Upcoming Appearances • October 19, 2011 in Washington, DC: Speaking at "What will turn us on in 2030?", a conference on energy futures.
• March 29-31, 2012 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
John Baichtal is a contributor to MAKE magazine and Wired's GeekDad blog. He has also written for legendary tabletop gaming magazines Dragon and Dungeon, as well as Kobold Quarterly and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He is the co-author of The Cult of Lego.
I'm heading to Germany next week for a series of school visits and public appearances to promote the German edition of my novel For the Win. I'm doing public stops in Hamburg (Nov 7, 10AM, Hamburger Kinderbuchhaus im Altonaer Museum), Berlin (8PM, Sankt Oberholz), and Munich (7PM, Lovelybooks, livestream available). Full details at the RandomHouse.de site.
According to its title, this video shows a Brazilian police car ramming the wing of a smuggler's small twin prop airplane. A commenter named pvbernhard translated the dialogue:
0:13 - I'm going to hit the wing - I'm going to hit the wing. Do not shoot.
0:23 - Drop one there. [one police officer get out of the car] I will get the others.
0:27 - Police! Get out! Get out!
Hylozoic Ground, a Canadian art installation that was exhibited at the Venice Biennale, sounds like a really lovely, immersive environment. One warning: if you're the sort of person who's allergic to obscure, overwrought "artist's statements," the site may frustrate you -- it took me about 50 clicks before I found a screen that actually stated, in simple text, what the installation was. Which is a pity, because it's pretty cool and I can't think of a single reason not to tell people about it. For your convenience, I've pasted it here for you:
Tens of thousands of lightweight digitally-fabricated components are fitted with microprocessors and proximity sensors that react to human presence. This responsive environment functions like a giant lung that breathes in and out around its occupants. Arrays of touch sensors and shape-memory alloy actuators (a type of non-motorized kinetic mechanism) create waves of empathic motion, luring visitors into the eerie shimmering depths of a mythical landscape, a fragile forest of light.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
This intimidating squirrel-like beastie with the impressive choppers lived 94 million years ago. Scientists from the University of Louisville recently discovered fossilized remains of the animal, named Cronopio dentiacutus, in Argentina. Apparently, it was about the size of a mouse. From CNN:
(Paleontologist Guillermo Rougier believes Cronopio dentiacutus) was an insectivore, which is common for small animals today. Their teeth seem to be specialized for cutting and crushing; the large canines of Cronopio dentiacutus could puncture through small insects. To give you some perspective on the size of these canines, imagine if one of your front teeth came down below your chin, Rougier said.
Kevin Kelly pointed to this great interview with William Gibson. Kevin says, "This long revealing interview with William Gibson is a gold mine. In addition to being a gifted writer, Gibson is one of the best conversationalists I've encountered. I could listen to him all day."
GIBSON
I was never much of a Raymond Chandler fan, either.
INTERVIEWER
Why not?
GIBSON
When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic.
But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.
But I don’t think that writers are very reliable witnesses when it comes to influences, because if one of your sources seems woefully unhip you are not going to cite it. When I was just starting out people would say, Well, who are your influences? And I would say, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon. Those are true, to some extent, but I would never have said Len Deighton, and I suspect I actually learned more for my basic craft reading Deighton’s early spy novels than I did from Burroughs or Ballard or Pynchon.
I don’t know if it was Deighton or John le Carré who, when someone asked them about Ian Fleming, said, I love him, I have been living on his reverse market for years. I was really interested in that idea. Here’s Fleming, with this classist, late–British Empire pulp fantasy about a guy who wears fancy clothes and beats the shit out of bad guys who generally aren’t white, while driving expensive, fast cars, and he’s a spy, supposedly, and this is selling like hotcakes. Deighton and Le Carré come along and completely reverse it, in their different ways, and get a really powerful charge out of not offering James Bond. You’ve got Harry Palmer and George Smiley, neither of whom are James Bond, and people are willing to pay good money for them not to be James Bond.
