Selasa, 19 April 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Is sugar a poison?

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 10:50 PM PDT

Gary "Big Fat Lie" Taubes wrote a long feature for the NYT Magazine analyzing the claims made by UCSF childhood obesity expert Robert H. Lustig in his infamous lecture Sugar: The Bitter Truth , which has gotten about a million YouTube views (it's also had other exposure: I watched it last year on UC cable access while in LA).

Lustig claims that sugar is a "chronic toxin" -- a poison that will make you sick if you eat it for long enough -- and he blames it for everything from cancer to heart disease. Taubes traces the history of this theory about sugar through the past century, and concludes that while not conclusive, the evidence is worrying. I've tried to eliminate sugar from my diet with varying success since 2003, when I did a year of "strict Atkins" and lost 80 lbs, most of which I've kept off since by avoiding processed carbs where possible. I find that eating a little sugar (or high-carb food like bread) generally leads to cravings for a lot more, which means that slight slips tend to snowball.

Lustig's argument, however, is not about the consumption of empty calories -- and biochemists have made the same case previously, though not so publicly. It is that sugar has unique characteristics, specifically in the way the human body metabolizes the fructose in it, that may make it singularly harmful, at least if consumed in sufficient quantities.

The phrase Lustig uses when he describes this concept is "isocaloric but not isometabolic." This means we can eat 100 calories of glucose (from a potato or bread or other starch) or 100 calories of sugar (half glucose and half fructose), and they will be metabolized differently and have a different effect on the body. The calories are the same, but the metabolic consequences are quite different.

The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose). And if you take that sugar in liquid form -- soda or fruit juices -- the fructose and glucose will hit the liver more quickly than if you consume them, say, in an apple (or several apples, to get what researchers would call the equivalent dose of sugar). The speed with which the liver has to do its work will also affect how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose.

Is Sugar Toxic? (via /.)

Ethiopia's "newspaper landlords" rent the want-ads by the minute

Posted: 19 Apr 2011 04:09 AM PDT

Ethiopia's "newspaper landlords" are entrepreneurs who rent the right to read a US$0.35 newspaper for 20-30 minutes at a go, for less than $0.01 per rental. Most of their customers are reading the want-ads. Newspaper publishers are ambivalent about the practice -- on the one hand, it creates a newspaper-reading habit among the nation's aspiring poor, but on the other hand, rentals displace some sales -- and the "landlords" complain that customers steal their newspapers.
Tesfaye says that 30 to 40 people will read a single paper. At the end of the day, the well-thumbed publications can be sold on.

"After a newspaper passes its deadline we will sell it to shops who can use it as packaging for items that they sell," says Tesfaye, who says he uses the earnings from his business to support his three siblings.

Renting a read from 'newspaper landlords'

More watch-part motorcycles

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 10:41 PM PDT

Backwards Beekeepers on CNN

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:43 PM PDT


[Video Link] It was a lot of fun to see my friends from the Backward Beekeepers club in Los Angeles in this CNN report. I wrote about the Backwards Beekeepers in my book Made by Hand, which is selling on Amazon in the United States for the bargain price of $10.38, hardcover.

NYT: Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 03:58 PM PDT

I had been planning on making a standing desk for some time now, but the thing that really got me off my butt was this article in the New York Times magazine by James Vlahos, titled "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?"
People don't need the experts to tell them that sitting around too much could give them a sore back or a spare tire. The conventional wisdom, though, is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you'll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. "Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting," says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

The posture of sitting itself probably isn't worse than any other type of daytime physical inactivity, like lying on the couch watching "Wheel of Fortune." But for most of us, when we're awake and not moving, we're sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops -- "the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse," Hamilton says -- leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides -- for "vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream," as Hamilton puts it -- plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

Variety loses legal round in battle with punk band Vandals over album cover

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 03:12 PM PDT

The Los Angeles-based punk band the Vandals would appear to have won an important round in a legal battle with the entertainment publication Variety, over a dispute involving Variety's logo and a Vandals album cover. The story is as full of LOL as it is of legalese, and involves a few YouTubed mockery videos made by the band and their attorney.

Christian protesters destroy controversial Andres Serrano art "Piss Christ"

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:11 PM PDT

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"Piss Christ," a long-controversial work created in 1987 by NYC-based artist Andres Serrano, was attacked with hammers and destroyed yesterday (Palm Sunday) following an "anti-blasphemy" campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon.

