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Saturday, July 31, 2004

$100,000 effort to identify foul stench in Las Vegas

For the last ten years, a mysterious nasty smell has been coming out of storm drains on Fremont Street in Las Vegas. Officials there want to spend $100k to track down the source of the vile odor.

The stink emanating from the storm sewers has plagued the area around the Fremont Street pedestrian mall for a decade, and every time the city has thrown time, effort and deodorizer at the problem, the "sewer-type" aroma has just returned.

On Wednesday, City Council is to consider a $100,000 US consulting contract aimed at finding the source of the olfactory offence.

A tiny closed-circuit television system would be used to examine the downtown storm drains, smoke would be pumped into the system to identify outlets and dye would be used to follow water flows.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:05:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Linux/sf convention call for papers

Mark sez, "Linucon, a combination science fiction convention and Linux expo is looking for panelists and papers for their upcoming event."

We're looking for several different types of programming. On the Geek side we have "Heavy technical", which includes topics like programming, system administration, and security, and "Light technical", which is about using computers rather than programming them (Digital art, electronic publishing, online communities, Linux on the Desktop, Open source in business, video games, etc). On the Fandom side, our main themes this year include literary topics (for authors, editors, publishers, and readers), Anime (and Manga), gaming, costuming... There are also "crossover" topics (like online comics and computer animation) that appeal to both sides.

Link (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:32:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Horror Channel coming to cable

The Horror Channel is an all-horror cable network launching next October. Link (Thanks, Prof. Griffin!)

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

Steampunk aquatic stiltwalker from Brighton's glory years

The Daddy Long Legs was a steampunk invention that graced the Victorian seaside at Brighton. It walked on 20' long legs that reached down to rails on the seabottom, ferrying passengers along the shore in clanking comfort. Link to poster, Link to article (Thanks, Anita!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, July 30, 2004

Women scientists' unsung stories in comic-book form

Rosalind Franklin's story is one of many great and unsung women scientists' stories recounted in the brilliant, Eisner-nominated comic book Dignifying Science, which features the work of Jen Sorensen, Anne Timmons, Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin and others, and the stories of scientists like Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Lise Meitner, Barbara McClintock, Birute Galdikas, and Hedy Lamarr. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rosalind Franklin: Crick and Watson's uncredited collaborator

Many of you wrote in response to the Crick obit from earlier today to remind us of the unsung and uncredited hero of DNA, Rosalind Franklin. Here's what Allison says about her:

It is past due that Dr. Rosalind Franklin received credit for actually being the scientist who demonstrated the helical nature of DNA. Her crystallography was crucial to the subsequent elucidation of DNA structure and replication. Her research was used without her knowledge or permission.

Link

Update: Alex sez: "According to the NY Times there were no hard feelings between her and her colleagues."

One of the problems caused by the book was Dr. Watson's implication that the pair of them had obtained Dr. Franklin's data on DNA surreptitiously and hence had deprived her of due credit for the DNA discovery. Dr. Crick believed he obtained the data fairly since she had presented it at a public lecture, to which he had been invited. Though Dr. Watson had misreported a vital figure from the lecture, a correct version reached Dr. Crick through the Medical Research Council report. If Dr. Franklin felt Dr. Crick had treated her unfairly, she never gave any sign of it. She became friends with both Dr. Crick and Dr. Watson, and spent her last remission from cancer in Dr. Crick's house.

Dr. Franklin likely would have shared the Nobel Prize had she not died from cancer in 1958, the prize was not awarded till 1962. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:51:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toronto Star 1945 online

The Toronto Star has put its searchable 1945 archive online for free. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:45:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disturbed diarist using perl blog site mistaken for bot

"Bondage-chICK" is a young, disturbed girl (she's a "cutter" who cuts herself to feel better), who stumbled across a free developers' journal service offered by perl.org and started using it for her personal diary. No problem, except that the developers who stumbled across her journal assumed that she was a perl bot ("If this is autogenerated, you need to tweak it so that the doubled+transposed letter mistake doesn't happen so often, and introduce some more naturalistic errors. If it's not autogenerated, you're really sad and about 18 months behind the curve.") or a gag. Of course, the whole thing might be a hoax. Or not. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:40:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PowerPoint is why you got dumped by email

Joey "AccordionGuy" DeVilla has posted a rumination on how we got to the point where it is socially acceptable to break up with someone by email. He concludes that it's a natural outgrowth of "PowerPoint culture": "I think that the 'Dear Jane' emails that those people received were inspired by elements of office culture: PowerPoint, project post-mortems and annual performance reviews. Of the people who told me that they were dumped via email, all of their boyfriends worked white-collar jobs in which they either sat through or made PowerPoint presentations." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Golfing in Dubai

Look at these pictures of a Syd Mead-like golfing station in Dubai. That little green circle is the spot you stand on to hit the ball. Link (via Ritilan.com)

UPDATE Jeremy sez: The "Syd Mead-like golfing station" is actually a helicopter pad attached to the Burj al Arab, a luxury hotel. Tiger Woods was invited to hit balls into the Gulf as a publicity stunt. It's not the opening shot of the world's most difficult hole. See this Sports Illustrated article for more details.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:58:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Albinism photos of the 19th century

Gallery of olde tyme photos of 19th century albinism. Link (Via Sensible Erection)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:12:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Francis Crick (1916-2004)

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA, has died. In 1962, Crick shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for uncovering the secret of life.

"Evolution is cleverer than you are." -Francis Crick

Link

Update: Crick's groundbreaking 1953 paper on the molecular structure of DNA, co-authored with James Watson, is available here. (Thanks, Christina!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:34:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LA Times online unclenches from paid-subscriber-only silliness

In recent months, the Los Angeles Times has taken a hell of a lot of heat from bloggers, media critics, and even some of its own writers over a constipated web content management policy that locked up all "Calendar" section listings to paid subscribers only. They've finally reversed that policy. This is groovy, because links just want to be free, man. Link

Update: A number of BB readers who are non-LAT-subscribers have written in to say that the "unclenched" content is "re-clenched," and that they can't access without paid subscription. Others have written in to say that registration, but not paid subscription, is still required. This could be a temporary tech glitch, but I'm still confused, and so are the rest of the LAT's online readers, so AFAIK it's still broken. Why do some publications insist on getting in the way of readers who just want to read basic content like this? I'll be looking for that new Koreatown barbecue/karaoke hotspot on their mercifully reg- and sub-free competitor LA.com.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:24:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Squirrels scream ultrasonically

Ground squirrels emit an ultrasonic shriek to warn others that a predator is nearby. In the current issue of the journal Nature, University of Manitoba researchers report that while bats and whales use ultrasound for echolocation and to track prey, to their knowledge "ultrasonic alarm calls have not previously been detected in any animal group, despite their twin advantages of being highly directional and inaudible to key predators." From a New Scientist article about the study:

"Ultrasonic alarm calls might be beneficial because many of the birds-of-prey that catch and eat squirrels cannot hear them. Conveniently, ultrasound also has a shorter range than audible sound.

'It may be used to secretly warn others without alerting a more distant predator,' says (researcher David) Wilson.

Link (Thanks, Gabe!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:15:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSFT buys spam company, sues the competition, silences political activists

My cow-orker Annalee Newitz has posted a great editorial on the latest court battles over spam, pointing out the weird, anticompetitive and anti-speech aspects of the spam fight.

Microsoft is developing what it calls Bonded Sender, a program that would supposedly separate "legitimate" Internet marketers and bulk mailers from spammers. Working with a California company called IronPort, Microsoft will create a white list of Internet marketers who have paid a fee and demonstrated that they have no record of spamming. Companies participating in the Bonded Sender program will be allowed to send their email ads to HotMail and MSN users.

Given Microsoft's investment in the Bonded Sender program, it seems they may soon be in the business of serving as middlemen between emailer marketers and their webmail users. In other words, it sounds like the software megacorp is about to start competing with Richter. Of course, Microsoft could always call off its suit if Richter claims to have been rehabilitated -- and he pays his Bonded Sender fees!

In the spam wars, sometimes it's hard to tell the spammers from the antispammers.

The situation gets even more complicated when you consider the fact that Microsoft will do more than pick and choose winners in the junk email business. Bonded Sender will punish most the people who aren't even sending advertisements -- groups like Internet activists MoveOn.org, who send out millions of emails to alert their members to upcoming political events and issues. If these groups don't pay their Bonded Sender fees, HotMail simply won't deliver their email -- regardless of whether users have specifically opted in to receive it.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:25:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Observing the SETI observatory

The SETI Institute predicts that we'll detect an extraterrestrial transmission within twenty years. If that turns out to be true, it'll probably be the folks at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek radio observatory who will have heard the call. Hat Creek is home to the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array (ATA), funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

I just returned from a trip with two friends to Hat Creek, about five hours northeast of San Francisco. Leading Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher Jack Welch and his former student, astronomer Jim Gibson, were kind enough to give us a tour of the facility.

More about our visit to Hat Creek in my journal at TheFeature. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:11:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Genome of human zit sequenced

Scientists have sequenced the genome of the bug that causes zits. It had previously been mistaken for a part of the human genome.

“Sequencing the whole genome has revealed that the bacterium can actively degrade human skin tissue because of the massive presence of these enzymes, and also that there are specific immunogenic proteins which are present in this bacterium which trigger the immune response,” Brüggemann told New Scientist....

Severe acne is usually treated with common antibiotics, but many strains are becoming resistant to these. “With the genome sequence it’s now quite easy to generate specific drugs against this bacterium,” says Brüggemann. “That’s the next task.”

Link

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

Ingenious spare-parts wheelchairs for the world's poorest nations

The Free Wheelchair Mission is a religious NGO that produces wheelchairs out of $41.17 worth of parts, and makes its plans for same available for free online. The project was inspired by the sight of a legless Moroccan woman dragging herself across a dirt road. Now the project works to provide low-cost wheels to all comers around the world. Link (via Gizmodo, via WorldChanging)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:47:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ancient hard-drive, guy in bunny suit

On Gizmodo, this stunning image of an ancient, room-sized hard drive being serviced by a guy in a clean-room bunny-suit. The best part is that this thing and a million of its brothers put together probably had a lower capacity than the USB memory built into the pen I lost last month. Link

Update: Daniel Klein sez, "The picture is of a fixed-head disk, very similar to a Borroughs unit I had the pleasure of disassembling (in 1975) after a catastrophic head crash (I got authorization from Gordon Bell himself to do it). It took me 3 days to whittle it down to nuts and bolts, and the platter weighed 18 pounds. The hub upon which the platter was mounted was phosphor bronze, and weighed an additional 17 pounds. So imagine the inertia of 35 pounds spinning at 3600 RPM. It had electric brakes, because if you just switched off the power, it would spin for a loooong time. There is an (apocryphal) story of movers just hitting the circuit breaker (not the off switch that engaged the brakes), and after waiting the requisite 5 minutes for spindown, loaded the drive into a truck. All the moves and hallways were right angles, of course. Since brakes had not been engaged, it was still spinning at 2000 RPM or so by the time it was loaded. When the truck turned a corner, the drive precessed right out through the side of the truck. It held a few megabytes at most, if I recall correctly (a similar unit was used as a swap disk on the PDP-10, so it would have held 256K or so). "

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:15:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day, Ken!

Today is Sysadmin Appreciation Day, and it's long overdue. I started out as a sysadmin, and I'm here to tell you that sysadmins are the secret masters of the universe, underappreciated, all powerful, and indispensible. The world would crumble into dust but for the diligent work of our sysadmins.

I'd like to take a moment to recognise Boing Boing's volunteer sysadmin, the incomparable Mr Ken Snider, whose indispensible work is the reason that Boing Boing has such killer availability and uptime.

I'd also like to thank Chris Smith, who runs our submit-a-link form, instituting countermeasures against formspammers and catching the bounces.

Also due for appreciation is Carl Steadman, the long-time host of Boing Boing, whose donated services and connectivity made this all possible.

Finally, my appreciation to the sysadmins at EFF, past and present: Matt Peterson, Chris Palmer, Marc Perkel, Christopher Davis and Dan Brown. Thanks for keeping the Internet working (oh, and lest I forget, the OpenCola sysadmins: Helen, Michael, Karl, and Ken [again!]). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:56:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO legally sell downloads of cover-songs

CDBaby, a wonderful indie music publisherdistributor, has put up a howto for legally selling downloads of cover songs.

If you record a cover version of a song, (meaning your performance of a song that has been released in the U.S. with consent of the copyright owner), you are entitled by law to release your recording commercially, and the owner of the copyright to the song cannot prevent you from doing so.

The Copyright Act provides for what is called a "Compulsory License", which means that if you follow the steps set forth by statute, you can distribute your recording of that song on a CD or over the internet.

The following details the procedure for individuals to obtain a compulsory license to digitally distribute cover songs over the Internet to end users in the United States.

Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:42:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mesh wireless conference call for papers

There's an upcoming mesh wireless conference in Boulder that's looking for papers on subject like Software Defined/Cognitive Radios, GPS, Galileo, Glonass Interoperability and standards, Effective Spectrum Management and Propagation Modeling in Urban Environment.

The ISART technical program committee is soliciting papers for the 7th annual International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies (ISART) to be held in Boulder, Colorado March 1-3, 2005. These papers will discuss new technologies, research and development, innovative ideas, enabling technologies, standards, protocols, business practices and policies, and government regulation for the purpose of forecasting the future development and application of radio frequency technologies into the next decade.

Link (Thanks, Sam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:39:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Penguin Putnam's racketeering domain-name scam

Katie has owned the domain katie.com since 1996. Penguin Putnam recently released a book about girls who get into trouble with the interweb and called it Katie.com. Now, the clueless dorks at Penguin have decided that they need to strongarm Katie out of her domain so they can do tie-ins with their book (ironically, they scrapped girl.com, the original title, 'cause that's a porn-site, but they figured that a web-developer's site is fair game).

Today I also had a very unpleasant phone call from a lawyer working with Katie Tarbox, the author of the book. She tried to convince me that I should donate the domain name to them. Somehow this would resolve my problem. OK so not only do I get walked all over, my life invaded by this book, treated badly by the publisher/author who refuse to acknowledge that they've done the wrong thing, but then I get to hand it over to them on a silver plate and I not only have suffered all this aggravation but ultimately have lost the thing that I care about. Exactly HOW does this resolve anything other than give them the thing they want which they have done everything to hijack without any care and consideration for what is right and just?

Secondly, she tells me that they're planning on launching some school curriculum thing to teach kids about online safety - and they're calling it Katie.com. Are they insane? No wonder they want me to hand it over.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:32:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Induce hearings video as a Bittorrent download: QED

Orrin Hatch wants to ban P2P networks that are used for music-sharing, claiming that their non-infringing uses are negligible. He even held hearings on his Induce bill to make the point. Video of those hearings are now available on a P2P system called Bittorrent that allows lots of people to simultaneously download large files by portioning out the burden of serving parts of the file to everyone who's trying to get a copy.

Download a copy of the hearings for yourself, participate in the democratic process, and in so doing, prove that their conclusions were utterly bogus. Torrent Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:18:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Better German tubemap

Horst sez, "You published a link to an alternative London Underground Map ("what if the Germans had won WWII?") in German on July 29th. Problem is, as any German native speaker might tell you, many of the names of this map are Mock-German rather than real German and don't really make sense. "A while ago I attempted a real translation of the London Underground map into German, with station names being real, literal or etymological translations of the English placenames into German. Most German readers of my map agree that it's funnier than Myrtle's map (the one that you linked to).

"Incidentally, the translation of the London map into German was part of a project that started with a translation of the underground map of Vienna, Austria into English, which might be of more entertainment value as most of your readers can actually read it. Link (Thanks, Horst!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:14:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, July 29, 2004

New O'Reilly magazine: Make

Today, at OSCON in Portland, Dale Dougherty and I announced a new O'Reilly magazine called Make. It'll be a quarterly, full-color magazine filled with fun projects and hardware hacks involving technology. (Dale is the editor and publisher, and I'm the editor-in-chief. Thanks to BB's own John Battelle for getting me involved!)

Make will have 5-minute tips you can use to improve your gadgets, networks, and computers, as well as much longer projects that might take several days (or weeks) to complete. The first issue is coming out in January. If you're interested, visit the web site and sign up for the newsletter. I'll also be running the Make blog on that page. I hope that a lot of BB readers become Make contributors, too. Please send me your ideas for hacks, tips, tricks, workarounds, neat things to build, useful tools, etc. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:57:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Polaroids from DNC, and historic first for Web in Kerry's DNC speech?

Inside this online gallery, a series of polaroids shot by TIME photographer Christopher Morris at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. At left, the Rock the Vote bus arrives at the FleetCenter.

And if I'm not mistaken, John Kerry's mid-speech invitation to voters moments ago to go online for platform details was the first time in America's history that any presidential candidate plugged a campaign website during his acceptance speech. Snip:

"I've told you about our plans for the economy, for education, for health care, for energy independence. I want you to know more about them. So now I'm going to say something that Franklin Roosevelt could never have said in his acceptance speech: go to johnkerry.com."

Link to speech text.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:50:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MSNBC: Social Networks Go to Work

I just filed this story for MSNBC about the business value of social networking services. Truth or hype: can some SNSes become helpful professional tools for businesses -- in particular, independent entrepreneurs and smaller companies, for whom each new personal connection is a significant business building block? Includes interviews with unrepentant compulsive digital networkers danah boyd, Frank Keeney of SOCALWUG, Noah Glass of audblog, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid, Scott Rafer of Feedster, Travis Kalanick of RedSwoosh (and, once upon a time, Scour.net), and human router Joi Ito -- who said this:

Their usefulness depends on your needs and networking style. LinkedIn, for example allows you to search histories and CVs in your network -- it's great for finding people who work in a particular company, or who have worked with someone you know. It's also an interesting way to find references for people or companies you're getting to know.

I think email is broken in a serious way, and SNS is trying to address some of the issues associated with that breakdown. These networks may get it right and really change the way we do business, but we're still at the beginning of the development and evolution curve.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:07:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

One million legal music d/ls

Here's a wiki that's attempting to collect links to 1,000,000 legal music downloads. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:25:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Victrola iPod amp

Tubesville is a custom amp shop in NYC that builds whimsical bespoke amplifiers like this Victrola-oid iPod amp. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:24:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Easy Soulseek client for Macintosh means no more PC for me

Soulseek is my favorite P2P file-sharing network. Until recently though, the only functional Macintosh Soulseek client, Nicotine, has been a big hassle to install and run, requiring the Apple Developer Tools and X11 SDK. Now there's a new pre-compiled version of Nicotine. All you need is OS X Panther and Apple's free X11 X Window System. It was a simple install and works like a charm.

The result is that now I feel OK selling my PC laptop and buying a Powerbook. I love the ultra-portability of my supersmall and spritely Sony Vaio PCG-SRX77 and I'm sad to part with it. But at least the 12-inch Powerbook approaches sub-notebook size. And I'll finally be all Apple, all the time. Link (to eBay auction)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:30:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Volunteer coders to help connect up the Peace Corps

Scott, a Peace Corps volunteer, got web-volunteers to help him build a fantastic web-resource for his project in Guyana. Hot on the heels of his success there, he's putting together a much more ambitious project to connect up the whole Peace Corps. When I worked in Costa Rica 12 years ago with Youth Challenge International, I came back with the same intention, but I was ahead of my time -- today, this is totally do-able.

I want to build site that will link up average joe web and graphic designer, database guy and anyone else that can help with Peace Corps volunteers around the world. We do some partnering in Peace Corps but we don't tap the huge potential that exists with folks at home. We need to do this. It will help get more done in the tiny timeframe that we are here in country.

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Music blogs under the BPI gun

Ian sez, "Anybody who runs a music blog in the UK beware NTL sent me an email today containing a BPI (the British equivalent of the RIAA) copyright infringement notice for hosting songs from my blog on my server. Looks like they've read all the recent music blog stories."

You should be aware that copyright in a work is infringed by a person, who, without the licence or consent of the copyright owner, does or authorises another to do any of the acts restricted by the copyright.

We are therefore writing to you to request that you remove or block access to the website identified above. This may be accomplished most effectively by blocking access to the particular URL listed above.

Link (Thanks, Ian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:01:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Film piracy zine from 1975

Mike Sizemore has uploaded a scanned in issue of "Private Screenings," an old mimeographed film collectors' mag from 1975. The issue is the special on film piracy -- that is, unauthorized duplication of actual FILMS. It's a fascinating look into the world of plus-ca-change-plus-c'est-la-meme-chose. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tethered to your hardware: don't get leashed by your vendor!

Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of the brilliant copyright/tech book The Anarchist in the Library, has a guest-editorial on Engadget today about "tethering" -- using technological measures to ensure that all the aftermarket goodies (coffee for your coffee-maker, music for your iPod) come from the same company that sold you the original hardware. It's easy to understand why hardware companies love tethering -- it's a license to screw their locked-in customers out of titanic sums of money -- but that's exactly why smart customers need to reject tethered products.

So we looked on with enthusiasm at the new pressurized personal coffee makers. They push hot water through a sealed “pod” filled with a precise measure of coffee. It was neat, slick, well-designed, and promised a strong, good, dependable dose. It’s the same technology that supplies those surprisingly good coffee available from coin machines in public spaces in Europe.

After a half-hour of debating the pros and cons of such a radical “format shift,” we left without one of these cool new machines. We opted out because these specialized “pods” are essentially “tethered” to this brand of coffee maker.

What if we hate the coffee that the company supplies for the maker? What if the company goes out of business? What if they raise the prices of pods? We would no longer order pounds of unpadded coffee from Peet’s in Berkeley or run across the street to the deli for an emergency brick of cheap coffee. And my favorite New York coffee supplier, Oren’s on Waverly Place, would no longer get my business.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:54:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lab Notes from UC Berkeley

In this month's Lab Notes from UC Berkeley engineering:

* Traffic monitoring technology to ease the gridlock
* Nanoscience for energy applications
* New materials for safer nuclear reactors

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:42:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Target... for all your Kabbalah needs

As part of her devotion to "Kabbalah" (note the quotation marks), Madonna sports a knotted red string as a protective talisman. Now, you too can block the evil eye with a Kabbalah Red String, just $25.99 from Target, your neighborhood supply house for mystical goods.

