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While no one knows for sure when exactly the snowman began smoking a pipe and drinking hard liquor, it may have started as early as 1890, based on a label from a bottle of whiskey from that year. An 1898 postcard shows a snowman carrying two bottles of champagne off to an office party. On holiday greeting cards from the 1900s through and on (up to the 1930s), the snowman often has a drink in one hand and a pipe in the other, mirroring our society’s changes and America’s fascination with smoking and drinking. This would eventually escalate to the snowman cavorting with women and offering drinks to minors. One could argue that these depictions were, in a way, humanizing, but seeing a tipsy snowman chasing a girl with a stick is disturbing at best.Snowman Gone Wild
By 1908, there was clear evidence of his partying ways were out of control. In the silent movie The Snowman by Wallace McCutcheon, a chain-smoking snowman is swigging whiskey and appears in the rest of the film sloshed, inspiring a flogging by the townspeople. This behavior would continue on film and media through magazines and postcards as a pickled, skirt-chasing, under-the-table lush. In other words, he had become a frozen W.C. Fields. By the ‘30s and ‘40s, there is no question, the two started to look alike, both wearing straw hats, putting on more weight and looking more round and sporting crimson noses. And both enjoyed prolific silent movie careers based on their reputations as charming drunks. It’s hard to say if either had copied from the other but they were both enhanced by the other’s notoriety. Ironically, W.C. Fields hated the holidays and passed away on Christmas Day, 1946.
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Greater City: Providence has a post on some recent LED lighting news (good stuff+links in the blog and the comments), including links to a couple of articles on LED streetlights in NYC, Ann Arbor, and others:
Since LEDs use less power than existing halogen, incandescent, or even fluorescent bulbs, it makes sense that this will be the choice in illuminating miles and miles of roadway. Moreover, when cities and states start ordering LED based street-lights, the quantity needed will no doubt force down the cost, eventually leading the way to more adoption of LEDs as a lighting source.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!
Continuing in our lazy-time retrospective of favorite Boing Boing tv episodes from the past year, we revisit an animated music video gem by Kristofer Ström of Ljudbilden & Piloten, based in Sweden. Here's their blog. Snip from the original BBtv blog post:
This short work is a music video he created for the Swedish electronica band Minilogue. The track is "Animals," and the video features colorful critter-blobs wreaking hyperfun havoc all over an urban real-life-scape.We asked Kristofer to tell us a little about how this came together, and he explains:
In late 2007 we (me and the band Minilogue) started talking about making a followup to the very popular "hitchhiker's choice" video. At the same time I was doing some VJ-ing for them and found that those little animations i made for that could be characters in their next video. So I started producing a lot of loops of creatures. I hooked up with bart yates, nicholas wakeham and erik buchholtz, and our first thought was to put them all in an animated world... but i didn't really feel it. Then Erik showed me a test of my characters motion-tracked onto some footage -- and there it was. So he went out shooting some spots, rough cuts without the creatures, then we added those little fellas in the footage. Voilá! A longer version will be found on the minilogue DVD, coming this fall, finally! The longer version of "hitchhiker's choice" will be on there too. Some other stuff can be found on our temporary web site: http://varelsen.com. Link to Minilogue's YouTube features. (Special thanks to Claire Jones, and to Cocoon.)
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Ryan Brenner made a Labyrinth as part of his Eagle Scout project.
Ryan <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/12/25/walking_the_lines
/">says:
My part was to lead the building of it, but there's a part of everyone who worked on it in the paths of the labyrinth. Some people brought stones from their yards, the beach, or travels and placed them there in memory of someone or with intentions and prayers. . . .Now as more people return to walk the labyrinth, they bring stones to add or use other ways to make it their own special place," Brenner said.
The Hanover version is 55 feet across, with a 2-foot-wide path. The stones, which were delivered in piles or one at a time, are laid in a roping pattern of eight concentric circuits. There are two entrances, one leading to a 20-foot-long path that goes directly to the center, the other to a 100-yard-long path that goes all the way around before entering the center and then out.
The labyrinth is hosted by the First Congregational Church in Hanover Ma, where there is something of a labyrinthian tradition.
