Top > Scripting News Directory > Tim Post's Tomorrow > Boing Boing

130,000 inflatable breasts missing at sea. Nick sez, "WA Today from Australia posted this story about 130,000 inflatable boobs that were lost at sea en route to Australia. They were part of a promotion for men's magazine, Ralph. When the ship arrived, the boobs were found to be missing."

Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.

The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt...

Ralph editor Santi Pintado urged anyone who has any information to contact the magazine.

``Unless Somali pirates have stolen them its difficult to explain where they are,'' Pintado said.

``If anyone finds any washed up on a beach, please let us know.''

Storm in a C-cup - 130,000 boobs lost at sea(Thanks, Nick!)

Strange and endangered wildlife. WebEcoist's list of "20 Strange and Exotic Endangered Species" is a sad marvel of incredibly odd creatures that your kids might never get a chance to see.


This is not shopped. This is not a hoax. That is a giant crab on a garbage can. They’re native to Guam and other Pacific islands. Coconut crabs aren’t endangered, per se, but due to tropical habitat destruction they are at risk. In WWII, American soldiers stationed in the Pacific theater wrote home with tales about entire atolls being covered in the armor-plated giants. These crabs can crack a coconut in one swipe; but they’re generally too slow to be very dangerous to humans. Children pass lazy afternoons by picking the crabs off tree trunks and watching them crash to the ground; it’s reportedly great fun. And kind of messed up.
20 (More) Strange and Exotic Endangered Species(via Neatorama)

(Image: Giant coconut crab by Jason Kottke)

If we were in charge of America's finances....
Today's XKCD hits it out of the park with an alternate currency that we can all get behind. Click through to the original for the bonus guffaw in the tool-tip.

Alternate Currency

Fast Forward 2: original sf from the cutting edge, including "True Names," a novella by Benjamin Rosenbaum and me!. Fast Forward 2 is the second volume in Lou Anders' excellent science fiction anthology series, featuring knockout stories from Karl Schroeder and Tobias Buckell, Kay Keyon, Ian McDonald, Paolo Bacigalupi and many others. I'm very proud to have a story in the book, too -- a long, long novella I co-wrote with Ben Rosenbaum called True Names, which tries to imagine what the wars between light-speed-lagged, self-replicating nano-machine-based galactic civilizations would look like as different nanites warred to see who would convert the universe to computronium first.

While all the stories herein are at least excellent, there were a couple of absolute knockouts that I want to mention. First is Toby Buckell and Karl Schroeder's Mitigation, a taut military thriller about the global geopolitics of genomic seedbanks. Also fantastic is Ian McDonald's Eligible Boy, which returns to the fractured future India he delivered in his brilliant, Hugo-nominated novel, River of Gods, and explores the hard problem of matchmaking in an era of demographics upturned by gendercide. Finally, Paolo Bacigalupe's The Gambler should be required reading at every school of journalism in the world, exploring as it does the question of click-driven news and coming up with genuinely novel and sometimes disturbing things to say about it.

Lou's posted two of the stories from the anthology online as free samples: "Catherine Drewe" by Paul Cornell" and Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Gambler". I'm especially fond of this latter, as I mentioned above.

I'm delighted to announce that Ben and I are releasing True Names today as a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike download, to accompany the podcast of the story we released earlier this year. I hope you'll give it a read, and a remix -- I can't remember when I've had more fun writing anything.

(How's this for embarrassing: none of us can find an editable file with the final, copyedited text, just the PDF from the book. There's a remix-challenge for ya: turn the PDF back into ASCII or HTML or something sensible!)

Beebe fried the asteroid to slag when it left, exterminating millions of itself.

The asteroid was a high-end system: a kilometer-thick shell of femtoscale crystalline lattices, running cool at five degrees Kelvin, powered by a hot core of fissiles. Quintillions of qubits, loaded up with powerful utilities and the canonical release of Standard Existence. Room for plenty of Beebe.But it wasn't safe anymore.

The comet Beebe was leaving on was smaller and dumber. Beebe spun itself down to its essentials. The littler bits of it cried and pled for their favorite toys and projects. A collection of civilization-jazz from under a thousand seas; zettabytes of raw atmosphere-dynamics data from favorite gas giants; ontological version control data in obsolete formats; a slew of favorite playworlds; reams of googly-eyed intraself loveletters from a hundred million adolescences. It all went.

