The Little Hacker's Room

In the world of design, urban mobility is much more than how you get from point A to point B. Urban mobility operates at the intersection of myriad innovation freeways, from architecture to infrastructure, technology to transportation, city planning to style. It's about feet, fashion, bikes, busses, automobiles, and yes, even cars that fly. Just ask Jens Martin Skibsted, co-designer of Terrafugia's new Transition Roadable Aircraft, aka flying car.

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"empty home on Bloomington Ave S, Minneapolis" by Andrew Ciscel via CC

OK, so I'm not an economist. But as a venture investor in early-stage medical and technology companies I read the usual financial articles that come across my screen and I see the same statistics everybody is seeing. I listen to Obama and I watch the TV shows where pundits argue with Congressmen about the wisdom of this or that particular tax or stimulus measure to restart our sick economy. I have nothing to say about this, no statistics of my own and no fancy theory, so instead of taking sides in this particular debate I keep looking for the things that are missing.

What is missing is this: Over two million American families have now lost their homes; foreclosure figures are at an all-time high. Several million new families will be thrown into the street over the next year, no matter what happens to taxes or the stimulus. This is a given. Yet, among Washington and Wall Street experts this disaster is only reflected in the form of statistical figures they mix up and datamine alongside many other figures, where the numbers lose their special, tragic character.

It's not a very newsworthy disaster, either, so after a while it even fades from TV news: no dramatic shots of oil gushing up from a broken well or birds coated with black tar. No sense of urgency here, just a big spreading tragedy. The experts only know that the banks are off the hook: they have been given tons of new money to help with mortgages. The fact that this money sits unused and that many banks have not even appointed managers to deal with desperate homeowners does not come to their attention. My Bank of America branch won't even talk to you about mortgages - they send you to a faceless office downtown where nobody knows you.

In such complex situations, it is healthy for somebody to just state the obvious before trying to develop cute, complicated theories. You don't look smart by stating the obvious: Duh! Everybody knows that. You won't get invited on the CNBC morning show. You knew what I'm going to say all along but perhaps you hadn't thought it through.

So here is an obvious statement: if you have just lost your house you are not likely to go buy a new TV set for a while. If you just moved your family into a cheap motel, you probably don't think about ordering new drapes for the living room; and if you also lost your job (as thousands of people continue to do every day) and now live in your car in some urban park, you won't be shopping for refrigerators, sofas and camcorders for a long, long time to come.

Since nobody can find you because you don't have an address any more, the statisticians won't be asking for your opinion about the economy, which may explain the puzzling discrepancies in the mysterious tables called "consumer sentiment," a figure that is now at a five-month low. This "obvious" fact may also account for the lack of any serious recovery; or the probability that the economy will not be very robust for a while, no matter how "stimulating" the climate gets in Washington around election time; it may explain the chill over the Chinese industry, which makes all the refrigerators, the sofas, the TVs, the drapes and the camcorders you used to buy when you had a house to put them in; and the uncertainty in Europe, which makes the machines China needs to make TVs, camcorders, drapes and sofas. So that uncertainty travels around the planet in opposite direction to the Earth's rotation and comes back to hit us from the east, because we used to supply lots of goods and services to Europe to make the machines, etc.

No wonder Mr. Bernanke finds that things are "unusually uncertain." At least he still has his sofa.

[ Watch video: view at YouTube or Download MP4. ]

Boing Boing Video proudly presents Markets of Britain, discovered by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz from the archives of a great and underappreciated documentary filmmaker named Lee Titt, who also never existed.

Earlier this week, we presented this Boing Boing Video interview with Popper and Serafinowicz about their "Look Around You" DVD, just been released in the USA. This film was presented at a recent launch event in Los Angeles, blogged previously on Boing Boing.

Mini emus!

Buy the DVD. Below, a trailer for the DVD produced by BBC America. The actual show is a lot weirder.

Via Peter Serafinowicz.

• Looking back at Look Around You with Popper and Serafinowicz ...
• Sci-tech educational parody show "Look Around You" now on DVD in the USA

This Saturday in San Francisco, the largest bicycle-powered music festival in the world takes place in Golden Gate Park's Speedway Meadow and throughout the city. Bike powered? Think Gilligan's Island. In Golden Gate Park, more than a dozen bands will play through a 2000 watt pedal-powered audio system and a variety of crazy party caravans will travel through the streets during the day and night. All of the infrastructure for the event is haulable via bicycle and no cars or trucks will be involved in staging the festival. My family will be attending, and we're especially excited to see our favorite San Francisco singer/songwriter Diana Gameros. We first heard Diana perform solo at Roosevelt Tamale Parlor, a very old and excellent tiny restaurant in San Francisco's Mission District. At Roosevelt's, Diana mostly performs traditional Latin music but in her own modern, soulful, and passionate style. Diana's original music is enchanting indie pop infused with her strong Latin heritage. Check out Diana and her band at noon on Saturday or on her MySpace page. Diana's tune "Para Papa," listenable in her MySpace player, is one of my favorites.

