"How can you be serious?" Not by wearing this T-shirt! The classic Mark Pawson T-shirt, updated for 2012.
By Xeni Jardin at 10:08 am Thursday, Apr 26
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
By Xeni Jardin at 9:58 am Tuesday, Apr 17
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
[Video Link, by YouTuber GarrulousCrap]. Lonely cat is lonely. (via Tara McGinley)
By Xeni Jardin at 9:45 am Saturday, Apr 7
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
"Martini," by photographer JKG III (web), shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.
By Xeni Jardin at 11:27 am Saturday, Mar 10
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
An internet classic from 2010 by Chris Cohen. (via @nytjim @janinegibson @bengoldacre)
By Xeni Jardin at 1:14 pm Friday, Mar 9
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
[Video Link]. Yes, this remix video is months old, but you probably missed it—and it's not like stuff this weird ever grows old. The song is here. (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)
By Xeni Jardin at 6:36 pm Wednesday, Mar 7
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
A Tumblog of Greatness: kitties and titties (NSFW). Contains nudity, both female and feline. Not for kids, or for adults browsing the web while at work. BB mod Antinous points out that they omitted one obvious image (that one's safe for work). (thanks, Tara McGinley)
By Xeni Jardin at 4:49 pm Thursday, Mar 1
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
[Video Link]. I'm recovering from yesterday's chemo infusion (my fifth!), and feeling kind of lousy. Jonathan Mann asked me this morning if he could write a song for me as his daily song project, and if so, if I had any theme requests. I was like, duh! Kittens, and space. And like a beautiful internet miracle, bam! Just hours later, he created the wonderful video above: "Kittens in Space."
More about Jonathan: YouTube channel, Facebook, Downloads, Twitter, mailing list, Soundcloud, blog, G+, app.
Lyrics follow.
By Xeni Jardin at 12:56 pm Monday, Feb 27
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
[Video Link] Hard to explain this web series, and this particular episode. Cats. Philosophy. Emptiness. Best to just watch. (via Andrea James)
By Xeni Jardin at 3:54 pm Thursday, Feb 23
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
[Video Link].
Craig Davis Pinson, a composer who is a Boston Conservatory student, writes in the liner notes for the video embedded above:
This is a set of variations written on the melody heard in the Youtube video Nyan Cat. It is an experiment, in which I tried to find the limits of how far I could transform the melody before it begins losing its identity. The theme is known as Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!, originally posted by username daniwellP on the Japanese video sharing website, Nico Nico Douga. The Nyan Cat phenomenom has become ingrained in popular culture, and amazes me both in its sheer absurdity and its freakishly colossal popularity. However, fascinating as they are to me, the origins of the theme are not played upon in this composition. Instead, I treated Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! as pure musical material from which to generate music. The motivation to use this theme came from my repeated viewings of the video, and slowly realizing that it is a strangely alluring melody. Therefore, this is my tribute to Nyan Cat. Credit goes to daniwell-p for creating this theme, prguitarman for creating the gif animation, and saraj00n for joining them. Theme used for non-commercial purposes as per daniwell-P's request.
On a large scale, the work is structured along a simple alternation pattern. The theme and its variations alternate, similarly to rondo form. However, the theme is progressively dissolved, meaning that each time it returns it contains less percentage of the source material. This chipping-away continues until there's nothing recognizable left. In the variation episodes, more tools are employed to change the essence of the theme, especially, pronounced changes of duration, texture, harmonic character, and of the intervallic makeup of the melody. Each of the variations has its own defined character, and they contrast sharply with one another in mood and technique. Despite of the contrast of its sections, the piece exploits a long-scale narrative arc, playing on the contrast between the theme's duration - which remains essentially consistent at each iteration - and the durations of the variation episodes, which seem to grow out of control as their proportions become subverted.
Read the rest
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 1:07 pm Wednesday, Feb 1
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I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.
Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us
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
U xpect adorabulness. U gets it. But kittehs also gives u edukashun n' sientific nuance.
That's all the LOLcat speak I can muster in one go. Seriously, watch this video from Big Cat Rescue. It's fascinating. And, you should know, at the end, they link you to a slightly less educational feature about ocelots and lynx chasing laser pointers. Just sayin'.
Thanks, Andrew Balfour!
By Xeni Jardin at 7:34 am Saturday, Jan 14
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
Image: Alfalfa, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by photographer David W. Oliver.
By Xeni Jardin at 10:36 pm Friday, Jan 13
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
Look at that!
(via @joejanecek+@popurls, video by Katie Westlake)
By Xeni Jardin at 5:55 pm Wednesday, Dec 14
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
GirlieMac, aka Tomomi Imura (Twitter) just won the internet with her deftly conceived and Photoshopped series of HTTP status message "motivational poster" images, featuring cats. A bunch of them are featured above and below. The full set is here at Flickr. She's taking suggestions for more, if you can think of any she missed. (thanks, Bonnie Burton)
By Xeni Jardin at 12:41 pm Tuesday, Nov 15
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
[Video Link, thanks @kaepora]
By Xeni Jardin at 10:40 am Friday, Nov 11
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Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.
PBS NewsHour's Jenny Marder wrote a really interesting feature about the abandoned pets inside the Fukushima evacuation zone in Japan. I encountered some of them when I traveled to the area with Safecast and PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien (our resulting PBS NewsHour report video is here).
Jenny digs into what happened with the volunteer effort to rescue and adopt the abandoned pets, and talks to scientists about the effect of fallout on animals (including intergenerational and genetic changes, like what the world saw within bird and wild animal populations after Chernobyl). Snip:
At the tail end of Miles O'Brien's latest NewsHour report on radiation in Japan, a golden dog with a thick red collar trots into the street of the abandoned town, Katsurao, and weaves along the center divider.
Miles asks, off camera: "Do we have anything to feed him?"
The piece, which airs tonight, reports on the group Safecast, which has measured, mapped and crowdsourced data on radiation levels in locations throughout Japan, particularly in the hot spots near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The dog was one of several scrawny, undernourished dogs and cats they encountered, most likely abandoned by their owners during rapid evacuation.
Read more: What's the Fallout for Dogs Near Fukushima? (The Rundown News Blog | PBS NewsHour)
(Photos in this post by Sean Bonner: all iPhone snapshots of abandoned pets we encountered in the evacuation zone, shot during our drive from Tokyo to Fukushima in August, 2011)
