SPECIAL FEATURE: Everybody loves cephalopods: “

Everybody loves cephalopods—that class of animals containing octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. But why? What makes these non-fluffy, non-mammals so appealing?

Read the rest

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Metagames in review: “Andy Baio reviews the state of affairs in games about games. The metagaming concept begins with hardly-playable jokes like Desert Bus, finds creative fluency in extending game mechanics and tropes to the point of absurdity, and ends with that annoying version of Tetris which always gives you the most contextually inconvenient brick.

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ROA’s street art: “

Graffiti is often a harmful imposition on communities, but ROA’s is so delightful and imaginative surely anyone would think twice about whitewashing it — especially commissioned works. Thankfully, authorities in London saw reason in that case and allowed the Hackney rabbit to stay. Pictured above is his cousin in Brooklyn.

UPDATE: Zeitgeist Magazine has a marvelous gallery showcasing how ROA paints his rabbits. Here’s a map of some of his stuff in London. Behold! The circulatory system of the rabbit.

ROA !’s photostream [Flickr via I360]

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Using the Force. Messing with kids’ heads can be fun!: “

Echo Lake Shoot A Video With Microsoft Kinect Camera: “

As directed by Daniel Nixon, quoted here as saying:

As far as I know (and I’m scared of checking) this is the first music video to be made with the Microsoft Kinect camera. The footage was shot on that piece of £130 equipment and recorded to custom software running on a laptop.

Echo Lake – Young Silence from Dan Nixon on Vimeo.

The band sent me the link. And here’s the video. Doesn’t hurt that it’s a perfectly lovely piece of music, from Echo Lake’s forthcoming YOUNG SILENCE EP on No Pain In Pop.

Related articles

• An Interview With Professor Elemental (warrenellis.com)
• Idle Thought On Comics And Social Media (warrenellis.com)
• Svk (warrenellis.com)

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The ultimate Internet attribution instructive flowchart: “See Something? Cite Something.”: “

‘A joint chart and public service announcement from two comic artists who are sick of having their work miss- or unattributed to them. Here’s the right way to show your artists some love.’

What you see above is but a snippet. View the whole chart in its full mindboggling and ROFL-rofling beauty here.

(notquitewrong.com, thanks Rosscott via BB Submitterator)

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Art installation looks like burning building: “

Isabelle Hayeur, an artist from Montreal, created ‘Fire with Fire,’ an artwork that simulates a fire in a ‘four-storey heritage building in the downtown eastside.’

Via Make: This building is not actually on fire

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Steampunk helmet filled with live goldfish: “

This video was shot at the San Francisco Edwardian Ball, a steampunk goth event held in many cities. The subject is a costumer who has created a helmet that appears to contain live goldfish swimming around his face; I think he’s got a double-chambered helmet filled with water and fish (poor fish!), but I wouldn’t swear to it.

Edwardian Ball 2011: Goldfish Helmet

(via Neatorama)

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EDGE World Question 2011: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”: “

Each year, über-big-think-literary-agent and EDGE founder John Brockman poses a question, and collects and publishes the answers. This year:

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY’S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

The term ‘scientific’is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A ‘scientific concept’ may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or ‘in a phrase’) but has broad application to understanding the world.

•
My response to the EDGE 2011 Question is here (‘Ambient Memory And The Myth Of Neutral Observation’).

• Here is the index of all participants, more than 150 of them, including Brian Eno, J. Craig Venter, George Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Evgeny Morozov, Linda Stone, and

Richard Dawkins (who will be returning soon as a Boing Boing guestblogger, I’m happy to report!).

• News coverage so far includes: The Atlantic, Wired UK, New York Times,
Sueddeutsche Zeitung
, Newsweek, Die Welt, The Guardian
, Publico.

(Image: RUDBECKIA, Katinka Matson)

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Awesome Foundation: $1,000 a month for the most awesome idea, every month: “The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences organizes regional groups of 10 people who commit to ‘showing up each month, stuffing $100 each into a paper bag, and giving that bag to the person we think has the best chance at achieving something awesome.’ The Toronto chapter is up and dispersing grants, with no strings attached.

Submissions through our application form are placed in a common pool viewable by all chapters. Each chapter meets monthly to select a project to fund. By consensus, trustees determine which project to fund, and the $1,000 fellowship is distributed accordingly. Some chapters also routinely contact applicants for interviews before awarding the fellowships.

Chapters are divided by geography, and more recently by topic of interest. While specifying a chapter to apply to is not necessary (all chapters can view the applications received by all other chapters), many chapters show a preference for local projects.

The Awesome Foundation

(via Confessions of a Science Librarian)

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