Boing Boing
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3D scanning with a plain webcam
Coming soon to a science fiction plot near you: with the right software, a plain-jane webcam can be a 3D scanner. It's a project from Qi Pan, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University Engineering Department. ProFORMA: Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition (via Futurismic) …
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Let's blow up the moon
Behold! The Rings of the Earth.
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Photographs of residents in their tiny flats in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate
Michael Wolf took 100 photos of people living in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate. Each flat is 100 square feet. Almost every room has the same kind of metal bunk bed. They almost all have a TV, electric fan, and rice cooker. I looked at all 100 photos. Here's the creepiest room. Here's t …
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Matt Logue's "Empty Los Angeles" photography book
Matt Logue says: I just completed a self-published book depicting an uninhabited Los Angeles, and it got an honorable mention in the photography.book.now competition at blurb.com! The photos were made over a period of 4 years, beginning in 2005, at a variety of locations around LA. Empty Los Angel …
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A Klingon Christmas Carol
An after-Thanksgiving treat for the whole family... Scrooge has no honor, nor any courage. Can three ghosts help him to become the true warrior he ought to be in time to save Tiny Tim from a horrible fate? Performed in the Original Klingon with English Supertitles, and narrative analysis from The V …
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Mishap at the Electrical Substation
As a little kid, I used to think electrical substations would make really awesome jungle gyms. This video helpfully demonstrates why 5-year-old Maggie was an idiot. This is the Eldorado Substation near Boulder City, Nevada. What you're seeing: A substation like this one is connected to long-distanc …
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Humans are domesticating themselves with smaller brains as a result
Marginal Revolution posted the following excerpt from Jeremy Taylor's book titled Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human. I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves. If we're following the …
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Rats in the urban ecology
(CC-licensed image by Flickr user laverrue) Gregory Glass is a disease ecologist -- he studies the relationship between pathogens and hosts. A professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Glass's laboratory is Baltimore's urban underbelly, where he hangs out with beefy sewer rats. …
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Man to marry his video game girlfriend this Sunday
Last month, I wrote about a Japanese husband who confessed to his wife that he had a virtual girlfriend, a character from an addictive Nintendo DS game called Love Plus. Now, another man is planning to hold a wedding ceremony with his Love Plus girlfriend this coming Sunday. The man, who calls himse …
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Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag
[Click for larger image.] I was lucky enough to see Black Flag play live a number of times in the '80s, around the time Glen E. Friedman shot the photo that graces this book's cover. I was an underage teen sneaking into grownup punk clubs, high on moshpit fumes (and, truth be told, lots else). The b …
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Big Bird cakes disasters
Cake Wrecks has a gallery of horrendous cakes with a Big Bird theme. To be fair, it seems really difficult to decorate a cake to look like Big Bird, what with that long beak of his. Big Bird cakes disasters
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Getting meaningful things done using "fixed-schedule productivity"
Cal Newport, a post-doc at MIT who writes the blog Study Hacks, has an interesting method of getting important work done. He calls it "fixed-schedule productivity." The idea, in a nutshell, is this: "Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligat …
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Beard worn as cage around head
This fellow apparently won a facial hair competition in 1991 for his beard head-cage with working door. (via Imaginary Foundation)
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Brilliant meteor over Utah
A gorgeously glowing meteor flew over Utah on Wednesday night, alarming some citizens and delighting others. The image above is from a security camera at the IMFT plant in Lehi, Utah. From KSL-TV, were you can also see some video of the fireball: Clark Planetarium Director Seth Jarvis said the st …
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Chuck Prophet documentary
My film director pal Scott Compton just finished shooting a documentary about singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet. Scott and collaborator John Behrens joined Prophet and his band in Mexico City earlier this year where the group recorded ¡Let Freedom Ring!, an album of "political songs for non political …
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Cigar box ukulele kit
Yesterday I received a surprise package in the mail: a cigar box ukulele kit from Papa's Boxes (which sells kits for four different ukuleles and a 5 string banjo, all based on cigar boxes). It looks like it has everything needed -- a cigar box, strings, hardware, glue, drill bits, and even a piezoel …
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Demi claims missing hipflesh is for real. But $5,000 says it's Moore photoshopping.
Photographer Anthony Citrano recently pointed us to a possible Photoshop Disaster on the cover of W magazine's December issue, in which Demi Moore (aka @mrskutcher) appeared to be missing a chunk of flesh from her hip. This reminded me of the Ralph Lauren debacle. Many blogs and news sites picked t …
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Google puts a stop to tooth-whitening, belly-flattening scumbags
The Big Money reports that Google has made a "minor shift in its policy that has major implications." Instead of banning scammy ads for bogus teeth whiteners and stomach flatteners, Google will now ban the advertiser itself, "effectively neutering the advertiser's ability to shift from one ad and sh …
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Taste Test: natto, gooey fermented soy beans
In Japan, we eat soy all the time. For breakfast we have rice with natto and miso soup with tofu; for dinner we pop edamame into our mouths in between chopsticks-full of vegetables sauteed in soy sauce. I always assumed it was good for you, until I came to California and my health-conscious American …
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A programmer's lament on the Apple App Store
"How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak." — Paul Graham.
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