My latest Locus column is "It’s Time to Stop Talking About Copyright," about the way that concentrating on "copyright" instead of "Internet policy" or "policy" causes us to miss the big picture:
The disconnection laws that the entertainment industry has bought for itself in the UK, New Zealand and France provide for removing whole households from the Internet on the strength of their copyright accusations. If the net were just cable TV, this might make sense, but for families all over the world, the net is work, socialization, health, education, access to tools and ideas, freedom of speech, assembly and the press, as well as the conduit to political and civic engagement.
There just isn’t such a thing as ‘‘copyright policy’’ anymore. Every modern copyright policy becomes Internet policy – policy that touches on every aspect of how we use the net.
And as we make the transition from a world where everything we do includes an online component to a world where everything we do requires an online component, it’s becoming the case that there’s no such thing as ‘‘Internet policy’’ – there’s just policy.
Upcoming Appearances • October 19, 2011 in Washington, DC: Speaking at "What will turn us on in 2030?", a conference on energy futures.
• March 29-31, 2012 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
I visited my little brother, a dedicated minimalist, last month. In general, I think of myself as not particularly consumerist-y. But hanging out with somebody who is sooo much better at not consuming pointlessly has left me with a lot to think about.
Gadgets are one of the biggest things I've been pondering. This is not, especially, my area of weakness when it comes to consumerism. (That would be landscaping plants, furniture, and kitchenware.) But I did recently get my first smart phone. I have been, lately, complaining about the weight of my old MacBook. And I have been contemplating a new MP3 player. In other words, I'm at a potential buying stage in my slow-moving gadget cycle. Do I need to be, though? And if there is a reason to buy some new stuff, how should I make those choices?
That's probably why Thomas Hayden's essay In Praise of Crap Technology struck a chord with me. In it, Hayden waxes poetic about his $19.99 Coby MP3 player. It's a product that's supposed to suck. It's something you buy reluctantly, when you can't afford an iPod. But, apparently, nobody bothered to let the Coby know about that. It's boring. It's ugly. It doesn't have the latest features. But, as Hayden points out, it's also durable, inexpensive, inherently theft-deterrent, and reliable. It also does exactly what he needs it to do. No less. And no more.
My portable audio technology needs are simple. A few hundred well-chosen—by me, dammit—songs and a half-dozen episodes of the WTF podcast and I’m good to go. My trusty Coby does all that, with an FM radio tuner included. (I do wish it had AM too—the crap technology of the air—but why gripe?) Most important, it’s worth next to nothing so I’m virtually assured never to lose it—unlike apparently every iPhone prototype ever—and I don’t cringe at all when my toddler flings it across the room. And because the next Coby is sure to be just as mediocre, I’ll never need to upgrade—I’ve stepped off the escalators of feature creep and planned obsolescence, and all the expense and toxic e-waste that come with them. Crap technology, it turns out, is green technology.
Now that's a damn good point. Granted, crap technology can be dirty if it's actually crap—something you're going to have to throw out and replace every year. But it's nice to get this reminder that there's a lot of room between crap-that's-actually-crap and the-newest-most-expensive-thing. That grey zone is home to Hayden's Coby.
It's also home to the Sansa Clip my husband and I have shared for half a decade. It's now outlasted two iPods—one that was lost/stolen and another with a faulty battery. Where those more-coveted gadgets failed, the Sansa came through. And it's stuff like this that brings up an important question I need to ask myself more often: What makes "crap" crap?
I've been pretty proud of my ability to resist the constant-upgrade/early-adopter treadmill. But maybe I need to be less smug about that. Because, until I really thought about how good the Sansa Clip has been to me, I was thinking about replacing it with an iPod. And there's not really a point to that. Because I already own good technology. It's just a piece of good technology that happens to be "crap".
Here's a photo of a crosswalk light and a portion of a tattoo store sign. I wonder what's in the metal box behind the pole? (And the painting on the brick wall? It's by Dustin Spagnola.) (Via Reddit)
From the annals of poorly considered marketing campaigns, this ad for Schick razors, which touts the fact that the product is so gentle it was used to keep the horribly burned flesh of the survivors of the Hindenburg nice and smooth.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
No, this is not a still from the Radiers of the Lost Ark scene when the ark is opened, but an absolutely magnificent image of southern Chile's Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano spewing lightning-topped ash. Wow. Ricardo Mohr's photo was selected as one of National Geographic's "Pictures We Love: Best of October."
