Kamis, 07 April 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Flying wing to wing with a spaceship: Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo at opening of Virgin America's new SFO Terminal 2

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 08:22 PM PDT

This morning I got up early, packed my bag and headed to the San Francisco International airport (SFO) to attend the opening of Virgin America's new Terminal 2 (T2). I was expecting Sir Richard Branson to be there, and I had been told to keep an eye out for some appearance from some element of Virgin's Galactic's program, but I had no idea what I was in for.

I pretty quickly found out I was in for this:

Shortly before boarding the plane, one of Virgin's PR people announced that we would be making a 20 minute flight over San Francisco, rendezvousing with White Knight 2 and Spaceship 2 inflight, then landing in parallel with the spacecraft.


[Video Link]

After that, I was just in shock. I did what I could to keep myself collected, which was not an easy task. This was just totally unexpected and amazing. At times, the spaceship was only a couple hundred feet away from us.


04062011-t2-galactic-presidio-hr.jpg


A new Virgin America A320 named "My Other Ride is a Spaceship" flies beside the first commercial space flight system - Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) (and SpaceShipTwo) - over San Francisco on April 6, 2011. (photo: Mark Greenberg/Virgin America)



[video link]

Here's what greeted us when we arrived at the new terminal:

Sir Richard Branson and California lieutenant governor (and former San Francisco Mayor) Gavin Newsom entering the new terminal:

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin was a total character, sitting backwards in his seat as we prepared to take off so he could talk to Sir Richard. Here he is checking out the new terminal with some stewardess friends:

Virgin America has some photos of the flight and the new terminal up on their website.

[Editor's note: photos and video in this post, except where otherwise noted, shot by Dean Putney.]

Incompetent Nazi spies landed in Florida in 1942 and surrendered

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 04:03 AM PDT

A recently released MI5 report on a bungled Nazi sabotage plot details how a group of hapless, big-mouthed Nazi "spies" landed in Florida (after drunkenly bragging about their mission in a Paris cafe), and never managed to make bombs or poison Americans because their commander immediately surrendered to the FBI.
The submarine dropping half the group on Long Island ran aground, and MI5 noted that "it was only owing to the laziness or stupidity of the American coast guards that this submarine was not attacked by U.S. forces."

The Germans were stopped by a coast guard, who -- to the evident astonishment of the British -- did not detain them. He told his superiors, who were slow to contact the FBI.

The others in Florida also made it ashore, despite their attention-grabbing attire of "bathing trunks and army forage caps."

Unfortunately for the team, their leader, George John Dasch, had decided to surrender. The report describes Dasch "ringing up the FBI in Washington from the Mayfair Hotel and saying that he was a saboteur and wished to tell his story to Mr. Hoover" -- FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI was initially skeptical, but Dasch was soon giving a full confession, and the whole gang was rounded up.

Within months, the saboteurs had been tried and sentenced to death. All were executed except Dasch and another who had also backed out. They were deported to Germany after the war.

British spy files shed light on Nazi saboteurs (via Runnin' Scared)

(Image: 1943 ... bad thru and thru!, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from x-ray_delta_one's photostream)

 


Ex-Congressman in Libya to 'Help' Once Proposed Arming Gadhafi

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 01:59 PM PDT

Over at Wired Danger Room blog, Noah Shachtman reports on former US Congressman Curt Weldon, who traveled repeatedly to Libya over the last decade and ended up so cozy with the Gadhafi regime that the firm Weldon worked for once floated the idea of selling arms to Tripoli. "Now that Gadhafi is under assault from NATO airstrikes and rebel ground troops, it should come as no surprise that Weldon is back in Libya, 'to try to help negotiate a political settlement with Gadhafi and family,' according to CNN."

Raining worms in Scotland

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 02:37 PM PDT

Wikipedia Commons A Ae Gravure De Pluie De Poissons
A shower of worms fell on a class of kids playing football at Scotland's Galashiels Academy. (For more on weird "animal falls," check out Charles Fort's 1919 classic The Book of the Damned. Above, a 1555 engraving of a "fish fall.") From Scotsman.com:
(Teacher David) Crichton said the children had just completed their warm-up when they began to hear "soft thudding" on the ground.

The class then looked to the cloudless sky - and saw worms falling on to them. The incident in Galashiels is believed to have been caused by freak weather over a nearby river lifting water and worms and dumping it over the road...

