Read an RPG Book in Public Week is an event that happens three times a year, during the weeks surrounding March 4th, July 27th, and October 1st (starting on the Sunday on or before, and ending on the Saturday on or after). During these weeks, roleplaying enthusiasts are encouraged to take their favorite RPG rulebooks out with them and read them in public — on the bus, in the coffee shop, at lunch, at the park, or anywhere (as long as it isn’t disruptive to work, school, church, or any other functions).
The point is to make the roleplaying hobby more visible, to get it “out of the basement” and into public areas where more people can see it. This will make others more aware of the hobby – some may ask you what your book is about, giving you the opportunity to explain the hobby to them. A few of those may be interested enough to try it themselves. Former gamers may see what you’re reading and think about the great times they used to have with roleplaying, and possibly even try it again.
[via Boing Boing]
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My favorite pranksters in the Fatlab (Free Art & Technology) visited Berlin for the Transmediale festival, during which they replicated a Google Street View car and toured around town filming skits like asking for directions and lurking in front of the Chinese embassy. Check out the site for a video of it in action and PDF instructions for building your own Street View car.
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Computer Engineer Barbie via Gizmodo…
This is actually wonderful. Barbie’s had 124 careers since 1959, ranging from Stewardess to Paratrooper. Today she gets her 125th: computer engineer. You can tell she’s smart ’cause she’s got glasses, and reads nothing but binary.
Barbie’s latest career move is also significant for being the first decided entirely by online vote. Though maybe it’s not so surprising that the internet community was especially inclined to see a Bluetooth-rocking geektastic Barbie.
“All the girls who imagine their futures through Barbie will learn that engineers – like girls – are free to explore in?nite possibilities, limited only by their imagination,” says Nora Lin, President, Society of Women Engineers. “As a computer engineer, Barbie will show girls that women can turn their ideas into realities that have a direct and positive impact on people’s everyday lives in this exciting and rewarding career.”
Thoughts? What Barbie would you like to see for kids to celebrate?
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With 87,000 bar fights a year in the UK, with a combined health care cost of over 2.5 million pounds per year, the British Design Council saw a need for better bar glassware. Design agency DesignBridge stepped up with these concepts. What do you think, readers? How would you redesign the classic pint glass to to make it safer, while keeping it glass? [via Core77]
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Artist Harold Hoy makes sculptures out of Erector girders.
The works of Harold Hoy have centered on the complex relationship between mankind and the natural world. Hoy’s current body of work is constructed of galvanized steel and pipe hanger material and is based partly on an erector set. He uses the child’s toy as a platform to work around larger issues of man’s predilection for claiming ownership of the natural world and our desire to manipulate and re-form it.
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Skynet Symphonic, music composed entirely of audio FX from the movie Terminator 2, Judgment Day. [via io9]
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Evan Roth at Free Art and Technology writes:
Welcome to GML week @fffffat! Graffiti Markup Language (GML) is a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags. Gestural graffiti motion data of a tag created in GML-supported software is saved as a text file with a “.GML” extension…. a new digital standard for tomorrow’s vandals.
FAT members have been hard at work standardizing various open source graffiti-related software packages, including Graffiti Analysis, Laser Tag and EyeWriter to be GML compliant.
Please stay tuned to FAT all this week as we publish new GML related projects each day. There will be multiple new free software releases, open data repositories, iphone apps, robots, guest bloggers and more. GML week is now officially open for business.
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The Engadget Show: Kindle etching and DIY adventures with Adafruit Industries. Some footage and a tour of the show at Adafruit, I hang out there quite a bit 
Josh writes -
If you’ll recall, some months ago we held a little competition for readers to submit artwork destined for laser-etching on the backsides of Amazon’s Kindle. After everyone voted on the top five out of the mountain of selections, we took the gaggle of readers down to our friends at Adafruit Industries (headed up by the lovely and delightful Limor Fried and Phil Torrone) for some time under the laser. While we were there getting our etch on with their massive laser, we convinced Limor and Phil to show off some of the other crazy kit they’ve got in the labs — and we’ve captured it all on film… er, video. Take a look at our excursion into the world of dynamic DIY’ing — we think you’ll like what you see.
Adafruit posted some additional photos of the etched Kindles here – and you can also view the Engadget show M4V here…
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These signs (stickers? graffiti?) use simple computer commands to address elements of the urban environment. Love that these can have both a positive or critical message. If only you could command-z IRL… [via @alexislloyd]
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Pretty much everyone has googled themselves to see what the internet has to say about them. However, if you’re particularly active on forums, blogs, twitter and so on, you’ll end up with so many hits you can barely process it. A web application called Personas created by MIT doctoral student Aaron Zinman attempts to generate a visual representation of those hits, creating a bar chart breaking the subject down by interest. At the same time, the project doesn’t merely create a pretty picture, it raises awareness of the capriciousness of algorithm-driven data mining.
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.
Try it on personas.media.mit.edu/.
Via
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