Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Roses are red, Frankenroses are blue.

The Japan Times reports that liquor distiller Suntory has successfully engineered a truly blue rose by inserting a gene from pansies. The company created a blue carnation using the same technology in 1995. Why'd they do it? Because they can. Link, with photos. (Thanks, Sid)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:30:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thousands volunteer to spy on fellow citizens

Time has good news for nosy, racist jerks: the Dept. of Homeland Security is enlisting 400,000 people to report on suspicious behavior in public areas.

After the [training] session in Little Rock, two newly initiated Highway Watch members sat down for the catered barbecue lunch. The truckers, who haul hazardous material across 48 states, explained how easy it is to spot "Islamics" on the road: just look for their turbans. Quite a few of them are truck drivers, says William Westfall of Van Buren, Ark. "I'll be honest. They know they're not welcome at truck stops. There's still a lot of animosity toward Islamics." Eddie Dean of Fort Smith, Ark., also has little doubt about his ability to identify Muslims: "You can tell where they're from. You can hear their accents. They're not real clean people."
That kind of prejudice is hard to undo, but it's a shame Beatty's slide show did not mention that in the U.S., it's almost always Sikhs who wear turbans, not Muslims. Last year a Sikh truck driver who was wearing a turban was shot twice while standing near his tractor trailer in Phoenix, Ariz. He survived the attack, which police are investigating as a hate crime.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:46:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Painters of Blight" show at Roq la Rue in Seattle

Seattle's Roq la Rue Gallery (2316 Second Avenue) is running a two-day exhibit on Friday, July 9, and Saturday, July 10, featuring the work of two dozen artists paying tribute to Thomas Kinkade and Jack T. Chick. (click on thumbnails for enlargements. Painting on left is by Jim Blanchard; painting on right is by Johnny Ryan).

As you probably know, Thomas Kinkade, the famous "Painter of Light," has made millions of dollars with his customized prints of day-glo cottages against backdrops of enchanted forests. He has a team of "Kinkade-trained Master Highlighters" who go over reproductions of his work with oil paint. For this show, artists Jim Blanchard, Kamala Dolphin-Kingsley, Robert Hardgrave, Claire Johnson, Charles Krafft, Pat Moriarity, Erin Norlin, Marion Peck, Benton Peugh, Robert Rini, Bonni Reid, Mark Ryden and Kipling West have highlighted pages from the Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light with Scripture: 2004 Deluxe Wall Calendar, in their own distinct styles.

And Jack T. Chick is the famous artist-publisher of a series of incendiary 3" x 5", 24-page religious comic book tracts. Loaded with scare tactics and jabs at "enemies" of Christianity, Chick's comics vividly depict the horrors of Hell for anyone who neglects to convert to Christianity. Since 1961 Chick has created 175 proselytizing tracts, which have had more than 500,000,000 copies published in over 100 languages worldwide. Artists Tom Bagley, David R. Drake, Jed Dunkerly, Nathan Eyring, Rod Filbrandt, Cliff Hare, David Lasky, Deborah F Lawrence, Eric Reynolds, Johnny Ryan and Kamilla White have each created work inspired by Chick. In contrast to the Kinkade artists, they worked with no specific assignment, and came up with equally diverse outcomes: David R. Drake reduced an entire tract to its minimum visual information, creating 23 individual tiles still closely correlated with the original, Eric Reynolds has painted an original portrait of the reclusive Jack T. Chick, and David Lasky will display the original art for an entire tract written by Jim Woodring intended to be traded for unwanted religious pamphlets.

No link, but you can find out more about Roq la Rue here.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:23:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

True surround sound

Audio engineers at UC Davis have developed a new technology that delivers motion-tracked binaural sound (MTB). It's an update on conventional binaural recording which uses microphones embedded in a dummy head to capture the "location" of sound in a room. One problem with conventional binaural recording is that the sound doesn't change when you move your head. For example, if you hear a recording of someone behind you and turn your head to face them, it still sounds like they're behind you.

"The new method records through multiple microphones (eight for voice, 16 for music) spaced around a head-sized ball or cylinder. The sound is played back through headphones with a small tracking device attached to the top to follow head movements. As you turn your head while listening, the system mixes sound from different microphones, reproducing what you would hear if you were in the room."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:28:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ISPs not liable for royalties, says Canada's Supreme Court

Canada's highest court has just ruled that ISPs cannot be forced to pay royalties on music downloaded by users:

In a unanimous 9-0 decision, the court ruled that although ISPs provide the hardware and technology, they aren't responsible for what people download. The court ruled that companies providing wide access to the web are "intermediaries" who are not bound by federal copyright legislation.

Link (Thanks, Michael)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:11:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shanghaied in Portland

My post about CIncinnati's abandoned subway reminded BB reader Colin Sheridan of Portland's Shanghai tunnels. During the 19th century, this was the real underbelly of the city. Sailors would get drunk, drugged, and dragged through the underground tunnels to the port where they'd be sold to a ship captain as slave labor. By the time the poor saps awoke, they were already at sea. These days, tours are available and, of course, there's even a Shanghai Tunnel bar. Link

Update: BB reader Mike says that Chuck Palahniuk's non-fiction book Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon "covers the tunnels and a bunch of other cool stuff to be found in, around, and under Portland."

Update: BB reader Jeff says "several people have called the tunnel tour operators written about in Fugitives and Refugees, and the conclusion is that the tours are not currently in operation because the building they used to use to enter the tunnels has been renovated and bought by somebody tunnel-unfriendly. They're looking for a new entrance."

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:59:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Art attack update

University of Buffalo professor Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, was charged yesterday with mail and wire fraud. As you may recall, Kurtz has been under investigation after he awoke to find his wife dead and called the police who discovered some biological materials related to Kurtz's latest art project. (See this post for background.) Robert Ferrell, chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health, was also charged for helping Kurtz obtain $256 worth of harmless bacteria. The absurdity continues. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:37:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Shirley talks about his new Gurdjieff book in Los Angeles, July 1

Author John Shirley will be at the Bodhi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles at 8585 Melrose Ave this Thursday July 1 at 7:30 pm till 9-ish, to talk about his book Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (Tarcher/Penguin). Here's an essay about Gurdjieff that John wrote for Fringe Ware Review.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:24:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japan's rent-a-puppy business

Sid sez: "Babies can't be far behind ... in Tokyo you now can rent the cute little dogs that are all the rage. About $15 will get you an hour of canine bonding, and for a heftier fee you can take one home for the night. All puppy necessities included. These same dogs usually sell for about $3,000-$5,000."

In Tokyo alone, the number of shops registered to rent out pets grew to 115 as of March, up from 17 just three years earlier.
Each person who rents a dog by the hour is given a leash, some tissues and a plastic bag - in case the pooch has to answer the call of nature. They also get strict instructions not to let the dogs run free, to keep them in the shade on hot summer days and refrain from giving them snacks.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:13:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Annotatable UK ID Card consultation

Mark sez, "As you may know in the UK, ID cards are being debated again. A document with a draft Bill has been produced and the public consultation process is now underway. I have taken this document and converted it into a Moveable Type blog, pretty much every parachraph in the document is linkable, commentable and trackbackable." Link (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:47:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickr adds Creative Commons licenses, OS X uploader

Flickr (Ludicorp's amazing, witty, easy photo-sharing/community service) has just added two spiffy new features: an uploader for OS X that works with iPhoto and a tool for automatically adding Creative Commons licenses to the photos you upload and share. (Disclosure: I'm on Ludicorp's advisory board) Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:46:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Down and Out wins Locus Award

This is so freaking cool: my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has won the Locus Award for Best First Novel of 2003. The Locus Award is based on a popular poll of readers of the trade mag, a larger group than even the Hugo voters, making it the largest beauty contest in the field. I couldn't be any happier: thanks everyone! Hope to see you at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, where the award will be presented. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Akihabara is geek sex paradise

The Japanese town of Akihabara has become a legendary gadget shopping destination. But this Japan Today story examines its odd brand of nerd sociology, in which fantasizing about sex is of far greater importance than actually having sex. Spotlight on girls named "Pudding," synthetic paramours, and the scarcity of 'no-pan' cafes -- in which miniskirted hottie waitresses going commando serve you rice cakes with a smile.

The area has undergone something of a makeover recently with posters and figures of animated beautiful girls plastered all over the place and the emergence of cafes and restaurants devoted to "cosplay," featuring girls dressed as animated heroes, maids, etc. Even a public area, such as the floor space of JR Akihabara station, has got into the act, with a 3-meter-round poster of the face of a beautiful girl appearing in an animation video. Kiichiro Morikawa, a professor at the Kuwasawa Design Research Institute, said, "An increasing number of animation goods and game shops have opened their doors and changed the area into an 'otaku' (geek) Mecca." Psychologists say these "otaku" or geeks are regressive, have poor social ability, and have never fully matured as adults. "Therefore, they are not good at communicating with others, cannot date real human beings, and instead adore an imaginary character," said one.

Link (Thanks, Steve)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:46:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod based foreign language phrasebook

Talking Panda is a new language translation app designed for the Apple iPod. Comes with over 300 common words and phrases of whichever language you want to speak. French, Spanish, and Japanese for $10 per language. RFID News editor John Wehr, who is helping out with the project, says "The fun thing is that the idea is so straightforward it could be used (or pre-installed?) with any portable player." Flash demo here, and website here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:15:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Fight Club"-branded office supplies, sort of

Weblogger Sean Bonner phonecammed a funny discovery in the laser-printable-label aisle at Staples today -- the "sample address" on the packaging for Avery #8293 is addressed to Brad Pitt's character in the movie Fight Club. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:25:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Five pounds of Silly Putty for $60

You can buy five pound chubs of Silly Putty from Binney & Smith for $60 plus shipping. Egg not included. (But you can buy 144 glow in the dark plastic eggs from the Oriental Trading Company for $5.) Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:36:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Kevin Sites dispatch from Iraq: Under Steel Rain

A new weblog dispatch from NBC correspondent and blogger Kevin Sites, about life in the militarized zone with the distinction of having been mortared more than any other in Iraq -- 400 times in the last three months

[S]oldiers aren't the only ones in danger. Civilian employees of Kellog. Brown and Root -- which provide many of the civilian services on base -- are also at risk. Many of the food service employees, mostly foreign workers from poor nations like the Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh; say theyre very frightened by the mortars. One says he sleeps on the ground pulling sandbags around him, but while the mortars haven't got him yet, the sand fleas have. He shows me the red bites on arms.
Four Philippine workers were killed at the largest Army supply base in Iraq last April when insurgent rockets hit their living quarters at Camp Anaconda. But those inside the camp aren't completely surrounded by hostility. At dusk in Guard Tower 7, soldiers watch Iraqi boys play soccer not more than a hundred yards away. Some Iraqi civilians even live in shacks right next to the massive walls surrounding the base.
"Hi Nora," one of the soldiers says, waving to a shy ten year old Iraqi girl popping her head out from behind a sheet that covers the opening to the mud and clapboard shack. "Hi Michael," she says in a high-pitched voice, waving then quickly ducking back inside.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:35:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoblogging London's Tube strike

The bloggers at London.Metblogs.com have been doing an admirable job of covering the subway strike in London. Link (Thanks, Sean)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:30:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lucas Arts makes a Make-A-Wish kids-with-leukemia game

A kid with leukemia worked with the Make A Wish foundation and Lucas Arts to produce a leukemia-themed kids-game.

The game he created is about fighting cancer, and it reflects Ben's own battle with leukemia. It takes place inside the body, on a playfield of mutating cells. The hero, a boy on a hovering skateboard, uses high-tech weapons to destroy these cells by collecting the seven shields that protect against common side effects of chemotherapy.
It's not easy to get the shields -- they're in the hands of monsters that have to be zapped. FireMonster guards the fever shield and hurls molten lava. VampMonster guards the bleeding shield and sends out vampire bats. Robarf guards the vomit shield "with big smelly green globs." And QBall, guardian of the hair-loss shield, shoots out billiard balls.

Link (Thanks, Adam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:46:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SENT gallery show opens in LA July 10

The gallery show for SENT, the phonecam art project I'm co-curating with Sean Bonner and Caryn Coleman of sixspace, opens Saturday July 10 in LA. Images from 25 invited artists, filmmakers, and celebs will debut alongside digitally-displayed images submitted by the public.

The SENT exhibition takes place in the "Brunette" Meeting Room on the fourth floor of the Standard Hotel Downtown LA, 550 South Flower Street. SENT will debut for public viewing at a reception from 7-10 pm on Saturday, July 10. The exhibit will be open for public viewing from Sunday, July 11 through Saturday July 17 from 12pm to 5pm daily. Admission is free of charge, and the project is sponsored in part by Motorola. Oh! and did I mention that the Downtown Standard now offers free WiFi throughout the hotel? Come all ye bloggers.

Details here. At left, two phonecam photos submitted by anonymous public participants.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:15:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

President Bush accidentally allowed to be interviewed by a real journalist

The President's handlers foolishly granted a Presidential interview (requires RealPlayer, interview starts about 20:40 into the stream) to a non-White House Press Corps journalist, Carole Coleman, the Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish public national television network. When she asked him pointed, pertinent questions, he became upset when his stock answers failed to satisfy her. An aide to the President later complained that Coleman had "overstepped the bounds of politeness."

Coleman is a mainstream European journalist who has conducted interviews with top officials from a number of countries - her January interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently solid enough to merit posting on the State Department's Web site.
Unfortunately, it appears that Coleman failed to receive the memo informing reporters that they are supposed to treat this president with kid gloves. Instead, she confronted him as any serious journalist would a world leader.
She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless "answers" that satisfy the White House press corps - at one point, he mumbled, "My job is to do my job" - she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.
The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman's questions and follow-ups - "Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?" the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.

Mark's note: I haven't been able to see the video interview, but I read the White House'stranscript of the interview, and I think the description above, by John Nichols of The Capital Times, is misleading. President Bush said more than just "My job is to do my job;" he said "My job is to do my job and make the decisions that I think are important for our country and for the world." And President Bush wasn't asking the interviewer to "go easy on him;" he was asking her to allow him to finish answering her questions. That said, Bush's answers weren't satisfactory. Link

Vidiot sez: The White House complained later that Coleman was disrespectful and didn't ask the "suggested question" about what Irish PM Ahern was wearing that day.

Coleman has responded to White House criticism, noting that she submitted her questions three days in advance.

Andrew sez: "Since I get on with RealPlayer about as well as a house on fire, I wasn't able to watch the link given. I have been pointed here, though; even assuming it's been, ah, tactfully clarified by a White House aide, the transcript is still pretty atrocious - the lines you quoted are still in.

The interview is also available as an MP3.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:04:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fast Company's new linking policy still broken

Fast Company has amended its atrocious linking policy, but the one they've put in its place is only slightly better.

Fast Company permits links to the Fastcompany.com Web site. However, Fast Company reserves the right to withdraw permission for any link and requests that you not link for any impermissible purpose or in a manner that suggests that Fast Company promotes or endorses your Web site.
Fastcompany.com does not allow framing of its Web site content.

The Web exists because there is no permission needed to create a link (and that includes a framing link). This is enshrined in the RFCs that defined the Web. It has been the guiding principle of the Web since the first page went online.

That permission-free world made the economy that Fast Company services possible. It is dangerous and irresponsible for Fast Company's lawyers to tell the lie to Fast Company's readers that there is a legitimate basis for asserting the right to control who may link to your website (you don't need a policy to tell people that links that create the fraudulent impression of an endorsement are illegal -- fraud is illegal even if you're not on notice about it).

This is a step in the right direction, but only a small one. The faxed-permission-form was ridiculous, but the real evil in it wasn't the ridiculousness, it was this damaging lie about permission being required for links.

I really hope that Fast Company acts like the heroes I know they can be here, changing their linking policy to something like:

The Web exists because no one has the right to grant or withhold permission for links. Fast Company exists because of the Web. Accordingly, we neither grant nor deny permission to link to our site, and urge you to do the same.

I would buy twenty FC subscriptions for twenty friends if they would do this. I'd settle for removing the linking policy entirely (but I wouldn't buy the subs). Link (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:08:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disabling autorun in Windows yields bliss

Endgadet's Phillip Torrone sez: "By default Windows will automatically look for a file called Autorun.inf on any CD you pop in to your system, we’ve always known this is a big security issue as there are a lot of spyware and viruses distributed on CDs, you read about this every week. In fact, Microsoft is even disabling this in their next security focused service pack. Add to that, record companies are adding Autorun software which won't allow Windows users to make MP3s from the CDs they've purchased. So in an effort to protect people from Spyware, viruses and other nasty things we're suggesting everyone disables autorun." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:00:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free MP3 of parrot-fronted deathmetal act HATEBEAK

Ladies, gentlemen, budgies: I present to you a free MP3 from the new album by HATEBEAK -- the world's only deathmetal band with an avian vocalist.

Link to Beak of Putrefaction MP3. Buy a clear vinyl 7" for $5 postage paid at this Link. (Thanks for hosting, Leonard Lin! And special thanks to Chris -- founder of Reptilian Records and manager of HATEBEAK's feathered frontman Waldo.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:59:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snapshots from the "other" Hollywood.

Here are the rest of the snapshots I took at a recent porn industry convention in Los Angeles. Shown here: an inflatable swimming pool full of disembodied plastic genitalia. This, by the way, was art. Link , and previous BoingBoing posts: 1, 2, 3

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:46:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Supreme court rules web porn is free speech

Today, America's highest court ruled that a law intended to punish child pornographers is an unconstitutional restriction for online free speech.

The high court divided 5-to-4 over a law passed in 1998, signed by then-President Clinton and now backed by the Bush administration. The majority said a lower court was correct to block the law from taking effect because it likely violates the First Amendment. The American Civil Liberties Union and other critics of the law said that it would restrict far too much material that adults may legally see and buy, the court said. "Today's ruling from the court demonstrates that there are many less restrictive ways to protect children without sacrificing communication intended for adults," said ACLU associate litigation director Ann Beeson in a statement. Beeson argued the case before the court in 2001 and again last March.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:35:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bayesian spam rumination: when word-frequency-histograms attack!

Ed Felten has posted an intriguing rumination on the possible failure modes of Bayesian spam-filtering -- filtering that uses word-frequency statistics to classify email as spam or ham. As Ed points out, Bayesian filters are trained by the spammers, who, by choosing the vocabulary of their messages carefully, can make messages containing certain words or phrases undeliverable on the Internet.

Now suppose a big spammer wanted to poison a particular word, so that messages containing that word would be (mis)classified as spam. The spammer could sprinkle the target word throughout the word salad in his outgoing spam messages. When users classified those messages as spam, the targeted word would develop a negative score in the users' Bayesian spam filters. Later, messages with the targeted word would likely be mistaken for spam.
This attack could even be carried out against a particular targeted user. By feeding that user a steady diet of spam (or pseudo-spam) containing the target word, a malicious person could build up a highly negative score for that word in the targeted user's filter.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BBC affirms Creative Archive in Charter Renewal plans

The BBC has submitted its Charter Renewal documents to the UK Government, outlining its plans for the next ten years. It's a long and comprehensive document, and most excitingly, it describes a free and open Creative Archive intended to provide Britons with access to the material in the BBC's vaults for free viewing, remixing and reuse.

Imagine being able to view and listen -- and even download and own -- extracts from the world's largest television and radio archive.
53% of internet users download content for their own compilations 55. For the first time, the BBC will open up its treasure chest of programmes to the public who own it and make its contents available to individuals and to families for learning, for creativity and for pleasure. Two-thirds of current and prospective broadband users say they are interested in the Creative Archive service.
The BBC Creative Archive will establish a pool of high-quality content which can be legally drawn on by collectors, enthusiasts, artists, musicians, students, teachers and many others, who can search and use this material non-commercially. And where exciting new works and products are made using this material, we will showcase them on BBC services.
Initially we will release factual material, beginning with extracts from natural history programmes. As demand grows, we are committed to extending the Creative Archive across all areas of our output.

1MB PDF Link

Update: Check out this quote from new BBC Director General Mark Thompson, from today's press conference: "We want to builld a digital world based on universal access, open standards and unencryption [sic?]. Encryption, subscription and other forms of digital exclusion lead to widespread welfare losses. They may have a role within the total broadcasting ecology, but the idea that they can successfully replace free-to-air public service broadcasting flies in the face both of economic theory and real-world experience." (Thanks, Adam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:16:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How Free Software won the hearts of hackers, capitalists, commies and academics

My friends Biella and Mako have written a good, short academic paper on how it is that "Free and Open Source Software" can be seen as tactically advantageous to big corporations, Starbucks-smashing anti-globalists, and liberal commons-oriented IP wonks.

While the money behind IBM's advertising machine makes their take on FOSS particularly visible, they hold no monopoly on the interpretation of FOSS's meaning and importance. This is evidenced by the extensive use of FOSS as an iconic tactic by leftist activists around the world. Also bearing a three letter acronym, the Independent Media Centers (IMC) are a socio-political project whose mission and spirit are completely contrary to the goals of a large corporation like IBM.

Link (Thanks, Biella!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:01:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scion of genius Imagineer posts on Slashdot?

Here's an amazing post on Slashdot from someone who claims his father designed many of the coolest widgets and gizmos in Disneyland:

Some of the Disneyland items he's made...
- Invented/installed the fireflys in Pirates of the Carribean
- Came up with putting the green-eyed rats at the end of Pirates as you go up back to ground level. We have a bunch of them at home and put them in windows and under the Christmas tree
- Invented the light flicker-ers that have been used at Dland for almost 30 years to make plain lightbulbs in opaque houseings look like they are flame
- Real-time population counter for Disneyland. Even went to the president's office and installed the LED display on his desk (prior to the popularization of "computer networks")

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:54:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to hack Blogger

Blogger has published an article on how to hack the service to add greater customization by tweaking its template vocabulary:

For instance, most of our default templates display archive links in a list. But really, the archive tags simply provide the names and URLs of all the archive files, and we can do whatever we want with them. Do you know how to make a pull-down menu in HTML? Think that might be a more efficient format for your three years of daily archives? Great! Move the archive tags out of the list and into a menu.

Link (via EvHead)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:51:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World texting record

A Singaporean woman has set a world record for mobile-phone texting, keying in the benchmark phrase (below) in 43.24 seconds, without the benefit of any predictive text utilities.

The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mac OSX Tiger: It's your birthday, get busy

BoingBoing pal Paul Boutin points us to the euphemism du jour for online porn, clipped from today's preview of the Mac Tiger browser with built-in RSS. Emphasis is mine.

"Go ahead and shop for birthday presents on the family Mac. No information about where you visit on the Web, personal information you enter or pages you visit are saved or cached."

Shop for birthday presents. Heh. What, is that like a "happy ending"? Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:58:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 28, 2004

New article on resveratrol: the red wine longevity supplement

sentdev sez: "Betterhumans has issued a report about resveratrol, the compound found in red wine that is responsibile for the so-called French Paradox-the fact that the fatty food-consuming French have low levels of heart disease. Consequently, resveratrol has been touted as the first true antiaging drug. Early clinical reports show that it may have a role in decreasing insulin levels and blood pressure, increasing good cholesterol, and extending lifespans to a degree normally achieved through calorie restricted diets. But as the report points out, the jury's still out on its long term effects." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:50:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Savetheipod.com

Pho list co-founder John Parres sends word of a new project organized by opponents of the INDUCE Act: Savetheipod.com. The site is a collaboration between online activism groups Click The Vote and DownhillBattle. John says:

The record and movies industries are pressuring Congress to pass a bill this week that will threaten the iPod and peer-to-peer networks. I just sent free faxes urging my reps in Congress to stop the INDUCE Act. Convincing even a single Senator will force a real debate on the bill. The site contains more info about the INDUCE Act and a form to fax your Senators and Representative.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:16:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WSJ says abortions are good for the Republican party

This bizarre opinion piece by the Wall Street Journal's Larry J. Eastland argues that if there was no such thing as abortion, then there would be have been enough voting-age Democrats alive in 2000 to have given Gore the edge in the last election, because according to a survey, Democrats are more likely to have abortions than Republicans.

As liberals and Democrats fervently seek new voters and supporters through events, fund-raisers, direct mail and every other form of communication available, they achieve results minuscule in comparison to the loss of voters they suffer from their own abortion policies. It is a grim irony lost on them, for which they will pay dearly in elections to come.

Link (Thanks, Carlo!)

David sez: [The WSJ's editorial] is so full of bad reasoning and misuse of numbers, it's pretty meaningless. Lots of official-looking numbers and tables do not sound logic make. Here's the [Church of Critical Thinking's] analysis.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:59:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex bomb: erotic psy-ops throughout war history

Fascinating online collection of sexually-oriented wartime propaganda, from WWII through present. At left, a shelling report form from the Korean War, fortified with boobies to encourage more soldiers to carry and complete the form each day. I'm not in agreement with all of the editorializing, and I wish some of these historic images weren't displayed so small, ultra-compressed, and with the naughty bits blurred out -- but it's an amazing collection. Link (thanks, Philip)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:43:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toaster oven casemod

Great casemod: a PC built inside a toaster-oven. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:23:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unaired Jack Black pilot for download

Andy "Waxy" Baio has posted a video file of the unaired pilot of "Heat Vision and Jack," a Knight Rider-like spoof from 1999 produced by Ben Stiller and starring Jack Black and Owen Wilson. Link (Thanks, Waxy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:17:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

70s Eurofurnishings hall of shame

Eurobad 74 is a photocollection of "Europe's worst interiors of '74." Link (Thanks, MJ!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:22:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RSS reading coming to Safari

At today's worldwide developer conference, Steve Jobs announced that the next version of Safari will have an RSS reader built in. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:09:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Article about toymaker Marvin Glass

Here's an article about toymaker Marvin Glass (mentioned in my previous post), written by one of his former employees. "Working for Marvin Glass was wild... The atmosphere was a cross between James Bond & the Playboy mansion." Link

Note: the book, The Playmakers, has a long chapter about Marvin Glass.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:52:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secret Fun Spot: retro graphic and industrial art gallery

Secret Fun Spot is a treasure trove of mid 20th century advertising, toy, and industrial art. Be sure to check out the section on Marvin Glass, the genius game designer who made Ants in the Pants, Dynamite Shack, Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots, Gnip Gnop, Hands Down, Haunted House, Lite Brite, Odd Ogg, Operation, Mouse Trap, Time Bomb, Tip-It, and Toss Across, among other masterpieces of primary-colored plastic. Mr. Glass, unknown to me until today, was responsible for shaping much of my appreciation for pop art. The site's design is fun, but I wish the pictures were bigger. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:45:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Ashcroft-themed smut video contest

Nerve is running a contest for John Ashcroft-themed amateur porn. Celebrity judges Moby, Ted Hope, and John Cameron Mitchell will pick from 15 finalists whose work is now online for your smut-tastic viewing pleasure -- titles include 1-800-4.D.O.J-S+M and The Passion of John Ashcroft. Too bad Nerve decided to post all the vids in WMV only. Some critics argue the format is nearly as restrictive as the policies of the man at whom this contest pokes fun. Link to FB item.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:34:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Surreal road sign art project

A group of artists in Lyon, France are installing fake, but beautifully designed and built, road signs. Link (Via The Cartoonist)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:29:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cincinnati's Secret Subway

I just spent the weekend in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1925, construction in Cincinnati began on a state-of-the-art subway system for the rapidly expanding city. Three years later, money ran out and the seven miles of completed subway were abandoned. Since then, this surreal underworld has faded into the city's secret history, with awareness peaking every so often when a new plan for the tunnels is proposed: a fall-out shelter, a wind tunnel for the university's engineering students, a venue for a music festival. Back in high school, several of my friends accessed the cavernous stations for a few exciting evenings of urban spelunking. Now though, legit tours are occasionally offered. According to this recent piece on NPR's All Things Considered, the waiting list is 2,000 people long. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:10:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evolved antenna designs

This antenna (and many others on the linked page) was evolved by NASA using a genetic algorithm. While highly effective, its design is counter-intuitive.

