tech@vedella

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: this plea for 500 Jack Kirby fans to kick in $60 each to get a pop-up Jack Kirby museum in a Lower East Side storefront, to be curated by the folks who do the most excellent online Kirby Museum and Research Center

Photos: Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing — CC BY 3.0, allowing commercial use with attribution. Demonstrations inspired by Occupy Wall Street spread worldwide today, with marches across the U.S and Asia. According to Reuters, most large cities in Europe saw protests, with tens of thousands in Rome and London. Here in Pittsburgh, a column of [...]

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending, the fabulous, ultra-deluxe gaming tables of Geek Chic, which sport a series of nested, pull-out play-surfaces, drawers, a rail-system for suspending drinks/bins/additional surfaces, erasable acrylic-coated surfaces, and so forth. Shown here is the "Sultan," their top-of-the-range item, but they have a variety of options for smaller [...]

Michael Klapthor's ceramic sculpture "The Price of Safety" is a one of a series of beautiful and evocative works featuring stylized houses on the backs of expressive dog-like creatures. (via Super Punch)

From Reddit's Cylinsier, a response to Occupy Wall Street critics who argue that because they somehow managed to bootstrap themselves to wealth and privilege, the system is fair and its critics are just sore losers or lazy, greedy fools.

The Guardian reports on life for visible minorities under Alabama's new "immigration" law that allows the police to detain and question "suspicious" (that is, brown) people and arrest them if they don't have immigration papers -- even if they're American-born US citizens. Many people of Hispanic origin have walked out of their jobs in protest, [...] Presented By: Visualize the Future of the Anywhere Office   Has your company seen an increase in workplace mobility? Does the cloud really matter for your business? Make sure you’re in the know with Cisco and be prepared for what’s in store. Read, learn, share and discuss the future of the network. http://network.cisco.com/ Ads by Pheedo

Jonas Pfiel's "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera" sports 36 cameras and contains firmware that stitches their output together to form a global panorama; you throw it into the air and at the top of its arc, it takes a snap and processes it. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Toby Slater sez, "London, UK steampunk extravaganza White Mischief hosts 'Ghost In The Machine', a Halloween ball on Saturday 29th October. Headlining is Abney Park, arguably the world's most famous steampunk band; compere is Professor Elemental, the pith-helmeted chap-hop MC. Also performing are The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, notorious for releasing [...]

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: illustrator Pat Dorian's excellent t-shirts, which took top honors in my personal "t-shirt I would buy if I didn't have about 40 times more t-shirts than I could possibly use" competition. Presented By: Visualize the Future of the Anywhere Office   Has your company seen an increase in workplace mobility? Does the cloud really matter for your business? Make sure you’re in the know with Cisco and be prepared for what’s in store. Read, learn, share and discuss the future of the network. http://network.cisco.com/ Ads by Pheedo

"The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations," published in 2008 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, experimentally verifies the hypothesis that laypeople find explanations for psychological phenomena compelling because adding "neuroscience" makes them sound true: In line with this body of research, we propose that people often find neuroscience information alluring because it interferes with their [...]

Forbes has a good article on Intel's "Tomorrow Project," wherein Intel Chief Futurist Brian David Johnson gets science fiction writers and technologists to produce materials about the future of technology as part of the company's future product development plans. I've contributed a short story, Knights of the Rainbow Table (about the moment when human-memorizable passwords [...]

[Video Link] Brian from the band I Fight Dragons generously made a tutorial that explains how to create your own chiptunes (music made on old videogame soundcards). Many of you have asked how we do what we do, so now we're starting a series to explain the inner workings of our tech for those of [...]

[Video Link] This disturbing video is making the rounds today, and there are conflicting reports of what it documents. The man on the ground has been identified as 32-year-old Ari Douglas, a legal observer at the Occupy Wall Street protests for the National Lawyer's Guild. The video appears to show a police officer running over [...]

[YouTube video link.] This YouTube video title misidentifies the person being punched as female. The person is Felix Rivera-Pitre, reports Gothamist. He tells Gothamist that he is HIV positive and is a former dancer: [Rivera-Pitre] tells us he was walking a little bit in front of the police on William Street, and admits he "shot [...]

Here's Randy Regier's latest artwork. I don't know if it's the size of a matchbook cover or a blimp hangar door, but its terrific. Randy Regier's "Fisher Fire Fly" model spaceship kitRandy Regier's Shokor Robot toyRandy Regier's toy sculpture: "Fast Asleep"Photos of amazing NuPenny toy store in Portland, MaineNuPenny Store in Wichita is never openRandy [...]

Noe Montes shot some beautiful portraits of people at city hall in Los Angeles, at the "Occupy LA" protests. (thanks, Jesse Thorn)

At Fire Dog Lake and at American Spectator, evidence indicating that Patrick Howley, Assistant Editor of The American Spectator, effectively acted as an agent provocateur at an anti-war protest outside the Air and Space Museum yesterday, leading to an incident in which a number of protesters were maced. Above is a photo (slightly modified by [...]

Researchers report that Saturn's moon Enceladus is covered in superfine powdery snow. From National Geographic: "The particles are only a fraction of a millimeter in size … even finer than talcum powder," study leader Paul Schenk, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, said in a statement. "This would make [...]

Two bits of glad tidings: first, Charlie Stross announces that we've turned in the manuscript for our collaborative, post-Singularity comic novel Rapture of the Nerds; second, my agent Russ Galen has sold Homeland, the sequel to my 2008 novel Little Brother, to Tor, in "a significant deal."

On the always-excellent How To Be a Retronaut, a gallery of the dreadful automobiles of the Soviet Bloc from the 1960s and 70s.