Similar events were recorded in 1872 in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1877 in Christiana, Norway, and in 1924 in Halmstad, Sweden. In July 2007 a woman was crossing a road in Louisiana when large clumps of tangled worms dropped from above.

"Never mind cats and dogs - school hit by worm rain" (via Fortean Times)

Möbius Gear: a one-sided, toothed gear

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 03:40 AM PDT


UC Berkeley postdoc Aaron M Hoover combined math and imagination to solve the problem of building a one-sided "Möbius gear." He rendered it and then output molds for it on a 3D printer, cast them, and assembled his freaky, mind-melting beast.
While searching for a suitable project for CS 285 (Procedural Solid Modeling) I was introduced to the Möbius gear by Professor Sequin. I was immediately intrigued by the curious combination of the Möbius mathematical surface popularized by M.C. Escher and functional mechanical gear elements. After some time staring at and puzzling over this image, I convinced myself that this mechanism is indeed possible and that with right tools, a functional prototype could be built. (The entire mechanism essentially boils down to an oddly configured set of planetary gears. One can think of the black portion in the image as the ring with a fixed zero input velocity. A single blue gear is a planet, and the white strip is the sun. Output can be taken either from the sun or the planets (with no regard for practicality!). In practice, however, it's easiest to actuate the Möbius strip (the white portion).
The Möbius Gear (via Neatorama)
 


World's most powerful rocket

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 11:38 AM PDT


Just announced, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket. This is a beast of a launch vehicle. Launch price is $80 million to $125 million, but "Modest discounts are available for contractually committed, multi-launch purchases." From SpaceX:

With the ability to carry satellites or interplanetary spacecraft weighing over 53 metric tons (117,000 lb) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Falcon Heavy can lift nearly twice the payload of the next closest vehicle, the US Space Shuttle, and more than twice the payload of the Delta IV Heavy.
Falcon Heavy Overview (via @arielwaldman)

How emacs got into Tron: Legacy

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 01:14 AM PDT


Here's a great account of the good, nerdy thoughtfulness that went into generating the command-line screenshots for Tron: Legacy; JT Nimoy decided that he'd go for a mix of l33t and realistic, and landed on emacs eshell and posix kill:
In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.
jtnimoy - Tron Legacy (2010) (via JWZ)
 


Biffo the Bear

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 11:03 AM PDT

retro_characters_biffo_004.jpg Biffo the Bear is a character from Britain's long-running, vaguely anarchic kids comic, The Beano. His first appearance was in the 1950s, to which this illustration dates. Look familiar? [via @cabel and @stevenf]

Chicken Little: what do you sell to an immortal, vat-bound quadrillionaire?

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 10:39 AM PDT

Tor.com is running my short story Chicken Little, which originally appeared in the Frederick Pohl tribute anthology Gateways (a book that also includes work from Bear, Benford, Brin, Bova, Gaiman, Haldeman, and many other worthies). Chicken Little is the story of a product designer at a marketing company who is charged with coming up something to sell to an immortal, sovereign quadrillionaire living in a vat.
The first lesson Leon learned at the ad agency was: nobody is your friend at the ad agency.

Take today: Brautigan was going to see an actual vat, at an actual clinic, which housed an actual target consumer, and he wasn't taking Leon.

"Don't sulk, it's unbecoming," Brautigan said, giving him one of those tight-lipped smiles where he barely got his mouth over those big, horsey, comical teeth of his. They were disarming, those pearly whites. "It's out of the question. Getting clearance to visit a vat in person, that's a one-month, two-month process. Background checks. Biometrics. Interviews with their psych staff. The physicals: they have to take a census of your microbial nation. It takes time, Leon. You might be a mayfly in a mayfly hurry, but the man in the vat, he's got a lot of time on his hands. No skin off his dick if you get held up for a month or two."

Chicken Little also appears in my DIY short story collection With a Little Help, and on the audio edition, in a reading by the amazing, multi-talented Emily Hurson (who also has a sideline as a zombie voice in the recent Romero movies!). Chicken Little
 


Scratch-built Muppet Theatre: obsessive toy collecting at its finest and most creative!

