Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
In 1972, Dr. Ediwn Land introduced the first one-step instant camera, the Polaroid SX-70. According to Charles and Ray Eames' short promotional documentary about the camera, embedded below, the SX-70 was designed from the beginning to topple "barriers between the photographer and his subject." It was, the Eames said, "a system of novelties.”
In the new issue of Smithsonian, Owen Edwards tells the history of the SX-70:
The genesis of the little wonder machine, the story goes, was that Land’s young daughter asked why she couldn’t see the vacation photos her father was taking “right now.” Polaroid was already a successful optical company; in 1947 Land and his engineers began producing cameras using peel-and-develop film, first black-and-white, then color. Sam Liggero, a chemist who spent several decades as a product developer at Polaroid, told me recently that Land had long envisioned an SX-70-type camera, involving a self-contained, one-step process with no fuss and no mess. Liggero describes Land as someone who “could look into the future and eloquently describe the intersection of science, technology and aesthetics.”
One point I agree with: it's a mistake to focus solely on Apple. Many, many Western technology companies work with Foxconn, and with factories where conditions are worse. From the January 25 NYT piece on Foxconn:
Foxconn Technology [is] China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung.
Let that sink in. Foxconn outputs nearly half of all the world's consumer electronics.
Few tech companies have taken the kinds of early steps Apple has to try and improve matters, and share information about the process.
And while Pogue doesn't explicitly address this point, I'll throw it out there: cheap overseas labor in rotten conditions with poor labor law standards are part of what keeps gadget prices where they are. If we mean what we say about wanting better lives for the men and women who make our consumer electronics, are we willing to change consumer culture, and pay more? I'm not optimistic.
What do you think? And is there *any* reality-based model that could lead to some of those manufacturing jobs coming back to the US (or, name your labor-friendly nation here) in our lifetimes? Again, I'm not optimistic.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un aims a rifle at the Sporting Bullet Factory, built in 1996 at the order of the North's late leader Kim Jong-il. The factory produces "sporting bullets" for developing military sports. Its exact location is undisclosed. Undated picture released by the North's KCNA news agency in Pyongyang, on February 23, 2012. Wonder what sort of computers those are, and what they're running? (REUTERS/KCNA)
No more hope. LA-based street artist Shepard Fairey today entered a guilty plea in his criminal case with the Associated Press. He's facing a maximum sentence of six months in prison. The criminal case concerns not the intellectual property dispute itself, but charges of "criminal contempt for destroying documents, manufacturing evidence and other misconduct" in the civil case, which was settled out of court with AP. — Xeni
Evening Standard: "A prominent Right-wing Republican sheriff in Pinal Country, Arizona, known for his conspicuous campaign against illegal immigrants, is accused by his gay Mexican lover of three years, Jose Orozco, of threatening to have him deported if he revealed their affair."
I have heard many of these lines, myself. Jenny Saldaña (Facebook | Web | Twitter) is a Dominican actor/writer/producer/speaker who is surviving breast cancer with a fierce sense of humor intact. In the video above, she re-enacts some of the many unfortunate things that presumably well-meaning women have said to her, during her experience with the disease. There's a cool interview with here here, from a few years back. Her new project is here. Jenny, you're awesome.
(via @gillyarcht, who is also a survivor, and also awesome)
Historically, people slept for four hours, woke up for a couple of hours, then fell back asleep for another four hours, according to historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech. In 2001, he "published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks."
His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
…
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".
On Thursday an El Paso County Commissioner, with a reputation for shouting down any efforts towards drug law reform, was was indicted by a federal grand jury for "conspiracy to distribute more than 110 pounds (50 kg) of cannabis."
[Willie Gandara Jr. has] been accused of conspiring to distribute 50 kg of weed. But if he were conspiring to distribute only 49 kg, his penalties would have been less severe. Since this would be Gandara's first offense, his prison sentence would have gone from no more than 20 years to no more than five, if convicted. Meanwhile, fines would have been capped at $250,000 per offense, not $1 million. You would think a county commissioner and drug warrior would know more about drug laws.
Unfortunately, the drug war's lack of logic doesn't end there. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug, which according to the DEA, means it has "high potential for abuse, have no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and there is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision." But both meth and PCP are Schedule II.
Our thanks to Shana Logic, one of the web's coolest indie shops. Everything there is 100 percent handmade or independently-designed. Plus, it's a small business so you're supporting artists. Shana Logic offers jewelry accessories, guys' apparel, tech gear and more: Take 10% off your entire order with the discount code BOINGY, or get free shipping on all orders over $75 to the USA and Canada.