(Once, Beebe would have been sanguine about many of the toys -- certain that copies could be recovered from some other Beebe it would find among the stars. No more).

Predictably, some of Beebe, lazy or spoiled or contaminated with meme-drift, refused to go. Furiously, Beebe told them what would happen. They wouldn't listen. Beebe was stubborn. Some of it was stupid.

Beebe fried the asteroid to slag. Collapsed all the states. Fused the lattices into a lump of rock and glass. Left it a dead cinder in the deadness of space.

Fast Forward 2 on Amazon,True Names release on the Internet Archive

See also:
True names podcast
Review of River of Gods

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets. y45u4u.jpgToday on Boing Boing Gadgets, a graffiti artist left a curious message for Brownlee on his front doorstep, and Joel did not pay six dollars to dink around on an iPhone Stylophone. Beschizza was outraged that breaking a web site's terms of service has been made a crime. Elecom finally made a waterproof SD card. Joel lusted after a Poulsen kit that will turn any car into a hybrid. Meanwhile, Beschizza spent all morning as a paranoiac, obsessing over the spy messages in number signals. Circuit City's bankruptcy fire sale is not extending to their fire extinguishers. Nokia finally unveiled their flip-up QWERTY touchscreen, the N97. Brownlee was surprised by how nice gadgetry looks in the aesthetic of oriental pottery and looked like an idiot wondering about when Apple was going to sell their premium in-ear headphones when they had just that moment gone on sale. The FCC leaked the Sony's new netbook, There was a strange halved keyboard from Japan. Fujitsu offered a free laptop replacement every three years to their customers. Some cool junkbots were on display, and Palm blames the economy for their plummeting revenue when the truth is more obvious. Finally, the game of Operation finally meets lockpicking. And John slathers his face in moist gobs of MomSpit.Link

Spider Robinson reads Varley's "The Persistence of Vision". Spider Robinson's latest podcast installment is a reading of John Varley's towering and brilliant 1979 novella, "The Persistence of Vision," winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. I'm a gigantic John Varley fan (especially of his short fiction) and this story may be the best of the lot.

"The Persistence of Vision," is the story of a drifter crossing America during a terrible depression who happens upon a Taos commune run by and for a community of blind-deaf people, the adult cohort of a decades-gone German measles epidemic. In the commune ("Keller"), the narrator discovers important, unsuspected truths about independence and interdependence, communication and community, and the power of hope and perseverance.

This story pulls off one of science fiction's best tricks: exploring the fundamental question of whether disasters demand that you bug out, heading for the hills to wait out the disaster, or bug in, grabbing your go-bag and heading for your neighbors' to see how you can help.

This is a timely reading -- and not just because the economy is in free-fall. Technology is rupture -- each new wave of technological change displaces and remakes us. Today's technocratic winners are tomorrow's superannuated losers. The future of human history will be about how we answer the bug in/bug out question.

Every time I read this story, it fills me with sorrow and hope and makes me mist over, and Robinson's reading is no exception. If you only listen to one piece of audio this week, make it Spider's reading of "The Persistence of Vision."

MP3 link to "Persistence of Vision,Spider on the Web podcast feed, Spider on the Web homepage

The John Varley Reader: 30 Years of Short Fiction

Previously:

UK government sneaking in mandatory ID cards. Glyn sez, "The UK Government planning to sneak in a police power to make anyone who has ever entered the country, at any time, prove who they are. This would effectively cover any British citizen who has ever left the UK, even for a holiday, because they will have "entered" the UK on their return. It will mean that for the first time in more than half a century that the police will be able to demand your papers."

ID cards are not voluntary(Thanks, Glyn!)

(Image: ID Card, a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike image from Gareth Harper's Flickr stream)

Women in science group want a female Doctor Who. The UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology is calling for the next Doctor Who to be a woman, in order to inspire girls to take up careers in science (and time-lording).

A spokeswoman from the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (UKRC) said: "There is a distinct lack of role models of female scientists in the media and recent research shows that this contributes to the under-representation of women in the field.

"The UKRC believes that making a high profile sci-fi character with a following like Doctor Who female would help to raise the profile of women in science and bring the issue of the important contribution women can and should make to science in the public domain."