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 03:12 AM PDT

Lance Cardinal avidly collected the Palisades Muppet toys right up to the point that the line was cancelled. Bitterly disappointed that the promised Muppet Theatre Backstage Playset never shipped, he made his own from scratch, an insanely detailed project with footlights, working drapes, rigging and trapdoors, and a variety of backdrops lovingly recreated from their show equivalents.
The most disappointing loss was the Muppet Theatre Backstage Playset. This would have held all the playsets inside of it, and created a place to display the characters in their natural environment. Im sure Palisades would have done an amazing job...but I think I have done them justice. I have tried to capture the essence of the Palisades brand, including aesthetics, attention to detail and interactive fun!
Scratch Built Palisades Muppet Theatre Playset (Thanks, Lance, via Submitterator!)
 


TOM THE DANCING BUG: In Which Lucky Ducky Is Engaged In Shocking Class Warfare

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 07:48 PM PDT

1032cbCOMIC ld - psych 101.jpg

SSL certificate authorities put us all at risk by handing out certs for "mail" "webmail" and other unqualified domains

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 03:35 AM PDT

In the wake of the revelation that a major SSL certificate provider suffered a serious breach, Chris Palmer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation has analysis of the common practice of issuing certificates for unqualified domain names, such as "mail" and "www" and "localhost" (an unqualified domain is one that consists of a single word, without a top- and second-level domain, e.g., "www" instead of "www.boingboing.net"). These unqualified names should never be issued certificates, as doing so leaves anyone who makes a practice of using them within a company network vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Palmer found tens of thousands of these certificates, and sounds the alarm that if you're not using fully qualified domains for secure connections, you're very vulnerable.
Although signing "localhost" is humorous, CAs create real risk when they sign other unqualified names. What if an attacker were able to receive a CA-signed certificate for names like "mail" or "webmail"? Such an attacker would be able to perfectly forge the identity of your organization's webmail server in a "man-in-the-middle" attack! Everything would look normal: your browser would use HTTPS, it would show a the lock icon that indicates HTTPS is working properly, it would show that a real CA validated the HTTPS certificate, and it would raise no security warnings. And yet, you would be giving your password and your email contents to the attacker.

To test the prevalence of the validated, unqualified names problem, I queried the Observatory database for unqualified names similar to "exchange". (Microsoft Exchange is an extremely popular email server, and servers that run it commonly have "exchange" or "exch" in their names. Likely examples include "exchange.example.net" and "exch-01.example.com".) My results show that unqualified "exchange"-like names are the most popular type of name, overall, that CAs are happy to sign.

Unqualified Names in the SSL Observatory
 


Canadian genre publisher Chiaroscuro relaunches its website

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 03:04 AM PDT

Congrats to Canadian indie science fiction/fantasy/horror publisher Chiaroscuro on the relaunch of its website. Chiaroscuro publishes great books and short fiction, hosts awards and events -- a really dynamic and energetic venture well worth your attention.

Bandwidth changes everything for cloud storage

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 08:38 AM PDT

Amazon's Cloud Player -- an online file storage service -- upsets the music labels because people could use it to share music instead of simply store and listen to it. Nilay Patel writes that earlier legal outcomes might not be a good guide this time around, because a legitimate role for 'digital lockers' is more obvious than in times past.
What's new for Amazon? Bandwidth, and tons of it. We've reached the point where uploading 5 or 15 or 20GB of data to a cloud service is a feasible task for most broadband-connected consumers, and that changes the nature of the argument entirely. If you're a Cloud Player customer, you get a defined 5GB or 20GB of storage, and the music that lives in that storage is your copy. Your copy that you're allowed to make. It's not "functionally equivalent" to a fair use copy anymore -- it is a fair use copy... This is going to completely fuck the labels, since they can't argue that Amazon is making unauthorized copies of songs. In order to stop Cloud Player, they're going to have to completely switch tactics and argue that it's actually the content that matters, and that Amazon doesn't have the rights to enable streaming content from their platform. But that's a ridiculous argument, since Amazon is just going to say that it's not actually doing much of anything -- it's just giving users some storage space and publishing an app that can play those files over the network. The labels will have to somehow argue that the content of the music files is protected, since they can't really touch what the users are doing to their own copies.
As an aside, Amazon seems to have timed this very well, working a subtle sea change in how people perceive the idea of online storage (even if usage of it remains quite niche.) I hope Dropbox, one of the killer apps that were a step ahead of it, can keep pace. Amazon Cloud Player and how bandwidth killed the copyright star [Nilay Patel]

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 10:16 PM PDT

April 12 is the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight. Events are planned all around the world—from Minneapolis to Addis Ababa. Find a party in your neck of the woods at the official Yuri's Night website.

