KnitSonya did a fantastic job refurbing these old theater seats with fresh upholstery and so on:

The surly teenager, with great ingenuity, broke them down and hauled them to the car. My friend Kobi brought the fabric back from a trip to Finland. (I provided the address to the Marimekko outlet) Pasha serendipitously used upholstery batting as packing material when she mailed the loom. And finally Mr. Knitsonya helped put them back together again. (There was that brief 45 minute window today where I thought I had thrown away all the hardware) It was like some epic craft undertaking: Cast of thousands! Years in the making! But aren't they gorgeous?

Link (via Craft)

Tor Books is raffling off this gorgeous Asus Mini laptop that's been hand-painted by famed science-fictional artist Donato: all you need to do to win is sign up to get word when the awesome (yes, I've seen it) tor.com website launches:

As a promo for Tor.com, we asked Donato to paint an Asus mini computer which you, yes you, can win! To sign-up, go to Tor.com.

The first time I watched this I realized what makes Donato Donato. There's a point about third of the way through where I thought he was done....and then he keeps painting.

The computer is in my office and is supposed to be on display at ComicCon. It's been hard to bat co-workers away from it. Should it go missing, my list of suspects is long.

Link (Thanks, Patrick!)

This weekend, the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project at the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in NYC will introduce a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests. Conference goers will be given unprecedented ability to connect with new people, find the talks they're most interested in attending, see what's happening and where in real time, and experience and talk about the way RFID technology is changing the world.

The AMD social networking site lets visitors "tag" themselves based on a diverse set of interests. Old-school hackers, network security experts, cryptographers, political activists, law geeks, lockpickers, reverse engineers, bloggers, privacy advocates, and far more—visitors can label themselves with multiple interests, to become discoverable by fellow visitors from around the world with similar interests, in the same room or across the building. Attendees can then use email or text messages to "ping" the people they discover on the site—new contacts and old friends alike.

The AMD site connects visitors to the many talks and events occurring during the conference, too. The same interests tags are used to highlight events and alert visitors to something they might otherwise miss—a vital feature for such a large conference. Attendees can also use the interactive schedule to select events they want to attend, and receive alerts before those events begin.

The site also provides visualizations of activity on the conference floors. Website users can watch the real time positions and movements of people across the Mezzanine, revealing the group dynamics of a massive number of people and instantly identifying the hotspots. Users can also click on any conference room to see its current event, speakers, and attendees.

Link (Thanks, aestetix!)

Grimgarden's "Doomies" are little ceramic fellers shaped like hooded death. Fill them with incense cones and they waft magic stench through your poisoned herbs and carnivorous fly-traps. Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

Update: Geez, I almost missed their "Rebirdy" -- a skull-shaped bird feeder that has the chirpy critters feeding out of the eye-sockets.

Infinite Matrix editor Eileen Gunn sez, "I've put up a new issue of the Infinite Matrix -- in honor of Cory's birthday and because I have three great stories the world needs to read: a reprint of Cory's fine Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers and two excellent stories by writers from Eastern Europe: Serbian activist and writer Yasmina Tesanovic's charming Cats and Cars at and Ukrainian SF writer Yana Dubinianska's spine-tingling Barge over Black Water. "

Nimby and the D-Hoppers is one of my most widely reprinted stories, and it's one of a very small handful of stories that I hadn't yet published for free online, though it has been released as CC-licensed podcasts and a CC licensed comic. As with the other adaptations, the text is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

And yup, yesterday was my birthday! I'm 37, which means I'm now in my prime. It sure beats being a total square at 36. Link

Mary sez, "Jim C. Hines, author of Goblin Quest, has just written lyrics to go with the Gilbert and Sullivan perennial 'Modern Major General' AND he's released them under a Creative Commons license. They are ripe with video potential."

I am the Very Model of a Modern SF Novelist

I am the very model of a modern SF novelist,
I've manuscripts space opera, anime, and fantasist,
I know the kings of fandom and the best flamewars historical
From Andrew Burt to LiveJournal, in order categorical;
I'm very well acquainted too, with matters editorial,
I keep my cover letters brief and never too suctorial,
About rejection etiquette I'm teeming with propriety,
With many cheerful facts about your online notoriety,
I'm very good at worldbuilding and proper use of ansibles;
I know the hyphenated names of beings unpronounceable:
In short, in matters space opera, anime, and fantasist,
I am the very model of a modern SF novelist.