What makes this particular piece of string so special is, in part, the fact that it has traveled to Israel, to the ancient tomb of Rachel the Matriarch, and returned, imbued with the essence of protection... The string draws upon the connection to and awareness of Rachel and must be tied on by a loved one and sealed with Rachel's protective energy by reciting the Ben Porat prayer (included on a card).

Link (Thanks, Gabe!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:25:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bigfoot in Oklahoma

Charles Hallmark tracks Bigfoot in the Chickasaw National Park. One of his methods is to place a bag of greasy popcorn bag in a garbage can overnight and then dust for fingerprints. Of course, Hallmark is not the only Bigfoot enthusiast roaming the backwoods, but his description of his own Sasquatch sightings made me smile:

"No muzzle, no tail. Just boing, boing, boing."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:44:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Not a La-Z-Boy

Now on eBay, this Mission medical chair, used for healing at the end of the 19th century. According to the auction listing:

"This chair, constructed of oak and with foot pedals and straps, was essentially a forerunner of our exercise bycycles, but the manufacturer in the late Victorian era claimed marvelous benefits if this chair was used with electrical currents and mild shock."

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne!)

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

Sex toys still banned in Alabama, guns okay

A decision issued yesterday by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says Alabama doesn't have to lift its silly, arcane 1998 law banning the sale of sex toys. The Constitution does not include a right to sexual privacy, the panel of three judges ruled. Many Americans would disagree, including this one. To paraphrase Andrew Orlowski's brilliant quip about the INDUCE Act, under this law one could stroll down Alabama's southern streets selling semiautomatic rifles and dildos, and be arrested for the dildos.

"In this case, the American Civil Liberties Union ('ACLU') invites us to add a new right to the current catalogue of fundamental rights under the Constitution: a right to sexual privacy. It further asks us to declare Alabama's statute prohibiting the sale of 'sex toys' to be an impermissible burden on this right. Alabama responds that the statute exercises a time-honored use of state police power -- restricting the sale of sex. We are compelled to agree with Alabama and must decline the ACLU's invitation. (...)

"Alabama's Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act prohibits, among other things, the commercial distribution of 'any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for any thing of pecuniary value.'"

This calls for massive civil disobedience. FreeTheAlabamaVibrator.com is still available, people -- it's time to stick it to the Man. Here's the decision in PDF (Sherri Williams v. Attorney General of Alabama, case 02-16135). More on the story here, in a Seattle P-I piece. And during National Orgasm Week, no less. Is nothing sacred? Here's a PDF summarizing the state's gun laws (Alabama's congresscritters are against renewing the Assault Weapons Ban, which expires on September 13 -- evidently the state's pro-gun lobby is much more powerful than its pro-vibrator lobby). (Thanks, Baptiste Coulmont)

Update: Fleshbot has just issued this fatwa playful tease to readers who oppose the Alabama ban:

three $50 gift certificates from Eros Boutique to the three readers who come up with the best sex-toy related protest items, either by way of a vibemod prototype or Photoshopped creation. Confederate Flag Ticklers? Birmingham Ben-Wa Balls? Crimson Tide Cock Rings? Send your ideas and photos here.

You can have our Hello Kitty vibes and Cup-'o-Pussys when you pry them from our cold, dead hands, Alabama governor Bob Riley.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:56:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Attack of the Hoax Blogs

In today's NYT, my Wired News colleague Daniel Terdiman writes about the growing trend in blogs that purport to be real, but are in fact hoaxes (and yes, he knows they're "weblogs" or "blogs," not "Web Logs," but c'est la editorial policy, mon cher). Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:15:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK Big Brother Awards pix and video

MoblogUK has pix and videos from last night's Big Brother Awards at the LSE, hosted by Mark Thomas, which were a hoot. Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:15:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF defending creators of This Land is Your Land parody

I'm proud to relate that EFF is representing Jib Jab, the creators of the wonderful "This Land is Your Land" Flash parody that aroused the ire of the holder of Woody Guthrie's copyrights and resulted in a threatened lawuit. Here's a little bit of my cow-orker Fred von Lohmann's letter to the copyright-holder's lawyers.

In your July 23 letter, you contend that "This Land" offers no "satirical comment" on the Guthrie original. You are mistaken.

While your view of Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" as being predominantly about "the beauty of the American landscape" and "the disenfranchisement of the underclass" is interesting, most Americans think of the song as an iconic expression of the ideal of national unity. Jib Jab's parody addresses, among other things, the lack of national unity that characterizes our current political climate (ending with the optimistic hope that unity might be rediscovered). In short, "This Land" explores exactly the same themes as the Guthrie original, using the parodic device of contrast and juxtaposition to comment on the original. See Abilene Music v. Sony Music Entertainment, 320 F .Supp.2d 84, 90-91 (S.D.N.Y. 2003) (emphasizing the role of contrast and juxtaposition as parodic devices). The parodic comment takes on an additional dimension of irony when viewed in light of the often omitted closing stanzas of Guthrie's original.

Link

Update: Turns out that Woody got the melody from the Carter Family

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:08:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to remove MSIE from Windows

Xeno sez:

When CERT and other security agencies said to stop using IE, I wasn't too concerned as I use Firefox. However, it was quickly brought to my attention that due to shell calls and all Microsoft products being able to ignore your default browser, this still made your system vulnerable through IE. So I took the long painful journey of finding a simple way to remove IE.

Now, I'm getting emails from tons of satisfied people who have followed my instructions and have even their default Microsoft aps (including Windows update) using whatever browser they told it to. Even Microsoft has called me to see how I did it. Unfortunately, they blatantly told me that they won't be including it in their knowledge base 'for obvious reasons'.

Link (Thanks, Xeno!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:10:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Salon op-ed on DNC bloggers

Danah boyd has adapted her rant about the NYT's dismissal of the DNC bloggers as "Web diarists" into an op-ed for Salon.

Blogging will not replace traditional journalism, but it presents a threat to the normative press culture and an opportunity for radical reporting. Bloggers do place the issue of professionalism under attack, not by being unprofessional, but by exposing the ways in which the media operates. As blogging reaches the masses, people are introduced to information that was not reported because it did not suit the party line. Bloggers will happily document the power games that they witness in the press room and will expose future Jayson Blairs. Bloggers also capture information that the mainstream press does not yet realize is valuable, which means that ambitious and digitally minded journalists are constantly scanning the blogs for information. More and more, journalists are thanking bloggers for new slants. The competition between journalists and bloggers for readers' attention results in more diverse and compelling coverage.

Reg Req'd Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:08:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickr jingle remix

Hot on the heels of yesterday's jingle for the Flickr service, a Flickr user has remixed it, transforming it from something naive and sweet to a sinister bit of electronica. 3.9MB MP3 Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:04:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Volunteers needed to webify government documents

Mark, who noded out the UK National ID Card consultation on a blog for trackback, commentary and markup, is trying to do the same with other important government documents, like the Butler report and the 911 report. This is a great idea, the natural extension of the good work done by Cryptome in hosting other important documents. He's calling for volunteers to help with the conversion: looks like a rewarding project to contribute to. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alternate history tubemap

This tubemap with station-names translated into German is really disorienting and, as Teresa points out, evokes an alternate history of WWII. 337k GIF Link (via Making Light)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:53:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Folk Process defined and expanded upon

Hot on the heels of the attack on Woody Guthrie's memory (in the form of a lawsuit against political parodists who used his "This Land is Your Land" as part of a Flash movie) is this wonderful piece on what Pete Seeger called "the folk process" -- the way that traditional art has been made by ripping, mixing and burning the art that preceded it.

Guthrie may be right that Pete Seeger was the first to coin the term "folk process", but the process of oral song-transmission through through variation and selection was being analyzed even before Pete Seeger's birth in 1919. And the process itself has been operating as long as there have been songs. The folk process was described, though not so named, by Cecil Sharp in 1907: "[Development of a folk song] involves the three principles of continuity, variation, and selection."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:42:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Open Source Con session blogs

Danny O'Brien and Quinn Norton are attending the O'Reilly Open Source con in Portland, and blogging the hell out of the sessions and keynotes. This is excellent stuff.

Stumbling into the Perl Lightning Talks now. Randal Schwartz (looks like Randal. Certainly wearing Randal-like clothes. He's the Hooter's guy, right? I always get him and Tom Phoenix confused. Okay, definitely Randal.) Anyway, he's written a CGI replacement that uses Class::Prototype to create a proper MVC-style object interface for Web applications. The stub class implements a default Web app, and you just stick in your own methods which customise it. I wonder if this is how WebObjects works? They worked out how to structure it by looking at oodles of existing CGI apps.

I don't know what the name of this class is (for I am an idiot), but it'lll be out on CPAN soonest. Look for the Hooters guy.

Danny Link, Quinn Link

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

Ebook column that gets it all wrong

Gizmodo has a new column called "Feature Creep," and they kicked it off with an editorial about the future of ebooks that is striking for its complete disregard for the actual marketplace experiences with ebooks. It's full of hoary chestnuts about ebooks that have been emptily mouthed for 10 years ("Call it digital paper or electronic ink, it's the future of eBooks.") and aside from the occassional iPod comparison, there's hardly a paragraph in there that couldn't have been written in 1997 -- nor one that takes note of any of the events since then.

Take DRM. The author asserts on the one hand that DRM can work, and that it won't be so invasive that it turns off readers (whom the author insists on calling "consumers," an odious buzzword that invokes Gibson's description in Idoru, "...a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed").

This despite the actual marketplace fact that all DRM becomes invasive (ask any copyright policy maker in a country that allows parallel importing how he feels about the "lightweight" region-coding DRM on DVDs that reverses the laws he was elected to enact).

This despite the actual marketplace fact that DRM is generally broken within a few days of engagement with the public, often by teenagers, grad students, or people with ready acccess to sophisticated DRM-cracking tools like Google and the sinister Shift key (for more on DRM, see my DRM talk)

But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again ("If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.") despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it (there're very few ideas more goofy than the idea that people will start buying ebooks just as soon as they have fewer features and more restrictions, provided that the ebooks can be played back on special-purpose devices with sharp screens). He cites Sony as proof of this ("Sony may be nuts, but they're not that nuts."), despite the fact that Sony was forced out of the walkman market by its failure to deliver the DRM-free devices that its customers demanded. Yes, Sony is that nuts.

He doesn't even touch on the marketplace experience of every published writer who's tried giving away DRM-free ebooks -- me, Lessig, Jim Munroe, the Baen authors, Orson Scott Card -- universally, the experience is that we sell more books (Lessig's latest just went into its third hardcover printing, for chrissakes). This of course echoes the experiences from elsewhere: the movie studios' box office revenues appear to be increasing as a function of the amount of movies being shared on P2P nets and the only empirical study of music downloading and music sales concluded that the effect was usually negligible, rarely negative, and sometimes positive.

He does, however, take time out to snidely dismiss blanket licensing schemes -- like the ones that enable cable television, radio, photocopying, exam papers, live performance, covers, lending, coursepacks, jukeboxes, rentals, etc etc etc all over the world -- as a kind of pipe dream ("When the visionary of all visionaries develops a model for all-you-can-eat media consumption that provides for the artists to actually eat, perhaps I'll change my mind; until then, we are what we are, and we'll have to play nice within the confines of the present system.") despite the fact that these systems have been employed to universal good effect whenever new technology makes exclusion too costly to work effectively. It's like he's totally missed the fact that billions of dollars go right into the pockets of creators and rights-holders through these schemes.

Bizarrely, he asserts that people might buy periodicals that expire off their players in 60 days -- despite the fact that every one of us has a friend or relative with a giant stack of old computer mags, or National Geographics, or colorful Wireds, sitting on a shelf.

Really, it's as though he sat down and called an ebook startup's PR guy, then reasoned out all of his conclusions a priori, without reference to any of the activity in the field.

I believe fiercely and passionately in ebooks -- that's why I give talks like this one -- but articles like this do nothing to advance the discussion. They're echoes of the dotcom snakeoil that dominated the ebook discussion five or ten years ago, and it's a disappointment to see this kind of editorial-in-defiance-of-facts on a hip net-zine like Gizmodo. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:08:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Roger Wood wall-clock

My friend Roger Wood is a genius clockmaker who builds clocks into assemblage sculptures made from found objects, antiques, rust, and vacuum tubes. He publishes an irregular newsletter showcasing his latest creations, such as this one, which is similar to one that I bought from him before I moved to London, which was the first piece of decor I put up in my new flat after moving in. Every place I've lived since I left Toronto has had a Roger clock in it, and it wouldn't feel like home without one. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ESPN's accidentally dirtiest homoerotic web headline EVER

"Rangers Take Whiff of Angel's Colon." Fantasy baseball, indeed. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:06:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Talking Love Doll

Back it up, RealDoll, this new pornorealist product plans to kick your 36"-24"-36" synthetic ass. Formed in the image of Playmate Linn Thomas, the "Talking Love Doll" promises to do what none before have: talk back atcha. "Almost seamless, life-like feeling skin, mannequin hands, feet and head with long flowing hair, large breasts and jointed arms with orbital sockets, multi-speed, Batteries included," says the website, along with claims that the "Wireless, Vibrating" Ms. Thomas is molded from all-new "Futurotic Material." You say Futurotic, I say vinyl. Whatever.

One thing is certain: IANALDU (I am not a love doll user), but even more tempting than the off-the-shelf model would be a haxxored version. She could speak everything from Shakespeare to software user manuals, for the man with the right set of tools. And, no, I actually mean tools. Dollmodding, anyone?
Link to Fleshbot post. Figure out a way to install Elizabot on the damn thing for extra credit.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:46:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are TV Networks "Inducers" for airing JibJab Bush/Kerry spoof?

Ernest Miller says,

BoingBoing noted yesterday that JibJab, the creators of the hilarious Bush/Kerry/Guthrie parody were facing threat of a copyright lawsuit by the current copyright holders for "This Land is Your Land." Now, the Home Recording Rights Coalition has issued a press release pointing out that when the television news broadcasts promoted the flash animation they were likely "inducing" people to violate copyright, assuming that the animation isn't fair use. Under the INDUCE Act, that could make the broadcasters liable for literally millions of copyright violations. Heh.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:49:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moebius Double twist strip playground equipment

Kevin Jarnot sez: "Little Tikes Commercial has created a playground structure called the "Infinity Climber", which is a climbable Moebius double twist strip for kids. It also recently won a 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA)" Link

Cassidy Curtis sez: "I hate to break it to your readers, but that piece of playground equipment is not really a Moebius strip. It has two twists, not one, which means it's an orientable surface (having two unique sides), topologically equivalent to an ordinary circular strip. A kid on one side of the strip could crawl around forever and not meet any kids on the other side. Real Moebius strips have an odd number of twists, and thus have only one side."

Kevin McCarty sez:That's not quite right either. A two-twist strip is not topologically equivalent to a no-twist strip, nor to a one-twist strip (the Moebius strip). They're all topologically inequivalent. The two circular edges of the 2-twist strip are linked, while with the 0-twist strip they're not. For all integers n, the n-twist strips are inequivalent to each other. The ones with even number of twists are orientable with two circular edges with varying linking number, and the odd-numbered twists are non-orientable with a single circular edge that links (knots) itself a varying number of times. Welcome to the wonderful world of homotopy equivalence classes.

Tim sez: I should add that Kevin McCarty's comment is only true for strips nested in euclidean space. Without such an embedding, there's no way to distinguish strips differing in an even number of twists. See: on homotopy, where the space Y is in fact euclidean 3-space. Without such a reference space we can only say whether our strips are homeomorphic or not, which they indeed are whenever they differ in an even number of twists.

I believe that any confusion here originates from the use of homotopy in knot theory where an ignorance of the space in which the knot is embedded would result in every knot being equivalent to the trivial knot.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:34:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Foul-smelling goo sold to keep people out of abandoned buildings

Ruffin sez: "a New Zealand company is now making a synthetic "skunk gel" called Skunk Shot that is being used by law enforcement to keep vagrants and junkies out of abandoned buildings." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:00:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Comic book ad gallery

Here's a well-documented gallery of comic-book miracle product ads, with high-res scans. Clip-art ahoy! Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:27:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lost electronic records from '02 raise '04 concern

In today's New York Times:

Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near. The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.

Dan Gillmor blogs,

This is even worse than it seems. The notion of an audit trail in this case is ludicrous to begin with. Even with a digital backup there's still no way you can trust that the votes cast were the votes recorded. That's the big problem with touch-screen voting machines that lack a voter-verifiable paper trail -- paper that can be used to check the machines' accuracy and be the actual ballot in a recount. And this is only the latest strange incident in Florida's sordid elections record. You have to conclude that the people running elections in Florida are buffoons at best. At worst? The thought is frightening.

Link to Dan's blog entry, and Link to NYT story.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:11:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SMS messages become embroidered cross-stitch art

Among the goodies you'll find on Birmingham, UK-based artist Kate Pemberton's site are "an extensive casio watch camera diary," and a series of embroidered versions of canned short text message (one of them is shown here). I hope she posts the other 24 online -- they're great.

Kate says: "Texting is quick and has [largely] replaced the act of sending a card -- Happy Birthday images for example. If something is stitched by hand by the message sender, there is a lot of emotion attached... someone has stitched feelings there, using up much time and patience. Texting is flippant... however we may be more likely to send texts to people who we may not send cards to! There are other ideas within the work about the role of the female image in technology and the correlation between pixel art and traditional cross-stitch."
Link to Kate's "endfile" geek-art website.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:32:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DNC cops just don't get wireless security?

On the politech list, a thread of items from various listservs related to cybersecurity and the Democratic National Convention. In one item, reader Wes Morgan says,

I'm watching CNN's Headline News, and they run a story on security preparations for this week's Democratic Convention in Boston. They go on, at great length, about the extensive network of cameras--approximately 75 of them, scattered around various Federal buildings and convention sites--and make it a point to illustrate how the security force, with their wireless networks and handheld devices, can grab the feed from any of these cameras at the tap of a stylus.

So, they show one such device - with it's 802.11b card clearly identifiable - and show another agent viewing a webcam of the Boston Harbor shoreline - with the URL of the hosting site clearly readable. When talking about the cameras, they show several different cameras on different buildings, some of which seem fairly unusual in their architecture.

I now know that they're using 802.11b, and I know the name at least one system handling the webcam feeds, and (with a bit of reconaissance) I can probably determine the position of at least one camera. So much for cybersecurity; I can't believe that the Feds even let that stuff on the air, much less that they did so without obfuscating critical information. *sigh* What were they thinking?

Link, and here is a press release which states that DNC cops are using handhelds with (apparently) 802.11 to access law enforcement databases.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:59:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Net art applet: Secret mating lives of robots

Offspring is a lovely abstract visualization of the pair bonding process of a theoretical robot colony:

"Each robot is assembled, ages through youth, comes into a reproductive stage, and eventually dies of fatigue. If a robot is lucky enough to find a mate during it's reproductive stage, baby robots may be assembled.

Visually, the Offspring image is a historic graph of robot colony size and distribution. Males of the population are represented by single horizontal lines while Females are shown as double lines. (...) Robots can only mate with robots near them in both space in age. To encourage dissimilar permutations, robots are not allowed to mate with siblings."

BoingBoing reader Skye Ashbrook says, "They even give you the source code to each process. I'd love to take those and build small apps on my system to render really high-res versions to output to nice paper on an IRIS printer or something. They can't handle much traffic so if the link is fUXXored, please please keep trying back -- it is so worth it." Link

Update: BoingBoing reader Prion adds, "I was marveling at the mating robots and had in my mind that the work was similar to the magic found at levitated.net. Looking at the credits in the source code I discovered that flash master j.tarbell was the author, one of the levitated.net contributors. For glorious nonlinear flash animation, visit the site."

Update 2: BoingBoing reader David says, "The code for the robot pair-bonding is written using Processing, a Java-based language and environment. It's a fun system, with instant gratification."

And BoingBoing reader Darren says, "When i saw this i was reminded of a current exhibition on in the modern art museum kiasma. its by a scottish artist charles sandison. he used something similar in that he had words "food" "man "woman" "child" "mother" "father" "old" and they all interacted with each other. the "man" would go to get "food" the children and mothers and woman would stay huddled together in the "village" area. groups of men would go and fight each other now and then. fascinating stuff. More info about the artist here. "living rooms" is the name of the exhibtion in kiasma.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:58:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Judge: RIAA can unmask file swappers

Declan McCullagh reports that a US federal judge has granted a preliminary victory to the RIAA by granting its request to reveal the identities of anonymous fileswappers accused of copyright infringement:

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin ruled Monday that Cablevision, which provides broadband Internet access in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, can be required to divulge the identities of its subscribers sued over copyright violations.

This ruling is the latest decision to clarify what legal methods copyright holders may use when hunting down people who are trading files on peer-to-peer networks. Courts have spent the last few years grappling with how to reconcile Americans' right to be anonymous with the entertainment industry's own right to sue people who violate copyright law. Chin, in Manhattan, said that the implicit guarantee of anonymity in the Bill of Rights is an insufficient shield in this case: "Such a person's identity is not protected from disclosure by the First Amendment."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:54:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DNC protesters' tech setup

There are roughly 5,000 protesters at the Democratic National Convention this week. This Wired News story points out that while they may differ on many issues, they unanimously reject the so-called free-speech zone in which they're penned by the U.S. Secret Service and local authorities. Wireless tech helps, though.

The protesters are also coordinating actions outside the free-speech zone by sending text messages on their wireless phones. Some protesters for a short time Monday converted the zone into a mock prison camp by donning hoods and marching in the cage with their hands behind their backs. The protest zone, which most people here simply call "the cage," is beneath an elevated section of disused subway tracks near a newly paved bus parking lot.

Activists say the zone resembles the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The zone, surrounded by two layers of chain link fences mounted on Jersey barriers, draped with black mesh and topped with razor wire, violates the protesters' free-speech rights, said a legal observer for the Boston chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

"You can't have free speech inside a prison," said the observer, Tony Naro, a recent college graduate who plans to start law school this fall.

Link (Thanks, Mike, who also points out that indymedia has been doing a lot of geek tech organizing for protesters on-site)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:38:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Don Martin MAD toons onomatopoeia glossary

A MAD Magazine fan has compiled a chapter-and-verse glossary of the sound effects used by Don Martin in his comic strips.

