Whoot! Props to PopSandbox! The Next Day Graphic Novel Featured in the NYTimes Book Review - Comics Roundup - NYTimes.com

John Porcellino’s skinny, slightly tremulous freehand line reduces everything and everyone to their simplest forms, as in a small child’s drawing if the child in question happened to be a devastatingly expressive minimalist. Porcellino is known for his autobiographical comics (collected in several volumes, most recently “Map of My Heart”), but THE NEXT DAY (Pop Sandbox, paper, $16.95; available in comics stores; on sale in general-interest bookstores this fall) covers new and darker ground. Written by Paul Peterson and Jason Gilmore, it’s based on interviews with four people who attempted to kill themselves.

Their stories are each edited down to a few lines that suggest the rest: what drove them toward suicide, how they tried to do it, what came afterward, how they regard that time now. One woman describes how, at 18, she lay in bed crying for three days, “until my parents took me to the doctor.” Porcellino draws her as a set of closed-in curves, squirming just a little, for five consecutive panels; in the page’s sixth panel, the bed is empty. Every few pages, Porcellino presents a silent scene — rain falling on a tree and a house — as the book pauses to breathe. Then, finally, the rain abates, and we see the house again, the four narrators together outside of it, alive.

Human and jellyfish combined to make the first living laser (Wired UK)

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By Mark Brown, 13 June 11 via Wired UK

"Medical researchers from Harvard University have created the first "living laser"; a biological cell that's been genetically engineered to produce a visible laser beam.

Lasers need two things to generate beams. They need a gain medium that amplifies light, and an arrangement of mirrors to concentrate and align that light.

Normal lasers, ever since their invention in the 1950s, use synthetic gain materials like gases, crystals and dyes to amplify photon pulses. But professor Seok-Hyun Yun and colleague Malte Gather, instead used green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is used to make jellyfish bioluminescent, as their gain material.

The team genetically engineered human embryonic kidney cells to produce GFP. They then placed a single cell between two mirrors. In terms of sizes: the mirrors were spaced 20 micrometres apart (20 millionths of a metre), and the cell was just 15 to 20 micrometres...."

!!! DIY magnetic silly putty is black magic (Wired UK)

By Roy Wood,13 June 11 via Wired UK)

"Instructables user mikeasaurus has posted a fun and easy guide that describes how to make your own magnetic Silly Putty. Basically, you just take some standard Silly Putty (which is a lot of fun by itself) and blend in some black iron oxide. As far as experiments go, this is simple and safe, and the results look like something out of World of Goo (by the way, World of Goo is an amazing game, and you're really missing out on something great if you haven't played it yet).

I didn't think the magnetic putty would be all that interesting until I saw the accompanying video. Take a look, and I think you'll find the results attractive, too...."

Project London: Filmmaking goes open-source (Wired UK)

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By Dan Smith, 10 June 11, via Wired UK

"This article was taken from the July 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

In Project London, aliens have inhabited Earth after escaping their own dying planet. Joint Command, a military organisation comprising humans and "Nalardians", rules the population with an iron fist, its only opposition a resistance movement known as the London Underground. It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster, but the film's budget is almost nonexistent. Nonetheless, set in Seattle (the London references stem from a working title that stuck) Project London features more than 780 computer-generated effects that bring action sequences, futuristic backdrops and huge fighting robots to life -- through open-sourced contributions. Instead of buying software licences and hiring staff, the anti-Hollywood project relied on a crowd-coded 3D package called Blender and volunteer artists. Since Blender is free to download, says writer and director Ian Hubert, 23, "we figured people who use it may be more interested in helping." He advertised for creatives on US classifieds network Craigslist and the Blender Community (a subsection on the Blender website), vetting potential collaborators' previous work before assembling a team of 12 CG workers. Some were from the US and Canada, others from Europe, and one from as far afield as Malaysia. "There's only a handful I've ever met in real life," says Hubert, based in Washington State. "We've just relied extensively on email."...

Karakuri -Extraordinarily Beautiful Japanese Automata Video - thanks Matt!

"Japan has always been on the forefront of cutting edge robotics. Its roots can be traced back 200-300 years during the Edo period when skilled craftsmen created automata (self-operating machines). Using nothing more than pulleys and weights they were able to make the Karakuri (Japanese automata) perform amazing tasks.
Japans modern day robots can be traced back to the Karakuri. Today Hideki Higashino is one of the few remaining craftsmen who is determined to keep the history and tradition of Japanese Karakuri alive.

Shot and edited by Matthew Allard."

Mapping Main Street - Still Going Strong! Collaborative Documentary Project

Once you start looking, you'll notice Main Streets are everywhere and tell all kinds of stories. There's a Main Street in San Luis, Arizona that dead-ends right into the Mexican border. The Main Street in Melvindale, Michigan runs through a trailer park in the shadows of Ford's River Rouge plant, once the largest factory in the world. Main Street is small town and urban center; it is the thriving business district and the prostitution stroll; it is the places where we live, the places where we work, and sometimes, it is the places we have abandoned.

A Collaborative Documentary Project


Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States. We invite you to capture the stories and images of the country today. Go out, look around, talk to people, and contribute to this re-mapping of the United States.

We've already got a head start. In May, the Mapping Main Street team packed into a 1996 Suburu station wagon and started a 12,000 mile journey across the country to visit Main Streets. In the process, we took photos, shot videos, and interviewed people. On Main Street in a small town in West Virginia's Appalachian Mountains, we met a retired man who is fixing up a boarded-up house that was once a hotel for jazz musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King during segregation. In New Hope, PA, we sat down for beers with a cop on Main Street who talked about strangest fetishes he had come across in his line of work.Ê We've talked with farm laborers and business owners, people out on their porches and people on park benches. We've even stood in empty fields...all on Main Streets across the country.

We commissioned bands to write songs for the project. High Places, the Hive Dwellers, Jason Cady and Ian Svenonius collected field recordings on Main Streets and wrote a songs inspired by those recordings. We've also started fabricating a Mapping Main Street scuplture that will serve as a mobile art installation and recording unit, enabling people to share stories via cell phones.

Mapping Main Street is produced through the generous funding of Maker's Quest 2.0, an initiative between the Association of Independents in Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is also supported with funds from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.