The violent slashing of the picture, and another Serrano photograph of a meditating nun, has plunged secular France into soul-searching about Christian fundamentalism and Nicolas Sarkozy's use of religious populism in his bid for re-election next year.
More in the Guardian (via LGF).

Image: Wikipedia

LA Library, 1960: Gun-toting child reads bunny book

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 02:47 PM PDT

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From the LA Library archives:

Wrapped in Thought: Four-year-old Philip Ross finds ABC Easter Bunny more interesting than his guns and spurs. Son of Mr. and Mrs. Max Ross, 12605 Califa St., North Hollywood, he said he can't read but 'didn't mind looking at pictures.' Librarians at North Hollywood branch library said he is a frequent visitor."
Contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Bart King. Captions invited. Also, wonder where this child (who'd now be an adult) is today!

Public Knowledge announces "Copyright School" video challenge

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 02:20 PM PDT

Mehan J. tells Boing Boing,
We at Public Knowledge were pretty upset when we saw YouTube's "Copyright School" educational video, which discourages remixing, dismisses fair use as overly complex and effectively tells users that only "original" content is suitable for upload. So we're challenging YouTube users to produce a better "Copyright School" video, one that explains both what you can and can't do with copyrighted content without permission from the rightsholder. The creator of the best video will win $1000!

Twitters: Robin Cooper phone pranks Apple store

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 02:12 PM PDT

Standing desk prototype #1

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 03:56 PM PDT

Standing desk3.jpg

I built an elevated platform so I could try working at a standing desk. It's 11.5 inches high, and I built it from .75" x .75" sticks and .5" plywood. I added lots of triangular bracing and then sat on it to make sure it could hold my 27" iMac without collapsing. I just started using it this morning so I can't say how much I like it yet.

I'm standing on a gardener's kneeling pad, which is probably too spongy. I might switch to a yoga mat. Standing desk1.jpg

Standing desk2.jpg

This is a prototype. I am going to use this one for a week, take notes, and make another prototype. (First note for Prototype 2 - a nook under the plywood to hold the external drives and USB hub.)

Here's Donald Rumsfeld at his most charming (which is about as charming as a monitor lizard) defending his standing desk and explaining to the CNN host that Thomas Jefferson had one and that naval officers use them. Go Rummy!

UPDATE: Here is the image I'm using on my desktop.

The Fifth Question: Why Manischewitz?

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 12:38 PM PDT

My father wasn't a drinker. In fact, I never saw him imbibe at all, except of course for a few sips of Manischewitz at Passover. In memory of my dad on this first night of Passover, I link to cultural historian Yoni Appelbaum's essay at The Atlantic titled "The 11th Plague? Why People Drink Sweet Wine on Passover." From The Atlantic:
Traditional Products "A seder without sweet Manischewitz," the comedian Jackie Mason once said, "would be like horseradish without tears, like a cantor without a voice, like a shul without a complaint, like a yenta without a big mouth, like Passover without Jews." To the uninitiated, Passover wine is an ethnic curiosity, or a culinary ordeal on a par with lutefisk. Those who grew up drinking it, though, find in Concord grape wine the taste of Jewish tradition. And that's ironic, because there may be no more thoroughly American beverage.

The central ritual of Passover is the seder, a recounting of the Exodus over four cups of wine. Jewish law stipulates that kosher wine be produced and handled only by Jews, a requirement that initially proved difficult to meet in North America. Early cultivars of native grape species were poorly adapted for viticulture, and imported grape vines succumbed to cold, mildew, and fungi. The few who could afford it imported wine from Europe. Others relied on a stipulation that, in exigencies, allowed other premium beverages to be substituted for wine. So Jews filled their seder cups with everything from hard cider to clear Jamaican rum.

The most popular solution, though, was adapted from a common custom of the old country. Immigrants soaked raisins in water and boiled down the liquid, producing an ersatz wine. It was thicker and sweeter than wine from grapes. Most raisin wine was non-alcoholic, either because American Jews mistakenly conflated fermentation with leavening, which was proscribed on Passover, or because this left it exempt from excise taxes. Some made the wine at home, but production also migrated to small shops and basement wineries. By 1890, the six leading vendors in New York alone sold 40,000 gallons of this Passover wine.

