Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town podcast
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After a long hiatus, I’m back at my podcast, and to kick it off, I’m reading my 2005 novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, “A miraculous story of secrets, lies, magic and Internet connectivity.” It’s going to take a while — this is a looong book — and I’m really looking forward to it. I haven’t re-read this book since it was published, and it’s been enough time that it’s like reading something someone else wrote, which is really cool and fun. Here’s the Publishers’ Weekly summary: “It’s only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow’s fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he’s the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately to behave like a human being’or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist’s plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead brother who’s now resurrected and bent on revenge.” MP3 Link, Podcast feed link…
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Big Kitchen With Food: a five-year-old’s cooking show
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Julian Kreusser is an adorable foodie five-year-old with his own cooking show, “The Big Kitchen With Food” on Portland cable access TV. He cooks others’ recipes and his own (”Yummy Yummy Citrus Boy”) and he’s absolutely fabulous. BrooklynTwang sez, “his story is full of win - there is the coolness of a 5 year old boy who loves cooking, the refreshingness of a cooking show with an awkward host, and what appears to be some very cool free range parenting, encouraging the kids enthusiasm for something and letting him use food processors, stoves, etc. to follow his muse. I just watched an episode and it was rad. It even included a plug from Julian to buy your food locally because its better for you!” Five-Year-Old Chef Gets His Own Show, (Thanks, BrooklynTwang…
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“Citizen videos” spread online showing BART police officer shooting unarmed man to death
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(Warning, explicit content: the video below shows a man being shot to death). In the early hours of New Year’s Day, 27-year-old BART police officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed 22-year old Oscar Grant. A number of people who were riding the BART train that night witnessed the shooting, and shot video or photos on handheld cameras or phones. The victim’s family today filed a lawsuit for $25 million. Five days after the shooting, the accused officer still has not given a statement. He is said to be have received death threats and authorities are apparently moving him from place to place to protect him from harm. Some people are speculating the shooting may have been an accident — the officer may have grabbed his gun by mistake because he thought he was instead grabbing a Taser device. I have operated both devices, though certainly not in those extreme stress conditions, and I find that argument hard to understand. The weapons are so different. Snip from SF Chron article, to that point: [Use-of-force training and research firm founder Bruce Siddle] said changes in how the brain processes information in a stressful situation might have led the officer to mistake the butt of his service weapon for the Taser. But other experts found the idea that the shooting resulted from such a mix-up hard to believe. “That’s as reflexive as you getting in on the driver’s side of the car (instead of) the passenger side if you want to drive it,” [Florida criminologist George] Kirkham said. “There’s no remote similarity to a conventional firearm. … The Taser is just like apples and oranges.” The fact that so many videos and images are surfacing in this case is significant, because each set of images provides a different view of the killing, with different visual information. Snip from that same SF Chron article: Roy Bedard, who has trained police officers around the world, advanced a different theory after his first viewing of the video: that the shooting was a pure accident, a trigger pulled because of a loss of balance or a loud noise. But in an indication of how the videos might move the investigation, Bedard reached a different conclusion after viewing the shooting from a different angle. “Looking at it, I hate to say this, it looks like an execution to me,” he said. “It really looks bad for the officer. … We have to get inside his head and figure out what he was thinking when he fired the shot.” I first heard about the story from Jake Appelbaum’s blog: BART Police (in Oakland) murdered a man on NYE. Here is one video (nsa.org). Here is another released by a Bay Area CBS affiliate — first, we see the entire, raw footage a 19 year old eyewitness shot on her camcorder, then we hear her explain what she saw and experienced — she says a female BART police officer tried to forcibly confiscate her camcorder. Here is still another video (YouTube), and many YouTube users are annotating and re-uploading video to offer amateur opinions on what’s going on, and who did what, why….