WORD                   Sound Of           Source

AAAAGH! EEEEEOOOW ACK! Removal Of A Deep  MAD #66, October 
UGH UGH MMP AGH! AEEK  Rooted Tooth       1961, Page 20

AAAK AAK               Busy City People   MAD #164, 
                       Coughing           Jan 1974, Page 33
                                                        
AAEEFWOFAAEE           One Of Tarzan's    MAD #245 
                       Special Animal     March 1984 Page 42
                       Calls
                        
AAGH                   Indians Getting    MAD #121 September 
                       Shot               1968, Page 15
                                                        
AAHT AAHHT BLOOOOT     Busy City Horns    MAD #164, Jan 
                                          1974, Page 33
                                                        
ACK                    Indians Getting    MAD #121 September
                       Shot               1968, Page 15
                                                        
ACK                    Man choking        MAD #268 January 
                                          1987 Page 42

Link (Thanks, Eric!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK Big Brother Awards TONIGHT! Mark Thomas names and shames privacy-bashers

The UK Big Brother Awards -- which present an Orwellian trophy of a boot stepping on a human face forever to egregious governmental and private-sector abusers of privacy -- are being held tonight! Free admission, no need to RSVP, loads of cheap drink, Mark Thomas standup routines, DJs spinning -- your basic techno-activist festival. I'll be there -- hope to see you too!

The event kicks off at the London School of Economics Student Union at 6:30PM, near the Aldwych and Holborn tube. The entrance to the Quad is through the Claire Market Building (Building C) on the right of Houghton Street (Directions, Map)

On July 28th 2004, Privacy International will stage the 6th annual UK Big Brother Awards to recognise the people and organisations that have done the most to devastate privacy & civil liberties in the UK.

Now an annual event in seventeen countries, Privacy International's Big Brother Awards bring together a rich and unique mix of all ideologies and backgrounds. This year, for the first time, the award night will be open to the general public. A space for a thousand people has been reserved at the London School of Economics, which is hosting the event on the night.

Link (Thanks, Ian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:29:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Non-Lethal Slippery Foam, an Anti-Traction Material for the ages

The Mobility Denial System is an oil-slick-in-a-can, a combination of "Drilling Mud Additive, Flocculent and water" that renders surfaces as slippery as wet ice. Lots of tasty acronyms and buzzwords on the sell page, including "Anti-Traction Material (ATM)" and "Non-Lethal Slippery Foam."

Once applied, the material will degrade or impair the adversary's ability to move. For Interior applications it can be applied to flat, smooth, non-porous surfaces such as linoleum, tile, wood floors or staircases. Exterior applications include sloped, rough, porous surfaces such as concrete, asphalt, and grassy areas.

Link (via Coolhunting)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickr jingle

Staff at Flickr, an outstanding social photo-sharing app, have written a great jingle for the service. Sweet! (Disclosure/Boast: I'm on the advisory board for Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr) 142K MP3 file (via Sylloge)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:52:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spiderman trufen determine to shoot a non-sucky Spiderman 3 before Hollywood

A group of pissed-off Spiderman fans have determined to make a third Spiderman movie off their own bat, without permission from Marvel or the studio, rallying to a cry of "In recent years Hollywood Studios have assaulted our comics. Well comic lovers, it's time to fight back." They're soliciting production crew, actors, effects people and cash donations, so they can get the Secret Spiderman Movie out before Hollywood beats them to the punch.

10 Worst Casting Choices
10. Hugh Jackman as Wolverine
9. Dolph Lungren as Punisher
8. Ben Affleck as Daredevil
7. Matt Salinger as Captain America
6. Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face
5. Shaq as Steel
4. Val Kilmer as Batman
3. Michael Clarke Duncan as Kingpin
T1. Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl
T1. The Governator as Mr. Freeze

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:49:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory teaching Clarion in 2005

In 1992, I graduated from the Clarion Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University, the famed six-week "boot-camp for science-fiction writers." It was an amazing experience: my instruction from the likes of Damon Knight, James Patrick Kelly, Lisa Goldstein, Nancy Kress and Kate Wilhelm forever changed me as a writer and a person.

Therefore, it is a stupendous honour to be able to announce that I will be returning to Clarion next year, as part of the 2005 roster of instructors. My co-instructors will be Joan Vinge, Charles Coleman Finlay, Gwyneth Jones, Walter Jon Williams and Leslie What.

Clarion is in transition this year, as funding cuts at MSU will require a change of venue. Here are some details:

Among the options being considered are moving the workshop to another university or becoming an independent non-profit organization, along the lines of Clarion West. In either event, Clarion is likely to leave its long-time home in East Lansing and is actively soliciting suggestions for new location(s) and offers from organizations or groups willing to host the workshop. “I think it’s past time for Clarion to make a transition to a new venue and a new structure,” said Board Member James Patrick Kelly. The Clarion Board is calling on alumni and friends of the workshop to volunteer to help with the transition. “We need to work on fundraising, communications, and administration,” said Kelly. “We’re encouraging people who believe in Clarion to get involved with everything from putting together our newsletter to helping choose the instructors and lots in between.” To that end, the Clarion Board of Directors, which currently consists of Matheson, Kelly, Kate Wilhelm, Maureen McHugh, Karen Joy Fowler, Tim Powers, and former Clarion director Tess Tavormina will be looking to reconstitute itself and expand its membership.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:43:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Segway Polo video

A group of Bay Area Segway owners have formed a Segway Polo club. Here's video of the second match. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:39:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian government demands nude pix of stripper-immigrants

Canadian Immigration officials are requiring that exotic dancers looking to enter Canada submit nude photos of themselves dancing, so ensure that they aren't nude-dancer-impersonators, sneaking into the country to do other kinds of work.

The potential dancers have to prove they can dance in the nude, immigration lawyer Mendel Green said Monday.

"They can't be partially nude," he said. "If they don't have pictures in the nude, they are not going to wiggle their bottoms in Canada."

Reg Req'd Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:36:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush's lies about Castro plagiarised from undergraduate essay on Internet

Bush recently characterised Castro's remine in Cuba as proud of the prostitution there, a bizarre charge that had no basis in fact: Castro simply never said what Bush accused him of saying ("This is his quote -- 'Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world' and 'sex tourism is a vital source of hard currency.'"), and no one except Bush says that he did.

It turns out that Bush's speechwriters found the quote in an undergraduate paper for Dartmouth, and they plagiarised it out of context:

Three days after Bush's remarks, the Los Angeles Times reported that the White House found the comments in a Dartmouth undergraduate paper posted on the Internet and lifted them out of context. "It shows they didn't read much of the article," commented Charlie Trumbull, the author.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:33:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Obama's DNC speech: a reminder of why America is worth fighting for

Barack Obama, a Democratic Senatorial candidate from Illinois, gave a barn-burner of a speech last night at the DNC, full of fiery sentiment that reminds me of what I loved about the USA when I lived there, and why I stick up for it now that I'm in a part of the world where the America-bashing is often ill-considered and all-condemning:

If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief-I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper-that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America-there's the United States of America.

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Link (via Electrolite)

Update: Here's a Link you can paste into RealPlayer or a Real-compatible app like MPlayer or VLC for video of the speech (Thanks, Quentin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:29:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SimRestauranteur

Master game designer Greg Costikyan has posted a fantastic review of a new sim/tycoon game in which you run a restaurant. Sounds like a lot of fun!

Restaurant Empire gives you a good sense of managing a restaurant. You hire and fire staff, construct a menu, place tables, decor, and kitchen equipment, and open the doors. Over the course of a day, people wander in and order. As is typical in games of this type, each customer's desires, wants, and reactions are tracked in detail, and you can click on any guest to see what he or she is thinking about (often, about the rudeness of staff or delays in their order). You can also see what peoples' main complaints are, general level of satisfaction, and so on. You try to increase the popularity of your restaurant by upgrading the menu and decor (as profits permit), adding new recipes and deleting less popular ones, learning about businesses that can provide premium ingredients, and so on.

The main game is a series of well-planned, linked 'levels,' each requring you to reach some benchmark within a period of time to 'win' (e.g., make $15,000 in profit in a single month). The level system provides a 'programmed learning' approach--that is, you're introduced to the details of game management over time--as well as a sort of backstory that provides a degree of motivation, and some characters (like your uncle, a retired restauranteur) who provide advice.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:24:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yesterday's transportation future

Peter Davidson sez, "A wonderful Berkeley website/gallery featuring some of the fantastic oddities and plans of futurists from the first half of the 20th century about the far-off world of 1980! Included are plans for a helicopter in every garage, a Mag-Lev train between LA and NY that would only be economically feasible if every citizen of those cities used it to commute to the other each and every day, futuristic car designs that never came to pass, hovercraft buses, the shape of trains to come and so on." Link (Thanks, Peter!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:22:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barbie in a Blender responds to Orrin Hatch

Induce Act. 85.5k JPEG Link (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:19:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nerd tattoo gallery

This is an awesome gallery of even more awesomer nerd tattoos, from Mac logos to 8-bit Nintendo heros to DNA, culled from the submissions to BMEZine, a body-modification zine. Link (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:12:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cthulhoid casemod

This lovingly detailed Lovecraft-inspired casemod is great -- it's the Necronomicase!

* Fully textured outer case
* Necronomicon Glyph window, with 114 cuts...
* ...Lit by two 12" CCFL tubes
* Elder Sign & Cthulhu Runes etched window, lit by...
* ...8 superbright green & 8 superbright yellow LEDs attached to...
* ...Hard Drive activity flasher circuit.
* Power button in monster mouth
* Reset button in right eye
* Light switch in left eye
* Sculpted tentacles set on left side around window.
* Textured fan cowling inside
* Front bezel eyes lit with 2 superbright LEDs
* Front lower part lit with two 4" CCFL tubes
* Fully textured CD & floppy bezels
* Decorated semi-clear pull-down front cover
* Two extra Stealth Fans
* Glow-in-the-dark rounded IDE cables
* Split sleeve & mesh wire covers
Link (Thanks, George!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:07:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Hell is for economists

Bizarro, dubious factoid of the day via Reuters:

Economists searching for reasons why some nations are richer than others have found that those with a wide belief in hell are less corrupt and more prosperous, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Link (Thanks, Q-Burns!)

Update: BoingBoing reader jeffk says, "This is the actual article referenced by the Yahoo "Hell & Economics" And, well.... Jesus Fucking Christ are their statistics fucked up! This is yet another example of conclusions not being supported by the facts of their own frippin' study!"

Update 2: BoingBoing reader Morgan Foust says the report conclusions aren't supported by the data, and the Reuters story appears to add up to sloppy journalism. "What is the correlation between 'fear of hell' and productivity?," asks Morgan, "According to this simple chart -- which took all of five minutes to generate in Microsoft Excel -- the correlation is negative. In other words, by the Fed's own data, the more a country believes in Hell, the lower their productivity. (For those paying attention, the correlation is a weak -.21.)" Link

Update umptybillion: BoingBoing reader Chris says, "Morgan Foust's feedback is off target. Productivity is a measure of outputs divided by inputs. GDP and per capita income are not measures of productivity. I'm not arguing the merits of the Fed's report, but Foust's feedback appears to be based on a flawed understanding of what is (and isn't) 'productivity'."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:20:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web menu zen: Greenland's only Chinese restaurant

What's that you say? You're wandering the ice-covered streets of Greenland, empty-stomached, jonesing for some Chinese takeout? Well, grab a bib and download this, baby: the online menu of the frozen land's only Chinese restaurant. You'll find Misigisaq in Greenland's second largest "city," Sisimiut (population 5,000), about 100 km north of the Arctic Circle. Manager David Dukes says, "We are adding new dishes all the time -- this week harbour porpoise cooked in a clay pot is the new special." Oh, but what to order:

# Love at first Sight: Caribou meat on little sticks
# Dried Fried Seal
# Tired Fisherman's Soup: a pick-me-up soup of whale meat and six traditional Chinese herbal medicines to reinvigorate you.
# Fragrant and Crispy Greenland sea bird (eider duck or Bruennichfs Guillemot, depending on the season)
# Numbing Spicy Musk Ox
# Clay Pot Walrus
# We are proud to serve not only a variety of Chinese teas, but also Kaffi Tunnulik (coffee and caribou fat).

Looks like they want to franchise, too. I'll have a venti, half-caf coffee and caribou lard, please -- hold the foam.

Misigisaq ApS is looking for partners interested in franchising our unique concept of Greenlandic ingredients and top quality Chinese cooking. We are able to support any such partnership with training, franchise documentation, and full logistic support. We believe there are many international sites with great potential for Misigisaq Restaurants. We can outline the prerequisites for a successful Misigisaq branch with any interested parties.

Link , and do not miss the "customer snapshot gallery" with pictures of tough tundra homeboys and this lovely local girl. (via egullet, thanks, Jonno)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:25:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired (and unwired) tech at the DNC in Boston

From the NYT, an interesting piece on the geeky underpinnings of the Democratic National Convention's communication infrastructure:

Most cellular carriers are augmenting their coverage in Boston to make sure the surge in traffic does not lead to a rash of busy signals and disconnected calls. Nextel, the official mobile provider to both conventions, is deploying its iDEN network with encryption codes used by the National Security Agency to make sure no one eavesdrops on all the deal making.

The company is supplying modified BlackBerry devices that allow conventioneers to access the Internet wirelessly at high speeds. It has also helped connect the many public safety agencies, which typically communicate over different frequencies. Nextel expects its customers to log millions of minutes on its DirectConnect service, which turns cellphones into walkie-talkies.

"It's like organizing a wedding on steroids," said Matt Foosaner, senior director of Nextel's emergency response team, referring to the arrangements his company is making for the conventioneers. "They are not going to stay tied down to a landline."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:41:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney parks gossip columnist

An anonymous reader writes, "MiceAge.com is sort of a gossipy (and many times quite bitchy) site devoted to all the latest going-ons at the happiest place on earth. Diehard fans of the place either loathe Al Lutz's almost weekly tidbits about operating problems and weak attendance at the new companion California Adventure park or love the many photos and the latest plans to update or replace attractions. This week Al posted about a recent visit by Michael Eisner to try and chat up the cast members, only to end up proving how out of touch he is with what is going on. Last week Sue Kruse in a very funny piece detailed just what was involved as far as the public goes with a staged 50th anniversary event. In an internet ocean of fawning Disney sites, MiceAge stands out if only for trying to just try and tell it like it is."

When Eisner did show up at that particular cafeteria in a pitiful attempt to rub elbows with the masses, he only really succeeded in proving how out-of-touch he is and how little about the Parks he actually knows. As the cafeteria took notice of Eisner's arrival, which was hard to miss due to the big entourage accompanying him, Eisner put forth his best political skills and tried to make friends. He marched right up to two college aged guys wearing Adventureland costumes waiting for their cheeseburgers and said "Hi fellas, where do you guys work?" The two Cast Members dutifully replied "We work at the Jungle Cruise, sir." Eisner broke into a broad and forced smile and said "Hey, that must be a lot of fun! I'd love to be able to drive that boat around all day, making those jokes and shooting at the hippo's like you do!" And without missing a beat, one of the Jungle Cruise Skippers said "We don't get to shoot at the hippo's anymore sir. They took the guns away three years ago." Eisner could only stammer, "Oh, they did? I didn't know that..." before he moved on down the line for the next forced smile and handshake. (By the way, the plan is still on to reverse Paul Pressler's silly and overly PC decision and bring back the guns to Jungle Cruise that we'd told you about in a previous update.)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:38:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot Revolution!

Here's a gallery of Joe Alterio's agitprop for the Robo-Equality Party. Digital prints on archival paper are $40 to $100 depending on the size. Link (Thanks, Lindsay!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:49:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gay marriage satire

The Fafblog continues its reign as the funniest political satire blog on the Net with today's post about gay marriage in the form of a mock-interview with the Family Research Council's Dr. James Dobson:

[JD]: The legality of gay marriage sent out powerful shockwaves of destructive gay energy throughout hetereosexuality. Without an amendment to the constitution specifically barring homosexuals from obtaining marriage rights, this destructive Gay Force rampaged throughout the Traditional Family Nexus, corrupting it and turning thousands of upright, decent, missionary-position-loving straight couples into deranged, out-of-control mutant gay perverts.

FB: This is horrible! What in your scientific opinion as a doctor can we do to stop this?

JD: Well, humanity's only hope at this point lies in the Marriage Protection Act, which would strip federal courts of the ability to review the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. That way if the draconian anti-gay laws we need turn out to be unconstitutional, we'll never know, because the courts won't be able to stop them.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: INDUCE Act update

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Madeleine Brand about the Hatch/Leahy INDUCE Act, much-blogged here and there and elsewhere of late. The law seeks to ban technology that would "intentionally induce" copyright infringement. Hollywood and the recording industry back it, seeking new muscle to combat filesharing. Tech companies, digital liberty advocates, and geek activist groups like savetheipod.com say it's ill-conceived and badly written. In its current form, INDUCE would unfairly stifle innovation, they say -- and could outlaw a wide range of gadgets and services we take for granted, from iPods to PDAs to web search engines (et tu, Google?).
Link to online archive for today's "Day to Day" show, available after 12pm Pacific time.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:29:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Home Improvement," Baghdad-style

This CS Monitor story explores one of many new "reality" TV shows which have launched on Iraqi television stations in recent months. One of these programs is a home makeover show in which producers bring donated materials to bombed-out houses and try to fix 'em up. There was also an interesting segment on NPR last week that covered other reality TV shows in Iraq, but I can't find the url right now.

"This is a big surprise," says Ahmed Hassan Kadhim, standing in the doorway with a gap-toothed grin. "What can I say?"

"We've brought you a whole set of furniture!" says Ms. Zubair. "We're trying to compensate you for what you lost!"

"Labor and Materials" is Iraq's answer to "Extreme Home Makeover" and the country's first reality TV show. In 15-minute episodes, broken windows are made whole again. Blasted walls slowly rise again. Fancy furniture and luxurious carpets appear without warning in the living rooms of poor families. Over six weeks, houses blasted by US bombs regenerate in a home-improvement show for a war-torn country.

Link (Thanks, steve)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:59:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Preparing for Emergencies" parody site

Thomas Scott sez: As you may or may not know, the UK .gov is sending out leaflets on what to do in an emergency (read: terrorist attack, not that we want you to panic, although if you panicked a bit and voted for us again it'd be nice) to every household in the UK. As part of this, they registered www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk .

Pity they forgot to register www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk , really.

I managed to grab it, and hastily cobbled together a parody. (The original's under Crown Copyright, and the parody is so ridiculous as to have no chance of misleading those looking for the genuine info. It includes information on coping with a zombie attack, for crying out loud.) I got a few pleasant emails, including one saying that the site had done the rounds of the top emergency planning civil servants. And then, not twelve hours after the original site went up, I got a rather different one from the UK .gov ...

I considered giving up, but heck -- it's a parody, it's obviously a parody, and I'm damned if I'm going to be strongarmed into taking it down. As a concession, I added a conspicuous "this is a parody" notice to the bottom of the home page. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:44:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Turn your iPod into a universal remote

This week's Engadget HOWTO is a project to turn your iPod into a universal remote.

How did we do this? Basically, we “recorded” the “sounds” an infrared remote makes on a PC and then put them on an iPod as songs. Adding a special sound-to-IR converter then turns those sounds back to IR and allows you to use your iPod as a remote control. As an added bonus, it works up to 100 feet. It’s a slick all-in-one unit and we’re never going back to 6 remotes ever again.

Link (Thanks, PT!)

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

Tim Wu to edit Lessig blog

Tim Wu, my old elementary school classmate from the Alternative Learning Programme -- a public alternative K-8 programme in Toronto -- is now a law prof at Virginia and he's been making a name for himself writing brilliant papers on the copyfight. Now Tim's been tapped to guest-edit Lessig's blog while Larry disappears into the unwired jungle for a month to have an extended data-sabbath. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Simpsons movie in the offing

Simpsons movie! Simpsons movie! SIMPSONS MOVIE!

During the Simpsons panel at San Diego's Comic Con International, executive producer and longtime Simpsons contributor Al Jean announced the news that many fans have been waiting for: "There will be a movie," putting enough "English" on the word "will" to leave no doubt among the faithful that they will be able to see the yellow-hued denizens of Springfield on the big screen. Jean did not provide a release date, saying only that the show's producers were taking the time to get it right.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:16:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily trashblog

Trashlog is a photoblog that posts a photo of one piece of found trash every day. The weekly views are awesome -- almost poetry. Link (Thanks, asthmatic!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:15:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MP3 Pioneer Debuts Spatial Sound System

For today's Wired News, I filed this story about a new "3-D" sound technology that promises to make every spot within a movie theater, theme park attraction, gaming room, or home theater a "sweet spot." The demo last Thursday in Studio City appeared to wow a number of the studio suits in attendance, but whether or not consumers and entertainment companies are prepared to pay for implementing the technology is another matter.

On a darkened sound stage, executives from Disney, Microsoft, Paramount and an array of Hollywood entertainment companies listen to the whispering voices of ghosts.

This Studio City lot isn't haunted. They're here for a private demonstration of IOSONO, a new immersive sound technology developed by Karlheinz Brandenburg -- the German inventor considered responsible for much of the development and commercialization of the MP3 codec in the 1980s and '90s.

Inside the dimly lit demo space, a ring of over 300 speakers hangs roughly 10 feet above the ground. Using a digital pen and a touch-sensitive tablet, a sound engineer drags individual sound elements from one point to another to direct the position of sound elements. Samples of phantasmic voices whisper, hiss and appear to be darting and sliding invisibly from one spot to another throughout the room.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:41:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's DRM talk in Swedish

Ulf Benjaminsson has translated my DRM talk into Swedish: Link Updated Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:10:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elizabot passes sex-chat Turing test

A bored hacker modified an Eliza programme to act as an IRC sex-chat bot that impersonated an eighteen year old girl (or, rather, impersonated a sex-chat afficianodo of indeterminate gender impersonating an eighteen year old girl). He assumed that people would try to have cyber-sex with his bot and get bored, but in fact a surprising number were convinced and even got off with it.

This is a plot element in Bruce Sterling's brilliant "RU486?" a short story collected in Globalhead -- feminist hackers finance their RU486-running operation with a phone-sex line staffed by automated chatterbots.