Link (Thanks, Mary!)

George Dyson, one of my all-time-favorite science writers, has written a short science fiction story for Edge. Bruce Sterling describes it thusly: "Amazingly, this piece reads almost exactly like I would have imagined it. Try to imagine Hugo Gernsback writing "Ralph 124C41+" only Hugo used to live in a treehouse, is a comprehensive scholar of extinct technologies, and has an IQ high enough to boil mercury."

Google was inverting the von Neumann matrix—by coaxing the matrix into inverting itself. Von Neumann's "Numerical Inverting of Matrices of High Order," published (with Herman Goldstine) in 1947, confirmed his ambition to build a machine that could invert matrices of non-trivial size. A 1950 postscript, "Matrix Inversion by a Monte Carlo Method," describes how a statistical, random-walk procedure credited to von Neumann and Stan Ulam "can be used to invert a class of n-th order matrices with only n2 arithmetic operations in addition to the scanning and discriminating required to play the solitaire game." The aggregate of all our searches for unpredictable (but meaningful) strings of bits, is, in effect, a Monte Carlo process for inverting the matrix that constitutes the World Wide Web.

Ed developed a rapport with the machines that escaped those who had never felt the warmth of a vacuum tube or the texture of a core memory plane. Within three months he was not only troubleshooting the misbehavior of individual data centers, but examining how the archipelago of data centers cooperated—and competed—on a global scale.

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

This marvellous paperback chair is on display at Myopic Books in Providence Rhode Island (where the Rag and Bone blog's proprietor spotted it). It was made by artist David Karoff: "David Karoff welded the chair and attached the paperbacks: they have holes drilled though their insides and are slipped onto a hidden rebar frame. All of the materials are recycled - even the books, which are cast-offs from the Rochambeau Library Book Sales." ZOMG I wish this was for sale. Link (via Make)

Sean Tevis is a geeky geek from Kansas who's fed up with his state rep, an anti-abortion, anti-evolution, pro-censorship, pro-surveillance, anti-gay incumbent. Tevis -- an unknown -- is polling within three points of his opponent, and is looking to raise some Internet dough to kick this guy's (extremely tight) ass, and to promote his cause, he's made a fantastic, XKCD-style toon called "It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner." Specifically, he's looking to raise $8.34 from 3,000 people (no state rep in Kansas history has ever had more than 644 donors). I'm in*. Who's with me? Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

*Actually, I'm not. I'm a dirty foreigner and I'm not allowed to meddle in American elections. Someone else donate $8.34 to this guy for me, OK?

Inflamed by the New York Times's article on perfect chocolate cookies (in which it is revealed that the two secrets are: one, a little salt prior to baking; two, aging the dough for 36 hours in the fridge), the Ideas in Food blog tried (successfully) to shortcut the process by vacuum-sealing the dough:

From the Times story by David Leite:

At 12 hours, the dough had become drier and the baked cookies had a pleasant, if not slightly pale, complexion. The 24-hour mark is where things started getting interesting. The cookies browned more evenly and looked like handsomer, more tanned older brothers of the younger batch. The biggest difference, though, was flavor. The second batch was richer, with more bass notes of caramel and hints of toffee.

Going the full distance seemed to have the greatest impact. At 36 hours, the dough was significantly drier than the 12-hour batch; it crumbled a bit when poked but held together well when shaped. These cookies baked up the most evenly and were a deeper shade of brown than their predecessors. Surprisingly, they had an even richer, more sophisticated taste, with stronger toffee hints and a definite brown sugar presence. At an informal tasting, made up of a panel of self-described chipper fanatics, these mature cookies won, hands down.

The second insight Mr. Rubin offered had to do with size. His cookies are six-inch affairs because he believes that their larger size allows for three distinct textures. “First there’s the crunchy outside inch or so,” he said. A nibble revealed a crackle to the bite and a distinct flavor of butter and caramel. “Then there’s the center, which is soft.” A bull’s-eye the size of a half-dollar yielded easily.

Now, Ideas in Food:

What I can tell you is that the dough darkened and became fully saturated, similar to the way that the dough usually looks after a couple of days in the refrigerator. It also changed the texture of the dough, making it a bit more elastic to the touch. The just made dough was too soft to shape and needed to chill, so I left in the fridge for about three hours before baking.

The resulting cookies were pretty damn good. They had a slightly cakey texture in the center with chewy yet crisp edges and rich buttery, caramel flavors. It was impossible to eat just one and I was thankful that I had not baked off the entire batch.

