Ted Balaker of Reason.tv produced a video about moonshine. He says, "You can make beer at home, but if you try to make spirits at home it's a felony. Go figure."
If drinking makes us healthier and wealthier, why is America's liquor policy so screwy?
Jimmy Carter legalized home brewing in 1978, and that newfound freedom fueled the craft beer movement that continues to lavish beer lovers with endless choices. But in many ways, laws that govern whiskey, gin, and other distilled spirits are stuck in the 1920s.
Federal agents still raid distilleries much like they did during Prohibition, and making any amount of moonshine at home is not only illegal, it's a felony that can carry up to five years in prison. The result is a market dominated by a few big names, where would-be craftsmen are forced to hide their work.
And yet, despite the danger, America is in the midst of "moonshine renaissance," in which a new wave of hipster hobbyists has joined with old-time 'shiners to flout the law and do what they love to do.
I use my Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M many times throughout the day, but I don't think I'll pay $3200 for the special edition model with Urushi lacquer coating and gold embellishments.
The special limited-edition models have been designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of PFU and are decorated using an Urushi lacquer coating and gold embellishments. The high-quality lacquer coating is applied using a centuries-old method which originated from Ishikawa Prefecture, a region renowned for its excellent craftsmanship in traditional Japanese lacquerware and the birthplace of PFU.
The design of the special edition ScanSnap models represents the pinnacle of traditional Japanese aesthetics and convenience. The special models are the result of the collaboration between PFU and Japan’s premier maker of Wajima lacquerware, one of the most recognized examples of traditional Japanese crafts. The durable lacquer coating was applied using a special layering technique called "Tenpi kurome," and is accompanied by the depiction of a Golden Eagle (the official bird of Ishikawa) and company logo made from pure gold powder.
The UP! personal 3D printer from China retails for $1500, with goop running at $50/kg. From this early adopter's review: It runs at 0.3mm resolution, and the finished models show striations from successive layers of goop, but light sanding produces a smooth finish. For objects with funny extrusions and sitcky-outie bits that aren't stable until they are fully printed, the printer calculates and adds support struts on the fly, and these have to be removed with a hobby knife after printing.
This 1936 Henderson motorcycle was given a superb Art Deco mod by Frank Westfall of Syracuse, NY and displayed at last summer's Rhinebeck Grand National Meet. The Knucklebuster blog got to see and photograph it in person there, and has a thrilling account of its performance: "The bike is a fantastic piece of history, the craftsmanship is absolutely stunning and it's surely more of a museum piece than a daily rider. Frank has obviously spent an incredible amount of time meticulously restoring and rebuilding the bike to its current gorgeous state."
Pink Cake Box made this custom XKCD wedding cake for one of their customers in New Jersey: "The top of the cake includes cutouts of the comic characters with a red heart on a wire between them. The entire cake is covered in white fondant with black thin bands at the base of each tier. Equations inspired by this comic decorate the remaining tiers."
Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks has prosopagnosia (face blindness) and he wrote about it in The New Yorker. The article isn't online, but here's an audio interview with him.
From The New Yorker's abstract of the article:
Severe congenital prosopagnosia is estimated to affect two to two and a half per cent of the population—six to eight million people in the United States alone.
Writer describes his own difficulties recognizing and remembering faces. He also has the same difficulty with places and often becomes lost when he strays from familiar routes. At the age of seventy-seven, despite a lifetime of trying to compensate, he has no less trouble with faces and places than when he was younger. He is particularly thrown when seeing a person out of context, even if he was with that person five minutes before. Writer gives several examples of his inability to recognize familiar people out of context, including his therapist and his assistant.
Great news! Jim Woodring has raised the funds required to build and demonstrate a giant dip pen (David wrote about it in July).
The dip pen is a bit of fetish item for me (as it is for many pen users). The pen is extremely difficult to master but ultimately allows for an extraordinary degree of expression. The well-constructed pen and ink drawing is a monument to perseverance, requiring tremendous patience and control. I am thrilled by the challenge of creating such drawings in public and introducing new audiences to the allure of the medium. The pen (nib) itself will be approximately 16 inches long, made of steel and fully functional. The holder will be six feet long and made of wood with a metal sleeve insert to hold the pen. Nib and holder will resemble as closely as possible the actual implements on which they are based.
Once the pen and penholder are built I will train myself to ink with it; and once I've done that, I will arrange at least two public performances in which I will use the pen to ink large graphite drawings on 3' x 5' sheets of bristol.
