BoingBoing FTW

[jrtom]

Odd corners of IP law, or how magicians deal with those who steal their tricks:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/12/magicians-innovate-w.html

Ice cream dispenser sizes portions according to how sad you sound:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/11/voicestress-icecream.html

"Geostationary Banana over Texas"
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/11/artist-will-send-300.html
and, just because, http://www.geostationarybananaovertexas.com/ (how can one resist a URL like that?)

Madeleine L'Engle tribute involving tesseracts:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/11/a-fourdimensional-tr.html
(and for bonus points: http://www.tomorrowland.org/photos/uncategorized/hypercube.gif, which is one of the cooler hypercube animations I've seen)

Comments

Re: News

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Personal accountability and public shame work better than incredibly dense legal-speak.

It's been suggested (in the comments on that page) that the reason why this works for magicians may be because their community is relatively small and tightly-knit. Public shame works less well for larger communities, I think.
(And bad men break the laws, sure, but the laws give us a framework in which to deal with this, which I think is useful. Granted, the existing legal landscape is incredibly tangled and dense, but I have a sense that we'd not be better off for chucking it entirely.)

Nevertheless, it's an interesting exploration.

I *so* do not want a machine that trains kids to sound whiny

Point. An amusing notion: swap polarity so that you _won't_ get ice cream unless you're _not_ whining. :)

Re: News

[fdmts.livejournal.com]

Point. An amusing notion: swap polarity so that you _won't_ get ice cream unless you're _not_ whining. :)

Ex-ACT-ly.

If we want to train kids to be annoying, we've got all those kids television shows already.