tech@vedella

Stuck Up! is a new book by two psychiatrists and an emergency physician examining 100 x-ray images of strange foreign objects that have, er, made their way into people's bodies, such as bronzed baby shoes, a knife, a Barbie doll, a cassette tape, an extension cord, and, yes, the iPod seen above right. It's nice [...]

Ivana sez, You are invited to participate in a design competition for development of sustainable technologies and their components for printing on open source 3-D printers! The goal of the contest (organized by Queen's University Applied Sustainability Lab and Michigan Technological University) is to facilitate an open exchange of 3-D sustainable technology designs that can [...]

Friday Freak-Out: Eric Burdon and War perform "Tobacco Road" on German television in 1970. Originally a folk tune written by John D. Loudermilk, the song was first made a hit in 1964 by The Nashville Teens. The Jackson 5, Lou Rawls, and many other artists covered it too. In 1970, Eric Burdon and War turned [...]

In an answer to a reader question, NPR explains why it uses both "climate change" and "global warming" to refer to the concept of rising anthropogenic greenhouse gasses forcing a corresponding rise in global average temperature. Personally, I try to use "climate change" in all cases, for the same reason NPR likes that name—it doesn't [...]

Matt "Monsterbrick" Armstrong -- he of the epic Lego Room in Wednesday's post -- is working on a neo-Victorian series of models. Each of these models, like the stunning typewriter above, is constructed solely of Lego -- but perfectly and amazingly. They represent both the look and the soul of the device. My favorites include [...]

As noted previously on Boing Boing, Oakland's mayor Jean Quan disclosed today that she was one of 18 elected officials on a conference call last Thursday organized by the United States Conference of Mayors to discuss local responses to OWS around the US. The New York Times reports that Portland mayor Sam Adams says there [...]

A man armed with a weapon was shot by campus police in a computer lab at the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

The Occupy Seattle is marching, and police have responded in force, according to multiple eyewitness accounts. The Occupy Seattle account tweets, "Pepper spray has been depolyed against protesters including a priest and a blind woman." One participant tweets, "They maced a pregnant woman, a kid, a priest, and a blind woman w/ a fucking cane!" [...]

The Guardian has a copy of the New York State Supreme Court's ruling on Occupy Wall Street. The 'petitioners' application for a temporary restraining order is denied.'

Turnstyle News photog Denise Tejada has a set of photos from today's mass protest at UC Berkeley, in California's Bay Area. At the time of this blog post, the crowd gathered is somewhere north of 1,500 people. (thanks, Alejandro de la Cruz)

The City Council of Seattle, Washington today adopted Resolution 31337 in support of the Occupy movement. "The resolution recognizes and supports "the peaceful and lawful exercise of the First Amendment as a cherished and fundamental right in the effort to seek solutions for economically distressed Americans at the federal and local levels".

Protesters are returning to re-occupy Zuccotti Park in New York City. Mayor Bloomberg's administration maintains that the occupiers will not be allowed to stay overnight. Watch the live video stream here. At the time of this blog post, a GA is taking place. NY Daily News is one of a number of news organizations live-blogging [...]

The Onion's AV Club does quite a good job examining the weird world of Frank "Dark Knight" Miller's view on the Occupy movement: Comic book crank Frank Milller’s political philosophy has become as angry—and jagged, and messy—as his drawing style pretty much since 9/11, when Miller first began turning his grim, nihilistic viewpoint into an [...]

Ben sez, "I want to share a short documentary that I recently produced about the hidden Infrastructure of the Internet called Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors. The video is meant to remind viewers that the Internet is a physical, geographically anchored thing. It features a tour inside Telx's 9th floor Internet exchange at 60 [...]

OWS, bloodied but unbowed, has made a rather good funny: "What are their demands?" asked social historian Patrick Bruner. "They have not articulated any platform. How do they expect to be taken seriously?" Critics of the new occupation allege that meddling billionaire Michael Bloomberg is behind the movement. Others question the new occupiers' militant posture, [...]

Karen sez, "Instructables user RobHopeless has engineered a way to make your own 3D printer. This tutorial is an entry in Instructables' 4th Epilog Challenge, which is accepting all sorts of creative projects for the chance to win an Epilog Laser." I have wanted a 3D Printer for a while now and there are some [...]

A couple of years ago our friend Clifford Pickover wrote the terrifically fun book, The Math Book. Now he's got a new one that's just as good about physics. It's called, as you might guess, The Physics Book and the publisher has kindly given me permission to run some examples from the book. You can [...]

Vice profiles the efforts of one woman to "snuggle" with a bunch of feral raccoons, a feat she accomplished by donning a protective suit of material she judged thick enough to fend off rabid scratches and bites, then covering this suit with rotting food to attract a head-to-toe blanket of living, gorging raccoons. 2 As [...]

Pixar animator Angus MacLane created a way to show humanity in Lego that is bigger and more creative than a minifig, while still being charming and lovable: the CubeDude. Consider the Tron Guy CubeDude, above. His head is a cube seen from one corner -- hence the name. Nevertheless, the best of these creations are [...]

Playboy ran a lengthy conversation between our pal Paul Krassner and our former-pal Andrew Breitbart. KRASSNER: As a Supreme Court Justice, Thomas has declared that the Constitution gives states a right to establish an official religion, that prisoners have no constitutional right to be protected from beatings by guards, that a school official is allowed [...]