It turns out that pornbots are among the class of Eliza-derivatives that can pass a Turing Test (or rather, horny sex-chat boys are among the class of human beings that can't tell a chatterbot from a person -- other groups include psychotherapists, who, in one experiment, couldn't distinguish actual transcripts of therapy sessions with schizophrenics from simulated therapy with schizophrenic chatterbots; and the university student who mistook a chatterbot for his prof in the middle of the night when he IMed same for permission to extend deadline on a late paper).

'eliza' is a program that talks to you, pretending to be a psychologist. its script of possible responses is super tiny, so it doesn't fool anyone. or so i thought.

IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out. my friend reduz found a version of 'eliza' that could go on IRC. he put it on IRC. a lot of people from other countries thought it was a real woman, so naturally they tried to have sex with it. they got frustrated quickly. reduz is a bad man...

so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels.

Link (Warning, contains links to transcripts of IM-based sex, NSFW) (via Waxy) Update, Zed sez, A bot on a MUD was horndogged by an individual for two weeks without him getting it. Note that while the bot was designed for a modicum of verisimilitude, it was not designed to fool anyone, or targeted to fool horny boys.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:58:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Danah calls the NYT out for pissing on DNC bloggers

Danah boyd has written a fiery response to yesterday's NYT article on bloggers at the Democratic Convention ("Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps"), which began poorly by equating journalling with blogging, and went downhill from there:

By framing bloggers as diarists, the NYTimes is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed. They further perpetuate this view by pasting a picture of a youth on the front of the article to suggest that bloggers are all inexperienced and naive, further implying that their reports will not have the value of the more "adult" perspective of "real" journalists.

The entire spin of the article focuses on how bloggers are like children in a candy store - naive, inexperienced and overwhelmed by what is now available to them. The article focuses on the minutia of blogging, emphasizing that bloggers won't really cover the real issues, but provide the "low-brow" gossip. (I somehow suspect that the NYTimes is far more likely to cover what various attendees are wearing than the bloggers.) The article does proceed to share its stance on bloggers through the voice of one subject: "I think that bloggers have put the issue of professionalism under attack." (Not Jason Blair?)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:43:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woody Guthrie's copyright used to defile his memory in lawsuit threat

Two brothers who cooked up a funny parody of Bush and Kerry singing "This Land is Your Land" have been threatened with a copyright infringement lawsuit by the current rightsholder to the classic Woody Guthrie song, a company called Ludlow Music. A lot of the copyright rhetoric centers on copyright's ability to give creators controls over their works, but here it is working just the opposite, for Woody Guthrie's standard copyright notice went like so:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:37:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disneyland 1968 family holiday photos

Here's a wonderful set of family holiday snapshots from a modern-day blogger's childhood trip to Disneyland in 1968 -- and good as the photos are the reminisces that accompany them are even better. Link (via The Disney Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:34:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, July 26, 2004

Portraits of Thai kickboxers, by Siege

Following up a thread of Muay Thai-related posts: this striking series of portraits shot in Bangkok by photographer Siege, whose weblog was just launched by Nerve.com.

Link to Thai kickboxer portraits (free to browse, and totally work-safe), and Link to Siege's new blog (paid Nerve.com subscribers only, and is the very definition of not-work-safe).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:13:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

10th-century Japanese text "The Pillow Book" becomes a blog

A blogger named Simon Cozens is translating the classic Japanese text The Pillow Book (Makura no Soshi) by Sei Shonagon into English and republishing it as a blog. It's easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read -- well, rather like a blog. Some dates are fictitous, and some liberties have been taken to produce a coherent narrative stream in blog format -- but the content is purported to be a faithful translation of the original. Since I speak neither contemporary nor classical Japanese, I'll have to take this blogger (or someone wiser)'s word for it. And no, I'm sorry -- Ewan McGregor has nothing to do with this one. Link (Thanks, Andrew)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:52:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mobile iTunes

Apple just announced a new iTunes mobile version that Motorola will load onto their "mass-market music phones" in the first half of next year. TheFeature's Carlo Longino gives his quick take on the deal:

Plenty of handsets today are capable of playing mp3s, but presumably none do it with the ease and grace -- or inherent coolness -- of Apple's products. It's an interesting move for Apple, which has said in the past the iTunes music store is a loss leader designed to help sell iPods. Presumably, they want to take new Moto phone users and turn them into iPod buyers... That, or this is just the first step towards the much-clamored-for wireless iPod.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:05:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rethinking Kerry's campaign slogan

Jess Hemerly of A Great Notion points us to a Slate article about John Kerry's campaign slogan "Let America be America again," a line snatched from a poem by Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes. The irony is that the poem itself was written with ironic intent--Hughes was apparently a vocal Communist and Soviet Union supporter.

Instead of misappropriating Hughes's poetry, Jess suggests Kerry sample some other beats:

from Ginsberg's "America":
"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. Vote Kerry."
"America stop pushing me I know what I am doing. Vote Kerry."
"America why are your libraries full of tears? Vote Kerry."

from e.e. cummings:
"a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man. vote kerry, his arse is fresher than Bush's."

from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "I am Waiting":
"Are you waiting for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right? Vote Kerry."
"I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in the Lost Continent in a new rebirth of wonder. Vote Kerry."

okay i'm ridiculous but do you see how ridiculous the Hughes thing is?

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:00:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stargate fan-site operator busted under anti-terrorism law

The creator of an SG-1 fansite has been charged by the FBI with criminal copyright infringment, the result of an investigation that involved a USA PATRIOT Act warrant against the site's ISP to gather intelligence. The Feebs confiscated and then destroyed his personal computers, returning their remains months later. All this comes after several of the show's cast and creators have made a special point of saying how much they liked the site. The site owner lives in Ohio, but has been charged in LA and needs money to get to the coast and defend himself; they're raising money through t-shirt sales and could use your help.

Adam was first tipped off about the investigation when the FBI raided his and his fiancee's apartment in May of 2002 and seized thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment. Adam later received a copy of the affidavit filed in support of the search warrant, and was shocked to discover that this document, prepared by the FBI, contained significant amounts of erroneous and misleading information. For example, two social security numbers were listed for Adam, one of which is not his. References were made to a cease and desist letter sent by the MPAA to an email address that did not exist. His online friendship with other Stargate fans across the globe was portrayed as an international conspiracy against the MPAA. And perhaps most disturbing of all, it was later revealed that the FBI invoked a provision of the USA Patriot Act to obtain financial records from his ISP. The FBI's abuse of its powers did not stop there. When they seized Adam's computer equipment, he was given written documentation stating that it would be returned within 60 days. The equipment that they did return did not arrive until more than 8 months later, and only then after much prodding from his lawyer. Much of it was damaged beyond repair - one laptop had a shattered LCD screen, an empty tape backup drive was ripped apart for no apparent reason, his fiancee's iBook was badly damaged when it was pried apart with a screwdriver. The FBI's computer crimes staff is either incompetent (at least when it comes to Macintosh computer equipment) or else they just don't give a damn.

Link (via MeFi)

Update: Matthew sez, "There's a press release on the US DOJ site from April 2004 describing the charges. From this, you can learn the guy's name: "Adam Clark McGaughey".

The funny thing is that after searching google groups for "Adam McGaughey", you find a bunch of people that seemed to have been ripped off by him around 2002 on some SG-1 sites (as well as ebay) (make sure you sort by date to get more recent stuff).

I won't comment on any of the stuff here, but it's some interesting extra information that adds to the story.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:23:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gallery of retro science book covers

This gallery of "How and Why" book covers makes me want to go straight to eBay. Link (via The Cartoonist)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:22:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Artists uses mouth to make chewing gum sculptures

World of Wonder has a video clip of a man who makes little animals sculptures out of chewing gum, using his mouth to mold them.

"He prefers to work with gum that is past the expiration date. It takes him about three hours of chewing to get a piece of gum the right consistency for art. Once he's done that, it takes him only 30 second to make a turtle, 20 seconds for a pig, and over a minute for something complicated like a UFO. Unless he's out and about handing the sculptures to unsuspecting kids, he submerges the tiny artifacts in water to harden them. When he's really on his game he can do as many as 20 an hour."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:04:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Island travelogue: Caribbean Panama

Erik Gauger sez: "This is one of my latest travelogue notes. It is about a semi-autonomous people that live on very tiny islands off the coast of Panama, are the smallest people in the western hemisphere, and get wildly drunk in the morning when a girl hits puberty." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:27:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MyDoom uses search engines to find email addresses for propagation

The new MyDoom variant scans your HDD for domains (e.g. craphound.com), then hammers on search engines looking for valid email addresses at that domain (e.g., "GET /default.asp?lpv=1&loc=searchhp&tab=web&query=e-mail+example.com"). The traffic got so bad that it actually took Google down for a while. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:17:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UPDATE: Failed terrorism attempt on recent flight?

It's been debunked by Snopes

Spencer Cross sez: "[T]he Annie Jacobsen article that you mentioned today has become quite a big deal, and the debate is far wider than just Snopes. Salon has an excellent followup to it that I thought you might want to read. The article has also been picked up and embellished by a number of "fair and balanced" media outlets. Likewise, "in an effort to provide the most up-to-date information," WWWS is now linking to several articles that support Jacobsen's relentless and unapologetic alarmism, but has failed to link anything on the other side of the debate. I would encourage people to e-mail the editors at WomensWallStreet.com and let them know what they think about their journalistic integrity: editors@womenswallstreet.com.

First hand report from a writer for Women's Wall Street about her experience on a flight from Detroit to LA. Apparently a group of 14 men on the plane kept going into the restrooms and signaling each other. Hard to say what really happened, and it could have been perfectly innocent, but it makes for interesting reading.

The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag... ...Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object... ... The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed the man in the yellow shirt he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word 'No.'

One possibility -- the men were sharing food, and some of the food was spoiled, so they threw it away in the restrooms. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:07:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hilarious ACLU video clip about about total surveillance society

This excellent piece of short speculative fiction presented as a video clip depicts pizza ordering in a near-future United States. Link (Thanks Patricio! )

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:53:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lil' Abner

Eric Burns sez: "This is a followup on Boing Boing's recommendation of Li'l Abner a couple of months back -- specifically highlighting the wedding of Li'l Abner, which was one of the biggest events to happen in comic strips... well, ever. [Here's] a post I put up on my LJ about it going into more detail."

The wedding of Li'l Abner and Daisy Mae Yokem was such big news it made the cover of Life Magazine. Newspapers reported it. In the late Seventies, the hoopla was commemerated in an episode of M*A*S*H when, during heavy shelling, radio reports kept coming in to the 4077th on whether or not the pair finally got married. It was the kind of plot resolution (and cultural impact) modern comic artists only dream of.

Well, Comics.com is diligently reprinting Li'l Abner, day by day, and reminding readers of how utterly politically incorrect... and hilariously funny... Kickapoo Joy Juice, Fearless Fosdick (a parody of Dick Tracy that was so brilliant it was turned into a television show. A puppet so, no less), Jubulation T. Cornpone and all the rest of Li'l Abner's work and world were. And we have finally reached March of 1952 in the reprints... which means that we are in the process of watching Li'l Abner be inexorably cornered into marriage.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:38:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lord of the Rings movie made from famous film footage

Glenn sez, "The mysterious O. Sharp has created a fantastic mash-up of Lord of the Rings, across three decades of movies, casting such big names as Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich. Tolkien's story is retold through a clever selection of overdubbed clips, and it works surprisingly well - it's an amusing tribute without being a parody, and I think it's certainly worth watching, even if it's only for Dooley Wilson sitting at his piano singing 'The Road Goes Ever On'." Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Untrained people on horses to look for terrorists near airports

Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Security wrote a short piece for The Register about the Houston Airport's ridiculous plan to recruit amateurs to ride around on their horses and patroll the grounds near the airport.

Want to help fight terrorism? Want to be able to stop and detain suspicious characters? Or do you just want to ride your horse on ten miles of trails normally closed to the public? Then you might want to join the George Bush Intercontinental (IAH) Airport Rangers program. That's right. Just fill out a form and undergo a background check, and you too can become a front-line fighter as Houston's airport tries to keep our nation safe and secure. No experience necessary. You don't even have to be a US citizen.

Sounds like a great opportunity for unemployed idiots who drool at the prospect of harassing people but failed the test to become a cop. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:26:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Utility pole boxes as tourist maps

Darren sez, "Victoria, Canada's City Engineering department has found an inventive use for those ubiquitous traffic control boxes you see on lamp and traffic light posts. In high pedestrian traffic areas, they've pasted neighbourhood maps on them. The maps wrap around three sides of the box, identifying areas of interest (as well as, interestingly, the city's URL).

"What a great idea. Not only do they use existing visual real estate (avoiding the need for other street-level maps), but it's a really cheap, low-tech solution to graffiti. As a guy who spent two sweltering summers across the street from the pictured box, at the busiest Tourism Information Centre in the country, I appreciate any non-human assistance for tourists." Link (Thanks, Darren!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:21:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Remote control model blimp

This remote control blimp costs $60 (not including helium) and has a range of 300 ft. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:18:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

See for yourself that the Earth isn't flat... it's hollow.

River guide Steve Currey invites you to join him on a twenty-four day trip into the, er, hollow earth. Currey has chartered a Russian Nuclear Icebreaker ship to leave next summer and is accepting reservations for up to 100 passengers.

"The indigenous Eskimos believe there is a hole in the Arctic Ocean. Observations of several Arctic explorers of mirages of land in the Arctic indicate that the most plausible location for a north polar opening that leads into the interior of the earth is located at 84.4 N Latitude, 141 E Longitude.... Don't miss this chance to personally visit that paradise within our earth via the North Polar Opening and meet the highly advanced, friendly people who live there. We are of the opinion that they are the legendary Lost Tribes of Israel who migrated into the North Country over 2,500 years ago and literally became lost to the knowledge of mankind."

The trip runs $18,950 a head, but anyone adventurous enough to join Currey should note that:

"By joining Our Hollow Earth Expedition, expedition members agree that there are NO GUARANTEES that this expedition will reach Inner earth. The expedition will make a good faith effort to locate the North Polar Opening and enter therein, but worst case scenario is that we visit the geographic North Pole, explore the region, and continue on to the New Siberian Islands."

Link (Via RealityCarnival)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:54:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ET contact by 2025

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), predicts that we'll detect an extraterrestrial transmission within twenty years. The bold forecast is based on two factors: an estimation of how many alien transmitters there might be in our galaxy, and Moore's Law, which says that computer processing power will double every eighteen months or so. From New Scientist:

"Within a generation, radio emissions from enough stars will be observed and analysed to find the first alien civilisation, Shostak estimates. But because they will probably be between 200 and 1000 light years away, sending a radio message back will take centuries."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:38:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brasilian and Danish women's CounterStrike teams

This is a very striking photo of the Brasilian (not pictured here, click link) and Danish national women's teams at the Electronic Sports World Cup -- basically, the world cup of CounterStrike. As Alice points out, despite the drearily predictable "they're hotties -- no, they're ugly" chatter on the message board that accompanies the original, this pic "will do the gaming world many, many favours. To quote a senior work colleague: 'but, they're so normal!'." Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toronto Star prepares to join NYT in Google-obscurity

Michael sez, "Hot on the heels of a Wired article about the irrelevance of NYT thanks to forced registration, The Globe & Mail in Canada has now done the same, and the Toronto Star is about to:"

Registration at thestar.com
We are introducing registration on thestar.com. At first, registration will be voluntary. Later in July we will move to mandatory signups. Readers will have to answer several questions to access stories. Section fronts and some other areas will remain open to everyone for now.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:15:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kalashnikov: US gov't is pirating my AK-47 design

The US government is an enthusiastic supporter of pirate manufacturers of Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles, and Kalashnikov himself is pissed off that he's not receiving royalties from all these American-bought bootleg firearms.

Since the collapses of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's army in Iraq, the United States has been purchasing or arranging the transfer of thousands of knockoffs of Kalashnikovs commonly referred to as AK-47's, to outfit new military and security forces in Kabul and Baghdad.

These rifles have not been made in Russia, where the arms industry holds patents for the weapon in several nations. Instead they have originated in weapons plants controlled by Eastern European states, each of which was a partner of Moscow's in Soviet days.

Link (Thanks, Roy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:07:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, July 25, 2004

Japanese popstar van-art

This is a stunning gallery of fan-car art inspired by Japanese pop-star Ayumi Hamasaki. Link, Link to lots more Ayumi fan art (via MeFi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:34:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pro video gamers have it tough

Great K5 piece on the plight of the professional video-gamer, plagued by new game releases and vendors who build games for non-competition play.

In this, I am referring to the Cyberathlete Professional League's one time decision to switch from the Quake series, which they had been using since the start of their foundation, to a newer (and more popular) game at the time, the infamous Counter-Strike.

Now for most of the 'professional gamers' who have lived off their earnings from past CPL tournaments, this meant the end of their career unless they made the jump from Quake to Counter-Strike. Unfortunately, switching games is not as simple because both games have different sets of physics and gameplay; in Quake you battled one another one on one while Counter-Strike is a team-based game, the players usually in numbers of five.

Now, even more recently, the CPL has announced for their World Tour that they would be switching games once again, this time back to a duel based game. There will still be a Counter-Strike tournament during the event, but this leaves many to wonder how much more air time does Counter-Strike have before it finally gets shelved as well.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

No one at BlogOn presentation is using Explorer

At the BlogOn conference, a Microsoft presenter asked his audience how many of them used Internet Explorer:

Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand. The presenter was thrown off his mark, but he recovered and said, "Wow! Okay how many of you wish we'd fix IE so you could use it?"

Still no hands....

Informal survey afterwards said the Windows users in the crowd were all using the latest Firefox. Wouldn't it be amazing if Mozilla ended up winning in the end?

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:27:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Every Nintendo in a polished wooden box casemod

This guy deconstructed a NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube, then built this beautiful polished wood enclosure for all of them so that they could coexist in one incongruous box. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:26:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real ships guerrilla DRM for the iPod

Real Networks have reverse-engineered Apple's iPod and written a player for its DRM "Helix" format, which they're giving away. This means that you'll be able to play the Helix files you buy from Real on your Apple iPod.

I'm cautiously glad about this. It's the right idea: tech vendors should be writing tools that allow anyone to play anything on anything: it's insane to own an Apple "record player" that only plays Apple "records" -- meaning that if you buy your records from Real, you need to buy another record player.

My only disappointment is that Real is engaged in the same behaviour: Real's records only play on players licensed by Real: it would be much more customer-friendly if Real went into the business of providing us with music in a patent-free, open standard that could be implemented by anyone. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Update: Ernie Miller's posted a lengthy analysis of this on his blog:

Note, however, what Real is not doing (and strangely, the news reports don't seem to mention either). You can convert Real files into FairPlay files, but you can't convert FairPlay files into Real files. Real is not allowing people to copy their iTunes into Real's DRM'd format. Why? Because it would likely be a clear violation of the DMCA. You may be able to play Real's DRM'd music on an iPod, but you still won't be able to play iTunes on a portable music player other than an iPod.

So, this isn't quite the breakthrough the analysts and whatnot seem to be claiming. If you buy anything from iTunes, you're still locked into Apple. If you buy an iPod, you can buy from Real's music store, but what real advantage does that provide? A DRM connoisseur might say that you will have the option of using other players in the future, but so what? Anyone who knows anything about DRM knows that you can't trust any of these competing formats. Perhaps in a few years one might want to buy another brand of portable music player, but what happens if Real's DRM fails in the marketplace and is squeezed out? What good did the flexibility do?

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:23:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

30,000 anti-Induce Act letters sent to Congress

Orrin Hatch's Draconian Induce Act -- which would criminalize iPods on the grounds that shipping a high-capacity personal stereo practically begs the public to use file-sharing services to fill it -- continues to draw fire from all quarters. Between EFF and SaveTheIpod.com, over 30,000 Congresscritter letters have been sent by voters in every state in the Union, asking government to save America from Orrin Hatch and the cartel that has put him up to this insanity. Click below to send your own letter: Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:19:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

London's toilets in audiobook form for iPod

pPod is a spoken-word iPod based guide to the public toilets of London.

pPod combines text, spoken word audio, and music to deliver a guide to London’s public loos – truly a convenience for iPod users on the move! Entertaining audio reviews and even accompanying sound tracks such as Handel’s ‘Water Music’ and ‘Cosmic Winds’ will help users to locate their nearest (and loveliest!) loos.

Link (Thanks, Alistair!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:49:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, July 24, 2004

9/11 commission report: much of what we knew was wrong.

This piece in today's New York Times outlines a number of the presumed truths about 9/11 which the 9/11 commission report effectively debunks. Among them:

The commission's report found that the hijackers had repeatedly broken the law in entering the United States, that Mr. bin Laden may have micromanaged the attacks but did not pay for them, that intelligence agencies had considered the threat of suicide hijackings, and that Mr. Bush received an August 2001 briefing on evidence of continuing domestic terrorist threats from Al Qaeda.

Link to NY Times story, Link to downloadable report, and here is Kottke's helpful outline of the lengthy report's structure.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:35:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wicked-ass trailer for Thai kickboxing film "Ong Bak" aka "Mach"

Action-feature Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior promises a truckload of Thai kickboxing mightiness. Completed in 2003, it opened July 24 in Japan (under the title Mach) and is apparently slated for North American release this November. In this whup-tasstic preview, a hero with flaming feet stomps opponents in all directions. Lots of aerial fight choreography without wires. Forget what I said before about that Bollywood guy -- stuntman-turned-actor Phanom Yeerum, aka Tony Jaa, is my future husband.

BoingBoing reader JohnD says, "Its low budget, virtually no action for the first half, then it gets as intense and exciting as you could want it too, despite the rudimentary story," and reader Garrett Gee says, "Fight sequences were great, it made me want to train again."

Link to Quicktime trailer, and Link to the movie website. Link to the company that holds the copyright. Link to IMDB details, Link to alternate French site. (via Warren, thanks for the update Tanner, and thanks very much to Joi Ito for the kind translation assist! )

Update: BoingBoing reader mediamelt says, "You seriously need to check out the trailer for Born to Fight, the latest from the director and fight choreographer of Ong Bak. Some seriously insane stunts here. Watch for the truck scene, I hope that stuntman got a huge bonus! BTW: Ong Bak's plot is so-so, but the stunts are nothing short of revolutionary. You can purchase a region-free DVD of the film here (same place I got my copy)."

