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Cory Doctorow:

Here’s a complete collection of Alcoholics Anonymous inspirational comic strips from 1968-1974.

Link

(via Waxy)

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on April 25, 2006, 7:41pm

Cory Doctorow:
California’s name comes from fan-fiction:

California is named after the island of California, home of Queen Calafia, her beautiful black amazons and their man-eating griffins, as all detailed in Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandian, which was the Sword of Shanarra of its day, a highly unauthorized but popular sequel to the much more highly respected Amadis de Gaul, more The Lord of the Rings of its day. At the end of Don Quixote, Cervantes had this to say about Esplandian: “Verily the father’s goodness shall not excuse the want of it in the son. Here, good mistress housekeeper, open that window and throw it into the yard. Let it serve as a foundation to that pile which we are to set a-blazing presently.”

That being said, Las Sergas de Esplandian was the pulp novel the conquistadores had on board when they sailed around and encountered the Baja peninsula. What’s more, when the Portola party went up the coast, thinking the descriptions in LSdE were based on actual travelers’ tales, they thought the California condors were Queen Calafia’s big black man-eating griffins.

And so on to the present day where California is ruled by Conan the Barbarian.

lor=”red”>Update: Ape Lad points out that Idaho got its name as the result of a hoax: “When a name was being selected for new territory, eccentric lobbyist George M. Willing suggested ‘Idaho,’ which he claimed was a Native American term meaning ‘gem of the mountains’. It was later revealed Willing had made up the name himself, and the original Idaho territory was re-named Colorado because of it. Eventually the controversy was forgotten, and modern-day Idaho was given the made-up name when the Idaho Territory was formally created in 1863.”

Update 2: Andrew sez, “The author of the quoted blurb is off in the
placement of their Don Quixote quote. It’s not from the end of Don
Quixote, but rather from Volume I, Chapter VI, when the curate and barber
go through Don Quixote’s library and dispose of books they deem improper
(or, rather, that Cervantes deems worthy of mockery) — which means it’s
near the very beginning of Don Quixote, rather than the end.”

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on April 25, 2006, 9:21pm

Today’s link

Adult link
Dreamstripper Professional

Ensign Games has just released DreamStripper Professional. According to the release on the new game, it has lots of new stuff including mo-cap dances, a total control mode, AI facial movements, a resolution of 1600×1200 (up from from 800×600), new easy to use UI for dressing up the dancer, as well as more accessories, clothes and ways to customize your dancer.

when I grow up I wanna be a stripper. –SZ

Originally from Sex & Games, ReBlogged by sonia zjawinski on Apr 26, 2006 at 08:31 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on April 26, 2006, 8:31am

[Image: Angkor Wat, Cambodia, a city reclaimed by the roots of trees].

