All three bear improvements over earlier generations of this familiar fruit, but some of the new additions—and in some cases, what's missing—may surprise you. Following are snapshots of the new iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, and iPod Touch, with taste-test notes.
Look at this squid's eye. Just look at it. See anything eerily familiar?
Squid, along with the rest of the family Cephalopoda, haven't shared a common ancestor with us vertebrates in some 500 million years—long before the evolution of our camera-like eyes. And yet, there the cephalopods are, flagrantly swimming about with eyes that use a lens to project an image onto a retina. Call it Squid Eye for the Vertebrate Guy. So, how's it work?
Convergent evolution, my friends. Convergent evolution. We happened to hit on similar solutions to the same problem of sight, even though the eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods evolved separately, in very different ways, at different times. Today, we can see that legacy in cephalopod and vertebrate fetal development. With vertebrates, the eyes grow on stalks, reaching out from the brain. In cephalopods, the eyes start as a clumping of cells on the surface of the skin and reach backwards, into the head, to make brain contact. Similar destinations. Very different road maps.
This lovely illustration—featuring dissections of the head, funnel, mantle and eye of a Thaumatolampas diadema—comes from The Cephalopoda Part I: Oegopsida and Part II: Myopsida, Octopoda Atlas written in 1910 by zoologist Carl Chun following a German expedition to the Indian, Atlantic and Great Southern oceans.
Here's Instructables user Sunbanks's simple HOWTO for making candles out of discarded shotgun shells, just the thing for your William S Burroughs-reviving seance!
Here's a service that takes Google maps satellite views and converts them into print-and-fold envelopes you can use for your correspondence, creating a kind of handsome, 21st-century stationery.
Articles included: "How to Get Rid of Your Woman," "Trouble With Twats," "Why Men Wear Beards," and then: "Positive Prison Reform Plan."
Above, the cover art for an issue which contained a feature article titled "How to Select a Good Ol' Lady." Apparently, the courtship ritual involves strangling her. Then, meth!
Some of the images on the aforelinked link are not work-safe.
I was going through my photo archive and came across this sign for funnel cakes that I photographed in Austin a couple of years ago. Doesn't it whet your appetite?
This video of a cruise ship in heavy seas is intense, and the Rod Stewart soundtrack doesn't make it any less so. I bet it was quite scary for the folks onboard. (Thanks, Mathias Crawford, via Dangerous Minds!)
Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon in 1980, has again been denied parole. From CNN:
In their written comments, the commissioners told Chapman they had concerns "about the disregard you displayed for the norms of our society and the sanctity of human life." After considering the action he took in 1980, they concluded Chapman's "discretionary release remains inappropriate at this time and incompatible with the welfare of the community."
The beta test period for Makers Market has come to a close and we're bummed to announce that the doors are closing on the Market and our Boing Boing Bazaar. There is some terrific stuff in the BB Bazaar and we encourage you to reach out to the sellers directly and seek out their merchandise via other channels. Thank you to all the makers, the buyers, and our great partners/friends at MAKE! We learned a lot from this experiment and are currently exploring some new ways to create a curated catalog of wonderful things. More on that soon. The official message from our partners at MAKE follows.
Clifford Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University and director of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab. Corina Yen is editor-in-chief of Ambidextrous Magazine.
For the first century of the automobile's use, passengers were always people or pets. However, in the past decades, automobiles have begun to carry a new "passenger": a voice-based computer agent used to give directions, warn of problems (e.g., "your oil is low"), control entertainment (e.g., "you are now listening to KQED"), and make suggestions (e.g., "the closest Starbucks is 2.3 miles away"). As a social scientist who studies human-technology interaction, I've guided my design of and research on these "virtual passengers" by studying real passengers. By leveraging those attributes that make passengers likeable and non-distracting, one can then make GPS systems, voice-activated controls, and other voices in the car more desirable and effective. For example, we've found that people adjust their way of speaking to match the situation in the car: when the driving is dangerous passengers unconsciously shorten and simplify their sentences. There are now GPS systems that do the same. Similarly, when BMW found that German drivers wouldn't take directions from a female voice and had to have a product recall, they found a voice that better matched their brand: a male "co-pilot."
One of the most important issues to address in car interfaces is how to deal with upset drivers, as negative feelings are among the primary causes of accidents on the highways. Unfortunately, there is little known about effective strategies that passengers can use when dealing with an upset driver. In particular, should a passenger -- real or virtual -- in a car with an upset driver sound happy and upbeat or depressed and morose?
There's still time to reserve a free ticket to see Boing Boing's screening of the much-talked-about documentary CATFISH at the Landmark Theatre on Pico blvd. in Los Angeles.
Just a reminder: A great way to view the posts on Boing Boing is by tapping the j key to move down the page to the top of each post (and k to move back up). It sure beats scrolling! — Mark • Comments: 29
I hope to see you at World Maker Faire 2010 in New York on Sept. 25th and 26th!