Music that is in everything

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 07:23 AM PDT

Ambrose Heron compiled a list of music cues used repeatedly in different movie trailers: near the top is one I always seem to notice, a segment from James Horner's Aliens soundtrack.

What is legitimate "newsgathering" and what is "piracy"?

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 02:14 AM PDT

Zunguzungu's got an excellent, nuanced piece on the creation and attribution of value in newsgathering and reporting. Zz reminds us that the current arrangement is perfect arbitrary and contingent: no underlying universal principle reifies certain news-related activities (writing the story), ascribes no ownership stake to other activities (sources quoted and unquoted, tipoffs, references); and damns yet another set of activities (curating, aggregating and commenting upon the news).

I'm interested in the way that "old media" people resort to ad hominem and obfuscation when challenged on commercial matters -- a few nominal news-pros recently wrote that Boing Boing wasn't entitled to comment on the viability of paywalls unless we did so while hiding from bombs in Libya (nevermind that these gentlemen were writing from the comfort of their own safe American living rooms). There's certainly a lot of do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do in the current round of future-of-news handwringing: this is the narrative that allows a "newspaper" whose news is ninety percent curated picks from the newswires, run verbatim without comment or context, to be full of democratic virtue; while websites that examine, criticize and contextualize those same stories are parasites who contribute nothing.

The more you talk about piracy, it seems to me, the more you bump into the uncomfortable fact that journalism is only distinguishable from word-piracy because, and to the extent that, we arbitrarily decide that it is. We have social conventions that determine what is and isn't okay to say and steal, and how to do so -- institutional rules defining the difference between socially useful activities and socially un-useful activities -- but while those conventions are under particular stress right now (file this under "the internet") they were also never quite as stable as we might have liked to think they were. This is not to say that they aren't necessary, useful, and worth retaining, of course. They just aren't written in stone, nor were they received from on high; they are a contingent function of what it is that we expect "the press" to do as part of the social function they fulfill. Which is why, ultimately, the kind of society that we believe "good journalism" will serve will be the determinant of what standards we use in defining what is good in journalism.

That line of thinking, however, would take the conversation in a different direction than either Keller or Huffington want it to go. This is because they are not, a such, interested in the social function of "the press" -- for which, see Jay Rosen's manifesto -- but rather, in the business of profiting from their activities. This should not surprise us, but neither should it escape our notice: their job is to make information commodities, to secure ownership of them, and then find some way to sell them. "Real Journalism" talk, in that context, is just market fetishizing, a way of mystifying the work of social production that makes "news" possible, so that it can appear to be the original creation of whoever is selling it to you. Never mind all the different people whose unpaid contributions made the production of the story possible (the original tipoff, unquoted sources, quoted subjects, the reference works consulted, etc); they will not be paid or credited for intellectual labor, because of the magic thing that happens when the story has been published: having become news, it will subsequently be considered the sole production of the New York Times or whoever. And if Arianna Huffington steals it, now, she becomes indistinguishable from a Somali pirate. Once we have decided where ownership of information begins -- whose intellectual labor counts and whose does not -- then we can proceed to sell it.

Why Arianna Huffington is Bill Keller's Somali Pirate (via Making Light)

(Image: Piracy, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from toobydoo's photostream)

 


CWA: Why should you care about species extinction?

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:20 PM PDT

CWA is the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Now in it's 63rd year, the conference brings together scientists, politicians, activists, journalists, artists, and more for a week of fascinating conversations. It's free, and open to the public. Think of CWA as the democratic version of TEDtalks. I'm at the conference all this week and will be posting and tweeting about some of the interesting things that I learn.

 bleached coral.jpg

Short answer: Because extinction doesn't happen in a vacuum. When one species dies out, it can have further reaching implications for the ecosystem that species lived in. Case in point: Coral reefs. You've probably heard a lot about coral reefs dying. But it's not always spelled out that these deaths are more than just a loss of biodiversity. During a panel on Tuesday, Peter Hildebrand—an atmospheric scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center—did a nice job of putting this issue into stark relief.

"Coral reefs supply a lot of the basis of the food chain in the ocean. If we wreck up the climate, then we change concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air, which means we're changing the pH levels in the water, and that chemical change damages the shells in the coral. As coral die, that damage has effects right up the food chain to the large fish that we eat."