How can you bring your maker spirit out? Have you or somebody near you made a labyrinth? There are indoor and outdoor versions of this practice, which could lead to some very crafty solutions. Do you have people in your community who are making things that help tune others in to their deeper selves? Who is doing great and valuable Eagle Scout projects in your life? Add your comments below and contribute your photos and videos to the Make Flickr pool.
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confidence
drunkard's dozen
hr giger bar
sorry i missed your party
how to know when to leave the bar
community art makers
previously on web zen:
n.y.e party music zen
Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)
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The Clint Eastwood movie, Gran Tornino, was nice, had a few memorable moments and lines, and followed the general pattern of one of Eastwood's earlier movies. I called it The Man With No Name at the Retirement Village (even though he was living in an old Detroit neighborhood that was becoming an Asian ghetto). I wanted one more of the old style Eastwood movies, a Dirty Harry for the ages, a bloodbath of righteous vengeance. I really loved the old Eastwood, the new kind, compassionate and thoughtful, well, not so much. 
One other bit of housekeeping -- a lot of people didn't understand my $249 pre-Christmas gadget quest piece, and thought I was asking instead for a condescending lecture on charitable giving. Actually I wanted to know your dreams for modestly priced electronic luxuries, not a big ticket purchase like a 60-inch flatscreen or a new MacBook, but perhaps something like a hard drive, iPod, but off the beaten path, something a guy like myself might not have. I consider the piece a roaring success. The most popular suggestion was to get a Flip camera, which I'm still considering, even though I really like my Canon camera and can't get too excited about another picture-taker.
NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist Thomas Friedman - Time to Reboot America...
...we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.
That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us
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Short an ingredient for some holiday cookies? Slashfood can help you create DIY butter (via Lifehacker). Mother Earth News has another take here.
The Make: television show debuts in only seven days! I had no idea what to expect when they asked me to host the Maker Workshop segment of the show. Well, the entire crew is wonderful and incredibly hard-working, which made it totally fun and rewarding. Everybody was willing to pinch-hit when needed. In this picture we see Executive Producer Richard Hudson grabbing some tools and fixing the firing circuit on our Burrito Blaster air cannon. How many Executive Producers can do that?!
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Got a Meggy Jr RGB? Wrap that rascal in this comfy Meggy Cozy. Right this way and Lenore will show you how it's done...
More:
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Get a bird's-eye-view of the world with this Pole Mounted Aerial Rig for photography and video.
Thanks go to William Gurstelle for the original article in Make: Volume 16
To download The Pole's Eye View MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the complete Pole's Eye View article in MAKE: Volume 16 "Pole's Eye View"
and you can see that in our digital edition.
Dave Parker shares the building and programming instructions for this LEGO NXT inch worm on nxtprograms.com - the movement is really unusual.
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Get a bird's-eye-view of the world with this Pole Mounted Aerial Rig for photography and video.
Thanks go to William Gurstelle for the original article in Make: Volume 16
View the PDF
I bet it smelled good when instructables user rstraugh etched the brick pattern on this gingerbread bridge.
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"FoldSkool Heroes" by Marshall Alexander are paper versions of the Commodore 64, original Pong game and other old school video game systems. They come in printable PDFs from the artist's site, so feel free to print and use as desk ornaments.
Foldskool Heroes via Retro Thing
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Sparkfun is planning a big ol' robot race around their building in Boulder, CO -
April 15th, 2009 10AM - Rain, shine, or snowSounds like fun, though I'm kind of disappointed the prize wasn't some shiny new Sparkfun awesomeness - oh well, cash will do! More details available here - Autonomous vehicle race Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!Create a vehicle that can autonomously navigate
around the SparkFun building$300 cash first prize
Photo credit: Artmann-Wi
The key strategic resources needed for effective learning are exactly the same ones you access daily when in need to find out how something technological works or how to solve a difficult psychological situation. The field of interest does not affect the learning resources you use.
But somewhat distracted, numbed by what traditional media and parents have been telling us, we appear mostly incapable to look at our educational system with fresh eyes, or to ask relevant questions as to why we force our most promising youth to spend the most brilliant years of their lives to memorize dates, facts and notions they will have little use for in the real life that exists outside of their secure school walls.