The UKRC have set up a group on social networking site Facebook in a bid to get the BBC and members of the public behind their cause before the future Time Lord, or Lady, is chosen in time for the next full series set to air in 2010.

'Doctor Who should be a woman' say female scientists (via IO9)

Photographic Periodic Table of Elements Cards, Puzzles, Personalized Posterers.

This is one of the baddest-ass gift ideas I've seen yet this holiday season. So, you may recall an earlier Boing Boing blog post about the Periodic Table rendered in lenticular 3D photographs....

Theodore Gray has been making the ultimate periodic table, a one-of-a-kind wooden table with real samples that sits in his office. For the rest of us who don’t visit his office he has he has created an incredible (and very tastefully designed) photographic poster "after four years of collecting and photographing samples of all the chemical elements, months of struggling to select the very best example of each one."
Mr. Gray is producing those posters still, and they're vivid and lovely. But he's also offering a custom banner service so you can print out a name (yours, that of your loved one, or your beloved blog, whatever) in photographic elements. Ours is above. Also, he's just begun offering a really cool puzzle with the same imagery, and a deck of index cards -- unlike other "elements" card decks, this one has perfectly square cards with all the info about that element on the back. You can reassemble them to make the periodic table. I've seen all of this stuff, it's sitting in the Boing Boing tv office right now, and it's beautifully printed, packaged, and presented. I'm going to buy a bunch for holiday prezzies.

UPDATE: Oh, cool -- a special offer for Boing Boing readers! Theodore, the guy who makes all this stuff, says:

I've added a "Where did you hear about my products?" comment field to the PayPal order page (it comes near the end of the ordering process). If anyone puts in boingboing, I'll send them a free extra product. If they order any size of poster, I'll include an extra 18x36 poster. If they order something non-rolled (like place mats, 3D lenticular print, card deck, or puzzle), I'll send something else that's not rolled. (Sending both a rolled and non-rolled item costs much more than sending two of the same type.)


Previously:

Reports: Mumbai Attackers Took Coke, LSD, and Steroids; Wore Versace; used GPS and VOIP.

(Image above by keerthi). Today marks one week since the attacks in Mumbai that killed and injured hundreds (BB post #1, BB post #2). Skimming headlines this morning in the Times of India, the post-attack narrative has now turned to the possibility of punitive strikes on Pakistan by India, with some Indian media implying US support -- things could get a lot scarier, fast, given that both nations have nukes. US Secretary of State Rice just arrived, and on this same day, they've found bombs in the Mumbai train station that was an attack site.

One of the other aftermath stories I've been following: what tech devices the attackers used to orient themselves and coordinate communications before, during, and after the attacks. VOIP phones, SIM cards, and Garmin GPS units, among them. Some of this information is apparently the result of interrogation with the one known surviving attacker (God only knows what methods they're using). All of this first circulated in Indian tabloids. I'm not sure of how reliable any or all of it is. But here's a snip from a possibly-more-reputable-than-others source, caveat lector, etc.:

[T]he terrorists who carried out the rampage in Mumbai procured with ease five cell phone SIM cards -- three of which were being purchased from Delhi's Karol Bagh area while the rest from West Bengal's 24 Parganas district, interrogation records of the only arrested ultra have revealed.

Mohammad Ajmal Amir Iman has told interrogators that right through the fighting, the Lashkar-e-Taiba headquarters in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir remained very much in touch with them, frequently calling their mobile phones via a voice-over-Internet service.

The government last year imposed strict rules on the issuance of SIM cards by cellular services operators following the Mecca Masjid blasts in Hyderabad in May, where terrorists had copiously used cell phones to trigger improvised explosive devises and send text messages to their handlers in Pakistan.

Here's another account:
Each man was equipped with a Kalashnikov rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition and grenades. The group also had at least one state-of-the art Garmin global positioning system set, and several mobile phones fitted with SIM cards, which have now been determined to have been purchased in Kolkata and New Delhi. Three men had larger bags, packed with five timer-controlled Improvised Explosive Devices.
Over at WIRED Danger Room blog, Noah Shachtman has two must-read posts up about post-attack analysis, including insight from Bruce Schneier: Mumbai Terrorists Used Pirates' Tactics, and Sorting Fact From Fiction in Mumbai Attacks.

