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Boing Boing
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Apple's autumn iPod harvest: hands-on (photo gallery)
As predicted last week in the Boing Boing agricultural almanac, Apple this week releases three new varieties of iPods for the fall crop. All three bear improvements over earlier generations of this familiar fruit, but some of the changes—including what's missing—may surprise you. Following are snapshots of the new iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, and iPod Touch, with taste-test notes. You can find them all in your local farmers markets soon, or order them now at ole Farmer Jobs' online apple store....
 
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The beauty and wonder of a squid's eyeball
Look at this squid's eye. Just look at it. See anything eerily familiar? Squid, along with the rest of the family Cephalopoda, haven't shared a common ancestor with us vertebrates in some 500 million years—long before the evolution of our camera-like eyes. And yet, there the cephalopods are, flagrantly swimming about with eyes that use a lens to project an image onto a retina. Call it Squid Eye for the Vertebrate Guy. So, how's it work? Convergent evolution, my friends. Convergent evolution. We happened to hit on similar solutions to the same problem of sight, even though the eyes of vertebrates and cephalopods evolved separately, in very different ways, at different times. Today, we can see that legacy in cephalopod and vertebrate fetal development. With vertebrates, the eyes grow on stalks, reaching out from the brain. In cephalopods, the eyes start as a clumping of cells on the surface of the skin and reach backwards, into the head, to make brain contact. Similar destinations. Very different road maps. This lovely illustration—featuring dissections of the head, funnel, mantle and eye of a Thaumatolampas diadema—comes from The Cephalopoda Part I: Oegopsida and Part II: Myopsida, Octopoda Atlas written in 1910 by zoologist Carl Chun following a German expedition to the Indian, Atlantic and Great Southern oceans. You can see more of Chun's detailed, passionate illustrations at the BibliOdyssey blog. Image: Some rights reserved by peacay...
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HOWTO make shotgun shell candles
Here's Instructables user Sunbanks's simple HOWTO for making candles out of discarded shotgun shells, just the thing for your William S Burroughs-reviving seance! Shotgun Shell Candles (via Make) Marine accused of exposing self, waving shotgun, shouting white ... Shotgun expert shows his stuff Shotgun shell shot glasses Fully Loaded chair made of shotgun shells Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Dice edition Gadgets Cheney shoots 78-year old lawyer with shotgun, story ... William Burroughs Shotgun painting at auction...
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Print and fold envelopes lined with Google satellite maps
Here's a service that takes Google maps satellite views and converts them into print-and-fold envelopes you can use for your correspondence, creating a kind of handsome, 21st-century stationery. MapEnvelope (via Make) Civil War mail art: envelope illustrations from mid-1800s - Boing ... Paper and envelopes that look like icons Peri Peri keychain emulates envelope tear-off strips ......
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Hipster dinosaurs
I find this site, full of coloring-book images of dinosaurs altered into pretentious cool kids, incredibly charming. Thanks to the awesome Ashley Stubblefield!...
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