm late posting this, but it's not too late for you to go: ticket sales online ticket sales are closed, but they're available on-site at the San Mateo Fairgrounds noon-7pm Sunday 22 April (map).

Photos: Above, an audience member is entranced by robot dance moves. Below, "Last Rites" delivers a lethal hit against "VD6" for a knockout in a heavyweight combat prelim round. By Dave Schumaker.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/21/to-do-this-weekend-in-sf-bay-a.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/09/bring-your-own-big-wheel.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/09/bring-your-own-big-wheel.html#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:04:29 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=153739

These people in San Francisco probably had more fun than you on Passover/Easter weekend. BB reader Bhautik Joshi shares his photographs from "Bring Your Own Big Wheel 2012" in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, and explains the idea behind it—

For the uninitiated, the gag is really simple:

- large group of adults in costumes assemble with a variety of wheeled, childrens toys (Group A)
- large group of spectators gather (Group B)
- Group A races down windy Vermont St as fast as they can, leaving a trail of noise and awesomeness in their path
- Group B cheer like maniacs

Video Link. YouTuber Adam Forgie of Utah, the person behind the camera, shoots these lovely videos with some regularity. "I take care of my legally-blind, near-deaf grandmother," he explains. "She may be blind, but she can still dance! She likes the attention." You can follow her on Twitter here.

Update: Boing Boing readers in various spots around the world report that the video is blocked in certain countries outside the US. This is dumb. Sorry. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/90-year-old-grandmas-dance-t.html/feed 11