Link (via MeFi)

The good folks at Evil Mad Scientist Labs have unveiled their fantastic HOWTO for recreating a 1958, oscilloscope-based proto-video-game called "Tennis for Two," created by a physicist named William Higinbotham "to improve what was an otherwise lackluster visitors' day at the lab."

Before we start, let's be clear that this is not a tutorial in how to build an oscilloscope. Tennis for Two is supposed to display on a 'scope, so beg, borrow, or buy one if you don't have one handy. Older low-end analog scopes like mine (a Hameg!) usually go for $50-$150, and if nothing else, you can always make a Scope Clock out of it later.

There are three parts to the electronics that we're building. First, there is the AVR microcontroller-- the brains of the outfit. The specific variety that we're using is the ATmega168, the same chip used in (for example) the Arduino platform. Secondly, there are two handheld controllers that connect to the ATmega168 microcontroller. Each handheld controller has a knob and a button. Third, there is the digital to analog converter that takes the output from the AVR and uses it to drive the scope.

Link

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John posts about this marvellous artifact: the autographed typewriter on which Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for sale for a mere ~$25K. An archivist friend of mine tells me that libraries that once collected authors' papers are now storing their hard-drives:

N.V. Books in Great Wolford, Warwickshire is selling Adams' vintage Hermes Standard 8 typewriter for a cool $25,257.94. Or, rather, they are selling a first-edition copy of Hitchhiker's Guide in "fine" condition and generously throwing in the typewriter as extra. With strange significance, the x key is particularly discolored and worn, which I hope will prompt someone to do a statistical breakdown of the frequency of letter x's in Adams' oeuvre. Also, for authenticity, an "End Apartheid" sticker is slapped on the side, identifying it with almost carbon-dated efficiency as a relic of the late 70s and 80s.

Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has the exciting news that Apple I BASIC has been extracted from an audio cassette and converted to MP3. It's actually got a pretty good beat.

They very first piece of commercial Apple software — a primordial flavor of BASIC originally released in 1976 that took thirty seconds to load — has been perfectly and authoritatively extracted from a yellowing audio tape and converted into a 38 second MP3, playable in iTunes. Plucky, hyper-intelligent beardos are now dissecting the file and learning its secrets, but their findings are a bit above my head.

Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

DEFENDER of the Favicon implements the game of Defender using Javascript and the tinsy, teeny space afforded by a Favicon. Supposedly works in Firefox and Opera, though my Firefox just stalls on the splashscreen. Nevertheless: woah. 8-bit arcade game in a Favicon. Woah. Link (via Wonderland)

Here's a magnificent grid showing how a humble rock would be displayed by an enormous variety of video games' rendering engines, executed with affection and wit (Fipi Lele pointed out that the Zork version would be, "There is a rock here."). The rock is the perfect, Sluggo/Zippy-esque subject for this kind of comparison, absolutely bang-on.

All I know about this image is that Kotaku apparently published it in April, 2006. Oh, and that it rocks. So to speak. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Geoff sez, "A reader emailed me about this amazingly weird town in Belgium where, due to how the town was divided back in the 12th century, parts of the village are actually now Dutch. In other words, you have this weird island-effect - check out the map - where pockets of the Netherlands exist within the larger matrix of a Belgian town. These sovereign pockets are only big enough to hold a few houses, though - and the houses differentiate themselves, nationalistically, by including coats of arms on their fronts. They even have separate postal services! It's like something straight out of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. What's more, because laws differ in the Dutch parts of the town, restaurants apparently used to close at different times - but in some cases this simply meant that you had to move to another table, thus crossing the national border. " Link (Thanks, Geoff)

Happy Trinity Day: on this day in 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated in Alamogordo, in Los Alamos, NM. Celebrate with a mushroom pizza.

Don't miss Ellen Klages's award-winning Green Glass Sea, the best story ever written about trinitite (the radioactive green-glass "rocks" made from sand fused by the Trinity detonation) and remember, you can buy the stuff online!

With gallows humor, the Los Alamos physicists got up a betting pool on the possible yield of the bomb. Estimates ranged from zero to as high as 45,000 tons of TNT. Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on the bomb destroying all life on the planet.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, was under no illusions about what he and his fellow physicists had wrought. The effects of the blast, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, moved the intellectual Oppenheimer to quote from the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

More prosaically, Dr. Kenneth Bainbridge, site director of the Trinity test, said: "Now we are all sons-of-bitches."