A family fun festival to MAKE, create, learn, invent, CRAFT, recycle, build, think, play & be inspired by celebrating arts, crafts, engineering, food, music, science and technology
ROCKETS & ROBOTS • DIY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY • ARTS & CRAFTS • BICYCLES • ELECTRONICS • ARTISAN FOODS • URBAN FARMING • SUSTAINABLE LIVING • WOODWORKING • CIRCUIT BOARDS • MAKER SHED • ALTERNATIVE ENERGY VEHICLES • FIRE ARTS • LIVE MUSIC • ART CARS • TESLA COILS • ARDUINO & KITS • AND SO MUCH MORE!
Neighbors want David Alvand of Plymouth, Devon, England to cut the lovely leyland cypress tree in his yard. In 2003, Alvand almost went to jail over a 12-foot concrete privacy wall that he ultimately was forced to remove. From The Guardian:
(Neighbors) have launched a formal complaint under antisocial behaviour legislation to force him to cut back the vast leyland cypress trees completely filling the front garden.
Planted in 1991, shortly after the 66-year-old moved into the area, the famously fast-growing trees – better known as leylandii and the source of countless previous neighbourly disputes, some turning violent – are now more than 10 metres tall.
As well as completely obscuring the front of Alvand's home, their higher branches overhang his neighbours' roofs, as well as the pavement.
One neighbour said: "That wall took years to sort out. It's been a nightmare. Now the trees are an eyesore – they block out sunlight and make the street look bad."
Robert Schneider of excellent psych-rock group Apples In Stereo hacked a Mattel MindFlex game, which measures brain waves, into a controller for his Moog analog synthesizer. He calls his mind-control interface The Teletron. If you'd like to make your own, here are Schneider's video instructions, "Teletron for the Populace."
Ali Abdulemam, a blogger in Bahrain and contributor to Global Voices, was arrested this weekend by Bahraini authorities on charges that he spread "false news" on BahrainOnline.org, a top pro-democracy online media outlet in Bahrain.
Fifty-three years ago, Jefferson Thomas joined eight other black teenagers in integrating Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. The reaction against them was immediate, pervasive and frequently violent. White mobs spit and screamed at Thomas and the other Little Rock 9 when they showed up for school. The state's governor tried to use the Arkansas National Guard to keep the black students out, saying that following the federal mandate would only result in social disruption and that integration would have to wait until some unspecified time. And Thomas' father was laid off, probably as punishment for his son's decision.
"It seemed that overnight, things stopped being so bad," he said. "The same things were happening, but they didn't hurt me as much. I didn't feel like I was a failure. I felt victorious because I made it through the day."
Thomas died last Sunday, from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 67. He is the first of the Little Rock 9 to pass away. Little Rock Central High School has since become a National Historic Site. The photo of Jefferson Thomas—along with classmates Minnijean Brown and Thelma Mothershed—is from their online archives, where you can also listen to oral history recordings, read about the lives of the Little Rock 9, and get a deeper understanding of the events surrounding public school integration. Personally, I like this shot because it shows Thomas and his classmates in a candid moment, looking like normal teenagers, rather than people from a history textbook. That reminder, that historic figures are people, is important to keeping their experiences—and the lessons we ought to be learning from those experiences—fresh and real. History isn't just facts for a quiz.
Responding to an unexpected flood of user complaints about the recently-relaunched Digg, founder Kevin Rose's approach may remind some of a certain Cupertino CEO's terse emails circa "antennagate." Next: will cranky users demand free Digg bumpers? Watch video, via TC— Xeni • Comments: 11
I've posted before about my friends at Youth Media International/Youth Radio, an Oakland-based non-profit that helps underserved young people learn the tools of media creation. You may have heard their excellent contributions to NPR or read their journalism at the Huffington Post and other places. Right now, Youth Radio has two very rare job openings that are killer opportunities for the right people.
First, they're looking for a "Managing Editor" to helm a new online news service and media property for young people. Rob, Dean, and I have all been consulting on this at varying levels, and it's a really groundbreaking, worthwhile project. Managing Editor job description
Also, the organization recently won a MacArthur Foundation competition to launch a "Mobile Action Lab" to build six online/mobile apps "that serve real needs in youth communities." Are you a developer who can run the lab and collaborate with young people to make the apps? Developer-In-Residence, Mobile Action Lab job description
In a Huffington Post op-ed, danah boyd argues that pressure to censor Craigslist, which recently resulted in the company's removal of its "adult services" section for users in the United States, actually "helps pimps, child traffickers and other abusive scumbags."
As a victim of violence myself, I'm deeply committed to destroying any institution or individual leveraging the sex-power matrix that results in child trafficking, nonconsensual prostitution, domestic violence and other abuses. If I believed that censoring Craigslist would achieve these goals, I'd be the first in line to watch them fall. But from the bottom of my soul and the depths of my intellect, I believe that the current efforts to censor Craigslist's "adult services" achieves the absolute opposite. Rather than helping those who are abused, it fundamentally helps pimps, human traffickers and others who profit off of abusing others.