Diana Gameros (MySpace)

Bicycle Music Festival

Opening Saturday July 31 (tomorrow night): The Sea No Evil art show benefitting the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Above, a piece by Gary Baseman from the show. The donating artist list is pretty incredible.

The opening night event features Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and focus of Animal Planet TV series "Whale Wars," who will give an update on the state of affairs in the world's oceans.

The Crystal Method and artist-DJ Shepard Fairey will both perform sets.

(thanks, Gary Baseman)

• Waxahachie, Texas: "Art of the Secret Society" exhibit
• Esther Pearl Watson's paintings of UFOs "and such"

Last weekend*, I joined around 90,000 of my closest friends at the Twin Cities Flugtag in St. Paul. If you aren't familiar, Flugtag is an event that tests out the skyworthiness of home-built flying contraptions. For the most part, there's more of an emphasis on art and comedy than on effective engineering. Teams design their flying machines (and costumed skits) around a theme, they perform for the audience, and then push their craft off an elevated runway and (usually) directly into a major body of water below.

It's entertaining. I had a good time watching giant purple narwhals (narwhals!) and open caskets piloted by zombies crash into the Mississippi River. But what really made Flugtag post-worthy is the moment captured in the video above.

My husband called this before the flying even started. Walking around the "hangar" area, looking at the crafts before the show, he spotted what looked like an anorexic WW2 bomber on stilts. It wasn't the most elaborate craft. Or the most hilarious. But it was going to fly further than anything else, Baker predicted. Unlike some home-built aircraft, this thing actually had an airfoil.

Later, we found out that it also had controllable flaps. And a for-real-real pilot&mdashMajor Trouble, her band of Dirty Dixie drag queens took care of the entertainment portion—at the controls.

We'd already watched six or seven contraptions utterly fail to fly. We'd gotten used to a routine. The team pushes off. The team goes straight down. It is hard to describe the utter elation that swept the crowd when Major Trouble's plane came back up**. And flew. Really, truly flew. For a second, we all forgot that jet planes existed. For a second, we were all back at Kitty Hawk, in 1903, witnessing a previously unimagined miracle.

Major Trouble and the Dirty Dixies flew 207 feet before ditching in the Mississippi. They broke—by 12 feet—a Flugtag flying record that had stood for 10 years. Everything happens in the Midwest. You are missing out.

**Another thing it is hard to describe: The frustration that rippled through the crowd every time the RedBull announcers referred to the Mississippi River as "the ocean". This happened repeatedly. Guys, we get it, you're used to staging these things on the coast. But there's a freaking opposite bank, right over there. And the people on that side are rolling their eyes at you, too.

On the cover of the current issue of TIME: Aisha, an 18 year-old Afghan girl whose nose was cut off for "shaming" her in-laws. Her story blogged previously on Boing Boing here. The cover is sure to shock, and some criticize it as "Afghansploitation": an image used at a sensitive moment, to inspire support for endless war. (Thanks, Kristie LuStout)

Electronic musician Tettix just released A New Challenger, a remix album featuring tracks from his earlier T.K.O.E.P.. Alex Mauer, Derris-Kharlan, Disasterpeace, Hélas Techne and Minusbaby worked with him to create it.

How did it come together?

Well, it's a funny story.

Initially it was a project for Attractmode. Adam Robezolli over there contacted me about doing a shirt for Dragon Punch. He was going to get this guy Akutou to do the shirt, print it up, split the proceeds with me. I was totally down for that. Then he recommended maybe releasing an EP of Dragon Punch remixes to go with the shirt and had some remixers in mind. This was almost a year ago now.

That's an aeon in internet time!

Obviously things did not go according to plan. The shirt, it turns out, was a total creative block for me and I eventually gave up and told Adam it was too stressful to work a design job all day and then come home and try to design a shirt, so I was handing the reins back to him. Perhaps a shirt will one day be created, perhaps not. So it goes.

So you took over the remix project yourself?

I took over the remix project myself. Started contacting chiptunes musicians I respected about being involved. Decided it would be more fun to open up the entire album for remixing instead of Dragon Punch. I was surprised how responsive people were! Initially, it was still going to be called "Dragon Punch E.P." and was also going to feature the album version of Dragon Punch in addition to the remixes.

Did you get everyone involved you wanted?

I had the whole thing buttoned up and ready to release. And then minusbaby got back to me three weeks after I emailed him and wanted to remix Clothesline. Obviously, I wanted him involved so I decided to hold off the release. His sudden unexpected inclusion was also when I got the "A New Challenger!" idea. So what was once "Disasterpeace's Dragon Fist Rising Mix" became "Disasterpeace vs. Dragon Punch!" and so on. I wrote the interstitial tracks, which were a ton of fun. Might do an extended mix of Continue, too. And then rebuttoned the album up for release. I'm glad minusbaby was such a late-comer, I think the album concept is much stronger because of it. And his remix is sick.

So, somehow, this project started as a Dragon Punch t-shirt and ended up as a T.K.O.E.P. remix album.

Download A New Challenger free of charge at Tettix's website.