Saturday, May 14, 2005

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Thursday, March 24, 2005

Rock'em Sock'em Robots. The Marvin Glass toy cartoons never end at Bedazzled! This time, Spike has made available the commercial for Rock'em Sock'em Robots. A great commercial for a great toy. Link [Boing Boing] 11:55:10 AM   comments[]

Sunday, March 6, 2005

Honda Numo Hybrid Scooter. I want a scooter. There, I've said it. New York might be one of the more scooter-friendly cities in the US, but I'm still going to look like Grimace doing a hand-stand from behind. Still, if Honda ever decides to commercialize this Numo gasoline/electric hybrid prototype, I would stoically face down the jeers and stares of smaller New Yorkers, as I'd use the money I'd save in gas to purchase grenades. Prototype: Honda Hybrid Scooter [TreeHugger] [Gizmodo] 2:05:49 PM   comments[]

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

The Couch Potato Tormentor. You remember the TV-B-Gone, don’t you? Anonymously turn off any TV, just like that? Well, we didn’t think you could get a product much more amazing and enjoyable (and simultaneously obnoxious) than that, but the Couch Potato Tormentor may very well take the cake. Instead of just turning your TV off, it randomly changes the channel, or screws with the CD or DVD currently playing, or whatever. The best part is that you don’t even have to be there—once it’s programmed you can just leave it lying nearby and the Couch Potato Tormentor will just mess with your TV at random intervals. [Engadget] 1:23:27 PM   comments[]

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Idle hands. Mark Slouka wrote an amazing essay for the November issue of Harper's Magazine called "Quitting The Paint Factory: On the Virtues of Idleness." It's about the beauty of doing nothing, and the fight against those who would deny us one of life's greatest pleasures: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy." Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business." [Boing Boing] 4:34:04 PM   comments[]

Thursday, December 2, 2004

Burton / R.E.D. Audio HiFi Helmet. Burton’s new snowboarding helmet with a built in audio system and an ear clip design that lets those bass notes boom right where you’ll feel’em might be one of the best ways you can find to spend $150 bucks. A mute button and an emergency-disconnect plug means you could also wear this baby in the real world, like on your bicycle, and still hear what bums were shouting at you.  [Cool Hunting] 11:47:42 AM   comments[]

Friday, November 19, 2004

Neuroscience of music. In the new issue of Scientific American, UC Irvine neurobiologist Norman Weinberger looks at how the brain processes music. Surveying the research in his and others' labs, Weinberger examines how our brain "retunes" itself to various kinds of musical input and how we've evolved our response to music. "An imaging experiment in 2001 by Anne Blood and Zatorre of McGill sought to better specify the brain regions involved in emotional reactions to music. This study used mild emotional stimuli, those associated with people's reactions to musical consonance versus dissonance. Consonant musical intervals are generally those for which a simple ratio of frequencies exists between two tones. An example is middle C (about 260 hertz, or Hz) and middle G (about 390 Hz). Their ratio is 2:3, forming a pleasant-sounding "perfect fifth" interval when they are played simultaneously. In contrast, middle C and C sharp (about 277 Hz) have a "complex" ratio of about 8:9 and are considered unpleasant, having a "rough" sound. What are the underlying brain mechanisms of that experience? PET (positron emission tomography) imaging conducted while subjects listened to consonant or dissonant chords showed that different localized brain regions were involved in the emotional reactions. Consonant chords activated the orbitofrontal area (part of the reward system) of the right hemisphere and also part of an area below the corpus callosum. In contrast, dissonant chords activated the right parahippocampal gyrus. Thus, at least two systems, each dealing with a different type of emotion, are at work when the brain processes emotions related to music. How the different patterns of activity in the auditory system might be specifically linked to these differentially reactive regions of the hemispheres remains to be discovered. In the same year, Blood and Zatorre added a further clue to how music evokes pleasure. When they scanned the brains of musicians who had chills of euphoria when listening to music, they found that music activated some of the same reward systems that are stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs." [Boing Boing] 11:44:45 AM   comments[]   Are You A Comfort Addict? Do you find yourself unsatisfied, but unable to work out why? Do you find yourself nodding during Fight Club when Tyler Durden tells his recruits that their struggle is a philosophical one... only to be dismayed with his idea of a solution? Is everything okay, but nothing great? You could well be a comfort addict. [kuro5hin.org] 11:28:16 AM   comments[]