I just read a long and totally fascinating article by David Grann – called “The Lost City of Z” – from an old issue of The New Yorker.
The article explores whether or not a lost city called “Z” really exists somewhere in the Brazilian rain forest – “a region nearly the size of the continental United States” – even while it tracks the life of a British explorer, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who “disappeared in the forest, along with his son and another companion” in 1925.
“Fawcett had been acclaimed as one of the last great amateur archeologists and cartographers,” Grann writes, “men who ventured into uncharted territories with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose.” Colonel Fawcett believed that, “in the southern basin of the Amazon, between the Tapajós and the Xingu tributaries,” lay Z, a ruined city lost to the jungles of time.
“To bolster his case that the ruins of Z would be found in the region,” Grann tells us, Fawcett “cited carvings that he had seen on rocks in the area, and documents that he had uncovered from Portuguese conquistadores in Brazilian archives. He quoted a Brazilan scholar, who declared, ‘My studies have convinced me that… there may yet be found in our forests, as yet penetrated in few places, ruins of ancient cities.’”
Because of Fawcett’s disappearance, however, at least 100 other explorers have lost themselves in the Amazon, looking for his remains (or, more likely, looking for Z). There was, of course, one crucial problem: Fawcett, funded by the Royal Geographical Society, kept his expeditionary path completely secret, even releasing false latitudinal coordinates for fear that someone else might steal the final prize: discovering, mapping, and documenting Z.
Fawcett was exploring at “the peak of the British Empire,” we read, “a time when the English were constantly confronting and colonizing new, exotic civilizations; when imperial explorers such as David Livingstone were trying to map the so-called ‘dark continent’ of Africa; and when the Allan Quartermain novels by Fawcett’s friend H. Rider Haggard, which chronicle the intrepid adventurer’s discovery of ancient civilizations in Africa, were wildly popular.”
The last thing he needed, in other words, was another explorer hot on his trail.
To make a (very) long story short, David Grann – the article’s author – visits Colonel Fawcett’s granddaughter in Cardiff, Wales, whereupon Grann discovers unpublished letters from Fawcett that reveal the expedition’s true route through the jungle. Thus Grann sets off for Brazil.
More and more information about Fawcett pops up. “One day, during a visit to a colonial archive in Rio de Janeiro,” Grann reports, “Fawcett discovered a document, partly eaten by worms, that was titled ‘Historical account of a large, hidden, and very ancient city, without inhabitants, discovered in the year 1753.’” Within the document, Grann tells us, Fawcett learned about a Portuguese “soldier of fortune,” who, along with his expeditionary team, “ascended a mountain path” to find “a spellbinding vista: below them were the ruins of an ancient city. The men climbed down, and discovered stone arches, a statue, wide roads, and a temple with hieroglyphics.” Reading the account, Fawcett “became even more entranced with the idea of a lost civilization” – and, presumably, so did Grann.
Now in Brazil, Grann – carefully tracking Fawcett’s final self-enforestation – is taken by a guide to the ruins of an enormous ranch built deep in what used to be jungle; what he sees there shocks him: “The farm had been consumed by jungle in just a few decades, and I wondered how actual ancient ruins could possibly survive in such a hostile environment. For the first time, I had some sense of how it might be possible for the remnants of a civilization simply to disappear.”
Several pages ensue in which Grann hears contradictory tales of a kidnapped white man paraded through the territories of various tribes back in the 1930s; albino children; “very bad Indians”; and “a colossal man,” named Afukaká, “his arms as thick as legs, his legs as big as a chest.”
Then my eyes started popping out of my head, because here Grann meets Michael Heckenberger, a “highly regarded professor at the University of Florida,” who was doing field work in the upper Xingu basin.

[Image: NASA, satellite views of Brazil's Xingu National Park].

Prof. Heckenberger “had battled everything from malaria to snakes to virulent bacteria that made his skin peel off and forced him to boil his garments twice a day.” He looked “a little like a surfer.”
Heckenberger, familiar with Fawcett’s story, turns to Grann and says: “I want to show you something.” He grabs a machete, and they all walk more than a mile into the forest, “cutting away tendrils from trees, which shot upward, fighting for the glow of the sun.” Then Heckenberger stops. He gestures at the ground: it’s sloping. Why is it sloping?
It used to be a moat.
“What do you mean, a moat?” Grann asks.
“A moat,” Heckenberger answers. “A defensive ditch.” It’s nearly a mile in diameter and more than 900 years old.
Heckenberger then shows Grann some excavation pits, where foundations of “palisade walls” are found, half-buried in black soil.
Turns out the group of them are standing in “the remains of a massive man-made landscape. There was not just one moat but three, arranged in concentric circles. There was a giant circular plaza where the vegetation had a different character than that of the rest of the forest, because it had once been swept clean. And there had been a sprawling neighborhood of dwellings, as evidenced by even denser black soil, which had been enriched by decomposed garbage and human waste.”
There were also the remains, Heckenberger explains, of “Roads. Causeways. Canals.”
So is it the city of Z? Or is Z still out there, waiting?

Originally from BLDGBLOG on April 25, 2006, 10:24am

Mark Frauenfelder:

A gallery of ultra-nerdy tattoos from webcomics. This self-referential tattoo is my favorite. Link (thanks, Marisa!)

