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Online sf convention with Peter Watts this Sunday

Tony Smith from the StarShipSofa podcast sez, "Just a final reminder... SofaCON is this Sunday and there's time to snag yourself a ticket to the online science fiction convention of 2013 . Guests include Peter Watts, Amy H Sturgis, Lois McMaster Bujold and Greg Frost." This is a livecast, interactive online event -- so anyone can play! Cory 0

Kneel before Zod

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My favorite photo from Comic-con. Appears to be this excellent guy.

Anatomy tees redux


When I blogged Leslie Arwin's Skeletees in 2007, I had no idea that I'd still be wearing my Skeletee all the time, six years later. But it seems like I wear it at least once every couple weeks, despite my massive trove of shirts. She does a gorgeous muscle tee, too, and many other designs:

Medical illustrator Leslie Arwin's Skeletees feature highly detailed, stark anatomical drawings of the bones, muscles, nerves and digestive tract, printed on the front and back. I picked up a skeleton shirt today and I'm delighted with it -- it's a great, thick, high-quality tee with a nice cut and the design is wonderful.

Anatomical T-Shirts - Skeletees.com

William Gibson interview is fine

The Paris Review has at long-last run its amazing interview with William Gibson on the Web. I've read a lot of interviews with Gibson and even conducted some, and this is one of the finer ones. I love his writing practice ("start with a sentence; don't have a shopping list of things"), but I think if I revised manuscripts as I went along I would never, ever finish. Here he is on the future:

It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.

My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson (via IO9)

Killing stupid software patents is really easy, and you can help


The US Patent and Trademark Office is required by law to let the public submit "prior art" for pending patents -- essentially, evidence that the thing the patent-filer is claiming to have invented already exists. People who spot patents in need of killing post them to a Stack Exchange forum called Ask Patents, in the hopes that other forum members will come up with invalidating art.

Joel Spolsky writes about how he found -- in 15 minutes, mind you -- the prior art necessary to invalidate a dumb-ass Microsoft patent on scaling images. He documents the process by which he did it, and shows how easily you could do it, too. As Spolsky points out, software patents are all basically shit, and trivial to prove as such. It just takes a dedicated army of freedom fighters to find and submit the prior art that helps the overworked patent examiners at the USPTO to reject the garbage they get by the truckload.

Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for. Ask Patents can be used to block them with very little work. And this kind of individual destruction of one software patent application at a time might start to make a dent in the mountain of bad patents getting granted.

My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn’t that be something!

Victory Lap for Ask Patents - Joel on Software (via O'Reilly Radar)

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - “Nightwater Girlfriend” (free MP3)

Sound it Out # 54: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - “Nightwater Girlfriend” (free MP3)

Naming your band after a Russian political leader does not necessarily get you noticed in his home country, but it eventually did for Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. The Boris Yeltsin Foundation has been following the Springfield, MO band’s consistently lovely music-making for years, and invited them to visit the motherland as headliners of the Old New Rock Festival in Yekaterinburg, Russia this past January.

Once the band accepted the gig, the U.S. consulate in Yekaterinburg named them cultural ambassadors to Russia for a day. SSLYBY performed at a local high school and answered questions about being an American rock band. There’s a forthcoming documentary about this trip called “Discussions with Russians”.

Where do you go from there? SSLYBY returned to Missouri in the spring and wrote/recorded a new record in guitarist Will Knauer’s parents’ attic. It’s called Fly By Wire and is full of deliciously earnest pop gems like “Nightwater Girlfriend”, which you can download below.

Book-scanning brings the 19th century to life

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanford history prof Paula Findlen discusses the renaissance of 19th century scholarship occasioned by the mass-digitization of 19th century literature. This was only possible, of course, because the copyright on these works had expired. Findlen, who doesn't study the 19th century per se, nevertheless found the wide and deep catalog of available 19th century materials meant that an overall awareness of the literature and culture of the era has permeated historians and other scholars.

By the standards of the 21st century -- or even the mid-20th -- the 19th century record is sparse to the point of nonexistence. But the lack of restrictions on duplication and -- especially -- indexing means that this world is particularly vivid for people who are paying attention.

As I've noted, I love 19th century Punch almanacs, love their physicality, but the mass-digitization and cross-referencing of them makes the physical ones a thousand times better.

