When one Boing Boing editor posts about something another editor already posted, we hide it from the front page. But you can see all the duplicated posts here. If we duped something, it must be doubleplusgood, right? Read the rest
My Russian grandmother had these Soviet calendars from the 1960s. I was fascinated with them when I was a small child and studied them almost every time I visited. The calendars have 365 pages, one for every day of the year. I don't read Russian but I can understand what most of the pages are about from the illustrations: profiles of Soviet heroes, chess problems, cartoons, boasts about the Soviet space program, and other nuggets of pro-Soviet propaganda. I now realize the bold red and black graphics had a big influence on my design aesthetic. I also love the cheap newsprint and the way they are bound with big staples. Maybe one day I will self publish a book using this kind of paper and binding method. When my grandmother died at the age of 107, I inherited a few of the calendars and they are some of my most prized possessions. I looked on eBay to see if I could pick up the calendars from other years, but I couldn't find anything like them! Read the rest
My father introduced me to the "Cross the Network" puzzle when I was a kid. Here it is, as described by Martin Gardner in one of his early Mathematical Recreations columns, which ran in Scientific American from the 1930s to the 1980s.
One of the oldest of topological puzzles, familiar to many a schoolboy, consists of drawing a continuous line across the closed network shown in Figure 51 so that the line crosses each of the 16 segments of the network only once. The curved line shown here does not solve the puzzle because it leaves one segment uncrossed. No "trick" solutions are allowed, such as passing the line through a vertex or along one of the segments.
It turns out there is a solution. Is it a "trick?" That's up for you to decide.
This puzzle, and many others, are in Gardner's Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions: The First Scientific American Book of Puzzles and Games. Used copies available cheap! Read the rest
Jerry Seinfeld once quipped "There's no such thing as fun for the whole family." He probably wouldn't have changed his mind after seeing Ed Emberley's series of simple step-by-step instructional drawing books, but I happen to think they are fun for the whole family. I've owned his books for years, and they are a constant source of enjoyment and inspiration for me and for my daughters. You can apply Emberly's technique of taking simple shapes and building on them, not only in the step-by-step instructions in his books, but in your own creations as well. The more you study his work, the more you can use it in your own style.
Mr Beast, creator of Finger on the App, a game in which players vie to be the last one to keep their finger on their smartphone screen (and occasionally move it to a new spot indicated by the app, to prevent cheating) announced that he is ending the competition with four players remaining.
He tweeted:
Dear the four remaining contestants with your finger still on the app, I’m ending it here. Three days is insane! You ALL win and will ALL receive $20,000! CONGRATULATIONS!
Dear the four remaining contestants with your finger still on the app, I’m ending it here. Three days is insane! You ALL win and will ALL receive $20,0000! CONGRATULATIONS!
— MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) July 3, 2020
GO TO SLEEP!
— MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) July 3, 2020
A man tried to hitch a ride on a jet by hiding in one of the engines. It's a good thing he was caught before the pilot started it up.
Image: YouTube Read the rest
Republican strategist Steve Schmidt went on MSNBC to express his outrage over Trump's shocking inaction against Russia's well-documented program of paying bounties for dead American soldiers in Afghanistan:
We've had incompetent presidents, and dumb presidents, and dishonest presidents. But we've never had a faithless president, who is faithless to his oath, who refuses to defend the country from a hostile foreign power, whether it's an attack on the lives of our military or it's an attack on our election process, which so many hundreds of thousands of Americans have died to preserve and protect. It's a shameful, shameful despicable hour in the history of the American presidency, and of all of his degradations and desecrations of his office, this is the most severe. It's the most scandalous and it's should shock the conscience of every American. We have never had a president who refuses to fulfill their oath when it comes to being the Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States quite like Donald Trump.
Image by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America - Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link Read the rest
Eric Trump posted a photo of Chelsea Clinton's wedding in which suspected pedophile Ghislaine Maxwell can be seen in attendance. “Birds of a feather,” he wrote. Almost immediately, people responded to the tweet with the many photos of Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein cozying up to Donald and Melania Trump.
Soon after that, young Eric deleted the tweet without explanation.