Update 2: Reader Jon Silpayamanant says, "There is another French site that you might be interested in as it has a download section where you can get "The Making of Ong-Bak": Link. The reason, as I mention in my blog post, that France had already been distributing the film for several months is because of Luc Besson. There's a little blurb about how the Thai director, Prachya Pinkaew, left a little message to Besson in Ong-Bak in the French site."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:27:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blog-detectives tackle suspected Mexican child-porn recruitment site

Eduardo Arcos, editor of the Spanish-language blog ALT1040, is conducting an online investigation into a website suspected of recruiting teenage girls in Mexico for child porn. He's soliciting help from other bloggers, and using the "comment" feature in his blog as a way to exchange info with concerned citizens throughout the blogosphere. Together they're collecting data, with the apparent goal of revealing who's behind the suspect site -- and seeing to it that appropriate action is taken to protect potential victims. Here's my clunky attempt at translating Arcos' summary post:

A site called TV-whores with a theme and intentions that are very clear, contains the following text: Girls from 13 - 19 years of age: earn thousands of pesos simply by taking photographs. More information here. (...)

The page in question offers thousands of pesos to 13-19-year-old girls for taking digital photos. You don't have to be naked, you can be in a bikini or underwear, it says... but it's more than suspicious."

Link (in Spanish)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:21:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lessig: Shame on you, O'Reilly

Larry Lessig has written a long open letter to Bill O'Reilly that opens "You have declared a 'war' on the New York Times. That's good for you, good for them, and good for our democracy: Strong opinions deserve strong spokesmen. Your battle will help sharpen a debate about matters important to the Republic." Lessig then proceeds to take O'Reilly to task, point-by-point for an ongoing campaign of pathological libel agaist Jeremy Glick, the son of a 9/11 victim who spoke out against the Bush Presidency and the war. Glick appears in Outfoxed, a new documentary that criticises O'Reilly and his network, and in answering the charges raised in Outfoxed, O'Reilly has chosen Glick as a symbol of what he hates, and in order to make his point, he has been lying repeatedly about what Glick said and did. Lessig's point is that attacking a giant media organisation is one thing, but using your on-camera bully pulpit to repeatedly slander someone who has already lost so much is unconscionable.

# on February 5th, you told your viewers that "Glick was out of control." He may have been out of your control. But you and our government have got to learn that just because someone disagrees with you, he doesn"t become a security threat. Again, watch the interview, Mr. O"Reilly. He was not "out of control."

# on February 5th, you told your viewers that Glick was "spewing hatred for this program." Watch the interview, Mr. O"Reilly. He criticized you, not the program, for unethically using sympathy for the 9/11 victims for your own political ends. He was calling your behavior improper. You had not earned his hatred.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:53:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BugMeNot's reg form

BugMeNot -- a service that creates spoof entries for registration-required sites -- has produced a mock registration form aimed at people associated with reg-reqd sites that exemplifies many of the critical problems with registration on the Web:

What percentage of sites do you visit that require registration?

What percentage would you be comfortable with?...

Would you be willing to have an RFID chip inserted under your skin in exchange for a free, 12 month newspaper subscription?

What if we told you that you couldn't access news unless you agreed?

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK Friends of the Creative Domain Wiki

The Friends of the Creative Domain is a UK activist group supported by the Campaign for Digital Rights, EFF, and the Union for the Public Domain, created to foster free culture, free software, open content and the like. Its first project is to help the BBC win the right to put its archive of TV and radio programming online in the next version of the BBC's Charter, which is being negotiated right now.

FCD has just put up a Wiki for gathering and organising materials related to its campaigns -- it's the right place to go to get started if you want to pitch in. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:58:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Marvellous classic audiobooks on Telltale Weekly

Some time ago, I blogged about Telltale Weekly, a site that records and posts audiobook editions of public domain texts, charging small sums ($0.25-$4 or so) for MP3/OGG/AAC downloads.

I just revisited the site and gosh, there's been a lot of good stuff posted since I last stopped by (there's an RSS feed for new titles that I've just added to my newsreader): classic stories and essays by Twain, Jack London, L Frank Baum, O Henry; poetry by Walt Whitman; political speeches and essays by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass... My cup runneth over.

And there's good karma at Telltale: after five years or 100,000 downloads, TTW will release each track into the public domain under a CC license; also, partial proceeds from Ogg downloads are donated to the Xiph Foundation, who support Ogg development. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:48:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, July 23, 2004

Bioengineered household appliances

Faux company "Geniecorp" makes creepy, icky, biogenetically-engineered household appliances for happy mutant homes of the future. "Lick-n-Span," "Alarm Cock," and "Lhasa Mopso" are but a few. Link to the online shopping mall, full of funny, handsomely-designed Flash animations -- it's all a clever promotional tease for this self-published book. (Thanks, Howard)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:44:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bart Nagel's Mondo 2000 collection on eBay

Bart Nagel was the visionary photographer/designer behind the cyberdelic aesthetic of Mondo 2000, the "magazine-of-record" for early 1990s cyberculture. If you don't know Mondo, you should. Bart is now auctioning off part of his own Mondo 2000 collection, including 17 issues of the magazine, issues of High Frontiers and Reality Hackers (RU Sirius's pre-Mondo 'zine), the essential Mondo 2000 User's Guide to the New Edge, a rare unworn Mondo t-shirt, and assorted other ephemera. "Mondo 2000: How fast are you? How dense?" Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:04:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pixelblocks are like a cross between Lego and Lite Brite

Pixelblocks are Lego-like colored plastic blocks. The cool thing about them is that you can use them like pixels, to add images and patterns to the surfaces of your creations. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:19:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Database of 466 lousy tippers

Bitter Waitress has a database of names and locations of restaurant patrons who left lousy tips, along with comments.

Where it happened: Franklin, TN

Total bill / Tip amount / Percentage: $75.76 / $4.24 / 5%

What happened: Barely squeezing into their chairs, they immediately whip out their two free appetizer coupons and proceed to order the largest appetizers possible. They then order the largest portions on the menu, request numerous favors and have me box up the last little scraps that they can't cram down their gullets into 6 separate containers. Then with a patronizing tone they tell me that I can keep the change.

Link (Thanks, Darren!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:24:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Self-cleaning nanofabric

CNN reports on the recently-announced invention of self-cleaning nano-coated fabric that's a leap beyond stain-resistant Dockers. The materials scientists at Hong Kong Polytechnic University coated cotton with nanoparticles of titanium dioxide. When subjected to ultraviolet light, the titanium dioxide produces an oxidizing agent that can break down dirt and other organic substances. According to researcher Walid A. Daoud, several companies have already come knocking.

"(The fabric will be useful for) military people, or travelers, people who go hiking, who don't have a lot of water and time to wash their clothes," he said. "This is a very good idea because then if the clothes get dirty, the dirt can be decomposed by the fabric itself. So after a few days in the sunshine, or even indoor light, the dirt will disappear."

As both BioED Online and CNN point out, the technology was prophesized in the 1951 film The Man in the White Suit starring Alec Guinness. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:02:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FCC allows mix-and-match antennae

The FCC has a new and somewhat baroque regulation that legalizes plugging aftermarket antennae into your WiFi access-points. In a long post on WiFiNetNews, Glenn Fleishman takes apart the new regulation and explains in admirably.

The FCC rule doesn’t suddenly make all antennas legal for all systems. Instead, they have chosen a clever middle ground. For new devices—or, presumably for recertification of old devices—manufacturers will be allowed to test the system with high-gain antennas of each major type, like omni, patch, yagi, and so forth. Once the device is certified, the manufacturer can release the characteristics of the antennas they tested for both their in-band and out-of-band signal patterns and strengths. (Out-of-band transmissions are the inevitable but not intentional frequencies that are broadcast on at typically very low levels due to harmonics and other technical radio issues.)

Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:18:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Velvet Underground plundered by Ergo Phizmiz

Avant-odd composer Ergo Phizmiz has posted MP3s of his album covering Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat in its entirety. The release features Phizmiz on: "Banjo, Bass Guitar, Ruler, Music Box, Violin, Toy Piano, Electric Guitar, Accordion, Squeezebox, Euphonium, Ukulele, Kazoo, Xylophone, Pixiphone, Uumskither, Mbira, Pod, Delay, Turntable, Percussion." Earlier this year, he released the instant plunderphonic classic "Ergo Phizmiz & his Orchestra plays Aphex Twin."

"The music of Ergo Phizmiz combines sampling and electronics with acoustic instrumentation, plundering the history of popular and classical culture into a Dadaist assault on the senses. Equally at home in the three-minute pop-song as in long, drawn out sound-collages, the sound of Phizmiz comes somewhere between cartoon-music, experimental classical, pop, Gamelan and hip-hop."

Link (Via Metafilter)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:32:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US Copyright Office Wants to outlaw VCRs?

Ernest Miller writes:

Yesterday, Marybeth Peters, the head of the US Copyright Office, testified before the Senate regarding the INDUCE Act. Her testimony was even more radical than the RIAA's. Not only did she (inappropriately) explain what outcome the Appeals Court in the Grokster case should reach and argue (wrongly) that the INDUCE Act wouldn't have a chilling effect on innovation, she actually said she thought the INDUCE Act was not enough. The Register of Copyrights argued that the Betamax decision, which made VCRs legal, should be overturned by Congress. Wow.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:29:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shipwrecked U-Boat salvage blog with CC-licensed A/V

Thor (who has the same birthday as me -- happy b-day, Thor!) sez,

We made International news last week when our team found the shipwreck of the rare U-215, a U-Boat that was on a secret mission to mine Boston Harbor when it decided to disobey orders and sink an American liberty ship in July 1942. That action lead to a watery grave for 48 German sailors, and 10 more who went down on the Alexander Macomb.

During the whole dive I was blogging the event from shore, keeping in touch by satellite phone. Unfortunately our website, Shipwreck Central, wasn't ready to go online so I was left to ponder the question of "if a blogger blogs in the woods..."

It's 5:30 AM here in Halifax and I'm back at home having a Wi-Fi beer on the porch. A couple of hours ago we opened up the site for a 'soft launch'. We're pretty happy with it, it's like the IMDB of shipwrecks with a kick-ass map interface, and best of all we've made our audio and video available under a Creative Commons license. I can't wait to hear live from the dive audio mixed in with some downtempo-ambient... it goes quite well from my experience.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:20:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory and Charlie Stross in Popular Science

The current ish of Popular Science (August 2004) is on stands now, with a great piece on Charlie Stross and me as science fiction writers who are doing good work on the Singularity (alas, the piece isn't online yet, but it's easy to find in shops). I'm really happy with how it came out, but wanted to give out one tiny bit of errata for the record: the article identifies me as a co-founder of boingboing.net -- although I'm a proud co-editor of BB, the founding was done by my pal Mark Frauenfelder and his wife Carla Sinclair. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:15:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Slam poetry for CC remix

Wayne Mercier is a Vancouver slam poet who has just released his first book of poetry published, and along with it, a CD of him reading his work. He's made the entire audio of the CD available for downloand and remix under a Creative Commons license.

I'm really excited about this, not just because it's a way of getting my stuff out into the world, but because - to my knowledge - this is the first time this has been done in Canadian poetry. Coach House Press releases electronic editions of their author's work but retains copyright. Also the fact that this is audio, and thus open to extensive remixing and incorporation into larger, multimedia projects, is very cool.

Link (Thanks, Wayne!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:12:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gundam-to-USB hub mod

Jason Streigel converted his Gundam action figure into a two-port USB hub, and lavishly documented the build process. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:43:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

With ReplayTV out of the picture, Studios turn on TiVo

TiVo's strategy has always been to play nice with the movie studios. While SonicBlue was shipping the Replay with automated commercial skipping and show-sharing, TiVo was adding DRM-based systems for cautiously moving programming around your house and only your house. It worked -- sorta. Replay got sued into oblivion, and TiVo was left standing.

But now that the studios have chased the TiVo competitors out of the market, they're turning on their pet PVR. TiVo wants to deliver a product that will allow you to share your programming among no more than 10 sets -- this isn't the indiscriminate sharing that the Broadcast Flag advocates said they feared: this is heaily DRMed, controlled and modest sharing.

And the Studios and the NFL don't like it. So they're demanding that FCC order TiVo to disable this feature. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:40:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Glenn Fleishman's gadget bag

The latest victim in Gizmodo's "What's in Your Gadget Bag?" feature is Glenn Fleishman, who comes clean about a truly astonishing amount of crap that he lugs around with him in his electronics kit, described with the loving verbosity of a real geek.

The camera used to take this picture is a Canon S1 IS, a 3-megapixel device that has a 10x optical zoom, interchangeable lenses, and uses four AA batteries. Using 2200 milliamphere hour (mAh) batteries recently, I took 500 photos and movies over the course of a month before swapping out another set and recharging. The camera does 640 by 480, 30 frame per second mono-audio video up to the size of the memory card on top of its anti-jitter-motor photos.

Finally, I always carry a 12-foot extension cord with multiple plugs on the end, and the alternative two-prong adapter for my Apple power supply. You never know how many friends you have until you have extra outlets.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:36:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joi Ito taking a PhD in "sharing economy"

Joi Ito (who never got an undergrad degree) is going to do a PhD in Business Management, and his thesis project is a book on "the sharing economy." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:21:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Doonesbury to be dropped for being "too controversial"

The Continental Features comics syndicate has announced that it will be dropping Doonesbury because the strip is "too controversial" (lately, Trudeau has been using the strip to criticise the Iraq War and Fox News).

The Continental head said he doesn't know exactly when "Doonesbury" will leave the package; he's currently polling clients to see if they want to replace it with "Agnes," "Get Fuzzy," "Pickles," "Zits," or another comic.

Link (via Joi)

Update: Phil Gyford sez, "Some time ago I knocked up an RSS feed that links to the latest Doonesbury strips (unlike the RSS feed that used to display the actual strips and was told to quit by Ucomics)."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:20:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mt-blacklist wins plugin contest

The Movable Type plugin contest judging (which I helped with) has closed, and the grand prize winner has been announced: Congrats to Jay Allen for his mt-blacklist plugin and his choice of an Apple G5 dual 2GHz with 23" Apple Cinema HD Display or a Dell Dimension 3.2 GHz Extreme Edition with two 20.1" 2001FP Dell Ultra Sharp Digital Flat Panel Display and Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:18:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secret Swing visit report

After reading the earlier entry here on Toronto's Secret Swing, an art installation in which a playground swing has been hung in a narrow downtown graffiti alley, Chris sought it out and went for a ride and shot some good pix of it in action. Link (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:15:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Hollywood Zen: Still life on CBS lot

I was working on the CBS lot in Studio City around sunset today. I had a digital camera with a few minutes and megabytes to kill, so I took some quickie snapshots of abandoned TV sets. Everything you see here is life-sized, but fake (not unlike my city). The trees are painted on drywall, the houses are 3 feet deep, even the ivy is two-dimensional. Vacant studio lots emit a strange kind of sorrow and character that's not there when they're full of bodies. Like flat sketches that pop off the page when liberated from their daily human cargo. After actors depart and crews go home, the lots wake up to live moody, secret little dream lives we don't know about. LA is full of promises and lies. Here, even the studio sets lie to you about being inanimate. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:49:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

9/11 PDF cleaned up

Glenn Fleishman sez: "Sid Steward is a PDF guru that I've turned to in the past to bookmark and clean up my electronic books. He forwarded a link to a site he's created where he has the 9/11 Commission's report optimized for faster download, and including bookmarks and other PDF add-ons. His site offers a fast full text search of the PDF with links that will open the file and hit those bookmarks." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:45:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GOTMILF? Not anymore, for vanity plate car owner

Michael Syravong thought he'd pulled a fast one on Washington's Department of Licensing when he got a license-plate that read "GOTMILF." He told the department that MILF stands for "Manual Inline Lift Fluctuator," But eventually, bluenoses who are somehow familiar with the true meaning of the acronym (Google it for the not-safe-for-work answer), complained to the department and Syravong lost his plates. Link (Thanks, Eric!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:09:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spintronics -- nanostorage coming to a gadget near you

I wrote a piece for TheFeature about "spintronics" -- nanotechnology-based storage that is going to show up in products as early as next year.

Spintronics is a field of nanotechnology that uses the directional spin of electrons to indicate the "1s" and "0s" of binary computation...MRAM, short for Magneto Resistive Random Access Memory, is the furthest along of several nascent spintronics nanotechnologies. MRAM is likely to play a major role in portable memory in the upcoming years, because it combines many of the benefits (and very few of the disadvantages) of hard drives, flash memory, SRAM and DRAM.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:58:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

KITT for sale

KITT (Knight Industry Two Thousand), from the 1980s TV series Knight Rider, is up for auction on eBay. Apparently this was one of the tricked-out 1983 Trans Ams actually used in the show:

"After being released from its film duties, KITT found its way into the show circuit by promoting many Budweiser World of Wheels car shows for a number of years. After its tour of duty, the car was in need of restoration and in 2001 the owner approached Mark Scrivani of Mark's Custom Kits to restore the vehicle. The original, futuristic dash built by universal would only illuminate and was not intended to be functional; the owner commissioned Scrivani to make the dash fully functional, thus, the various non-functioning consoles were removed, cleaned up and made functional with pushable buttons, sound and visual effects. The dash received fully operational gauges and instruments, as well as an in-car camera tied into one of the two dash-mounted LCD monitors. The other monitor is wired into a trunk-mounted VCR for running and viewing tapes for future car show use. The original scanner mounted in the front of the vehicle was restored and functions properly. The scanner sound effect is also added to external speakers so it can be heard while the scanner is running. Besides the original Universal registration, the car comes with the original stamped steel "KNIGHT" license plate..."

William Daniels not included. Link (Thanks, Alan Rapp!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:45:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bipedal Dog

She's no Natasha the Walking Monkey, but Faith the Amazing Biped Dog certainly has an impressive gait. Faith was born with just one front leg and it was on backwards. A vet graciously removed the dying limb and, with help from her family, Faith has overcome her handicap: "Even though Faith has this defect we taught her to stand, hop, and eventually walk on her two back legs, like a human." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:32:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Plane used often by White House carried 13 Bin Ladens out of US post-9/11

Still losing sleep over fears that Osama bin Laden's kin were forced to suffer in commercial coach class when they flew out of the US a week after 9/11? Today's Washington Post should make you feel better:

At least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a passenger manifest released yesterday. One passenger, Omar Awad bin Laden, a nephew of the al Qaeda leader, had been investigated by the FBI because he had lived with Abdullah bin Laden, a leader of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which the FBI suspected of being a terrorist organization.

The passenger list was made public by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who obtained the manifest from officials at Boston's Logan International Airport. Lautenberg's office was given the document in recent weeks and released it before today's issuance of the final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Although much was already known about the "bin Laden flight," Lautenberg provided additional details, including the information that the plane, a 727 owned by DB Air and operated by Ryan International, began its flight in Los Angeles and made stops in Orlando, Dulles International Airport and Boston before continuing to Gander, Newfoundland; Paris; Geneva; and Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. The aircraft, tail number N521DB, has been chartered frequently by the White House for the press corps traveling with President Bush. (...)

"The Saudi Embassy offered to pay more money if our crew had a concern," [Ron Ryan of Ryan International] said. But he said all were reassured because "the FBI and Secret Service were heavily involved. They were in abundance every place we were."

Link

Update: BoingBoing reader Ken says, "Here's the aircraft's website run by the charter company. They fled in style. Link"
[Ed: image above grabbed from this online photo tour of transcontinental luxury service model N521DB, described on charter company DB Air's website as a "club room in the sky." ]

And Vidiot says, "Besides the White House press corps and the bin Ladens, N521DB has also flown Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, and the Baltimore Orioles...here are pix of it at various airports: Link"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:22:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Game developer: the real pirates are my publishers

From the author of Galactic Civilizations I and II:

"So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much. The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken."...

"So yea, tell me again how I need to put some dongle or whatever on my game to keep 15 year olds from pirating? When our contract with publishers forces them to wear a shock collar that I can press a button to shock them if royalties aren't paid on time then we'll talk about forcing customers to deal with massive copy protection. But it's not the pirates I worry about."

Link (Thanks, -d!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:04:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Enigmatic photo-toons

A Softer World is an enigmatic weekly three-panel comic strip made of artfully arranged photos and bits of text. Link (Thanks, Bob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:58:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Imagineering head on Tiki Room rehab

A Laughing Place message-board poster ran into Marty Sklar, the head of Disney Imagineering, at Disneyland's Tiki Room, and had a conversation about the upcoming Tiki Room refurb:

We talked briefly about The Tiki Room, about John Hench and Rolly Crump, and he confirmed the rehab, the roof being in particularly bad shape, and that the birds need a pretty extensive rehab.

'They used to bring the birds up to Imagineering and we'd refurbish them. Now, they do them here, and not often enough,' he said.

The Cast Member who introduced the show did an excellent job, she just did the spiel with enthusiasm and professionalism.

As we were walking out, I walked past Marty Sklar and he said 'It's still a good show isn't it?'

Link (via The Disney Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:29:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In-game product placement's distopian future

Great Terra Nova post on the new round of VC funding received by Massive Incorporated, which does in-game product-placement and ads:

** you hack monster for 80pts of damage
** you hack monster for 100pts of damage
>monster: did you know you can get 'monster' discounts at QuickieMart
** you hack monster for 10pts of damage
* you have killed monster
* you gain 1000XP
>would you like to convert these to 1 QuickieMart loyalty point (Y/N)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:27:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Downloading isn't killing music

Suw Charman has written an excellent article for the Guardian on my pal Koleman Strumpf's empirical, quantitative research on the effect of downloading on record sales (he concluded that it doesn't really have one), and the music industry's content-free bluster in reply.

"We consider it a very flawed study," says Matt Phillips, a BPI spokesperson. Both the BPI and the International Federation for the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) have criticised the study for including the Christmas period when people are buying CDs as gifts.

"It's very straightforward to address these kinds of criticisms," says Strumpf. "We got rid of the Christmas season and just looked at the first half of our data. We still find the same effect."...

"Over the period 1999 to 2003, DVD prices fell by 25% and the price of players fell in the US from over $1,000 to almost nothing," says Strumpf. "At the same time, CD prices went up by 10%. Combined DVD and VHS tape sales went up by 500m, while CD sales fell by 200m, so a possible explanation is that people were spending on DVDs instead of CDs."