"The 11th Plague? Why People Drink Sweet Wine on Passover" (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

Xeni on The Madeleine Brand radio show: Russia's "Gaga-esque Gagarin Glitzothon" (audio)

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 01:02 PM PDT

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I joined Madeleine Brand Show guest-host Alex Cohen today for a radio segment on my recent trip to Moscow with Miles O'Brien and his documentary crew, on the occasion of the 50 year anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first space flight. On April 12, 1961, aboard the Vostok 3KA-3, Gagarin became the first human ever to venture into space.

On the show today, we talked about the crazy Cosmonaut's Day celebration we attended inside the Kremlin; what space tourists do in space; why NASA has bought up seats on the Soyuz as our shuttle program ends, and we also chatted about weird Russian strawberry sushi and the amazing Soviet time capsule that is the Moscow metro. [Listen here, or download MP3 here].

Miles shot video of the military choir finale, with breakdancing cosmonaut cosplay kids. That video is embedded above, or here on YouTube. The good stuff starts around 1:39 in.

And below, a translated video of Russian President Medvedev's speech at the Kremlin event.

His speech begins around 2:00 into the video. Of note: under his administration, Russia has increased space spending, and is building a new cosmodrome in Russia (so they won't have to lease space at the Baikonur cosmodrome in neighboring Kazakhstan). This, as the US slashes NASA's budget and ends the shuttle program.


I ask you, fellow countrymen: where's our space gala and astronaut pride?



(photo and video in this post courtesy Miles O'Brien)

China's "Jasmine Revolution": anonymous out-of-country bloggers troll the politburo

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:49 PM PDT

Anonymous international bloggers have been writing in Chinese about a "Jasmine revolution" in China, calling on Chinese people to show their discontent for local corruption by going to places that are normally crowded and walking around, not doing anything special. The Chinese authorities freaked out and blocked these sites, and most people in China have never heard of them -- but because people keep turning up and walking around in the normally crowded places, the politburo is convinced that the Jasmine Revolution is in full swing.
The organizers, whoever and wherever they are, have repeatedly called on people to gather in a range of popular and public areas in the centre of major cities across China - shopping malls and university campuses - and go for a stroll every Sunday afternoon to call for minor political change. These public areas are, at that time of day, normally filled with young people and out-of-town domestic tourists, all now potential 'protesters'. Now, because of the number of competing and overlapping security agencies, there is a lot of pressure on the local commanders to make some arrests and to show some success, but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists. So some young tourists get beaten up and taken away, and some journalists get smacked around. This then acquires a predictable, and well understood, dynamic of its own. At the same time, the organisers have used a wide range of popular and politically 'safe' words to use as code words - the characters for 'Two Conferences' being one, which is also the political conference that occurred in Beijing at the same time. Last weekend it was the 'Three Represents', which was Jiang Zemin's political thought legacy, and so on. These keywords get picked up by the censors, and all web and SMS traffic using them gets shut down or blocked - Jasmine itself is of course popular in Chinese culture and widely used in branding, but sites using 'Jasmine' in their copy, however innocuous, are blocked - with real-world social, political and economic consequences.
THE "JASMINE REVOLUTION" (via Warren Ellis)

Mild brain shocks may improve learning and cognition

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 10:36 AM PDT


Around 1800, Italian scientist Jean Aldini zapped the brains of dead felons with electricity to make their bodies move. He later reported using the same technique to cure "melancholy." This sounds like the history of electroconvulsive (shock) therapy, but those were actually the first experiments in transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), tweaking the brain with very mild shocks, 1,000 times less intense than delivered by shock therapy. A resurgence in tDCS is now underway. (Experiment "Consent Video" above from the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation.) Indeed, neuroscientists at the University of New Mexico are using a tDCS device powered by a 9-volt battery to see if 2 milliamps shocks to certain regions of the scalp can improve cognition and learning. Early results are promising. (In fact, tDCS may even prime neurons to respond to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technique we've posted about on BB many times in which bursts from a magnetic coil near the head alter brain activity. TMS has been tested as a potential treatment for certain severe neurological and psychological disorders. Scientific journal Nature surveys the tDCS field in its latest issue. From Nature:

Last year a succession of volunteers sat down in a research lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico to play DARWARS Ambush!, a video game designed to train US soldiers bound for Iraq. Each person surveyed virtual landscapes strewn with dilapidated buildings and abandoned cars for signs of trouble — a shadow cast by a rooftop sniper, or an improvised explosive device behind a rubbish bin. With just seconds to react before a blast or shots rang out, most forgot about the wet sponge affixed to their right temple that was delivering a faint electric tickle. The volunteers received a few milliamps of current at most, and the simple gadget used to deliver it was powered by a 9-volt battery.