Seriously, why would he tweet this? https://t.co/ibSDUkPKNP pic.twitter.com/b4S3SvApP1
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 3, 2020
This is a great example of why I think so little of Eric Trump (and the other one). https://t.co/vuq41FQtPQ
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) July 3, 2020
Eric thinks he is on to something. pic.twitter.com/ew7wBci8tF
— KD (@Fly_Sistah) July 3, 2020
Yesterday I posted about Finger on the App, a game in which players must keep their finger on their smartphone screen (and occasionally move it to a new spot indicated by the app, to prevent cheating). The last person to keep their finger on the app wins a prize of up to $25,000. Over 48 hours later, 15 players are still vying for the prize. The game started with 1.3 million players. Yesterday morning about 80 players remained. As of now (12:55 p.m. Pacific time) 15 players are left.
MrBeast is keeping track of the activity.
A montage of people losing the $25k finger on the app challenge on livestream when viewers trick Siri to open. from r/Wellthatsucks
Image: Twitter Read the rest
What is Arduino? It's a credit card size electronics prototyping platform that lets artists, designers, and others add interactivity to their projects. (My book Maker Dad, has a useful Arduino tutorial.)
This Arduino UNO clone starter kit is very inexpensive and has the following components:
A Joe Rogan lookalike thought he could win a chess game by intimidating his 16-year-old opponent through insults, and gaslighting, and patronizing disdain. Unfortunately for the mouthy gentleman, the kid, who said almost nothing during the game, whipped him. When he was checkmated, the loser said to the kid, "You know what, you're not nice," and stormed off. Read the rest
The Professional Advertising Regulatory Authority (ARPP) of France has banned the airing of a television commercial for VanMoof electric bikes. From a statement by VanMoof (Via Core77):
According to the ARPP, certain shots of the car's reflections "discredit the automobile sector [...] while creating a climate of anxiety." It is notable that the ARPP rejected what would have been one of the first bike ads on French TV, despite recently pledging to reinforce the sustainability aspects of their policies.
Read the restThe [banning] decision comes at a time when the French car industry is in trouble, with sales plummeting due to COVID-19 and widespread economic decline on the horizon. In a bid to support the sector – responsible for almost a third of the country's greenhouse gas emissions – the government recently introduced a recovery plan worth €8 billion.
Bartosz Ciechanowski makes web pages with interactive visuals to explain things like gears, four dimensional cubes, the orbit of the earth around the sun, transparency in digital imaging, lights and shadows, and RGB color spaces. Read the rest
Coffee YouTuber James Hoffman reviewed the 9Barista stovetop espresso machine.
Here's a half-section illustration from the 9Barista website so you can see what's going on. It has two boilers, a heat sink, a coiled heat exchanger, and a spring-loaded valve:
It's available from the 9Barista espresso website for $385. Read the rest
I'm reading Matt Alt's fantastic new book, Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World. Early on in the book, he points to Sony's TR-63 transistor radio (introduced in 1957) as the beginning of Japan's gargantuan influence on the world through consumer electronics, toys, entertainment, and other aspects of popular culture.
I was curious about this transistor radio so I looked it up online and learned that IFixIt did a teardown of the radio back in 2009.
Read the restThe TR-63 was introduced in 1957 - it was the first "pocket-sized" transistor radio ever made and the first Sony-branded product exported to North America, by the then-named Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo company (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation). It became a huge commercial success, over 100,000 units were sold.
It seems "pocket-sized" was a bit of a marketing gimmick at the time - although smaller than any competing product, the TR-63 was a bit too big to fit into a standard shirt pocket. So story has it that company salesmen wore custom-made shirts with slightly bigger pockets to show off the TR-63's small size. But unlike desktop radios of the day which were promoted under the idea of "a radio in every home", the TR-63 was uniquely marketed as something each person could own and carry with them. A foreshadowing of the Walkman and iPod, perhaps?
The TR-63 contains a whopping 6 transistors. By comparison, the Cell processor chip in the PS3 contains two to three hundred million transistors. That's an indication of the progress made in the electronics industry in the past 50 years.
Toothbrushes might seem like a good idea for scrubbing small areas, but they are not angled properly for the job and they wear out fast. The OXO good grips deep clean brush set has two brushes and a wiper blade designed for cleaning tile grout and other hard to reach areas. Read the rest
As long as Sheldon Adelson keeps raking in gamblers' losses, who cares about the body count?
From Rt.live:
Read the restThese are up-to-date values for Rt, a key measure of how fast the virus is growing. It’s the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If Rt is above 1.0, the virus will spread quickly. When Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading.
