My friend and fellow woman-with-breast-cancer Lani Horn share the following by email, and I asked her permission to post it to Boing Boing because I about died of teh cute. She said:
— Read the restMy kids had the stomach virus this week. Middle kid got it first.
Wil Wheaton did a very funny, 30-ish minute standup set at #w00tstock 5.0, which the Alpha Geek Radio folks recorded and put in their podcast feed. Here's the MP3 — warning, very NSFW.
AG Radio – #w00tstock 5.0 – Story Time with Wil
(via Wil Wheaton)
(Image: Wil Wheaton, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from genevieve719's photostream)
Kill City Blues is the latest in Richard Kadrey's amazing hard-boiled supernatural thriller series Sandman Slim. I've been a Kadrey fan since his landmark debut novel Metrophage, and have read and enjoyed all his work since, but Sandman Slim are the novels Kadrey was born to write. — Read the rest
This is seriously awesome. Researchers with the Mastadon Matrix Project need help sifting through "matrix" — the dirt that a fossil is embedded in. Join the Project, and you'll be sent a kilogram of matrix from a mastadon dig in New York State. — Read the rest
Native American political activist and actor Russell Means, founding member of AIM, has died at 72 of esophageal cancer. A NYT obituary is here. More: russellmeans.com.
Spider Robinson writes:
— Read the restI just received word that Jay Kay Klein, THE photographer of science fiction
and fantasy, passed away on Sunday morning, May 13, in a Catholic hospice (a
"Francis House") in Syracuse, NY, at age 80, of esophageal cancer.
"From the "Obscure Pleasures of Medical Libraries" to the "Aphrodites of the Operating Theater," cultural critic Mark Dery is never one to turn a blind eye at our own gross anatomy. In 2006 though, Mark couldn't look away even if he wanted to. That year, the author of the new essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, spent his summer vacation at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center suffering through the poisonous cure of chemotherapy before punctuating his year with hours under the surgeon's scalpel. Boing Boing is honored to publish for the first time Mark's intense, moving, and deeply personal account of his Season In Hell." — David Pescovitz
On the wall at the foot of my bed, a poster displays the Faces Pain Scale, a series of earless, genderless every men arranged, from right to left, in increasing degrees of agony.
“The faces show how much pain or discomfort someone is feeling,” the caption explains. “The face on the left shows no pain. Each face shows more and more pain and the last face shows the worst pain possible. Point to the face that shows how bad your pain is right NOW.” The blurb adds, helpfully, that your face need not resemble the cartoon visages in the Pain Scale.
It’s August 2011. I’m lying in a room at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, waiting to undergo surgery for a small-bowel obstruction, an intestinal blockage resulting from postoperative adhesions caused by my 2008 surgery for my first small-bowel obstruction, itself the result of my 2006 surgery for a rare and virulent cancer. Abdominal surgery begets scar tissue. Which gives rise to adhesions. Which sometimes cause bowel obstructions. Which may necessitate surgery. Which begets more scar tissue, which…
We've talked here before about the extremely important (and often-overlooked) DIY aspect of science. Scientists are makers. They have to be. The tools they need often aren't available any other way. Other times, the tools are available, but they're far more expensive than what you could construct out of your own ingenuity. — Read the rest
The sciencebloggers are abuzz after a WSJ editorial mentioned Nexium, a heartburn medication, repeatedly by name, implying that it is some kind of wonder drug. Nexium was developed by AstraZeneca because its flagship anti-heartburn med, omeprazole (sold under brand names like Prilosec or Losec) was going off-patent. — Read the rest
Meet the viruses and bacteria that infect parasites, which infect people. It's like a Russian nesting doll of microbial pests. As a human, I'm not sure whether to feel a bit of schadenfreude at parasites getting what's coming to them, or be deeply disturbed. — Read the rest
When heavy publicity turns early scientific findings into massive public debacles—see: Life, arsenic—we spend a lot of time talking about the problems inherent in doing science by press release. Essentially, an early finding might be pretty damn intriguing. But an early finding doesn't mean much until it's been picked apart by other scientists, and held up to criticism and verification. — Read the rest
Maryn McKenna is the author of a new book called Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA.
MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staphyoloccus Aureus) kills more people every year than AIDS. In the US alone 19,000 die from it each year, and another 369,000 are hospitalized because of it. — Read the rest
The vocoder was an anti-eavesdropping technology invented by Bell Labs in 1928. It ended up a favorite tool of musicians. Enjoy this excerpt of Dave Tomkins's book, How to Wreck a Nice Beach -- The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop.
Richard Kadrey's Kill the Dead is the sequel to his 2009 hard-boiled supernatural thriller Sandman Slim, and it's everything a sequel should be; that is, more.
Sandman Slim was one of the most hardboiled, hard-assed novels I'd ever read. — Read the rest
Tiny Art Director is a site written by Bill Zeman, an artist whose daughter is four. The basic schtick is, she tells the Bill what to draw, he draws it, she critiques it (she's hard to please). It's hilarious and great — and he's got a book-deal! — Read the rest
A tinsy little virus called "Sputnik" with only 21 genes preys on larger, more developed viruses, infecting them and hijacking their resources to reproduce and spread:
— Read the rest
With just 21 genes, Sputnik is tiny compared with its mama – but insidious. When the giant mamavirus infects an amoeba, it uses its large array of genes to build a 'viral factory', a hub where new viral particles are made.
John sez, "Night Shade Books has made the entire text of Butcher Bird available as a DRM-free download, in a wide variety of formats. Kadrey is the author of one of the quintessential cyberpunk novels, Metrophage (which you can also read online.)" — Read the rest
Richard Kadrey — a charter member of cyberpunk's original vanguard, author of the wonderful Metrophage — has a new novel out at long last, and it was worth the wait.
Butcher Bird is Kadrey's extended, mythological celebration of all things deviant, transgressive, queer, perverse and broken. — Read the rest
The FBI and Joint Terrorism Task force are hosting a conference in Kansas City, Missouri, with an unusual theme: "Agroterrorism." Not "aggro" as in, "Osama totally aggro'd out on that infidel," but agro, like crops.
Oh, there's some tiny-font mumbo jumbo on the website about "devoting increased time and attention to specific topics related to the prevention, detection and mitigation of an intentional attack against the food supply," but I know what this is really about: Genetically modified foods rising up to eat their masters. — Read the rest
The Food and Drug Administration approved certain viruses as food additives, to be sprayed on cold cuts before packaging. The bacteriophages are added to defend the meats from Listeria monocytogenes, a bug that when ingested can cause a nasty bacterial infection in humans. — Read the rest