It might sound like some wacky garage experiment, but Vincent Clark, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico, says that the technique, called transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), could improve learning. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded the research in the hope that it could be used to sharpen soldiers' minds on the battlefield. Yet for all its simplicity, it seems to work.

Volunteers receiving 2 milliamps to the scalp (about one-five-hundredth the amount drawn by a 100-watt light bulb) showed twice as much improvement in the game after a short amount of training as those receiving one-twentieth the amount of current1. "They learn more quickly but they don't have a good intuitive or introspective sense about why," says Clark.

The technique, which has roots in research done more than two centuries ago, is experiencing something of a revival. Clark and others see tDCS as a way to tease apart the mechanisms of learning and cognition. As the technique is refined, researchers could, with the flick of a switch, amplify or mute activity in many areas of the brain and watch what happens behaviourally. The field is "going to explode very soon and give us all sorts of new information and new questions", says Clark. And as with some other interventions for stimulating brain activity, such as high-powered magnets or surgically implanted electrodes, researchers are attempting to use tDCS to treat neurological conditions, including depression and stroke. But given the simplicity of building tDCS devices, one of the most important questions will be whether it is ethical to tinker with healthy minds — to improve learning and cognition, for example. The effects seen in experimental settings "are big enough that they would definitely have real-world consequences", says Martha Farah, a neuroethicist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

"Neuroscience: Brain buzz"

 


Chocolate compound beats codeine for cough-suppression

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:33 PM PDT

A compound found in chocolate outperforms over-the-counter and codeine-based cough-suppressants in clinical trials. The compound, theobromine, was written up in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal following a small placebo-controlled study at Imperial College London. Our GP told us that the best thing for a cough was a spoonful of honey, and it's pretty much all we use around our house (well, that and the vile, repulsive, disgusting, incredibly effective Buckley's Mixture -- but that's a last resort).
The researchers believe theobromine acts on the sensory nerve endings of the vagus nerve, which runs through the airways in the lungs to the brain. Capsaicin stimulates these endings to provoke coughing.

The team explored their hypothesis by looking at theobromine's action on the vagus nerve in separate experiments involving guinea pigs and excised human trachea tissue.

Their results confirmed that theobromine does indeed inhibit the capsaicin-induced sensory nerve depolarisation in the vagus nerve.

Persistent coughs melt away with chocolate (via Amanda Palmer)

(Image: Chocolate, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 26149290@N02's photostream)

It's people like us what makes trouble: the pernicious influence of immigrants in the UK.

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 10:02 AM PDT

Feorag NicBhride's "The pernicious influence of immigrants in the UK" is a non-exhaustive catalog of the many awful travesties wrought by we dirty foreign immigrants on the pure, clean shores of Britain, including tea, the Conservative party, football, and the English language.

As Charlie Stross says, "if you're one of that 40% [of British residents polled who do not think the UK has benefited in any way from immigration].you can stop reading my books right now, because obviously they are of no benefit to you."

* The English language (the Anglo-Saxons, much modified by the Normans)
* TheEnglish legal system (the Normans). The Scottish one is based on Roman law.
* The music of Handel (emigrated from Germany to England), Freddie Mercury (from Zanzibar), Cliff Richard (Indian), George Michael (Greek), Status Quo (Francis Rossi is a mix of Italian and Irish), Vanessa Mae (Chinese) KT Tunstall (Chinese) and practically everything in the charts right now, it seems.
* Football - the contributions of British Italians and people from the Caribbean are far too many to list. In fact, it would be best to ignore sport altogether. I mean, once the England cricket team was captained by someone called Hussain, the whole enterprise was doomed.
* James Bond - Ian Fleming was of Swiss origins.
* The Conservative and Unionist Party - Iain Duncan Smith (grandmother was Japanese), Michael Portillo (Spanish descent), Nigel Lawson, Baroness Warsi, Michael Howard (Romanian parents) and Winston Churchill (whose mother was an American immigrant).
* Wicca - this might seem to be the only genuinely British religion, but Dorothy Clutterbuck, who taught Gerald Gardner, was born in India. Gardner himself spent most of his formative years in Asia.
* The railways - built with Irish labour. Even though the labourers were British citizens at the time, they didn't want to be, and this should be respected.
The pernicious influence of immigrants in the UK