Tunisian Facebook users have plastered Obama's Facebook page with thousands of messages in support of the Occupy movement:
Among the comments, Tunisian Facebook users circulated “Arab Spring” jokes, such as: “Tunisia is the first country to recognize the American Transitional National Council,” referring the revolutionary upheaval in Libya and the global recognition of the Libyan transitional council.
The Facebook users described it as a “virtual surprise attack” on. Many of the recent entries on his 2012 presidential campaign page were bombarded with as many as 20,000 comments each.
“Tunisian people are calling the U.S. authorities to respect freedom of expression and not to resort repression and assault on the rights of American citizens,” read one comment, which was reposted by several users.
Another comment read: “Tunisian people denounce violations against the American people by the security forces, which affect the freedom of expression.”
John Baichtal is a contributor to MAKE magazine and Wired's GeekDad blog. He has also written for legendary tabletop gaming magazines Dragon and Dungeon, as well as Kobold Quarterly and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He is the co-author of The Cult of Lego.
One of my favorite Lego genres -- and one for which the Lego Group will never release a set -- is that of ApocaLego. Whether it's a zombocalypse, bioplague, robot insurrection, or nuclear conflagration, builders who participate in this theme love detailing the end of days. Expect a lot of bikers, ruined buildings, and jackbooted reactionaries vainly trying to hold back the chaos. And it's a popular theme; the ApocaLego Flickr group claims over 1,000 members with over four thousand uploads.
Kevin "Crimson Wolf" Fedde (work pictured above) builds some of the most detailed and creative ApocaLego dioramas around. Kevin, a college student from Ft. Collins, CO, layers his models with intricate detail and mini shorelines, making them seem almost plausible. While he revels in the requisite "Mad Max" skirmishes, I love how he also shows how people's shanties look like. This is how they scrounge electricity. Those details are far more interesting for me than any battle.
Andy "Waxy" Baio writes about the "Supercut" phenomenon for Wired -- these being videos that edit together dozens (sometimes hundreds) of instances of some iconic cinematic moment, whether it's Sarah Palin's breathing, Obama's mentioning of "spending," Hollywood actors answering the phone (or saying "We've got company" or similar cliches), or every instance of "dude" from The Big Lebowski.
I wanted to learn more about the structure of these videos, so I enlisted the help of the anonymous workforce at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to analyze the videos for me.
Using the database of 146 videos, I asked them to count the number of clips in each video, along with some qualitative questions about their contents. Their results were interesting.
When looking at the source of the videos, nearly half come from film with a little over one-third sourced from TV shows. The rest are a mix of real-life events, videogames, or a combination of multiple types, as you can see below.
According to the turker estimates, the average supercut is composed of about 82 cuts, with more than 100 clips in about 25% of the videos. Some supercuts, about 5%, contain over 300 edits!
This concrete ladle, made from a Nazi army helmet, was apparently created by a demobilized German veteran who turned a tool of war into a tool of creation:
THERE IS SOMETHING MAGNIFICENT and poetic about this humble object. Only great words can describe it and there, I fall short with things of such raw beauty. I purchased this from my friend Joshua Lowenfels, who found it at a flea market in NYC. He purchased it from an old German fellow who was parting with a few things from his life. The handle is only about two feet long, so it appears to have been used as a sort of ladle for scooping and pouring wet concrete. I got weak-kneed when I saw it. If this isn’t the most perfect statement on the whole failed Nazi experiment, and of war in general, I don’t know of one. You can see more great things at in Josh’s online shop at: http://www.joshualowenfels.com
[Video Link] Last night my 8-year-old daughter and I played Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure (we have a Wii and it is available on the other console platforms and the PC as well). We had a great time playing the game, which is geared for younger players but has sly humor that kids and adults will enjoy (is was written by Toy Story writers Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow).
The game comes with a "portal," which is a wireless peripheral that you place 3D action figures (included) on to have them appear in the game. The action figures contain an RFID chip (or something like it) that the portal scans and sends to the game console, and the new character immediately gets swapped into the game.
Skylander's Spyro's Adventure Starter Pack comes with three characters, and additional characters (which have different abilities to help you on your quest to save a world from destruction) cost about $7 each.