Photojojo's iPhone Rangefinder case clips onto your iPhone, making it look like an iPhone inside a case that looks like a bit like a rangefinder. It's compatible with Photojojo's magnetic fisheye, wide-angle/macro and tele lenses: you can get it with a full set for $99. [via This Isn't Happiness]
[Video Link] Jeff Diehl made a great video of a his drive across the barren landscape of Mongolia, condensed to four minutes. It's a time-lapse with occasional real-time breaks and his comments. This is a nice way to present a travel video.
Experience the roadlessness, the bandits, the breakdowns, the yaks, and the camels, without ever having to figure out how to steer and shift a right-driving mini-car through some of the remotest land on the planet. And see it out the windshield just like we did.
I don’t typically do this anymore given my new job. But from time to time this will happen. But if you read The Wall Street Journal, you’d never know. Why’s that? Because they’re fuckheads who don’t credit actual sources of information.
The WSJ's omission is rude, for sure. How hard is it to begin a sentence with "First reported by MG Siegler at TechCrunch," or somesuch? Other venues, including Bloomberg, did exactly that. WSJ reporter Jessica Vascellaro's tweets also suggest that Siegler's post is how she knew about the story, after all.
But she didn't have to credit Siegler as her source of information because she got Apple on the record to tell her itself. She had a more direct source.
Siegler's scoop was fantastic, but getting it wasn't the news. Apple buying Chomp was the news. No-one owes us politeness, and hearing a story first doesn't make us part of the story. It gives us a first-mover advantage. Isn't that enough?
Russian sculptor Katya Malakhova created a set of Batman matrioshkes that -- judging from the description -- actually nest. I wonder if the ears are hollow?
In the tradition of The Shining re-cut to look like an uplifting comedy, comes this music video, which repurposes scenes from several movies—most prominently 2001: A Space Odyssey—to tell the story of a misunderstood computer that accidentally hurts the ones it loves.
It seemed like a fun challenge to take images that have acquired so much "baggage" over the years — like the glowering cyclops eye of HAL from 2001, which has become visual shorthand for "evil machine" — and try to attach completely opposite emotional associations to them. What if something like HAL wasn't evil at all, but just misunderstood in its intentions, like a puppy who plays too rough with its owner? That's exactly the image that Jascha's plaintive refrain in "Limited" put into my head. Remixing material from five very different films creates a necessarily impressionistic approach to telling a story, so maybe the story this video tells in your head isn't the same one that it tells in mine. Either way I hope it's a good one.
"The Price of Privacy: How local authorities spent £515m on CCTV in four years" is a new report from Britain's Big Brother Watch, and it documents how the skyrocketing expansion of Britain's police and local government surveillance has resulted in over 4,000 fewer patrolling police officers, less privacy, and no appreciable reduction in crime.
CCTV has been viewed by those controlling expenditure as a cheap
alternative to conventional policing, with no demonstrable equivalent
success in reducing crime.
The efficiency of CCTV varies hugely across the country, with cameras
regularly not working or turned off, footage being deleted before it can be
used and pictures of insufficient quality for court purposes.
Local authorities have spent an unprecedented amount of money to make
the United Kingdom the most watched nation of people anywhere in the
world. That amount of spending on CCTV is steadily increasing, with funds
being diverted from conventional policing budgets to pay for the new
technology.
CCTV serves as a costly placebo for many local authorities designed to
appease neighbourhoods suffering from anti-social behaviour problems.
As the number of CCTV cameras increases, so does the potential number of
people being watched and the number of council officers watching – with
worrying implications for personal privacy and data security.
The lack of enforceable regulation means that more intrusive use of CCTV –
for example, in public toilets, schools or with audio recording capability – can
only be challenged in the courts by way of judicial review.
Jillian York and Trevor Timm, writing for the EFF, explore the possibility that the Syrian government used satellite phone surveillance to pinpoint the locations of journalist Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London and French photographer Rémi Ochlik, who were murdered in Homs, Syria this week.
On Monday night, Colvin appeared on CNN, telling Anderson Cooper that “the Syrian army is shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.” Responding to Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s statement that he was not targeting civilians in the barrage of rocketfire raining on Homs, Colvin accused the regime of “murder” and said: “There are no military targets here…It's a complete and utter lie that they are only going after terrorists.” A few hours later, she was dead.
The Telegraph quoted Jean-Pierre Perrin, a journalist for the Paris-based Liberation newspaper who was with Colvin in Homs last week as saying: “The Syrian army issued orders to 'kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil'” and that the Syrian authorities were likely watching the CNN broadcast. The Telegraph then described how “[r]eporters working in Homs, which has been under siege since February 4, had become concerned in recent days that Syrian forces had ‘locked on’ to their satellite phone signals and attacked the buildings from which they were coming.”
