(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

While driving through Dallas, I stopped to visit the museum in the old Texas Book Depository building from which Lee Harvey Oswald took a shot (or two, or three) at John F. Kennedy. Two X marks have been etched into the asphalt, marking the locations where the president was hit. I was fascinated to see tourists running out into the road to have their pictures taken while standing on an X.

The Book Depository looks especially good to me in infra-red

The ruthlessly modern, official Kennedy memorial, by architect Philip Johnson, is located just a couple of blocks away, but relatively few people seem to go there, perhaps because they are more excited by the guilty thrill of an assassination site which shamelessly admits what it is.

Another possibility is that Johnson’s memorial is shunned because it looks like a giant urinal. (Just my opinion of course. YMMV.)

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The comments are down, but we’re working to get ‘em fixed as soon as possible! In the meantime, go and watch Dr. Who on BBC America! Exciting stuff.

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Ed Note: Boingboing’s current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker’s Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.

A dear friend of mine, who blogs under the name Supa Dupa Fresh, and I share a grim truth — we’ve both lost our spouses. One of the other things we have in common is an off-beat sense of humor. These two forces collide on her Fresh Widow blog, and especially, with her Fresh Widow (and Widower) Cards. She explains:

One night in my support group, S. said casually that he’d “left work early… I just pulled a widower card.” I thought about how often I’d done this in the months since LH died, but more about how I could make good use of some little advantage. All the handicaps I was living with… single (really, double) parenting, how impossible it was to go grocery shopping with a toddler, and how no one could see that anything was wrong. The side of me that is tempted to shoplift (but only cashmere or chocolate) was aroused.

I was always comfortable as an underachiever, but could I have some legitimate “cover” after surviving catastrophe? Something versatile? Something I could use every day?

And so the concept was born: Not as useful as a “get out of jail free” card, more powerful than a hall pass… it’s… it’s… The Widow Card!

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Boing Boing Video, Offworld, and Boing Boing Gadgets have been on the scene at the Global Game Jam in various cities around the world, and we’ll be bringing you some fun post-Jam documentary LOLs next week. For now, check out this meta Flickr photoset, which contains lots of sleepy developers, half-consumed energy drinks, and funny things people think up when they’re hyperconnected and under-slept — international dance-offs, for example.

Above, Boing Boing Video colleague Jolon Bankey is also organizing the Global Game Jam Costa Rica, and this is the live stream for CR. Pura Vida, guys!

Update: Here’s the link for their liveblogging — fun stuff afoot.

Below, Jolon writes:

Hey Xeni! We’re at the site of the Global Game Jam in Costa Rica, and all the teams are going strong! We have a few casualties curled up in a corner behind me, but for the most part people haven’t slept, or did so for 15 minutes sitting in front of their chairs before jerking awake and getting back to rocking their virtual world in the short time left.

With only 27 short sleepless hours ahead of them, everyone is surprisingly energized. We have had continuous communication with the other locations around the world via webcams and projectors everywhere, which has been a lot of fun. There have been Macarena dance-offs between Costa Rica and the rest of the world, we lost a contest with Brazil, but Scotland gave us a 10 for our efforts.

We polished off some giant tubs of Gallo Pinto and huevos revueltos earlier, and now people are just trying to push through with an unending stream of Sobe Adrenalin Rush (*cough* sponsors Thank you Sobe!)

-jgb 12.04.29 pm Saturday January 31st, 2009
Offices of Schematic, Costa Rica
PLaza Roble, Escazu, Costa Rica

Previously on Boing Boing:
* Global Game Jam has begun! (live video stream)
* Global Game Jam (48 hour videogame dev marathon) this weekend!

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Boing Boing reader Joe Sabia says he’s created the first ever interactive photo hunt on YouTube. “There are 30 levels to the game, recapping all the big nominees for the oscars. 64 videos in all. i made use of youtube’s annotations… thought you would enjoy.” The subject matter may or may not be something that interests you, but I loved this clever and effective use of a mass-market web service feature (annotations) for a purpose other than the one for which that feature was originally developed.

Start here.

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(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

Even this very humble shack in Louisiana looks mysteriously beautiful when the visible spectrum is blocked. If we had infra-red sunglasses, the world might appear a lot more pleasant than in its more usual shades of dull-brown, muddy-green, and dirt-gray.

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(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

My friend Richard Kadrey introduced me to infra-red photography. Sensors on digital cameras can detect infra-red, but normally are shielded from it by a protective filter that resides as a thin layer over the chip. You can hack a camera by removing the layer, but it is easier to buy a Fuji IS-1, which is infra-red-ready. If you use a lens filter that blocks the visible frequencies, the camera displays an image that consists of infra-red transposed into the visible spectrum.

Vegetation reflects almost all light below red, and thus appears “white.” Conversely, the upper atmosphere does not refract infra-red, and thus a blue sky appears “black.” An unexpected effect is that most fabric dyes reflect infra-red, so that a crowded sidewalk appears to be populated entirely by angelic people dressed in white.

During 2007 I drove across the country and took a bunch of infra-red photographs. The Southern states looked especially good, because they contain so much vegetation.

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Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets:

• Samsung shoved 32GBs into a single stick of RAM.

• We examined some multi-chromatic electromagnetic chart porn.

• Pixel art makes good (if illegible) book jackets.

• Brownlee was nostalgic for the days of Prodigy and the <s> emoticon.

• Swaying in the wind, sixteen fabric inflatable robots.

• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made out in the Macintosh Dating Game.

• We tried to formulate a question to ask sci-fi writers that would, fifty years from now, juxtapose the actual path of future technology with our own subconscious expectations of which way that path will wind. That won’t make a lot of sense, so just read the post.

• Beschizza broke rocks with a hammer made of engine parts.

• The BBC got punked into believing in a magical cell phone created by Oompa Loompas.

• We looked at some cool wallets made from cassette tapes.

• We argued bitterly about the merits of a Space Invaders watch that doesn’t actually play Space Invaders.

• Kittens rode a Roomba around the room.

• A clockwork trilobyte crawled out of the wreckage of the post-apocalypse.

• We jumped to our feet and applauded the world’s first vertical backflip on a Big Wheel.

And more besides. Come read us!

Link

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(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

Still on the topic of population and mortality (more or less), here is some light relief. I redraw the chart from a source that I found at www.graphjam.com.

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(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

To what extent do we feel overcrowded, as a species? I’m not talking about resources; just psychological factors.

To create this chart I turned to the CIA Factbook, where I looked up the populations of various nations and then divided this number into their land area (excluding lakes and rivers) to get the number of square feet available per person. I represented the results in squares that are all drawn to the same scale.

Of course if you are in Australia, where each resident has almost 4 million square feet to play with, you won’t make full use of your land ration, if only because most of it is desert. On the other hand, when I was in Australia I did feel intuitively aware that the country was, so to speak, empty. As soon as I drove out of an urban area, the emptiness was right there. Conversely, in Hong Kong, where citizens have barely more than 1,600 square feet each, everyone is intensely aware of being crammed into a very crowded place.

Personally I enjoy wilderness areas, but I wouldn’t claim that open spaces are essential for my mental health. I do, after all, still have an apartment in New York City containing just 350 square feet. The apartment next to mine, identical in size, used to be a home not only to a married couple, but also their young child.

I suspect that our romantic yearnings for “freedom to roam” may be just that: Romantic yearnings.

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