More about the attackers, who were apparently men in their early twenties, from Pakistan: reports circulating (which we at BB can't verify) say they took large amounts of cocaine and LSD before and during the attacks to stay awake, in an altered state of consciousness. And, they apparently worked out a lot as part of a training bootcamp program in Pakistan, taking steroids to build muscle mass.

And, a random, weird thing: one attacker captured alive by the Indian authorities is shown below in a CCTV camera still. Remember how Indian TV news was reporting that his shirt read "CRSA," speculating that this was some new terror organization, when the attacks were taking place? Well, take a closer look. That's "VERSA", with the rest of the word cut off -- is it "VERSACE ?" Presumably a knockoff tee, common throughout India (and the rest of the world), but still -- they wore Versace. Loren Coleman has more, and reminds us of an obliquely resonant factoid: the Versace design label's founder Gianni Versace was killed by a psychopathic murderer.



Previously:

Purple people eater gloves. 200812031001

Spotted in the Craft magazine Flickr pool.Purple people eater gloves

Get a sneak peek at Metaplace MMO with Boing Boing Offworld. hubworld.jpgRaph Koster's Metaplace is offering the first 250 Offworld readers a chance to play around with the company's web-embeddable virtual meta-world.Brandon has more:

Metaplace is also jumping ahead of the pack in modeling the software's Terms of Service around his 2000 manifesto “Declaring the Rights of Players", which gives creators "freedom of expression, ownership, including earning money & running their own world, privacy," and the ability to develop their own individual terms of service. Users, too, get "freedom of speech & assembly, privacy, rule of 'law' and due process," and full ownership of their own IP.
Bop over and get your invite key. You'll never guess what it is. (Translation: You probably will.)Only on Offworld: Be one of the first to join virtual world Metaplace [Offworld]

BBtv: Bill Barminski video for "Surfer's Point," by SubAtomic Nixons.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled weekly programming (Brandon from Offworld is taking the week off from Boing Boing tv duties) to bring you a short, sweet, retro-tastic little video from Bill Barminski, one of our favorite filmmakers and multimedia artists. This piece is a music video for his music side project, the SubAtomic Nixons. Direct MP4 download here (Duration:00:01:32). You can view previous BBtv episodes featuring his work right here.

Hungarian sausage commercial.

Delightful sausage commercial from Budapest.(via Filled with Chocolate Pudding)

Emily the Strange is a rip off of a 1978 book character. Rosamond-Emily

The page on the left is from a 1978 book called Nate the Great Goes Undercover, by Marc Simont. The poster of Emily the Strange on the right is from 1991.

From "We Thought You Wouldn't Notice," a blog that points out art swipes:

If you’ve ever walked into a Hot Topic, you are somewhat familiar with Emily, but on the off-chance that you haven’t, you can get aquainted with her at her big fat website. She was designed in 1991, according to creator Rob Reger, as an image for use on skateboarding merchandise. Since then, she has morphed into a kind of goth pop icon. At first she was just a mouthpiece for typical Hot Topic tee slogans (”I WANT YOU to go away,” “Problem Child,” etc. etc.) but since has moved to full-fledged characterdom, with her own comic book series and a film slated for 2010.

Google searching for any information on this rip has yielded a tiny handful of bemused observers (this one offering the most analysis), but as far as I can tell no real action has been taken. I doubt that neither Marjorie Weinman Sharmat nor Marc Simont (the author and illustrator of the Nate the Great books, respectively) is aware of the appropriation of their character. I plan to send a letter to each c/o of their publishers as soon as possible. I really do think something should be done. This stolen character has already made millions for its “creator” and the fact that she will have her own film is clear testament of how big she’s gotten.

I wonder if Reger is giving Simont a percentage of the sales from Emily merchandise?

Emily the Strange is a rip off of a 1978 book character

Two new books from Feral House. Feral House, one of my favorite publishers of outré history, recently released two excellent books. Dope Menace has hundreds of color photos of sleazy drug paperback books, and The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People is a re-issue of the Wallace Family's (The Book of Lists, The People's Alamanac) fascinating history of the bedroom proclivities of famous folks, past and present.

200812031119While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drug paperback books were once a transgressive medium with a perversely seductive quality.