Link (Thanks, Suw!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Special US Army food designed to be rehydrated with urine

Matt sez: "story about how some company has developed food packs for the us army that can be rehydrated with urine. It's supposed to reduce the amount of water(and therefore weight) they need to carry." The pouch has a filter that removes almost all the toxins from the urine. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:03:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Demolition man

Controlled Demolition Incorporated is a family-owned company that demolishes bridges, buildings, missiles, and other structures around the world. Their Web site features a breathtaking video of the orchestrated collapse of the Seattle Kingdome. Company head Mark Loizeaux was recently interviewed by New Scientist:

"It has to be the right job in the first place, the right explosive, the right pattern of laying the charges, and sometimes, which sounds odd, the right repairs to bring it down as we want, so no one or no other structure is harmed. And by differentially controlling the velocity of failure in different parts of the structure, you can make it walk, you can make it spin, you can make it dance."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:54:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Squint and see Jesus

An image of Jesus was spotted in a tinted window at a Cole Hardware store in Rio Grande Valley, Texas.

"I go to church whenever I get a chance, but I'm not a spiritual person. I do believe, especially now," a resident said after seeing the window.

Link

UPDATE: Satirista says "What's downright high-larious is that when I visited the link to Local6 news to get the full story, I clicked on the right-hand link 'click here for a larger image...' thinking I was going to see a bigger Jesus, and this is the page that came up."

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:38:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

9/11 commission report: How to get a copy online or in hard copy

Here are instructions on how to obtain a copy of the official final report of the 9-11 Commission. The document will be posted online at 11:30 am ET today is now available online at this Link.

The U.S. Government Printing Office offers hard copy, if you prefer. Ask for stock number 041-015-00236-8. This will cost $8.50 plus $4.75 for shipping, (total = $13.25), checks and most major credit cards accepted. Order by phone at 866-512-1800 or on-line, or by mail from Superintendent of Documents, PO Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954.

You can also obtain a copy of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the U.S. intelligence community's pre-war assessments on Iraq on-line: Link. The GPO offers printed copies for $51 (stock number 052-071-01415-2, follow order instructions above.)

Update: Reader FerrisB says, "If you'd like to hear the testimonies from the commission hearings, the iTunes store has them available for free in their audiobook section. Link

Update 2: BoingBoing pal John Rambow says, "There's also a trade book edition of the report. It's only $10, and it's probably easier to get and read than the GPO's version. Link"

Update 3: Jason Kottke says, "I've created an HTML version of the 9/11 Commission Executive Summary with permalinks for each paragraph for easy linking and copy/paste. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:42:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Anime keychain drives

Gizmodo has the scoop on a line of Gundam-branded USB keychain drives.

To appeal to the "maniacs" (Japanese for "someone who knows too much,") IO Data has included two features for collectors of the drives - and I'm not making this up - by installing the included "Cute" software, your desktop wallpaper will automatically change to a corresponding Gundam wallpaper. When you take it out, it will go back to normal. The second feature is the screensaver, which when you purchase and use more than one of these drives, will add the respective characters to the ensuing action. You too can engage in intergalactic space combat for about $55 USD for a USB 2.0 mecha, or $45 for a USB 1.1 mecha.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:05:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Garden gnomes take £15,000 off the value of your home

The Guardian has published a piece cribbed from a TV show called "The 20 Quickest Ways To Lose Money On Your Property" -- a list of the pounds-value of bad decor decisions on your home's resale value.

5 Additions such as "humorous" gnomes and stone cladding (£15,000)
6 Textured finish to ceilings (£14,000)
7 uPVC windows (£12,500)
8 Smell of pets (£10,000)
9 Poor DIY (£10,000)
10 Avocado bathroom suite (£8,000)
11 Nightmare neighbours (£7,500)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:03:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Antique science fiction toys for sale

ToyTent are purveyors of astonishingly cool (and wickedly expensive) vintage space toys, robots, and rayguns. Just browsing the images of these things gets me all excited. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SiteFilter thinks blogs are porn, chat sites or worse and censors them

A couple days after discovering that the SiteFilter censorware in use at his hotel was blockign MeFi, Metafilter Matt ruminates on the general suckitude that is censorware, especially in light of the fact that SiteFilter's crappy blacklist is mandatory in the libraries of the State of Georgia.

I tried all sorts of blogs, both new and old, political and tech, but the ones that were blocked were completely random. Like I said before, waxy.org is blocked (screenshot), but similar sites are not. Gawker is blocked (screenshot), but no other gawker media site is (wonkette and gizmodo are fine). Acts of Volition seemed strange to block (screenshot), since it's a pretty tightly focused tech/design blog. On the purely humorous side, Oliver Willis is considered not a "Chat" site like the rest of the blocked blogs, but a "Sex" site (screenshot). I bet the #joiito army is not going to be happy when they hear that Joi Ito's site is blocked (screenshot).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:58:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alan Moore on our modern distopia

Salon has an excellent interview with Alan Moore, the man behind Watchmen, From Hell and other canonically awesome funnybooks. Moore talks distopian politics:

One of the reasons we singled out media in "V for Vendetta" was because it is one of the most useful tools of tyranny. We invite it into our own home every night; I'm sure that some of us think of it as a friend. That might be a horrifying notion but I'm sure there are people who think of television as perhaps one of their most intimate friends. And if the TV tells them that things in the world are a certain way, even if the evidence of their senses asserts it is not true, they'll probably believe the television set in the end. It's an alarming thought but we brought it upon ourselves. I mean, I think that television is one of the most diabolical -- in the very best sense of the word -- inventions of the past century. It has probably done more to degrade the mind and intelligence of its audience, even if they happen to be drug addicts or alcoholics; I would think that watching television has done more to limit their horizons in the long run. And it has also distorted our culture.

TV and politics have always made inevitable bedfellows, but the results have been disastrous. Look at the situation we have now. Let's say that tomorrow someone who is a political genius were to emerge -- and I'm not expecting this to happen, but say that it did. Say that a politician emerged who seemed, for once, basically competent, who seemed to be able to do their job as well as the average cab driver, comic writer or journalist. If they were the most intelligent, visionary, humane political thinker in the history of mankind, but were also fat, had some sort of blemish or something that made them less than telegenic, we would not be able to elect them. All we're able to elect are these telegenic, photogenic crypto-Nazis. As long as they look good. I suppose it's too early to go into my rant on Ronald Reagan? That would be tasteless.

Red Req'd Salon Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:55:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ukranian cave system that hid Jews from Nazis for nearly a year

This is an incredible National Geographic piece on the exploration of the Priest's Grotto, a cave system in the Ukraine where 38 Jews hid from the Nazis for nearly a year.

Once inside, Nicola marveled at not only the remarkable natural features of the cave but signs of human presence, including walls and old shoes and walls made of stones...

"It's amazing," Nicola told National Geographic News. "When I go into a cave I have special boots, because an ankle sprain deep in a cave could be serious business. I have special wicking underwear, so I don't get hypothermia, a special suit, special gloves for gripping things. I have three independent light sources—that's a standard rule. This is all for a day trip into a cave, and yet this is a situation where average people lived here for nearly a year."...

Link (via Ambiguous)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:51:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Parliament should place its debates under a CC license

TheyWorkForYou.com, the brilliant political action site that scrapes and reformats the record of the UK Parliament, is technically in violation of the law: Parliament holds a "Parliamentary Copyright" in its debates, and by scraping and republishing them, TheyWorkForYou infringes upon it.

Richard Allan has a great solution to this problem:

What this is doing is forcing Parliament to look at how it handles other people reproducing the material on the Official Parliamentary Website. It would look awful if Parliament were to try and stop people from using what is and should be public information. But the public interest would not be served by people of dubious motives giving false information by doctoring the official record.

What is the answer? Perhaps a Creative Commons license for the House of Commons which can allow re-use of material without payment but subject to conditions such as repetition in full without alteration? I am starting to think there is a good campaign here to ask Parliament to use appropriate Creative Commons licenses for all its output?

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fabulous celebrity nightmare porn spam specimen

This was the most spectacularly surreal piece of sex spam I'd received in a long time. Since it involved a misspelled celebrity menage a trois that never was (thank heavens), I felt obligated to share it with these folks. And if you think that's special, oh, just you wait for the Japanese live eel porn video link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:39:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eastern Standard Tribe paperback errata submitted

Last week, I posted a plea for people who had pet typos, continuity errors and the like in Eastern Standard Tribe to come contribute to a Wiki where I was gathering these up for the paperback edition. A week later, I have an excellent list of the errata for the book, and I've sent it off to my editor. Many thanks to all of you who generously gave of your time and detail-attentiveness for this effort -- I'm overwhelmed. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:31:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russell Simmons, Glen E. Friedman, the WTC, the RNC, and a message.

Sean Bonner, with whom I co-curated the SENT phonecam art show, blogs:

Russell Simmons owns a loft facing ground zero. Since 9/11 there's been extremely limited access to the building, but this morning our good friend, photographer Glen E. Friedman get in for a few minutes to make a statement which will be up through the RNC. Here's a bunch of pictures from inside and out.

Link (And incidentally, Mr. Friedman was an invited participant in SENT. Some of his phonecam photos from the show are here.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:24:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Political bloggers don't follow the power-law distribution

Henry Farrell, a poli sci prof, has just finished a new paper on blogging popularity. He sez, "The finding that is perhaps of most interest to bloggers is that there doesn't seem to be a power law distribution of links to political bloggers - instead, it's a lognormal distribution. Our interpretation of this is that the forces leading to pervasive inequality and 'rich getting richer' phenomena are weaker than Shirky and others suggest - lognormal distributions are associated with network growth models that provide more room for link-poor sites to grow richer." 237K PDF Link (Thanks, Henry!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:22:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi Toys book -- free downloadable preview chapter

Mike Outmesguine, tech guru and Southern Calilfornia Wireless Users Group cofounder, has a new book out called "Wi-Fi Toys." It's a compendium of hands-on projects involving "extreme wireless technology." There's great stuff in here. It's just broad enough to avoid intimidating non-geeks, but just geek enough so that the experiments will actually work. Mike says:

This book attempts to bring readers into the fray by teaching them, step-by-step, how to build fun, useful, and k001 projects using Wi-Fi. Thanks to Wiley Publishing, the entire first chapter is available for download as a non-DRM'd PDF file here. This chapter teaches the basics of Wi-Fi and shows you how to terminate a cable and choose a pigtail for any wireless project. Also, at the last SOCALWUG meeting, I gave a highly interactive (i.e. Comments/Questions/Answers) presentation about the book. Slides here, Video here, Meeting notes here.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:25:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

She's lost control

Joy Division, fancy undies, Dita Von Teese, and a Dubya knockoff. What more do you need to know? Fleshbot reports that in this viral marketing vid from Agent Provocateur, "one of our favorite Joy Division songs gets the full-on cheesecake S&M treatment." You'll need Windows Media Player to watch it, which is a total buzzkill, but the nipple wrenches kinda make up for it. The song will be released as a single on a promo CD in August. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:04:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Comment dit-on "BoingBoing" en Francais?

BoingBoing reader, Rocket Scientist, and honorary East Texas conspiracy correspondent Charles says, "I was in Paris two weeks ago, and saw this production. Sure, there's an extra E, but it's close." Link to full-size image.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:49:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jellyfish toxin produces erections

I suppose we are all going to be barraged with spam for "Miracle irukandji" soon.

The sting from an irukandji tentacle can cause irukandji syndrome, entailing severe pain, anxiety, paralysis and a potentially fatal rise in blood pressure. Researchers have found that one rare species also causes an extra symptom of prolonged erections in male victims.

Link (Thanks, Michael Bock!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:10:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Technorati's Sifry to report campaign blogosphere buzz for CNN

CNN just announced that Technorati founder Dave "total mensch" Sifry will provide real-time analysis of the political blogosphere at next week's Democratic National Convention. More details on Joi's blog -- seems like a pretty significant moment in the steadily increasing integration of conventional media with blogs. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:35:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bipedal monkey

It's a weird day for non-human primates. Natasha, a black macaque at the Safari Park zoo in Israel, became exclusively bipedal after surviving a near-deadly stomach disease. Natasha's veterinarian says that brain damage may be to blame (thank?) for her new ability. Pierre Boulle, your meme is ready. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:09:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Your blog's Pagerank determines your discount on software

A software developer, Thinstall, has a pricing structure based on your blog's pagerank. The more popular you are on Google, the cheaper your price is. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:11:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DreamWorks Animation to spin off from film studio, raise $650M in IPO

There are big plans for the animation house that built "Shrek" 1 and 2 -- a $650 million IPO and a split from parent company DreamWorks SKG, which was originally formed to unite the creative forces of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and record producer David Geffen.

DreamWorks Animation, based in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California, would be controlled by Katzenberg and Geffen. Katzenberg would be chief executive and Geffen would sit on the board, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission... Roger Enrico, former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Inc., would be chairman of the new company. Spielberg would not hold a seat. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, an initial DreamWorks investor, would sit on the board and could cash out some of his original investment, although the filing does not say he will.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:09:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prius test drive

Matt test drove a Prius. He liked it, but and says the gas mileage isn't nearly as good as advertised is great (see below for correction): "After 150+ miles I averaged nearly 54 mpg."

The key device, which is about the size of a small box of wooden matches, slides into a slot in the dashboard. The next step in starting the car, according to the quickstart guide, is to press the POWER button. I had to laugh — this car boots up. I really enjoyed pressing that button.

Link

Bobby Martin sez: Matt said that *other people* had reported getting much worse than the Prius advertised milage, but he was unable to reproduce those results - he got 54 mpg.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:39:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

virginityrules.com

If the "pro-abstinence" programs this website evangelizes are as daunting as the website's own hopelessly opaque Flash interface, Virginity will indeed Rule. Then again, I can think of many naughty things to do with a frisky websurfing partner while one waits, waits, and i do mean waits for the UI to load. Created by the "East Texas Abstinence Coalition." Link (Thanks, Snoodle!)

Update: BoingBoing reader Charles Statman of Longview, Texas -- the very municipality which begat this maelstrom of morality and malformed memes -- says: "There is absolutely, positively NOTHING to do in Longview Texas. Teenage sex is the whole point of life there. Hell, Longview is more boring than Silicon Valley. Instead of preaching an outdated theme, these holy rolling abusers of outdated flash interfaces should be educating kids and handing out condoms."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:24:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Krispy Kreme announces a do-nut flavored drink

Yarnivore sez: "Krispy Kreme unveils frozen beverage line, including a glazed-flavored drink" -- the 20 ounce portion of "Original Kreme"-flavored frozen drink will have 117g of carbs. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:59:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hyote mystery continues

I received a ton of mail about the mysterious animal recently spotted in central Maryland. One reader asked his father, a retired veterinary pathologist, to speculate on the origin of the unique specimen:

"In my opinion... it looks like a fox with Cushing's Syndrome. An adenoma of either the pituitary or hyperplasia or adenoma of the adrenal gland cortex produces hyperadrenalcorticism (Cushing's Disease in humans). This syndrome causes a thinning of the epidermis of the skin and hyperpigmentation - which you see in this animal - thin, patchy dark colored skin - also you see a distinct pattern of hair loss, similar to what is shown in these photographs - Loss of hair on the body with retension on head and lower extremities - Hair also becomes brittle. Additionally the animals become very thin with weird weight distribution - bodies become somewhat barrel shaped. So my reply is this photo depicts a fox with an endocrine disorder."

Meanwhile, BB reader Rick points us to a few new photos of the magical animal. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:29:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bill O'Reilly enjoys ordering his guests and others to "shut up"

This video commercial starts out with a quote from talk show host Bill O'Reilly making the claim that he has told a guest to "shut up" only one time in six years. The rest of the commercial shows clips of Mr. O'Reilly telling people to shut up. Link (Via Horkulated)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:16:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why Al-Qaeda wants President Bush to be elected

Aaron Swartz presents three reasons why Al-Qaeda wants President Bush to be elected (or re-appointed).

1. Reuters reported a letter from an al-Qaeda group that said “it supported U.S. President George W. Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader ‘more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom.

2. A top CIA expert on al-Qaeda has concluded that al-Qaeda loves President Bush, and might go so far as to plan an election attack to rally the country around Bush.

3. Even administration officials concede “al-Qaeda has morphed into a loose and expanding association of regional terror cells [and] the Iraq war has fueled rather than doused the fires of jihad.”

Link (via Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:10:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crazy tiled animated GIF of stickfigure acrobats

Amazing piece of animated GIF artistry depicts dozens of stick-figure people running amok in a Donkey Kong style universe. Link (Via Horkulated)

bRETT sez: "You might want to mention that the stick-figure animation already mentioned on your site today works AMAZINGLY well as a stereogram. Makes a cool thing even cooler."

He's right - it looks great. Here are instructions for viewing stereograms. -- Mark

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:08:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Swing State summer camp

This is a pretty cool successor to the Dean Meetups as a social way to be politically active: you can sign up to go to a swing state and recruit Democrat voters.

Swing State Summer Break is a 100% volunteer-operated program for progressives of all ages and their allies, who volunteer to do grassroots, electoral work during the months leading up to the election.

We make it ultra-convenient, easy, and fun to get involved in the nationwide effort to defeat Bush this November. Just tell us which states you're interested in, and when you have time to do it, and we'll take care of the rest.

Link (via Oblomovka)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:14:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World's smallest vertebrate

The "stout infantfish" has been identified as the smallest, lightest animal with a backbone. The largest of only six specimen ever found is just 8.4 millimeters long. Stout infantfish swim exclusively near Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. Scientists who studied the fish at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography point out that "roughly 500,000 of these fish weighed together would barely tip the scales at one pound." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:37:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chimp yawns are contagious too

Yawning is contagious among chimps as well as humans. Scientists at the University of Stirling showed video of chimps yawning and grinning to other chimps, several of whom then followed suite. According to a New Scientist article, the experiment supports the notion that chimps, well, grok each other on a pretty deep level. The results of the experiment are strikingly similar to other studies on contagious yawning among humans conducted by evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup.

"Our data suggest that contagious yawning is a by-product of the ability to conceive of yourself and to use your experience to make inferences about comparable experiences and mental states in others," Gallup told New Scientist.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:28:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot librarian

Researchers at Universitat Jaume I in Spain are designing a robot librarian of sorts. The three-wheeled bot listens for verbal book requests, heads to the approximate location of the title on a shelf, and uses digital cameras to read the spines. The toughest challenge is engineering a grasper with "fingernails" to pull out the book, Professor Angel del Pobil told the BBC:

"It is mimicking the way we manipulate our hands. We have constant feedback from tactile sensors, so it is moving very slowly. In the first experiments, the books really got damaged because it was pressing too hard. Now it touches gently."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:12:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flowers as speakers

This is sweet: a Japanese amp system that lives in a flowerpot and uses the foliage above to amplify the sound.

Called the "Flower Speaker Amplifiers", the gadget made by Let's Corp is hidden in a vase or a potted plant and sends music at just the right frequency to vibrate up the stems and then be converted into audible sound by the plant as a whole.

Link (via /.)

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

Government docs on P2P

Jeremy sez, "A St. John's University law student created a p2p network allowing users to share government documents. Over 600 court and government documents such as memos, communications and reports can be accessed through the Kazaa, LimeWire and Soulseek p2p networks. The Abu Ghraib prison memos and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on government intelligence leading up to the Iraq War are included. It would be nice to see this collection of useful, informative and sometimes embarrassing documents grow. It might also give Washington more fodder for legal maneuvers against p2p." Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:47:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Militant wing of the accessibility movement

Wired News covers the militant wing of the accessibility movement: Web designers who re-design important infomrational websites to improve their accessibility and standards-compliance:

David Jones republishes articles from Wales' National Assembly website on his own Assembly Online site because the official designers "clearly don't know what they're doing."

"They're singularly clueless; the HTML and CSS are invalid," he said. "I was exasperated, so I thought I'd do it myself to show them how it might be done. My employer -- an Assembly-funded body looking to secure next year's funding -- cited it as a disciplinary offense. I don't work for that company anymore."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secret Swing in Toronto

Joey's posted some info on Toronto's "Secret Swing," a mysterious art installation that consists of a playground swing hanging in a downtown grafitti alley. He also points to some of Rannie's pix (Link, Link) that show it off in all its glory. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:35:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bottlecap tripod DIY

Inspired by yesterday's link to a commercially available bottlecap tripod, Adam has put together instructions for a $1.50 DIY version. Link (Thanks, Adam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese government's idiotic plans for wireless LAN "tax"

From the Japan Times: Japan's telecommunications ministry announced yesterday it may force consumer WLAN users to pay spectrum user fees.

[T]he ministry plans to hit the users with these fees because such appliances use almost the same spectrum as mobile phones, whose users are required to pay the fees, they said. The move might provoke stiff opposition from product manufacturers as it is likely to affect their sales. The ministry plans to collect fees from users of information appliances when they purchase these products, according to the sources.

Manufacturers of home appliances are currently stepping up efforts to develop information appliances that are linked via wireless networks and can be controlled from anywhere. Spectrum user fees have been charged in connection with licensed broadcasting and radio stations, as well as with cellular phone companies.

Gamespot has more on the story, and points out that gamers in Japan who use the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP would also be affected because both use wireless LANs to connect.

Reports say the bill will not be proposed to Japan's parliament until 2005 -- leaving ample time for device manufacturers and pissed-off wireless enthusiasts to raise a fuss.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:36:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google circa 1960

Kevin Fox has whipped up a concept sketch for Google functionality as available in 1960. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:29:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Depression-era anti-Bush movie

Greg sez, "The expanded version of the fully-animated commercial my frind Tom and I created for MoveOn.org's 'Bush in 30 Seconds' contest is now online. Originally planned to be only a couple minutes long, the full length version is now a seven minute look at the hard times living under Bush's economy. The completed short is an appropriate juxtaposition of Bush's economy with a depression-era style that I think is appropriate when describing the first presidency since Hoover to preside over a job loss." This is an amazing piece of work. Link (Thanks, Greg!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:19:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cameraphone hysteria recapitulates portable camera hysteria of 1888

Amazing PBS piece traces the history of the reaction to the portable camera -- eerily familiar to the reaction today to the phonecam.