First, there is the potential of needing less power. Antenna ST5-3-10 achieves high gain (2-4dB) across a wider range of elevation angles. This allows a broader range of angles over which maximum data throughput can be achieved. Also, less power from the solar array and batteries may be required.
Second, the evolved antenna does not require a matching network nor a phasing circuit, removing two steps in design and fabrication of the antenna. A trivial transmission line may be used for the match on the flight antenna, but simulation results suggest that one is not required.
Third, the evolved antenna has more uniform coverage in that it has a uniform pattern with small ripples in the elevations of greatest interest (between 40 and 80 degrees). This allows for reliable performance as elevation angle relative to the ground changes.

Link (Thanks, zogby!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:51:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tolk1en in hackerish

F3ll0wsh1p of teh R1ng: the classic Tolkien translated into hacker 1337-speak.

[At Bilbo's 111th Birthday]
Merry: "Omg, I pwn"
Pippin: "Sif, I pwn"
**Rocket goes off
Gandalf: "Pwned!"

Link (Thanks, Fez!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:41:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

An overseas view of INDUCE act (aka INSANE act)

Ernest Miller says:

Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz, a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan, has a different perspective on the INDUCE Act. Of course, there must be something wrong with his translation, as Dr. Lenz believes the Act is named the "Intentionally Stopping Advances of the Nation's Economy," or INSANE Act. Anyway, he is not nearly as opposed to it as many commentators here in the US:
First of all, while it might be true that this legislation will help to make America a technological backwater, with iPods and the Internet being illegal under this legislation, depending on your perspective, that is actually a good thing. It helps Europe and Japan in the global competition with America to have strange American laws strangling research and development there, so from an international point of vie w, I can only say "go ahead".
Lenz notes that the law could use some improvements, and if these improvements were made, then, "it might be better than the Japanese approach of just arresting creators and sort out later if it was actually illegal what they did."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:15:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

News of early Iraq Power handover broken by a blog

Biggest story ever broken by a blog? It appears that blogger/BBC News correspondent/landmine survivor Stuart Hughes was first to break news of the early handover of authority in Iraq today, on his weblog. Link. Hughes was in Istanbul at the Bush/Blair press conference after that, and filed live text and audblog coverage here: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:54:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Meshcube: transparent tiny meshing access-point

The Meshcube is a tiny, kit-built meshing WiFi (802.11a/b/g) access-point. It's kinda pricey (€199 and up), but it looks great and meshing networks are genuinely cool. Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:16:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to sign up for ABC RSS without selling your soul

ABC News has a good selection of RSS feeds. Unfortunately, in order to reach the page where they're listed, you have to click through this disgusting, clueless, multi-page "agreement" (excerpted below):

4. CONFIDENTIALITY. During the term of this Agreement, you may have access to some of ABC News's nonpublic technical or product information ("Proprietary Information"). Such Proprietary Information shall belong solely to ABC News. You shall not, except as expressly authorized by this Agreement, use or disclose Proprietary Information without the prior written consent of ABC News unless such Proprietary Information becomes part of the public domain through no fault of yours. You agree (i) not to disclose any Proprietary Information to any third parties, (ii) not to use any Proprietary Information for any purposes except carrying out your rights and responsibilities under this Agreement, and (iii) to keep the Proprietary Information confidential using the same degree of care you use to protect your own confidential information, as long as you use at least reasonable care. You acknowledge and agree that due to the unique nature of ABC News's Proprietary Information, there can be no adequate remedy at law for any breach of its obligations hereunder, that any such breach may allow you or third parties to unfairly compete with ABC News resulting in irreparable harm to ABC News, and therefore, that upon any such breach or threat thereof, ABC News shall be entitled to injunctions and other appropriate equitable relief in addition to whatever remedies it may have at law.
5. PUBLICITY. ABC News may use your name in releases, customer lists, marketing and other materials. Unless otherwise expressly permitted by ABC News, you may not create, publish, or distribute any items that reference ABC News without first submitting those items to ABC News and receiving ABC News's written consent.

Get that? You have to sign onto a confidentiality agreement in order to read the RSS feeds at ABC! And sign away your publicity rights. And agree not to forward on any ABC stories without permission.

Luckily, I didn't agree to any of that. I deleted everything in the text field containing the agreement, substituted some rude text of my own and found myself a nice list of all of ABC's XML feeds. If you'd like to directly subscribe to ABC's RSS without selling your soul by clicking through their one-sided adhesion contract, here are the direct URLs:

World Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/world_rss20.xml
US Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/us_rss20.xml
Politics Headines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/politics_rss20.xml
MONEYScope Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/business_rss20.xml
Scitech Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/scitech_rss20.xml
Health Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/health_rss20.xml
Entertainment Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/entertainment_rss20.xml
Travel Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/travel_rss20.xml
Relationships Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/relationships_rss20.xml
WNT Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/wnt_rss20.xml
20/20 Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/2020_rss20.xml
Primetime Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/primetime_rss20.xml
Nightline Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/nightline_rss20.xml
This Week Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/thisweek_rss20.xml
GMA Headlines: http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/gma_rss20.xml

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:13:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Top-ten untranslateables

Here's a great census of the ten most untranslateable foreign and English words:

1 plenipotentiary
2 gobbledegook
3 serendipity
4 poppycock
5 googly
6 Spam
7 whimsy
8 bumf
9 chuffed
10 kitsch

Link (Thanks, Gerry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:42:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Inverse graffiti: use cleaning solvent, not paint

A Yorkshire graffiti writer has come up with a really clever writing technique: he lays a template with his tag over a dirty wall, then sprays the template with solvent, leaving behind a clean patch bearing his message. It's inverse graffiti -- he's selectively cleaning up dirty walls.

He decided to commercialize the process and tagged Smirnoff ads in Leeds, and that's where he got into trouble: he's been ordered to "remove" the clean patch of wall and get rid of the ad. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:40:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 27, 2004

I got two turntables and a right to vote

My DJ buddy Michael Donaldson, aka Q-Burns Abstract Message, pauses his world tour for a show in L.A. this Wednesday -- and shares word on a project he's organizing with fellow turntablists and fans thereof:

As you know I'm politically concerned... I've been trying to figure out how, in my pseudo-lofty position of DJ dude, I can make some difference. After much thought, I've come up with an idea.
I've collaborated with my friend Laurin Fedora to come up with a t-shirt design -- basically the word "VOTE!" in a replicated stencil. I'm having a number of these shirts made in different color combinations and then will wear one at each of my US DJ gigs from August until the election. I will also have photos of myself wearing a shirt on my web site (along with a concept explanation) and in any pictures that are used for magazines/flyers/etc.
The idea is this: I know that the age demographic that I am mainly playing to (people in their 20's) are traditionally the ones that do not vote. This is a shame as the actions of the current administration will resonate strongly in their futures. I don't know if wearing a t-shirt with this design at my gigs will inspire any of these potential voters, but I can hope and have some optimism. Perhaps seeing a DJ in the supposedly apolitical world of dance music caring enough to send a message will inspire a few people.... I wanted to keep the message non-partisan... the simple message of 'VOTE!' also states my feelings accurately: if more of us voted, then maybe we will find more candidates who truly represent us.
I'm wondering if you'd like a piece of the action. Laurin is offering to make more of these shirts. Would you like one (or more than one in different colors)? (...) Laurin has donated his time to help me with this. I'm paying for the materials for the shirts that he's making for me. If you'd like a shirt or shirts, I would need you to pay for the cost of the materials as well. It's not much ... just the price of the shirt and an extra buck for the ink and screening. Let me know as soon as possible if you'd be interested in this as Laurin wants to screen a bunch in the next day or two.

If you're interested, e-mail Mr. Q-Burns at this Link. Send name, e-mail address, shirt size, and color preference -- someone will respond with cost, payment, and shipping details.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:01:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Congress looks out for Hollywood

A piece by my Wired News colleague Katie Dean about a slew of legislation passed on Capitol Hill this week that could outlaw a range of devices and software, and impose severe penalties on anyone caught trading files. Link. And Andrew Orlowski offers an astute analysis in The Register, which begins: "It may soon be possible to carry around an AK-47 assault rifle and an iPod with you down the street - and be arrested for carrying the iPod." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:53:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PopSci design competition: "personal occupation kits"

Among the finalists in the 2004 Popular Science design competition:

"The horrendous situation in Iraq highlights the thorny challenge of liberation by a superpower: The liberated don't necessarily buy into the program...In this concept, autonomous surveillance systems watch foreign news broadcasts for any foment of anti-American sentiment to identify areas in need of intervention. The geographical coordinates are beamed to airplanes carrying the smart bombs; the bombs explode and shower, not explosives, but small, flower-like packages containing assorted bits of Americana."

Link (Thanks, Brian Wong!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:20:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coffee Geeks: brewing gadgetry, DIY roasters, Cuban contraband

Responding to a previous post about current guestblogger Christopher Coppola's favorite road trip espresso maker, several readers point us to CoffeeGeek. The site lists reviews for such a mindbogglingly vast array of coffee-related gadgets, I get a contact buzz just clicking on it. Link. (Thanks, Josh, and everyone else!)

Reader Bill says, "If you're talking coffee, you should check out this website, from a tiny California company that supports do-it-yourselfers that roast their own beans. While there are some hazards - like smoking the place out, you can use 1970's air popcorn poppers, woks, or actual home roasters. Apparently, coffee goes stale in 4-6 days, so most of us have been drinking stale coffee without even knowing it." Link

And reader Simon Fodden in Canada says, "For those closer to the middle of the landmass, the Merchants of Green Coffee offer similar products, plus (oh, the forbidden fruit!) really good coffee from Cuba."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:19:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ukiyo-e remix art

A BoingBoing art exclusive: the latest watercolor from Moira Hahn, whose illustration work has appeared in Time, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. About this remix of classic ukiyo-e art -- which depicts a backyard conflict between cats and birds -- Moira says "Kuniyoshi was an influence, the primary Edo period ukiyo-e artist who regularly depicted cats... [but] most of this composition has been changed from various Edo and Meiji sources. The original figures were human, patterns were different, and there was no owl." [Ed. note: Dude, is that Waldo from Hatebeak on the far left?]

Link to full-size jpeg image (about 500k)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:11:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iraq torture memo primer

A helpful timeline and overview of government memoranda related to the mistreatment and torture of wartime detainees, from the New York Times . Link bypassing NYT's dumb-as-a-stump site registration

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:58:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Three-year-old commentator on pre-movie (c) warnings

James took his three-year-old to see Shrek 2 yesterday and when the copyright warning came on at the start of the picture, his son responded appropriately.

I went to see Shrek 2 today with my son Edward who is 3 next week. He was very excited, he loves going to the cinema. However when the copyright warning about taking pictures and video appeared (the one that Cory Doctorow takes pictures of) he said in a very loud voice "blah blah blah blah", which had me in hysterics if no one else.

Link (Thanks, James!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:02:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Perfect pint apparatus

A student has invented a device for hand-free, no-attention "perfect pint" pouring that will empty a can of lager into a pint sleeve without your having to take your eyes off the football. Link (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

1895 8th grade test

Here's a Grade Eight test from a 1895 Kansas schoolhouse:

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono,super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd,cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane,fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced andindicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Link (via Kottke)

Update: If you're thinking of writing to me about Snopes saying that this is false, go re-read the Snopes entry. They don't dispute the authenticity of this document, only the conclusions drawn in the modern introductory text.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:14:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Translating my DRM talk into Japanese via a Wiki

Here's a project by Matt from M@blog to collaboratively translate my DRM talk into Japanese, using a Wiki. Link (Thanks, Andreas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:54:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kim Jong Il's fanatical food fetish

Todays' LA Times has a great story about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's obsession with expensive, exotic food. He sends trusted aides all over the world to buy morsels of gourmet food and eats sashimi carved from live fish, while his subjects dig in the dirt with sticks looking for bugs to eat.

Kim insists that his rice be cooked over a wood fire using trees cut from Mt. Paektu, a legendary peak on the Chinese border, according to a memoir written by a nephew of Kim's first wife. He has his own private source of spring water. Female workers inspect each grain of rice to ensure that they meet the leader's standards. (The nephew, Lee Young Nam, who defected to South Korea in the 1980s, was assassinated by suspected North Korean agents in Seoul in 1997.)
Kim's refined palate is not merely a matter of idle gossip, but the subject of serious study by political psychologists trying to understand the North Korean leadership.
Jerrold M. Post, a psychiatrist who founded and was the longtime director of the CIA's Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, says Kim's obsession with eating the best food comes from being the son of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, revered by the propaganda machine as a god-like figure. Post diagnosed the younger Kim as a malign narcissist in large part based on information about his eating habits.
"This is how you prepare food and water for a god."

The former South Korean Ambassador says this is a good thing: "Kim Jong Il loves life. He is a drinker, a womanizer, a gourmet. To start a war requires an ascetic like Hitler who doesn't care if he lives or dies. But I can't see Kim starting a war that he will surely lose." Link

Ian sez: This is an update to the post on Kim Jong Il's food fanaticism. The link is an excerpt from a book by his former cook (who is now hiding) and it's very interesting. It's from the Jan/Feb issue of Atlantic Monthly, and I believe it's the only part of the book available in English.

Eric sez: " In reference to your post on Boing Boing about Kim Jong-il and his food habits, I thought you might as enjoy these:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK21Dg03.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK22Dg01.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DK23Dg01.html

I read those a few weeks back and I figured those were what this post was going to link to.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:06:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FastCompany's terrible linking policy

FastCompany -- the tech magazine for the new economy -- has a spectacularily clueless policy on linking, in which they expect people who want to link to their site to fax a permission form to their legal department! Imagine if this were enforceable: the Web that Fast Company has built its business upon would crumble into a billion individuated and unlinked pages.

Due to the large volume of requests we receive, we do not have a reciprocal linking program. However, if you like, you may link to us at no cost. This option requires the execution by you and Fastcompany.com of a one-page Web-linking agreement. Please download and sign the agreement and fax it to 617-738-5055, attn: G+J legal, Fastcompany.com. As soon as you receive back the agreement signed on behalf of Fastcompany.com, you may begin linking to our content.

Here's some of the spectacularily clueless "linking agreement" Fast Company thinks it can force linkers to sign off on:

For good and valuable consideration, effective upon the duly authorized signatures of Owner and G+J below (the "Effective Date"), G+J hereby grants to Owner a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to create a hyperlink from the Linking Site to Inc.com from the Effective Date, unless and until such permission is terminated by G+J upon notice to Owner, subject to the following terms and conditions.
Owner hereby represents and warrants that: (i) any content displayed on the Linking Site shall not infringe upon or misappropriate any third party intellectual property or other proprietary rights, shall not invade any third party rights of privacy or publicity, shall be free from any libelous or obscene material, shall be accurate, and shall not otherwise violate any applicable law, regulation or non-proprietary third party right; (ii) the Linking Site does not and will not contain any harmful software code or viruses; (iii) Owner has duly registered the domain name of the Linking Site with all applicable authorities and possesses all rights necessary to use such domain name; and (iv) Owner shall use its best efforts, including any and all then-available technology, to prevent Internet users from downloading any content from Inc.com.

There are a lot of stupid organizations that have policies like this, but very few of them have the close relationship to the Web that FC has. The disturbing thing here is that FC's credibity as an authority on the Web lends credence to this bizarre and damaging idea of needing permission to link. Link (Thanks, Jordon!)

Update: Well, this is the kind of slow company that Fast Company has put itself in: Sellotape forbids linking to their site -- this is the kind of idiotic behaviour that Fast Company should be able to sell itself on: "Buy a sub to Fast Company and learn how not to be as stupid as Sellotape!" (Thanks, Reyhan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:55:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hinterland Who's Who: short nature films from my childhood

"Hinterland Who's Who" was a series of 1960s-era short nature films that used to air as interstitial material on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation when I was a kid, maddeningly interrupting the cartoons. There was a very funny sendup of these on an old SCTV episode, but other than that, I haven't seen these since I was a small child. Until today. Now they're all on the Web. Now, the Internet is complete. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:46:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 25, 2004

Senate approves PIRATE act

Today, the U.S. Senate approved a proposal that will give federal prosecutors the power to file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers -- penalties include fines up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The so-called Pirate Act has raised alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer companies, who have been eyeing the recording industry's lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. They worry that the Department of Justice could be even more ambitious.
Senate leaders scheduled Friday's vote under a procedure that required the unanimous consent of all members present. Now the Pirate Act, along with a related bill that criminalizes using camcorders in movie theaters, will be forwarded to the House of Representatives for approval.

Link to Declan McCullagh's story on News.com.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:47:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sound wave refrigerator

Ice cream tycoons Ben and Jerry gave Penn State $600,000 to develop a refrigerator that uses sound waves instead of freon to keep food cool. The mad-scientist outsider-art design is excellent.Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:13:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mr. Vice President has a potty mouth

As Jess Hemerly writes on A Great Notion , "There's something about the way this Washington Post article is written that makes the entire scenario 3,000 times funnier." From the article:

"On Tuesday, Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

'Fuck yourself,' said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency."

...Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes."

Link to Washington Post article (free reg. required)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:06:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Simians, Cyborgs, and Gareth Branwyn

In 2000, longtime bOING bOING editor Gareth Branwyn underwent total hip replacement to help relieve the pain of severe degenerative arthritis. A quintessential happy mutant, Gar wrote a smart, funny, and poignant deconstruction of his reconstruction, accompanied by "get well" illustrations by designer Jim Leftwich.

"During the initial visit with my orthopedic surgeon, he brought in an implant for me to play with. It was a gorgeous, awe-inspiring piece of modern machinery - almost Zen-like in its shining simplicity and austere precision. The cementless implant technology my doctor's clinic uses was co-developed by them and has been implanted into thousands of patients. The description of the implant reads like something from a William Gibson novel. I now sport a Duroloc(r) 100 acetabular titanium cup with sintered titanium beads for in-bone growth adhesion. I have a bleeding-edge Marathon(r) polyethylene liner with irradiated cross-linked polymers for tighter bonding and longer wear rates. My Prodigy(r) brand stem has a 28mm cobalt-chrome head and a cobalt-chrome femoral component with sintered cobalt-chrome beading for bone in-growth fixation. Where 2001's HAL 9000 was fond of telling people that he was made at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois, I can now boast that part of me was manufactured by DePuy Industries of Warsaw, Indiana."

Just yesterday, Gar updated "Borg Like Me" with recent post-upgrade reflections. "Do cyborgs dream of bionic upgrades?" he asks. "Yes they do!" Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:47:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fun world statistics comparison site

A BB reader sez: "This is the world's biggest database for comparing statistics between countries. Sounds boring, sure- but check out the 'Mortality' stats. They've got World Health Organization stats on how people die all over the world - e.g. Austria has the highest per-capita rate of deaths resulting from "Falls involving ice-skates, skis, roller-skates or skateboards". Heaps of Japanese die of 'drowning and submersion in bath tub". Check out "struck by reptile". Amazing." Link

A BB reader sez: This crashes firefox and mozilla browsers. PLEASE warn your users before clicking.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:01:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reality TV Gilligan's Island

Boing Boing reader Zed says, "Someone's making a 'The Real Gilligan's Island,' a Gilligan's Island Reality TV show, promising 'situations drawn from the original series.'" Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:13:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alice in Wonderland pop-up book as a Flash app

Here's a BRILLIANT Flash adaptation of J. Otto Seibold's magnificent Alice in Wonderland Pop-Up Book. 872k Flash Link (Thanks, Roboto!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Wars/Office Space mashup

Office Space Wars is one of the funniest amateur video projects I've ever seen: it's a remake of Office Space, set in the Star Wars Universe, with Vader as the bad boss, Jar Jar as the stapler guy, and R2D2 as the bad printer.

Update: Erin, who was hosting this file, has been shut down by her ~~lame-ass~~ generous ISP (the ~~ironically~~ aptly named tera-byte.com). If you have a link to a more stable version of this movie (the filename is OfficeSpaceWars.wmv) mail it to me and I'll update the post

Update #2:Tera-byte was saving Erin from a huge-mongoose bandwidth bill, and one of their techs has posted the file on his personal site: 30MB WMV Link (Thanks, Emil, for hosting this!)

Update #3: For some reason, someone moved this link to point to the Michael Moore F-911 trailer in the middle of the night. Hardy har har. Anyway, it now appears to be pointing back to a mirror of the Office Space Wars short. Who knows if it'll last. Here's a mirror that Ari put up; here's another mirror, courtesy of Tian.

Update #4: Here's a torrent and here's a mirror of it -- thanks, Trousle! ,p> Update #5: Another mirror

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:25:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ESC-key creator dies

Bob Bemer, inventor of the escape key and co-inventor of ASCII has died of cancer at 84. Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P hits without radio airplay

Here's a chart of musicians getting significant "airplay" on the P2P nets, even though they're being ignored by the world's radio stations. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:38:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 24, 2004

Monty Python Black Knight model rocket

Stefan sez: "Xtreeem rocket nerd Bob Fortune builds a flying model of the luckless, limbless Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:28:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Death metal band with parrot as lead singer -- Hatebeak

The new album by HATEBEAK -- the world's only deathmetal band with an avian vocalist -- promises music so terrifying it will "make you vacate your bowels." Song titles inlcude Beak of Putrefaction and God of Empty Nest. "Hatebeak pecks your eyes out and assaults your ears in a flurry of pummeling riffs and grey feathers that leaves you lying in a pool of blood begging for more." Buy a clear vinyl 7" for $5 postage paid at this Link. (Thanks, Mara!)

Update: BoingBoing reader Justin reminds us that Judas Priest and/or Sony Music may not appreciate HATEBEAK's creative reappropriation of this album cover. Loukas points us to the fact that the band's logo was lifted from an album cover that blogger and SENT co-curator Sean Bonner designed for a Connecticut-based band named Hatebreed in which all members are human. And reader Jason gill says, "Don't forget this grindcore band who's lead vocalists are two pitbulls to go with your parrot metal!".

Update 2: BoingBoing reader Will says, "Naming the album 'Beak of Putrefaction' is probably also a nod to the grindcore band Carcass and their first album called 'Reek of Putrefaction."

Keep your beak glued to BoingBoing for an upcoming exclusive MP3 and interview with Waldo, the feathered frontman of HATEBEAK.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:41:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bizzare Spider-Man comic strip remixes

Link, click reload for a new one (about 20 total, some dumb and some sublime) (via Warren)

update: BB reader Eric Smith says, "I believe they are the remix work of Jay Pinkerton. His blog is fantastic (he writes for National Lampoon and other comedy outlets) - I highly recommend reading everything he has ever written. (the Ikea desk, the bad assss song, etc). He has done many other comic "things" over time - although I couldn't find any other Spiderman specific things on his site via Google. I suppose it is possible that he got them elsewhere, but I would say that they sound entirely like his sense of humor (and the fact that he does other comics as well makes me think that he is the source of these).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:26:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orrin Hatch criminalizes the iPod

With Orrin Hatch's nation-destroying Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act headed for law, EFF has decided to create a real example of just what kind of "piracy" Hatch is targetting. Here's EFF's hypothetical complaint against Apple (for making the iPod) C|Net (for reviewing the iPod), and Toshiba (for supplying hard drives for iPods). All three of these activities fall within the scope of activity that Hatch's bill seeks to end:

As detailed further in Professor Expert’s report, the iPod would have been much less attractive to consumers had it been incompatible with the music files downloaded from P2P networks and had it not allowed consumer-to-consumer transfers. Professor Expert’s report also makes it clear that the iPod, in turn, enhanced the attractiveness of P2P networks by offering iPod owners expansive storage capability and lightning-fast data transfer, allowing them to listen to any number of infringing music files when away from the computer.
Surveys conducted by Professor Expert establish that a majority of iPod owners have used at least some significant portion of their iPods to store and play infringing music files, whether derived from P2P networks or promiscuous hand-to-hand copying. Upon information and belief, Apple was certainly aware of this fact from its own internal marketing research.

Link (Thanks, Jason (and good work!))

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:29:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kerry's science and technology plan

Boing Boing pal Tom Kalil, former President Clinton's "point person" on science and technology, suggests we take a close look at John Kerry's just-announced sci/tech plan to accelerate innovation. Worth noting in the plan, Kalil says, are promises of "increased funding for research in bio, info and nanotechnology, and more spectrum for unlicensed uses and 'cognitive' radio."

From the document:

"George Bush has failed to lead on science, technology, and innovation. He has politicized or ignored scientific and technical advice. His budget plan cuts almost every area of research that is critical to our future economic growth. And during his tenure, America’s position as a leader in broadband Internet technology has eroded from 4th in the world to 10th in the world.

John Kerry’s plan will be paid for by accelerating the transition to digital television while ensuring that Americans continue to enjoy free, over-the-air television. This will provide wireless broadband for first responders, expand the spectrum that is available for unlicensed wireless broadband and also free up $30 billion of spectrum for public auction – paying for his investments in innovation."

Link to press release. Link to PDF of the plan.

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:16:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Antenna Design's Black Magician

I have a new article online at TheFeature.com about a 60-year-old ham radio head who may have revolutionized antenna design:

Rob Vincent couldn't let anything interfere with love, even interference itself. In 1995, the ham radio buff moved in to his girlfriend's small Rhode Island house to live happily ever after. But there was a hitch. Her small piece of property wasn't big enough for Vincent, his significant other, and the 140-foot antenna he needed to reach his wireless buddies around the world.

Dedicated to both his future wife and his hobby, Vincent spent nearly a decade designing the antenna now standing in his backyard. The 40-foot-high pole bests conventional antennas three times taller. This week, the inventor and his employer, the University of Rhode Island, are filing a patent on the technology...

"The people saying that I'm a snake oil salesman... will have to order a great big plate of crow very soon," Vincent says. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:53:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NDP supports bad Internet treaties

This is painful. I've been a New Democratic Party supporter all my life, and was proud to cast my absentee ballot for Olivia Chow in this year's Canadian Federal election -- and would love to see Jack Layton in the PM's seat.

That said, the NDP's tech policies are rotten. For one thing, they support WIPO's punishing Internet treaties. I hope that this is a matter of ignorance and not a well-thought-out, stable policy. I'd be happy to talk to any NDP policy person about these treaties, and why they're so poisonous to liberty.

The NDP endorsed the Committee's recommendations on swift ratification of the controversial WIPO Internet treaties, and even more surprisingly, it gave its approval to an extended licensing scheme for educational materials, despite the heated opposition from the education community.