The money raised will go towards the engineering and manufacture of the steel nib; the creation of the pen holder, which will be hand turned and lacquered with a cork wrapping and metal insert with spring retainer; the supplies to create the public drawings (ink, paper, graphite, eraser, and); and the creation of the drawing table itself.
Artist Mitch O'Connel bought a some unusual CB radio cards at a flea market.
Love these personal CB radio cards, the more homemade looking the better. The sometimes naive art seems more personal, contains great left field imagery and, as an artist, less threatening!
We're looking for great sites suitable for a non-specialist audience in the following categories:
* Best blog
* Best news site / online magazine
* Best podcast
* Best Q&A / ask the expert site
* Best revision site
* Best kids' site
* President's prize (anything which doesn't fall under any of the categories above)
You can nominate sites until the 10th of October and there's several ways to nominate. On Twitter, you can send a message to @dotrythisathome or make a general tweet using the #pwa10 hashtag. There's a Facebook page. Or you can just send an email. Winners will be announced just as soon as the judging panel—which includes yours truly—reaches a decision.
Michael Geist writes in with the latest news on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the secret, closed-door copyright treaty that will bring US-style copyright rules (and worse) to the whole world. Particularly disturbing is the growing support for "three-strikes" copyright rules that would disconnect whole families from the Internet if one member of the household was accused (without proof) of copyright infringement. The other big US agenda item is cramming pro-Digital Rights Management (DRM) rules down the world's throats that go way beyond the current obligations under the UN's WIPO Copyright Treaty. In the US version, breaking DRM is always illegal, even if you're not committing any copyright violation -- so breaking the DRM on your iPad to install software you bought from someone who hasn't gone through the Apple approval process is illegal, even though the transaction involves no illicit copying.
Ironically, this DRM push comes just as the US courts and regulators have begun to erode the US's own extreme rules on the subject. Or perhaps this isn't so surprising: in the past, the US copyright lobby has torpedoed the courts and Congress by getting USA to commit to international agreements that went far beyond the rules that they could push through on their own at home.
Given the history of ACTA leaks, to no one's surprise, the latest version of the draft agreement was leaked last night on Knowledge Ecology International's website. The new version - which reflects changes made during an intense week of negotiations last month in Washington - shows a draft agreement that is much closer to becoming reality. Square brackets [ed: these indicate areas where there is still debate] have been removed from many sections, leaving the core issue of scope of the agreement [ed: that is, whether the treaty will cover things like EU-style trademark rules that would prohibit calling it "cheddar cheese" if it's not made in Cheddar, England] as the biggest issue to be resolved when the next round of negotiations begins in a few weeks in Japan.
Perhaps the most important story of the latest draft is how the countries are close to agreement on the Internet enforcement chapter. The Internet enforcement chapter has been among the most contentious since the U.S. first proposed draft language that would have globalized the DMCA and raised the prospect of three strikes and you're out. In the face of opposition, the U.S. has dropped its demands on secondary liability [ed: that is, forcing ISPs and online services to police and censor their users or face prosecution] but is still holding out hope of establishing digital lock rules that go beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and were even rejected by its own courts.
William Gibson's latest novel, Zero History, is his best yet, a triumph of science fiction as social criticism and adventure. Continuing on from 2007's Spook Country, Zero History features a reformed, dried out version of Milgrim, the junkie anti-hero from Spook Country. He's been rehabilitated at the expense of Hubertus Bigend, the shadowy power-broker whom we first met in Pattern Recognition. Bigend has got Milgrim hunting for the designer behind a mysterious line of fetish-denim, in the hopes of remaking it as the basis for a lucrative US military contract; this being Bigend's idea of novelty-seeking good times.
Joining Milgrim is Hollis Henry, the former pop star from Spook Country, still reluctantly in Bigend's employ, but even more conflicted, and missing her ex-boyfriend, a thrill-seeking nutjob whose idea of a good time in jumping off tall buildings in a glidersuit. Milgrim -- and later, Hollis -- track the secret denim from South Carolina to London to Paris and back to London again, and very quickly find themselves embroiled in an intrigue involving US spooks, experimental UAVs, rogue infosec specialists, and a palace coup at Blue Ant, Bigend's legendary design and branding firm.