A friend of mine named I-Wei Huang (who I met when I saw his amazing steam-powered remote control vehicles at Maker Faire a few years ago) designed many of the Skylander characters. The above video is a cool speed drawing he made using Sketchbook Pro.
Boing Boing is proud to present an exclusive debut: the video for Björk's "Thunderbolt," from her new album, Biophilia.
Björk tells us:
Am playing live shows in reykjavik at the moment. Here comes a recording of thunderbolt live. Please please, do me a favour and use headphones or proper speakers when you listen.
VIDEO CREDITS: Director: thirtytwo. Producer: Dan Bowen. Production Company: Pulse Films.
(Editor's Note: The record label has geo-blocked the video. This is a bummer. Depending on where you are in the world, you may have problems viewing. We apologize for their decision, and have asked them to please release a non-geo-blocked version so that fans around the world can enjoy this wonderful work of art.—XJ)
Righthaven, the copyright trolling organization that misrepresented its title to the copyrights of many of the newspaper articles at issue in its lawsuits against website operators, is now on the brink of bankruptcy. The US Marshals in Nevada have been authorized to seize $63,720.80 from it in cash or assets to pay the fines and fees owed for one of its failed legal actions. For more of Righthaven's keystone kops antics, see our earlier stories.
In August, the case Righthaven v. Hoehn was tossed by a federal judge in Nevada, who went a step further and declared that defendant Wayne Hoehn's complete copy of a newspaper article in a sub-forum on the site "Madjack Sports" was fair use. On August 15, the judge awarded $34,045.50 to the Randazza Legal Group, which represented Hoehn. Righthaven, which had spent so much time thundering to defendants about just how badly the federal courts would make them pay... didn't pay.
Instead, it filed a flurry of appeals alleging (among other things) that having to pay the money would involve "the very real threat of being forced out of business or being forced to seek protection through bankruptcy." Righthaven contended that it could eventually win the case on appeal and thus should not be bankrupted before it had the chance to make its case.
But the increasingly disorganized organization couldn't even get its appellate filings in on time. Yesterday, Righthaven had to admit that it missed the October 31 deadline for its opening brief in the case. It blamed the problem on a "misunderstanding," then noted it would need a few more weeks to actually write the brief, since "Righthaven’s counsel is scheduled to undergo a surgical procedure for which it is estimated that he will be recovering outside of the office for approximately one week."
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
After Elizabeth Herrick and her boyfriend "euthanized" their 32-year-old horse with a rifle, they gutted it and Herrick climbed inside its carcass for a nude photo session. Then they posted the photos online resulting in some, er, "extreme emotional reactions" and a police investigation. I'll skip posting the photos, but you can see them on HuffPo. If you really want to. You don't. Trust me.
As well as photos of Elizabeth inside the horse's body, there are many others, one of which appears to depict the couple posing with the animal's heart.
The couple's explanation for the photos -- and later eating the animal? According to authorities at the department, the pair wanted to feel "one with the horse" and nature.
"This is definitely number one on the oddity list," (Washington County Sgt. Dave) Thompson said. "It's like nothing I've ever seen before."
According to the incident report obtained by The Huffington Post, detectives ruled no charges would be filed against the pair since nothing they did is technically illegal in the state of Oregon.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
NASA researchers are exploring the possibility of tractor beams. The scientists are studying several methods for grabbing planetary or atmospheric particles in a laser beam for transfer to an instrument that would analyze their composition.
"The original thought was that we could use tractor beams for cleaning up orbital debris," (principal investigator Paul) Stysley said. "But to pull something that huge would be almost impossible -- at least now." That's probably ok because the old man would get that tractor beam out of commission anyway. From NASA:
Currently, NASA uses a variety of techniques to collect extraterrestrial samples. With Stardust, a space probe launched in 1999, the Agency used aerogel to gather samples as it flew through the coma of comet Wild 2. A capsule returned the samples in 2006. NASA's next rover to Mars, Curiosity, will drill and scoop samples from the Martian surface and then carry out detailed analyses of the materials with one of the rover's many onboard instruments, including the Goddard-built Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite.