Depressed man eats own finger

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:53 AM PDT

A severely-depressed fellow in New Zealand severed his own finger, cooked it up with some vegetables, and ate it. Apparently this is only one of eight known cases of "self-cannibalism." The incident was discussed in the scientific journal Australasian Psychiatry. From their report, quoted in the New Zealand Herald:
"At the end of 2008, following another personal crisis, and while not being fully compliant with his medication, he spiralled into another episode of depression. He experienced significant insomnia and suicidal ideation, and ruminated for days about cutting off his fingers.

"In an effort to seek reprieve from these thoughts, he tied a shoelace around his [little] finger to act as a tourniquet and cut the finger off with a jigsaw.

"He then cooked it in a pan with some vegetables and ate its flesh. His plan was to amputate another two fingers the following day.

"Mr X reported initial excitement - non-sexual - and a sense of relief from his ruminations. Given the instantaneous benefit, he felt that there was no point in cutting off any more fingers."

The man later regretted the act of self-harm - his first - "because of its debilitating effect".

"Depressed man cooks and eats his finger"

Steve Buscemi's Eyes: the printable mask

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:37 PM PDT


From the collective unconscious that gave us the "Chicks with Steve Buscemi's eyes" meme, a print-and-wear Steve Buscemi's Eyes mask.

Alex Pardee: The Free At-Home Version Of STEVE BUSCEMI'S EYES! (via Super Punch)

The first underwater color photo

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:06 AM PDT

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National Geographic has a slideshow that shows off major milestones in underwater photography. This image is the first color photo ever taken underwater.

Underwater color photography was born with this shot of a hogfish, photographed off the Florida Keys in the Gulf of Mexico by Dr. William Longley and National Geographic staff photographer Charles Martin in 1926. Equipped with cameras encased in waterproof housing and pounds of highly explosive magnesium flash powder for underwater illumination, the pair pioneered underwater photography.

NAS studying cancer risk among people who live near nuclear facilities

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 09:03 AM PDT

Since September 2010, the United States National Academy of Sciences has been working on a comprehensive study of cancer risk in people living near U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission-licensed nuclear facilities. A committee meeting for this study is scheduled for today. You can watch a live webcast, or, if you live in Chicago, attend some of the sessions that are open to the public.

A race to document the mysterious history of 1000 English words

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 08:44 AM PDT

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At the University of Minnesota, a linguistics professor is racing against his own mortality to finish a dictionary that will explain the origins and history of some of the most mysterious words in the English language. If he completes it, it will be the second time any language has had its linguistic history documented in this way. The trouble is, Anatoly Liberman is 74, and he thinks he needs at least another decade to finish his dictionary.

As he dug further, Liberman discovered that about 1,000 common English words -- mooch, nudge, man, girl, boy, frog, oat, witch and skedaddle among them -- seemed to be highly confused or all but untraceable, as if they magically appeared in English, pouf!

"It was like finding all these waifs of English who run around with dirty T-shirts and no shoes and no one takes care of them," says Liberman. "And suddenly I wanted to build a nice, warm orphanage for the parentless words, for the boys and girls and heifers too."

It would be a new kind of word-origin dictionary, one focusing on the most problematic, misunderstood words in English. Liberman knew right away it was a magnificent, massive project that could take 30 years or longer to complete.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Getting In the Last Word

Image: Some rights reserved by Muffet

Famed Egyptologist sentenced in corruption case

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 08:29 AM PDT

Zahi_Hawass_in_northern_Egypt_on_8_May_2010.jpeg

Zahi Hawass has long been a controversial figure. This well-known Egyptologist has been frequently called to task for showboating his science, but he's also generally popular in his native Egypt because of the attention he's brought to Egyptian history and culture. He served as Minister of Antiquities under former president Hosni Mubarak, and was appointed to the same position after Mubarak was ousted.

Now, Zahi Hawass might be going to jail.

