From the title of this Victorian science book it's not out of line to assume that there might be at least a few diy methods for accidentally electrocuting yourself, but that's just the beginning.

The tome in its entirety is supposed to be available for free as a hi-res e-book sometime this month, but for now you can see a full list of some actually really beautiful sounding demonstrations, (like how to make phosphorescent displays using oyster shells), and some other cool heirloom science excerpts at Lateral Science.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for the link.

Northern California artists Savanna Snow, who I've previously featured on BB, and Michael Eli have a magickal show opening Friday evening at Oakland's Art At The Oakbrook gallery. Titled "A Golden Dawn," the show runs until April 19, with an artists' discussion on April 10. (Click the lovely invite below to see it larger.) A preview of the show is also viewable on Flickr. Savanna writes:

This show of paintings & installation of a Hermetic Lodge seeks to place the viewer at the dawn of a New Romantic era. These two artists offer up a mediation on the Magical Order & past Utopian movements of late 19th century California. All the exhibited pieces were created via collaboration utilizing only found materials, these elements wrought from nature directly correlate to the history they evoke. Key figures such as Joaquin Miller, William Merrit Chase, Bernard Maybeck, John Muir & Ordonez De Montalvo are some of the Esoterics represented by the artists.

Downhill skiing is a team sport in the Paralympics. Visually impaired skiers hurtle down the mountain at highway speeds, guided by another skier, who goes a few seconds ahead and calls back changes in direction and terrain via radio headset.

Visually impaired ski racer Danelle D'Aquanni Umstead says:

It is a "visually impaired team," not an athlete and their guide. Guiding is not something just anyone can do. As a guide you have to be just as committed, ski faster and also be able to turn around at any given moment to look behind you at the other athlete when at high speeds. This is not an easy task, and takes a lot of training as a team. Finding the right guide is definitely the hardest part for a visually impaired skier. To be able to trust in that person one hundred percent, and find a guide who has the same goals as you.

My documentarian friend Andrea Dunlap over at the Seedling Project pointed out this great footage of a 'scissor dancing' contest in Peru, something she saw when she was living and filming there a few years ago. It happens a few times a year to mark Easter, Christmas, and Yacu Raymi (an annual water festival).

Andrea says participants travel everywhere with an entourage of harpists and violinists, doing intricate, rhythmic, often acrobatic dances using pieces of metal shaped like broken scissor halves as percussion, "eventually degenerating into stunts like dancing with cactus stuck all over the dancer's body, breathing fire, throwing firecrackers, etc...They make their own costumes and they have fierce names like Terror of Puquio, and The Lion." And you thought you were rebel for running with scissors!

Andrea has some scissor dance footage of her own and more photos from her time in Peru on her site. In addition to her focus on the food movement in California, she's currently working on a documentary about the incredible Cusichaca Trust, a group of archaeologists who are studying ancient Incan agricultural techniques and trying to revive them for modern farmers.

Watch above in delight as a Wilford Brimleyesque feline named Cooper demonstrates the fine art of BANG DEAD. It's the fisheye lens what makes it magic. MOAR at sweetfurr.blogspot.com. (thanks, Susannah!)

I've been a huge fan of Robbie Conal ever since Mark asked me to profile him for The Happy Mutant Handbook back in 1995. Conal is the Los Angeles-based artist who creates unflattering portraits of (mostly white, male, right-leaning) political and other public figures -- think Reagan, Bush I and II, and their cronies -- and prints them on 2-by-3-foot posters. Then in the dead of night, he and his posse paste 'em up, guerrilla-style, in U.S. cities, in bus shelters and construction sites where, in the morning, folks on their way to work get an eyeful of funny, gritty, cheeky political satire.  I first went "postering" with Robbie in San Francisco, and can testify it's some of the most fun I've ever had with my clothes on. I've done it several times since, and still have a gloop of dried wheat paste in the trunk of my Honda. 

Bob Harris, the eight-time Jeopardy champ who wrote a terrific Peru travelogue a couple of weeks ago for Boing Boing gave a great talk about the culture of joy as an international language. It's on YouTube now.