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Computers Linked to Glaucoma? Maybe we should have listened to our parents and gone outside instead of playing video games. In newly published study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, heavy computer users were 74% more likely to develop visual field problems as compared baseline in a group of 10,202 randomly selected workers. Furthermore, heavy computer users were found to be 81% more likely to develop glaucoma. [Slashdot] 12:17:30 PM   comments[]

Monday, November 15, 2004

How D&D changed the world. To put it simply, Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination as a kid's best toy. The cliche of parents waxing nostalgic for their wooden toys and things "they had to make themselves" has now become my own. Looking around at my toddler's room full of trucks, trains, and Transformers, I want to cry out, "I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided die!" Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures. [Boing Boing] 1:07:13 PM   comments[]

Friday, November 12, 2004

Ingesting insects. According to a new study from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), edible insects are an excellent source of nutrition for people in Central Africa where traditional proteins are at a premium. For every 100 grams of dried caterpillars, there are about 53 grams of proteins, about 15 per cent of fat and about 17 per cent of carbohydrates, according to the study. The insects are also believed to have a higher proportion of protein and fat than beef and fish with a high energy value... “Due to their high nutritional value in some regions, flour made from caterpillars is mixed to prepare pulp given to children to counter malnutrition,” said (FAO researcher Paul) Vantomme. “Contrary to what many may think, caterpillars are not considered an emergency food, but are an integral part of diet in many regions according to seasonal availability. They are consumed as a delicacy.” [Boing Boing] 12:52:27 PM   comments[]

Tuesday, November 9, 2004

Embarrassing sweater gallery. Fashion archeology at its most embarrassing. One man unearths clothing that has gone long unworn and asks the timeless question, "What was I thinking?" [Boing Boing] 10:41:01 AM   comments[]   free the exit poll data. The six news organizations at the left contracted with two polling organizations at the right to provide exit poll information one week ago today. Those data were inconsistent with the actual results — significantly so. Dick Morris says that “this was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.” The aim of the evil doing in Morris’ judgment was to suppress Bush votes — which it apparently didn’t. But the same data are used by skeptics on the other side, to suggest that those who had a hand in tallying the vote — in particular, one company whose President had promised to deliver Ohio for the President — changed the votes that the exit poll surveyed. I think both claims are bunk — I don’t think there was a conspiracy to suppress the Bush vote, nor do I think Diebold stole the election for Bush — but there are obvious puzzles that need to be resolved. First, there is Morris’ point — exit polls are just not that wrong. Second, there are the insanely inverted county votes in the many heavily Democratic counties in Florida that had their votes counted by optical scan (and tallied by Diebold machines among others). Why were the polls so bad? Why did Democrats in those counties overwhelmingly defect to the President while remaining “liberal” in their other votes? These are questions of fact that can be answered, or at least understood, if the facts were known. The Exit Poll Consortium should enable that knowledge. It would be a relatively simple regression to map exit poll data against counties or precincts with suspect machines. More importantly, it would be relatively easy to isolate where, if anywhere, suspicion should be directed. The Exit Polls have done enough damage to this election. My bet is that it was incompetence at Edison/Mitofsky. But those firms owe it to this Nation to release their data totally, so that a wide range of competent statisticians can evaluate whether and where the problem was. And more importantly for the blog space: If blogs are going to be something more than the CB radios of journalism, we need an ethic to treat this sort of question ethically. Anyone who is surprised that a voting machine didn’t work has been living on Mars for the last 100 years: Always, and in every election, voting machines fail. That fact should force us to a sensible architecture for voting machines — one which we don’t have just now for electronic voting machines. But it isn’t, itself, evidence this election was “stolen.” No one can, or should, utter such words without the data to back it up. Instead, we should demand what, in this context, should be our right: to have access to the data. There is irresponsibility somewhere. Let us not add to it here. [Lessig Blog] 10:29:21 AM   comments[]

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