Ambiguous "true-false" answer. Dain Fagerholm. Trove of free, public domain HD video. Matt Ruff's The Mirage: spectacular alternate history of Arabian manifest destiny. I am a huge fan of Matt Ruff's novels, so when friends in the know started to spontaneously tell me about how fantastic the advance manuscript they'd just read for his next novel, The Mirage, was, I just assumed, yeah, it'd be more great Matt Ruff. But this isn't just more Matt Ruff. This is Matt Ruff with the awesome turned up to 11. To 12. To 100. The Mirage is an alternate history novel set in a world where Arabia, the United Arab States, are the world's historic superpower. It's Arabia that intervenes in WWII (outraged over Nazi incursions into Muslim North Africa), and after the war, Arabia partitions Germany and establishes a Jewish homeland, Israel, with Berlin as its capital ("Israelis" enjoy a special "right of return" entitling them to visas to visit Jerusalem, of course).
Arabia prospers, though it is not without its internal strife. But Arabia is a good place to live. For Crusaders -- the Christian extremists who go on attacking Arabia -- 11/9 is a wake-up call. The Mirage. Jim Henson short explains "Data Communications" for Bell execs, 1963. Boing Boing » Blog Archive » Uncle Six Eyes: a bust.
Photo: Father and son at first and last Space Shuttle launches, 30 years apart.
Science. Games. Old Time Stuff. Interactive discussion on risk, chance, and the illusion of certainty. Car-racing game on a thermal printer. Joshua Noble's "Receipt Racer" is a car-racing game played using a thermal receipt printer; it reminds me of the games I used to write in BASIC on our old teletype terminal, which we loaded with enormous rolls of brownish paper towel of the sort you could get in elementary school bathrooms (once the paper was used up, we re-rolled it and ran the other side through the teletype, though filling a roll took a long time at 110 Baud!). The game is played on a receipt printer, a common device you can see at every convenient store. It prints those papers you usually find crumbled up in your pockets, just to throw them away.
It is a thermal printer using heat to darken the paper. This eliminates any slowdowns in printing lots of black. A roll can be ordered online and costs around 80 cents. 50 meters is the maximum distance you are theoretically able to race in one run, before running out of paper. RECEIPT RACER (Thanks, Manny!) Bookcase in a stairwell that you access via bosun's chair.