"These techniques have proven to be largely successful, but they are limited by high costs and limited range and sample rate," Stysley said. "An optical–trapping system, on the other hand, could grab desired molecules from the upper atmosphere on an orbiting spacecraft or trap them from the ground or lower atmosphere from a lander. In other words, they could continuously and remotely capture particles over a longer period of time, which would enhance science goals and reduce mission risk."
★Ten more Occupy Portland demonstrators were arrested yesterday at 4AM. When they asked what the charge was, they were told they had "failed to comply with a lawful direction: "'The didn’t give a Miranda warning, nor did they tell us why we were being arrested,' Former U.S. Marine Sgt. Micaiah Dutt recounted. 'They said, 'because you were being blatantly illegal, there was no need for explanation.''" (Thanks, Jordan!)
— Cory
[Video Link] "A resident in Llodio, Alava, got a shock when a snake came slithering out of the slot of a cash machine when he withdrew his money. Police report that this occurred at a Caja Madrid bank when the client went to get some money before going to work. The middle-aged man grabbed his money despite the snake attempting to attack him."
Apparently it is important to keep taunting the snake with a stick.
Snake in ATM machine
A YouTube video posted by a person who claims to be Hillary Adams, daughter of Aransas County Court-At-Law Judge William Adams shows a video of a man said to be Judge Williams viciously beating her as a teenager in 2004 (in the video, her age is given as 16). The accompanying text states:
Aransas County Court-At-Law Judge William Adams took a belt to his own teenage daughter as punishment for using the internet to acquire music and games that were unavailable for legal purchase at the time. She has had ataxic cerebral palsy from birth that led her to a passion for technology, which was strictly forbidden by her father's backwards views. The judge's wife was emotionally abused herself and was severely manipulated into assisting the beating and should not be blamed for any content in this video. The judge's wife has since left the marriage due to the abuse, which continues to this day, and has sincerely apologized and repented for her part and for allowing such a thing, long before this video was even revealed to exist. Judge William Adams is not fit to be anywhere near the law system if he can't even exercise fit judgement as a parent himself. Do not allow this man to ever be re-elected again. His "judgement" is a giant farce. Signed, Hillary Adams, his daughter.
Someone claiming to be the judge has posted this response: "I found this easily after being told of it. I am aware of your posts. Unfortunately I can not respond much to this libel, except in court. Just be advised, I am aware of it and action is being taken. Judge Adams."
(UPDATE: The above quote was copied to YouTube from an old thread at Scam.com. The person there claiming to be Adams was responding to accusations regarding a different matter.)
Meanwhile, Reddit's human flesh search engine has posted the Judge's office numbers and address, as well as contact info for other organizations with which he is affiliated.
The video is unbearable at points, and if the facts are as presented in the accompanying text, I imagine this will be a tough reelection season for the judge. It's also amazing to think that the brave young woman in the video had the good instincts and courage to record her abuse, a neat parable about the innate advantages that smart, technologically literate young people enjoy over their technophobic, vicious, thuggish elders.
Subsequent to this video's posting, a Reddit thread appeared claiming that the Reddit and YouTube accounts for the woman identified as the abuse victim from the video have been hacked. The thread claims that the video is in danger of being deleted as a result, and urges Redditors to make mirrors in case that happens. Here is one such mirror.
★
The Oakland PD union is confused by Mayor Jean Quan's approach to the protests -- they say that after they were ordered to clear the Occupy camp (a mission that led to bloody conflict in the streets), the mayor allowed the protest camp to be re-established in a larger, better organized form. Meanwhile city employees have been given permission to participate in today's Oakland General Strike -- but not the Oakland PD. "There is no clear mission here. The mayor is painting this picture that we're the bad guy. We're just doing our jobs, carrying out her orders, and we need some big leadership now."
(Thanks, Al!)
— Cory
★
Wikileaks' founder will be deported to Sweden to face rape allegations within a month. Assange has 14 days to seek to appeal to Britain's supreme court. [Guardian] — Rob
Upcoming Appearances • October 19, 2011 in Washington, DC: Speaking at "What will turn us on in 2030?", a conference on energy futures.
• March 29-31, 2012 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
Yesterday, I asked you to submit your physics questions for a chance to win either VIP tickets to see Brian Greene tonight in New York City, or a DVD set of Greene's new NOVA series. I did the drawing this morning and the winners are:
• Kevin Harrelson — Proud new owner of a DVD set of Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos!
