Alan Radecki is an aviation historian, a photographer, and probably one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet with regard to the life and lore and Mojave airport -- now America's first spaceport. When I was out at Mojave covering the SpaceShipOne launch for NPR, he generously served as a guide for me, my "Day to Day" producer Nihar Patel, and fellow shooter Jason DeFillippo. Alan drove us down desert dirt roads to some amazing airplane graveyards, and introduced us to incredible characters who live and work out there. More on that soon, on the radio show.

Alan took some great photos out there earlier this week, and has just published them online. He maintains a blog about the Mojave airport, and has a new book coming out -- Mojave Scrapbook -- about the site's rich aerospace and aviation history.

Link to Alan's latest batch of photos. This one's pretty magical. (Thanks, Wayne, and thanks Todd Lappin!)

This iPod was accidentally dropped into a bonfire -- the kicker is, it still works! And there's video to prove it. Link (via Engadget)

Larry Lessig's Web 2.0 presentation on Free Culture just got a long, heartfelt standing ovation here. Here's Weblogs, Inc's MP3 of the talk. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Is it just me, or does this CNN banner ad seem incredibly bizarre, and CNN's online game to "Pick the winner of the popular vote in each state" to be in profoundly bad taste? The winner gets a gigantic HDTV. It feels weird. I mean, since when are these things "Presidential Showdowns?" My people call 'em "Elections."

I agree with everything R. Crumb says in this audio file about old ethnic music and how much better it is than contemporary music. Link (Thanks, Ezra Friedman!)

Orrin Hatch's crazy, iPod-criminalizing INDUCE Act has been shelved -- for now. The combined efforts of tech companies, nerds, and grassroots organizers have stalled it, and Hatch has cancelled plans to introduce the bill today. The quote from the RIAA positively seethes with frustrated malevolence.

Hatch canceled plans Thursday to present the bill to the Judiciary Committee, and participants in the talks said there would likely be no movement on the proposal in the immediate future. Hatch has previously said he intended to pursue the legislation next session if a bill wasn't approved. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., is expected to take over as Judiciary chairman early next year.

The chief executive for the Recording Industry Association of America, Mitch Bainwol, acknowledged Thursday that negotiations need more time.

"So long as illegitimate peer-to-peer services hijack a positive technology and intentionally offload their legal liability to America's kids, legislation will be a priority for the creative community," Bainwol said.

I have only one thing to say to Mr Bainwol: Neener. Neener. Neener. Link

Legendary VC Bill Gurley gave a fantastic, biz-nerd-oriented talk about Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games today at the Web 2.0 conference -- a talk in which he laid out mindblowing stats about MMO use that have him slavering as a financier for the opportunity to throw money at these things. Weblogs, Inc. has his talk up as an MP3. Link

Michael sez: "[Here's a] clip from a British children's television show (apparently) that has more sexual innuendo than anything I've ever seen in my life."

Rod (to Jane): "Do you want to blow on my pipe while I'm twanging away?"

Jane: "Oh no Rod, I was blowing a lot with Roger last night. But would you like to play with my maracas?"

Zippy: "No, let's just pluck away with our twangers."

Bungle: "Yes, it doesn't matter what size your twanger is."

Zippy: "I've got a big red one."

George: "I've only got a tiny twanger. But it works well and I like to play with it."

Geoffrey (to viewers): "Well, have you got your twangers out? And remember, you can bounce your balls at the same time. If you haven't got any balls, ask a friend if you can play with his.

Link

UPDATE: Michael sez: From imdb: 'There are currently rumours doing the rounds that Rainbow was nearly axed due to an 'obscene' edition being made that contained a lot of sexual innuendo about balls, twangers, plucking and so forth, a clip of which was shown on a late-night Channel Four comedy show. In fact, this edition of Rainbow was never meant to be broadcast 'properly', it was an in-joke performed by the cast and crew for a Christmas party at the production studios. It has long been a tradition within the British television industry for the videotape editing department to produce 'Christmas shows' consisting of bloopers, X-rated moments and suchlike fare to be shown at the seasonal gatherings, and the 'adult' Rainbow was produced with that in mind.'