FWIW, I think extended licensing -- where all material is considered to be covered under a blanket license once a certain minimum of rights-holders have opted in -- is a great idea. It keeps holdouts from stalling blanket license regimes that simplify re-use and distribution. Link (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:37:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni's MMS primer

On MSNBC, a quick primer I wrote on the (as-yet-unfulfilled) promise of MMS. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:23:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scriptable, Internet-controlled sex toys

I filed this story for Wired News today about one of the more interesting gadget demonstrations at this weekend's Erotica LA porn industry convention: remote-control, "scriptable" sex toys. Adult entertainment providers will soon sell celebrity-branded "scripts" for the devices (think: Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick, Ron Jeremy, and the like), which work like mobile phone ringtones but -- well-- then again, kinda different.

Using a two-way video, audio and text chat interface, expo attendees were invited to control Doc Johnson-branded iVibe pleasure devices being put to use by models at an undisclosed location, in various states of undress.
"The device control works both ways -- the person on each end controls the speed and rhythm of the device the other is using," explained High Joy President Amir Vatan, as one attendee cranked his remote partner's iVibe to warp-speed intensity. The Internet-enabled products will become publicly available before the end of 2004, and will later be integrated into an assortment of Web porn destinations.
"It's the ultimate in site stickiness," said Vatan. "For online adult providers, more interactivity means more traffic, and more traffic means more revenue."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:13:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoblogging 24 hours of music around the globe

Boing Boing pal Jean-Luc says,

For this year's "Music Day" (June 21, 2004), the French "Fete de la Musique" organization created a worldwide beautiful photoblog about what happens in music during this day on five continents. There are pics from Afghanistan, Zambia, Sudan, Bolivia and all around the world."

Link to "June 21: Like We Were There."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:55:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Best actual adult film title ever

Bodyslamming Anal Chiropractors out of the #1 spot in my list of all-time worst/best porn movie titles ever, this new gem: Crack Whores of the Tenderloin. Another fine title from the same filmmakers, Bongwater Butt Babes, is described on the production company's website as "a poignant relationship study in the spirit of Godard."Link (via Fleshbot). More fun: a list of 100 ridiculous titles here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:36:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lawsuits against White House stonewallers

The Associated Press wonders why it had to resort to filing suits against the Pentagon and Air Force in order to obtain President Bush's military service records, especially since the White House says they've already turned them over.

AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, told E&P [Editor & Publisher] the lawsuit is needed to get access to a portion of Bush's record that may offer more information than the paper files previously released. "The paper file may not be everything," he said. "It has been there a long while, it could conceivably be tampered with." Because the microfilm record has been in storage and "it can't be altered, that access to the microfilm would settle the matter," Tomlin added.

Link

Meanwhile, a watchdog group called Project on Government Oversight is suing Attorney General John Ashcroft for reclassifying certain documents pertaining to a translator who says she was bribed not to disclose information about a 9/11 coverup. (Reported previously in Boing Boing here and here) Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:06:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schneier: More police power = less security

Bruce Schneier's just published a fantastic editorial about how expanded police powers make us less secure:

The United States is admired throughout the world because of our freedoms and our liberties. The very rights that are being discussed within the halls of the Supreme Court are the rights that keep us all safe and secure. The more our fight against terrorism is conducted within the confines of law, the more it gives consideration to the principles of fair and open trial, due process and "innocent until proven guilty," the safer we all are.
Unchecked police and military power is a security threat -- just as important a threat as unchecked terrorism. There is no reason to sacrifice the former to obtain the latter, and there are very good reasons not to.

Link (Thanks, Bruce!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:19:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Presidential candidate ringtones

If your phone supports MP3s or WAVs as ringtones, you can download these clips of the three presedential candidates saying "I'm John Kerry and I approve this message," "I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message" and "I'm Ralph Nader, running for president and I approve this mess." Link (Thanks, PT!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ernest Miller savages Orrin Hatch's grotesque new law

Ernest Miller has posted a line-by-line, "obsessively detailed" critique of Orrin Hatch's introduction to the dumbfuck, nation-destroying new INDUCE Act, which makes it a crime to "induce infringement."

Such beliefs seem common among distributors of so-called peer-to-peer filesharing (“P2P”) software. ["So-called," indeed. Hatch isn't about define what P2P software is because it would end up including things like e-mail, IM, VoIP, HTTP and plenty of other internet protocols. P2P is how much of the internet works.] These programs are used mostly by children and college students – about half of their users are children. [You can say the same things about videogames, as well as other popular technologies like IM and SMS. It is frequently the case that the younger generation adopts new technologies sooner than older users.] Users of these programs routinely violate criminal laws relating to copyright infringement and pornography distribution. [You can say the same thing about plenty of internet protocols, such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and so on.] Criminal law defines “inducement” as “that which leads or tempts to the commission of crime.” [Luckily, not every temptation is a crime or there would be more people in jail than free.] Some P2P software appears to be the definition of criminal inducement captured in computer code. [Software is a tool. This is the same as saying that bolt-cutters and crowbars are inducements to burglary.]

Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:12:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MP candidates on the "Canadian DMCA"

With the Canadian election coming up in four days, Ray called up all the candidates in his riding and asked them what they thought of the Canadian version of the DMCA:

What I believe needs to happen is the creation of a new "industry model", one that understands that all music, programs, books, etc, will be distributed over the internet. What this means is that a huge infrastructure of advertisors, retailers, wholesalers, etc, are going to wither away and have to find new ways of making a living. Instead, modern technology will allow consumers and artists to interact directly. Until industry realizes that this is the new "rules of the game", they will be in the situation of King Canut trying to order the tide to not come in. Part of this realization will be the understanding that consumers simply will not pay the same price for a book, music, etc, that they download and print themselves off the internet that they would have to pay if they went to a physical store and made a purchase. And why should they? They have removed almost all the "middle-men" who previously had to do work to get it into their hands.

Link (Thanks, Ray!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:08:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DRM'ed Constitution: more primitive than the original

This DRM'ed ebook version of the US Constitution costs $3, and can only be printed twice per year. As John notes, "It would only take 7 years to get copies out to the 13 colonies. Even with the primitive means the colonists had, it only took a few months to distribute the constitution." Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tocando fondo en el Magic Kingdom

There's a collaborative project underway to translate my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom into Spanish. The core volunteers have put their efforts to date on a Wiki so that others can play along. Link (¡Gracias, Francisco!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:02:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Ugoff, new BK ad directed by Roman Coppola

Crispin Porter + Bogusky -- the same ad agency responsible for the much-blogged Burger King Subservient Chicken meme -- have created a new BK campaign that features a ubersnotty fictitious fashion designer named Ugoff. Part Sprockets, part Queer Eye, part Zoolander, part hamburger. The TV spot was directed by Roman Coppola, who also happens to be kin of our current guestblogging filmmaker Christopher Coppola. Score by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and Wes Anderson film soundtrack fame. Link to the website! of! Ugoff! with! videos! and! designer! pouches! (Thanks, Steve)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:58:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Where in Washington, D.C. is Rev. Sun Myung Moon?

BoingBoing reader Adam Rakunas says:

So, last March, a bunch of Congresscritters and religious leaders held a little ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building for Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, owner of the Washington Times, and an all-around peach of a guy with a messianic complex like you wouldn't believe. During said ceremony, Moon and his wife are wrapped in ermine robes and crowned by an Illinois Congressman. The video appeared on the Church's site, some blogs found it, it got yanked, and now John Gorenfeld, whose site tracks Moon, has the video and has cranked out a BitTorrent of it. They can take away our press, but they can't take away our Torrents!

Link to the Capitol Hill ceremony heralding Rev. Moon's "declaration of God's fatherland and the era of the peace kingdom, the realiziation of God-centered families, and true peace."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:20:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Christopher Coppola's road trip espresso machine

BoingBoing reader Nora read our current guestblogger's post about a super-rad mobile espresso maker that plugs in to your car's cigarette lighter. She was inspired to do some googlesleuthing, and says:

"I needed to find the Millennium Coffeebreak Car espresso maker that Christopher Coppola talked about. Wooden spoons from Italy, Coffee mug art from Alessandro Bartolozzi. Plus french presses, frothers and funnels. Espresso is a beautiful thing."

Playa lattes, ahoy! Link to Caffe Tucano

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:08:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Et tu, Comdex?

Yesterday, the mother of all pop music fests -- Lollapalooza -- was canceled. Today, the mother of all tech trade shows -- Comdex. Wow. Fans of Sonic Youth and Morrrissey who have a penchant for middleware schwag are double-bummed. Link (Thanks, Michael Slavitch)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:22:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex toy tech-art from discarded household gadgets

Ian Haig is an Australian ~~geek pervert~~ artist who makes wacky, futuristic sex toys from used tech stuff: discarded vacuum cleaners, food processors, and the like. Many of the passers-by who wandered into his booth at the recent Erotica LA expo assumed the devices were intended to be used. A scary prospect, given their appearance, but some people will get off to just about anything. Thankfully, Haig makes the devices for observation only. Think of it as socio-sexual nerdist commentary, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Just be grateful nobody's trying to plant one of these firmly up your cheeks.

I shot a couple of photographs of Mr. Haig and his "Futurotica" tools at Erotica LA: one, two.

Link to Haig's Futurotica website with image gallery and background. Link to Fleshbot's coverage.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:09:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Action figure war photography

Stefan Kirkl takes pictures of action figures that he's elaborately painted and posed, producing what looks like gripping battlefield photography. Link (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scratch-n-sniff postage stamps in New Zealand

BoingBoing reader Cliff Van Eaton of New Zealand says:

The New Zealand postal service just introduced a scratch n' sniff postage stamp (although they call it a scratch and "smell" stamp, since I guess they've decided us Kiwis don't "sniff"). It's a 45 cent stamp (the normal rate for sending a letter) that gives off the scent of New Zealand-bred magnolia when it's scratched.
The only draw back is that it's only available as part of a presentation pack of all 5 flower stamps. I've had a good go at a normal over-the-counter book of ten 45 cents stamps, and I'll I get is the faint aroma of offset lithography.

Link, scroll halfway down the page to find the special "smellies" gift pack.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:24:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space Invader Stickers

Super-cool Space Invader stickers with which to plaster your walls. Link (Thanks, Damon)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:20:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA squats and dumps on nation's libraries

As part of the antitrust settlement against the RIAA, the record labels are obliged to donate a large number of discs to public libraries. Rather than giving America's libraries decent music, the RIAA is dumping the worst deletes and cutouts in their warehouses, dumpsterloads of reeking liquid shit, and blaming it all on a computer error:

The Des Moines (Iowa) Public Library was on track to take the lead in redundancies, though the identification of the programming bug may come in time to avert what might have been a record overkill. Its crate of 2,647 CDs, due to arrive in the next couple weeks, was listed as containing 430 single-song discs -- 16 percent of the total -- of Whitney Houston singing "The Star Spangled Banner" at the 1991 Super Bowl, according to Steve Cox, of the Iowa State Library.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:20:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wordwide War Drive stats

The fourth World Wide War Drive has ended, and the resulting statistics include:

Unique networks in DB: 288,012
Networks with WEP: 91,050 (31.6%)
Networks without WEP: 146,688 (50.9%)
Networks WEP unknown: 50,274 (17.4%)
Networks with default SSID: 82,755 (28.7%)

link (Thanks, socalwug)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:12:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy 92nd, Turing!

Today would have been Alan Turing's 92nd bithday (if he hadn't been hounded to death by the British authorities who forced hormone treatments on him to "cure" his gayness). Turing invented modern computer science and is one of my all-time heros. Link (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monster truck

The world's largest truck is the Liebherr T 282B, used for hauling in the mining industry. At more than 24 feet tall and 47 feet long, the 224-ton monstrosity can still putt along at 40 miles per hour. New Scientist has published an interview with Francis Bartley, head of R&D for Liebherr:

"The first time I was in it at a mine, the driver started to drive away and actually ran into the back of a service truck. It seems we mashed it down to the ground. I saw someone yelling, but we didn't feel a thing."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:23:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Automated cutups of my DRM talk

Alan has created a tool that automatically spits out a machine-generated cutup of my DRM talk:

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Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's new quarter

The contest to design a commemorative quarter for this year's Canada Day was won by an 11-year-old from BC with this great, cartoony design. I think this is the best coin I've ever seen. Link (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fresno cops spying on peace groups

After a Fresno peace activist died in a donorcycle accident last year, his obit revealed that he was not, in fact, a peace activist -- he was a Sheriff's Deputy. So this weird accident revealed that the Fresno fuzz was paying its coppers to inflitrate local peace groups, a chilling bit of McCarthy-era totalitarianism.

Now the Fresno peace group and the ACLU have successfully pressured the state Attorney General to look into this.

Fresno County Sheriff Richard Pierce won't confirm or deny that Kilner was spying on Peace Fresno. But he said in a prepared statement that his department reserved the right to conduct surveillance as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.
Russell and other members say their group has nothing to do with terrorism and spends most of its time organizing a monthly antiwar protest at Shaw and Blackstone avenues, one of Fresno's busiest intersections.

Bullshit-registration-required Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:45:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photographers' bust card

Here's a great printable one-pager that describes what you're legally allowed to take pictures of, and what to do if someone tries to bust you for it.

148K PDF Link (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paper foldable eMac

Here's a printable cut-and-fold paper model of an eMac to go with all your other paper computers. 308k PDF Link (via Cult of Mac)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MP3: Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" played by school percussion ensemble

Lovely. I don't know much about this one, but I can tell you it's a school band covering Radiohead's "Paranoid Android." Kicking and squealing Gucci little piggy. Link to MP3 file.

Update: Boing Boing reader Brian says, "The ensemble playing is the UMass Front Percussion Ensemble. UMass has one of the best small-school drumlines in the country, and perhaps the best in the East."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:29:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Call for entries: artist-made karaoke videos

Paging William Hung...

CONTRABAND, STOWAWAY LOUNGE:ARTIST-MADE KARAOKE VIDEOS
For screening at ISEA2004 CRUISE AND LOS ANGELES FREEWAVES FESTIVAL
Deadline: July 26, 2004
We are soliciting short videos for a global karaoke jukebox on a ferry between Helsinki and Stockholm as part of ISEA2004 Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. Videos for CONTRABAND, STOWAWAY LOUNGE should re-invent the pop-cultural medium of karaoke. From Tokyo to Tallinn, the ubiquitous, democratic form of entertainment activates national identity, nostalgia, sentimentality, and glimmers of rock-stardom. Individual performances transform this generic format into ironic, campy, critical and individualized meanings. Erupting within the entertainment-industrial complex, these do-it-yourself appropriations recode the corporate into the personal. We invite artists to create musical video-dramas for the crooners of ISEA2004, and later, Los Angeles Freewaves Festival.
Videos the length of pop songs should be submitted with vocals-free music. Read along lyrics preferred. Midi files, if necessary, can be downloaded for free off the web.

For more info, e-mail this woman. (Thanks, Mara!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:22:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Supermen of Illinois

The photos from the Superman Festival in Metropolis, IL make it look like my kind of event. Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:55:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Should we eradicate mosquitos?

Interesting NYT piece about the environmental pluses and minuses of eradicating mosquitos.

Another value of mosquitoes, perverse to some, obvious to others, is that they "keep out the riffraff," meaning human beings. Concentrations of pests offer protection to wilderness areas. The tsetse fly, which causes livestock disease as well as human sleeping sickness, has kept humans away from some wildlife refuges and has been called "Africa's best conservationist." Of course, this view has been described by others as ecological imperialism.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni's tech report from "Erotica LA" adult trade show

The editor of Fleshbot dragged me to the Erotica Los Angeles convention this weekend to see if any geek news was hiding beneath the piles of neoprene genitalia and Paris Hilton DVDs. I met v14gr*a-spammers and gubernatorial porn stars. Took a bunch of snapshots, spotted a herd of Realdolls (shown at left) -- and I filed this report for Fleshbot. Link to full-size image at left. I'll be posting more snapshots from "the other Hollywood" soon.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:27:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Come work for EFF!

EFF is hiring! EFF is the best employer I've ever had -- including myself, when I was self-employed, and the company I helped found -- and it's hiring a new Membership Coordinator: the person in charge of satisfying current members and increasing membership. If this sounds like you, apply!

The Membership Coordinator reports to the Director of Development and is a key part of EFF's fundraising team. The MC is responsible for managing all contact with EFF's 12,000+ members, helping to develop strategies to grow the membership, processing all donations to EFF, mailing regular "thank-yous"and renewal notices to donors, ensuring an efficient donation system, managing the donation pages of the website, and responding to any issues donors may have. The MC also manages all aspects of EFF's online shop, including order fulfillment. Additional responsibilities include various marketing projects, including oversight of the design and printing of t-shirts, hats, stickers, brochures, and other materials. The MC also attends a number of commercial conferences each year, managing the EFF booth presence and speaking informally with conference attendees.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:23:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fantastical timepieces

The Wrist Fashion Blog has a stunning roundup of super-sexy new timepieces, including this melting Dali clock and a kitchen table surfaced with electroluminescent film that displays a digital readout of the time. Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:59:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I F*ED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A

Hollywood is full of odd, smiling creatures, and Dessarae Bradford is one of them. I met her at the Erotic LA convention this weekend -- I was wandering around in a daze shooting photos, escorted by the editor of Fleshbot. The self-published book I FU*KED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A*S is Ms. Bradford's purportedly autobiographical account of a colorful sexual encounter with the famed actor. She wouldn't talk details -- I think she wanted me to buy the book -- but the story includes strap-ons at least one dog. The number and position of asterisks in the title change from time to time, and evidently there's a fair amount of position-changing within the story itself. Snip from the book's promo site:

"In Sept. 2002, I fu**ed Alec Baldwin in his a** in a hot, sweaty, nasty sex romp. Read the story that will change lives. Be the first one on your block to have the nitty gritty about that night, that will be only told in my book. Grab the scoop before my story gets into the hands of the media, and they attemp to censor it. I had Alec Baldwin on all four's for me, and S/M was involved. Read the real story. Tell everyone you know about this site. Free Baldwin brothers, and family photos come with this book, and a free I FU**ED ALEC BALDWIN IN HIS A** bumper sticker too."

I'm not so sure that the "free Baldwin brothers" offer will go over big in this town -- you might say we've had our fill. Is Ms. Bradford's story true? I don't know, but don't believe everything you read at a porn convention.
Link to book website, "Blessed Adventure Publications." I shot some snapshots of Ms. Bradford, including the one at left: snapshots one, two. Link to Fleshbot's coverage.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:51:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory on Asimov's I, Robot

I wrote the cover story for this month's Wired Magazine, about Asimov's robot stories and the new I, Robot movie.

Yet Asimov's reductionist approach to human interaction may be his most lasting influence. His thinking is alive and well and likely filling your inbox at this moment with come-ons asking you to identify your friends and rate their "sexiness" on a scale of one to three. Today's social networking services like Friendster and Orkut collapse the subtle continuum of friendship and trust into a blunt equation that says, "So-and-so is indeed my friend," and "I trust so-and-so to see all my other 'friends.'" These systems demand that users configure their relationships in a way that's easily modeled in software. It reflects a mechanistic view of human interaction: "If Ann likes Bob and Bob hates Cindy, then Ann hates Cindy." The idea that we can take our social interactions and code them with an Asimovian algorithm ("allow no harm, obey all orders, protect yourself") is at odds with the messy, unpredictable world. The Internet succeeds because it is nondeterministic and unpredictable: The Net's underlying TCP/IP protocol makes no quality of service guarantees and promises nothing about the route a message will take or whether it will arrive.
This need for people to behave in a predictable, rational, measurable way recalls Mr. Spock's autistic inability to understand human emotion without counting dimples to discern happiness or frown lines to identify sorrow. It's likewise reminiscent of scientology, which uses quantitative charts of personality traits, such as "lack of accord" and "certainty," to help people become 100 percent happy, composed, and so on.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:19:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gallery of "Slow Down" signs painted by kids

J.T. sez: "Simon Mason, author of "The Secret Signals" and longtime numbers stations researcher, has compiled a page of the no-speeding signs made by the schoolchildren of Kingston upon Hull, hung below every speed limit sign in the city. There are roughly 100." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:55:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

USB keychain with cam and voice-corder

The LipStick 5in1 is a USB keychain drive with a built-in voice recorder and a digital camera that can also serve as a webcam. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:00:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roll-your-own Zelda

Zelda Classic is a faithful (modulo updated graphics) recreation of the original NES Legend of Zelda game. It includes an SDK for making your own Zelda foes, levels and quests. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYC pizza guide on iPod

Here's an iPod-based guide to the pizzerias of New York city, organised by borough. Link (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:43:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seizure dogs as assistance animals for epileptics

New research confirms the anaecdotal evidence of dogs accurately predicting epileptic seizures.

These dogs not only protect their charges from injuries, such as falling, but also seem to help kids deal with the daily struggle of epilepsy.
Nine of the 60 dogs in the study (15 per cent) were able to predict a seizure by licking, whimpering, or standing next to the child. These dogs were remarkably accurate - they predicted 80 per cent of seizures, with no false reports.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:32:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mobile phone antenna disguised as a churchtop crucifix

There are Euro companies that specialise in camouflaged cellular masts and antennae, as a sop to people who worry that these eyesores irradiate their children's gonads. One such firm is now manufacturing an antenna disguised as a crucifix, intended to go on the steeples of churches where they need really good mobile reception. Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoessay of the NYC commute

This photoessay, called "Commute," is a captivating collection of images from the morning commute in NYC. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:24:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Who owns recordings of numbers stations?

Interesting summary of a case where an indie label sued a major for copyright infringment, and where the indie is totally and utterly in the wrong.

Irdial is a tiny label that released a CD of intercepts from "numbers stations" -- the radio stations where a neutral voice recites mysterious numbers and codes, presumed to be part of the international espionage system.

WEA is the major label for Wilco, whose album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot samples the numbers stations recordings on Irdial's album.

Irdium sued WEA for copyright infringement -- in other words, they claimed that they owned the mysterious voices that float in the ether all around us at every hour of the day and night. They claimed that they, and not the spook who recited the words Yankee Hotel Foxtrot into his mic over and over again, were somehow the creators of the mysterious broadcast. Unfortunately, WEA settled instead of countersuing Irdium into a smoking heap of slag for proffering this notion that absolutely offends reason.

Joe Graz has some analysis on his blog:

They claim, first, that their recording is unique because of the radio interference that surrounds it, and that this interference gives them a copyright in the recording. Second, they edited the recording to make it more interesting. Third, they processed the recording to make it clearer . Each of these, they say, gives them exclusive rights in their recording.
I don't know UK copyright law very well, so I don't know whether this claim has more merit there. But under American law, Irdial probably would have lost had the case gone to trial. First, simply recording a radio broadcast does not give a person rights in the recording. A recording of a preexisting transmission does not have the requisite originality for copyrightability. Second, Irdial's editing may have been sufficient "selection and arrangement" to give rise to a copyright in the whole track, preventing wholesale verbatim copying. But from the description they give, there were no edits within the "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" sample; the sample Wilco used was an unedited slice of Irdial's source material, and thus Irdial's edits cannot have given rise to copyright in the sample. Finally, the equalization and processing. Irdial admits that the EQ was "to remove noise" – not for any creative purpose.

Link (via Copyfight)

Update: Christopher sez, "Despite their questionable copyright claims to numbers stations recordings, Irdial is not all bad. In the past they released much of their catalog under a "free" license, which to my untrained eye looks a lot like Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs. Hyperreal hosts a mirror of these files, including the numbers stations."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Translating my talk into Italian on a Wiki

Luca Lizzeri is working to translate my DRM talk into Italian -- there's a Wiki where you can contribute! Link (Thanks, Luca!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 21, 2004

A student's scarlet letter

A student at at a Japanese high school dozed off in class last week. As punishment, his teacher made him write an apology letter.... in his own blood. Later, the teacher confessed to the principal. It gets even stranger. According to the principal, quoted in this Reuters article, the other faculty in the room didn't notice when the boy was handed a box cutter. Apparently, they didn't see him cut his own finger open and start writing either. Even more suspicious is that the teacher will be back at work in a few days and neither the boy nor his parents has asked for a transfer into a different class. Link
UPDATE: BB reader Roy Berman says that he found an article about this in Japanese and translated it here. The comparison is interesting!

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:04:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gillmor: Sprint's attempt to de-camera cameraphones is silly

Dan Gillmor has written an insightful column about Sprint's announcement that it will soon sell camera-free Treo 600 camera phones. Sprint wants to satisfy customers fearful of internal corporate espionage, but Gillmor says resistance is futile:

I suppose it's always better to sell what the customer wants. But I have bad news for Sprint's worried customers: This won't help much, because the pace of technology means cameras will soon disappear from view, embedded in clothing and eyeglasses, not just phones.
Sprint's move highlights one more set of issues we have to confront in a world of digital information. Whether we're talking about photos or videos or documents or just about anything else that can be converted into zeroes and ones, we're entering a changed world.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:33:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SpaceShipOne blog, part 6: snapshots

Ground crew member Alan Radecki has posted his photos from the SS1 launch on his blog, here. Boing Boing pal Todd Lappin says, "I love this one (at left). It seems to capture so much of the backyard spirit of the adventure."

Reader eecue also photoblogged the scene at Mojave airport, and that's here. Plenty of news coverage and blog ruminations out there about today's launch -- the first-ever private manned space flight -- but this snip from a CNN story struck me as memorable:

[Scaled Composites co-founder Burt] Rutan mingled, talked and directed traffic with those who spent the night on the windy Mojave Desert floor across from the airstrip Sunday night. He saved one sign as a memento of the occasion: "SpaceShipOne; GovernmentZero".

Link, and link to previous BoingBoing post.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:24:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rotary-dial phone handset Bluetooth mod

For sale on eBay, an old rotary-dial phone handset, modified to act as a self-contained, battery-powered Bluetooth handset.

there is an access hole to charge and operation is via a single rocker at the base (see picture) this enables volume up and down for the ear piece aswell as for the ringer volume. I will include the manual for operation.

Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:47:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lauren Weinstein outwits Comedy Central's humiliation show

LVX23 sez: "Beware! You could be next! Net pundit & privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein was almost ensnared by the greedy talons of a Viacom/MTV "reality" charade. Thanks to some clever web research she was able to uncover the con and spare herself himself humiliation in front of a national audience."

"At first I found nothing again. But then I started working backwards from the contact phone numbers I had for the show's production staff. This time I hit pay dirt, and while the pages unscrolled on my screen a cold chill ran down my spine. As the recent, angry testimonials I had found recounted, with a matching of modus operandi that left no chance for error, the show on which I was about to appear was a fraud. Not really a debate at all, the show is actually a program for Comedy Central (yes, an MTV/Viacom network) called "Crossballs" -- and its sole purpose is the embarrassment and humiliation of the expert guests who are brought on expecting a legitimate discussion program."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:15:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

You are now required to give your name to police when asked to

Remember our March entry about the Nevada Cowboy who was arrested for not showing his ID to the cops? He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost, in a 5-4 decision.

"Joining Kennedy's opinion were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen G. Breyer, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented."

By bizarre coincidence, the same five justices who ruled against our right to privacy are the same five who appointed popular and electoral loser Bush to be president. Link

Alan sez: "Regarding today's Supreme Court decision--The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer and the article you linked to did _not_ say that one must produce identification when ordered to do so, but that one must identify oneself. The Nevada rancher in question was arrested because he refused (eleven times, according to the NewsHour report) to give his name when a cop asked him."