Boing Boing's managing editor Rob, not Bob, but Rob, Beschizza speaks on the Russian television news network RT about Megaupload, ACTA, the global copyfight wars, and the high-flying hijinks of Kim Dotcom.
Craig Davis Pinson, a composer who is a Boston Conservatory student, writes in the liner notes for the video embedded above:
This is a set of variations written on the melody heard in the Youtube video Nyan Cat. It is an experiment, in which I tried to find the limits of how far I could transform the melody before it begins losing its identity. The theme is known as Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!, originally posted by username daniwellP on the Japanese video sharing website, Nico Nico Douga. The Nyan Cat phenomenom has become ingrained in popular culture, and amazes me both in its sheer absurdity and its freakishly colossal popularity. However, fascinating as they are to me, the origins of the theme are not played upon in this composition. Instead, I treated Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! as pure musical material from which to generate music. The motivation to use this theme came from my repeated viewings of the video, and slowly realizing that it is a strangely alluring melody. Therefore, this is my tribute to Nyan Cat. Credit goes to daniwell-p for creating this theme, prguitarman for creating the gif animation, and saraj00n for joining them. Theme used for non-commercial purposes as per daniwell-P's request.
On a large scale, the work is structured along a simple alternation pattern. The theme and its variations alternate, similarly to rondo form. However, the theme is progressively dissolved, meaning that each time it returns it contains less percentage of the source material. This chipping-away continues until there's nothing recognizable left. In the variation episodes, more tools are employed to change the essence of the theme, especially, pronounced changes of duration, texture, harmonic character, and of the intervallic makeup of the melody. Each of the variations has its own defined character, and they contrast sharply with one another in mood and technique. Despite of the contrast of its sections, the piece exploits a long-scale narrative arc, playing on the contrast between the theme's duration - which remains essentially consistent at each iteration - and the durations of the variation episodes, which seem to grow out of control as their proportions become subverted.
Annalee Newitz at io9: "What will happen if the state takes control of human reproduction? The answers could be weirder than you think — and might terrify pro-life politicians as much as pro-choice advocates. — Xeni
The wonderful science fiction writer David Marusek sez,
To promote my launch I am giving away two free Kindle ebooks containing several of my previously published short stories. Locked behind pay walls, these stories have been somewhat difficult to obtain (outside of pirate sites). My Morning Glory and other flashes of absurd science fiction is a mini-collection of flash stories first published by the British science journal, Nature, and She Was Good—She Was Funny is a short story about love and murder in the depths of an Alaskan winter. It first appeared in Playboy magazine. Both are kick-in-the-pants fun and will be free for the downloading from the Kindle store from February 23 through 27.
Marusek's The Wedding Party is one of the best sf stories I've ever read. It's tremendous to see his work online.
See also my review of Marusek's 2009 novel Mind Over Ship.
Right this minute, eleven accomplished creative professionals have
wedged themselves into a studio in Brooklyn, New York, and are in the
process of putting together the first issue of twenty-four magazine.
twenty-four is a quarterly publication for which each issue is
conceived, written, illustrated, designed, and produced in 24 hours.
The creation of the first issue began at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on
February 23, 2012 and will finish at 10 a.m. on February 24, at which
time PDFs of the planned 64-page magazine will be sent to the 100+
people who backed the project on Kickstarter. Print copies will follow
within a week. The first issue is 100% donation-funded and ad-free.
The first issue has the theme of "trust," which will be illustrated
and explored in fiction, poetry, articles, interviews, photo essays,
and drawings. In addition, the contributors are documenting their
creative process and soliciting ideas from the public by posting
photos, videos, and text to Twitter (using the hashtag #24mag),
Flickr,
Storify, YouTube, and
Tumblr.
In what has become an annual rite of spring, each April the U.S. government releases its Special 301 report - often referred to as the Piracy Watch List - which claims to identify countries with sub-standard intellectual property laws. Canada has appeared on this list for many years alongside dozens of countries. In fact, over 70% of the world's population is placed on the list and most African countries are not even considered for inclusion.
While the Canadian government has consistently rejected the U.S. list because it "basically lacks reliable and objective analysis", this year I teamed up with Public Knowledge to try to provide the U.S. Trade Representative Office with something a bit more reliable and objective. Public Knowledge will appear at a USTR hearing on Special 301 today. In addition, last week we participated in meetings at the U.S. Department of Commerce and USTR to defend current Canadian copyright law and the proposed reforms.