The appearance of Eastman's cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the "camera fiend" began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares. One resort felt the trend so heavily that it posted a notice: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Other locations were no safer. For a time, Kodak cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The "Hartford Courant" sounded the alarm as well, declaring that "the sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around among his Sunday School children."

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:31:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PC in a motorcycle gas-tank

Out of the Box Computers is selling a PC called the ThinkTank that is built inside a modded motorcycle gas-tank. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:12:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Evidence for Hersh's claims of child sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib?

Following up on this BoingBoing post about allegations by journalist Seymour Hersh of rape and sexual abuse of minors at Abu Ghraib prison Iraq -- there appears to be evidence for those claims in supporting statements that accompany the Taguba Report.

What most of us have seen of the report are excerpts from the 50-page summary. In fact, there are well over 6,000 pages in the report itself, including statements by and interviews with witnesses. Among them, testimony from an Iraqi prisoner that would appear to substantiate Seymour Hersh's claims that boys were sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Maj. Gen. Taguba evidently found these statements credible -- they supported statements from interviews with soldiers and other witnesses.

At the end of this post are links to digital copies of two documents from the Taguba report, hosted on the Washington Post website. Is it possible that they document the exact incidents to which Hersh referred? Excerpt from statement provided by Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee #151108, on January 18 2004:

I saw [name deleted] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15 - 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name deleted] who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [name deleted], I think he is [deleted] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.

Another testimony alleging abuse of minors from a statement provided by Thaar Salman Dawod, Detainee #150427, on January 17, 2004:

I saw lots of people getting naked for a few days getting punished in the first days of Ramadan. They came with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Grainer was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young. I don't know their names.

Here's a update (sub required) on Capitol Hill plans for hearings on new (and as-yet unreleased) material documenting torture at Abu Ghraib. And there's this snip from a CBS interview with "leash girl" Pfc. Lynndie England, the guard seen grinning and pointing at Iraqi prisoners in the infamous photos:

When England was asked if there were other things that happened at Abu Ghraib, things that were not photographed, she said, "Yes." When asked if there were worse things that happened, she said "Yes," but would not elaborate.

Link to first PDF, Link to second PDF. (Thank you, Mark)

Update: A recent Associated Press item on plans for new abuse-related hearings quotes Sen. John Warner as saying that new Iraq prisoner abuse incidents come to light "each day":

More cases of possible mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners have come to Congress' attention and need investigation by the Pentagon, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Thursday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., also said that L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the American-led occupation in Iraq, may testify about prison abuse at a congressional hearing next week.

"I'm not trying to, you know, drop a little hint here. I'm just saying ... each day that comes along, new incidents that occurred in the past" are revealed and will need to be investigated, Warner said. ... Warner spoke to reporters after his committee had a private, classified briefing on the status of several Defense Department investigations into abuse stand. He gave no further details on what new allegations came up during the briefing.

Link

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

Bottle-cap tripod

Michale sez, "Tripods are great for photography, but a pain in the ass to carry. Everyone these days seems to be carrying water bottles everywhere. So trust a Japanese company to combine the two to make a really useful thing: A mount that makes a bottle filled with water or soda a useful stable base for your digital camera." Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science of Carbage

Science News has an interesting survey of the latest scientific studies about the Atkins diet. Predictably, the jury is still out:

"This year, a spate of studies comparing low-carb versus low-fat diets has confirmed that unrestricted-calorie, high-fat, high-protein eating can trim a person's weight at least as much as low-fat, restricted-calorie dieting does. Several of the studies also highlight other apparent benefits from carbohydrate restriction.

However, a few studies have turned up evidence of problems, including (heart disease). Many physicians now conclude that although low-carbohydrate diets—such as the Atkins and the Zone diets—are proving powerful weight-loss tools, they aren't for everyone. These health professionals argue that such plans should be adopted only under the guidance of a physician.

A few physicians go so far as to argue that low-carb diets aren't for anyone..."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:10:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: Renaissance of Breakin'

On today's edition of the NPR show "Day to Day," I report on one of the cooler '80s flashback trends -- break-dancing, which is enjoing a popularity boom among urban youth. From headspins to poppin' and lockin', b-boy style is back in the house, yo.

I went to one underground hiphop dance competition in LA recently, and talk to some of the participants on today's program. At left, one of the judges bursts into a spontaneous headspin at the end of the b-boy competition. View more snapshots I took at the event here.

More story background: website of competition organizer Joanna Vargas, an LA-based choreographer: Link. Bboy.com, a popular website for the breakin' community... several judges and dancers described it as a popular networking hub: Link. And Culture Shock, one of the larger groups that participated in "MAXT OUT" competition -- two members were interviewed in today's NPR piece: Link. A lot of the teens I spoke with talked of hooking up with other dancers on Myspace.com and Friendster. Among dancers, the most popular way to hear about new underground hiphop seemed to be a combination of word-of-mouth and (a) Kazaa, or (b) burning CDs for each other. Everyone complained about how suck-ass commercial urban FM radio programming has become.

Listen to NPR show audio here after 12 noon Pacific Time.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mullets. Copyright. Beer.

Beer behemoth Miller Brewing Co. is suing an L.A.-based clothes manufacturer for copyright infringement and brand dilution. The problem? Parodical T-shirts that riff off the Miller slogan, bearing messages like "It's Mullet Time" and "Mullet Low-life." The shirts are available at stores including The Buckle and Nordstrom (where you can buy by them online, for now). Link to news story. (Thanks, Kyle)

Update: BoingBoing reader in South Africa Gerrie Swart says, "Miller is owned by South African Breweries Limited (SAB). The interesting thing being that SAB recently won a court case against a small company making satirical t-shirts in South Africa (this company is called Laugh It Off promotions). It might be that SABMiller will be using the same shitty tactics in other countries? Some links on this: SAB buys Miller (Link 1 Link 2), SAB wins case against T-shirt company (Link), Laugh it Off wins this round (Link), SABMiller wins first round against Laugh it off Promotions (Link)."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:52:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Duke buys entire freshmen class iPods

Duke University is buying iPods for its entire incoming freshman class.

""Whoa!" said rising Duke freshman Mollie Tucker of Raleigh when she learned she'd pocket an iPod. "It sounds like a good idea. It sounds really cool." When she arrives Aug. 19, her iPod will be loaded with all kinds of useful information, including orientation schedules, calendars, campus tours, even the Duke fight song.

"Students also can use them for course content, such as recorded lectures, music, language lessons and audio books. Throughout the year, they will be able to download information through a Duke Web site modeled after Apple's iTunes site..."

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:44:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jack Kirby's weirdly wonderful Jimmy Olsen comics

Irregular Orbit has a nice entry that sums up everything great about comic book genius Jack Kirby.

[Kirby] also agreed to take on DC's long-time oddball series, Superman's Pal: Jimmy Olsen. Which quickly became Superman's Ex-Pal: The New Jimmy Olsen -- folded into Kirby's Fourth World universe with wild plotlines involving subterranean space-age/primitive biker gangs, genetic research carried out by genetically enhanced researchers and chaos wrought by rampaging D.N.Aliens. And then there's Don Rickles look-alike, Goody Rickels vs. Don Rickles himself. This is all conveyed in Kirby's expressionistic, perspective pushing, chrome-plated, spaced-out style, complete with the occasional trippy photo-montage for variety.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:20:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to unlock your crippled Computer Shop modem for free

The Computer Shop UK has a deal on a PC that comes with a firmware-locked modem that can only dial one ISP, Supanet. In order to get unlocked, you need to pay a pound a minute to call their support line and then fork over £60 so they can post you a CD that will restore your modem to good working order.

Yoz has the deal, and a link to a utility that can unlock your modem without paying Computer Shop's ransom. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:20:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's in two new sf anthologies

Great writing news this week: I have stories in two brand-new anthologies.

Unwirer, which I publicly collaborated on with Charlie Stross using a blog is now published in its final form in ReVisions, a collection of alternate science stories.

Nimby and the D-Hoppers, which was originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, was honoured with includion in Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best SF 9.

A good writing day indeed.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:25:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why registration-sites suck

Wired News has a good piece on the backlash against the growing trend of news-sites requiring logins to read their articles, covering automated tools like the Mozilla bugmenot plugin that automatically spoofs your logins to 14,000+ sites.

The point that everyone seems to miss is that no one can possibly keep track of a thousand passwords for a thousand websites, which means that these sites undoubtably contain recycled passwords (admonishments from security experts to never recycle a password are the infosec equivalent of telling people to "eat less and exercise more" -- simplistic doctrine that is vanishingly unlikely to be adhered to in the field).

The more you recycle a password, the higher the likelihood that you will use it in a sensitive context -- a bank site, a message board, an IM client, an auction site -- where someone might impersonate you or even commit identity theft crimes against you.

What's even worse is that while these news-sites are willing to spend the computational cycles necessary to receive your password, none that I've seen use SSL for their login, which means that the NYT and others demand that you send your password in the clear when you sit down at a WiFi cafe and want to read the paper. This is a potential disaster if that NYT password is also a sensitive one somewhere else: it's a case of really callous disregard for user privacy and security. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:19:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rondstadt fired from Aladdin Casino for praising F911

Linda Rondstadt was yanked of the stage at Vegas's Aladdin Casino for praising Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 911.

Ronstadt "spoiled a wonderful evening for our guests and we had to do something about it", Mr Timmins said.

He said the 58-year-old singer, booked to play the Aladdin for one show only, was not allowed her back in her luxury suite after the show.

Link (Thanks, Tracy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:30:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Body language and facial expressions in MMOs

Good piece on Mindjack on the rise of body-language cues in Massively Multiplayer online games with emphasis on Second Life's toolkit:

"V-Chat," launched in 1995, was an early contender in the ballooning collection of larger-scope chat spaces that encompassed both 2D and 3D graphics. V-Chat's avatars, although primitive, were both customizable and capable of expressing a range of emotional states. Microsoft's 2D "Comic Chat" built upon the facial expressions Microsoft had tested with V-Chat. Comic Chat displayed text in speech or thought bubbles, allowing users to express not only their public, but "private" thoughts; AI-detection of user-typed acronyms would cause one of the illustrated avatars to assume an appropriate pose, such as waving if the user had typed "BRB" for "be right back." While both the 2D Comic Chat and 3D V-Chat gave users more expressive outlets, it was ultimately 3D space that would offer the greatest potential for interpersonal dynamics. After analyzing logs from V-Chat sessions, Microsoft Research found that "Overall, V-Chat users appear to be using the 3D features of the program to reproduce the social conventions of physical proxemics."2 The opening up of chat to 3D space allowed users to communicate nonverbally simply by establishing location and facing relative to other participants.

Link (Thanks, Donald)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:27:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TheyWorkForYou source-code online

TheyWorkForYou is the best political advocacy site I've ever seen: it scrapes the UK Parliamentary record and then turns the debates into an easily searched means of keep tabs on your MP -- and to turn your MP's deeds into the basis for discussion and political activism. A common question from Americans, Canadians and others is how this system might be adapted for their respective governments.

Well, now the TheyWorkForYou team have released the source-code for their app under the GPL, and they're also publishing raw XML feeds of their data-sources for you to mix and munge.

Get busy! Link (Thanks, Danny!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:25:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Circular concept printer

This circular concept printer ("uses rotational, instead of linear, movement to reduce its size") was one of 130 winners of the 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA). Link (via Gizmodo)

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

Censored WiFi at hotel in San Francisco

Metafilter Matt is staying at a free WiFi hotel in San Francisco, and he just tried to visit MeFi to post some messages, only to be confronted with a censorware message from the hotel's ISP, primly telling him off for visiting a dodgy "chat site," something that, apparently, the hotel doesn't want its guests doing. Jesus Screaming Christ, what jackass at the hotel decided that filtering its guests' Internet access was a good idea? I wish Matt had published the hotel's name so that the rest of us could avoid the hell out of it.

FWIW, the Hotel Tropicana on Valencia (around the corner from my old apartment) has free and completely open WiFi (SSID: linksys) was just remodeled, and is pretty cheap, and very central. Link

An anonymous reader writes, "I work at a San Francisco hotel, The Sir Francis Drake, and that censorware message is exactly what I started seeing this week when I tried to access Metafilter and Linkfilter from the work computer (on my lunch break, honest!) ... If the hotel in question isn't the Drake, then it's probably another Kimpton Hotels property.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:18:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, July 19, 2004

Delightful gallery of reptile freaks

Here's a nice selection of nature's finest three-eye, two-headed, two-tailed, and five-legged lizards, snakes, and frogs. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:42:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Salling Clicker turns your mobile phone into a remote control for your Mac

Justin Ried of TheFeature has good things to say about a neat-sounding application called Salling Clicker that turns a Bluetooth device into a remote control for your Mac.

One of the really amazing features is that you can see not just ordinary information about the track you've got currently playing in iTunes - artist and song name, track length, etc. - but also the album art, directly on your mobile device.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:37:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Will 'Net access via satellite fly?

Interesting story in The Star (Canada) about this weekend's launch of Telesat Canada's new Internet broadcast satellite:

Canadians should care about this moment -- about this particular satellite. Anik F2 is more than just the largest and heaviest of commercial satellites in the world, it's also the first to combine cutting edge Ka-band technology with older and less powerful Ku- and C-band transponders. The latter two will continue to carry Canada's television and telecommunications signals, but the powerful Ka-band "spot beams" will, for the first time, let an Anik satellite deliver two-way, broadband Internet service to any location in North America at a price that's competitive with residential cable or DSL high-speed services.

Link (Thanks, JP!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:12:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Call in the cryptozoologists

This mystery animal is traipsing around the Baltimore suburb of Glyndon.

"The beast is not shy, and visits most often under bright sun. While no one here knows what it is, they do have a name for it -- the hyote, a combination of a hyena and a coyote."

Link (via Fark)

UPDATE: Numerous readers have written in with reports that the "hyote" is actually a fox, dog, or bear with terrible mange. No matter the origin of the mysterious beast, I agree with this posting from the Fark forum: "We must catch it and learn from it."

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:59:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Governator calls foes "girlie men" who should be "terminated"

California's AGW (Actor-Governor-whatever) derided his opponents in a speech this weekend as "girlie men," and asked his supporters to "terminate" them at polls in November if they fail to approve his >$103 billion budget. I read this headline on a copy of the LA Times at a neighborhood Hollywood espresso filling station early Sunday morning -- and had a hard time believing my own baggy, sleep-deprived eyes.

The governor used the "girlie men" reference twice in a 16-minute speech aimed at pressuring the Legislature to pass his budget, now 17 days late. The remarks were apparently references to an old "Saturday Night Live" skit parodying Schwarzenegger. Comedians Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon played "pumped-up" bodybuilders with Austrian accents who dismissed anyone without a muscled torso as a "girlie man."

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) said he was "nonplused" by Schwarzenegger's comment. "I don't know what the definition of 'girlie man' is. As opposed to his being a he-man?" Burton asked. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) said, "Those are the kinds of statements that ought not to come out of the mouth" of the governor. "He says he's going to 'terminate' members in November? I really don't know what he means by that. That's not funny any more," Nunez said.

Link

Update: The inevitable "Sacramento Girlie Men" T-shirts have arived. link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:57:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dad tracks his preemie baby's progress on photoblog

This most unusual weblog is a father's daily documentation of his prematurely-born child's struggle to survive. Eric was born at only 24 weeks' gestation. He was twelve inches long, and weighed only one pound, seven ounces. BloggingBaby.com describes the online journal the infant's dad is maintaining:

His dad has been blogging the whole thing, complete with photos, video and all the "tearability" you can handle. The content ranges from detailed medical discussions of the conditions a premature infant suffers, to more spiritual musings on what it's like to give skin-to-skin "kangaroo care" to a child born 15 weeks premature. In one passage we discover that "his neutrophils ( his "big gun" immune cells as wendy, his nurse practitioner, likes to call them ) are down and his bands ( immature neutrophils ) are up," while another passage has us visiting the NICU in the middle of the night.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:50:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Extreme minimalist ASCII boob art

Fourteen lines, 28 total breasts, 6 characters maximum per line. Link (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:19:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Charlie" filming halted by chocolate-covered $540K camera lens

OK, best Hollywood lede *evar*:

The remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory was thrown into chaos on Wednesday when a worker dropped a $540,000 camera lens in a vat of chocolate.

Link to IMDB news, and link to a fine upstanding tabloid's account. (Thanks, Mara! Thanks, Defamer!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:54:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Massive dance-numbers from Star Wars Galaxies

If you liked this morning's link to a music video made from captured sequences from the game Soul Calibur, you'll love these stunning, massively coordinated dance numbers from the Star Wars Galaxies universe, where dozens of players and their familiars rock out in Bollywood-scale, beautifully edited sequences. I Get Knocked Down Link Fett's Vette Link Ice Ice Baby Link (Thanks, Raph!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:37:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Seed Magazine: a Maxim for science writing

I just finished reading my first issue of Seed Magazine, a science-culture magazine that is the best new magazine I've read since I picked up my first issue of Wired.

The writing in this magazine -- mostly by scientists -- is stellar, and there's a fantastic mix of long features and short factoids about science. The approach to the subject is like the very best science fiction, coming at it from the intersection of the social and the scientific, going for the cultural stories behind the science. There's even a fiction department, something that tech-oriented magazines have been sorely lacking since Omni folded up.

This is almost a Maxim for science, something that makes science cool and relevant and edgy. The mag's been around for quite a while, but it wasn't until my cow-orkers Seth and Annalee turned me onto it that I discovered it. Now that I have, I'm taking out a subscription.

I really can't gush enough about this: it's the best subway reading I've had in months. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:26:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod speakers made from Altoids tins

The winner of a contest to invent a MacGyver-style invention using Altoids tins is a peach: make a set of iPod speakers out of two Altoids tins, two playing cards, and a set of headphones. Link (Thanks, Vidiot!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:19:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New tunes from former Afghan Whigs bassist

My friend John Curley played bass in the dark soul-rock band Afghan Whigs, the first non-Seattle group signed to Sub Pop records. For more than a decade, the Whigs released consistently stunning albums, concluding with 1965 on Columbia records in 2000. The following year, the group disbanded. Singer Greg Dulli continued with his Twilight Singers, guitarist Rick McCollum became Moon Maan, and John Curley focused on his recording studio Ultrasuede in Cincinnati. Now John has formed a new band, The Staggering Statistics. Here's an article about the group from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

"It spirals away from you," Curley says. "Even if your goal is informal, sooner or later you begin writing songs that you want to play for other people. Then there's a little thought in your mind: we could get signed (to a record deal). You stand in the room with ether long enough and you start getting overcome by the fumes."

I was thrilled to hear that John and the Staggering Statistics have released their full-length debut recording for free online. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:14:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Another issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley

My latest issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley is now online. While my Lab Notes site highlights interesting engineering research, ScienceMatters explores the physical sciences, biology, and chemistry. Inside this month's issue:

* The Cellular Mechanic
* An Explosive Theory About Volcanoes
* The Mathematics of High-Tech Highways

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:41:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex Pistols honored (exploited?)

In September, The Hospital gallery in London will display items belonging to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, including a blood-stained "Never Mind the Bollocks" poster collected from the Chelsea Hotel room where the couple lived (and she died).

"The collection of artefacts, including original T-shirts, posters and handwritten lyrics, has been assembled over 15 years by art dealer Paul Stolper and Andrew Wilson, deputy editor of Art Monthly. They told The Independent on Sunday that the hotel items were sold at auction by Sid Vicious' mother, Anne Beverley."

Link

In other Sex Pistols news, plaque were ceremonially unveiled in north Norfolk to honor two venues where the Sex Pistols had played important early and late gigs. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:32:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

San Francisco's clubs you can't join

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle surveyed the most exclusive clubs in San Francisco, from the San Francisco Golf Club (with an alleged "no Jews, no people-of-color" policy) to the shadowy Bohemian Grove, a frat party playground for the conservative rich white guys running our shadow government:

"In 1971, President Richard Nixon, a member (of the Bohemian Grove) since 1953, was to be the lakeside speaker, but reporters had finally raised a ruckus about a sitting president giving an off-the-record speech at the Grove. Nixon sent sugary regrets in a telegram that hangs in the city clubhouse today, saying that anyone could be president of the United States, but only a few could aspire to be president of the Bohemian Club.

Privately, he said to domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman (and the hidden tape recorder) in the Oval Office that May: 'The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time -- it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.'"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:17:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monster trading cards

Wonderful gallery of scanned-in vintage monster trading cards. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reputation systems academic paper

The current issue of First Monday has a thorough academic article on reputation systems.

The sharing of observations and opinions builds up a picture in each person’s mind of the reputation’s subject, which we might call the "Invisible Eye" — the distributed formation of reputations, and consequent increased ability to distinguish better from worse. To the degree that you have access to and trust the experience of others, it is almost as if you yourself had been there watching that previous situation, thus increasing your base of experience from which to judge future reliability — and increasing pressure on the subject in question to behave responsibly. The analogy to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is not accidental; just as selfish local actions with market incentives can lead to collectively efficient behavior, locally maximizing actions with reputation incentives have the potential for similar guided emergent behavior that exceeds what might have been designed by a conscious planner.

The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" — instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other’s experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:49:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ToyViewer 4.50 sought

Does anyone have a copy of the freeware Mac image editing app, ToyViewer, version 4.50 (not later or earlier versions -- version 4.50, released last December?). I upgraded to a more recent version and lost some important functionality. Email me if you have the goods. Link

Update: Found! Thanks to everyone who wrote in with the link. Link

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

Sunday, July 18, 2004

Daily Show on possible election cancellations

Lisa Rein has posted Jon Stewart's Daily Show commentary on the threatened cancellation of the November US elections in the event of terrorist threat. Required viewing. Link (via On Lisa Rein's Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:54:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ex-IDEO lectures on creativity and management

Avi sez, "Andrew Hargadon used to work as a design engineer at IDEO. Then the academic bug bit him and he went on to research the innovation process from an insider's perspective. His course notes are now online and provide simple but effective methods to understand and enhance your creative thought process." Link (Thanks, Avi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:52:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World Transhumanist con in Toronto, Aug 5-8

The World Transhumanist conference is coming to Toronto, Aug 5-8, with free $12.50 public keynotes from Steve Mann and Stelarc.

The theme of this year's conference is "Art and Life in the Posthuman Era," featuring such presenters as cyborg Steve Mann, Australian performance artist Stelarc, Extropy Institute founder Max More, leading biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, and transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, among many others.