Ryan sez: "Mark, Alan's update to the entry on the Supreme Court decision is not quite accurate. The Supreme Court said that one must say one's name when asked by police investigating a crime. Under the ruling, you do not have to provide an identification card, but it doesn't prevent police from asking for one. But oddly, the Court came up with this ruling and upheld Hiibel's conviction even though he was never asked the simple question "What is your name?" before being cuffed and put in the patrol car (which one assumes is the moment of arrest).

"If you watch the video, you see the officer never asks Hiibel what his name is, but instead asks for identification over and over and at one point, even seems to reach for Hiibel's wallet.

"Under the Supreme Court ruling, Hiibel had and continues to have the right not to show his identification card or even have identification on his person. But it seems under the Supreme Court's reading of the case, if police ask you for your identification card, you have the right to say no, but you also have to know that you have to state your name instead. The legal obligation falls on the citizen to volunteer his name, not on the police to ask the person what his name is.

"My feeling is that at the very least, the justices voting in the majority never even saw the video, even though it was easily available on the Internet at http://papersplease.org/hiibel.

"If they had, they could have come to the same conclusion about the necessity to identify oneself to police, but at the same time, logically, the Court would have

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:43:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marc Laidlaw's lucky lightning photo

Science fiction writer and Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw was on TV for his lucky accidental photo of a tree being struck by lighting.

He snapped his camera just as lightning struck a tree in his backyard, capturing nature's awesome power. He says he didn't know he had captured the shot, saying the strike was so terrifying, he just turn and ran. It wasn't until he went back and looked at his shots that he realized what he had, first thinking he had a daylight photo mixed in there.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:31:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mechanical musical marvels

Mechanical Music Digest is devoted to antique nickelodeons, musical toys, automatons, and other wonderful contraptions of yesteryear. The site is no beauty, but the content is magnificent, with articles on miniature player pianos, steam-powered calliopes, and even amazing fakes:

"Please be aware that there is currently a 'wave' of brand new, made-to-deceive old-looking automatons reaching the international marketplace. The few different variants of this monkey 'hookah-like' smoker which we've seen are purposely constructed so as to allow no internal inspection..."

Link (via String Can Phone)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:09:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Public toilet lets you see out, but people can't see in

Here's a picture of a public toilet in Switzerland that's made entirely out of one-way glass. No one can see you in there, but when you are inside, it looks like you're sitting in a clear glass box. I don't think I'd be able to go. Link (Thanks, DocX!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:04:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cards as weapons

In 1977, magician Ricky Jay wrote the definitive book on card throwing--Cards As Weapons--with such chapters as "Cards and the Martial Arts" and "Self-Defense." From the Smithsonian article about Jay that I blogged a few days ago:

"According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Jay has thrown a card farther, higher and faster than anyone. He captured the records one day in 1976; one card he threw traveled 135 feet; another sailed into a window several stories up; another flew 90 miles an hour. He throws a card with such deadly precision it can pierce a watermelon at 20 paces."

While Cards as Weapons unfortunately is out-of-print and copies go for several hundred dollars, BB reader David Maduram has posted selections from the text on his Web site. Link
UPDATE: Numerous readers point out that a PDF of Cards As Weapons can easily be downloaded via P2P clients like BitTorrent, eMule, and eDonkey. If Ricky Jay had the book reprinted, I'd still be delighted to buy it though!

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:39:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neurology of humor

Cognitive neuroscientists at Dartmouth College have shown that the part of your brain that "gets" a joke is not the same as the region that deems it funny or not. To test their hypothesis, the researchers conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on subjects while they watched Seinfeld and The Simpsons. From a Scientific American report on the study:

"The investigators found that instances of humor detection lit up the left inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortices--the left side of the brain. Humor appreciation, in contrast, led to spikes in activity in the emotional areas deeper inside--specifically, in the bilateral regions of the insular cortex and the amygdala... Past research has shown the left inferior frontal cortex to be involved in reconciling ambiguous meanings with prior knowledge. And ambiguity, incongruity and surprise are key elements in many jokes."

Still, the results are preliminary. When SciAm asked an outside psychologist for his expert opinion on the research, he commented: "If some people don't find The Simpsons funny, it's premature to say that they have a defective frontal lobe." Of course, he's wrong. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:10:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free textbooks for Cisco training

A Cisco networking instructor got sick of Cisco price-gouging his students for textbooks so he wrote his own and is giving away the electronic edition and selling the print edition through Lulu for $20 -- and he gets $5 for every copy sold.

Tired of seeing his students pay exorbitant prices for Cisco Systems' high end computer training textbooks, Basham found a way to give the information away for free.
He wrote an 800-page, two-volume manual of numbers, formulas and test tips that can be obtained by anyone who sends him an e-mail.

Link (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory on "Nerd Determinism, Nerd Fatalism, and the Copyfight" in London

Cory's giving a free talk in London one week from today, at the Stanhope Centre near Marble Arch. It's part of an afternoon event on technology activism, and my bit is called "Nerd Determinism, Nerd Fatalism, and the Copyfight."

Date: Monday, 28 June 2004
Time: A panel discussion from 15:00 to about 17:00, with drinks to follow
Location: Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research (tube: Marble Arch, use exit #11 from the Hyde Park pedestrian subway) Stanhope House, Stanhope Place (at Hyde Park), London W2 2HH

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:00:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tunneling ssh over DNS

Dan Kaminsky, the Jedi master of packet-level hacking, has figured out how to tunnel ssh over DNS, a stupendously weird and cool feat. Ever been at an airport or coffee shop with WiFi that redirects you over and over again to the same captive portal page no matter what you do? With Kaminsky's tool, you could circumvent any captive portal that allows DNS to slip through. Here's the presentation he gave at the LayerOne conference in Los Angeles.

Reverse Serial Propagation
Can be quickly and statelessly deployed
* Scan networks with generic recursive probe
* For each incoming request seeking to service the probe, return whatever(TTL=0) and probe with an actual block request
- If a block request comes back from the recurser, populate the server
-If the population packet drops, the upstream should retransmit
* Move back through the file after each server group fills up
* Can be much slower to populate!

480k Powerpoint Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gamedeck: like a Herman Miller chair for gamers

The Gamedeck is a purpose-built gaming chair that a giant articulated hunk of sound-surrounded rumble-vibrating steel with good ergonomics and badass aesthetics. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SpaceShipOne blog, part 5

The Space Woodstock Wireless edition. SpaceShipOne ground crew member Alan Radecki says:

Well, folks, there's now a big RV city sitting out there...and they're still lined up and coming in at 10pm. Lots of folks are wandering the flightline street, ooing and ahing. XCOR has their hangar open and are doing firings of their little rocket engines to show off for the folks. Someone on the [mojave airport mailing] list mentioned "Space Woodstock"...it certainly seems like it! There's a ton of press out here, too...it'll be neat to see how things play out.

BoingBoing reader Mike, who is en route to the Mojave launch site, writes:

We're currently southbound on I-5, 222 miles from Mojave, and intelligence from the front says that parking has been opened already and there's about 300 people there already. We have a wifi base in here connected to a GRPS cellular uplink and all sorts of insanity, so we are a moving open wifi spot, and we will be one of the many who will have a port open there.

And BoingBoing reader Peeter says, "The webcast links you pointed to earlier seem to be overloaded, but this one from MSNBC still works -- at least here in Europe."

History may change today -- if the launch is successful, it will be the first time a privately-built spacecraft carries a human into space. Link to news that Mike Melvill has been chosen as the craft's pilot, Link to Space.com's page dedicated to the launch (look for lots of updates there around 9:30 am ET) and Link to previous BoingBoing post.

Update, 7:48 am PT: the liftoff was successful. BoingBoing reader Flora says, " Here is another live stream from that bastion of good stuff, the BBC. You can also get the free trial RealOne pass and listen/watch the CNN coverage here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:16:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 20, 2004

MP3: Charles Aznavour v. Afrika Bambaataa

One-stop subway ride from the Bronx to the Champs-Elysees. Link to MP3 mashup of "Hier Encore" meets "Looking for the Perfect Beat," and Link to parent website, Link to lyrics. (Thanks, JeanYES)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:35:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot Hall of Fame awards

Asimo, C3PO and Robby the Robot were among the 'bots honored in this year's edition of the Carnegie Mellon University Robot Hall of Fame. This BBC piece on the winners and selection process includes photos. Link (Thanks, Rod)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:07:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spidey Goes to Bollywood

Marvel Comics and Gotham Entertainment Group are introducing a new version of Spiderman regionalized for South Asian audiences. In the Indian version, Peter Parker becomes Pavitr Prabhakar; instead of fighting the Green Goblin he'll battle Rakshasa, a mythical Indian demon. He's wearing a sarong-like garment, and he has unstoppable spiritual powers of asskickage. Link (Thanks, Robin Pen)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:57:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Successful test liftoff for John Carmack's XPrize contender craft

John Carmack may be best known for the legendary electronic game Doom -- but his latest venture is the development of a space craft to compete in the $10 million Ansari Xprize. A craft built by Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace had a succcessful test flight earlier this week:

"The flight was perfect. It went 131 feet high, and landed less than one foot from the launch point," Carmack reported on his web site. "It can easily do flights three times as long, which may show up some problems before we hit them with the big vehicle."
Armadillo's rocket concept makes use of a hydrogen peroxide monopropellant.
Carmack said the vehicle's auto-land system worked perfectly, softly settling down on its tail section. "I had tried several algorithms on the simulator before settling on this one, and it behaved exactly the same in reality, which is always a pleasant surprise."

Link to space.com article with images and video, Link to Armadillo Aerospace home (thanks, Steve)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:26:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Annotated DRM talk on a Wiki

Quinn has posted my DRM talk to her Wiki with extensive annotation, and she's inviting more. How cool! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 19, 2004

Live audio coverage of SpaceShipOne on Monday morning

The Space Show --an online talk radio program about space commerce, tourism, R&D, and the like -- will broadcast the Space Ship One launch from the Mojave Airport this Monday morning, June 21 at 6:00 a.m Pacific time.

Host David Livingston says, " Listen to the live webcast here. An additional streaming site has been provided Space Show listeners by Jeff Birk at Pioneer Radio in the UK, here. After the live broadcast, the report will be archived TheSpaceShow.com, and it will be streamed for ongoing play at Live365.com." Previous SpaceShipOne-related BoingBoing post: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:42:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nerdy typefaces

This site has a great collection of free TT typefaces inspired by media from Gilligan's Island and Buffy. I love the videogame dingbats. Link (Thanks, brecht!)

Update: EvilHippy points out that this site has even more media-themed typefaces

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:56:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ricky Jay revealed

The June issue of Smithsonian magazine features a profile of Ricky Jay, magician, author, and collector of odd antiquities. I'm fascinated not only by Jay's unparalleled talent as a prestidigitator, but also his insatiable curiosity for the wonderful, obscure, and strange--from the freaks and fringe-dwellers featured in his newsletter/book Jay's Journal of Anomalies to his comprehensive knowledge of old-time grifts and scams. From the Smithsonian article:

“The idea of crime based on wit is kind of wonderful,” Jay told me. “There’s not much admirable in a guy who comes at you with a gun and says, ‘Give me your money.’ But a guy who makes you sign a piece of paper, and then you find out you’ve bought the Brooklyn Bridge—the con is enormously appealing. And it’s theatrical. The con—the big con, especially—is an entire theatrical orchestration for an audience of one. It’s both lovely and diabolical at the same time.”

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:11:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fahrenheit 9/11 opens Friday

Scott sez: "Next Friday, June 25th, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 opens in a reported 417 theaters across the United States and Canada. An amazing feat given the fact that just a few weeks ago filmmaker Michael Moore was still trying to figure out who would distribute his latest documentary, despite winning Cannes film festival's prestigious Palme d'Or. Various conservative organizations (including "Move America Forward" and the RNC) have launched a preemptive attacks against the movie and are urging movie theaters to drop the anti-American film from their movie lineup." Link

See pics from the NYC premiere here

Support the film by buying advance tickets here

You can find scenes from the movie here

Watch the trailer here

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:51:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sister Machine Gun's singer on downloading music

Here's an excerpt of a speech given by the singer from Sister Machinegun at a recent gig at Jamie Zawinski's DNA Lounge. It speaks for itself:

Anyways, everything we've played in this set up to this juncture, this crossroads, this... interlude... is released on Positron Records, which we own and operate, the representative of which [at the merch booth] will be happy to supply you with a fix in that regard, for a modest fee which will go toward letting us sleep in a hotel room instead of the van...
Everything after that juncture (that interlude) is released on Wax Trax Records. which means it's owned by -- actually it's not owned by TVT Records, it's owned by Credit Suisse. so technically speaking, the first four Sister Machine Gun albums are released on Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, which is kind of cool when you think about it.
The point being, I don't get fuckin' paid for that shit, not a dime, not a single red cent. So you can go ahead and go home, and -- hey, you can download it right the fuck here, they got WiFi. Just get up on Morpheus or some fuckin' thing and get that shit for free.

Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:29:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Highly-evolved race cars

Researchers at University College London are using genetic algorithms to evolve the best tunings for race cars. From New Scientist:

"Genetic algorithms mimic the principles of evolution to breed solutions to a problem. A population of potential solutions is tested for fitness and the best are cross-bred and mutated. The unfit members of the next generation are weeded out, simulating natural selection, leaving the fittest solutions to go on to breed."

Interestingly, the researchers tested their work virtually through repeated games of Formula One Challenge videogame. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:18:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jason Kottke reads my DRM talk

Woohoo! Jason Kottke has recorded himself reading my Microsoft DRM talk and dedicated the result to the public domain. I'm unbelievably flattered by the result, a 36.4MB MP3, and it was great to listen to him read it. Now I'm just waiting for the mashup mix. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:47:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tressed to Kill

BB reader Katrus informs us that the "Choppa Style" hair-do I posted previously is a "signature creation of Detroit hairstylist Mr. Little - and yes, the blades do spin." The information comes from Detroit Metro Times article about Hair Wars, a "three-hours-plus extravaganza of blooming, towering, blinking, spinning, smoking, cartoon-like hair creations" where Mr. Little and his rivals show off surreal sculptures like the spider style (left) and other fantastical coiffeurs:

"A model in a kimono has two dragons, sculpted out of braids, perched atop her head. When she reaches the end of the stage, billows of smoke emit from the dragons’ mouths, and the audience oohs and aahs. Backstage, Mz. Jade reveals the secret: inside each dragon is a bottle of aerosol sheen spray, rigged by remote so a press of a button triggers the spray. Under the bright lights the mist looks like smoke."

Link (Thanks, Katrus!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:54:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 18, 2004

King's new Dark Tower novel

Today I finished Song of Susannah, the next-to-last volume in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, books that King started as a teenager and that he claims will end his career -- he's vowed that the final volume in the series will also be his last book.

I believe him. He's doing the thing that Asimov and Heinlein did at the ends of their careers, tying in the loose ends of all his old work and name-checking and referencing all the writers who influenced him.

But unlike bad end-of-career novels like Heinlein's Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Song of Susannah is a sharp and tight book, a comparatively slim book of only 400 or so pages. I raced through it in just a couple sittings, devouring the yarn at speed and wanting at once for it to be over and for it never to end.

For King's Dark Tower quest is an astonishing series of novels, rich and wide and deep, drunk on prose and on the best characterization of King's creer. There's plenty King's written that I haven't cared for, but I'd crawl on glass to get my hands on the final installment of the series.

This volume in the story is about itself as much as it is about the characters and their quest. King's theories on writing are very sound, and this story is as much about how we read and understand and use stories as it is a story in and of itself.

But it's never preachy and it's never dull. King's story, which has all the hallmarks of cliche, manages to be both startingly original and utterly sane and crazy. Link

Update: Apparently, King has repudiated his vow to stop writing

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:01:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mario and Zelda Big Band: NES music with Latin beats and Japanese lyrics

Someone just posted a track by the "Mario and Zelda Big Band" on a private file-sharing site I'm on. This is a Japanese big band fronted by a singer whose delivery reminds me of the frontwoman for Orquesta De La Luz (my favorite Japanese salsa band), and backed by a huge horn and winds section. They've got a CD of a live performance of music from classic Nintendo games, with invented Japanese words and super tight Latin jazz melodies. I've just ordered the scorchingly expensive CD and while I wait for it to arrive, I guess I'll just keep this one track in heavy rotation. It's fantastic. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SpaceShipOne blog, part 4

Ground crew member Alan Radecki says:

Hi All, The FAA spaceport license came through today, and almost immediately, signs went up at the airport. Pics are now up on the Mojave Airport Weblog as well as a couple aerials showing the parking & RV areas that I shot this morning from our helo. For those who'll be in the RV park, sounds like the NASA interns will be throwing a big party with a band and all.

Link to part 3, Link to part 2, Link to part 1. Handy overview photo that shows the Mojave Airport scene where the ship will launch on Monday: Link. (Thanks, Todd Lappin)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:42:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lessig speaks on tech IP law and indie filmmaking at LA Film Festival

Not tomorrow, but next Saturday June 26 at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles from 10AM - 1PM:

Symposium on Copyright, Piracy, and the Future of Independent Filmmaking: The MPAA's screener ban was a wake-up call to the independent film community. With our future threatened, the community joined together and was eventually successful in defeating the ban in federal court. But policy is being created every day, at every level, that impacts the channels for distribution, access to independent films, and the protection of creative rights. This symposium (the first of two parts) offers a forum for critical analysis and debate about these important issues -- issues that are not easily or often addressed among the very people they impact most: independent filmmakers. Our goal is to form strategic alliances that will help us maintain and extend a production and distribution environment where independent filmmaking can continue to thrive. Part II of the Symposium will take place at the IFP Market in New York on September 26.
Join Lawrence Lessig, named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries and author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace examine copyright and anti-piracy policies affecting the motion picture industry today and the future of the independent filmmaker. Following a coffee break, a panel of experts and advocates will join him, including Robert Greenwald, (Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, Burning Bed), producer, director and documentary filmmaker.

$15, located at 7920 Sunset Blvd. @ Fairfax. More on the fest: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:25:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Choppa Style

This photo is amazing. I wonder if that cord provides power for the "blades" to move in some way? Link (to higher res image) (Thanks, Carlo!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:04:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush's plan to dose Americans with expensive antipsychotics

President Bush's family has made a lot of money from drug companies and still has very close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. (Bush Sr was on Eli Lilly's board of directors and Bush Jr appointed Lilly's CEO to a senior position on the Homeland Security Council.)

According to this British Medical Journal article, "Lilly made $1.6m in political contributions in 2000—82% of which went to Bush and the Republican Party. "

So it's not surprising that the President announced a plan to screen the entire US population for mental illness and pump lots and lots of people full of expensive Eli Lilly drugs. Bush's commission has recommended that the federal government adopt a model based on the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) a medication treatment plan that recommends Zyprexa as a first line antipsychotic drug for patients. Bush was governor of Texas when the plan was adopted, and Zyprexa coincidentally happens to be made Eli Lilly. It's the drug company's top seller, grossing $4.28 billion dollars last year. According to the article, "A 2003 New York Times article by Gardiner Harris reported that 70% of olanzapine sales are paid for by government agencies, such as Medicare and Medicaid."

But the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, sparked off controversy when Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General, revealed that key officials with influence over the medication plan in his state received money and perks from drug companies with a stake in the medication algorithm (15 May, p1153). He was sacked this week for speaking to the BMJ and the New York Times.
Mr Jones told the BMJ that the same "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that generated the Texas project was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which, according to his whistleblower report, were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:59:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thing Knowledge

My friend Alex at University of California Press gave me a review copy of the book Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments by Davis Baird. Sounds heavy, but on first glance it seems that Baird has balanced deep philosophy with fun machine history! The illustrations and vintage photographs are a treat too. I'm looking forward to digging into it. From Peter Galison's blurb on the back:

"Grappling with a wonderful assortment of objects--from antique orreries to modern spectrographs--Davis Baird draws the reader deep into fascinating questions about the nature of knowledge. As lucid on the semantic account of theories as it is on the inner workings of the cyclotron, this book that brings the laboratory to philosophers and philosophy into the laboratory."

Warning: At $65, it's a pricey book, probably due to a limited print run. Link
Update: BB reader Nate has a good point: "If you think it will be too pricy for individuals to purchase, you should encourage people to ask their libraries to purchase it. More sales for U. Cal. Press, far more potential readers."

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:30:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Paper Model Zen

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:05:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Metroblogging" regional group weblogs launch

Sean Bonner says, "Jason DeFillippo and I have launched Metroblogging which is the first step of global expansion of our LA blog, blogging.la. The first cities live are New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. Like b.la, we're hoping these sites will become a good street-level view of life in these cities." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:04:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SpaceShipOne blog: part 3

In which our protagonists are asked,"So, you got a license for that spaceport?"

Hi all, Not sure what the hitch is, but the designation of MHV as the first commercial inland spaceport didn't happen by the FAA as expected yesterday... stay tuned.
Regarding broadcasts and webcasts of the launch: CNN is reportedly going to do a live broadcast, don't know if that'll reach Europe. Local radio station KLOA FM 104.9 has the exclusive radio rights to direct feed, and it now sounds as if they'll be live webcasting the audio here. There is now a map of the public parking area up on the the airport site here. There really is no other news to report this morning. It's a gorgeous, if somewhat warm day.
-- Alan Radecki

Link to part one, Link to part two. (Thanks, Todd Lappin)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:58:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

From keywords, art

NYT story on an interactive art installation that toys with the surreal, free-association results of Internet keyword searches. David Ayman Shamma of Northwestern University, and Kristian J. Hammond of Northwestern University have created "Imagination Environment," currently on display in Chicago.

[The exhibit] starts with a live television news broadcast that is displayed at the center of a wall-mounted array of nine computer monitors. A software program scans the broadcast's closed-caption stream and selects keywords that prompt Internet searches for images. Seconds after the live audio is heard, the news broadcast is surrounded by pertinent photographs and illustrations on adjacent screens, as well as some images completely unrelated.
"The words tend to be linked to a strange combination of images that are on point and strikingly bizarre," Professor Hammond said.
For instance, during a recent televised briefing by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a reference to troops was as likely to retrieve a photograph of Girl Scouts as one of soldiers. But a mention of the secretary's title only generated a cartoon drawing of an administrative assistant.

Registration-free Link, and Link to artists' site (thanks Tony)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:55:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fornicate and run marathons to beef up your brains

Fascinating Australian Broadcasting Co science piece on the latest research in neuron production:

we do know a couple of things that stimulate brain cell production. One of them, of course is anti-depressants, which we now know probably the key molecule by which this acts, because we’ve been able to purify these cells that make neurons and we know what are the receptors that bind molecules. And one of these receptors turn out to be a receptor for a neurotrophine, a molecule that keeps nerve cells alive traditionally. But we know that anti-depressants raise the molecule that binds to this receptor and we now know that this is the factor that can stimulate the production of new nerve cells. So we think we’ve made the connection between anti-depressants and production of new nerve cells. But there are many other ways of stimulating the production and some of them are pretty damned interesting. One is if you put an animal on a wheel and let it run ad libitum and they run up to about 10 kilometres overnight, they make about twice as many neurones.
The other thing is that certain molecules produced during sex also appear to be highly stimulatory of neuronal production. Prolactin levels, which pregnant women have enormous amounts of, also stimulate large amounts (of neurons).

Link (Thanks, Adrian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Everything we know about traffic-calming is wrong

Mind-blowing article about the European and Chinese challenges to the received wisdom on traffic planning and calming, arguing that the separation of peds and cars leads to less-safe streets:

"The more you post the evidence of legislative control, such as traffic signs, the less the driver is trying to use his or her own senses," says Hamilton-Baillie, noting he has a habit of walking randomly across roads -- much to his wife's consternation. "So the less you can advertise the presence of the state in terms of authority, the more effective this approach can be." This, of course, is the exact opposite of the "Triple E" traffic-calming approach, which seeks to control the driver through the use of speed bumps, photo radar, crosswalks and other engineering and enforcement mechanisms.
The "self-reading street" has its roots in the Dutch "woonerf" design principles that emerged in the 1970s. Blurring the boundary between street and sidewalk, woonerfs combine innovative paving, landscaping and other urban designs to allow for the integration of multiple functions in a single street, so that pedestrians, cyclists and children playing share the road with slow-moving cars. The pilot projects were so successful in fostering better urban environments that the ideas spread rapidly to Belgium, France, Denmark and Germany. In 1998, the British government adopted a "Home Zones" initiative -- the woonerf equivalent -- as part of its national transportation policy.
"What the early woonerf principles realized," says Hamilton-Baillie, "was that there was a two-way interaction between people and traffic. It was a vicious or, rather, a virtuous circle: The busier the streets are, the safer they become. So once you drive people off the street, they become less safe."

Salon Link (Reg/Ads Req'd) (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Desk-lamp with an ignition key

Fun Furde founds these pretty, design-y lamps with War of the Worlds styling that you turn on by means of an ignition key. Link (Thanks, Fun Furde!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flatpack furniture crossed with airplane model kits

These punch-and-stick chairs ("3 chairs are routed out of one sheet of 8x4 15mm Birch faced ply-wood or MDF. 126 flat pack units will fit on a standard euro pallet. The excess wood is its own packaging. Easily assembled in minutes by the end user. Chairfix was inspired by Airfix model kits and is easily assembled by the consumer useing a mallet") are amazing -- so much smarter than traditional hex-key-and-swearing flatpack furniture. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pretty iPod Mini condoms

Tunewear makes these sexy Icewear cases for the iPod mini out of transparent ribbed silicon -- the same stuff used in diving masks. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:56:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Why Microsoft should get out of DRM

I gave a talk at Microsoft Research today on why Microsoft should get out of the DRM business and what they could do instead. Here's the text of it:

Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital into DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like Martha and Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the future world. Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best I think that Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses.

Link Update: Anil has created a pretty html version, and Trevor's created a purple version

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:53:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

A new kind of ratfish

This species of fish, the Hydrolagus matallanasi, has been swimming around for perhaps 180 million years. Apparently, it was first discovered by Brazillian fisherman in 2001 but the photo was just released today. According to researchers, this species of chimaera (or ratfish) is over a foot long and is related to sharks. "It's like if we had an animal as old as the Tyrannosaurus rex still alive," Jules Soto, curator of the Oceanographic Museum of the Universdad do Vale do Itajai, told Reuters. Link (Thanks, G!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:08:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Cool Tools: iPal and tool lending libraries

The latest Cool Tools newsletter is out, with amazing stuff as usual. My favorites this time are a battery-powered amplifier-speaker that you can plug an iPod into for blasting music, and a description of "tool lending" libraries. Link (If you don't see them on the Cool Tools site, wait a couple of hours, Kevin sends the emails before updating the site. Better yet, sign up for the list)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:32:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Battelle visits Applied Minds, a Willy Wonka-esque nerdvana

John describes his mind-blowing tour through Applied Minds, a Glendale, CA consultancy started by former Disney Imagineers Danny Hillis and Bran Ferren.

After chit chatting for a few minutes, he took me to a small room - no wider than my outstretched arms - at the far end of which stood one of those classic red English phone booths. We stepped inside - a bit cramped - and Danny lifted the receiver and dictated a passphrase of some sort. Presto - the rear wall of the booth opened, and we stepped into - nerdvana.
From a cramped phone booth into massive pure-white-lit space two-stories high, adorned with all manner of things strange and beautiful. Over to one side stood the Terminator-like skeleton of a forty-foot dinosaur, its 15-foot pneumatic legs gleaming and exposed. Nearly blending into the walls, itself painted movie-set white, was a tricked out Hummer-like RV refitted as a communications/command center - complete with built-in kitchen and bedroom. The space was a great big project lab, with happy geeks combing over various assemblages of wiring, motors, processors and plans like ants on a summer picnic. It's Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for geeks.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:56:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LED flashlight hack

Popular Science has a simple hack for replacing a flashlight's bulb with bright white light-emitting diodes.