Some Mac enthusiasts with waaaaaay too much time, libido, and Photoshop on their hands have created an extensive (47+ pages) gallery of Apple-inspired softcore. Link (via Fleshbot)

WBAY TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin is running an AP article reporting that Bush has won the election, weeks before the election is to take place. (Click image for enlargement."

At this hour, President Bush has won re-election as president by a 47 percent to 43 percent margin in the popular vote nationwide. Ralph Nader has 1 percent of the vote nationwide. That's with 51 percent of the precincts reporting.

Link (Thanks, Ian Meyer!)

UPDATE: Satirista sez "AP is now saying the article was a "test article" (WTF?) that was "inadvertently" picked up by WBAY. Now, I've been a freelance writer/journalist for quite awhile, as have you, but I've never heard of writing "test articles" in advance, other than advance obituaries for celebrities. Have you? Furthermore, I Googled '"test article" journalism' and came up with nada."

And, now, if you go to the Link, the site says only " You have reached a page that is currently unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please use your browser's BACK button to return to the previous page." I hope they keep changing the page. It's funny!

UPDATE: From: michael@slavitch.com Subject: Site Suggestion - for boingboing Date: October 8, 2004 7:05:52 AM PDT To: doctorow@craphound.com, xeni@xeni.net, mark@well.com ----------------begin submit------------- email_name: Michael Slavitch sez: "Remember that TV station that posted the AP article about electing Bush one month early? I sent them a snarky letter, and got a rather elegant and thoughtful response.

"Go figger!"

Dear WBay Staff;

You've made your station a laughing stock, so I suggest explanation far more detailed than "our apologies", unless you want to be classified with Fox News as a propogandist joke.

------

From: Miller, Ted
Subject: Electing Bush

Hi, Michael. As soon as we learned about the article, we had it removed. Unfortunately, we're not able to post another story in its place, so we posted a correction on our Home and News page that has a higher prominence (on our site at least) than the original article which was on the web site for 35 minutes.

We use an automated system for Associated Press national news, politics, science, entertainment, etc. If you see how much news we have on the site, you'll understand why we use automation (I am a department of one). If we did not have this system, there would simply be too many gaps in how often the entire site is updated.

The Associated Press tests about 4 times a week for a month prior to an election to help TV stations and newspapers make sure their publishing systems are working properly (yes, I see the irony). The AP's numbers are completely random with every test; if this error happened yesterday or tomorrow it just as easily could have declared Senator John Kerry or even Ralph Nader the winner.

We are sorry for the mistake, but it was unintentional on everyone's part and we responded quickly to remove it.

Ted Miller
WBAY Web Manager

Yesterday, I caught a demo of Laszlo, a really bad-ass application development environment for the Web. Lazlo does was Java was supposed to do -- let you run desktop-app-like applications within a browser window. But Laszlo doesn't require any plugin on its own, or flaky, slow Java. Instead, the Laszlo compiler turns Lazlo code (which is written in very fast, flexible, human-readable XML) into Flash apps. Pretty much everyone has Flash installed, so users can run your apps without installing new software (but since the Lazlo code is compiled down to Flash, it could also be compiled down to something else -- IOW, if Macromedia gets to rank with you, you could compile your apps to Java, to C++, Mono or whatever).

But the big news is that Laszlo is now Free Software -- free as in beer and free as in speech, licensed under an open source license from compiler to server. To recap: I came for the eye candy, I stayed for the liberty. This is nice stuff. Link (Thanks, Tobias!)

"What Barry Says" is a beautiful Constructivist-esque animation critiquing US foreign policy and the "Project for the New American Century." It's a collaboration between young British designer Simon Robson and friend Barry McNamara, who provided the rant for Robson to visually riff on. Link to 25 MB Quicktime video (Thanks, Nick Philip!)