Originally by Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing on April 25, 2006, 1:53pm

Since the start of this month, police and propaganda officials in China have launched their biggest crackdown on Beijing’s counterculture hothouse - Dashanzi art district - where at least three galleries have been ordered to remove politically sensitive works, such as: a painting by Gao Qiang depicting Mao Zedong bathing in a Yangtze river the colour of blood; a child-like depiction of the 1989 Beijing massacre by Wu Wenjian; Huang Rui’s cultural revolution slogan made up of banknotes bearing Mao’s portrait.

Banknote by Huang Rui.

Despite the crackdown, the Gao brothers said the climate was improving. From 1989 until 2003, they were on the government blacklist and forbidden to leave the country. But they are now part of a new wave of Chinese artists wowing galleries abroad. Next week, they will visit Nottingham to recreate their renowned work, Hug, in which they persuade strangers to embrace.

Painting by the Gao Brothers

Compared with the first years after he opened his gallery in 1990 (the first foreign-owned space for contemporary art in China), Brian Wallace says the atmosphere is improving. “Ten years ago the officials would have been rude and taken the pictures away. Now they are polite and ask for pictures to be withdrawn from public view.”

Image via Beausmith

Private and commercial freedom is almost unlimited, but anything public and political is subject to controls. Galleries in Dashanzi openly display nudity and sexually explicit pictures. But even a flat image of political leaders seems to make the censors queasy. One of the pieces that had to be removed is a grey painting of the current leadership all in the same dark suits and ties with the same hairstyle.

Talking about China, censorship and difference in culture, i’d just like to remind a story that made the headlines last year:

Berne’s Museum of Fine Arts had removed Xiao Yu’s sculpture made with the head of a dead fetus attached to a seagull’s body from a Chinese art exhibition last year after a complaint that it was disrespectful to the dead.

At the time, ethics experts, artists and art lovers argued that keeping the work under wraps was an affront to freedom of expression.

Via The Guardian.
Related: The China Connection (part 2) - Transmediale.

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by sonia zjawinski on Apr 26, 2006 at 08:55 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on April 26, 2006, 8:55am

a roundabout light installation consisting of a 6 meter high internally lit, traffic tower & a UFO platform made of a smooth concrete plate with a light green reflecting, artificial coating. in the middle of this, a big red letter ‘U’ (for UFO). the light in the tower changes its color as soon as traffic on the highway has low intensity. then the UFOs will know that they can start their landing. the intermediate 300 meters are lit with blue lights on both sides of the road, much like one sees at airports. see also litmus.
[ufolandingsbaan.nl & googlesightseeing.com|thnkx Brandon!]

Originally from information aesthetics on April 25, 2006, 11:32pm

an ambient light visualization that conveys the contamination of our everyday environment by nicotine. the lamp uses simple smoke detection sensors, which continue to play their role, but translate into color & sound the gradual saturation of the room by the exhalations of the cigarette smokers nearby.
see also pink noise & data smoke.
[galerie-quang.com & hehe.org|via we-make-money-not-art.com]

Originally from information aesthetics on April 25, 2006, 4:31pm

Reuters - Seven young artists on Tuesday sued
New York City over its strict anti-graffiti law, saying it
violated their constitutional right to free speech.

oooh! I don’t know how I feel about this. I love street art, but there is a definite find line between street art and bad tags (then again that’s just a matter of opinion). From the looks of it though, the cops shouldn’t be looking for spraypaint and markers. Kids will use anything - exacto knives, that gross glass etching chemical - to get their name out. I prefer looking at colors. –SZ

Originally from Yahoo! News - Oddly Enough, ReBlogged by sonia zjawinski on Apr 26, 2006 at 08:48 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on April 26, 2006, 8:48am

Awhile back we told you about Blinksale, a great online invoicing application. They’ve recently released version 2.0 of their service and it’s worth checking out if you’ve not already.

Blinksale was already pretty great but they’ve greatly increased the functionality of their invoice tracking, added the ability to track incoming invoices and invoice tagging. They’re also working on an API that should prove very useful.

 
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Related: Great freelancing tips
Related: Tax Tips: Own your own business
Related: Interview with millionaire Marc Allen

Originally from Lifehacker on April 25, 2006, 5:00pm

will the summer make good for all of our sins?
(2006, 34.8MB, 4:14 min.)

Exquisite music video for the Icelandic band múm.