Abram Sauer of Esquire measured the waistline of several different brands of "36-inch waist" pants and found the actual waistlines to be larger, and in some cases much larger, than advertised.
MIT grad student Joe McMichael's Globe Genie reminds me the Hyperspace button in the Asteroids arcade game. Just hit "Shuffle" and it takes you somewhere random on Earth, via Google's Street View. Simple but effective! Globe Genie(via Submitterator, thanks jacobn9820!)
Here's a first-person walk-through of "Machine," a steampunk horror show built by hobbyists in their garage. It's jaw-dropping awesomesauceular -- "real horrorshow," as Little Alex might say.
Here's University of Auckland engineering lecturer, Peter Bier riding a unicycle across his classroom with a juggling student on his shoulders, memorably demonstrating some key principles of physics.
Zak sez, "If you've ever seen Windsor McCay's LITTLE NEMO -- particularly the gorgeous full-sized collections -- you know how involved the illustrations got. Cartoonist Jeremy Bastian just did an enormous commission of Little Nemo that captures McCay's style perfectly. It is 13 by 9 inches and is inked by brush. According to the person who commissioned it, it took Jeremy two weeks of 10-hour days to draw it. The person who commissioned it has several close-ups of the details on this page."
Ted Balaker of Reason.tv produced a video about moonshine. He says, "You can make beer at home, but if you try to make spirits at home it's a felony. Go figure."
If drinking makes us healthier and wealthier, why is America's liquor policy so screwy?
Jimmy Carter legalized home brewing in 1978, and that newfound freedom fueled the craft beer movement that continues to lavish beer lovers with endless choices. But in many ways, laws that govern whiskey, gin, and other distilled spirits are stuck in the 1920s.
Federal agents still raid distilleries much like they did during Prohibition, and making any amount of moonshine at home is not only illegal, it's a felony that can carry up to five years in prison. The result is a market dominated by a few big names, where would-be craftsmen are forced to hide their work.
And yet, despite the danger, America is in the midst of "moonshine renaissance," in which a new wave of hipster hobbyists has joined with old-time 'shiners to flout the law and do what they love to do.
I use my Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M many times throughout the day, but I don't think I'll pay $3200 for the special edition model with Urushi lacquer coating and gold embellishments.
The special limited-edition models have been designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of PFU and are decorated using an Urushi lacquer coating and gold embellishments. The high-quality lacquer coating is applied using a centuries-old method which originated from Ishikawa Prefecture, a region renowned for its excellent craftsmanship in traditional Japanese lacquerware and the birthplace of PFU.
The design of the special edition ScanSnap models represents the pinnacle of traditional Japanese aesthetics and convenience. The special models are the result of the collaboration between PFU and Japan’s premier maker of Wajima lacquerware, one of the most recognized examples of traditional Japanese crafts. The durable lacquer coating was applied using a special layering technique called "Tenpi kurome," and is accompanied by the depiction of a Golden Eagle (the official bird of Ishikawa) and company logo made from pure gold powder.
The UP! personal 3D printer from China retails for $1500, with goop running at $50/kg. From this early adopter's review: It runs at 0.3mm resolution, and the finished models show striations from successive layers of goop, but light sanding produces a smooth finish. For objects with funny extrusions and sitcky-outie bits that aren't stable until they are fully printed, the printer calculates and adds support struts on the fly, and these have to be removed with a hobby knife after printing.
This 1936 Henderson motorcycle was given a superb Art Deco mod by Frank Westfall of Syracuse, NY and displayed at last summer's Rhinebeck Grand National Meet. The Knucklebuster blog got to see and photograph it in person there, and has a thrilling account of its performance: "The bike is a fantastic piece of history, the craftsmanship is absolutely stunning and it's surely more of a museum piece than a daily rider. Frank has obviously spent an incredible amount of time meticulously restoring and rebuilding the bike to its current gorgeous state."
Pink Cake Box made this custom XKCD wedding cake for one of their customers in New Jersey: "The top of the cake includes cutouts of the comic characters with a red heart on a wire between them. The entire cake is covered in white fondant with black thin bands at the base of each tier. Equations inspired by this comic decorate the remaining tiers."
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As predicted last week in the Boing Boing agricultural almanac, Apple this week releases three new varieties of iPods for the fall crop. 
Here's Instructables user Sunbanks's simple HOWTO for making candles out of discarded shotgun shells, just the thing for your William S Burroughs-reviving seance!
I, for one, welcome the dawn of 
There's still time to 
Ali Abdulemam, a 
I've posted before about my friends at 
As a victim of violence myself, I'm deeply committed to destroying any institution or individual leveraging the sex-power matrix that results in child trafficking, nonconsensual prostitution, domestic violence and other abuses. If I believed that censoring Craigslist would achieve these goals, I'd be the first in line to watch them fall. But from the bottom of my soul and the depths of my intellect, I believe that the current efforts to censor Craigslist's "adult services" achieves the absolute opposite. Rather than helping those who are abused, it fundamentally helps pimps, human traffickers and others who profit off of abusing others.
Check out 