A flashlight ... hacked to use three 2300-millicandela LEDs will be as bright as an incandescent and last 5 to 10 times longer. Of course you can add up to 20 LEDs (as long as they fit in the reflector) if you're planning to, say, man a lighthouse with the thing.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:47:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

French "Blog your music" online blogosphere shindig

The second annual Blogue Ta Musique is under way. "This is a volunteer and non-profit music sharing event, and a important collaborative moment for french-speaking bloggers (and others)," says Jean-Luc in Paris. "Download the beautiful small BTM logo, and more information (en Français) is here."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:03:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Enron/I Got the Power mashup

Dav sez, "The ever brilliant Tim Ross of Tuba Frenzy has mashed up the Enron tapes (and I think some Bush quotes) with Snap!'s The Power. It's beautiful. Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn! Burn baby burn!" 5.1MB MP3 Link (Thanks, Dav!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indie digital video art from Tijuana in LA

If you're in LA next week, head over to the IAF video art festival Tijuana-Los Angeles on Saturday June 26th, 2004. Takes place at LA's Mexican Cultural Institute on historic Olvera street. Videographers, visual artists, and DJs/sound artists from Tijuana, the D.F., and Southern California. The event should be great fun. Link, and remember: not this Saturday, *next* Saturday. (Thanks, Sal)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:19:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mile High kit

Mid-air shagger helper. For frequent flyers fortunate enough to need it, this discreet 8" x 5" x 3" case contains adult accourements like massage oil, condoms, lube, sex toys, wet wipes, and after-sex mints (what? No Sphincterine?). Link (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:09:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mongolians need surnames!

Monogolians, who have customarily used only first names, are now required by law to have last names as well. Unfortunately, most people are choosing "Borjigin," Genghis Kahn's tribal name. The director of the State Library is attempting to fix this by publishing advice on historically accurate surname choices for potential Borjigins.

Mr. Besud has spent years poring over the dusty archives of the state library to compile a book of possible surnames for the nameless. He obtained access to the highly secret archives of the country's Communist Party, which included detailed lists of the names of noble families who were prohibited from party membership.
He discovered his own long-lost surname, Besud, by finding his grandfather's name on a 1925 list of conscripts in a Communist army.
His book, called Advice on Mongolian Surnames, provides maps and lists of historically used surnames in each region of the country.

Link (via Foe Romeo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:34:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Could you outrun a crossbow bolt? How about a 747?

Here's a chart showing the typical speed of various Hollwood chase-scene pursuers, from T-Rexii to Boeing 747s. There were many craptacular things to mock about The Dat After Tomorrow, but most among them was a chase scene in which the protagonists need to outrun ice. This would have been handy then.

90 mph baseball pitch: 40.0 m/s
Stone from Commercial Slingshot: 42.5 m/s
Crossbow Bolt: 45.7 m/s

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:31:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real ray-guns

Following up on our previous post about the Pentagon's new Active Denial System (energy beam) and other "non-lethal" weapons, here's a New Scientist feature about the state-of-the-art in ray guns:

"...the $9000 Close Quarters Shock Rifle projects an ionised gas, or plasma, towards the target, producing a conducting channel. It will also interfere with electronic ignition systems and stop vehicles.

'We will be able to fire a stream of electricity like water out of a hose at one or many targets in a single sweep,' claims XADS (Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems) president Peter Bitar."

Amnesty International and other human rights groups are none too thrilled. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:21:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ScienceMatters@Berkeley launches

Based on the model of Lab Notes, my online research digest from UC Berkeley Engineering, we've now launched a new publication to focus on the sciences at the university. In ScienceMatters@Berkeley, I'll report on mind-bending research in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics.

In the premier issue:
* Crystallizing Nanoscience
* Hunting the Achilles' Heel of Hepatitis
* The Mysterious Matter of Dark Matter

If hope you enjoy it! If you do, please feel free to subscribe to the email or RSS ScienceMatters digest. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:51:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fark posts 1,000,000th link, Web surrenders

Congrats to Fark for post its 1,000,000th link! Link (Thanks, frigg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:42:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dot-matrix bicycle printer

jkinberg has invented a bicycle that doubles as a dot-matrix printer, huffing out low-resolution ASCII characters from an array of spray~~paint~~chalk cans mounted on the bike's rear and controlled by a Powerbook. He's planning to make a bunch of them to spray anti-GOP messages during the Republican convention -- he calls the project "Bikes Against Bush." Link (Thanks, Poppy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How many calories in a mouse?

Here's an oldie-but-goodie. In 1999, the Iams Company publicly released a list of their favorite "fun" (read: stupid) customer service calls, including such provocative queries as:

• "I have trouble seeing what I'm scooping in my yard. Can your food turn my dog's poop pink?" -dog owner, Ronkonkoma, NY
• "When my dog pees, he leaves brown patches all over the lawn. Is he peeing fire?" – dog owner, Covington, KY.

Link (Thanks, Jess!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:34:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SpaceShipOne blog, part two

In which Piss Clear meets the Final Frontier:

Hi all, The folks at MHV are continuing to get the various sites ready for the influx of people, who seem to already be arriving. Several RVs drove slowly down the flightline.
The White Knight, which was doing a number of touch and goes day before yesterday, was out doing maintenance runs today.
Yesterday's update generated a couple of questions:
1 -- Can a person sleep in their car on the airport overnight Sunday night? No. The general parking area won't open till 3am. Only self-contained RVs will be allowed on the airport overnight. There is a large open lot across Hwy 58 from where big-rig trucks usually overnight, and that might be an option. I do understand, however, that a number of people plan on lining up on the shoulder of 58 around midnight. Don't know if they'll get chased away or not. There's a CHP (California Highway Patrol, for you out-of-staters) station adjacent to the airport, so they may be out in force.
2 -- Is there any European live broadcasts planned? I've no clue. AFAIK, there are a bunch of satellite trucks scheduled to start arriving on Saturday, no idea who they might be from. I have not heard of anyone planning a live webcast, but you might want to check at space.com to see if they're doing anything...I know some of their folks will be here.
One caution to those planning on being here but aren't used to life in the desert: BRING LOTS OF WATER! Even at 7am, it's getting quite warm now, and you will get dehydrated much faster than you'll realize. There will be vendors selling water, but count on it being pricey. Our rule of thumb out here: if you're not peeing every couple of hours, you're not drinking enough.
Other news: I haven't received confirmation yet, but my understanding was that the FAA was supposed to issue the airport the first ever civilian spaceport license today. There's going to be about a 2 hour gap between the flight and the offical press conference, and they are tentatively planning to do a formal presentation of the license during that time, and it should be within view of the public viewing area.
The public viewing area is set up southeast of the new Taxiway Bravo (map is available at mojaveairport.com ), at the approach end of Rwy 30, so everyone will get an excellent view of the landing.
When Burt came in for lunch at the Voyager Cafe yesterday, he was all grins...looks like he's really having a lot of fun with this. Five days and counting!
Alan

Link to previous installation (Thanks, Todd Lappin!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:34:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iran blocks more 'Net sites -- including MT

The government of Iran has reportedly stepped up Net censorship again. The latest blacklist includes porn sites and political sites as one might expect, but also geek self-help sites and tech services like Movable Type. Link (Thanks, hoder)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:32:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hologram Generator on a Chip

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

In "Chip Miniaturizes Holography," Technology Review says that Japanese researchers have developed a hologram generator on a single circuit board. The electroholographic system consists of a special-purpose computational chip and a high-resolution, reflective mode, liquid-crystal display panel as a spatial light modulator. With this system, they were able to generate an hologram at a resolution of 800x600 in half a second for an object of 1,000 points. Their solution is scalable in two ways: the computation is done in parallel streams, and several chips can work on a single hologram. The researchers think that there will be real-time 3D applications for television or medical imaging within five to ten years. This overview includes other details and references, including a diagram and a photograph of the hologram generator.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:32:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Special BoingBoing report: Live from SpaceShip One

Paul G. Allen and Burt Rutan's SpaceShip One is scheduled to launch America's first Non-Government, privately funded manned space flight next Monday. Alan Radecki, part of the ground crew stationed at Mojave, is penning pre-flight updates and countdown info. Former BoingBoing guestblogger Todd Lappin has arranged for those first-person accounts to be blogged here.

Background: Link to Mojave airport site with launch info. Link to Rutan's press release on the June 21 launch. Link to Rutan's FAQ. And finally, Alan's first update follows:

Starting today, I plan on sending out a daily update on the activities surrounding the SpaceShipOne launch.
The flight is scheduled to commence at 0630 Monday 6/21, however that is dependent on weather. Should there be a weather delay, such as winds, the folks at Scaled plan on waiting and launching as soon as the weather permits, even if it stretches to the next day.
The public will enter the airport from the main Airport Blvd entrance off of Hwy 58. The airport will open at 3am, but it is pretty much assumed around here that there will be so many people showing up that the roads will be clogged. RVs will be permitted in the day before, with reservations (661/824-2433). I know that there's already 89 coming, some of whom are NASA folks who are bringing a band and everything. Regular vehicles will be charged $10 entrance fee (to help mitigate the huge cost of security that the airport has to bear), and I can't remember the RV cost...check mojaveairport.com for details. Don't try to avoid the traffic by coming in the back entrances...these are for VIPs with passes and tenants with ID badges.
There will be a TFR, and only aircraft with PPR numbers will be permitted into the airspace, starting on Saturday, I believe. Again, see mojaveairport.com for details. If you don't make it onto the airport, you'll still see the firing...it'll be visible for miles. (...) I'll be here starting Sunday afternoon, sleeping in the Mercy quarters. -- Alan

(Thanks, Todd Lappin!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:26:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Web-scale bookmark manager

Hyperlinkomatic is a new web-based bookmark manager that tries to scale up your favorites list to something that can cope with the modern, ginormous web. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:59:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show on Ashcroft's Contempt of Congress

Lisa Rein has posted some Daily Show clips from June including the stunning segment on Ashcroft's weaselling on torture before Congress. Watching Ashcroft spin and dodge and weave around Contempt of Congress is astonishing -- why isn't this man in jail RIGHT NOW? Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:58:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orin Hatch to make "counselling infringers" a crime

My cow-orker Fred Von Lohmann has unearthed a plan by Orrin Hatch to introduce a law that would make "counselling infringers" illegal.

Rumor has it that Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) will be introducing a bill tomorrow that would add a new Section 501(g) to the Copyright Act granting copyright owners a cause of action against those who "induce" copyright infringement (cf. patent law). This bill, dubbed the INDUCE Act, would apparently also reach those who "counsel" infringers.
Even a moment's reflection should make the danger to innovators clear -- you now have to worry not just about contributory and vicarious liability, but an entirely new form of liability for building tools that might be misused. It will be interesting to see whether the bill expressly precludes any Betamax-type defense. This may also pose First Amendment problems, to the extent a journalist or website publisher might be liable for simply posting information about where infringement tools might be found or how to use them.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:55:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Global Zombiefication Novel - The Earth Abides (George R. Stewart)

In reference to my entry below, Will sez: "The Earth Abides (originally published in 1949) is probably the best SF novel out there to explore this theme. A geologist goes solo backpacking, and comes back to find almost all of humanity dead due to a sudden world-wide plague. The novel chronicles the following life of the protagonist and a small band of fellow survivors. The first few years involve the gradual failing of services such as power, water, and the highway system. Later years are more focused on the growing encroachment of wilderness on the former developed world. A highly environmental and ecologically oriented novel; unusual for its time." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:15:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

President Bush and the Apocalyptic Christian cult

Fun Neal Pollack article in The Stranger about President Bush's kooky religious beliefs.

This is also the kind of country where the president meets with the members of a radical, far-right millennialist Christian sect three weeks before he counteracts all known international law and opinion regarding the Israeli-Palestinian situation. That sect, known as the Apostolic Congress, opposes any deal with the Palestinians because it believes that Christ won't return to Earth until all of Israel belongs to the Jews and Solomon's temple is rebuilt.

Link (Thanks, Kirsten!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:31:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Bloomsday

With Ulysses, James Joyce invited us to join Leopold Bloom as he took an epic journey through Dublin. In honor of the Bloomsday centennial, Jess Hemerly points us to the BBC's Cheat's Guide to Joyce's Ulysses. "It's funny if you've read the book, and helpful if you haven't," Jess says. Link (via a great notion)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:28:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos of pre-Warhol Nico

Great fashion magazine photos of Nico before she hooked up with Warhol's Factory and started singing for the Velvet Underground. Link (Short bio about Nico)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:22:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How long would AC power work after global zombiefication?

Nice Straight Dope column about electricity generation in a Dawn of the Dead scenario. If various types of power plants (nuke, coal, gas, hydro, wind) were unmanned, when would they stop functioning, and how would the grid handle it?

Bottom line? My guess is that within 4-6 hours there would be scattered blackouts and brownouts in numerous areas, within 12 hours much of the system would be unstable, and within 24 hours most portions of the United States and Canada, aside from a rare island of service in a rural area near a hydroelectric source, would be without power. Some installations served by wind farms and solar might continue, but they would be very small. By the end of a week, I'd be surprised if more than a few abandoned sites were still supplying power.

Link (Thanks, Grum!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:50:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Armageddon fundraiser porn, five bodies, and a Mormon assassination plot

Fleshbot points to a court case weirder than Michael Jackson and the Scott Peterson trial combined. Murder, dismemberment, lapsed Mormons, the death penalty, and Playboy model Kerissa Fare. Oh, and Rohypnol (thanks, virgil).

This week, a jury in Martinez, a small town outside San Francisco, will retire to consider the bizarre, brutally violent cult surrounding one Glenn Taylor Helzer, a lapsed Mormon accused of bludgeoning and dismembering five people in an elaborate extortion racket intended to hasten the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Helzer, a former stockbroker who has already pleaded guilty and faces the death penalty, exerted a charismatic hold over an eclectic group of followers including his younger brother, a former girlfriend turned Playboy centrefold model, and a self-described "good witch" who once offered to raise money for Armageddon by appearing in porn films.

Link to story in UK's Independent

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:10:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Only You Can Prevent Gray Goo

On Monday, I posted about nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler speaking out against the fear of "gray goo," out-of-control nano-machines. That reminded our dear old pal Jim Leftwich (AKA Ward Parkway) of this masterpiece he designed circa 1995. It was a continuation of the Urban Absurdist Survival Kit series from the Happy Mutant Handbook. Link (to higher-res image)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:49:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool robot sculpture gallery

Online gallery with images of work by Southern California-based artist, sculptor, designer and machinist Greg Brotherton. Great retro-combat-robot pieces, futuristic weapon porn, and a robo-blog with lines like, "Progress has resumed on my life's work: an army of robot women to take over the earth." Link (Thanks, Aron)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:37:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY ITrip amp

This fellow created an interesting amp design for an iTrip. Boing Boing reader Ian Meyer says, " He said that it would probably be capable of overpowering broadcast stations for a small radium (ie: enough to blast some Queen in place of the hippity-hoppity music that the guy in the car next to me is listening to loud enough to be heard for half a mile)." [Ed: Hippity Hoppity? Did someone see "The Ladykillers"?] Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:31:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New game group-blog

Joystiq is a new group blog on gaming from the same people who brought us Engadget. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:28:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GPS system that looks like Grand Theft Auto

Sony's new XYZ in-car GPS navigation system presents a ground-level visualization of your route that looks like a low-rez Grand Theft Auto. I became a loyal Hertz renter when they introduced their crappy-but-serviceable Neverlost GPS a few years back (I have no sense of direction and sometimes get lost playing Quake), and this week I took a flyer and tried out Avis's new GPS system, which is unspeakably shit: it's a Nextel phone that you suction-cup to your windscreen. You call a call-center and wait on hold, then tell a person over the speakerphone where you're going and they program a route into the phone, which then reads you directions in a robot voice. It's such a dumb setup that I was half sure I'd screwed up, but no, that's how it's supposed to work. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cockroach racing: it's got legs, baby

Bring on the kakerlaken! Following up on a previous post about the v hot Euro party game trend of Cockroach racing, Boing Boing reader Rochus Wolff says:

"Cockroach races have been up and about here in Berlin for a couple of years now, apparently introduced by the russian painter Nikolai Makarov. He claims (and I have no way of disprove him) that this is an old Russian tradition. I attended one of these races in January 2001 - it was a celebration of the Russian New Year, and a very odd mixture of betting on the cockroaches, drinking, eating and socialising.
"The race I attended was also quite fun because of the silly stories they made up about the roaches racing against each other. Apparently, one of them (Olga) was the daughter of another one, had then killed and eaten her father, but only after mating with him and having a child (Olga II), which was now racing not only against her mother, but also (I think) against another one of her father's children... or something. It was pretty weird, and quite funny.
"There are photos online (not mine, though) of a similar event in November 2002 here."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:24:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fax machine/intrusion-detector combo

Sharp's new Fappy fax machine will detect intruders to your home and fax a notice of their incursion to a preset panic-number. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:22:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robert Anton Wilson University

Old-school bOING bOING contributor Robert Anton Wilson is now teaching courses online. Wilson is the fringe philosopher/novelist/comedian who wrote such classics as Illuminatus!, Prometheus Rising, and Cosmic Trigger, key texts that shaped the birth of bOING bOING. The Maybe Logic Academy launches this summer with classes like "Conspiracy, Coincidence and Code" and "8 Dimensions of 'Mind." Each course is $125, but a package is available for $200 that includes membership in an online forum and a series of email correspondences with RAW himself. Fnord (Thanks, Dr. Maz!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:20:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dating site for MMO gamers

MMOdating is a dating service targetted at people who live and die by Massively Multiplayer Online games.

I should state outrIght that i'm Not a real person. i'm an imaginary friend. in front of the computer, of course, who could tell the difference? i loVe getting involved In a chat and forgetting all about the outSide world; for a moment then i can believe I am real. furthermore, i'm not entirely human. my mother was a human and my father was - or is - a dragon. i've had a very, very long life full of dragedy and adventure, Beautiful worlds have crumbLed before my Eyes. . . i'm dramatizing, yeah, i love playing the drama QUEEN, but there's really been more than i can easily talk About. three daughTers i've Had, marvellOus things have lived in my veins and leT Me work miracles. i've Always believed In doing good by alL the people in the world. but i'm retired from saving the world now. it all got too much, and now i'm just looking for a good time.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vatican reduces Inquisition's atrocity-count

The Vatican has "downsized the Inquisition," reducing the estimate of witches burned at stake:

he Vatican said Tuesday that fewer witches were burned at the stake and fewer heretics tortured into conversion during the dark centuries of the Inquisition than is generally believed.

Link (via Out of Ambit)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joystiq gaming newsblog launches

Pete Rojas of Engadget says, "There is way more video game news out there than we could possibly cover here at Engadget. So in partnership with Weblogs, Inc. we've created Joystiq, a new weblog covering everything related to video games." Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:13:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Teflon-coated yarn

A Norweigan company has shipped a teflon-coated knitting yarn that sheds water and is intended for use in all-weather knitting projects.

I was curious to see if the fibers would even allow water, being coated with Teflon and all. They did, but not before showing a curious phenomenon: the water lodged itself in the pockets of each stitch, making hundreds of tiny diamond-like bubbles all over the fabric surface.

Link (Thanks, Miriam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:12:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yahoo/Gmail war: Yahoo dialup users also get a storage boost

Folllowing up on this post about Yahoo webmail users receiving upgraded storage capacity in an apparent attempt by Yahoo to compete with Gmail, Boing Boing reader Brian says, "As a member of SBC Yahoo dial-up service, I received a notice yesterday that my email account now has a 2 Gig storage capacity. Obviously, this is separate from the free web-based email service from Yahoo, but 2 Gigs is bar far the most storage available to date, worldwide."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:08:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Artbots robot talent show participants announced

The organizers of Artbots: The Robot Talent show have announced the names of the twenty artists and groups participating in this third annual art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots. Show takes place September 17-19, 2004 in Harlem, NYC. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:02:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Urban archaeologist

Julia Solis is the intrepid explorer behind Dark Passage, a magnificent Web site showcasing the urban ruins of New York City and elsewhere. An abandoned hospital, a deserted jail, a hollow subway tubes... all are subjected to Soils's "exercises in forensic archaeology." Smithsonian magazine recently published a profile of Solis:

"These places contain the residue of the many souls that have passed through over the years," she says. "The less a place has been explored, the better, because the air hasn't been diluted and the soul marks are fresh."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:59:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod pirate radio bumper stickers

Boing Boing reader Beej says:

Griffin's stated range for the iTrip is a little inaccurate: I once left my iPod playing over the radio in the office, got in my car and drove out of the parking lot, around the corner and down the street. The signal petered out at about 150 feet. This is through the walls of my office and several intervening buildings! I've been running around for the past several months with this bumper sticker on my car. It's an ink-jet job and as you can see, it's getting a little faded. I figure that anyone that can read the bumper sticker-- on the I-5, at a stop light-- if intrigued could tune in and listen to whatever I'm listening to. No, I don't take requests. T-Shirt coming soon!

Link to full-size image.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:56:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neuromancer jacket-quote

I'm bursting with pride over something that I had to share: I've been asked for a jacket-flap quote for the upcoming 20th Anniversary Edition of William Gibson's Neuromancer, which Ace will publish next autumn. I've had some amazing honors in my career, but this takes the cake. I've only met Gibson a couple of times, but on both occasions I was struck by his generosity and wit.

Here's the quote I gave to Ace:

"Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading. I re-read it every year, just to get an edge on the year that's coming, and to glory in Gibson's prose and cunning artifice."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:29:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

New Guestblogger -- filmmaker Christopher Coppola

A big thanks to our outgoing guestblogger, Russ Kick of The Memory Hole, who filled the right-hand column with no shortage of interesting things during his visit. Mr. Kick is now off to write his next book, 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know, Vol. 2 due for release in November.

Our next guestbar resident, Christopher Coppola, has completed eight feature motion pictures. The latest of these is Creature of the Sunny Side-Up Trailer Park (a.k.a. Bloodhead), which had its world premiere during the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. The film stars screen legends Frank Gorshin and Shirley Jones, and television icons Lynda Carter and Bernie Kopell. His other film credits include the Trimark Pictures release Deadfall (1993) starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Biehn, and James Coburn; Gunfighter (1998) starring Martin Sheen, Robert Carradine, and Clu Gulager; Palmer's Pick-Up: An American Roadshow Odyssey (1999) starring Robert Carradine and Rosanna Arquette; Dracula's Widow (1989) which he produced for De Laurentiis Entertainment Group; G-Men From Hell (2000) starring William Forsythe, Tate Donovan, and Gary Busey; Bel-Air (2000) starring Charles Fleischer and Barbara Bain; and Clockmaker (1998), a children's fantasy film shot on location in Romania for Kuschner-Locke.

Christopher is co-founder and spokesperson for Ars Nova XXI, the mother company of PlasterCITY Productions (an independent feature and television production company that concentrates on HD digital format) and PlasterCITY Digital Post (a post-production facility that specializes in editing and onlining for feature films, television, shorts, commercials, and music videos.)

Welcome, Christopher!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:30:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boing Boing 2.0

Welcome to the new and improved Boing Boing, now with sponsors! Seriously, there's nothing wrong with your set. The only real difference you'll find on the page, besides a cleaner design, is the addition of those small ad boxes on the sides. We've decided to accept a limited amount of advertising so that we can cover our costs and dedicate more cycles to what we love -- finding and posting things that we find interesting, curious, and, of course, wonderful. What does this evolutionary step mean for you, dear reader? Nothing, except more of what you've come to expect from Boing Boing, brain candy for happy mutants since 1988. A warm round of thanks to our sponsors, and to you for your continued support! And a very special thanks to BoingBoing pal Anil Dash for the expert code massage.

- Mark, Cory, Xeni, David, and John

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:51:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tribe.net allows users to blog social net data

Social network service Tribe.net (I visit regularly, because some BoingBoing readers created a nifty BoingBoing tribe) just launched a feature that allows users to automatically publish aspects of their network experience to blogs or websites. MT, Blogger, TypePad are supported. Examples of the sorts of things one might "Tribecast" include lists of friends, special interest "tribes" one belongs to, or bulletin board listings.

This strikes me as an interesting new use of social nets, but also a potentially frightening one. It's bad enough that some folks are bold enough to belong to tribes like Vegan Oral Sex Enthusiasts Who Own Semiautomatic Weapons And Aren't Wearing any Underwear, but now such excessive displays of intimate information will be really, really public. Yikes. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:28:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SD earthquake

IM and phone reports of a moderate earthquake in San Diego large enough to scare the crap out of people, but no damage reports. Link. Update: Looks like a 5.2. And here are some reactions from San Diego bloggers

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:40:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iraqi artists express outrage over Abu Ghraib

Interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about a visual response by 25 artists in Baghdad to the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. At left, a sculpture by Abdel-Karim Khalil depicting a hooded detainee. Snip from CSM story:

[Iraqi Union of Artists deputy chairman Qasim Alsabti] created a life-size figure of a woman wrapped in a bloodstained white shroud. It symbolizes the rape of women detainees in Abu Ghraib, says Alsabti, who heard of allegations of women prisoners being raped at Abu Ghraib five months before the scandal broke. "There was a letter circulating in Fallujah from a woman inside Abu Ghraib," he says. "She was begging the resistance to bomb Abu Ghraib and bring down the walls on their heads so that their suffering would end. I felt like screaming when I heard this. I wanted to draw the attention of the American people."
[F]or many Iraqis, including artists like Alsabti, Abu Ghraib has become synonymous with what they see as the injustices of the occupation. "It's like an adviser from Saddam Hussei's regime has come back to Iraq and is now advising the Americans," he says.

Link. Incidentally, survivors of Pinochet in Chile know a thing or two about torture: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:30:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shockwave soccer replays

Carlo says:

"The BBC's doing these shockwave replays of goals and stuff from the European football championships. It's pretty nifty. I recommend choosing the Sweden-Bulgaria game, then the 57th minute goal by Larsson, then the ball-cam."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:23:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DJ Kreemy Table

Designer Karim Rashid's DJ Kreemy turntable table is perfect for otherworldly ambient sessions. Rashid: "(The table) is organic like sound, omnidirectional like sound, and that emphasizes the 'volumous' beats that irradiate from the two turntables." All I know is that it would match my 1967 Fender Rhodes "Student Model" piano perfectly. Link (Thanks, DF Tram!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:58:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: Computer limbs help trilateral amputee run again

Today on the National Public Radio program "Day to Day," I speak with Cameron Clapp. In September 2001, he lost both legs and his right arm in a train accident.

Supported by his large extended family -- and his identical twin brother Jesse -- Cameron fought against his disability to make an astounding recovery. Not only can the young man swim, run, drive a car, and even play golf again, he recently won four gold medals at the Endeavor Games, a sports competition for amputees. He can do this in part because of advanced prosthetic limb technology called the "C-Leg," short for "computer leg." The device (which Cameron demonstrated at Wired Magazine's NextFest) includes many tiny sensors controlled by a computer chip, and provides much greater mobility and control than conventional hydraulic limbs. Link to archived audio (after 12PM PT), a photo gallery, and more on both Cameron and the high-tech prosthetics he uses.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:50:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bluetooth virus EPOC.Cabir

Doesn't propagate by MMS or carry a payload, but there it is: a wild Bluetooth virus.