BoingBoing reader Micah at indymedia says:

A few minutes ago our host (Rackspace) in London received a federal order to turn over the hardware that hosts several Indymedia websites to the FBI.

Rackspace complied and handed the server over to the FBI, but they must have felt bad because they are building us a new server that will be online as soon as possible, oh and they apologized for the abruptness because they think that they are "required to comply with all federal orders of this nature". The servers hosted numerous local IMCs including Belgium and African imcs, Palestine, UK, Germany, and Brasil, Italy, Uruguay, Poland, Belgrade, Portugal, and more. We are unaware as to the reasons for this at this time. We suspect it has to do with an FBI request that we take down a post on the Nantes IMC that had a photo of some undercover Swiss police. They claimed there was threats and personal information, but there was nothing of the sort. The undercover police that were photographed on the page were photographing protesters. Rackspace is a US company, but have colocation in the UK where these servers are (err, were) located. So this is about Swiss police, on a French site, on a server in England, taken away by American federal police... can I be the first to say WTF?! Also on the IMC servers stolen by the FBI were a lot of icecast radio stations, the Indymedia PGP public keyring and BLAG (an Anti-corporate GNU/Linux distribution with a suite of media tools designed to be used to overthrow corporate control of information and technology through community action and free software... put out by the Brixton Linux Action Group). Rackspace has been asked by the EFF for a copy of the order, but Rackspace claims they dont know if they can give it up.

I have been in contact with [Rackspace's] regional director responsible for the federal order. He has stated that [he] can not provide any information regarding the order. I am going to follow up with our law enforcement liason to verify this.

Link

Last week I picked up the audiobook for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction to listen to during a long drive. I laughed so hard I nearly wrecked the car. When I got to my next stop, I rushed out and picked up the physical book, which is really a hell of an object: colorful, witty, and incredibly subversive in that it appropriates the iconography of USA Today (by way of Mad Magazine) to deliver nuanced, thoughtful, biting satire about the state of American democracy.

America (The Book) is the kind of thing I wish I'd had when I was about 20 years old -- a cross between Schoolhouse Rock and the political editorials in the NYT and Washington Post and the gonzo poltiical journalism of books like Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

Amazon has posted a (slightly lame) video intro to the book by Jon Stewart and a (very good!) interview between Stewart and an Amazon section editor -- it's a shame about the weird Windows DRM stream format, but they're worth checking out on your way to ordering the book. WMV Video Stream Link, WMA Audio Interview Stream (Thanks, Arlo!)

Drew sez, "My sister natalie (nataliedee.com) and myself have put together a site called "Get off the internet and vote", where we give away free merchandise to people who send in proof that they voted on november 2nd. I am pretty excited about a chance to use the internet for actual social change rather than entertainment. Not that it hasn't been done before, but it's the first time I have. enjoy!" Link (Thanks, Drew!)

I gave a talk this morning at Web 2.0 on copyright, called "Web 2.0 = AOL 1.0? How the forces of darkness are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to criminalize the Internet and you're not invited." It's online now as an MP3, thanks to Weblogs, Inc. Link

Here's a great animation produced by South Africans, telling the true story of a South African journalist who adopted a Creative Commons license and found herself collaborating with people all over the world, making money and changing society. 1.7MB Flash Link (Thanks, Redjade!)

Update: Alex sez, "I was really stoked to read this, even more excited after watching the film, and ready to tell the world about Thandi Mathobane, Journalist of the Future! The only problem is, she doesn't exist... Though you'd never know it, film is fictional. Here's the deal. That said, everything she does in this film is certainly possible now. Copyleft is definitely worldchanging for the developing world. But it does seem important to keep track of the difference between what we know and what we imagine....