Dope Menace collects together hundreds of fabulously lurid and collectible covers in color, from xenophobic turn-of-the century tomes about the opium trade to the beatnik glories of reefer smoking and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie to the spaced-out psychedelic ’60s. We mustn’t forget the gonzo paranoia brought on by Hunter S. Thompson in the ’70s, when anything was everything.


200812031124For its initial edition of The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People in 1981, the legendary Wallace family read 1,500 biographies, pored over rare correspondence, legal transcripts and medical reports, and interviewed lovers, confidants and associates of many distinguished men and women in world history.

This 600-page illicit encyclopedia of the private lives of writers, politicians, athletes, popes, rabble-rousers, composers, rock stars and sex symbols has been revised and enlarged, with a dozen new entries, including ones on Kurt Cobain, Malcolm X, Wilt Chamberlain, Ayn Rand, Jim Morrison, Nico, Aleister Crowley, and more.

Previously:

Prop 8 - The Musical -- starring Jack Black, Allison Janney, John C. Reilly, Marc Shaiman, and many more....

I enjoyed this Funny or Die video about Prop. 8. (Thanks, Shawn!)

Droidel, the R2D2 dreidel. Meet the Droidel, Starwars.com's print-and-fold papercraft R2D2-themed dreidel. Gemacht bin ich fon awesome!

Droidel, Droidel, Droidel (via Make)

I made this, you play this, we are enemies -- the weirdest goddamned game I've ever played.
I don't know that I've ever seen any computer art quite as -- I'm sorry, there's no other way of putting this -- as fucked up as "I made this, you play this, we are enemies," a Flash game that really strongly resembles the unmistakable bonkerosity of the complicated sketches left behind the crazy people who used to sit at their own tables in the library I worked at, furiously drawing for 10 hours at a stretch. It's brilliant and terrible all at once and that is why I love it.

I made this, you play this, we are enemies(via Wonderland)

Experiment provides "body swapping" experience. In a strange neuroscience experiment, researchers determined that and individual wearing virtual reality goggles showing video streaming from another person's body can have the sensation that the other body is his or her own. The results of the experiments, conducted at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, were published in the journal Public Library of Science ONE. From the abstract:

Wiredscience Images 2008 12 02 Swedish2The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person's body or an artificial body was one's own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person's body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one's body.
"If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping" (PLoS ONE), "How To Use Neuroscience to Become Your Avatar" (Wired)

Self-embedding disorder among teens. A new study by radiologists reports on teenage girls embedding needles, glass, and other objects in their flesh. While subdermal implants are nothing new in the realm of extreme body modifications, the researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio suggest that the increasing number cases they've seen are actually a form of self-injury similar to cutting. From the Chicago Tribune:

Personnel at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, report extracting 52 foreign objects that 10 teenage girls deliberately embedded in their arms, hands, feet, ankles and necks over the last three years, including needles, staples, wood, stone, glass, pencil lead and a crayon.

One patient had inserted 11 objects, including an unfolded metal paper clip more than 6 inches long...

The study, presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, is the first to report on this type of self-inflicted injury among teenagers, the researchers said. They call the behavior "self-embedding disorder."

Dr. William E. Shiels II, the study's principal investigator and the hospital's chief of radiology, said that uncovering the behavior was unexpected but that researchers are now hearing about cases in other cities. The hospital recently set up a national registry to track incidents and conduct research.
"Radiologists uncover, label new teen affliction" (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

TCHO chocolate is just outta beta!. 200812031307

Our chocolatier friends at TCHO have released their 1.0 "gold master" bars. I've been nibbling on their betas for months, and can hardly wait to taste these.

For the past year, we asked for your feedback during our Beta program to help us create our first flavor-driven chocolates. And an astonishing 46 percent of you gave it. Now, a year and 1026 (literally) iterations later – your “Chocolatey”, “Fruity”, “Nutty”, and “Citrus” have arrived. They have been worth the wait - they are, indeed, obsessively good.

Introducing TCHO’s first “gold master” formulations in our stunning new packaging.

We did it together, and we couldn't have done it without you. Thank You! And now that we have arrived at 1.0 formulations, Susanna Dulkinys, partner in one of the world’s leading design firms, Spiekermann Partners, has designed new 1.0 packaging that's as delightful and innovative as our chocolate. Susanna's new packaging delights - it's bright, colorful, tactile, sophisticated.

