hard deadlines

Robert Rauschenberg, a pioneer of multimedia art in the truest sense of the phrase, died last night. He was 82.

"It is impossible to have progress without conscience." -Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008).


Link to NYT obit, Link to Wikipedia entry (Thanks, Jeff Cross!)

I'm skeptical about a "talking R2D2 ice bucket," but I'm utterly sold by the fact that it comes with a Han Solo Frozen in Carbonite ice-cube mold! Now that'd be a classy cocktail! Link (via OhGizmo)

Fred sez, "Carrie Brownstein, formerly of Sleater-Kinney, now has a blog on NPR's website. She put together a mix of songs, and wanted to include a track from the Dead (since the songs are on the NPR site, she asked permission, unlike every other MP3 blog in the world). Look what happens:" "An interesting tidbit: This mix was supposed to have the Grateful Dead on it, whose music I really love, but they refused unless we promised to do a piece on them on All Things Considered. In addition, we would need to run a feature on The Dead on the site. Here's a sentence I've never written: Someone needs to take a bong hit and chill out. Just a simple "no thanks" would have sufficed. Are The Dead really in need of publicity? Because I swear there's a dancing bear sticker on every third car I see in Portland. And now I've written a paragraph on them anyway, for free, not even in exchange for a song. Doesn't that count?!" Link (Thanks, Fred!)

Neil sez, Some oceanographer friends of mine were encouraged to apply for TWIC cards so that they could access research vessels in port without escorts. Because they're, y'know, researchers.

That's not how the TSA rolls, though, and they received nice letters on TSA letterhead explaining that "I have determined that you pose a security threat."

It's a good thing we found this out now, before the NSF, MIT, and WHOI agreed to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for them to study here.

So let's review:

* Foreign students on F-1 visas are under no circumstances eligible for TWIC cards, even if they have a legitimate need to access US ports and research vessels.
* They shouldn't worry though, because anybody who has a TWIC card can still escort them (or anybody else) into "restricted" areas. Even though the TSA doesn't trust you, as long as someone they do trust trusts you, that's good enough.
* When the agency that's responsible for inspecting your shoes and liquids at the airport calls you a security threat, you shouldn't worry: it's not like there could possibly be far-reaching repercussions.

I feel better already. Link (Thanks, Neil!)

Fred sez, "Nice article explaining how the end of analog TV in the U.S. in Feb. 2009 is going to unleash DRM troubles on a lot of unsuspecting consumers." This is great for the studios, but it's not how the audience thinks (or should think) of their product. Paying for some form of content should directly connect to real received value: a performance of a movie in a theater. A DVD with additional commentary and deleted scenes. And yes, convenient on-demand availability, when appropriate. But too often, the "value" is based upon an indirect conspiracy to make it difficult or impossible to use the media you've already paid for, making the end result a tax on the technological have-nots. Link (Thanks, Fred!) --

Last week, I told you about my donations program for my new book, Little Brother. Every time I put a book online for free, I'm inundated by offers of cash "tips" from people who got the ebooks for free. I don't want anyone's money (cutting my publisher out of the loop isn't good for them or me), so I came up with an alternative. I asked librarians and teachers who wanted free copies to step forward and put their names down, and now I'm looking for would-be "donors" to step forward and send them copies of the book.

The project's been a smashing success so far: dozens of librarians, teachers and related trades put their names down for free copies, and we've started to fulfil the orders at a good clip. There's plenty of open orders left, though -- if you're one of those people who wants to compensate me for the free ebook, here's your chance! Link

David Byrne's latest art project turns an entire building into a instrument:
"I'd like to say that in a small way it turns consumers into creative producers," Byrne explains on his official site, "but that might be a bit too much to claim. However, even if one doesn't play the thing, it points toward a less mediated kind of cultural experience. It might be an experience in which one begins to reexamine one's surroundings and to realize that culture -- of which sound and music are parts -- doesn't always have to be produced by professionals and packaged in a consumable form.

