Howard Rheingold's 1994 sketches for HotWired

Howard Rheingold is scanning and posting the awe-inspiring pages from his notebook with sketches and notes for the design of HotWired, Wired's groundbreaking (and defunct) website. I love his use of color.

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Mary Blair exhibition in San Francisco

On Saturday, I visited San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum where i was blown away by the Mary Blair exhibition. A painter and Disney animator in the 1940s and 1950s, Blair is best known for creating the concept art for Disney's Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, designing Disney's It's A Small World world, and illustrating several timeless and magical Golden Books such as "I Can Fly." Blair was a tremendous influence on contemporary artists like BB pal Tim Biskup, Monsters, Inc. director Pete Docter, and our own Mark Frauenfelder. This retrospective exhibition is captured in book form in The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. Seeing her wonderful concept drawings and original Golden Book illustrations in person though was the perfect way to end a year filled with great art.




Link to selections from the exhibition


Link to buy The Art and Flair of Mary Blair


Link to Mary Blair entry on Wikipedia


Link to Cartoon Modern posts on Blair


Link to Blair work at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive


Link to Disney Legends: Mary Blair


Previously on BB:

• Mary Blair "Small World" designs Link

• "Mary Blair Week" at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive blog Link

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Girl gets revolutionary note in package instead of iPod

A man bought an iPod from a Wal-Mart. It was a Christmas gift for his daughter. When she opened it, it didn't contain an iPod. It contained a note, set in ransom-letter type, that read:

"Reclaim your mind from the media's shackles. Read a book and resurect [sic] yourself. To claim your capitalistic garbage go to your nearest Apple store."

Jay Ellis, the girls father, returned the iPod to the Germantown, Md. Wal-Mart store where he purchased it. The store manger told him that another customer returned an iPod with a similar issue.

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Hello Kitty contact lenses

Hello Kitty Hell posted this photo of a young lady modeling Hello Kitty contact lenses. Link

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Easy-bend teaspoon

Should Uri Geller ever lose his remarkable ability to bend spoons*, he should stock up on these special spoons that are made with a piece of nitinol, which gets soft under hot water.

The liquid does not need to be boiling - the spoon will also bend if placed under the hot tap.

To reset the spoon, just cool it under the cold tap, and straighten it again. The spoon can be used many times, as Nitinol is a very flexible metal.

(*If you can find a link to the video of Geller on the Tonight Show, please post it in the comments section)

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Ice fishing in Japan

Short news clip of people in Hokkaido camping on an ice-covered pond, fishing for tiny smelt, then grilling an eating them on the spot. Link

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Man with tail

Occasionally, humans are born with tails that are usually removed surgically shortly after birth. According to this brief video, Oleg Polovski of Moscow appears not only to to have kept his tail but can even, er, "wag" it. I don't buy the description that he's the "first case of human moving tail" but it's still a rare sight if it's indeed real.
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Old Age Rejuvenator Centrifuge of 1935

The August, 1935 issue of Science and Mechanics carried this hilarious article on the "Old Age Rejuvenator Centrifuge" -- a technology that whirled the elderly to keep them supple.

"What shall the prophylaxis (prevention) and therapy (treatment) be? How can the effects of this force be mitigated? Lying down relieves the daytime direction of fatiguing pull in the case of the well or slightly ill; but something more than this is needed by the badly-damaged. We suggest periods of centrifugalization. An individual in special need of treatment might rest at night upon a large revolving disc with his head toward the outer rim; the disc should be so beveled as to carry the head at a lower level than the feet; optimum (best) speed to be determined by laboratory experimentation. Such a disc might be large enough to carry ten or twenty patients. This mechanism would facilitate the functions which during the day are inhibited by gravity. Incidentally, certain cardiac (heart) and vascular disabilities might be especially helped. The decompensated heart, with edematous (swollen) and varicose extremities, might respond well."

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Privacy state-of-the-planet -- it's not good

Sam sez, "The 2007 International Privacy Ranking rates selected countries in terms public surveillance. Each year since 1997, the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International have undertaken what has now become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The Privacy & Human Rights Report surveys developments in 70 countries, assessing the state of surveillance and privacy protection. The most recent report, published in 2007 is probably the most comprehensive single volume report published in the human rights field."

It's pretty dismal. Basically, no country in the world presents a healthy environment for people who care about their privacy.


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(Thanks, Sam!)

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Promise and peril of data-scraping

Josh McHugh's Wired feature, "Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have About You?," is a meaty, thinky piece about the many risks of data-scraping. The piece investigates the risks to users (your data, slithering around the net), the risks to scrapers (your business entirely dependent on someone else's goodwill), and the risks to scrapees (bandwidth clobbering, your users get screwed and so on):

Giants like Yahoo and Google have thus far taken a mostly nonproprietary stance toward their data, typically letting outside developers access it in an attempt to curry favor with them and foster increased inbound Web traffic. Most of the largest Web companies position themselves as benign, bountiful data gardens, supplying the environment and raw materials to build inspired new products. After all, Google itself, that harbinger of the Web2.0 era, thrives on info that could be said to "belong" to others -- the links, keywords, and metadata that reside on other Web sites and that Google harvests and repositions into search results.