Read on:
Descarga Cachao - Timba Latin Jazz Quintet - This group is made up by several of the teachers / masters of my music school - a place I have realized has many of the traits of the ideal learning environment
1) Open Access
Learning is all about having freedom to access the tools, peers, learning objects and experts anytime you want to learn study something. No need to sit down in a classroom at a specific day and time. Resources, books, CDs and unique people need to be always accessible to the serious student. The Timba music school is accessible at most times and six days out of seven. The school acts also as a professional recording studio and practice location for many independent musicians in Rome. Anyone can call in and reserve a music practice room or you can just drop by and find some friends or an empty lab to play in. If you are a student you can schedule private lessons and have free access to a good number of free hours inside any practice lab.
2) Learning Objects
You can't learn something if the object of what you need to learn is not something you can have easy access to. Unless your learning interest is purely speculative and theoretical, in most cases, learning something requires having access to tools, objects, machinery or special individuals that allow you to try out, experiment, practice, review and perform your desired learning goal. At Timba school, music instruments, sound-proof rooms, microphones, speakers and sound amplifiers are the bread and butter or any music learner. Having these objects in good state, accessible and available for every learner to use at her request is a key fundamental requirement for learning and the school does all it can to provide accessibility, support and good maintenance of all such critical resources.
3) Passionate Peers
The best learning environments are characterized by passionate individuals who share a common interest and get together to exchange, talk, practice, teach other and learn convivially. Such groups are not characterized by age or district of residence. They include individuals of all ages, social classes and ethnicities. Being together with other passionate learners is by itself one of the most valuable traits of an ideal learning environment as key lessons and skills are often learned informally by asking or emulating what a peer does. The Timba school reflects all this by being a place not characterized by age-based classes, rigid teach to student relationships and structured lectures at all times. The learners are the ones that make up the true value of the school, and since many of the masters have the right attitude of being teachers and students at the same time, great opportunities arise for everyone to learn something from someone else.
4) Elders
Elders are individuals that have lots of experience. They may not be always the greatest teachers, but they are invaluable resources when it comes to get strategic advice, tips or better understanding into the what and why of who certain things came to be. When I am at the Timba school there are always some experts and wise masters that you can go and ask anything you want to. They are accessible and easy-going and they often enjoy coming and playing some sessions during our learning rehearsals.
5) Models
Having great models to follow and to be inspired by can provide a great boost in the motivation, drive and quality of work any learner places into his own study path. But beware. In my view, models, more often than not, are in the eyes of the beholder. You look up to someone, but not always because of his acquired public merits or celebrity, but because you like something specific about how that person does or executes something. You study, analyze, dissect and question his operating mode and by doing so you learn in much greater depth what it takes to make yours what he or she already has. A model act as reference from which to capture, emulate and absorb what is not already part of your abilities. My school acts as a perfect venue for this by offering such a variety of individuals, personalities, professional musicians and passionate artists that anyone can tap into such wonderful diversity to pick and select what most appropriate and interesting for her.
6) Professionals
The presence of people who perform for serious artistic purposes or who work professionally at the creation of what you are interested in can provide significant additional value to a learning experience. Professionals have specific goals, operate under tights or controlled budgets, need to make little mistakes and work around achieving a certain standard of quality in what they do. At the school, seeing, helping or co-operating with their work is as real as the real thing can get, and getting down to do the things with the front line guys is a pretty obvious hard-to-beat learning experience.
7) Opportunity To Try, Experiment and To Be Wrong
Having the chance to screw up, make tons of mistakes, go wrong a million times and start again afresh each single time is the key winning card of any serious learner. Whether for learning the newest interactive video game or for mastering a new percussion rhythm, a space where judgment is momentarily suspended and mistakes are well accepted components of the learning practice, one can learn at much higher speeds than where mistakes are underlined, greeted with irony and sarcasm and elevated to criteria for being able to access more advanced knowledge and skills. While old-fashioned approaches to teaching keep surfacing here and there also at the school, the general spirit is one of embracing mistakes as an opportunity to gain extra insight and to discover new things. Obviously, performing under fear of "making a mistake" is never good for a learner. What you need is exactly the opposite: a supportive, friendly circle of friends that spontaneously pushes to help you and to fill you in when everything else seems to fail. And that's what I find at the Timba school.