EPOC.Cabir is a proof-of-concept worm that replicates on Nokia Series 60 phones. It repeatedly sends itself to the first Bluetooth-enabled device that it can find, regardless of the type of device (ie even a Bluetooth-enabled printer will be attacked if it is within range).

Link (Thanks, Alfie)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:31:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suicide Girls -- the book

Rumor has it that the long-awaited print magazine for Suicide Girls recently died before arrival. But don't cry too hard for the online hipster smutster brand. They've got a delicious new photography book out, and it's already near the top of Amazon's arts and photography bestseller list. A number of BoingBoing readers including Michael McDaniel and Tim Holt write in to point out that Amazon's auto-recommendation system oddly suggests that those fond of the SG tome might also fancy Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs by Reverend Antonio Gallonio. "Better Together" indeed!
Fleshbot has a few sneak peeks of Suicide Girls, and there are more on the publisher's website here. (If you have to even *ask* whether or not it's worksafe...)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:13:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Collaborative, open textbook

OpenTextBook.org is a collaborative project wherein university students (and others) can turn their course notes into a giant, open textbook. You need to know how to use CVS to contribute and edit the book, but there's a daily PDF snapshot of the state of the project, which is looking pretty good! Link (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:10:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Working DIY paper Clie cradle

Here's a (badly machine-translated) Japanese page telling you how to print, cut and fold a cradle for Sony's Clie PDAs. Link (Thanks, Carlos!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:07:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roll your own pirate radio station with an iPod

BoingBoing reader Philip says, "After playing around with the new iTrip mini, the FM broadcasting accessory for the iPod our little minds got working on some ideas. We thought we might be able to make the range of Griffin's iTrip mini a little better if took it apart and exposed the antenna, turns out we could. And then we thought, hey -- we could use a couple iPods to broadcast something we wanted to get out there. Perhaps not 'should' that is, but could. Here's the How To."
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:06:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bio Diesel conversion primer

On Kevin Kelly's "Cool Tools" ezine, a primer on Bio Diesel -- fuels made from veggie oil. Roll your own renewable fueling station!

I have been running Bio Diesel in my truck for over a year now. Bio Diesel is basically slightly refined vegetable oil that can run in ANY diesel vehicle with little to no modifications. The vegetable oil used can be virgin, but it is generally recycled from fryers at restaurants. Yes, the exhaust smells like whatever was fried in it. The best part of running Bio Diesel is that no wars need to be fought over it: it's entirely domestic, supports US farming, it's totally renewable, and it cuts almost all aspects of a diesel vehicle's emissions by more than 50-75%. (The exception is NOx which is about the same). You get slightly less mileage and power (5% decrease) from petro-diesel, but your exhaust smells a lot better and its actually easier on your engine.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:02:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wall-building robot

BoingBoing reader Mack says:

Excellent pictures on this site! A USC roboticist has created a robot that can build large structures by extruding semi-liquid material from a pump in inch-thick layers to form a wall or a building, and then return to fill in the hollow wall. This looks like a macro version of 3-D prototyping in that you could essentially set up a machine, fill it with the right goo and programming, switch it on, and have a house in a few hours that was built completely without the intervention of human hands.

Link to National Science Foundation press release, and Link to an overview with more links on Mack's blog.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:58:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cornfield robotics in the Netherlands

BoingBoing reader Bas Suverkropp says:

The Field Robot event is kind of a miniature DARPA Grand Challenge, small robots must navigate through a maize field. Join Corn2Bwild, SANDRA, Wiedrobot and many others on june 17th and 18th as 22 teams from the Netherlands, Germany, USA, Hungary, Israel, Gambia, Poland, Nigeria,Ireland and Belgium compete in Wageningen, the Netherlands.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:52:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yahoo ups free email storage to 100MB in Gmail competition

Storage limit for Yahoo's free webmail service just expanded to 100MB in an apparent effort to compete with Google's yet-to-be-publicly-launched Gmail. Link (Thanks, Caines)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:43:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool Cassini Saturn science

BoingBoing friend John Parres says:

JPL's Cassini spacecraft is making it's final approach to Saturn after seven years of whipping around our solar system. This weekend the probe flew by an outer retrograde moon, Phoebe, and based on stunning pictures unspooling today it seems Phoebe is an ice rich body, perhaps even a captured comet! If all goes well on July 1st Cassini will enter into orbit around the ringed planet and provide four years of exploration including the December landing of the 700 pound Huygens probe on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:40:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weblog Festival in Iran

Hossein Derakshan reports back from Iran's first Weblog Festival.

[Iranian Deputy I.T. Minister] Nassrollah Jahangard wished that every Iranian could have a blog one day and expressed the government's support for persian blogs which, in his mind, are defining the presence of Iran on the Net and make an identity for the Iranian community on the Internet. He also added that blogs are sort of cultureal heritage for Iran and they will make the future of it.
The latter, Sohrab Razeghi, said that blogs and the values they carry with themseves are the begining of a modern society in Iran. He said that the openness, subversiveness, and a sense of individualism which are visible among Iranian weblogs are completely new things in the society. he then rejected the idea of government support and said that they should leave the persian blogoshpere alone and let it go in whatever direction it wants.

Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:37:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 14, 2004

Canadian copyfight hots up: Liberal MPs on the take from copyright industries?

Copyright has become an election issue in Canada, and with the federal election looming on the 28th (I've cast my absentee ballot, for Olivia Chow, and have my fingers crossed for a nation run as well as ~~Toronto~~ Layton's district in Toronto was under Jack Layton) the copyfight is heating up back in my homeland. Most recently, a Liberal MP from my old riding of Parkdale introduced a poorly thought-out bill that would have been bad news for the Internet. Michael Geist wrote an editorial about this in the Toronto Star, and the fallout has been intense, with letters going back and forth in the paper. Michael's written a followup editorial that the Star just ran.

Further, copyright reform proceedings must also be perceived to be balanced. According to Elections Canada, Bulte and her riding association have accepted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from rights holder groups and broadcasters. Parliamentarians involved in the copyright reform process should refuse all such contributions to ensure that the perception of absolute impartiality is preserved.

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:50:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Matsushita's "sleep room" for insomniacs

Next June, Japan's Matsushita will start selling a "sleep room" for insomniacs. USA Today's description of it reminds me of the euthanasia room from Soylent Green. You get into the bed, which is "upright like a recliner." A giant TV screen shows a video clip of a river in a forest, while soft music and nature sounds play in the background. A little while later, the lights dim, the TV shuts off, and the bed reclines. The river soundtrack continues to play. Then the massage machinery inside the mattress kicks in and kneads away the tension from your body. Finally, the lights go out and some air is released from the mattress, and you fall asleep -- hopefully.

At Matsushita, a night of rest isn't cheap. Rieko Saitoh, a company publicist, says the whole system is expected to go on sale in June 2005 — to the tune of $30,000.
Still, company officials say that even if the price is high, customers won't lose much sleep over it.
"Nobody who's come in here for 30 minutes hasn't fallen asleep," said Heiuchi.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:19:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hot party game trend: Cockroach racing

A Lithuanuan event management company offers unusual party games, including the time-honored sport of Madagascar Cockroach Racing.

Every participant receives special race money and can purchase with them one of six cockroach. Other participants bet for the couple of player and cockroach they liked the most and watch the competition on the big table (4.5x1.5 m).
The game will be a surprise to all guests. As much as they would load the poor insect from the beginning, they will love them be the end of the race. Players stimulate theirs cockroaches to run by knocking the glassed surface of the course with the special small sticks and joy of every step of cockroach. The finish of the race is quite unpredictable and every step of a cockroach brings lots of emotions to all the guests.

Link (Thanks, Frank)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:08:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Drexler says no to "grey goo" myths

Nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler has co-authored a paper in a scientific journal addressing fears surrounding self-replicating nano-machines. The paper, co-written by Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, was published in the journal Nanotechnology last week. From the abstract:

"In the light of controversy regarding scenarios based on runaway replication (so-called 'grey goo'), a review of current thinking regarding nanotechnology-based manufacturing is in order. Nanotechnology-based fabrication can be thoroughly non-biological and inherently safe: such systems need have no ability to move about, use natural resources, or undergo incremental mutation. Moreover, self-replication is unnecessary: the development and use of highly productive systems of nanomachinery (nanofactories) need not involve the construction of autonomous self-replicating nanomachines.
Accordingly, the construction of anything resembling a dangerous self-replicating nanomachine can and should be prohibited. Although advanced nanotechnologies could (with great difficulty and little incentive) be used to build such devices, other concerns present greater problems. Since weapon systems will be both easier to build and more likely to draw investment, the potential for dangerous systems is best considered in the context of military competition and arms control."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:34:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spanish blog radio

This online radio station serves the Spanish-speaking blog community worldwide. Cool! Link to the web radio station, and Link to the related weblog. (Thanks, Jean-Luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:13:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stanley Milgram's shocking new biography

The Man Who Shocked The World is a new biography about Stanley Milgram, the provocative social psychologist whose mind-blowing experiments three decades ago are still highly relevant in today's world of Abu Ghraib and Friendster. From the Milgram Web site, hosted by the book's author, Dr. Thomas Blass:

"Controversy surrounded Stanley Milgram for much of his professional life as a result of a series of experiments on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the experiment. But, during the experiment itself, the experience was a powerfully real and gripping one for most participants.
Milgram's career also produced many other creative, though less controversial, experiments; such as, the small-world method (the source of 'Six Degrees of Separation'), the lost-letter technique, and an experiment testing the effects of televised antisocial behavior which, though conducted 30 years ago, remains unique to the present day."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:10:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AmIGhettoFabulousOrNot?

If nothing else, click for the surprise of random white dudes in bad pimps-n-hos attire. Link (via buffoonery, thanks Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:04:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Catholic Church outsourcing prayers to India

Holy outsourcing! With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the US, prests in India are now picking up some of the work of saying special-purpose Mass for North American churches.

American, as well as Canadian and European churches, are sending Mass intentions, or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers, to clergy in India. About 2 percent of India's more than one billion people are Christians, most of them Catholics.
In Kerala, a state on the southwestern coast with one of the largest concentrations of Christians in India, churches often receive intentions from overseas. The Masses are conducted in Malayalam, the native language. The intention - often a prayer for the repose of the soul of a deceased relative, or for a sick family member, thanksgiving for a favor received, or a prayer offering for a newborn - is announced at Mass.

Link (Thanks, Zed)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:01:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, June 13, 2004

State of Wireless London

Julian Priest has written an excellent report on the state of "Wireless London" -- the wheres and hows of WiFi in the city.

The reason that it has been possible to operate freenetwork access point type nodes without charge is that once the equipment is installed, the incremental cost of allowing others to use it is very low. If you are already paying for network access for yourself, and have installed a wireless network, the additional cost of offering it to the public is negligible. The initial hardware costs are also low, at less than 100 GBP for an access point, and with running costs of 25 GBP per month it makes for a very affordable system.
However, commercial hotspots are faced with significantly more costs over and above the minimal equipment and networking costs, such as a billing infrastructure, help desks, credit checking, location payments, maintenance contracts, share holder dividends and marketing, to name a few. This is inevitably reflected in prices charged for the service.
It remains to be seen how these commercial models burdened with such overheads will compete with the freenetworking ones, and whether the marketing spend, and the strategy of local monopoly will be justified by the returns.

Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:14:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Man wins person-v-horse race for first time in 25 years

There's a Welsh town that hosts an annual 22-mile human-verus-horse footrace, with a £1000 cumulative prize for any human beats the horse that's gone unclaimed for 25 years -- until now.

Bookies William Hill had to pay out on scores of bets struck at odds of 16/1.
This year's contest had a record 500 runners and more than 40 horses and riders competing for the winning title.

Link (via Ben Hammersley)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:09:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Wanna buy a villa in Iraq?

Odd real estate listings are almost as fun to surf as weird eBay auctions. Here's an ad for what sounds like a charming Baghdad villa, complete with "recently restored water and electricity," and "Big basement designed also as anti-aircraft bunker with water facilities." Asking price for the property is only $665,000 USD, in a neighborhood described as "calm & safe." Link (Thanks, Jean-Luc)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:36:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Signal Orange: representing Iraq war dead on bodies of the living

The organizers of the "Signal Orange" t-shirt campaign want people to wear shirts displaying the identities of individual US soldiers killed in Iraq. They say the project serves to remind the world that war creates real victims on both sides. Snip from their project overview:

"Signal Orange is a project to make the invisible visible -- which is a premise and prerequisite for democracy. The goal of Signal Orange is to unveil the faces that the Bush Administration wants hidden -- and to stop pretending that its actions in Iraq are inconsequential.
"This is a response: Signal Orange represents the dead with the living -- wearing T-shirts in their names. There is one shirt for each soldier who died. The front states how he or she died, the back reads, "(Rank) (First) (Last) can't vote anymore." The signal orange color of the shirt was chosen for the same reason it is used where caution is required -- it's the most visible color in person, on camera, and on video. The shirts are to be worn in places where the media is focused, whether that focus is momentary or constant. Examples might include the audience outside a morning talk show, or a parade, or a sporting event, and it certainly includes the Republican National Convention in NYC come September.
"Signal Orange doesn't say that these soldiers or their families condemn or support the war, and it doesn't speak for them. Whether they opposed or supported the war, they were fighting for our right to decide democratically whether a war is just or not. They've been buried twice--once in the ground, and once in the media. If we can make them visible in the media through Signal Orange, we can demonstrate that they had voices that have been lost."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:24:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Defcon Wifi Shootout Contest

Get ready for the second annual "Defcon Wifi Shootout Contest", July 30 - August 1, 2004, at this year's Defcon in Vegas.

The goal of this year's contest is to achieve the greatest possible connect distance between two 802.11b stations through innovative engineering and antenna design. Wonderful prizes and fun are available to all who participate!

Link (via socalwug)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:08:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nokia launches phonecam with fashionsoftporn from photog Rankin

Handset maker Nokia promoted the release of a new phonecam/PDA with help from renowned British fashion photographer Rankin, and a bunch of hot nekkid fairy chicks.

[Rankin] was given an advance trial of Nokia's latest and highest-resolution cameraphone, the 7610. With it, he crafted six huge A2 sized photographs and 60 other shots, inspired by the legendary Cottingley fairy photographs. By running the images through software filters, the former co-founder of the legendary Dazed & Confused magazine managed to conjure up incredibly sharp images of beautiful women posed as woodland fairies. All this from a one-megapixel cameraphone with 4 x digital zoom, and a very sharp colour display.

Link to Mike Butcher's article in the Irish Times, and link to photo gallery with Rankin's digitally remixed phonecam images -- and some pics of the handset itself.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:59:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More on "Why can't the BBC play MP3s?"

Following up on this earlier BoingBoing post about the curious tale of Rodeohead MP3s, BoingBoing, and the BBC -- reader and geek sleuth Rupert Goodwins says, "I asked Mike Todd, one of BBC Radio's Broadcast Duty Managers, what was with that MP3 ban on the wireless. He said:

"A lot depends on the amount of compression in the original MP3, but the CD-R request would be either to allow a linear version to be supplied, or a very much less compressed version. Every time lossy-compressed audio goes via a lossy part of the chain it gets worse (depending, of course, on the original level of compression and the type of audio)."
A BH studio to the FM transmitter network is not a problem, but it is when it goes to DAB/Freeview/Dsat ... and then the studio itself may be being sourced via a lossy ISDN (as indeed Peel is). Add these together and the results could be dreadful ... therefore there's a policy to (a) not use MP3s unless editorial imperatives demand it and there is absolutely no other way, (b) not us Minidiscs except in certain circumstances and (c) have computer playout systems working with linear audio.

BoingBoing reader Rupert continues:

"There we have it. DAB is the European terrestrial digital radio system, Freeview is the UK's digital terrestrial TV system which has multiple radio channels too, and DSat is the digital satellite system. There's one heck of a lot of digital broadcasting round these parts, each with its own compression system, and that's before you start to worry about the streaming stuff on the Net."

[Xeni speaking again here]. I'm still not sure that explains it. The BoingBoing reader who pointed John Peel to the Rodeohead MP3s says that when he learned Peel couldn't play the MP3s, he burned them to CD, sent them to Peel at the BBC, and they aired on Peel's show shortly thereafter. So, either (a) the issue was that Peel's show was simply unable to deal with downloading, storing, and playing digital files (but popping a CD in a player was no prob), or (b) the above theory is true, and Peel's show obtained and then aired a non-lossy version of the material, from someone other than this BoingBoing reader.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:37:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Hotel Motel Zen

ice hotel
hotel pelirocco
propeller island hotel
the gobbler motel
madonna inn
wigwam village
hoogerbrugge hotel

web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:32:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paid song "ads" on radio walk, talk, quack like payola

An article in the LA Times about record companies paying radio stations to air specific songs as ads. Critics say the practice is a lot like the "payola" systems of the 1950s, which for the most part were outlawed long ago.

During a single week in May, Canadian pop rocker Avril Lavigne's new song Don't Tell Me aired no fewer than 109 times on Nashville radio station WQZQ-FM. The heaviest rotation came between midnight and 6 a.m., an on-air no man's land visited largely by insomniacs, truckers and graveyard shift workers. On one Sunday morning, the three-minute, 24-second song aired 18 times, sometimes as little as 11 minutes apart.
Those plays, or "spins," helped Don't Tell Me vault into the elite top 10 on Billboard magazine's national pop radio chart, which radio program directors across the country use to spot hot new tunes. But what many chart watchers may not know is that the predawn saturation in Nashville and elsewhere occurred largely because Arista Records paid the station to play the song as an advertisement. In all, sources said, WQZQ aired Don't Tell Me as an ad at least 40 times the week ending May 23, accounting for more than one-third of the song's airplay on the station.

Link (totally stupid site registration required) (via pho)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:20:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The postman always texts twice: shag phones

Disposable mobiles purchased specifically for the purpose of illicit sexual liasons. A Boingboing pal in the UK says reports of this odd social trend are legit -- throwaway phones allow sekrit lovers to communicate by SMS or voice, on the downlow. Snip from the blog where I first read the phrase "shag phone":

I heard someone (honest) talking about their "shag phone" the other day. He was a married man having an affair with a lady who was also married. It seems that one of the first heady rituals of the affair was to purchase a "his and her" pair of Pre-pay shag phones.
Only they knew each other's number, so when the phone rang, they could answer in an appropriately passionate way. While much the same effect could be achieved with caller recognition (assuming they were mobile literate), there was more than just a romantic gesture involved with this behavior. Technology still can't hide your phone bill from a suspicious spouse. And it can't hide your amour's frequently dialed number from prying eyes. Better to get a pair pre-pay phones with no incriminating phone bills or records. A small example of how the mobile is impacting on 21st century life.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:14:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rotator cuff surgery

This surgical video is not for the faint of heart, but it is fascinating to watch that little, whirling blade flense away all that frayed tendon and bone. As the possessor of some remarkably cranky back bits, this video compells me -- it would be so boss to just have someone jam some fiber optics and a Dremel tool into my shoulder and just grind off all the troublesome tissue.

About 9 years ago my dad was needing some relief from persistent shoulder pain. After the fun and joys of X-rays and MRI's he elected to have surgery to correct a bone spur that had literally torn the innards of his rotator cuff apart.

Link (Thanks, franklinrh!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ian McDonald's brilliant new novel, River of Gods: Bollywoodpunk

I just finished reading Ian McDonald's latest novel, "River of Gods," and my mind is whirling. River is the story of India's 100th birthday, when the great nation has fractured into warring subnations on caste, religious and cultural lines. Like McDonald's other great novels, the story is beyond epic, with an enormous cast of richly realised characters and a vivid, luminous vision of techno-Hinduism that beggars the imagination. Take, for example, Town and Country, a soap-opera acted out by AIs (or "aeais") who lead double-lives -- each AI character has another role, as the actor who plays the character, in a "meta-soap" where their squabbling, indiscretions and marriages are tabloid fodder for the soapi magazines that dote upon them.

This is just one of dozens of conceits in a novel that combines the best themes from books like Out on Blue Six and Desolation Road, handles them with the masterful hand visible in Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone and the Sturgeon-award-winning Tendeleo's Story, and folds in all the contemporary themes in sf like the Singularity and the cratering of cyberpunk memes and spits out a 575-page epic that I couldn't put down until I'd finished it.

Ian McDonald has been one of my favourite writers for some 15 years now, and the amazing thing is, he's getting even better. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:32:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vampire Hunter transforming board game

I'm at DreamCon, an sf con in Jacksonville, Florida, and I just spied this super-cool board-game in the dealers' room: it's called "Vampire Hunter," and the gimmick is that the tower in the middle shines different coloured lights on the board depending on the state of play -- the light reveals different details on the board, so that normal cits turn into werewolves and other monsters. No idea if the gameplay is any good, but what a great gadget! Holy crap, Amazon has it for less than six bucks on clearance: Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:15:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alternate history in bite-sized chunklets

"Today in Alternate History" is a site that racks, in "today in history format," several alternate history timelines. It's nice skiffy narrative in bite-sized chunks:

in 1862, the Human League takes credit for a series of bombings against Mlosh citizens of Britain. The Crown vows to catch them, but there are sympathetic elements in Scotland Yard that slow the investigation.
in 1934, Pascal, LLC, with the assistance of Carla Lambert, persuaded Congress to fund a system of linking Eddies together such that they could share information constantly. Using telegraph lines and radio frequencies set aside for them by the Congress, Pascal constructed a Knowledge Railroad that made the almost instantaneous transmission of information possible across the nation.
in 1958, Buddy Holly reunited with his old band, The Crickets, for a successful US tour. This reunion produced such hits as I'll Be Lovin' Her, Puerto Rican Mama, and their remake of I'll Be Seeing You.
in 1977, President Reagan enacted sweeping tax cuts, mostly aimed at the well-to-do, but with some at lower ends of the economic spectrum. They didn't prove to be the stimulus he expected, though, and the nation plunged into a deep recession.
in 1982, King Charles of England called on all exiled nobles of England to return and take their rightful place at his side. He announced a general amnesty for those who had supported the Nazis, and declared that England would rise again to its former glory.
in 1992, filmmaker Oliver Stone releases JBR, in which he attempts to give credence to People's Attorney Presley's arguments that Comrade President Rosenberg was killed by a conspiracy rather than a lone counter-revolutionary. The film is a huge success, prompting the Communist Party to call for its banning.

Link (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:50:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Electras: John Kerry's high school band rocks out

Luke Francl sez: "It's a little known fact that John Kerry was in a high school band called The Electras (he played bass). The site KerryRocks.com has lots of photos, the liner notes, and an MP3 melange of some of their songs.

"Due to increasing intrest, RCA has re-released the Electra's album and you can buy it for $14 (previously, it was nearly impossible to find). It's crazy that RCA kept the masters in their catalog for all this time. But you never know when the bass player from some shitty garage band might get nominated for President." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:47:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Field-trips to Great Brain sites

This page details the journeys of a family that set out to find and document places mentioned in John D Fitzgerald's Great Brain novels, a series of kids' books set in 1880s Utah. These autobiographical books about Fitzgerald's precious con man of a brother, Tom, were hugely influential on me -- in fact, the title story of my short story collection, A Place So Foriegn and Eight More, is my attempt to write a science-fictionalized version of the stories that so fascinated me as a boy.

We think we found the exact spot where JD, TD and their dad went fishing up Beaver Canyon. It was papa Fitzgerald's secret spot, not far up the canyon, and had great fishing in the river and an open meadow. It must have been at what is now the Little Cottonwood campground (#5). We tried to stay there, but all the sites were full.
In the story, the secret got out one year, and the location was crowded with other campers. JD's dad decided to go further up the canyon, maybe to Kents Lake (#14).

Link (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:38:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, June 11, 2004

Italy's premier Berlusconi SMS-spams voters' mobile phones

Italy's Berlusconi government spammed the cellphones of millions of citizens with text-messages about voting procedures for tomorrow's EU and local elections. Some call it an unprecedented invasion of mobile privacy for political control. Others argue it's a smart way for the administration to combat absenteeism and ensure that more of Italy's voting public shows up at the polls. Either way, unsolicited text messages don't grow on trees -- the stunt cost around $7M US, and critics want to know who paid for it.

The message, received on cell phones on Thursday and Friday, carried the sender line of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Premier Silvio Berlusconi's office. The message detailed when the polls will be open and what documents citizens need to vote.
"Finally we have recourse to a tool like the text message that is now in everyday use to bring the state closer still to its citizens," said Technology Minister Lucio Stanca. But the political opposition branded the strategy as a political tactic. The government "is trying every subterfuge to recover votes. It's alarming that privacy is violated in such a sensational way," said opposition lawmaker Francesco Martone.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:22:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Beasties disc has DRM -- Fight! For your right! To cooo-oopy!

The Beastie Boys' new CD, To the Five Boroughs, has DRM on it that prevents you from ripping it or making a copy for your car. I got the MP3s last week -- it's a great album -- and was going to buy the CD while I'm in the US this week, but now I think I'll just erase the MP3s and not bother. If the Beasties wanna treat me like a crook, I don't want to be their customer.

Note that the only thing that this DRM is doing here is pissing off the honest fans who want open CDs; the DRM on the CD didn't stop my source from making me a set of MP3s. In other words, if you plan on listening to the new disc on your iPod or laptop, you're better off downloading a copy made by a cracker and posted on Kazaa -- if you buy it in a shop, you're going to have to go through the lawbreaking rigamarole of breaking the DRM yourself.

I always hear record execs whining that they "can't compete with free" -- but maybe the real competitive disadvantage is that they're selling a product that's less useful than the one being served up on P2P nets. Link (Thanks, Jon!)

Update: Ian sez, "Hi, I'm not sure who posted re: Beastie Boys copy protection, but I just spoke with Mike D and their management and they wanted me to pass along that a) This is all territories except the US and UK -- US and UK discs do not have this protection on them; b) All EMI CDs are treated this way, theirs isn't receiving special treatment; c) They would have preferred not to have the copy protection, but weren't allowed to differ from EMI policy."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:33:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SF museum site

The website for Seattle's science fiction museum is live. Link (Thanks, Fun Furde)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:40:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What movies would Walt make today?

