boing boing parodies

coupla neat boing boing parodies from yesterday:

  • Gakker:

    My call for sanity regarding the fair use of the brick

    Bricks have many legitimate uses, including shelter, crowd dispersal, and brief grandstanding against Israeli tanks, so why all the focus on the very few which are heaved through shop windows to allow for the sharing of items? I paid for that brick, I’m not interested in being told what to do with it.

    My 4:40 am shouty talk at my sock-covered fist on the Greyhound 234 westbound, transcribed for campus dissemination and worship.

  • boring boring:

    Ingenious wallmod allows items to be stored on vertical surfaces
    Wallmod This guy (warning: site has no pop-ups) modded the wall over his bed with several shelves — three, to be exact. The lack of visible shelf brackets is very futuristic (although brackets can give a shelf a cool steampunky look). If you want to try it yourself, step-by-step instructions are here. Sweet! Link (Thanks, Francis!)

fuzzy math, RIAA style

moses runs the numbers:

There is only one logical integration of all these statistics with the recent Soundscan data: even though actual point-of-purchase sales are up by about 9% in the US – and the industry sold over 13,000,000 more units in 2004 (1st quarter) than in 2003 (1st quarter) – the Industry is still claiming a loss of 7% because RIAA members shipped 7% fewer records than in 2003.

Forget the confusing percentages, here’s an oversimplified example: I shipped 1000 units last year and sold 700 of them. This year I sold 770 units but shipped only 930 units. I shipped 10% less units this year. And this is what the RIAA wants the public to accept as “a loss.”

we <3 sciam

Scientific American has a great op-ed satirizing creationism:

There’s no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don’t mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there’s no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

prius love

The Boston Globe on the Prius love:

Then there’s the hipness factor: ”I’ve had a lot of kids tell me that this is way cool,” she says, ”and at age 52, I have very few ways to be way cool.” When she first started driving the old Prius, it was, she says, ”a guy magnet.” For a certain type of guy, anyway. ”I would go out, and guys in Subaru Outbacks with Greenpeace stickers and L.L. Bean shirts would come over,” she says.