"I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments," he adds, "but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down. The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part." Link to official Playing the Building site, Link to Wired News story

Muddy Mountain Pottery's Raku Ray Guns are made from ceramic, and named for golden age science fiction authors and personalities ("Tiptree Trilobite," "D.E.L. Ray," "Gerns-Backfire"). Beautiful and contradictory, made from heavy ceramic instead of futuristic materials. Link (via Neatorama)

Nat sez, "Rats laugh in the ultrasound when they're tickled. They also seek the hand that tickled them (not to bite). Listen to the Radio Lab segment on it, where the researcher who discovered the rodent guffaw talks about how he came to do so. I first found out about it in the excellent QI: The Book of Animal Ignorance, where you can learn that a kangaroo can shuffle foetuses between its two uteruses to wait for droughts to end before giving birth, monotremes are literally "one hole" (for pee, poo, and procreation), and the New Zealand kea are parrots strong enough to rip the kidney fat out of sheep. It's certainly changed my after-dinner conversation!" Link (Thanks, Nat!)

Kevin Kelly is one of the most fascinating people I've ever had the honor of meeting. For today's episode of Boing Boing tv, I visited his Bay Area home to learn more about the stories behind the stunning images that comprise Asia Grace, one of my favorite books by Kelly (there are many others).

Before he helped launch Wired 15 years ago, and served as the publication's founding editor, the onetime "nomadic photojournalist" wandered throughout Asia with a backpack crammed full of film -- and little else.

The resulting images, most of which were taken in the 1970s, form the body of Asia Grace. We see worlds that no longer exist: Afghanistan and Iran before wars that changed them forever; and traditional lifestyles in Tibet, Nepal, China, and India that fade further into history with each passing year.

Here's an Amazon link for the book.

In part two of today's episode, Kelly explains his hypothesis of "A thousand true fans," an idea that generated much debate and discussion on Boing Boing recently when we pointed to his blog posts on The Technium (which you should read regularly, if you don't already). His question: in the internet age, can an artist subsist on the micro-patronage of a thousand true fans?

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

The New Yorker's "Drug War Bulletins" are sure to boil your blood: a man who died for want of a liver transplant because the hospital insisted he needed "drug treatment" for his medical marijuana use; a suburban San Diego housewife who will spend the next 20 years in jail because she was peripherally involved in a heroin deal while she was in college in 1975; and a pulmonologist who'd been favored by the drug warriors until his giant, well-funded, unreproachable study concluded that pot didn't give you lung cancer, and who is now a pariah whose research conclusions have been boycotted by the press.

The War on Some Drugs is as unwinnable and destructive as all the other wars on abstract nouns. Who needs terrorists to rip America apart when you've got drug warriors killing off, imprisioning and shunning its innocents? .In Seattle, a fifty-six-year old man died last Thursday after being refused a liver transplant because he had followed his doctor’s recommendation to use marijuana to ease the symptoms of hepatitis C. From the Associated Press story:

His death came a week after a doctor told him a University of Washington Medical Center committee had again denied him a spot on the liver transplant list. The team had previously told him it would not consider placing him on the list until he completed a 60-day drug-treatment class…

The Virginia-based United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees the nation’s transplant system, leaves it to individual hospitals to develop criteria for transplant candidates.

At some, people who use “illicit substances”—including medical marijuana, even in the dozen states that allow it—are automatically rejected. At others, patients are given a chance to reapply if they stay clean for six months.

The cruelty and stupidity of this beggars belief. This patient did not need “drug treatment.” He was already undergoing drug treatment. Nor did he need to get “clean.” He was already clean. It’s the drug war that’s dirty. (H/t: John Leone.) Link (via Making Light)

You know how the mobile carriers charge you a couple cents to SMS a few characters' worth of text over their network? When you add it up, you're paying about a zillion bucks a meg for that traffic -- seriously! A space scientist from Leicester has calculated that SMS data is four times more expensive than receiving data from the Hubble space telescope. He worked out the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble – and compared that with the 5p cost of sending a text.

He said: “The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Dr Bannister said it had been difficult to work out exactly how much Hubble data transmission costs. So he contacted NASA who gave him a firm figure of £8.85 per megabyte (MB) for the transmission of data from HST to the Earth. Link (via Consumerist)

Fractal 23, from New York's Takeshi Miyakawa Design, might just be the coolest chest of drawers I've ever seen. Link (via DVice)

Man Babies is a bizarre blog that has nothing but photos of dads whose heads have been swapped with their kids' . Link

Brian McConnell says: The Worldwide Lexicon is a community translation system that enables a website's readers to translate to the languages they speak. We're beta testing a multilingual blogging service, Der Mundo.

