As Cory Doctorow has pointed out here on Boing Boing, Brett and Kate McKay’s The Art of Manliness is an essential resource for all things manly. Cory blogged the site’s “Dictionary of Manly 19th Century Vernacular,” but my tastes run more to “Talk Like Frank Sinatra.” I should point out that I’ve done my own research in this area. In 1987, on my way to Las Vegas to write about the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon for Newsweek — a telethon at which Sinatra himself appeared, albeit on video — I spent a good part of the plane trip poring over Kitty Kelley’s [...]

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20-year old Laura Hall of Bromsgrove, Worcestershire is thought to be the first person to be banned from all pubs, bars, and clubs across England and Wales. She is also not allowed to buy alcohol or drink in public. I wonder what this girl did wrong that makes her so exceptional among other belligerent drunk people, or if this is supposed to set an example for other drunken youngsters.Link [via Metro UK]

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USC Professor Henry Jenkins is a hard-core fan with hard-core fans. I should know. I’m one of the audience members who stalked him at a conference a few years ago after his keynote, hoping to have a conversation about a paper he’d just published at the time. It was an argument for a whole new way of thinking about literacy. Reading, writing, and understanding words on a page won’t cut it anymore. In a digitized world, Henry says young people need new skills that go way beyond basic composition and comprehension. Skills like play (“the capacity to experiment with [...]

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A Japanese company called KLab managed to create a duplicate of the Kindle Development Kit, which was given out to developers on a limited basis and allows programmers to start creating alternate software for Amazon’s e-reader. Using its homebrew Kindle emulator — which KLab claims is the first of its kind — the company managed to port Super Mario Bros. to the e-ink device. Guess what? It looks awful. Then again, who wouldn’t have guessed that? While I can imagine a world where Kindle games are kind of cool (and basically just Game Boy games from the ’90s), KLab’s [...]

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It was actually astronaut Naoko Yamazaki’s seven-year-old daughter who posed the scientific question to be tested. She asked her space-bound mother why, in a bubble bath, bubbles appear to be clear even if the bubble bath mixture is a fun color. Yamazaki, Japan’s second woman to be sent into space (and possibly the first mom), would be remiss not to test her daughter’s theory out. Once aboard the International Space Station, Yamazaki mixed tropical fruit juice with soap and began the experiment. Rather than appearing transparent as the do here on Earth, the weightlessness of [...]

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The Hyper Sub is yet another submarine designed for rich people with more time and money on their hands than they know what to do with. But hey, why not? This model combines a speedboat with a sub, offering up a surface speed of 40 knots and a range of 500 surface miles thanks to twin diesel engines and a 525 gallon fuel tank. Once it dives down underwater, it can hit depths of up to 250 feet and offers amazing views thanks to a glass ceiling that lets you observe everything above you. There’s no price on this one yet, but it’s a safe bet that mere mortals can’t afford it. Hyper [...]

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Nike’s new Free Run+ shoes do not make music when you flex them. Nor do they feature ports on the back for plugging them into speakers. But just for this video, they definitely do. Somewhere in a top secret location in Tokyo, break beat music duo, HIFANA (composed of KEIZOmachine and JUICY) discovered that Nike Free Run+ running shoes can drop beats like realtime samplers and no other. HIFANA eschewed a part of their regular break beat set up and hooked up the mixers and sound systems to Nike Free Run+ shoes. When bent or twisted, the ultra-flexible Nike Free Run+ drops different tunes and [...]

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Sure, you’ve seen photos of the moon’s surface. But have you seen them in amazing 3D? OK, maybe, but how about without having to cross your eyes? I didn’t think so. But now, if you’ve got a pair of red/green 3D glasses kicking around, you can do so right now. The photo above is of the Apollo 14 landing site. In 3D you can see the lander popping up from the surface, as well as the depth of all the craters. It’s actually pretty amazing. The images were made by Nathanial Burton-Bradford from images taken by the LRO. Here’s hoping he makes more. Flickr via Bad Astronomy

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My latest Guardian column, “Digital Economy Act: This means war,” explains how the latest round of dirty tricks from the entertainment industry — perverting British law, proposing an American police state, building an oppressive global treaty behind closed doors — changes the game. We’re no longer merely arguing about the future of control over culture: now it’s about the fundamentals of a just and free society:. In the US, the MPAA and RIAA (American equivalents of the MPA and the BPI) just submitted comments to the American Intellectual Property Czar, Victoria [...]

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I just spoke to Mari Kuraishi, founder of GlobalGiving.org, about how the recent surge in natural disasters has affected donor behavior.The vast majority of people are moved to give when there’s a disaster going on. As ghoulish as it sounds, disasters mean a lot of people come to Global Giving. Haiti, the Chinese earthquake, the Chilean earthquake… the news really helps make what we do relevant for donors; the angle we add is that you’re giving to a specific project undertaken by a specific organization, you’ll hear back from them about what they did with your money. [...]

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