Great FARK photoshopping contest: Movies Walt Disney would make today. Link (Thanks, Drew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:36:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kill a stupid Internet patent

Got a favorite stupid Internet patent you want to see clobbered? EFF is running a patent-busting contest:

We're currently seeking nominations for ten patents that deserve to be revoked because they are invalid. Sadly, we don't have the resources to challenge every stupid patent out there. In order to qualify for our ten most-wanted list, a patent must be software or Internet-related and there must be a good reason to suspect that the patent claims are invalid. We're especially interested in patents that target tools of free expression, such as streaming media, blogging tools, and voice over IP (VoIP) technology. Most importantly, the patent-holder must be aggressively enforcing its patent and suing (or threatening to sue) alleged infringers. We're particularly interested in cases where the patent-holder is trying to force small businesses, individuals, nonprofits, and consumers to pay licensing fees. Deadline to enter is June 23.
On June 30, the Patent Busting Project's team of tough lawyers and brainy geeks will announce the contest winners – or losers, depending on how you look at it. And that's when the real fight for great justice begins. We'll be needing your help to research prior art for each patent and offer your technical expertise or historical knowledge. Using a legal process called "reexamination," the Patent Busting Project will ultimately go to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and attempt to take those bad patents off the books.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

German Creative Commons licenses launch with a bang and two books

Janko sez, "The German Creative Commons licenses are introduced today, and my publisher agreed to participate by putting two books out under a BY-NC-ND license. Which is remarkable for two things: a) heise is actually one of the most influential German IT publishers. b) one of the books is mine :)" Link (Thanks, Janko!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:32:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cybernetic animal photoshoppery

Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: cybernetic animals. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:30:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Futures market for outcome of political and economic events

I didn't know there was a futures market for the next president. I read this in an article in Bloomberg:

Some investors are betting Bush will win the election. According to the Iowa Electronic Markets, as of 8:45 a.m. New York time investors were paying 53.2 cents for futures that pay $1 in November should Bush win the election. Kerry futures were quoted at 46.8 cents.
Sponsored by the University of Iowa Henry B. Tippie College of Business, the market allows investors to buy and sell futures contracts based on the outcome of political and economic events, such as elections and Federal Reserve interest-rate changes.

They also have a market for who will be nominated as the Democratic candidate. It will cost you two tenths of a cent to buy a share that'll pay a dollar if Lieberman gets nominated. Link

Michael sez: I think the Bloomberg article made an error when it claimed, "investors were paying 53.2 cents for futures that pay $1 in November should Bush win the election. Kerry futures were quoted at 46.8 cents." Notice that Dems are slightly favored over Republicans, which contradicts the Bloomberg article. Here is the prospectus for this future. Bloomberg probably misattributed another futures market to the presidential winner market. This futures market sort of looks like Kerry vs. Bush, but is really on who will be on the November ticket. The most likely being Bush/Kerry. (See the prospectus below.) Of course it's possible that Bloomberg was quoting a market value from several weeks ago, but I doubt it. Although it's true that, as the article claimed, "Some investors are betting that Bush will win the election." *Most* investors are betting that Kerry will win. At least for today.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:23:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Power Tool Drag Race in San Francisco

It's time again for the annual Power Tool Drag Races in San Francisco! This Saturday and Sunday...

"See average schmoes go up agaist GEARHEADS GODS in the age old struggle for Power Tool SUPREMACY! Watch as the finest minds in mutated motors RIP SHRED and BURN the track to TWISTED CINDERS! Nibble your carcinogen-laden fingers in suspense as the competition gets down to the FINAL BLOODY SHOWDOWN!"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:59:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Washington Post on Bush's torture methods

This Washington Post editorial about the methods of torture that the Bush administration approves of is all over the blogosphere, but I think it's important enough to post here.

Before the Bush administration took office, the Army's interrogation procedures -- which were unclassified -- established this simple and sensible test: No technique should be used that, if used by an enemy on an American, would be regarded as a violation of U.S. or international law. Now, imagine that a hostile government were to force an American to take drugs or endure severe mental stress that fell just short of producing irreversible damage; or pain a little milder than that of "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." What if the foreign interrogator of an American "knows that severe pain will result from his actions" but proceeds because causing such pain is not his main objective? What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country's security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:46:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rhythm Science

Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has a new book out that melds memoir with pomo ranting. Published by MIT press, Rhythm Science, is the latest in the Mediawork Pamphlets series under the editorial direction of Boing Boing pal Peter Lunenfeld. The Mediaworks Pamphlets pair authors and designers to create works in the vein of McLuhan and Fiore's seminal The Medium is the Massage. Rhythm Science contains a mind-spinning cut-and-paste CD mix of sounds from the Sub Rosa record label archive. Brion Gysin and Tristan Tzara, meet Scanner and Oval. Link
Update: Josh Glenn points us to his recent interview with Miller in the Boston Globe.

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:40:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free

Paul Boutin has written a great piece for Slate about a cost-free 3-step method to keep your PC virus free. Please read it an use it so your PC doesn't end up become a spam and virus spewing zombie. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:39:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seymour Hersh on Abu Ghraib: "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

Brad DeLong posted an email message he received from someone who saw Seymour Hersh speak at the University of Chicago a couple of nights ago.

[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."
He looked frightened.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:07:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why Spyware is good: it thins the herd

Nick Douglas sez: "WhereU is asking the court to change its mind on an authoritarian spyware law, albeit via a jurisdiction argument. Spyware sucks, sure, but if I can avoid it with Firefox and the occasional AdAware scan, I'd rather not pay taxes to protect luddites from it. Spyware is a disease in the Darwinian ecosystem of the Internet, and it keeps power users ahead of brain-deaders who click moving banner monkeys."

A New York company that makes Internet pop-up ads has asked a judge to block enforcement of Utah's new Spyware Control Act pending resolution of the firm's challenge to the law's constitutionality.
WhenU.com Inc. claims the law that took effect last month is "arbitrary and Draconian" and violates its free-speech rights.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:43:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New York Times gets mad at Apartment Therapy blog

Worth reading. A NY Times writer threatens to sic the paper's legal dogs on the Apartment Therapy blogger.

Yesterday the phone rang towards the end of the day and when we picked it up the voice on the other side of the line said, "This is Marianne Rohrlich." It was like getting a call from Elvis. Marianne Rohrlich?! Who we have been reading obsessively and PROMOTING obsessively for the best home section coverage IN THE COUNTRY? She is, however, not happy with us. "Did it occur to you that it is not right to just LIFT other people's work?" she asks me. ("Do you know what blogging is?" I want to ask.) "Our legal department is going to be calling you."

Link (Thanks, Keith!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:51:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Arcata Eye Police Log now a book

Stefan sez: "Arcata is a small, funky Northern California college town. Its laid-back style, liberal politics, and location on Route 101 makes it an attractive way station (or permenant home) for a wide variety of (ahem) colorful characters.

"The local weekly paper, the Arcata Eye, publishes an arch, sometimes hilarious, sometimes hair-raising police blotter column, available on its web site and now as a book!"

8:10 p.m. Malloy and Reed (you’'re too young to remember them) would’'ve described the behavior of the woman at a Uniontown shopping center as "hinky." It was this very hinkiness that compelled management and police to render her persona non grata, even though she hadn’'t stolen anything.
10:39 p.m. More hinkage, same place. This time it was a man. A man and a bottle. The bottle wasn’'t his, and yet he seemed to enjoy its company, toting it around the store and placing it in different locations, thus maximizing the hink factor and attracting a security guard’s interest. When he went through the checkout line, though, the bottle was not visible. He left, the police came, but neither he nor his glassy shopping companion were located.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:43:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BitTorrent of Daily Show on Ashscroft's refusal to turn over torture memo

A Boing Boing reader sez: John Stewart tears Ashcroft a new one over the torture legalizing memo. And it's funny." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:33:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO skin a PC to look like a Mac

Engadget has a great step-by-step HOWTO for skinning your WinXP box until its desktop is nigh-indistinguishable from a MacOS X box. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:21:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real Stuff by Dennis P. Eichhorn

I'm fanatical about autobiographical comics. Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Joe Matt, Chester Brown, Mary Fleener, Joe Sacco -- I can't get enough of them. There's something about comics and real life stories that go together; I can't quite figure it out, but it works. Denny Eichhorn, author of Real Stuff, is one of the best comic book autobiographers. Like Pekar, he doesn't draw his own cartoons -- he hires well-known ones to draw from his scripts. Dennis has led an interesting life. There's a little Kerouac in him, and a little Bukowski, too. It's a wonder he's still alive, after all he's been through.

One of my favorite episodes from his life is from his high school years. A kid he didn't know very well invited him over to his house. The mom asked him if he wanted a hambuger. He said, "Sure." When the burger was ready, the mom and her son sat down at the table and watch Denny eat the burger. They didn't eat; they just watched Denny. They had gleams in their eyes. When Denny was finished, they asked him if he liked it. He said it was OK, but a little spicy. Then the mom and soon broke out in laughter. "It was DOG FOOD!" they howled.

Denny had 20 issues of his comic, Real Stuff, published, mostly by Fantagraphics. This anthology, also titled Real Stuff, is published by a company in Los Angeles that I've never heard of, called Swifty Morales Press. They did a great job -- the book is a beaut. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:18:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SENT phonecam art show launches with Motorola

Phonecam photographers, contribute to SENT! The phonecam art show I'm co-curating -- the first of its kind in America -- is online, and you are invited to share your futurephone snapshots of the world with the world. The website is live now, and a gallery show will open at a downtown Los Angeles space on July 9.

Motorola is sponsoring the show, and they've provided some late-model camera phones for each of the 30 participating artists (including Megan Mullally of TV's "Will and Grace," Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, "Weird" Al Yankovic, and a number of renowned photographers and filmmakers).

National Public Radio's "Day to Day" program issued a "Phonecam Challenge" to their listeners in partnership with the show -- NPR listeners from around the world submitted images to SENT, and five winning entries will be recognized after review by a panel of judges including "Day to Day" host Alex Chadwick.

The invited artists' images will debut at the gallery show in July, and images submitted by the public are available for viewing right now.
Link, and instructions on how to submit your phonecam art are here. the NPR "Day to Day" Phonecam Challenge is here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:18:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Playlists of Web-available music

Webjay is a project to host and share listener-created playlists of songs that are freely downloadable from the Web. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:16:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reservoir Dogs/Star Wars mashup

Imperial Dogs is a work-in-progress mashup of Star Wars with Reservoir Dogs, from Studio Creations, who also brought us the Star Wars/Clerks mashup "Trooper Clerks." There are some sweet songs (Stuck in a Room with R2!) stills and animations up now. Link (Thanks, Sizemore)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:14:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Replica first-edition Britannica

This $200 replica of the 235-year-old first-edition Encyclopædia Britannica is really cool. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:12:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update: Dot-bomb bankruptcy auctioneer goes bust

Andover Consulting -- a dot-bomb vulture that specialized in selling off the assets of bankrupt Silicon Valley tech companies -- has gone bankrupt. Its assets are up for auction. Check out the cache of Herman Miller chairs and the sweet sweet cubicle action. Link (via Oblomovka)

Update: Billl sez, "FYI, Andover Consulting is *not* bankrupt or going out of business, according to one of their people I just emailed. I suspect this is just an auction of stuff they're liquidating from other companies."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:10:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conference schwag goldmine

VonGuard sez, "I just got back from the 2004 BIO conference in SF, and I can safely say that this show offered the best shwag I have ever seen at an expo. Who cares about the protesters and the genetically modified foods? Screw them, I want my keychain flashlights, pens, and squishy balls. Here then, I have created a page to honor the best of the best, the 2004 BIO shwag awards!" I'm a serious conference rat, but this schwag is way outside of my experience, truly a cut above. Link (Thanks, VonGuard!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy 70th, Donald Duck!

Donald Duck is 70 today! Link (Thanks, Tavie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:57:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley

In my new issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering:

* 3-D Videoconferencing (no glasses required!)
* Synthetic Biology (a parts library of genetic Tinkertoys!)
* Seconhand Smoke (worse than we thought!)
* The Molecular Foundry (fab new nanofab!)

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:47:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Red, round tricorder ready for space

My Wired News colleague Noah Shachtman filed this interesting piece about a weird new NASA gadget:

It's shaped like a basketball. It was inspired by Spock's tricorder. And, if NASA researchers have their way, it could be helping out astronauts aboard the International Space Station in as little as three years.
The Personal Satellite Assistant is a robot prototype designed to buzz around the space station, performing a variety of jobs for astronauts and mission controllers: monitoring life-support systems, keeping tabs on the day's tasks and reminding space scientists how to do their experiments right. After six years of development, engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center say they now have a version of the Personal Satellite Assistant, or PSA, that's fully mobile, with a sensor suite that's nearly space-ready.
But it's unclear whether the red spherical bot will ever make it into orbit. Like so much else at the space agency these days, the fate of the PSA remains uncertain. The drone's makers hope to have an answer from the higher-ups by the end of the summer.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:07:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anatomy of an MP3 meme, and why can't the BBC play MP3s?

BoingBoing reader Rob Annable posted this curious item about a song featured in a BoingBoing post -- that crazy "Rodeohead" bluegrass parody of Radiohead. It traveled from BoingBoing to Rob's blog to John Peel's show on BBC Radio 1. That's interesting, but what's really interesting is the fact that the BBC's legendary DJ told Rob the BBC can't play MP3s. Link (Thanks, JP)

Update on this post is here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:59:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to Un-DRM your Un-DRM'd iTunes 4.6 Songs

Ernest Miller says,

Gizmodo has a very interesting story about the iTunes DRM ripping software known as Hymn. "Now part of the whole shtick with Hymn is that even though it strips the iTunes DRM, it leaves your email address and other unique purchasing information in the protected AAC file, ostensibly to symbolically signify that Hymn users aren't trying to spread their fairly-purchased music files to the whole world, but instead to whatever devices they want." How does the new version of iTunes respond to this? It notes that the purchasing information is there and then blocks the file from playing.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:52:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More than electric wallpaper

The North American AVIT (Audio-Visualize It) conference takes place in San Francisco this weekend. AVIT is a showcase, tradeshow, and massive party for "live audio-visual artists," the VJs whose work often appears, but is rarely seen, on the walls of nightclubs and raves. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:31:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mind Games

Four epilepsy patients at Washington University can now play videogames on brain power alone. Bioengineers at the university implanted the patients with an electrocorticographic (ECoG) "grid" that collects signals from the surface of the brain. While it's clearly more invasive than using EEG electrodes taped to the head, ECoG is also far easier to use. Eventually the technology could lead toward bionic prosthetics for disabled people. From Washington University's press release:

"(After surgery, the patients were asked) to do various motor and speech tasks, moving their hands various ways, talking, and imagining. The team could see from the data which parts of the brain correlate to these movements. They then asked the patients to play a simple, one-dimensional computer game involving moving a cursor up or down towards one of two targets. They were asked to imagine various movements or imagine saying the word 'move,' but not to actually perform them with their hands or speak any words by mouth. When they saw the cursor in the video game, they then controlled it with their brains.

'We closed the loop,' said (professor Daniel) Moran. 'After a brief training session, the patients could play the game by using signals that come off the surface of the brain. They achieved between 74 and 100 percent accuracy, with one patient hitting 33 out of 33 targets correctly in a row.'"

I'm sure the military would love to play too. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:08:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Art Attack

On June 15, a federal grand jury will convene in upstate New York to consider possible bioterrorism charges against University at Buffalo art professor Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble, an internationally-known hactivist collective. From the CAE Defense Fund Web site:

"Early morning of May 11, Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife, Hope, dead of a cardiac arrest. Kurtz called 911. The police arrived and, after stumbling across test tubes and petri dishes Kurtz was using in a current artwork, called in the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Soon agents from the Task Force and FBI detained Kurtz, cordoned off the entire block around his house, and later impounded Kurtz's computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife's body for further analysis. The Buffalo Health Department condemned the house as a health risk.
Only after the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State had tested samples from the home and announced there was no public safety threat was Kurtz able to return home and recover his wife's body. Yet the FBI would not release the impounded materials, which included artwork for an upcoming exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art."

This Washington Post article provides more background on the bizarre turn-of-events. Protests at the Court House in Buffalo and in other major cities are planned. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:18:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Supreme Court MP3s for your next hot-n-heavy makeout session

Probably not that well-suited for hot-n-heavy makeout sessions, but -- psych! -- made you look. Following up on this earlier post about an audio version of the US Constitution, BoingBoing reader Jonathan Mitchell says:

This site gives free downloads of the oral arguments in US Supreme Court cases of the 1960s. The sound quality isn't always brilliant; the arguments may be barmy; but the interest is in listening to how crucial civil rights issues were viewed at the time. Try Loving v Virginia (are anti-miscegenation laws racially discriminatory? umm, hard question). Warning: some are almost two hours long.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:11:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush/Zombie Reagan 2004 ticket

A website proposing an unlikely -- actually, undead -- candidacy:

Q:What are some advanatages of adding Zombie Reagan to the ticket?
A: He will demonstrate America's resolve to continue the battle against terrorism. Instead of retreating to an undisclosed location, for instance, Zombie Reagan will be on the front lines, eating illegal combatants.

Link (Thanks, Macki. Incriminating phonecam snapshot of Macki making eyes at the formerly living President, taken at the LA Friar's Club last year, is right here.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:03:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogging Baby

Toilet training, thumb sucking.... might sum up any day's contents of dozens of navelgazing weblogs (or maybe something you'd spot on Fleshbot) but instead they're part of the latest micropublishing venture from Weblogs Inc. Link to bloggingbaby.com. Caution: NSFRH (not safe for Raffi-haters)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:22:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WIPO Broadcast Treaty: consolidated three-day notes

The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping "signal theft." But along the way, this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (EFF mirror, UPD mirror), trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:51:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amusing English place-names by post-code

Here's a service that will take your UK post-code and return a list of amusing place-names near to you. Here're the ones near my flat:

Mincing Lane
Cock Pond
Tyttenhanger
Pratt's Bottom
Titsey Park
Minges
Claggy Cott
Herbert's Hole
Nasty
Thong

Link (via Mine, Mine, Mine!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:41:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Public comments on NYC subway-photo-ban solicited

The NYC subway system is considering a ban on photography on its trains and platforms -- despite the long and honourable tradition of shipping kick-ass art by taking snaps on the trains. Here's a public inquiry site where you can comment on the proposal. Link (Thanks, Christian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:35:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush's climate-change Lysenkoism

Sterling's latest Wired column is a good comparison of the government-mandated pseudoscience in the Bush climate policy and the "totalitarian hucksterism" of Trofim Lysenko, Salin's number-one bad-science guy.

Presidential science adviser John Marburger complained that the UCS's account sounded like a "conspiracy theory report." That's because it is one. As the report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics.
When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:33:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mentality of Homo Interneticus

Kevin calls this First Monday essay, The Mentality of Homo Interneticus: Some Ongian postulates by Michael H. Goldhaber, "a wonderful summation of the new mentality of internet usage."

Increasingly, blogs — daily updates supposedly from an entirely personal perspective — have become a central focus of many people’s Web experience. A blogger captures our attention less through brilliance of expression, than by resonating with our own prior views, and also — often chiefly through various degrees of self–revelation. In general, the more intimate, the better; and the more supportive of a particular side, slant and style in some public debate, also the better each blogger then can direct our attention to other sites or sources, that further our knowledge of and loyalty to the same stance. We can easily be inundated in views, gossip, conspiracy theories, selected facts and so forth that serve to bolster the preconceptions that attracted us to such thoughts in the first place.
For any text to continue to hold our attention on the Internet, it must be calibrated so as to: provide just the right level of excitement to sustain interest; not introduce matters so strange that the reader cannot follow or is tempted to seek explanations on other sites; to present arguments of only moderate complexity — again not to distract or bore the reader; and gather the reader’s sympathy by presenting materials likely to resonate with her. Opportunities to escape these limitations that might do for a printed work are far more risky in the Internet environment, where attention can quickly stray. Despite the apparent democracy of the Internet, where anyone has an equal chance to create a site or blog, these tight restrictions demand a high degree of talent and ingenuity for success.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:41:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MEMS marvels

Researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne have created microscale models of the Tyne Bridge and the Angel of the North sculpture that are tinier than the period at the end of this sentence. The designs showcase MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) technology, tiny devices fabricated from silicon with techniques similar to those used in integrated circuit manufacturing. Of course, these microscopic architectural wonders were preceded by flw, a 1/1 millionth scale MEMS version of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater that Boing Boing pal Ken Goldberg and Karl Bohringer constructed way back in 1996. Link

Update: Starting on Monday 7/14, Goldberg and Bohringer's flw will be on display for a month at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:43:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sounds from the electronica underground

D-I-R-T-Y is a very cool experimental music soundsystem/clearinghouse whose Web site features dozens of Real Audio DJ sets and live performances from electronica artists including Cinematic Orchestra, Minotaur Shock, Jazzanova, Kid Koala, and many others. Air's "selection of great western songs" is quite a treat. You can also listen to D-I-R-T-Y's Radio Colette, direct from the hippest design/lifestyle shop in Paris. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:15:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update: blocked sites for .mil websurfers

Joi Ito points us to an interesting comment by one of his blog's readers, in response to this BoingBoing post about rumors some websites such as The Memory Hole may be blocked for access by military personnel in Iraq.

I'm on a civilian owned internet right now. That means if I chose, I can search for pornographic material right at this moment if I felt so inclined. However on a military computer, we use internet which is connected to a military owned server, broadcasted by our own Sattelites. These frequencies get filtered based on what the military deems is right and wrong. This includes shopping, games, pornographic material, dating services, chat lines, and perhaps some Blogs.
For those who felt they weren't being blocked from ANY site, well, if all you try to go to is Yahoo.com, then come on. Try out "bigkinkygirls.com" or something on a military computer. Or access a hate or racist site. Good luck. Sometimes, due to the filters, a site containing news and information may be blocked without the intention of cencorship. Such as some adult software blocks a childs report on Mule's simply because the webpage had the word ass in it.
NIPR's "Websense" software is strict and server based. And is controlled by a higher leveled ISO. If there is any doubt to the web pages contents, contacting the help desk should help them realise the mistake, and fix the situation upon investigation. But NIPR would rather block any suspected webpage, than allow one to slip through. But in the luckier parts of Iraq, the soldier is free to walk into a KBR internet cafe without cost. And many units supply them with free internet so that we may research, email our families, or simply have a good time at one of our favorite Blogs.
PFC "Zaku", 47th FSB, 1AD Baghdad

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:07:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monolith and digital copyright

BoingBoing reader Jason Rohrer created an app called Monolith, which "munges" together two arbitrarily-selected binary files (called a Basis file and an Element file) to produce a Mono binary file (with a .mono extension). Jason says the resulting Mono file will not be statistically related to either file, hence becoming an interesting tool for exploring the boundaries of digital copyright (what is the copyright status of the resulting .mono file?)

Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files. For example, munging two copyrighted files will produce a completely new file that, in most cases, contains no information from either file. In other words, the resulting Mono file is not "owned" by the original copyright holders (if owned at all, it would be owned by the person who did the munging). Given that the Mono file can be combined with either of the original, copyrighted files to reconstruct the other copyrighted file, this lack of Mono ownership may be seem hard to believe.
Consider this simple fact: for a given Element file and any other file of the same length (call it fileA), it is possible to choose a Basis file that, when munged with the Element, will produce fileA as the resulting Mono file. Therefore, if a copyright holder claims that she owns the information in all Mono files that are munged from her work, she is also claiming copyright over all possible binary files that are the same length as her work. For example, suppose that fileA is an MP3 of a Beatles song, and the Element file is an MP3 of a Britney Spears song copyrighted by Jive Records. It is possible to find a Basis file that, when munged with the Spears song, will produce the Beatles song as the Mono file. Jive Records certainly cannot claim copyright over the Beatles song (which is copyrighted by Apple Records), nor can they claim copyright over any other Mono files munged from MP3s of their songs.
What does this mean? This means that Mono files can be freely distributed.

Link

Update: Ernest Miller says, more or less, BFD: "The conceit of the concept is that neither the cryptotext nor the key is copyrighted. Thus, it should be legal to distribute both. Otherwise, the author of Monolith claims, everything is copyrighted and nothing can be distributed because there is always a number such that, if XOR'd with another number, will produce a copyrighted work. This argument is not new and it not terrible interesting. It basically postulates that any encrypted transmission of information is actually not a transmission of information at all." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:02:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Andre the Giant has a magazine

Street/commercial artist Shepard Fairey--instigator of the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" meme--is launching his new magazine, Swindle Quarterly, this month:

"SWINDLE quarterly will be the definitive pop-culture and lifestyle publication for young men and women. Servicing music, art, and fashion, SWINDLE provides a wide variety of fresh “lifestyle” content for the young and eclectic. SWINDLE will be the first truly non-disposable almanac of popular culture. It’s hardcover and premium print quality will set it apart from other publications on the newsstand. When you buy SWINDLE, you get a beautifully designed addition to your personal library, to be displayed next to your favorite books." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:00:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Arty light-up squishy doorbells

Spore's <$100 doorbells are pretty cool -- gell-filled, illuminated interactive door-art. Link (Thanks, Fun Furde)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suing carriers over locked handsets

A consumer-rights group is bringing suit against US mobile carriers for locking their handsets:

In the lawsuit, the foundation said that because the companies all use the same wireless network standard, called GSM, customers should be able to use the same phone across those carriers' networks just by changing out an easily-replaced unit called a "SIM card" inside the phone.

The carriers may claim that locked handset let them offer cheaper service -- because they keep you from using your subsidized handset with another carrier, but I don't buy it. I got a free T-Mobile handset by promising on pain of an enormous cancellation fee to stick with them for a year. In the meantime, why shouldn't I be able to rent a SIM when I go to Toronto and put it in my phone? Why shouldn't I be able to loan my handset to a friend from out of town so that she can put her SIM in it and log on to her service? Link (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:30:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 8, 2004

Proposal: Distributed audiobook of US Constitution?

Following up on this earlier Boingboing post about a downloadable Constitution for your iPod, the EFF's Jason Schultz says, "How cool would it to start an audio project having famous lawyers/judges reading various parts of the U.S. Constitution for download, similar to the distributed audio project for Lessig's latest book?"

Other than the idea of voluntarily listening to lawyers speak, this sounds like a great idea to me, too. Has this been done before? No? Any takers?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:15:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dancing With Cats

I just got home from having coffee with a friend at my favorite cafe in West Hollywood. There's a zany new age bookstore down the street. Sometimes I pop in for the sole purpose of sneering at book titles like Tantric Sex for Dummies and Is Your Pet Psychic?

But tonight was no ordinary night of snorting and hiding my face in the Feng Shui soy candle display. Tucked away on the shelf below that black velvet UFO portrait of The High ECK Master, I found Dancing With Cats (Chronicle Books, 1999). Been around for years, but I'd never seen it before. Filled with pictures of humans fannying about in tights, striking "I-Wish-I-Were-Baryshnikov" poses -- together with cats who doing the same thing. The text is rich. "Multicat" interspecies dance ensembles as a tool for enlightenment; think Busby Berkeley with hairballs and chakras. Dig the pre-dance exercises:

Before we can begin dancing with our cats, we must first make contact with them. We can't simply put on music and expect that our cats will dance with us. We have to first align our dynamic vibration systems with theirs and bring those systems into a kind of confluence before we can build the energy levels through the dance that are necessary to attain the higher vibrationary states which enable us to channel the infinite power of the universe.
You see, human beings and cats are not simply physical bodies confined within a barrier of skin or fur. We are also made up of dynamic energy systems which extend out, and interact with, every other energy system around us.
There's a simple exercise you can try right now as you sit in front of your computer. It's one of a number of what we call mirroring exercises that will allow you to bring your body into an energy-centered relationship with your cat and prepare you to dance with it... a simple purring technique. Remember that purring is the way a cat modulates its energy reserves in order to restore its psychic equilibrium.

So, roll yourself a catnip fattie and smoke this: Link

Update: If you like that, check out Catflexing and Why Cats Paint, both of which must be seen to be believed. (Thanks, Matthew Burns and Thomas A. Dennis!).