You can find Boing Boing at boingboing.dermundo.com where you can view, edit and score translations, and help make Boing Boing accessible to everyone who speaks your language. Der Mundo translates new posts using machine translation services, after which readers can edit or replace these rough translations to improve them. Der Mundo guesses which languages you speak based on your browser preferences, and tries to display articles in your language first. It falls back to the original text if a translation has not been posted yet.

Readers can score translations via a simple five star rating scale, and can edit existing translations by clicking on a pencil icon adjacent to each item. Readers can contribute translations by clicking on English --> ____ links below each article headline. This will take you to a web editor where you can create or edit a translation, as well as view the revision history.

WWL is an open source project, and is developing a suite of tools to enable websites and blogs to go multilingual, using a combination of machine translation, volunteers (readers) and professional translators. The project's goal is to eliminate the language barrier for interesting content by making it easy for people to form translation communities and services around topics, websites or languages. They will be releasing a professional translation hub, under the New BSD license, in early summer. If you're interested in contributing code to the project, or in helping localize the interface to more languages, contact Brian McConnell (brian@worldwidelexicon.org)

Link

Keeping track of my expenses was one of my resolutions this year. I've been using a terrific web-based application called PearBudget to help me keep my promise to myself. PearBudget is streamlined, lightweight, and elegant, and because it's web-based, I can use my iPhone to enter receipts as soon as I get them.

I asked Charlie, the co-creator of PearBudget, to explain why he and his partner Sarah made PearBudget.

At the core of our wanting to make PearBudget was that we wanted simple control over our finances.

Quicken and other more advanced accounting programs are overkill for the simple task of tracking your expenses and making a budget. Financial services that automate everything don't compel you to actively reconsider your spending habits. We wanted to be in control, but we didn't want to be overwhelmed. We designed PearBudget to ride that line.

Our background isn't in programming or banking, but in information design — Sarah's a map designer; Charlie's a typesetter and occasional web designer. So our interest in developing a better financial tool had a lot to do with creating a simple presentation of the user's information, and with giving the user a good experience developing and keeping a budget.

It's a truly beautiful app. You can try it for 11 days for free; after that it's $3 a month. Link

(Click on image for enlargement) The latest city to meet the perfect pixel placers at eBoy is Los Angeles, my beloved home. Link

DesignObserver's put together a great book/slideshow/Flickr group of beautiful table of contents pages from various books:
In this book, we have gathered together thirty Table of Contents pages from our personal collections. On the surface, the selection may elude standard organizational conceits: why a design collection that also includes poetry and fiction? Why Philip Larkin and not Billy Collins, Ayn Rand and not Philip Roth, Paul Rand and not Jan Tschichold? Like “next” itself, there’s no intentional logic or over-arching plan: we just found these examples engaging, the discrepancies between them even more so.

Some readers will appreciate their typographic form, while others will see further strategies at work — informational, strategic, philosophical, literary. There are odd, even anachronistic cultural references, gestures that date these books in a manner oddly soothing. They remind us that what we will be has, by its very nature, a great deal to do with where we’ve been — and that there is no future without a past. Link (via Kottke)

Livejournal's Snuffykin followed the plans in Craft magazine to replace the uppers on her worn-out shoes with knitted versions. The newly remade Converse kick all kinds of ass.
The shoe part:
* I cut the uppers and tongues off of Champion flat tops, then put several layers of gesso on the surfaces to whiten them up. I finished this with a few coats of matte sealer.

* Heavy duty yarn is hard to find. I found it at Joann Fabrics, finally. * Since the Champion shoe material was leather and not fabric like Converse, a sewing needle didn't go through easily. I used a bookbinding awl to punch holes through the layers of leather around the sole before sewing. Still, it was tricky.
* The Champion heel was shorter than the Converse heel, so I seamed the pieces rising above short heel.
* Running out of time, I sewed using running stitch, which actually holds up.

The results:
The shoes are wearable, walkable, but floppy. Partly because the heel is too short. I could have just followed the instructions for a size 8 for a more snug fit. They're messy looking, due to my rush to finish, but I'm not going to change a thing. I never wore those shoes anymore, but now they're just for special occasions. :) Link (via Craft)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel spotted this gallery of modular data-centers built into shipping containers -- talk about two great tastes that taste great together. Hard to imagine a more iconic use of 21st century technologies:
Royal Pingdom has a few images from the inside of portable data centers, the sort used by Sun and Google to drop massive computing power anywhere they can send a shipping container. I would like to hang a hammock inside and make one my new nest. Link, Discuss this post on Boing Boing Gadgets