On Sunday, an Egyptian court sentenced Hawass to a year in jail and a fine equivalent to $1600. The Al Jazeera article linked above doesn't do a very good job of explaining what Hawass had done to end up on the wrong side of the law. Luckily, the Talking Pyramids blog has the full story, and documentation. Their account makes the sentence sound like a pretty reasonably justified case of corruption.

Until December 2010, tourists visiting the Cairo Museum came in and out by the main entrance, on the south side of the building. Beside the entrance was a bookstore that opened many years ago. Every three years, the concession of this bookstore was publicly auctioned and given to the applicant who presented the best offering, in price and in merchandise. The last two auctions were won by Farid Atiya.

According to Farid Atiya, Dr Zahi Hawass was annoyed by Atiya's successful applications as Hawass wanted the concession of the book shop to be given to the American University in Cairo Press (AUC Press). In 2006 Mark Linz, the director of the AUC Press, told Atiya about the plans to build the new shop and that the AUC Press would be given the lease of the new shop. When Farid Atiya won the auction again in 2007 Dr Hawass swore that Atiya would not stay long.

Under the pretext of a museum embellishment, Dr Hawass had the idea of building a new gift shop on the western side of the museum. Visitors would enter the museum via the original entrance and would exit the museum through the new shop on the western side, thereby circumventing the old shop that was being leased to Atiya. The new shop was built and it's concession had to be auctioned to comply with the law.

In October 2009 the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) announced a limited auction to rent the Museum's new gift shop. In limited auctions only certain companies are invited, as opposed to a public auction in which any company can participate. Later it would be revealed that Zahi Hawass' intention was to rent the new gift shop to a government owned company called "Sound and Light" and that this company would give the management of the shop to the AUC Press. The Sound and Light company is responsible for operating the Sound and Light show and other functions on the Giza plateau and other sites. In 1990 Zahi Hawass was the Member of the Board of Trustees of the Sound and Light company.

A failure leads to new questions in HIV drug trial

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 08:09 AM PDT

In Africa, a human trial of drug aimed at preventing HIV infection has been halted, because women taking the drug didn't seem to be any more protected against HIV than women taking a placebo. That's happened before with trials of preventative HIV medication. What makes this situation particularly intriguing: These null results seems to be confined to women. When the drug was previously tested in gay and bisexual men, it reduced their chances of being infected with HIV by between 44% and 73%, depending on how faithfully the men stuck to the drug regimen.

AT&T future of telcoms video 1962, directed by Jetsons writer

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 10:57 PM PDT

Paleofuture features a smashing AT&T industrial video called "Talking of Tomorrow," about the future of telecommunications, directed by Chuck Couch, who wrote The Jetsons. As Paleo notes, the animation style is reminiscent of Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle, and features a teleworking engineering exec whose videoconferencing takes place from a soundproof room attached to his house: "Business, school and play in this retrofuturistic utopia all depend on the highly advanced communications technologies brought to you by Bell Telephone Labs. Documents -- or "business materials" as they call them -- are exchanged by 'telephonic machines.' Lasers transmit phone calls and TV shows from space. Data processing machines... um... process data."

Talking of Tomorrow (1962)

Pit cherries and olives with a hairpin

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:40 PM PDT

Hanne Blank's 2010 collection of tips for using everyday household objects instead of expensive kitchen gadgets is full of great advice, like using bent hairpins to pit olives and cherries.
The kitchen gadgets I use most often tend to be things that I don't think other people even think of as "gadgets." They're not even very gadget-y. They're just things that make good kitchen tools, and perform very very well in the roles in which I use them. They're mostly little, unglamorous, and inexpensive, and while I inherited one of them, I have never received anything in this line as a gift and probably never will. Why not? Well, a dollar box of wire hairpins does not exactly make a splash as a hostess gift.

U-bend metal hairpins are the best cherry pitters around, at least if you're only doing a pie's worth or so. They also work pretty well on ripe olives (they're not sturdy enough for use on green olives) and for hulling strawberries. You can buy a package of a hundred for about a dollar at a beauty supply store, and that will last you years and years.