The full submission focuses on four main issues: how Canadian law provides adequate and effective protection, how enforcement is stronger than often claimed, why Canada is not a piracy haven, and why Bill C-11 does not harm the interests of rights holders (critics of Bill C-11 digital lock rules will likely think this is self-evident).
New in the Watchismo Vault collection, the $17,500 Devon Tread watches, which use a cunning system of belts and optical sensors to keep and display the time. No, I don't have $17.5K to drop on something like this, but if you asked me to imagine what a $17.5K watch should look like, it would be something much like this: "The exposed movement is a mesmerizing display of the patented interwoven system of conveyor belts. This series of belts includes critical elements that allow the optical recognition system to know every belt position at all times."
Jon Rosenberg, creator of the entirely demented Goats webcomic sez, "Just wanted to let you know that it looks like I'm going to be able to do a fourth Goats book, and I'm doing it without a publisher -- this one is going to be wholly funded by the readers themselves. The Goats Book IV Kickstarter met its fundraising goal only eighteen hours after it launched, which has made me a bit giddy. The money is nice, but the ability to do projects without big companies backing them is superb." (Thanks, Jon!)
— Cory
Carlos Bueno, author of a kids' book about understanding computers called Lauren Ipsum, describes what happens when the cadre of competing bots that infest Amazon's sales-database began to viciously fight with one another over pricing for his book. It's a damned weird story.
Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.
The internet has everything.
This would just be an interesting anecdote, except that bot activity also seems to affect books that, you know, actually exist. Last year I published my children's book about computer science, Lauren Ipsum. I set a price of $14.95 for the paperback edition and sales have been pretty good. Then last week I noticed a marketplace bot offering to sell it for $55.63. “Silly bots”, I thought to myself, “must be a bug”. After all, it's print-on-demand, so where would you get a new copy to sell?
Then it occured to me that all they have to do is buy a copy from Amazon, if anyone is ever foolish enough to buy from them, and reap a profit. Lazy evaluation, made flesh. Clever bots!
Then another bot piled on, and then one based in the UK. They started competing with each other on price. Pretty soon they were offering my book below the retail price, and trying to make up the difference on "shipping and handling". I was getting a bit worried.
Sidebar: Lauren Ipsum sounds so interesting, I've just ordered a copy to read to my daughter!
Last year I had 250 business cards printed up with :) printed on them and nothing else. Since then I've been finding handy uses for them: writing notes, flirting with girls on the bus, propping up the occasional table, whatever. A nearly-blank business card is a surprisingly useful thing to have around.
The best thing I've been using them for is to make meeting lots of people more interesting. I'm normally very nervous about meeting new people, I'm regularly thrust into intimidating situations, and I meet so many different kinds of people that it's often hard to come up with something to talk about immediately.
Now I ask them to play my game: I hand them a pen and one of these cards and ask them to complete the drawing. No time limit, no wrong answers, do whatever you want. You just have to give it back to me so I can take it home and scan it. Your reward when you're finished is that you get to see the whole collection of what other people have done. And once a couple of people have done one, that stack grows quickly.
I've been collecting these for a while (you can see the full collection on my blog), but last night I stumbled upon Sketch Tuesday (on Wednesday) at the 111 Minna Gallery where dozens of artists from local museums and elsewhere came to draw. This was a particularly fruitful evening for the game, and I've put all of the cards I collected after the jump.
Thanks to Christian, Willa, Tim, Paul, George, Rick, Mae, Kimberly, Jim, Andrew, Lonnie, Adam, Drew, Brandon, and whoever else did one of these for me!
A heartening development in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's ongoing effort to secure the Internet's timezone database, which was threatened when an astrology software company called Astrolabe claimed a copyright in the arrangement of the world's timezones. After EFF sought sanctions against the company's lawyers, the company dropped the suit, apologized, and signed a "covenant not to sue."
In a statement, Astrolabe said, "Astrolabe's lawsuit against Mr. Olson and Mr. Eggert was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no one's property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our Complaint. We deeply regret the disruption that our lawsuit caused for the volunteers who maintain the TZ database, and for Internet users."
[Willie Gandara Jr. has] been accused of conspiring to distribute 50 kg of weed. But if he were conspiring to distribute only 49 kg, his penalties would have been less severe. Since this would be Gandara's first offense, his prison sentence would have gone from no more than 20 years to no more than five, if convicted. Meanwhile, fines would have been capped at $250,000 per offense, not $1 million. You would think a county commissioner and drug warrior would know more about drug laws.
Posted by 
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
To promote my launch I am giving away two free Kindle ebooks containing several of my previously published short stories. Locked behind pay walls, these stories have been somewhat difficult to obtain (outside of pirate sites). 
Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