What makes Zero History into Gibson's best so far is how absolutely perfectly he captures the futuristic nature of the present day. Milgrim -- a junkie dried out after a ten year fugue of living rough and stealing to buy pills -- is well-suited to this task, emerging as if from a time-machine into the 21st century in full swing, able to narrate its essential strangeness without seeming contrived. But all of Gibson's characters are in the business of understanding how we got to this futuristic present, and on every page, there is a jolt of pleasant dissonance as Gibson does the conjurer's trick of making you look at your surroundings with fresh eyes.
Here is a book that is both contemporary, and futuristic -- and anachronistic, filled as it is with characters who long for simpler times, who fetishize antique computers and vintage memorabilia. It's a book that doesn't so much feel written as designed, cunningly filled with trompe d'esprit effects that fool your brain into staring at your own life from the objective distance of a Martian.
And moreover, here is a book that is a novel, filled with people having exciting adventures and romance, developing as characters, chasing mysteries. An even better trick: to make something so smart that is nevertheless enormous fun as well. What a treat.
Fisherman Wily Dean was trying to catch cow-nosed rays in Southern Maryland's Potomac River for a marine biologist this week, but he ended up netting an 8-foot-long bull shark. Unfortunately, the story doesn't have a happy ending for the shark. From NBC Washington:
"We had an interesting morning bringing it in," Dean said. "It was quite a fight."
Once the shark was captured, the next question was: What the heck do you do with it?
"I am probably going to have it mounted, maybe the head," Dean said. "Right now, the shark's in the freezer."
Last night, the Hugo Awards, one of science fiction's most prestigious prizes, were presented in Melbourne at Aussiecon 4. The Hugo ceremony is one of my favorite parts of any WorldCon, and last night's event, emceed by Garth Nix, was a particularly outstanding edition. The ballot was extremely strong, with works that I really enjoyed competing in several categories. The voter and nominator turnout were both much higher than usual, and the program moved at a very, very good clip. This year's award, designed by Nick Stathopolous, was gorgeous, incorporating aboriginal motifs and an organic, Belle Époque look inspired by the Paris Metro signs. Kudos to the administrators on a smooth, well-run ceremony!
The fiction prizes were especially sweet this year. Best novel was an almost-unheard-of tie between China Mieville for his brilliant, mind-bending The City and the City and Paolo Bacigalupe for his stellar debut novel The Windup Girl. Best novella went to my collaborator Charlie Stross for Palimpsest, from his wonderful, mind-bending solo short story collection Wireless. Best novelette went to Peter Watts for The Island, from The New Space Opera 2. Boing Boing readers will remember Peter as the SF writer who was beaten and gassed near the US/Canada border when he got out of his car to ask why US customs officers were searching his car; he spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting the charge and the potential two-year sentence; was found guilty but received a suspended sentence. SF fans raised money to bring Peter to Australia, and his acceptance speech in which he called this the "best and worst year of his life," was brilliant. The best short story, which I presented, went to Will McIntosh for "Bridecicle," a lovely story.
Net-based media was a big winner this year: the podcast Starship Sofa (often presented here) won for Best Fanzine. And of course, there was Fred Pohl's Hugo for Best Fan Writer for his excellent blog The Way the Future Blogs.
Other categories whose winners made me especially glad include the Best Editor prize for my editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden (this was his second prize in the very new category, and he has taken his name out of the running for next year). The graphic novel category went to Phil and Kaja Foglio's steampunk comic Girl Genius. The Campbell Award for best new writer to Seanan McGuire, whose heartfelt acceptance speech made me burst into tears.
Tor.com has the full list of nominees and winners here.
No, it does not involve hundreds of tiny exercise wheels. (Although that would be pretty damn cute, too.)
Instead, every month, the farmers process more than 400 pounds of guinea pig poop into combustible gas—and a liquid byproduct that works as plant food—by allowing bacteria to break the waste down in a warm, oxygen-free environment. It's called anaerobic digestion, and it's a process that's increasingly popular on American farms, as well. Dairy farms—with their easy access to lots of consolidated cow shit—in particular.
What's cool about this Peruvian model is that it shows you don't necessarily need fancy, expensive equipment to make anaerobic digestion work. The process can be applied at different levels of tech intensity, depending on resources, location and how much energy you actually want to produce. This Peruvian family makes enough gas for themselves, plus a little extra. Meanwhile, a dairy farm in Wisconsin uses the gas to make electricity that they sell back to the utility company. All told, there's enough to power 70 households.