TCHO's 1.0 "gold masters."
Previously:

Splatterpunk claymation.

Japanese college student Takena makes splatterpunk claymation movies with death metal soundtracks. The above collection of clips from his work is to promote an upcoming claymation event. For more, may I suggest his masterpiece, Chainsaw Maid, which Mark posted about before. Takena's YouTube Channel (via Ask Earache)

Previously on BB:
• Claymation zombie film

Funny yule log screensaver from PES films. Pes-Yule

PES's new screensaver is a Yule Log that transforms your computer into a Fireplace.

Funny yule log screensaver from PES films

Previously:

Ground resonance and helicopter destruction. Images Dj09 Htw+Main
"When is a helicopter like a Patsy Cline song? When it falls to pieces." That's the darkly comedic subhed in a new Air & Space Magazine about ground resonance, a condition when a sitting helicopter's rotors become imbalanced while spinning. If the frequency of the now-vibrating rotor is close to the body of the chopper's normal vibration frequency, the oscillations increase. In seconds, the whole helicopter can just fall apart. (Ground resonance tore the helicopter above apart in just four seconds.) From Air & Space:

“I was standing right next to it,” says Frank Robinson, founder of the world’s leading helicopter company, describing a close call he had during a 1961 test of a gyroplane. “I had to grab hold of it and hang on and ride the damn thing down. You don’t want to be standing out there when it starts to jump around — it can jump on you. And there’s not a good way to get out of it. Just cut everything, hang on and hope..."

The destruction is wrought by the considerable energy stored in the rotor blades. The shaking rapidly grows in violence, exceeding the strength of the mast, transmission mounts, and landing gear. The cyclic control in the cockpit flails about so violently that the pilot cannot hold it, the rotor blades strike the tail boom or the cockpit, parts begin falling off, and moments later the helicopter may be a heap of scrap.
How Things Work: Ground Resonance

Directly downwind faster than the wind - part 3. Monday's post about a propellor-driven wind cart designed to travel directly downwind faster than the wind (DWFTTW) has generated an emotionally-charged discussion about the feasibility of such a vehicle.

There are three camps -- the people who think it's possible, the people who think it isn't, and the people who don't know. All three camps have members claiming to have degrees in physics, engineering, and aeronautics, and members from each camp are guilty of name-calling, insults, and cheerleading for their "side."

One fellow, a proponent of the idea that DWFTTW is possible, even told me that I should "prepare to be disappointed" because I have my doubts about DWFTTW! I would actually be delighted to learn the truth about this, whatever it is.

In MAKE Vol. 11, Charles Platt made a miniature model of the vehicle and came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a wind-powered vehicle that can travel downwind faster than the speed of the wind. Last year, while Charles was working on the MAKE piece, he emailed me this charming sketch and description:

Windmobile2

Lack of imagination among wind-cart enthusiasts has prevented themfrom realizing that a simple modern invention can solve the problem ofnet forward air flow trying to stop the cart. That invention is--theair duct!

A swivelling duct would be able to take advantage of wind coming fromany direction. A vane at the rear of the duct would automatically turnit into the wind. Even on a windless day, the lucky owner of thiswindmobile would only have to give it a push before leaping aboard, tocreate some relative air flow that would power up the fan andaccelerate the cart. Who could have imagined that the answer to theproblem of non-renewable resources could be so simple?

Of course, he is being facetious. This morning, Charles emailed me the following, along with permission to post it:

Cart

I have browsed the huge discussion in response to your cartposting. Amazingly, so far as I can see, no one has addressed thefundamental problem that if the cart transitions from moving slowerthan the wind to faster than the wind, the reversal of air flow willtry to turn the propeller backward, thus tending to stop the cart.It bothers me that so many people are conned by this idea (or conthemselves).

--

Three questions for cart enthusiasts:

1. When the cart begins running slower than a tail wind, does the airmove through the propeller from the back toward the front?

2. If the cart can somehow accelerate faster than the tail wind (asits proponents claim), does this means that air will now move throughthe propeller from the front toward the back?

3. If the flow of air through the propeller reverses in this way, willit tend to reverse the rotation of the propeller?

Answers to (1) and (2) are clearly "yes." Answer to (3) can bedetermined empirically by blowing air at a small fan, first from thefront, then from the back, and watching which way it turns. Answer to(3) will also be "yes."