Image: Some rights reserved by mattk1979

The shiny, blue crystals brought pain and death

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 10:11 PM PDT

The shiny, blue crystals brought pain and death: The strange and heart-wrenching story of how a town in Brazil ended up contaminated with radioactive cesium chloride.

Stiglitz: wealth concentration will be America's downfall

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 03:23 AM PDT

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs. We've heard lots of people talking about wealth concentration before, but Stiglitz combines impeccable credentials with a lay-friendly explanation:
America's inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect--people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military--the reality is that the "all-volunteer" army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the "core" labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment--things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don't need to care.

Or, more accurately, they think they don't. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from "food insecurity")--given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted "trickling down" from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation--voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% (via 3 Quarks Daily)

(Image: A Political Walking Tour Of Dublin 2, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from infomatique's photostream)

 


International Space Station Expedition 27: Soyuz launch (big photo gallery)

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 06:31 AM PDT

The Russian Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, named after the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, carrying the International Space Station (ISS) crew of U.S. astronaut Ronald Garan, Russian cosmonauts Alexandr Samokutyaev and Andrey Borisenko, blasts off at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 5, 2011. Three others are already in orbit on the ISS. More photos from the launch follow. (REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov)

International Space Station (ISS) crew members U.S. astronaut Ronald Garan (C, Russian cosmonauts Alexandr Samokutyaev (bottom) and Andrey Borisenko wave as they board the Russian Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, named after the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, before blast off at Baikonur cosmodrome April 5, 2011.



The International Space Station (ISS) crew member Russian cosmonaut Alexandr Samokutyae shows a toy which will be hung in the Soyuz spacecraft and used as a weightlessness indicator during a news conference at Baikonur cosmodrome, April 3, 2011.

The International Space Station (ISS) crew of U.S. astronaut Ronald Garan (L) along with Russian cosmonauts Alexandr Samokutyaev (2nd R) and Andrey Borisenko (R), pose with Marciel Santos Kayle Riss from French Guiana during a news conference at Baikonur cosmodrome, April 3, 2011. Riss met the crew as part of a tour which he won as a prize for winning an mission patch design contest organised by Russia's Roscosmos space agency.





The International Space Station (ISS) crew of U.S. astronaut Ronald Garan (L) and his crew mates Russian cosmonauts Alexandr Samokutyaev (C) and Andrey Borisenko, display a poster depicting them as Russian army's hussars during a news conference at Baikonur cosmodrome.

Anya's Ghost: sweet and scary ghost story about identity

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 08:40 AM PDT

Anya's Ghost, Vera Brosgol's debut graphic novel, starts out as a simple young adult story about a girl who's having a hard time fitting in at school, moves smoothly into a lighthearted story about an awkward girl and her ghostly BFF, and then slides precipitously (and scarily) into a no-fooling ghost story that'll have you jumping out of your skin while you finish it off.

Anya Borzakovskaya is a Russian emigre attending the third-worst private school in her state. Her single mother can't understand the pressures on Anya as she tries to Americanize herself and fit in to the sometimes vicious world of adolescence. Anya and her only friend, Siobhan, spend as much time feuding as they do helping each other out, and then there's Dima, the only other Russian kid in school, who is "fobby" (Fresh off the Boat) and who makes Anya squirm with embarrassment (usually just before he gets clobbered by the more athletic kids). Anya sneaks away from school one day in a dark cloud of frustration and finds herself down a deep hole -- with a skeleton.

A girl's skeleton. A haunted girl's skeleton. The haint that rises from the skeleton explains that she's been trapped since her death 90 years before, and while she is scary and sad, it's the ghost that gets Anya rescued. As Anya escapes from the pit, she accidentally scoops up a fingerbone from the skeleton, and inadvertently liberates the ghost. This turns out to be a blessing in disguise, though, as soon the ghost is helping Anya to pass her exams, stalk her secret-crush basketball star, and even dress and comport herself (the ghost is an avid reader of fashion and teen magazines and absorbs a lot about the world through them). She introduces herself to Anya as Emily Reilly, murdered by a passing stranger in her youth after being widowed by her beau in the trenches of WWI.

But Emily the ghost isn't all sweetness. Indeed, Anya discovers that Emily expects her to take all the help that Emily offers, no questions asked, and that's when it starts to get scary, as Anya realizes that she has befriended an altogether more sinister spirit than she thought.