Link (Thanks, Evan!)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

If you're in Silicon Valley this week and want to have some legal-type fun, you could drop in on the Lenz v. Universal hearing (dress nice, behave yourself!) in which EFF will be arguing that Universal should be punished for sending a bogus copyright threat to a mom who posted a 29-second youtube of her adorable toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy."

EFF represents Stephanie Lenz, who uploaded a 29-second clip of her son dancing in the family kitchen to the Prince song, "Let's Go Crazy," which is playing on a stereo in the background. Remarkably, Universal Music Publishing Group claimed that the video infringed its copyrights, and had the video yanked from YouTube. Lenz's lawsuit against Universal seeks to hold the company accountable for misrepresenting that her fair use violated its copyrights.

Link (via Recording Industry Vs. the People)

I'm not sure what Chinese string this restaurateur fed to the translation software used to to generate the giant sign hanging over the entrance, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't: TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR. Ah, the special problems of translations into other alphabets. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

Update: In the comments, Insect Hooves adds, "OM NOM NOM. I love their Segfault Chicken. And their Short Stack Overflow is to die for. Ooooh, and their 404 Not Pound Cake (foghorn)"

Our pals at Gama-Go are making 50 of these giant wooden Deathbot statues. They're 30 inches tall and sell for $350 including shipping. I am anxiously awaiting arrival of my new Deathbot overlord! And for those seeking an even more intense Deathbot experience, an armor-plated version is also available as part of Gama-Go's new Store Fund Club. To raise money to open a store, GAMA-GO is offering four tiers of membership support where you pay $80 to $5000 in exchange for a 10% to 40% discount and a limited edition creation, from a signed print to metal designer toys. (The giant armored Deatbot is part of the top-tier offering, 'natch.) Membership program sign-up ends July 31.
Gama-Go Store Membership (Gama-Go)

Previously on BB:
• New Boing Boing t-shirt by GAMA-GO!

My pal Christy at Instructables says:

Our intern Bilal (a runner-up in the last laser cutter contest) painted and laser-engraved his fingernails, then realized he could use press-on nails for a safer and more portable version. Of course, since concept is everything, he went for an epic Beards vs. Mustaches historical character smackdown. (At any rate, it's much less gross than the laser tattooing.)

Laser-engraved fingernails (Instructables)

Dennis sez, "My totally sw33t vegan zombie shirt got accepted to Threadless!" I agree -- super-sweet! But "grains?" Some of us are low-carb vegans, you know! Link

Worldchanging's challenged its readers to complete the sentence "Imagine no..." with scenarios for a world where the suckitude has been removed:

Imagine no hurry. Imagine no hectic deadlines, frantic commutes, meals on the go, or interrupted vacations. Imagine having more time. It’s not a pipe dream. Living more sustainably, in more compact communities with more innovative tools will save us enormous amounts of time that we waste today -- time that we can use to spend with our family and friends. So the next time you find yourself grabbing food at the drive-thru, imagine a world where you have time for a long lunch with friends. Imagine no hurry.

Imagine no maintenance. Imagine not needing to own your own car to enjoy the benefits of driving. It's not a pipe dream. Already car sharing companies and other business like them that allow you to drive a car when it’s convenient, while they handle the maintenance, insurance, fuel and parking. And it’s not only cars. Sharing services have sprung up for everything from lawn mowers to bicycles to designer handbags. So the next time you find yourself waiting at the mechanic's garage for an oil change, imagine it was your last. Imagine no maintenance.

Link

(NPR photo by Jolie Myers of Mister Jalopy astride his iron steed at Coco's Variety)

Professional amateur and Make contributor Mister Jalopy was profiled on NPR today.

Like many of his fellow makers, Mr. Jalopy is simultaneously an artist, a tinkerer and a craftsman. For him, it's a lifestyle. His garage is lined with cabinets full of parts, an unimaginable number of widgets, wires and springs. There are broken sculptures, pinball machines and dozens of bicycles and old cars in various states of transformation.

Next to the giant iPod is his version of a drive-in movie theater: a sturdy wooden box, which he has wired with various found parts and mounted on a Schwinn adult tricycle. The result: He can project movies onto a 12-foot surface anywhere within riding distance.

...