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Silver screen idols as manga characters photoshopping contest
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Today’s Worth1000 photoshopping contest strikes gold with the magna-ification of screen idols. Vincent Price is a natural for the dewy-eyed treatment. Vintage Hollywood Manga…
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Sock monkey goddess
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The latest in Flickr user Jek in the Box’s series of mystical sock monkeys is “Saras Sock Vati,” a Hindu deity in sensible elasticated wool. Don’t miss the Sock Buddha and Sock de Milo. saras sock vati (via Neatorama)…
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Vintage firefighter helmet is a steampunk inspiration
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Scuba_SM sez, “I found this site about early firefighter’s respirators. The embellishments like the decorative plaque and beveled glass on the air gauge show the craftsmanship that went into it. I think it’s pieces like this that really capture the steampunk fan’s imagination.” Vajen Mask (Thanks, Scuba_SM!)…
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Cooksey-Talbott’s Vertical Panorama Landscapes
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Ralph Cooksey-Talbott is a landscape photographer who studied under Ansel Adams in Yosemite in the 1970’s. Ansel published one of his photographs in the portfolio section of his book “Polaroid Technique Manual.” Ansel and Orah Moore, another of Ansel’s students, suggested that he shorten his name to Cooksey-Talbott, and that’s the name he has worked under ever since. Cooksey is currently doing vertical panoramic photography that is reminiscent in composition to monumental asian landscape ink-on-silk paintings. He calls them Vertoramas and I think they are exceptionally beautiful. Besides selling prints, Cooksey provides many of his images as free desktop pictures (here’s some zipped sets or just check for a Free Desktop link across the top when you’re browsing his galleries). And he’s also put up a lot of informative tutorial articles and videos on his site.–Bruce (Thanks, Howard!) Cooksey-Talbott Gallery (Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)…
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Young Lovers Try to Elope to Africa
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Three German children under the age of 8 were caught trying to get to Africa so two of them could get married. In warm environs, no less. When asked why they were going, groom-to-be Mika explained his seemingly simple plan. “We wanted to take the train to the airport, and then catch a plane, then we would unpack, and get married once we arrived. Then we wanted to go for a little holiday,” he said. There’s a slightly different version of the story on SkyNews, with a quote from a shocked and amazed mother. Child elopers’ Africa plan foiled (Thanks, Katie Wilson!) (Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)…
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Jay Leno’s wind turbine
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Ed Begley, Jr, says: Thought I would send along this video from my friend Jay Leno about a new wind turbine called the MagWind from Enviro-Energies that he and I will be installing soon. As many of you have asked about “vertical axis wind turbines,” I thought you’d like to see the latest in this technology. Jay Leno’s wind turbine…
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Article about quasi-perpetual motion technology
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Randell Mills, founder of BlackLight Power, claims to have invented a reactor that makes hydrogen atoms drop to an energy state below ground level, which causes them to release “100 times as much energy as you’d get by just burning the hydrogen.” IEEE Spectrum interviewed several physicists about it, and they say it’s poppycock. Nevertheless, the company developing the technology has received $60 million in funding. “This is scientific nonsense—there is no state of hydrogen lower than the ground state,” says Wolfgang Ketterle, an MIT scientist and a Nobel Prize laureate in physics. “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it’s had time enough to find its ground state.” Anthony Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also a Nobel laureate, says that quantum mechanics is “consistent with just about everything we know about atomic physics, so the onus is firmly on anyone who wants to discard it to prove his case.” He adds, “I don’t see that [BlackLight] has got anywhere near doing this.” But turn to Randell Mills, the founder, chairman, chief executive, and president of BlackLight Power, and he’ll tell you that this lower-energy hydrogen, which he calls hydrino, is very real indeed. “We produce hydrino on demand,” he tells IEEE Spectrum, adding that his team has isolated and characterized hydrino’s properties using spectroscopy and has even created hydrino-rich materials it can provide for analysis. BlackLight Power says it’s developing a revolutionary energy source—and it won’t let the laws of physics stand in its way…
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