Anya's Ghost manages to be really sweet, really funny and really scary, and it's got a powerful message about identity, fitting in, and the secret selfish bastard lurking in all of us and whether having such a goblin inside makes us irredeemable or merely human.

Anya's Ghost

CWA: Three things I learned from a World Bank transportation expert

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 07:34 AM PDT

CWA is the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Now in it's 63rd year, the conference brings together scientists, politicians, activists, journalists, artists, and more for a week of fascinating conversations. It's free, and open to the public. Think of CWA as the democratic version of TEDtalks. I'm at the conference all this week and will be posting and tweeting about some of the interesting things that I learn.

 Bogota.jpg

On Tuesday, I spoke on a panel about sustainable transportation. I'm currently writing a book about the future of energy ... but it's about the future of energy in the United States. So, out of whole panel, I learned the most new information from Arturo Ardila-Gomez, an urban transportation specialist with the World Bank, who focuses on public transportation initiatives in Central and South America. I was able to take some hasty notes from the speakers' table, and have three particularly fascinating facts from him to share.

• Colombia is one of the first countries in the world to have a mass transit system organized and financed at the national level. Six Colombian cities have met the criteria for development, which is primarily paid for out of the national-level tax pool. These systems primarily focus on bus rapid transit—a system that uses dedicated bus lanes and other efficiency measures to get the benefits of metro train lines and subways, without the higher cost.

• Free public transit doesn't seem to actually increase ridership, or decrease car use, very much. In fact, the best way to get the most car owners onto mass transit—which, in the case of Colombia, means getting wealthier people onto mass transit—is to promote higher priced, "premium" transit services. The only problem: Those projects can go awry if wealthy college students start using the premium transit. When that happens, car owners started to think, "Oh, this isn't for me," and went back to driving.

• Public transportation projects in Central and South America are often severely hampered by what Ardila-Gomez calls "Not On My Road Space"—the four-wheeled answer to NIMBYism. In fact, single-issue political parties, based solely around preventing restricted bus lanes from impinging on car space, have won elections. But there are ways around NOMRS. Remember, NIMBY can be counteracted if all the stakeholders feel like they're being included in the planning process. Same thing here. In Leon, Mexico, for instance, planners succeeded in designating an entire 6-block stretch of a narrow, historic street bus-rapid-transit only. They did it, Ardila-Gomez says, by consulting extensively with car owners and users, as well as with the people who wanted better bus service.

Image: Highway traffic in Bogotá, Colombia. The empty lanes are designated bus rapid transit routes. Some rights reserved by Edgar Zuniga Jr.

NASA Mars Science Laboratory + Curiosity Rover: first look (photo gallery)

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 07:02 AM PDT

jpl.jpg

This week, Boing Boing was invited to visit NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the first and only opportunity for media to enter the Pasadena, CA clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft have been built for launch in late 2011 from Florida.

Shipment from the clean room to Florida will begin next month. Curiosity rover recently completed tests under simulated space and Mars-surface environmental conditions in another building and is back in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for other tests. Spacecraft assembly and testing specialists showed Boing Boing the rover and the other spacecraft components, including the descent stage "sky crane."

Photographer Joseph Linaschke visited on behalf of Boing Boing (he donned a bunny suit for the occasion) and shot this series of photos. More below.












About the photographer:
Joseph Linaschke is a photographic storyteller and educator, and runs ApertureExpert.com, a leading site for Apple Aperture users. He has traveled the world representing various technologies and companies on stage, including MetaCreations, Wacom, Corel, and Apple, where he was part of the marketing team for Aperture and produced and shot several productions for iLife, Aperture and Final Cut Studio.

You can purchase prints of any images in Joseph's JPL Mars Curiosity Rover photo gallery here.

British Airways pilot survived being sucked out a window

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 10:01 PM PDT

What happens when an airplane's pilot gets sucked out the window in-flight? Surprisingly, that scenario does not necessarily end in disaster.

OCD cutting board marked with precise angles and measurements for accurate chopping

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 03:27 AM PDT


The OCD Chef Cutting Board is screened with fine, precise measurements so that you can cut all your food into perfectly even, perfectly angled chunklets.

THE OCD CHEF CUTTING BOARD (via Joshua)

 


Diposting oleh di

Tidak ada komentar:

Posting Komentar

Langganan: Posting Komentar (Atom)