DJ Danger Mouse, ex-Napster CEO Hank Berry, Morpehus CEO Michael Weiss and a guy from iTunes and another form a label did a great panel yesterday at Web 2.0 on the future of the music industry and the Internet. It was the first time I'd seen Danger Mouse in person, and it was an honor, especially given how much his Grey Album mashup of the Beatles and Jay-Z changed my life. Weblogs, Inc has the audio of the discussion online as an MP3. Link

Jeffrey Meldrum, an Idaho State University associate professor of anatomy and primatology who moonlights as a Bigfoot researcher, believes that the eruption of Mount St. Helens could result in some excellent Sasquatch footprint findings. From NCBuy Weird News:

"He says most of the ground in the area isn't soft enough to take a footprint, but a blanket of ash could provide a good medium. Meldrum owns more than 150 casts of mysterious ground tracks that fall somewhere between human feet and primate feet and says his study of them has convinced him that Sasquatch are real."

Link (via Fark)

A couple of guys have mad a tiny shotgun that goes on sale tomorrow.

The credit card-sized shotgun is a muzzleloader, meaning it doesn't use shotgun shells. The user has to measure out some gunpowder, pour it in each barrel, drop seven BBs in each barrel, and tamp in a small wad of paper. A knob on one end serves as a safety, and two buttons set into a hole in the body are the electrical triggers. Each barrel fires with a loud pop. "This is no more deadly than a .22," Teel said. "But the difference is you have multiple wounds, which means you'll try to get away quicker, and it will cause more pain. ... There will be more blood, which the cops will be able to see."

Link

"Track Down" is a 2000 movie about hacker Kevin Mitnick that was never released theatrically. Christopher Null reviews it in filmcritic.com.

The facts aside (and it's impossible to dispute the facts in Track Down, because there's no attempt to be accurate at all), Track Down is simply not a very good movie. Director Joe Chappelle has the unenviable task of helming this mess, having formerly directed a scant few films -- including Halloween 6 and Hellraiser 4 -- that couldn't have presented much of a challenge at all. With Track Down he must have found himself in a huge mess, stuck with a highly technical and convoluted plot and rising stars to coddle. You can almost hear him saying, "Ah, fuck it, let's just put a car chase in here."

Link

From time to time, Howard Lovy has posted brief items on his NanoBot blog about the relationship he sees between nanotechnology and Kabbalah. Now he's gone deep into the mystic for "Nanotech Angels," a Salon essay about how nano and Kabbalah are both "testament to the incomprehensible infinite."

"The mantra in the nanotech industry is to learn from the mistakes made in biotechnology and the public rejection of genetically modified organisms. Partly to blame was a "top-down" attitude taken by a scientific establishment that was much too self-important to bother with public attitudes and perceptions. So, consideration of "societal and ethical implications" is No. 1 on the nanotech industry's list. However, part of that process involves paying attention to the separate philosophical and religious societies in the world. Not the abstract "society" of a scientist's dream -- one that will listen to scientific explanations and reach "correct" conclusions based on the strength and logic of their arguments -- but the real society that's out there, the one that laughs at, or adores, Madonna and wears red strings, the one that crowds around old barns in rundown villages to gaze at a stain that they swear is the image of the original Madonna, the one that drops to its knees and faces Mecca five times a day, or faces toward Jerusalem every Friday night to welcome the bride of Shabbat."

Link (ad viewing required for free day pass)

Tim Bishop sez: "I was very surprised to read the bit on the Bird Flu on Boingboing today. I ran www.SARSWatch.org during the 2003 SARS outbreak, and I saw some pretty wild predictions.

"Epidemiologists have been studying this stuff for a little while, and have some pretty good models that might be worth explaining briefly.

"I started to write a response to the Boing Boing piece, but it got so long it turned into a blog piece." Link

Somebody put together an amazing video that plays all the fear-invoking phrases uttered by the speakers at the RNC. It's hypnotizing. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

Mark Hurst sez: This overlays a streetmap on an aerial photo of the Tower of London (and, presumably, with other cities as well). Move the mouse around to see the overlay move. Very cool hack. Link (via life with alacrity.)