• r matt — You're going to see Brian Greene live tonight in New York!
Both of you need to contact me to claim your prizes. You can reach me by email at maggie (dot) koerth (at) gmail (dot) com.
Remember: Not being chosen as the winner of the drawing doesn't mean your question won't make it into Brian Greene's hand. I'm sending on all the great questions from yesterday's thread to the fine folks at the World Science Festival. Watch the live stream tonight, starting at 10:00 pm Eastern, to see if your question made it!
Image: Dark and ordinary matter in the Universe, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from argonne's photostream
This morning, a demonstration took place in McLeod Ganj, a quiet Northern Indian village adjacent to the home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. In this town on the southern end of the Himalayas, young Tibetan exiles staged a memorial for Tibetans inside China-controlled Tibet who have burned themselves alive in recent months.
11 have self-immolated since February 2009. Most are teenagers or in their early twenties. The youngest was 17. It is an expression of despair, and an act of protest against increasingly harsh Chinese military crackdown on ethnic Tibetan cultural, religious, and social systems. For a list of the names, dates, and locations, read on (and there is more background at standupfortibet.org).
Oxblood Ruffin was at the demonstration. He tells Boing Boing,
It was a very moving demonstration. Young monks carried a graphic banner with flames in the background and the text, Tibetans are dying for freedom. They were accompanied by demonstrators wearing masks of world leaders.
It would be a little dramatic to say things have come to a head. But there's a definite shift, and I suspect that the recent spate of self-immolations will continue. The desperation is palpable, and there seems to be a sense of, "What have we got to lose?"
The Chinese are playing this off as though the Dalai Lama is running around with a lighter and inciting the monks to kill themselves. But that couldn't be further from the truth. Tibetans are very depressed about what's going on. But their is a quiet respect for what the monks have done. It's viewed as the supreme sacrifice for the Tibetan people.
Below, photos, and a press release issued today by organizers.
The Occupy Oakland folks have been publishing designs for today's general strike, including this jaunty little number from R Black. Lots more to choose from, too, including the venerable IWW black cat, back from retirement and looking as spry as a kitten.
★
The Corporation of London has "paused" its legal action against the OccupyLondon protesters camped outside of St Paul's Cathedral, in the wake of the Cathedral's decision to drop legal action altogether. The Corporation assures the public that it still plans to pursue legal action to remove the protests, but just not right now: "We’re hoping to use a pause – probably of days not weeks – to work out a measured solution."
— Cory
[Video Link] Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardens International (an organization that promotes kitchen gardening and home-cooking) argues that gardening for food is a subversive activity, because "when we encourage people to grow some of their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their hands: power over their diet, power over their health, and power over their pocketbooks... and we're taking that power away from someone else."
I'm old school when it comes to Planet of the Apes. If they aren't wearing tunics or padded vests, I'm not interested. That's why this painting, entitled "Trophies" -- which depicts a trio of proud gorilla hunters posing over a pile of Boing Boing comment trolls -- is a winner in my book. This masterpiece is by Jason Edmiston. See more of Jason's work here.
I'm heading to Germany next week for a series of school visits and public appearances to promote the German edition of my novel For the Win. I'm doing public stops in Hamburg (Nov 7, 10AM, Hamburger Kinderbuchhaus im Altonaer Museum), Berlin (8PM, Sankt Oberholz), and Munich (7PM, Lovelybooks, livestream available). Full details at the RandomHouse.de site.
+
This intimidating squirrel-like beastie with the impressive choppers lived 94 million years ago. Scientists from the University of Louisville recently discovered fossilized remains of the animal, named Cronopio dentiacutus, in Argentina. Apparently, it was about the size of a mouse. From CNN:
From the annals of poorly considered marketing campaigns, this ad for Schick razors, which touts the fact that the product is so gentle it was used to keep the horribly burned flesh of the survivors of the Hindenburg nice and smooth.
Among the comments, Tunisian Facebook users circulated “Arab Spring” jokes, such as: “Tunisia is the first country to recognize the American Transitional National Council,” referring the revolutionary upheaval in Libya and the global recognition of the Libyan transitional council.
A friend of mine named I-Wei Huang (who I met when I saw his amazing 