This rediscovery of the 19th century as an open-source reading experience is accompanied by a subtle appreciation of the era’s intellectual merits. Consider the quantity of material—obscure novels, local histories, antique catalogs, minor journals, a sea of biographies, and those vast and terrifyingly erudite bibliographies that were a specialty of that age of scholarship...

...We now have access to one of the most valuable tools of archival and bibliographic research: the 19th-century catalog. It often contains precious annotations of the process by which living artifacts become a historical record—the quirky details that tend to be lost in modern information systems, which strip away the idiosyncrasies of personalized description in favor standardized data. In a way, the experience of using Google to access the 19th century has enriched our ability to work in the physical archives and libraries that many of us still consider to be the epicenter of scholarship. I am constantly moving between my Victorian online experience and the far richer evidence available at some brick-and-mortar libraries.

How Google Rediscovered the 19th Century (Thanks, Harry!)

Watch the latest hand-picked videos in Boing Boing's video archives

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page:

• Street Fighter televangelist edition
• Drunk (hic!) Science
• The dildo is extinct, says CNN
• Bullets underwater in super slow motion
• Michael Jackson loved rodents
• Bauhaus video for "Ziggy Stardust" (1982)
• Bhangra remix of Daft Punk's 'Get Lucky'
• Making of a grand piano

Boing Boing: Video archives

Douglas Engelbart’s unfinished revolution

"Doug Engelbart knew that his obituaries would laud him as 'Inventor of the Mouse,'” writes Howard Rheingold. "I can see him smiling wistfully, ironically, at the thought. The mouse was such a small part of what Engelbart invented." Engelbart’s inventions transformed computing, but he intended them to transform human beings. [MIT Technology Review] Xeni 1

Ardent Industries to build raining voxel cloud on a forklift

Ardent Industries, the crazy people behind such large art installations as Dance Dance Immolation and SYZYGRYD, are building a giant 3D Mario cloud stuck to the top of a forklift so they can rain on people's parades. Their Kickstarter is fully funded and they're starting production and getting their forklift licenses! Rad!

Ardent Mobile Cloud Platform on Kickstarter

Haunted Mansion blueprints for sale


There are a lot of hi-rez bitmaps of the blueprints and schematics for various Disney rides and effects floating around on the Web. But Etsy's BlueprintPlace does them up right, as with this Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion Singing Statues Blueprint, "with ammonia activated paper on a Diazit blueprint machine." Cool!

BlueprintPlace (Thanks, Rocketdyke!)

Daughter records 'last dance' with her dad, who is dying of cancer

25-year old Rachel Wolf isn't married, but hopes to be one day, when she finds the right guy. Her father, Dr. James Wolf, is dying of metastatic pancreatic cancer. Dad and daughter planned a "last dance," complete with wedding gown, makeup, and guests. They created and recorded their father/daughter dance, so she can play it back after he is gone. Watch it here, and a local TV news account is here. (via Lani)

Street Fighter 'Best of Church Edition,' starring disgraced televangelist Benny Hinn

Via our pals at Dangerous Minds, the Lord's smackdown. Mr. Hinn is a real piece of work. [Video Link]

Apple Cares remix

Handsome Pixels' "atmosplat" masterpiece immortalizes the righteous outrage of a AppleCare-stiffed shopper, in the form of an aural nightmare to send to your enemies. [Audio Link via Mike Jerugim on BB Facebook]

'I'd Rather Kill Myself,' says 11yo girl from Yemen said to be escaping arranged marriage

A video of an 11 year old Yemeni girl protesting the practice of child marriage has skyrocketed to viral status, via YouTube, Reddit and other aggregator sites. In it, young Nada Al-Ahdal pleads with parents not to arrange marriages for their kids. She is identified as having escaped what was to be a forced marriage.

“It’s not our fault. I’m not the only one. It can happen to any child,” she says in the video, first published by Yemeni photographer Ziad Abdul-Jabbar and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

“There are many cases like that. Some children decided to throw themselves into the sea. They’re dead now.”

“Go ahead and marry me off,” she says. “I’ll kill myself, just like that.”

More at the Washington Post, and Al Jazeera. The Lebanese news site NOW has more background.