Uncle Sam is programmed with a variety of different "gaits", or types of movement patterns, which are based on the real-life behavior of real-life snakes. The goal is to create a modular—and, thus, relatively simple to produce and scale—robot that can get to and through places where people, and less-willies-inducing robots, can't maneuver.
(Why, yes, my nose is rather runny, why do you ask?)
Urge to vengeance aside, my main reaction while flipping through this gallery of pollen images was wonder at the intense variety of sizes, shapes, textures and tricks floating through the microscopic world of plant pollen. This group shot ranges from the (relatively) giant orb of pumpkin pollen in the center, to the teensy blue dot that belongs to the forget-me-not. Some of the grains seem like completely alien things, but others bear a striking resemblance to the plants they help create—for instance, I guessed that Venus fly trap pollen went with the Venus fly trap before I read the caption.
All these shots are the work of Swedish Swiss scientist Martin Oeggerli, who makes amazing art using a scanning electron microscope. The images actually start out in black and white, with Oeggerli going back and adding color, pixel by pixel. The colors can, but don't necessarily, reflect reality, but they do help make textures stand out and make the form more easily readable by your eye.
Mark Allen of Machine Project in Los Angeles says:
For a period of five weeks Josh Beckman’s Sea Nymph will be host to a whole series of nautical-themed events, performances, lectures, and workshops, as well as an opera by and for dogs. Inside the capsized hull of the ship there will also be a crystal cave. Join us at Machine for the opening on September 5th from 5-10pm, where you can gaze upon the wreckage with accompanying performances by Clay Chaplin, Ambient Force 3000, Ecce, OK Music, Chris Kallmyer, and Colin Woodford.
This is the world's first frozen margarita machine, invented and built by Mariano Martinez in 1971 from parts of a soft-serve ice cream maker. His inspiration: A 7-11 Slurpee.
Today, it resides in the collection of the National Museum of American History, where a museum director once called it a, "classic example of the American entrepreneurial spirit."
Polar explorer Børge Ousland (How'd you like to have that as your job title?) is on a sailboat making its way through the Arctic Ocean. This has never been an easy place for boats, and this video gives you a good idea of why. The captain of Ousland's boat explains the hazards of this area a little more in-depth, while simultaneously making an important point—thanks to warming trends, traversing the Northwest Passage isn't has hard as it used to be.
It is obvious that the conditions met by the early explorers such as Vitus Bering, Fridtjof Nansen, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and Roald Amundsen no longer exists. We passed through in a few weeks, while our predecessors were forced to overwinter once or even twice. Still, it is not an easy passage for any kind of boat or vessel. There is still ice, although not to the extent there used to be, but plenty to make conditions unpredictable for ships. In addition many of the seas you have to pass are very shallow. In the East Siberian Sea, the shipping lane is located 50 nautical miles off the coast, in order for there to be sufficient depth for bigger ships. Lights, buoys and nautical markings are scarce.
You can follow Ousland's progress on his blog. Today, he reached American waters and changed his underpants, and we learn that changing your underpants on special occasions is a fine, old Norwegian tradition. To which I can only say, "Good."
What would you make of medieval historical records that prominently note the occurrence of large crops of acorns? It's a bit of a weird departure from the kinds of things these records normally care about, i.e. battles and the deaths of famous people. In fact, the people keeping these records didn't even eat acorns, and other, more useful, crops aren't mentioned at all.
But, sometimes, an acorn might be more than just an acorn, according to a 2003 paper by classicist David Woods. That's because the Latin word for "little nut" and the word sometimes used to describe the swollen lymph nodes caused by the Capital-P Plague are one and the same.
The Latin term glandularius is the root of our word for gland; etymologically, glandula means 'little nuts' because this is what they felt like when palpated. There is at least one other example of a plague record using glandulara as a descriptor. In c. 660 the Burgundian 'Chronicle of Fredegar' describes the 599 plague of Marseilles as a cladis glanduaria.
So "a spark of leprosy and an unheard of abundance of nuts", becomes the far more logical, "we've had some issues with leprosy and The Plague this year".
Craigslist, the popular classifieds Web site, has blocked access to its "adult services" section and replaced the link with a black label with the word "censored."
Gilpin Family whisky is a new single malt whisky made from the urine of diabetics. Creator James Gilpin doesn't sell the stuff, but rather gives away bottles as a public health statement. From the product page:
Sugar heavy urine excreted by diabetic patients is now being utilized
for the fermentation of high-end single malt whisky for export. The Whisky market is growing faster then any other alcoholic beverage worldwide. With a prevalent genetic weakness being exposed in the northern hemisphere leading to a sharp rise in type two diabetes, economists have found a new exportable commodity to exploit and are keen to capitalize on this resource quickly.