But beneath all the kumbayas, there's an awkward dance going on, an unregulated give-and-take of information for which the rules are still being worked out. And in many cases, some of the big guys that have been the source of that data are finding they can't -- or simply don't want to -- allow everyone to access their information, Web2.0 dogma be damned. The result: a generation of businesses that depend upon the continued good graces of a relatively small group of Internet powerhouses that philosophically agree information should be free -- until suddenly it isn't.

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Funny sci-fi anti-Canadian DMCA video

The Galacticast netshow has produced a great little end-of-year short calling on Canadians to fight the Canadian DMCA in the coming year. This is the on-again/off-again US-inspired copyright act that Industry Minister Jim Prentice wrote without any input from Canadian interest groups, making it into a kind of wish-list for US-based entertainment giants.

The episode parodies many, many science fiction classics (and the host sports a nifty DMZ tee from The Secret Headquarters!) and does a good job of laying out the basic issues in funny, easy-to-understand ways.

It's a cinch that Minister Prentice will reintroduce the Canadian DMCA in 2008 -- and we're gonna kill it again!

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(via Michael Geist)

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Vivid cabbages

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: vivid cabbages from London's Borough Market.

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BBtv: Happy New Year!

Here's a look back at some of the goofiest, weirdest, or otherwise most memorable moments from Boing Boing tv in 2007. Thanks for joining us, and see you in 2008! Link to video and comments at Boing Boing tv.

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Driver blames pterodactyl for crashing into pole

From Wenatchee World:

A 29-year-old Wenatchee man told police a pterodactyl caused him to drive his car into a light pole about 11:30 p.m. Thursday.

When police asked the man what caused the accident, his one-word answer was "pterodactyl," Smith said. A pterodactyl was a giant winged reptile that lived more than 65 million years ago.

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(Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath)

Previously on Boing Boing:

• Leprechaun opens car door for pantless man

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Knot science

How is it that phone cords, earbuds, and the string for my son's gyroscope so often end up a knotted mess? To find out, biophysicists and mathematicians are developing experiments to exploring how knots can spontaneously form so quickly. Their research may provide insight not only into the tangled web of power cords behind your desk but also natural knots, like those in proteins and DNA. From Science News:

By tumbling a string of rope inside a box, biophysicists Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith have discovered that knots—even complex knots—form surprisingly fast and often. The string first coils up, and then its free ends swivel around the other coils, tracing a random path among them. That essentially makes the coils into a braid, producing knots, the scientists say...


In topology, a knot is any curved line that closes up on itself, possibly after a circuitous path in three dimensions. A circle is regarded as the "trivial" knot. Two loops are considered to be the same knot if you can turn one into the other by topological manipulation, which in this case means anything that does not break the curve or force it to run through itself.



Topologically, a knotted string is not a real knot, as long as its ends are free. That's because either of the ends can always thread back through any entanglement and undo the knot. An open string, no matter how garbled, is the same as a straight segment. (Mathematicians usually think of strings as being stretchable and infinitesimally thin, so in topology there is no issue of a knot being tight.)



Strictly speaking, then, the string in Raymer and Smith's box was never knotted. But it was still a mess.

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Previously on BB:

• Many better ways to tie your shoes Link

• Ideal knots spun in 3D Link

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Pancakes in a pressurized can

Over the holidays, my brother Charles proudly showed me his new favorite convenience foodstuff: Batter Blaster, pancake batter in a pressurized can. It's not only organic, but Batter Blaster is apparently "fast, easy and fun for the whole family." My brother says the pancakes and waffles it produces are quite tasty. Unfortunately, I didn't get to sample them.
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UK declares War on Terror over

Chris Spurgeon says: "According to a story last week in the London Daily Mail newspaper, the British government has had enough with the "War on Terror" hype. (Link is to military.com, one of the many sites that has reprinted the Daily Mail article.)"

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless "death cult."

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: 'We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language."

London is not a battlefield, he said.

"The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers," Macdonald said. "They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way."

Good to see the UK coming to its senses. Hopefully the US won't be far behind.

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Make your own "Moon Sand" for under 60 cents a lb

Make your own moldable sand with ordinary play sand, corn starch, and water.

One of the hot Christmas items this year was Moon Sand. But while it's certainly not a bank-breaker, it is costly for what is basically wet sand. So, I did a little digging around (pun intended) and discovered a way to make your very own moon sand. Here's the best part...the homemade stuff will set you back less than 60 cents per pound!

As you may know, there are several Moon Sand kits out there, and they come with all sorts of the usual play-dough style gadgets and molds. But if you just want a bucket of the stuff, the best deal I have found so far is at Amazon, where a 7 1/2 lb tub will cost you $18.74, down from $29.99 (at the time this article was published).

Link (Thanks, Will!)

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