The entrance to Overlook Mountain House lurks in the fog, welcoming hikers on Overlook Mountain. Towering 3,140 feet above Woodstock, the hotel was abandoned after suffering several fires. It is now owned by New York State. Found and photographed by @todseelie. #overlookmountainhouse #overlookmountain #abandoned #ruins #fog #atlasobscura #hidden #curiousity #explore #adventure #amazing #wanderlust #neverstopexploring #photooftheday #picoftheday #travel #wonder #urbex by atlasobscura (via https://www.instagram.com/p/BCqwe4Rqfac/)
In the race to replace concrete and steel, bioengineers and architects are experimenting with alternatives including blood, bone and eggshells 02.30 EST Last modified on Tuesday 8 March 2016 05.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person’s decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as “chronesthesia,” or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical “travel” occurs.
cyanometer, c. 1789, an instrument that measures the blueness of a sky
“But how to measure ‘blueness’? Using suspensions of Prussian blue, Saussure dyed paper squares every shade of blue he could distinguish between white and black. These were assembled into a numbered colour circle that could be held up to the zenith at a standard distance from the eye - the matching square established the degree of blue.“
“Last night, she might have wondered what undergrounds apart from the couple she knew of communicated by WASTE system. By sunrise she could legitimately ask what undergrounds didn’t. If miracles were, as Jesus Arrabal had postulated years ago on the beach at Mazatlan, intrusions into this world from another, a kiss of cosmic pool balls, then so must be each of the night’s post horns. For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U. S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, un-publicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.”
Various government departments spent a whopping £489,329 in 20014–15 on adverts with Facebook in the UK. In return the multi-billion dollar company gave the public purse £4,327, a lot less than most people in the UK paid in tax for the same period.
Astonishingly, Facebook claimed they only needed to pay this amount because they recorded a £28.5 million loss overall in the UK. However, they still managed to splash out £35million in share bonuses to staff.
Rice paddies, constructed in steps, cover the mountainsides of Yuanyang County, China. Cultivated by the Hani people for the last 1300 years, the slope of the terraces varies from 15 to 75 degrees with some having as many as 3,000 steps.
It seems uncontroversial that these systems may individually lower costs to users in a short-term sense. Nevertheless, while startup culture is fixated upon using digital technology to narrowly improve short-term efficiency in many different business settings, it is woefully inept at analysing what problems this process may accumulate in the long term. Payments startups, for example, see themselves as incrementally working towards a ‘cashless society’: a futurist buzzword laden with positive connotations of hypermodern efficiency. It describes the downfall of something 'old’ and archaic – cash – but doesn’t actually describe what rises up in its place. If you like, 'cashless society’ could be reframed as 'a society in which every transaction you make will have to be approved by a private intermediary who can watch your actions and exclude you.’
A capsule filled with art and artifacts is headed to the moon at the end of this year, where it will remain indefinitely as a celebration of the human capacity for creativity. Designed by an international team of artists, scientists, and engineers, the less-than-a-foot tall object is hitching a ride on a rover engineered by Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute that’s competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. If the journey proves successful, the MoonArk will land approximately 300 works in space, from ancient maps to poems to digital art.
Regular Boing Boing readers have seen me credit This Isn’t Happinessmany times for wonderful visual and audio finds. We’ve been linking toPeter Nidzgorski’s work since way back in 2008. Recently, his wonderful tumblog—a mix of art, music, film, urban ennui, and sexy design ephemera—went dark. No! Why? Automated DMCA takedowns, spurred by the complaint of a well-known copyright troll.
In Pete’s case, the copyright claimants are known tumblr trolls based in the UK who were claiming rights of music related photos erroneously. Tumblr appears to be now using an automated “take-down first” policy and not a process in which each claim is personally reviewed by staff, as Tumblr has claimed.
This stuff happens all the time with our blogging and remixing artist friends, but I like to share these stories because they’re totally outrageous and wrong, and– they now happen all the time. Pete’s tumblr is back up, but the down time added up to two weeks or more. I’d lose my shit if that happened to Boing Boing.
I’m incredibly skeptical of the project of teaching kids about copyright and fair use – not because it’s unimportant, because it’s so dire.
But copyright was developed as an industrial doctrine to regulate the entertainment industry. If kids need to understand industrial regulation in order to do their homework or horse around with their friends, something’s desperately wrong. You can’t write a regulation that’s complex enough to help Warner license Harry Potter to the Universal theme parks and still make it simple enough to cover children writing Harry Potter fanfic.
If it was simple enough for them, it wouldn’t matter, because no one at Warners wants to write a contract for a schoolchild.
But California, in its infinite absurdity, has passed a rule requiring schools to teach copyright – thanks to intense lobbying from the film industry – and almost all the education kids get amounts to “abstinence only,” as in, “Whatever you’re doing, it’s probably illegal, so don’t bother trying.” Various entities, including EFF, have developed better curricula than that, but the bottom line is, if you have to understand obscure industrial rules in order to conduct routine activities, the rules are stupid and at best you’ll be helping kids get in slightly less trouble and/or feel slightly less hopeless.
Consumerist’s Mary Beth Quirk has an excellent piece surveying the copyright curriculum landscape, and the people doing the heroic, nearly impossible work of providing a nuanced view of copyright to schoolkids.