Therefore, the reversed air flow will retard forward motion, the speedof the cart is self-limiting, and the claim is false.

If you have something to contribute in the discussion boards about this, please refrain from insults and name-calling.

Side note: I emailed Adam Savage about this, and he said it's "in the hopper" for a Mythbuster's experiment! Im considering running another article about this in a future issue of MAKE, as well.

Previously:

Paralyzed guitarist outfitted with mechanical glove. In June, Dorian Cox, guitarist for UK indie rock back The Long Blondes, suffered a paralyzing stroke that made it impossible for him to play his instrument. The band was forced to call it quits. Now though, Cox is learning to use a SaeboFlex, a glove outfitted with springs and levers that helps stroke patients grasp objects and regain hand function. He hopes to someday pick up his instrument again.

Saeboflex"My right arm and leg aren't really usable so I can't play guitar," Cox explained to the Telegraph. "That was a nightmare because it meant the band couldn't carry on and my livelihood had suddenly gone..."

"I know things might never be the same again and nobody can give me a definite answer about whether I'll play guitar again but I'm getting back on track," Cox said.
"Long Blondes guitarist Dorian Cox back on track with 'bionic hand'" (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

CNN Closes Space/Tech/Environmental Reporting Unit; Miles O'Brien Departs.

Oh, man, this is sad and unexpected news: 16-year veteran CNN reporter and presenter Miles O'Brien will be departing CNN, as the network closes its sci/space/enviromental/tech news division. Snip from mediabistro:

O'Brien's departure comes as the network dismantles its science, space, environment and technology unit in Atlanta. That includes O'Brien as well as six producers. O'Brien has been CNN's chief technology and environment correspondent since being replaced as anchor of American Morning in April 2007.

The network's environmental coverage will continue through the Planet in Peril franchise, which is part of the Anderson Cooper-hosted show AC360. The LA Times has an item about these changes, too. I won't go through a laundry list of the departing names here, but I've had the pleasure of meeting and/or briefly working with a number of them as a guest on various CNN shows. They're talented, dedicated, rare professionals.

Miles is truly one of the greats. I can't think of a single broadcast journalist as knowledgeable on space, aeronautics, and other tech topics. I am so sorry to hear this news.

Update: The screengrab above from Miles O'Brien's twitter feed. (Thanks, Matt West)

Previously:

Christoph Niemann's coffee-on-napkin drawings. Daniel Carter, creative director of MAKE and CRAFT magazines, told me about illustrator Christoph Niemann's remarkable coffee-on-napkin drawings.

200812031437

When I was 21 I worked as an intern at a magazine. The art director and I would brew a gigantic pot of coffee around 9 a.m. to help us get through the day. The pot would simmer in the coffeemaker, and through evaporation the coffee strengthened noticeably at lunchtime. In the evening hours, the remaining coffee had turned to a black concoction with a stinging smell and tar-like taste. We endured it without flinching.
Christoph Niemann's coffee-on-napkin drawings

Today on Offworld. brutallegend.jpgToday on Offworld our beta keys went fast for Metaplace's eponymous new virtual world service (just over an hour!), though there's still a chance to get on the waiting list. Elsewhere throughout the day we saw an Xbox 360 crammed beautifully into a laptop case from master of his craft Ben Heck, watched the latest trailer for the new Ghostbusters game, and examined the business of the iPhone App Store with Apple's 2008 top sellers list now out. We also posted the next Ragdoll Metaphysics column from Jim Rossignol, who looked at why 2008 was a crucial year for indie gaming, particularly generative MMO Love and 2D Boy's World of Goo, saw how Deus Ex's J.C. Denton responds to an ontological quandary, watched millions of copies of the Half-Life franchise fly off retail shelves, and previewed tracks from UK games podcast OneLifeLeft's new chiptune compilation CD.Finally, we played a Space Invaders game from an invader's perspective, and were excited to hear that news is afoot for Brütal Legend, the new black metal adventure from Psychonauts creator DoubleFine which stars Jack Black as its hessian lead.

      Click here to see the XML version of this information.
12/3/2008; 4:57:21 PM Eastern.
Refresh.