8) Showcase - Perform - Put Into Practice Publicly
Putting into practice what you have learned, especially if this takes place somewhat in a public, open access format, where people you don't know can peek in, participate and comment on what you do, can be extremely helpful in consolidating and mastering those skills you want to know best. Practicing within a classroom or only within a controlled and familiar audience is most often not the best way to try out something you may need to execute under very different terms. The Timba school is a small ongoing performance house with jamming labs and open sessions happening every few hours. If you want to dive in, they have got plenty of water.
9) Learning From Each Other, Just-in-Time, With No End (or Exam) in Sight
When individuals are freed from the idea that learning must be connected to a final exam / test to measure and certify what you really know, wonderful things start to happen. And once you have the luck of finding yourself inside an ideal learning environment, like my music school, one of the great, deep touching discoveries you make is how much you learn directly from your own peers. Not only learners in such an environment are very inclined to openly share, help and support each other when needed, but the overall atmosphere breathes of a place where everyone is always willing to share all of his knowledge and skills without expecting anything in return. Your peers feel like younger brothers and sisters who rather than compete with you, are your own best gateways to learn more and faster.
10) Learners' in the Driver Seat
When it is the student who can choose his master, peers and practice and learning times, you know something is going the right way. If it is true that it is really up to the learner to make all of the steps to relate and master what she is interested in, then it must follow that it must be the same student who chooses what to learn, from whom and when to do it. In my music school you can choose not only your teacher(s) but you can also participate in the practice labs of any of the other classes and teachers without needing to be specifically enrolled in them.
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I had a chance to check out Dream Squawk & The Shadow Puppet Sequencer at the ITP Winter Show 2008. Amy Khoshbin & Michael Clemow of Semiotech created these interactive instruments and have used them during live performances. They are both really interesting pieces that worked well together.
SemioTech was founded by Amy Khoshbin and Michael Clemow in 2007. Their work explores the fields of perception and "Expanded Performance" through the application of varying technologies on the performing arts.Semiotech has created two theatrical musical performance tools: Dream Squawk for voice modulation, amplification and sampling by Amy Khoshbin and the Shadow-Puppet Sequencer Table for auralization of narratives, by Michael Clemow.
Learn more about Dream Squawk & The Shadow Puppet Sequencer [ITP Page]
Dream Squawk by Amy Khoshbin
Dream Squawk integrates the performer's costume (a bird mask) with the technology itself to maximize performer mobility and create movements natural to the character. Dream Squawk is implemented using a wireless lav microphone, custom wireless circuit design built into the beak of the mask (using potentiometers and switches to record/mute two live vocal samples to create loops, and to allow the user to tweak echo effects and speed effects independently), a separate module worn on the head, and custom digital signal processing software (written in Pd).
More about the Dream Squawk by Amy Khoshbin
Shadow Puppet Sequencer by Michael Clemow
The Shadow Puppet Sequencer Table demonstrates an approach to narrative construction that is intimately coupled with sound design. The table provides a translucent surface upon which cutouts can be placed and moved, creating shadows that double as musical notes. The relationships between the shadow objects are thus spacial as well as musical. These relationships can be manipulated by moving the objects on the surface of the table. The narrative is propelled by changing the spacial-and thus musical-relationships of the objects over time.
More about the Shadow Puppet Sequencer by Michael Clemow
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I remember making pretend phone calls on my Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone when I was 7 or 8, and wondering if it was possible to turn it into a real phone. That question stayed with me, and when I saw a Chatter Telephone and a Crosley Princess Telephone recently at Target, I knew the answer was yes. I brought them home and made it work, and it was easier than I expected.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!