Large amounts of sugar are excreted on
a daily basis by type-two diabetic patients especially amongst the upper end of our aging population. As a result of this diabetic patients toilets often have unusual scale build up in
the basin due and rapid mould growths as
the sugar put into the system acts as nutrients
for mould and bacteria growth. Is it plausible
to suggest that we start utilizing our water purification systems in order to harvest the biological resources that our elderly already process in abundance?
As summer draws to close, I suggest a trip to Antarctica in this lovely Boing Boing special feature from our archives, Maggie Koerth-Baker's "Charting The Frozen Continent." When you get there, be sure to also scroll right to explore the photos! An excerpt:
"Oh, it's 32 and sunny here," says Claire Porter, a University of Minnesota graduate student working on the ostensibly frozen continent. "We spent the whole day outside hiking and playing around."
Antarctica, as it turns out, defies all sorts of expectations. Far from a blank, white canvas, the bottom of the world is a beautiful place, full of breathtaking peaks and stark, rock-strewn valleys studded with cerulean lakes. But the things that make Antarctica so fascinating—and such an important center for scientific research—also make it a difficult place to work. Porter is part of a team of scientists whose job is to make other scientists' jobs easier.
Video artist and viral genius Joe Sabia, whose work we've featured before on Boing Boing Video and the Virgin America in-flight Boing Boing TV channel, shares word of a project he just completed for the energy drink company behind Zombie Blood Energy Potion.
"Red Light Fright was highly experimental, highly speculative, and the results were hilarious," Joe says.
"We basically loaded an intersection with zombies, intentionally blew a right light, and received a ticket in the mail with a ton of photos showing branded zombies in action. No arrests, no manhunts for us (we hope). just good, safe clean fun."
Did the zombies really get the parking tickets? Are they real zombies? Are they real parking tickets? He won't tell me. Either way, a clever viral marketing stunt on what I'm told was a very low budget.
Parenting advice from another era: give your squalling children a pipe to smoke! Right up there with "Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes."
Kamill1 sez, "My first attempt at an automata, I think it turned out pretty well! Super fun build. A little wink to Jake Von Slatt, sitting down to play the pipe organ. Huzzah!"
"An executive at a billion-dollar Connecticut hedge fund was arrested on felony charges of allegedly running a huge year-round pot farm inside her home. But her boyfriend says the cops have it wrong, that they're goat farmers, not dope farmers."
For some uplifting weekend reading, I suggest Mary Roach's excellent Boing Boing special feature "Death In Space." From the intro:
The U.S. has plans for a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s. The ESA and Russia have sketched out a similar joint mission, and it is claimed that China's space program has the same objective. Apart from their destination, all these plans share something in common: extraordinary danger for the explorers. What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth?
Swedish ecologists Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak and Peter Mäsak are the inventors of an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation and burial, called Promession. The technique entails freezing a body, vibrating it into tiny pieces, and then freeze-drying the pieces, which can then be used as compost to grow a memorial shrub or tree.
Staggs: Both World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron take place in the world of The Long Emergency, which you’ve written about in the non-fiction title of the same name. Could you very briefly explain what the Long Emergency is for our readers?
Kunstler:The Long Emergency is the culminating crisis of modernity, growing out of the limits to growth, resource scarcity, and the collapse of the complex systems that keep us going — everything ranging from industrialized farming to oil-based transportation to electronic communication. It can also be described as the crisis of over-investments in complexity — resolving in a traumatic wave of sudden de-complexifying.
Staggs: Reading your novels, I find myself in some ways envious of the sense of community enjoyed by the residents of Union Grove, yet I remain aware of – and wary of – the incredible loss of life that our world would experience following a collapse of our oil-based infrastructure. On the whole, would you imagine that we’d gain or lose more in such a world?
Kunstler: It’s part of the tension of the story that we are constantly having to measure what’s been gained against what’s been lost. The losses are perhaps more obvious: comfort, certainty, and the whole prosthetic nimbus of technology that we are so used to. The gains are perhaps more subtle: making your own music, enjoying the sounds, scents, and sensations of nature much more directly, the blessed absence of cars and other motor-driven annoyances, unmediated relations with family, friends, and community members, a reconnection with the elemental ceremonies of birth, death, the harvest, the coming of spring, etc.