And BoingBoing reader Cliff Van Eaton of Papamoa, New Zealand says:

"It sounds like you had your tongue firmly implanted in your cheek ... you should, because the website you linked to was another wonderfully disguised creation by one of New Zealand's great merry pranksters, Burton Silver. He used to be a much-loved cartoonist here, with a long running strip called Bogor that featured a hedgehog that craved snails and marijuana leaves, and a sensitive new age logger. Here's a link to a few phone cards featuring the Bogor characters. He was featured on a New Zealand stamp a few years ago.
Silver created his first book ruse with Why Cats Paint. It was considered a big joke in New Zealand (because everyone here was quite familiar with his wit), but overseas lots of gullible people (read: cat lovers) took it seriously, and lo and behold he had a hit on his hands. My favourite Silver scam is a book and ball combination he brought out on the New Zealand market a few years ago at Christmas. It was a combination between golf (a favourite and very egalitarian pastime here) and rugby (the national religion). The golf ball is in the shape of a rugby ball, and you score points by hitting it between goal posts. Well, everyone knew that Silver was having a good joke, and lots of fathers and brothers got "Golf Cross" sets for Christmas. But interestingly, when people took them out in the paddock and had a bit of a hit around, they found that it was actually a very enjoyable game. Here's a link with more info about Golf Cross."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:54:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Download the US Constitution for your iPod

An anonymous BoingBoing reader says, "The Constitution of the United States has just been released for the iPod. This is cool on several fronts, not the least of which is the fact that it was produced by the American Constitution Society, a progressive lawyer's group associated with Mario Cuomo and Janet Reno. To my knowledge, this marks the first time a major DC policy group has attempted to use the iPod to accomplish its goals." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:54:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Big Sleep for Bonzo

BoingBoing pal Gareth Branwyn points us to some spectacular spleen-venting over the case of Alzheimer's that America appears to be having over Ronald Reagan's presidency. Tom Carson in the Village Voice. Sorry for the spoiler, but here's the final line: "The best that can be said for Ronald Reagan is that, if George W. Bush gets re-elected, we may yet end up missing him."

Ronald Reagan is the man who destroyed America's sense of reality -- a paltry target, all in all, given our predilections. It only took an actor: the real successor to John Wilkes Booth. In our bones, we had always been this sort of bullshit-craving country anyhow, founded on abstractions: not land (somebody else's), not people (Red Rover, Red Rover, send Emma Lazarus right over), not even shared history (nostalgia isn't the same thing, and try pulling that Civil War Shinola anywhere west of the Rio Grande). Just monumental words and wordy monuments, with two convenient oceans between them and circumstance; from Nat Turner's status as three-fifths of a man -- even though we ended up hanging all of him -- to Reagan's child Lynndie England (b. 1983, the year we invaded Grenada and lost 241 Marines in Lebanon), any shortfall could be blamed on something lost in translation. But it was Reagan, whose most profound Freudian slip was the immortal "Facts are stupid things," who beguiled us into living in the theme park full-time, and so much for the Declaration of Independence's prattle about "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" -- actually the only time we ever expressed much concern for those. Since his 1980 opponent, Jimmy Carter, was about the sorriest embodiment of the reality principle imaginable -- Three's Company's Mr. Roper on the world-historical stage -- facts didn't have a prayer.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:43:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Schneier explains why the Witty Worm is a scary piece of malware

Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Security explains why the Witty Worm is so awful.

Witty was very well written. It was less than 700 bytes long. It used a random-number generator to spread itself, avoiding many of the problems that plagued previous worms. It spread by sending itself to random IP addresses with random destination ports, a trick that made it easier to sneak through firewalls. It was -- and this is a very big deal -- bug-free. This strongly implies that the worm was tested before release.
Witty was exceptionally nasty. It was the first widespread worm that destroyed the hosts it infected. And it did so cleverly. Its malicious payload, erasing data on random accessible drives in random 64KB chunks, caused immediate damage without significantly slowing the worm's spread.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:46:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cut-and-fold paper vintage video-game cabinets

Here's an AMAZING collection of print-cut-and-fold miniature vintage arcade machines, just the right size for a Barbie to play. Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Autopen: mechanical signature storage and reproduction

The Autopen is a wicked vintage gadget that lets you store your signature as a series of mechanical cues for a multifariously branched mechanical armature. Gizmodo has a killer post on it, with old pop-sci articles on the forthcoming age of the autopen. Lots of online info revolves around how to tell if your collectable souvenir signature came off an autopen or an original signature.

The most useful one, though, is the Autopen, made by International Autopen Co. of Sterling, VA., a popular device that is apparently still in use (the Republic National Committee bought one just this year). The Autopen is loaded with special metal 'matrix' -- basically a traced pattern of the signature -- that can be used again and again, even if the signer isn't there. Even better, owners of Autopens can purchase signature matrices through the mail from third parties, duplicating any autograph at will. Current models of the Autopen weigh around 100lbs, run off regular power, and can use real pens and pencils (although they work better with Sharpies, due to the fixed width of the pen looking less off when done with marker).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:30:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Broadcast Treaty negotiations (day 2/3)

We've just wrapped up the second day of Broadcast Treaty negotations at the UN in Geneva, and once again, two colleagues and I took really extensive notes on the proceeding. Brazil and India gave amazing testimony today, and I was able to address the UN on DRM -- it was screamingly cool. We did a lot more editorializing today -- it's still hard to follow, but damn this is important. If we lose here, it's a disaster for the Internet and the PC.

* Brazil
- Article 5: National Treatment. We favor alternative J, irrespective of whether we agree on some kind of redefinition of the term "national." We reserve the right to come back -- possible at a future meeting -- to the issue of the rights conferred to the beneficiaries under the treaty.
[ed: note Brazilian implication that this business shouldn't be concluded at this session]
- Concentrate on Article 16, Technical Protection Measures [ed: AKA DRM]. Brazil is concerned with proposed inclusion of TPMs in proposed new treaty. Aware that similar provisions are in WCT and WPPT, but it's important to recall that those treaties were negotiated and adopted when there was little awareness regarding potential implications of use of TPMs. Since then, some years have gone by, and there's a growing widespread awareness that use of such measures can be quite detrimental to rights of consumers and public at large. Significant concern that anticircumvention has significant negative for exercise of rights exceptions and limitations in national laws. Important obstacle to access of public to public domain materia.
Inconsistent with necessary free flow of info so important to encourage innovation and creativity in the digital environment. All of Art 16 counters stated objectives of new treaty as referred to in preamble. Para recognizes need to maintain balance between rights of broadcasters and larger public interest.
This entire article should believe this entire article should be deleted from the text. Other delegates argue that e fact that we have these provisions in WCT and WPPTY mean that we should include them in this treaty. We disagree. Not pertinent to rights of broadcasting organizations.
[ed. Brazil is very courageous. -dt]
[ed. See EFF's Unintended Consequences report for some of the specific harms from adopting anticircumvention to which Brazil alludes. Brazil recognizes that previous treaties offer opportunity to learn from mistakes, not just blindly follow existing language. -ws]
[ed This is the best statement I've ever heard at a WIPO session. -cd]
Chairman: Access to information is near to my heart as well. This is not intended to cover DRM that locks up public domain material. If an industry or entity does this, then TPM protection shouldn't be available and circumvention should be lawful.
[ed. Since broadcasting isn't copyright, though, there's a wide range of new material locked up by new rights for broadcasters. Otherwise, there's no need for a treaty at all, since copyright and licensing of copyrights can cover the field. -ws]
[ed. It's a nice theory, but the DMCA enthusiastically covers the uncopyrightable, the public domain, and things that really shouldn't be thought of as copyright, like the way that garage door owners work or the secret of refilling a printer cart -cd]

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:10:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

History of the Universe in Seven Snoozes

Web art site Locus Novus is run by a Pasadena, California-based designer who does amazing things with hypertext. A Flash-based presentation of writer Jim Ruland's short piece "History of the Universe in Seven Snoozes" just went live today, and I think it is sublime.
Link, and here is another one of my favorite pieces from Ruland at McSweeney's. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:09:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What re-election stunt will the Bush admin pull in October?

October Surprise is asking people to predict the re-election trick that Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have in store for October. Results so far:

Osama bin Laden captured! 33.3%
Spectacular terrorist attack on US soil! 23.6%
Vote is threatened by terrorist attacks, vote suspended due to red alert. 14.6%
Diebold Election Systems fixes the vote in battleground states. 11.4%
Escalation in Israel, Iran, or North Korea. US opens a new war front. 8.1%
US pulls out of Iraq in October, leaving the UN in charge. 4.9%
WMD's found in Iraq! 4.1%

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:59:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wi-Fi: If Not Free, Then How?

My Wired News colleague Joanna Glasner filed this piece on the challenges commercial Wi-Fi networks have faced convincing people to pay daily or hourly fees for unwired broadband. Now that Cometa's kicked the bucket, survivors may need new pricing schemes.

"Wi-Fi wants to be free," said John Yunker, an analyst at Byte Level Research who follows wireless technology. He believes high-speed wireless access will evolve over the next several years into a freebie service, much like cable television or air-conditioning in hotel rooms, that customers come to expect at cafes, airports and conference centers.
For surviving Wi-Fi players to remain afloat, Yunker believes, they'll have to change their business models, offer more all-you-can-surf plans and cut prices. For those who do charge, he believes customers will be comfortable paying rates of about $4 a month for unlimited access to a network of hot spots.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:04:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Declan: Die, FCC, Die!

In his CNET column this week, Declan McCullagh argues that the Federal Communications Commission has outlived its usefulness and should be abolished.

Its justification for existence was weak 70 years ago, but advances in technology since then have eliminated whatever arguments remained. Central planning didn't work for the Soviet Union, and it's not working for us. The FCC is now an agency that does more harm than good.
Consider some examples of bureaucratic malfeasance that the FCC, with the complicity of the U.S. Congress, has committed. The FCC rejected long-distance telephone service competition in 1968, banned Americans from buying their own non-Bell telephones in 1956, dragged its feet in the 1970s when considering whether video telephones would be allowed and did not grant modern cellular telephone licenses until 1981--about four decades after Bell Labs invented the technology. Along the way, the FCC has preserved monopolistic practices that would have otherwise been illegal under antitrust law. These technologically backward decisions have cost Americans tens of billions of dollars.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:00:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weirdest Amazon Schwag

Great Amazon Listmania list: the 25 weirdest things on Amazon, including a lamp shaped like a human leg, 1250 grubs, an anatomically correct human torso and a live lobster. Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:12:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory in Ottawa Citizen

On May 30, the Ottawa Citizen ran a great profile on me and my books, with a sidebar on other authors who post their work online. The Citizen has a weird policy where they only let subscribers see their online archives, but Brent Kirwan, a generous reader, has sent me a high-resolution photo of the newspaper spread where you can read it yourself. 148k JPEG Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:48:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Low-cost low-carb

Here are some great tips for eating a low-carb diet that's also low-cost.

6. Look for substitutions that make sense. Don't want to pay top dollar for bacon? Lean boiled ham is much less expensive and fills the same purpose in many menus. And canola oil has the same healthy fat benefits as olive oil for less than half the price.

Link (via Carbwire)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:06:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brian Dear's blog reprinted in the San Diego Reader

Blogger Brian Dear has landed a sweet deal to have a month's worth of his blog posts reprinted as a cover story in the San Diego Reader -- he even got some sweet cash in the deal. He's blogged the story of his deal:

My first thought: scam. I mean, who is this guy? Why is he writing to me, right out of the blue? I don't know him from Adam. And, if this guy is from the Reader, then why was he using what appeared to be a personal email address (not sdreader.com)? So, I looked up the phone number for the San Diego Reader and called.
I asked for Jim Holman. The receptionist wanted to know what this was regarding. I told her I just a moment ago got this email from Mr. Holman saying he wanted to pay me for an article and I am calling to see if this is for real. She put me on hold and then sure enough, I was talking with Jim Holman.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:05:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slashdot-proof your server with FreeCache

FreeChache is a kind of Ad-Hoc-amai -- a service that caches high-demand content on high-availability servers. The Internet Archive's FreeCache service has an automated tool that integrates with Apache to automatically cache and redirect visitors attempting to download large, popular files -- using this can slashdot-proof your server. Link (Thanks, Dav!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:04:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Animals in classic art photoshopping

Today on Worth1000's photoshopping contest: Cute ani-mules matted into classical paintings. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:02:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ads on Pringles chips

Procter and Gamble is selling advertising space on individual Pringles chips.

According to the release, first up will be a promotion involving one of Hasbro's (NYSE: HAS) popular board games, "Trivial Pursuit Junior." Questions from that brand will be featured on the crisps, along with the answers, of course. (Actually, P&G should consider placing the questions in one canister of crisps and the answers in another canister to double sales -- as well as the anger level of consumers, I suppose). The launch of this initiative is scheduled for summertime.

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:00:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, June 7, 2004

Cool gift wrap in biohazard symbol pattern

SEE UPDATE BELOW
Nothing says "you're special" like wrapping paper emblazoned with the international symbol for lethally toxic crap. $10 per four-sheet pack, and you can buy it online. The "skull" and "Happy Fucking Whatever!" motifs are pretty swank, too.
Link (Thanks, CJC)

Update: Biohazard wrapping paper is a bad idea! Bottom line: stick with the "happy fucking whatever" paper. BoingBoing reader Chris Davis writes,

I am not a trained first responder (IANATFR), but I've heard that when real, trained, first responders come across safety symbols - biohazard, nuke radiation, etc - they take them very very seriously.
So lets say you wrap your bottle of wine for the party host in the cool biohazard paper, and then get in a wreck on the way there. And the wine bottle breaks inside the box. The EMT gets to your car, sees a damaged box covered in biohazard symbols leaking fluid on the passenger seat, and makes a 180 out of there to call in the trained biohazard people, leaving you to fend for yourself. Oops..
I just called a firefighter friend, so he IS a trained first responder (IAATFR?). Turns out he just last week had a hazmat response training session. He said they use 'common sense' - so in my example above, they MIGHT go ahead and treat the injured, but it would probably set a chain of events in motion that would be a really big deal - guys in hazmat suits going over your car before you get it back, law enforcement asking a lot of pointed questions.. He emphasized that in this day and age, they do take this stuff seriously.
As he put it, 'Say you've got somebody you've got a problem with. Wrap a box of kleenex in that paper, throw it in his car, and drop a dime. He will never fuck with you again.' "

Update #2: Yet another reason "biohazard" wrapping paper is a bad idea. Gosh, I'm sorry I ever blogged it! Boingboing reader Judson says:

There are very specific laws regarding the disposal of biohazardous waste, if you mark you waste as such you are required to dispose of in that manner, since people at the dump don't really like to go digging through possibly biohazardous waste to make sure it's dangerous. The EPA (or public health dept) however absolutely will dig through it in order to place the blame on the (most often) company that violated the disposal laws. I used to work for a large commercial lab, and I've heard through people at other labs of stories where they look through everything to trace it back to the violator... I'm sure you wouldn't get a fine for actual dumping, but I wouldn't want to cause that sort of trouble. People working landfills are another group that doesn't like to see the biohazard sign.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:02:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nerve.com's "Future of Marriage" survey

Tomorrow, "Literate Smut" online magazine Nerve launches a two-week "Future of Marriage" special issue. Included: the results of a "future of marriage poll" which canvassed 2082 readers for some interesting trend data and pithy quotes ("A good marriage needs blow jobs."... "Have failed at it three times, but I am in love once again, so I still have hope." ... "Would rather not die alone.")

New trends among our readers (primarily educated urban men and women in their twenties and thirties): 32%, for example, think cheating begins with a raunchy IM session. Fidelity is a priority for them (close to 80% are pro-monogamy), but they're laissez-faire about the lifestyles of others (97% think having children out of wedlock is okay). There's just one thing on which they refuse to compromise: 59% think bad sex is grounds for divorce.

Link to poll results (yeah it's Nerve, but at-work-surfers can chill -- no boobies are exposed in poll data results)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:56:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homer, Bart Simpson naked in Japanese soda TV ad

Animated TV stars The Simpsons have sold their butts, figuratively speaking, for the likes of Butterfinger and Burger King here in the US. But in one of the many Simpsons ads shot for Japanese "CC Lemon" carbonated tooth-rot sugarpotion, Homer and son appear au naturel. Sacre blog!
Link (Thanks, sekrit Fleshbot editor!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:50:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space Invaders Rug

Nerdolicious area rug from NYC-based design boutique Dune. According to Funfurde blog, the boutique's owner contacted Space Invaders maker Taito for permission to make the rug -- and Dune was reportedly given permission to do so without any requirements of licensing fees or royalty payments. Unlike the game on which it is based, this design product will cost you more than just a fistful of quarters -- $3,000, to be exact.
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:34:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LayerOne tech con this weekend in LA

BoingBoing pal boogah says:

LayerOne Technology Conference will be going on this Saturday and Sunday [June 12-13] at the Westin LA Airport. We've got a grip of really great speakers lined up for our first year... NTK's Danny O'Brien will be flogging his Life Hacks talk that's won over crowds at everywhere from Emerging Tech to NotCon. Dan Kaminsky will be giving an early preview of his Black Hat talk and hopefully be releasing some tools to back up his concepts. Jason Schultz of the EFF will be talking about how the DMCA is stifling innovation and preventing the future of interoperability. USC's Douglas Thomas will be covering how code is and can be a means of political action.
On top of that we've got eight more great talks, free wifi, a mini-vendor area [see: shirts and technological epherma] a cash bar right off the speaking area and gratis beer for paying attendees on Saturday night. Doors open at 9am on Saturday and on each day the first talk is at 10am and the we adjourn at 6pm. We're charging $50 for the weekend, which we'll gladly take at the door.

Highly recommended! Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:21:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Birthday Laughing Squid!

Our dear friends at Laughing Squid, San Francisco's clearinghouse for avant-garde art and creative madness, are celebrating their ninth birthday this November. They couldn't wait to celebrate though, so they're throwing the Laughing Squid 8 1/2 Year Anniversary Show this Saturday, June 12.

The line-up of performers is truly insane, from Subgenius savant Dr. Hal Robins to heavy metal bagpipe virtuoso The Madpiper to New York "sound acrobat" ZeroBoy.

As Timothy Leary said, "You have to go out of your mind to use your head." Happy birthday, Laughing Squid! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:58:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Awesome combover

I try not to post things that make fun of people's appearances, so I have to explain that I'm linking to this picture of an extreme combover not because I think it looks bad on the guy, but because I'm saluting him for being so in-your-face about it. He's pushing the envelope, and he deserves recognition. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:06:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pics of Sci-Fi Museum

Kirsten Anderson of Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle posted some pictures from the "friends and family" premiere of the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:44:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Low-carb potato

I've been on the Atkins diet for two months and my potato jones just won't go away. That's why I was thrilled to read that a new "low-carb" potato will be available come January. Developed by a seed company in the Netherlands, it's not genetically modified either. The bummer though is that this variety of spud is in reality just lower carb. According to potato expert Chad Hutchinson of the University of Florida, 3.5 ounces of the new potato contains 13 grams of carbohydrates, compared to 19 grams in a comparable chunk of Russet Burbank potato.

Hutchinson said it is due in part to the lower specific gravity, which relates to the amount of starch in the potato, compared to the more widely recognized Russet Burbank baking potato. "The smooth, buff-colored skin and light yellow flesh will make this potato an attractive and tasty alternative in many traditional potato recipes," he said.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:28:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sub-niche blog of note: peoplefallingover.com

Peoplefallingover.com has entries about people who involuntarily rotate about their Z-axis. For example, watch what happens to this man who insists on applying a red-hot branding iron to a horse's hind leg. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:27:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First-ever look inside a WIPO treaty negotiation (day 1 of 3)

I'm at the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, along with the largest-ever public-interest coalition in WIPO history, We've all come to oppose the Broadcast Treaty (which will make the Web illegal and require the world's governments to mandate the design everything that can receive a signal, from a PC to a radio) and the proposed Database Treaty (which would let people who'd amassed public, uncopyrightable facts turn them into their exlusive property).

There's no transparency into this process for most of the world. The doors are locked, the minutes are sealed, and you need to be accredited just to sit in the room.

There's no connectivity in the room, but by publishing and using an ad-hoc WiFi network in the main room, three of us (me, my cow-orker Wendy Seltzer, and David Tannenbaum from the Union for the Public Domain) were able to collaborate on note-taking on the first half-day's session using SubEthaEdit, the brilliant and unique Mac app.

The speaking style at these events is "diplomatic" --slow, formal and thick with coded and subtle messages. Between the three of us we were able to untangle some of the speech and tease out some analysis. I think that our point-form notes are a really good, comprehensive view of the meeting.

* Brazil: We've been at this for ages. No real and substantive discussions have taken place. There's no clear understanding of the potential economic and social impact of database protection. A study that was comissioned by WIPO on database copying in Latin America indicated from the Latin American perspective that regulation is premature. It's detrimental to innovation, science, education, access, etc., particularily in developing countries. In the light of this we want to question the usefulness and convenience of maintaining this on the agenda. This isn't unfinished business, the lacklustre engagement of the committee tells us that this is business we don't want to engage in, and this gets in the way of other business we might choose to address. We ask to have this permanently deleted from the agenda.
* ALA: The database protection issue in US Congress is significantly controversial, highly unlikely to pass in this Congress. Agree with Brazil, let's take this off the table here. Congress called this a "Solution in search of a problem" -- there's more databases than ever, why do we need this. We don't see a consensus or a need for protection.
* Ecuador: On behalf of Latin American and Caribbean group, I would like to make a general statement. We don't think that this should be on the agenda now.
* India: Should everyone who produces work by sweat of the brow come here for protection? This isn't creative labour. There's no allegation of widespread copying of non-original databases. Even if there were, the question relevant for this organization is whether this body should be considering nonoriginal databases. Where there's no creativity, databases are assets; that's the apporpriate concern to address by misappropriation, but not intellectual property. Perhaps soem other rubric, some other forum is appropriate. Many entities need protection of sweat of brow assets but we shouldn't have all of them approaching WIPO for a remedy.
If EU wants to protect nonoriginal databases, EU can. It's important to leave industry space to develop. at this stage, we need a more careful learning process, not laws that inhibit industry rather than facilitate. Database protection is premature now. Even in long term, it may not be appropriate for WIPO. We recommend the issue be deleted from the Standing Committee's agenda.
* US delegation: We think that this should remain on the agenda. We need to exchange more information about what this is and how it works where it's been adopted.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harry Potter movie reworked with a downloadable soundtrack

Wizard People, Dear Reader is a remix of the first Harry Potter movie. It's a special soundtrack to the movie made by artist Brad Neely that recasts the story and tone of the flick. The idea is to buy the DVD and play the soundtrack (which is a free download) alongside of it.

With Mr. Neely's gravelly narration, the movie's tone shifts into darkly comic, pop-culture-savvy territory. Hagrid, Harry Potter's giant, hairy friend, becomes Hagar, the Horrible, and Harry's fat cousin becomes Roast Beefy. As imagined by Mr. Neely, the three main characters are child alcoholics with a penchant for cognac, the magical ballgame Quidditch takes on homoerotic overtones, and Harry is prone to delivering hyper-dramatic monologues. "I am a destroyer of worlds," bellows Mr. Neely at one point, sending laughter reverberating through the warehouse Friday night. "I am Harry" expletive "Potter!"

Link Soundtrack mirror (via Creative Commons)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple's sweet new WiFi appliance

Apple has just announced the $129 WiFi Express, a WiFi appliance in an AC-adapter form-factor. It has an Ethernet jack, a stereo mini-jack and a USB print-server so that you can stream audio, USB and packets to anything in range of your WiFi base-station, at 802.11g speed. Link (Thanks Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:47:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NES-themed Game Boy

Nintendo has brought out a Game Boy Advance with classic Nintendo Entertainment System styling -- check out the ~~leaked~~ early pix. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:43:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired's fantastic intellectual property infoporn

Wired has just posted a series of "Infoporn" PDFs showing really fascinating stats about the realtionship of intellectual property and the public domain. They cover all the bases here, from books and music to seed-stock and the genome. This is excellent, excellent stuff. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:40:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogger photo-gallery

Rannie -- the photojunkie.ca photoblogger who can often be seen at events like SXSW taking even more photos than most people -- is doing a one-week tribute to bloggers, with pix of many webwriters. I like this one of me at the Bloggie awards. Link (Thanks, Rannie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:25:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is this Atlantis?

Researcher Rainer Kuehne of the University of Wuppertal believes that structures visible in satellite photos of a salt marsh region near the Spanish city of Cadiz may be "Atlantean" temples. This region on the southern coast of Spain was washed away by a flood between 800-500 BC.

"(In his description of Atlantis) 'Plato wrote of an island of five stades (925m) diameter that was surrounded by several circular structures - concentric rings - some consisting of Earth and the others of water. We have in the photos concentric rings just as Plato described,' Dr Kuehne told BBC News Online."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:20:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real "Walkman" settles with Sony

Sony is apparently kicking down several million Euros to Andreas Pavel, a German inventor who in 1977 patented and prototyped a wearable stereo called the "Stereobelt." Of course, the Stereobelt sounds a lot like the Sony Walkman, launched two years later. Flush with cash, Pavel now plans to go after Apple and other makers of, er, digital Stereobelts. Link (via my journal at The Feature)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:10:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

China cracks down on 'Net games

I filed this story for Wired News about a crackdown on electronic games by the Chinese government:

Responding to an unprecedented boom in computer game popularity, China's government established a censorship task force this week to monitor the content of imported games for offensive or politically sensitive content.
Ministry of Culture officials said all online and wireless games produced outside the country will now be subject to examination first before they can be legally distributed within the country. Foreign producers of online games already in distribution must submit those products to MOC examinations by Sept. 1, or face punishment.
"The ministry allows the import of foreign online games whose content accords with Chinese national conditions and has positive effects on young people's mentality," according to an MOC statement. Chinese officials had been monitoring the content of video games before, but they seem to be stepping up efforts after a period of exponential growth in computer and wireless gaming. Two European games were recently banned.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:50:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beam of Pain

A roundup of new weapon technologies in this Sacramento Bee piece:

Test subjects can't see the invisible beam from the Pentagon's new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds. People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.
The long-range column of millimeter-wave energy is known as the "Active Denial System" for its ability to prevent an aggressor from advancing. Senior military officials, who plan to deliver the device for troop evaluation this fall, say years of testing has produced no sign it will lead to health effects beyond perhaps causing skin to temporarily redden.(...)
But in an era of secret interrogations of al-Qaida suspects and revelations of U.S. abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, Executive Director Doug Johnson of the Minneapolis-based Center for Torture Victims is skeptical. "It seems fundamentally a weapon that's designed to create a great deal of pain and fear," Johnson said. "The concern I would have is ... once this kind of technology is available and there's a perception that it's safe and nonlethal, it seems like a natural device to be used in interrogations.

Link (Via Warren)

Update: Popular Science Michael Moyer says, "We did a feature last year on a bunch of nonlethal weapons that the military is developing. The writer actually got shot by the beam in question for the story. His verdict: It hurts really, really bad." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:01:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Public Enemy's history of copyright in hip hop

"How Copyright Changed Hip Hop" is an interview with Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee on the punishing battles Public Enemy fought over their use of samples in their early work.

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?
Shocklee: It wouldn't be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout--meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound--for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A recor