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Distributing a website over a content delivery network is typically an expensive proposition, but since the release of the Google App Engine beta program, there's an option for small to medium sized sites to easily distribute content on Google's infrastructure. Putting the application SDK aside, Matt Riggott wrote a decent howto on using the service simply as a free CDN:
A content delivery network, or CDN, is a system of servers spread around the world, serving files from the nearest physical location. Instead of waiting for a file to find its way from a server farm in Silicon Valley 8,000 kilometres away, I can receive it from London, Dublin, or Paris, cutting down the time I wait. The big names -- Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et al -- use CDNs for their sites, but they've always been far too expensive for us mere mortals. Until now.
There's a service out there ready for you to use as your very own CDN. You have the company's blessing, you won't need to write a line of code, and -- best of all -- it's free.
There are limitations to the service, of course. You can't host any files larger than 1MB, and you're limited to 650,000 requests a day and 10GB of downloads. That said, there are a lot of sites that fit within these parameters and could offload the static portion of their content to see a large reduction in bandwidth and provide faster load times to end users.
Using Google App Engine as Your Own Content Delivery Network
Google App Engine
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How is your holiday hacking going? If you have been good, Santa has stocked you up with lots of clever goodies to keep you and yours entertained.
Below are a few things that I found in my stocking and am looking forward to fussing with:
Disposable battery/charger for cellphones.
At two dollars (frugal Santa), if this is what it might be, it could be really awesome. What I am hoping to find in here is a case that can be cracked open, batteries replaced and if I am really lucky a voltage regulator. Sort of like a Minty Boost, but cheaper. Will it work? Maybe. The fitting to the charge booster is proprietary, aimed at a Samsung phone user, but with a cut off a USB mini B cable fitting, it should fit most of the rechargeable devices in my life.
Kingston 8 Gig micro SD mobility kit
8 gigs will make my phone have pretty much unlimited storage (for now). It would also more than double one of my mp3 players' capacity. Probably the most happy thing about this kit is that it comes with a host of micro SD adapters. As more things move towards the Micro SD format, lots of adapters will be handy. They never seem to be around when things need to be uploaded. Between that and really high capacity cards, too many pictures are staying on the camera too long.
Sandisk M2 2 Gig adapter
Sony annoys me how they make everybody bend to their proprietary flash card format. If you want to jack up your PSP's storage, you have to do something like this. Video, audio, lots of applications, home brew apps, gotta have a memory card for the PSP.
Adhesive copper sheet
This stuff is neat for making circuits on the fly. Basically, it is wire with glue on the back. It can be cut with scissors, torn, scored with a knife and other wires can be taped to it or soldered into place. If you have access to a vinyl cutter, you can make a design in Gimp, open office or whatever and cut it mechanically. It seems like an easy, almost magical way of making circuits. No soldering if you don't want to. This may be a good way of getting kids into circuits without the safety issues of soldering.
Wireless Mouse and number pad
Maybe this could be something to make a soap controller out of, or maybe it could be a good controller for that Scratch game you create out of holiday wrappings and boxes. Or maybe it's just something to rig up to the computer.
12 volt to USB Mini B
Everything seems to run on Mini B lately. Now I can charge on the road. What I have been using is totally inefficient, 12 volt DC to AC 10 year old inverter to ac power adapter to DC. Too much conversion.
Little audio speakers
Frugal Santa does it again. $2 usd bought a pair of speakers with a little amplifier. It runs on 6 volts DC, and can be used with a battery pack or included AC to DC wall inverter. Certainly the speakers will be easy to use, with a stereo headphone jack, and they fold up nice.
Flashlight with a zillion white LEDs
Remember when white LEDs were like gold? Not anymore. Cheap enough at $15 usd, maybe this could be repurposed for photography lighting. maybe it could just be a big huge white light. It uses 3 D cell batteries, so at 4.5 volts, certainly something clever could be done with it. Underwater ROV lighting? Hmmmm.
Well there is certainly more to mess with under the tree and in the closets, but this is a start. What goodies are under your tree? If you aren't doing the Christmas thing, then how are you celebrating the hacking spirit lately? How could you use any of these materials and gadgets as classroom/school projects? What sneaky uses can you find for cheap stuff? What possibilities do you see in your holiday schwag? Add to the conversation in the comments and post your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.
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Here are plans for a small-scale biodigester. Some details:
Have any commenters actually built or worked with methane-producing digesters?
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