Mr. Jalopy has been consulting with Disney, Apple and other major corporations, preaching the gospel of open source manufacturing. He tells them to use screws instead of glue, and to make schematics readily available so consumers can fix and re-imagine the objects they buy. He also urges technology companies to create forums for consumers to share ideas, and pushes car companies to sell patterns so people can create accessories like seat covers.

Mr. Jalopy: Are You Sure You Own Your Stuff? (NPR)

Mary sez,

To raise money for the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series, the hosts (Ellen Datlow and Matt Kressel) are holding a raffle. The prizes are unbelievable. Original art from Thomas Canty, Neil Gaiman’s keyboard (autographed), short story critiques by Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois… The list goes on and on. Seriously, one of the items is your own wormhole.

Between July 14th and July 28th, you can buy raffle tickets for only a dollar each. 1 buck. That’s nothing. And you can buy as many as you want.

If you aren't familiar with the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series, Terry Bisson and Alice K. Turner started the series in the late 1990s, attempting to bring together mainstream writers with writers of speculative fiction in order to show, in Alice Turner’s words, “that at a certain level they were plowing exactly the same field.” In the spring of 2000 Ellen Datlow took over for Alice K. Turner and in August 2002 Gavin J. Grant, publisher of Small Beer Press, stepped in for Bisson when he moved to California. Matthew Kressel stepped in for Gavin in April of 2008.

The reading series features luminaries and up-and-comers in speculative fiction. Admission is always free.

Link (Thanks, Mary!)

This BSD-daemon- taking-Tux-the- Linux-penguin -from-behind lighter was apparently offered for sale in a Barcelona minimart. One wonders if the manufacturer, distributor, or retailer are really that deeply invested in fights over free/open source licensing terms. Link (Thanks, Gerry!)

We've had Edith Piaf singing "La Marseillaise" since cock-crow here, so it must be Bastille Day! Go behead some aristos and tell 'em "Edith sent ya!"

On 5 May 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General to hear their grievances. The deputies of the Third Estate representing the common people (the two others were clergy and nobility) decided to break away and form a National Assembly. On 20 June the deputies of the Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath, swearing not to separate until a constitution had been established. They were gradually joined by delegates of the other estates; Louis started to recognize their validity on 27 June. The assembly re-named itself the National Constituent Assembly on 9 July, and began to function as a legislature and to draft a constitution.

In the wake of the 11 July dismissal of the royal finance minister Jacques Necker, the people of Paris, fearful that they and their representatives would be attacked by the royal military, and seeking to gain arms for the general populace, stormed the Bastille, a prison which had often held people jailed on the basis of lettre de cachet, arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed. Besides holding a large cache of arms, the Bastille had been known for holding political prisoners whose writings had displeased the royal government, and was thus a symbol of the absolutism of the monarchy. As it happened, at the time of the siege in July 1789 there were only seven inmates, none of great political significance.

Link

WorldChanging's Alex Steffen and I sat down last week for a cup of coffee and got to talking about post-apocalyptic life. I noticed that while there's a whole ton of stories -- and people who emulate them -- about heavily armed survivalists bravely holding off the twilight of civilization after the Big One, there are damned few stories about super-networked post-apocalyptic Peace Corps who respond to the Great Fall by figuring out how to put it all back together. I even came up with a name for it: the Outquisition; the opposite of the Inquisition -- missionaries who come to your town to remind you of how awesome it can all be, leave behind a bunch of rad, life-improving systems and tools, and generally get on with the business of being happy, well-fed and peaceful.

Alex wrote up a great post about this and 24 hours later, some WorldChanging readers created Outquisition.org. I'm not sure what they'll do there, but in my dreams, they're off building a non-secret society of emergency-preparedness Nice People who think that the response to catastrophe isn't lifeboat rules and militias, but humanitarian aid and kick-ass tools.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems -- and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

Link to Alex's post, Link to Outquisition homepage (Thanks, Alex!)

Mousewrites sez, "Steampunkwallpaper.com is a collection of wallpapers with a steampunky theme. I've taken it into my damn fool head to make one wallpaper a day for the next year, (15 so far) and I realized that I don't have quite enough ideas (my list of ideas is around 130 right now). I know that there's some people that don't like steampunk, but hell, there's some people who don't like coffee, either. No accounting for taste, I suppose! I love Boing Boing, and was hoping that the collective might give me some ideas? All my wallpapers are Creative Commons remix licensed, as well." Link (Thanks, Mousewrites!)