Originally by mica from DVblog on April 25, 2006, 11:00pm

Originally from Tinselman on April 24, 2006, 5:56pm

Getting up right when the alarm goes off can be hard. You know it’s true. Well, Steve Pavlina has an interesting technique to train yourself to get up when your alarm first goes off–when you really want to!

This is going to sound really stupid, but it works. Practice getting up as soon as your alarm goes off. That’s right — practice. But don’t do it in the morning. Do it during the day when you’re wide awake.
Go to your bedroom, and set the room conditions to match your desired wake-up time as best you can. Darken the room, or practice in the evening just after sunset so it’s already dark. If you sleep in pajamas, put on your pajamas. If you brush your teeth before bed, then brush your teeth. If you take off your glasses or contacts when you sleep, then take those off too.

That seems like a bit of a pain, but it just might work. The idea is to modify your behavior and that wouldn’t be easy. Steve goes on to explain in more detail how to go about this. We’re curious to know if Lifehacker readers have tried this or something similar, or if maybe any of you have another sure-fire method for getting up on time.

Thanks to Santiago for the tip.

 
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Related: How to sleep on an airplane
Related: Travel tip: Strategic napping
Related: How to get baby to sleep through the night

Originally from Lifehacker on April 25, 2006, 6:00pm

For those who believe that streets are for people as well as cars, here is the ultimate hybrid: a tent that looks like a car. Artist Michael Rakowitz says: “(P) LOT questions the occupation and dedication of public space and encourages reconsiderations of “legitimate” participation in city life. Contrary to the common procedure of using municipal parking spaces as storage surfaces for vehicles, P (LOT) proposes the rental of these parcels of land for alternative purposes.” Do a mashup with Rebar’s PARK(ing) and it will be just like a camping trip. ::Michael Rakowitz via ::WMMNA

Originally by lloyd from Treehugger on April 26, 2006, 7:34am

MSN Money has an informative article on reducing your taxes by turning your personal expenses into allowable business deductions.

Here’s the best part: Your business doesn’t have to make a profit for your expenses to be deductible. All you have to do is establish a “profit motive.” Under the Internal Revenue Code, a “profit motive” is presumed if you earn any net income in any three out of five business years.

We discussed this sort of thing briefly when we went over why you should start a side business, but this article gets down to the nitty gritty of how to get your hobby-cum-business to really save you money next tax season.

 
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Related: Check your IRS refund status

Originally from Lifehacker on April 25, 2006, 12:00pm

by Adam Pash

We like to preach from the pulpit of Life Hacks that technology is supposed to make us more productive. As our motto so eloquently puts it: Don’t live to geek; geek to live.

The thing is, even if you do “geek to live,” chances are you still might be a bit of a geek. After spending a weekend with the awesome DIYers, hackers, and artists at the first ever Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend, living to geek has never seemed cooler.

DIY for computers and technology

For all the awe and respect I have for the know-how and elbow grease it takes to accomplish some of the most difficult DIY projects, I’m always going to be a fan of those that nearly anyone can do. That’s why one of my favorite projects at the fair was this simple method for converting a $60 router into a $600 router (PDF alert!) with a firmware upgrade. The router in question is the fairly ubiquitous Linksys WRT54G. Simple, powerful, and nearly anyone can do it.

Of course, there was a lot of great stuff at the Maker Faire that I would have no idea how to do but can easily appreciate and enjoy. In the computers/technology realm, I really admired the custom retro handsets that the guys from DIY:Happy put together, who turned run-of-the-mill landline phones into cordless and wireless headsets with cell phone and bluetooth hacking. Also on the wireless front, I sat in on a very cool presentation by Ralf Muehlen of SFLan on setting up your own wireless LAN community (check out the site if you’re interesting in doing something like this yourself).

Although not particularly DIY, I got a chance to check out a few of Microsoft’s upcoming Origami/Ultra-Mobile PC prototypes, which are intended to bridge the gap between PocketPCs and laptops, running a full-fledged version of XP. While it’s great to have a relatively small device that can run anything your Windows box can, I can say that if that work requires any typing, the on-screen keyboard, which looks good in theory, is unfortunately a major pain to use. I’m not sure the PocketPC to laptop gap is one that really needs filling.