Western civilization jumps the shark:

Rebecca Loos, Beckham's former personal assistant, who gained notoriety earlier this year when she alleged she had conducted an affair with the England captain, carried out the procedure on Five's reality show, The Farm. Viewers were shown explicit footage of Loos, who donned rubber gloves to arouse the animal before collecting around a third of a litre of semen in a flask. Having completed her task, Loos told her fellow contestants: "My arms are aching! It lasts for about 10 minutes and he starts thrusting really hard and then I grip!" Fellow farm hand Debbie McGee told her: "You must do it really well." Andrew Butler, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said... "It doesn't help to see Vanilla Ice jumping on the back of a pig and riding it around..."

Link (via Warren)

Link (Thanks, Wayne!)

Boo-yah! A 50mph shopping cart modded with a jet engine. "Its metal glows red hot at temperatures up to 600 degrees C, so [Andy Tyler] has to sit with his back to a heat shield. The microlight instructor, 35, built the gas and liquid fuel pulse jet from instructions off the internet." The nerds, they are my people. Link (Thanks, Kent)

Newsweek's Brian Braiker has a story out on the Creative Commons/Wired Magazine music CD project that debuted at the recent benefit concert in NYC:

The Beastie Boys, David Byrne and Brazilian pop legend Gilberto Gil will appear on a new CD along with 13 other artists next month--not exactly earth-shattering news. But what's unique about the disc is that diehard fans are not only likely to end up copying, remixing and swapping it online; they're actively encouraged to do so. The compilation, due out at month's end, is both a legal experiment and the opening salvo in a war against the music industry's zero-tolerance policy on file sharing. And if the folks behind it have it their way, both the artists and their fans will come out winners.

Link

Interesting Slate piece about the hyperefficient drug delivery mechanism known as a venti cappucino, and the forthcoming price hike from Starbucks. Link (thanks, Paul Boutin!)

Fleshbot has a clusterfuck of a post here, with all sorts of news related to sex and Sims. Nude patches, naked knockoff Sims, fan porn, and the like. Snip:

Now that there's a widely available nude patch for "The Sims 2" that removes the pixelated blur when your wee animated minions take a shower or jump in the hot tub—not to mention hundreds of add-on objects ranging from latex catsuits to high-tech sex chairs—we expect to start seeing a lot more hot and heavy foreplay scenes and WooHoo! sequences that don't leaving us feeling limp.

Link

Susannah Breslin, who once ran a popular blog called Reverse Cowgirl, disappeared with nary a trace from the blogosphere some time ago. She has returned with a new site that reflects a broader range of work with regard to both media and subject matter. Susannah's new site includes an excerpt from her forthcoming novel Porn Happy, and some really fine photographic work, like the shot here.

Link to Susannah's new thing. Welcome back! Chris Bishop did some nice work with illos and UI here.

David Calkins says,

The Robot Fighting League's 2004 National Championships are this Saturday and Sunday, October 9-10th, 2004! See the metallic stars of TV gather to fight it out to decide who's the champion - in robot weight classes up to 340 pounds. Thrill to the spectacle as robots fight only a few feet away from the bleachers!

Famous robots from TV competitions and regional matches across the country - including this spring's ROBOlympics - will fight it out in grand style in the place where it all started: Fort Mason. Robots will bash it out in our specially-built bulletproof robot fighting arena - so you can watch the carnage up close and personal that will lead to Number One! We're firing up the barbecue and chilling the kegs in preparation for the families that filled the bleachers during ROBOlympics.

Link to event details

Senators Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy's roundly criticized INDUCE Act, which would criminalize technologies seen as encouraging copyright infringement, goes to markup today in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. From here, it will be put in final form for vote. A wide array of consumer and tech advocacy groups sent letters to the committee yesterday to urge them not to move forward. The EFF placed this protest ad in Capitol Hill news publication The Hill: Link. Here's a link to Katie Dean's coverage in Wired News: Link