Note: This starts out somewhat depressingly, with the body of a female octopus that died after reproducing—as all octopuses, male and female, do. But it quickly gets past that, and on to the wee, baby octopuses, floating around the sea. Turn off the sound to block out the sad song, and focus on that.
"In order to study the way that experience can influence the brain, there has been a great deal of research done on the visual cortex of the kitten."
Oh, this is going to end badly, isn't it?
This short documentary from the 1970s explains, in depth, some research that I mentioned earlier this year in a BoingBoing article on fetal senses. Long story short: Kittens are born blind and do a lot of their sight-linked brain development in the first few weeks after birth. Because of this, they make a handy model for studying how the brains of human fetuses form neural connections and how our sense of sight develops in the womb. It's important research that has helped medical science better understand how to care for premature human babies, besides adding valuable details to our understanding of the brain, in general.
Unfortunately, because kittens are adorable, said very important research looks almost comically evil when filmed. Seriously, this video is one "Thittens" joke away from working as a segment of Look Around You.
So, thanks, blorgggg (Thorgggg?), for sending this video in via Submitterator. I'm sure the Moderators will be thanking you (and me) as well. I do ask that, as we get into the inevitable discussion on animal research, you remember that the scientists involved did not raise kittens in completely dark rooms for sociopathic shits and giggles, but because they thought the potential benefits of the research outweighed the (mostly temporary) damage done to the kittens' visual abilities. You may disagree with that calculation—and you're welcome to do so. In fact, I think that complex discussion about ends and means in specific studies is valuable. And interesting. Far more so (on both counts) than simply labeling anyone who uses animals for research as a for-kicks abuser of fluffy baby kitties.
What Things Do is a stunningly good webcomics site, launched by comics artist Jordan Crane and featuring some of the best independent comics artists around, including
Gabrielle Bell, Abner Dean, Sammy Harkham, Jaime Hernandez, Kevin Huizenga, Ted May, John Porcellino, Ron Regé Jr., Steve Weissman, and Dan Zettwoch.
Many of the artists here seem to have been mildly influenced by Tintin's Hergé (and Joost Swarte). This is not a big surprise, since Jordan Crane selects all the artists for his site, and Crane himself shows a little Hergé in his work. (I can't think of a better artist than Hergé from which to draw inspiration.)
The comics in What Things Do all have the same yellow-gray color scheme (with a few exceptions) that give the site an elegant cohesiveness. The comics are large clear and readable.
In addition to showcasing the work of contemporary cartoonists, What Things Do, runs "decades-old work" from worthy but not-so-famous cartoonists, as well as articles about comics.
What Things Do: excellent webcomics
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the
United States and other countries.
William Gibson's latest novel, 
"We had an interesting morning bringing it in," Dean said. "It was quite a fight."
Last night, the Hugo Awards, one of science fiction's most prestigious prizes, were presented in Melbourne at Aussiecon 4. The Hugo ceremony is one of my favorite parts of any WorldCon, and last night's event, emceed by Garth Nix, was a particularly outstanding edition. The ballot was extremely strong, with works that I really enjoyed competing in several categories. The voter and nominator turnout were both much higher than usual, and the program moved at a very, very good clip. This year's award, designed by Nick Stathopolous, was gorgeous, incorporating aboriginal motifs and an organic, Belle Époque look inspired by the Paris Metro signs. Kudos to the administrators on a smooth, well-run ceremony!
The 
Sugar heavy urine excreted by diabetic patients is now being utilized
for the fermentation of high-end single malt whisky for export. The Whisky market is growing faster then any other alcoholic beverage worldwide. With a prevalent genetic weakness being exposed in the northern hemisphere leading to a sharp rise in type two diabetes, economists have found a new exportable commodity to exploit and are keen to capitalize on this resource quickly.
Video artist and viral genius Joe Sabia, whose work we've featured before on Boing Boing Video and the Virgin America in-flight Boing Boing TV channel, shares word of a project he just completed for the energy drink company behind 
Parenting advice from another era: give your squalling children a pipe to smoke! Right up there with "Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes."
The U.S. has plans for a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s. The ESA and Russia have sketched out a similar joint mission, and it is claimed that China's space program has the same objective. Apart from their destination, all these plans share something in common: extraordinary danger for the explorers. What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth?
Check out 