Also under the Microsoft roof were some cool software/hardware projects that you can find on Microsoft’s Coding4Fun, like a DIY DDR project. And since losing weight the video game way is a topic of interest here at Lifehacker, I was also pumped to see the Exercise Machine Game Controller that hooked up an exercise bike to a driving game. Hack this thing together with San Andreas and I’d be as fit as a fiddle.

DIY for fun and Art

When it came to art, there was no shortage of projects to check out at the Maker Faire. From customized musical instruments made out of motorcycles to the giant painting machine, repurposing technology into art was huge. Nowhere was this more evident than at the very popular Make Play Day, where aspiring Makers got the chance to get their hands on hardware, wiring, and plenty of hot glue guns to make whatever inspiration demanded.

Another huge hit was Sunday afternoon’s presentation by O’Reilly’s Scott Gray on making paper airplanes. You’d be amazed at what one man can do with a piece of paper.

DIY for travel and energy in the 21st century

Travel and alternative energy was big at this year’s Faire, and probably the most notable showing went to the people from ZAP! (Zero Air Pollution), whose electric cars, scooters, ATVs, and portable energy devices were all over the fair.

Of course not all travel and alternative energy needs to be practical, but the Maker Faire is all about DIY, right? In that vein, I was quite pleased to see a number of very cool and inventive hacked-up bicycles (like the very cool bicycle ferris wheel - see video below).

If impractical, totally non-traditional forms of transportation are more your style, you would have loved the giant electric giraffe.

DIY for the rest of us

Of all the presentations I checked out at the Maker Faire, I found none more promising than the presentation by Instructables co-founder Eric Wilhelm, who described Instructables as working towards the goal of open source hardware. By lowering the threshold of documentation (his words), Instructables hopes in turn to lower the threshold for participating and MAKE-ing. Sounds like a nice world to me, especially as someone who’s never found a particularly easy jumping-off point for getting down and dirty with hardware DIY.

If any readers got a chance to check out the Maker Faire, what were you favorite parts? Let us know in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com.

< ?php $setname = 'Maker Faire 06'; $username = 'lifehacker'; include('/www/utils/photogallery/photogallery.php');?>

For more photos from Maker Faire, you can check out makerfaire tag on Flickr.

Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker who has put serious thought into learning to solder. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

 
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Originally from Lifehacker on April 25, 2006, 12:30pm

We are halfway through Michael Pollan’s the Omnivores Dilemma with the intent of writing a review, but after reading President Bush’s speech yesterday at the Ethanol Lobby’s lunch we are going to do an interim review of a slice of it – of pages 33 through 56. Hell, we may just retype them in their entirety.

(This post continues on the site)

Originally by lloyd from Treehugger on April 26, 2006, 7:23am

..because just like Landbuses, there is standing room only. Up in the front, the suits get leather Barcaloungers that turn into beds, but here is a new idea for those of us in steerage- standing room seats. “Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.” We suppose there could be a treehugger case that more people crammed in means less fuel burned per person, and we also suspect that it will end deep vein thrombosis, but generally we think it gives new meaning to Flying is Dying. from ::New York Times

Originally by lloyd from Treehugger on April 26, 2006, 7:30am

Food manufacturers have been coming under pressure to reduce salt and cut out fatty ingredients from their products. Birds Eye says it has removed 550 tons of fat, Heinz claims to have reduced salt and increased the amount of vegetable in some foods, Kraft and Nestle have also decreased the amount of salt in their foods. But a series of articles in this week’s Guardian have been examining whether they really have cleaned up their act. Walkers, the best selling potato chips, have radically changed the contents of the saturated fat that they use and have reduced salt. Their ad says that their chips now contain the same level of salt as a slice of white bread. But the issue for Dr. M.Rayner, nutrition expert at Oxford University, is that chips are still not healthy food–”the industry seems to think making diets healthier is about choosing healthier versions of the same foods within categories. But that’s not enough - you’ve got to cut out whole categories”.

(This post continues on the site)

Originally by Bonnie from Treehugger on April 26, 2006, 4:06am