The Things That Earn Their Keep (via Lifehacker)

Ticklish penguin

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:07 PM PDT

Biopunk in an age without wonder

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 06:20 PM PDT

Marcus Wohlsen has covered startup culture, the maker scene, and the marijuana industry as a reporter in the San Francisco bureau of The Associated Press. His first book, Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life, was published this week by Current. I asked him to contribute a few pieces about the biotech underground to run on Boing Boing. Here's the third one. (Read the first one. Read the second one.)
biopunk.jpg MAKING/HISTORY: Biopunk in an age without wonder

In Georgian-era Britain, the surgeon was the commoner among scientists. While bewigged members of the Royal Society enjoyed aristocratic patronage, surgeons lacking both anesthetic and germ theory hacked through a thicket of superstition and rudimentary medical knowledge as they hacked their way through bodies. Universities still considered training in theology and ancient Greek and Roman texts the highest form of civilized learning. Surgeons were not offered the benefits of higher education. Instead, teenagers became apprentices and learned the trade.

One of these was a country boy named Edward Jenner. In school, this habitually curious clergyman's son avoided his mandatory study of the classics in favor of raising dormice and collecting fossils. His marks weren't high enough to follow his older brothers to Oxford. Instead, he entered the operating room, where he first heard tales of milkmaids who never got smallpox.

The story of how those tales led Jenner to develop the first smallpox vaccine to launch the era of modern immunization has become canonical in the lore of Western science. But it's worth recalling as precedent for the style and spirit in which today's biopunks aspire to operate.

Jenner was smart and became a Royal Fellow while still young. But he never took to London and returned to the country. He worked as a physician in his home village of Berkeley. At the same time, he documented the hibernation habits of hedgehogs and the sadistic parenting habits of cuckoos. He launched his own hydrogen balloon twice at the height of the European frenzy over humanity's newfound ability to fly. He discovered that hardened arteries were the cause of angina. All the while he was slowly advancing toward possibly the greatest public health innovation of all time.

In all these inquiries, Jenner let his imagination roam. He did not veer off down an alleyway of specialization. He relied on observation and intuition. He tinkered and cared little for orthodoxy. Because science as a way of thinking and doing was still being invented, Jenner necessarily made it up as he went along.

Skeptics of the biopunk movement rightfully observe that since Jenner's time, the professionalization of scientific practice has happened for good reasons. Protocols work and keep people safe. Peer review matters. Institutions provide money and job security so scientists can focus on science.

But most kids don't decide to become scientists because they like bureaucracy. The idealism in the biopunk idea that creativity matters more than credentials serves to remind of that original germ of curiosity that spawned the scientific enterprise in the first place. Gentleman scientists like Jenner had a more raw relationship with inquiry and experimentation. They asked big questions because they didn't know enough to ask the incremental questions by which most science today methodically advances. Science was an arena of wonder.

Biopunk's embrace of the amateur stems in part from a romantic hunch that the novice's sense of wonder can transcend lack of specialized knowledge in the pursuit of insight, just as happened in Jenner's time. After all, science itself had to happen before it could become professionalized.

Ray McCauley doesn't look like a punk. I first met him at his house in the Silicon Valley suburbs where he and his partner are raising twin boys, one named after Harlan Ellison. At the time, he worked a straight job as a data wrangler for a major DNA sequencing company.

Still, when he came home, he went out to the garage to work on a gizmo that could read small sequences of DNA in the field on the fly. He did it by himself, he said, because he didn't want to have to answer to anyone else as he tinkered away in pursuit of the "Eureka!" moments he first came to love as a kid playing with a chemistry set and taking apart old telephones.

Later he started organizing citizen-science clinical studies to learn whether you could correlate gene variations in different people with how their bodies handled certain vitamins. The science wasn't groundbreaking, but the fact that he did it himself was bold enough for the world's leading science journal, Nature, to take note.

"I'm a garage hacker, and I want to know how something works," McCauley told me. "But it's not the inside of a computer. It's me."

Buy Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life on Amazon

Motorcycles made from watch parts

Posted: 17 Apr 2011 10:44 PM PDT


DeviantArt's Dkart71 makes beautiful, detailed motorcycles out of watch parts.

Motorcycles out of watch parts (via Neatorama)

 


Privacy, Facebook, politics and kids

Posted: 18 Apr 2011 05:59 AM PDT

The Guardian's Comment is Free video team recorded an interview with me after the TEDxObserver event. They're editing it into a series of quick pieces; the first one, about kids, privacy, and social networks, just went live. I really like the way they put it together!

The most powerful mechanism we have for securing the privacy of individuals is for them to care about that privacy

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