Last year I was asked by Web Directions North, a gathering of assorted bigshots from Google, Yahoo!, etc. -- people who literally convene to design the next phases of the Internet itself -- to deliver the closing keynote.  The subject?  The future of the Internet's influence on global culture and politics.

Naturally, my take on it was illustrated with people dancing in the streets, teenage males being given fake boobs, and coffee made from civet poop.  

I'm happy to tell you it got a long standing ovation.

And now you can see the whole talk online here.

It's broken into bite-size pieces, organized loosely by the point I'm making, each about the length of a pop song.

The first chunk is above.

Parallel Lines is a project by from Ridley Scott Associates that will be released April 8. It's a neat premise!

Five directors were each challenged to create short films in different genres using the same dialogue. The five 5 beautifully diverse films are by Greg Fay, Jake Scott, Johnny Hardstaff, Carl Erik Rinsch and animators Hi-Sim and their genres range from drama, animation, action, to sci-fi and thriller.

Trailer for Parallel Lines

The world's shortest walking man, 21-year old He Pingping from Inner Mongolia, died this past weekend from heart complications. Sadly, we do not know much about his life aside from the fact that he was a 27-inch tall chain smoker who spent much of the last few years traveling to Japan, the US, and Italy after being recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007. I wish people focused more on what kind of person he was and how he coped with the constant stares and media attention instead of just displaying him as a freak show. He's pictured here with the world's tallest man, Bao Xishun, who is also from Inner Mongolia.

In a Twitter exchange, Anil Dash just reminded me that the word "avatar" comes from from the Sanskrit word Avatãra. The word means, more or less, "descent." More, from a related blog post at Heritage Key:

But while the modern day meaning implies gaming and interaction, the original definition has a very different meaning. In Hinduism, avatars act as manifestations of deities. This occurs when a god has decided to come to our world by taking a human or animal form.

The most well-known avatars were associated with the god Vishnu, who often appeared in our world to restore good in the world when evil threatened to corrupt it. The deity would do so by fighting off demons as a fish or a boar. At other times, Vishnu would lead armies to victory as an eventual king (Sounds a little similar to the plot of the movie Avatar?).

(Heritage Key, thanks, @xlent1 / Image: "Vishnu Dreaming," a Creative Commons licensed image from the Flickr stream of Vaticanus)

The opening night reception for the BLAB! art retrospective in NYC is Friday, March 26th, 6-9 PM. There will be 100 pieces in the show!

The Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators presents “BLAB!: A Retrospective,” a periodic anthology of works from leading contemporary illustrators, painters, sequential artists and printmakers worldwide. Founded by acclaimed Chicago-based graphic designer and art director Monte Beauchamp in 1986, BLAB! invites more than twenty-five visual artists each year from the fields of sequential art, graphic design, illustration, painting, and printmaking to contribute to BLAB!, a selection informed by Beauchamp’s distinctive vision and aesthetic. The anthology will be on display March 24-May 1, 2010 in the museum’s galleries in New York City’s Upper East Side.

From its roots as an exposition of comic illustration, the original BLAB! anthology format has evolved and diversified, with recent editions incorporating the work and vision of renowned illustrators and artists including Chris Ware, Gary Baseman, Sue Coe, Camille Rose Garcia, The Clayton Brothers, Owen Smith, SHAG!, Joe Sorren, Ron English, and Mark Ryden. BLAB! also features selections of vintage "found" graphics, such as Depression-era matchbook covers, obscure Valmor cosmetic labels and pre-1920 European Krampus postcards.

via Yanko Design

IEEE's Erico Guizzo visited the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo, and videotaped this demo of his machine that scans the text and images of a book as you flip through its pages.

Ishikawa is well known in robotics circles for his Matrix bullet time-style amazing demos -- like a robo-hand that can dribble a ball and catch objects in midair with superhuman dexterity. How he does it? A Super Vision Chip (that's what he calls it) that can "see" events too fast for the eye.

Ishikawa and his colleagues are already working on several applications -- including a microscope that can track individual bacteria and a video game motion-capture system (similar to Microsoft's Project Natal) for gesture playing. Late last year when I visited the lab, they showed me their latest creation: a superfast book scanner.

The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.