Link (Thanks, sentdev!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:46:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flowers for SF gay weddings effort stunning success

Back in February, Darren Barefoot started the charitable effort he called "Flowers for Al and Don," in which people donated money for flowers to be delivered to gay and lesbian couples awaiting marriage on the steps of the San Francisco Courthouse. The effort was a signal success. Darren sez:

As you guys covered this (and helped promote it) back in February, I just thought you'd be interested to hear the final results. Ultimately, we raised US $14,312.28. We delivered US $11,542.28 worth of flowers, and donated the remainder to two related and deserving charities--Lambda Legal and the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project at the ACLU.

Link (Thanks, Darren!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gay marriage compared to box-turtle marriage by Senator, Daily Show replies

In a fit of astonishing lunacy, Texas Senator John Cornyn tried to explain the need to ban gay marriage in the context of the social harm that would accrue from allowing men to marry box turtles ("It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle, but that does not mean it is right...Now you must raise you children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife"). Jon Stewart's Daily Show segment on this statement is nothing short of brilliant. Let's hope it gets enough airplay to cost Cornyn the election (and possibly get him institutionalized somewhere...). Realplayer link (via Vertical Hold)

Update: It appears that though the box turtles remark was in a speech prepared for Cornyn and delivered to the press, that Cornyn himself showed the good judgment not to make this ridiculous statement (Here's some notes from his press-secretary. (Thanks, Andrew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:42:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Is software better law than law?

James Grimmelman has taken Lon Fuller's classic text, the Morality of Law, and used it to measure software, evaluating the degree to which laws embedded in code can be thought of as "moral" laws:

Software is unambiguously better at legality than law itself on three counts (prospectivity, consistency, and possibility). It's strictly inferior to law on two (publicity and comprehensibility). One (stablility) is a complete wash. The last two (generality and reality) depend on very much on the kind of software we're talking about and how it's used.

Overall, then, there is no simple answer as to whether software is better than law or not when it comes to the conditions that Fuller would say make any system of authority worthy of obedience. It respects those values more in some ways, less in others. Whether or not any given software system is a good replacement for a legal alternative will depend on which values of legality are more important to you (a large part of Law and Morality discussed the ways in which these values are necessarily in tension). Further, it will depend on how well the software system's designers handle the challenges of explaining accurately just what it is that their software does, and those explanations will be more or less persuasive for different kinds of software.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:35:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

20,000 bottles of champagne found under English Channel

Divers in the English Channel have discovered the 50-year-old wreck of a French cargo ship with 20,000 half-bottles of (slightly flat) champagne in the hold.

Divers from the Folkestone Diving Club and other south-east clubs, who remain tight-lipped about exactly where and when they found the champagne, dug out bottles to bring back to dry land and cracked them open with friends and family at dinner parties.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flick mosquitos or you could get sick and die

If you catch a mosquito feeding on you, you should flick it away rather than squashing it, lest you drive its infectious guts into your body.

The issue is reviewed in an article published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine that focuses on a 57-year-old Pennsylvania woman who died in 2002 of a fungal infection in her muscles called Brachiola algerae.

Doctors were puzzled because the fungus was thought to be found only in mosquitoes and other insects. But it's not found in mosquito saliva like West Nile virus and malaria, so a simple mosquito bite could not have caused the infection.

The article's authors concluded that the woman must have smashed a mosquito on her skin, smearing its body parts into the bite.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:31:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Music video made with Soul Calibur video game footage

Dance, Voldo, Dance is a music video made by synchronizing the movements of gladiators from the game Soul Calibur with a dance track, so that they appear to be getting down with their nasty selves to the music. It's quite good! 11.2 MB Quicktime Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Massively useful Massively Multiplayer growth chart

If you or a loved one is pulling together any kind of presentation on Massively Multiplayer Online games, check out this freqeuntly-revised chart of growth numbers for various MMOs. The curve for Final Fantasy is astounding. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:22:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russian scientists turn waste blood into milk, yogurt, chocolate, and coffee

Ever wanted to be a vampire, but couldn't stand the sight of blood? Some scientists in Russia claim they've got the answer for you. Noticing that the typical meat packing plant produces 7 tons of blood a day, they've come up with a process to convert the proteins in the blood into the basic ingredients for "milk, yogurt, chocolate, and coffee." I'd say "I'll believe it when I taste it," but I don't believe I'll be tasting it, thank you very much. Link (Thanks, Klintron!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:01:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elvis enters public domain in UK next year

On January 1, 2005, Elvis Presley's "That's All Right" -- a 50-year-old tune currently enjoying the #3 chart spot in Great Britain -- will enter the public domain.

Anyone will be able to release it without paying royalties to the owners of the master or the performer's heirs. BMG will start losing a significant piece of its catalog income in Europe. As "That's All Right" is being hailed by some as the beginning of rock 'n' roll, the implications are that every year after 2005, more recordings that defined the genre will fall into public domain.

Link (Thanks, electrincinca)

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

Waterproof iPod/discman cage with powered speakers for the shower

The Boom Boom Multibox is a waterproof box containing a pair of battery-powered speakers and a stereo minijack. Just drop your iPod or discman inside it, plug in the speakers and snap it shut, and you've got a waterproof sound-system you can hang up in the shower. Next time I'm stateside, I'm ordering one of these -- I love having music in the shower (it'd also be cool for hotel rooms and the like). Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:45:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brazilians outnumber Yanquis on Orkut 2-1

Orkut, Google's social networking tool, is only open to people who've been invited to join the service. This means that once a well-connected Burning Man attendee shows up in Orkut, lots of burners follow.

Which is how it is that suddenly, Portuguese speakers (presumably mostly Brazilian, given Brazil's kick-ass connectivity and widespread adoption of moblogging, blogging and other viral, social tools) outnumber Yankees on the service nearly two-to-one. There's now a vicious fight raging between USAns and Portuguese-speakers, as the former group is displaced, for nearly the first time, by another linguistic group.

(I'm reminded of a story that a product manager for Hotmail once told me -- "Our growth curve was pretty steady, then one day someone sent an email to someone in India with 'Get a free email account at hotmail.com' in the footer and the next day we singed up half a million users").

Tammy Soldaat, a Canadian, got a sample of Brazilian wrath recently when she posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English.

Brazilian Orkut users quickly labeled her a "nazi" and "xenophobe."

"After that I understood why everyone is complaining about these people, why they're being called the 'plague of Orkut,"' she said in a site called "Crazy Brazilian Invasion."

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Benjamin Rosenbaum's "The Orange" online and CC-licensed

Benjamin Rosenbaum, whose knockout story "The Ant King: A California Fairytale" convinced me that he was desitined to be one of the great talents in science fiction, has Creative-Commons-licensed his story "The Orange," which originally appeared was reprinted in Harper's Magazine (selling an sf story to Harper's is itself quite a coup!).

An orange ruled the world.

It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange.

The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men in their tractors wept with joy; the tractors' motors rumbled hymns of praise.

Airplane pilots passing over would circle the grove and tell their passengers, "Below us is the grove where the orange who rules the world grows on a simple branch." And the passengers would be silent with awe.

Link (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Genetic research irreversibly damaged by Excel autoformatting

The Autocorrect feature in Excel (which drives me bonkers across the whole Office suite) has introduced irreversible errors into genetic research that is tabulated in spreadsheets, because Except autocorrects some identifiers to be dates.

Excel is widely used in genetic research to process microarray data. A microarray chip detects amounts of protein produced from thousands of different genes, enabling researchers to see which particular gene is being expressed in a sample of diseased tissue, for example.

The errors are introduced because some genetic identifiers look very like dates to Excel. If the spreadsheet is not properly set up, it will convert an identifier, such as SEPT2 to a date: 2-Sep. The conversion, the researchers say, is irreversible: once the error has been introduced, the original data is gone.

Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:43:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Trekkies 2 on DVD

Trekkies was an amazing, affectionate documentary about serious Star Trek fans, a fine piece of anthropology that was equal parts appreciation and gentle humour. Now there's a direct-to-DVD sequel, Trekkies 2, which I'm quite looking forward to seeing. Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:42:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Walkmen changed our social norms

This article on the 25th anniversary of the Walkman explores some of the fascinating social fallout from the rise of personal stereos.

"The Walkman was critical in altering the rules of being with other people," Schiffer says. "People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability."

Reg Req'd Link Link (Thanks, Steve!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steve "Cyborg" Mann on NPR

Infogargoyle sez, "NPR has just done an audio interview with the ever evolving cyborg, Steve Mann. He talks about his body's "dashboard" monitor on his head mounted display, eyetap. Mann also describes sousveillance - "the people watching the powers that be". Available in both RealAudio & Windows Media Player 9." What a pity that NPR insists on limiting the availability of its programmes to proprietary, streaming formats that can't be saved or shifted to an MP3 player, and require proprietary players to use. Link,/a> (Thanks, infogargoyle!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Great, cheap shrunken heads and popcult silver rings at Brighton's Wildcat

Wildcat is a custom jewellers in Brighton, UK, that sells amazing body jewelry; crazy, futuristic sex-toys; and these gigantic, chunky silver rings with pop-culture and science-fiction themes. The store was packed when I stopped in (and scored some bargains, including the first ring I've owned since I was 9 years old and my grandfather gave me a ring with my initials on it), and despite the brisk trade, the prices were refreshingly low, even when denominated in UK Pounds -- there's a great collection of sale rings that go for £10-30 each (and the shop also does a nice line in replica shrunken heads!). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ultima preservation efforts: a guide

Nelson has wirtten a fantastic post about the modern disposition of the Ultima games, including unauthorised bundles of the game's many incarnations along with easy-play emulators for running them on modern hardware.

The most impressive is the Ultima Classics collection. "Sedryn Tyros" has collected the Ultima games and distributed them in a bundle along with DOSBox setups that make it easy to run the games. His supplement also includes original pre-PC versions of the early games, often better than the PC ports, along with the emulators you need to play them on a PC. Alas, this collection is completely unauthorized and you'll have to scour your back alley's bittorrent site to find it.

Another option is fan-made reconstructions of the game engines. The best is Exult for Ultima VII, a portable engine that runs the classic game on many platforms (including Xbox!). Just take the open source game engine, copy over the assets from your Ultima Collection CD, and you're in business.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alice in Wonderland precursor manuscripts scanned and posted

A Dutch university student has scanned in an original manuscript for Alice's Adventures Underground, Lewis Carroll's precursor to Alice in Wonderland. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smoking money made by removing the insides of coins

This guy carves away the inside of coins from many nations, leaving nothing behind but the face on the "heads" side and a bit of metal in the shape of a smoking cigarette, creating the impression of a "smoking coin." Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kai Organic Cafe, Brighton: the opposite of a friendly place to relax

This morning, a friend and I stopped into a little cafe in Brighton, UK, called "Kai Organic Cafe." We ordered a couple of coffees -- paying close to $10 for 'em! -- and sat down in the absolutely empty upstairs area to plug in our laptops, drink our coffee, and get some work done. Half an hour later, the server came upstairs and told us off for plugging in, saying that she wasn't sure if the manager would approve and she didn't want to telephone him on his day off to find out, and so we'd have to unplug (no word on how the manager could possibly find out that anyone had used their precious electricity if it was his day off). We split, and found very good, free, high-speed WiFi, a friendly staff, and lots of unbegrudged electricity at Riki Tik, just a few steps away. If you're a visitor to Brighton looking for a friendly place to relax and plug in, I advise you to do the same (on the other hand, if you're a visitor to Brighton looking to sit with your hands folded in your lap while drinking overpriced coffee in an empty cafe with excruciatingly bad music, well, Kai's is your place) Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:28:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, July 17, 2004

Granular eruptions

Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have created an experiment that beautifully demonstrates how sand can exhibit liquid-like properties. These photos are stills from a video the scientists recorded at 1,000 frames-per-second of a marble-size steel ball dropping onto loose, fine sand. The surreal footage may aid geophysicists in understanding what happens when an asteroid smashes into a planet. From the abstract of the scientific paper:

"According to Shoemaker, the 'impact of solid bodies is the most fundamental process that has taken place on the terrestrial planets,' as they shape the surfaces of all solar system bodies. A lot of information on this process has been extracted from remote observations of impact craters on planetary surfaces. However, the nature of the geophysical impact events is that they are non-reproducible. Moreover, their scale is enormous and direct observations are not possible. Therefore, we choose an alternate and of course downscaled experimental approach in order to guarantee reproducible results."

For a link to the movie of the experiment, scroll to the bottom of the page. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:37:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Washington's Violent Videogame Law Held Unconstitutional

Ernest Miller says, "Washington State's ban on the sale (to minors) of violent videogames depicting violence against 'law enforcement officers' was held unconstitutional yesterday on First Amendment grounds. The 15-page decision is here: [PDF]. My favorite quote from the decision:

Would a game built around The Simpsons or the Looney Tunes characters be "realistic" enough to trigger the Act? Is the level of conflict represented in spoofs like the Dukes of Hazard sufficiently "aggressive?" Do the Roman centurions of Age of Empires, the enemy officers depicted in Splinter Cell, or the conquering forces of Freedom Fighters qualify as "public law enforcement officers?"

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:56:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Economist magazine = bluespamming villains?

BoingBoing reader Russell says:

The venerable Economist magazine has been Bluespamming potential customers - sending unsolicited advertising messages by Bluetooth to phones in the area. I never thought we'd see The Economist tarnish itself with spamming. What will we see next "Ho.t L!ve Fore.cast.ing" or "Wanna BI.G 0ne? Gro.w bigg3r id.eas wiv The 'Conomist" subject lines in our emails?

Link. We welcome a response by The Ec.0.n0m-1-5t -- just, um, not by way of bluespam, thanks.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:17:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Musicologist wins copyright battle over 300-year-old works

BoingBoing reader John says:

Dr. Sawkins, a musicologist, has won a copyright battle in Britain over a 300 year old piece of music, "Music for the Sun King" by Michel-Richard de Lalande. I understand that particular editions of literature, for example, are often copyrighted: the layout, the footnotes, etc, are all original. But the actual editorial choices- what to include, how to conflate contradictory texts- I had assumed were not copyrightable. By the logic of this argument, a good editorial choice made in one edition of a piece of music can be seen as infringing on the same choice made in another edition.

Link

BoingBoing reader Jon-o Addleman counter-argues:

The question isn't really whether editors can be granted copyright for their work or not. It's really a matter of how much new material is needed. In this case, new viola parts were composed to replace missing ones, among other things, but it's far from clear whether this has crossed the line between 'reproduction' and 'a new derivative work'. This is not an easily-answered question, as this thread on the harpsichord mailing list shows.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:12:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Globalization of snacks: Vada Pav (TM) to kick McDonalds' ass in India

BoingBoing reader Avi Solomon says:

The 'wada pav' (batter-fried mashed potato with bread & chutney) is a daily fast-food staple of millions of Mumbai citizens. Now it has been branded and TQMed to compete with McDonald's and is all set to take over the world. This is true reverse globalization-Here comes India!

Link, and see also Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:10:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

North Korea offers free email on new gov website

BoingBoing reader Roy Berman says:

I went to check out the North Korean news wire earlier today and noticed that they had heavily revised their web site since the last time I looked at it a few months ago. The layout was still kind of bad and the English a bit weird, but there were now buttons for email, shopping, etc. I discovered that the North Korean government is actually letting people sign up for free web based email accounts. Their web page actually claims that they have an advanced IT industry, but somehow after experiencing it's fruit, I am left doubtful. One of the most amazing things about it was the selection of password hint questions, which include gems such as 'How would Korea change after reunification?'

link to Roy's blog entry with more details, and link to North Korea's government website, which informs me that "Korea Is One Homogenous Nation," and that one of the three top-selling books in the northern nation is "Butterfly and Cock."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:07:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AT&T Wireless to Launch 3G Service Next Week

AT&T Wireless -- America's third-largest mobile services provider -- will begin rolling out 3G service in four markets early next week.

AT&T Wireless will launch its third-generation or "3G" mobile phone service capable of transmitting e-mail, pictures, and video at high speed in four cities -- San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix and Detroit, the sources told Reuters. The company will offer the data service at a fixed all-you-can-use rate of about $25 a month to consumers and $80 a month to corporate customers, one of the sources said.

Link (Via unwired)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:59:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, July 16, 2004

Los Alamos halts operations; Classified data disks lost at Sandia and Los Alamos

Two breaking news items today that relate to security -- or a frightening lack thereof -- at US government-run nuclear labs Sandia and Los Alamos. First, an item from my Wired News colleague Noah Shachtman, on Defensetech blog:

Los Alamos National Laboratory director Pete Nanos shut down the country's leading nuclear weapons lab on Friday, after a set of classified computer disks disappeared, and a student was hit in the eye with a powerful laser beam -- all in the space of a week.

"As of today, Director Nanos has suspended all Operations at the Laboratory," an internal e-mail obtained by Wired News read. "This is a very serious step."

"This willful flouting of the rules must stop, and I don't care how many people I have to fire to make it stop. If you think the rules are silly, if you think compliance is a joke, please resign now and save me the trouble," Nanos added in a separate e-mail to Los Alamos employees.

And separately today, this press release was issued by Sandia National Laboratories:

Sandia National Laboratories has located a floppy disk that had turned up missing in a recent inventory. The floppy disk, which had been marked classified, was found about 1 p.m. today (Friday). Sandia had reported the disk as missing June 30 in a wall-to-wall inventory. (...)

Sandia Corporation President and Laboratories Director C. Paul Robinson said: "We are relieved the disk has been found. But in my mind, the nature of the near miss of this recent incident is far too close for comfort. We must find better ways and procedures for ensuring the protection of such material."

Link to Los Alamos shutdown post on Defensetech blog, and related Wired News story here. Sandia National Laboratories press release: Link. Sandia was also hit earlier this month with a $3.1 million state fine for breaking environmental laws: Link. Image: Trinity Site explosion, 10 seconds after explosion, July 16, 1945. From the online historic photo archive of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:54:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Follow-up to Follow-ups to One-Hit-Wonder song titles

First, there was this -- by John Moe, in McSweeney's, much-blogged already but much funny, too:

# How Are We Going to Get These Dogs Back In?
# Bust an Additional Move
# Seriously, Eileen, Come On
# I Will Now Pass the Dutchie Back to You and Thank You for Passing It to Me Originally Because I Really Enjoyed the Dutchie
# Whoomp! There It Continues to Be

Link. Now, there's this, from sturtle:

# "As My Eyes Became Accustomed to Her Science, My Sight Was Restored"
# "Baby Lost 20 Pounds of Back (on Atkins)"
# "I Am No Longer Too Sexy for My Ten-Year-Old Shirt"
# and of course, "100 Luftballoons"

Link. But wait! Francis says Kittenpants blog has still more followups to followups to followup song titles. (Thanks, Siege, and thanks, Snoodle!).

Update: Make it stop! More followup song titles. And more. Aaaand more. Also, see this exhaustive list of supergroups that never were.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:17:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

I, Robot movie release sparks renewed interest in Asimov's 3 laws

Tyler Emerson says:

With today's film release of the feature film "I, Robot," the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has launced a new website, "3 Laws Unsafe", to explore the non-fictional problems presented by Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws are widely known and are often taken seriously as reasonable solutions for guiding future AI. But are they truly reasonable?

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:32:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Found Zen

audio kitchen | found slides | lost something? | grocery lists | noyes museum | found by toby slater | found by spencer schaffner | found magazine
Links to web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:25:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DotComGuy = NotComGuy

BoingBoing reader Alex says, "The man who legally changed his name to DotComGuy changed it back Tuesday - to Mitch Maddox. The trademark and domain name are up on eBay."
Link to auction, and link to news article.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:08:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory off for the weekend

I'm off for my birthday weekend now. No email, no Web access, no blogging: just idyllic relaxation in an undisclosed location. See you all on Monday, at which point I will have turned 33, entering Club 33 the hard way.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:06:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PC-based media centre in a wall-socket

This is pretty cool -- a prototype wallplate with three sockets, a USB port and a hard-drive, for use as a home media appliance.

The original brief by ComCom was to design a remote control. Thank Toshiko, he looked further than the brief and designed a line of 22 integrated electronic products. One of them is this wall mount triple socket. It has a USB port and a built-in hard disk. You can store music and movies in it and send them to other products in the same product line. The system will be shown in October in ComCom's show apartment in Tokyo.

Link (Thanks, Mason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:35:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Differences between WorldCon and DNC

This year's World Science Fiction Convention is in Boston, and accordingly, the URL for the con is boston2004.com. By a funny coincidence, the Democratic National Convention is also in Boston, and its URL is boston04.com. The inevitable confusion is quite humorous -- the organisers of the WorldCon have compiled a list of ways in which the WorldCon is unlike the DNC:

# We're not $10 million over budget. We don't even have a $10 million budget.
# Our promises for the future are supposed to be fiction.
# You don't have to donate thousands of dollars to us (though we wouldn't complain)—we'll give you a high-level appointment to work for us for free!
# The media will not outnumber the attendees.
# Thoats and banthas are more interesting animals than donkeys and elephants.
# The folks wandering around with walkie-talkies are likely to be helpful and friendly.
# The slogans on our buttons are actually funny, and many of them are about cats.
# No one will be kissing babies except their immediate families and friends.
# When we talk about "skull and bones" it's probably in a discussion about paleontology.
# When we sling mud, it's probably in a workshop on making alien pottery.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:24:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF Freedom Fest, Aug 4, 5-8PM

EFF's Freedom Fest is coming up in San Francisco -- great music, great signs!

Wednesdsay, August 4, 5-8pm
Yerba Buena Gardens

Austin Willacy
Josh Fix and the Furious Force
Josh Fix
The Megan Slankard Band

Link (via Vertical Hold)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:04:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BitTorrent search engine

Bitoogle is a front-end for Google that finds BitTorrent files. Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:00:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Cool potential for Orkut or Friendster

Whole Lotta Nothing has sent out a lazyweb request for a blogging plug-in that would allow a blogger's close friends to correct typos in his or her posts. I sure could use something like this.

I want a MT plugin that will let a select group of my closest, most trusted friends correct typos in text and URLs on my blog posts and republish their changes without my intervention. If I'm gone for a couple days and improperly used your when I meant you're, I'd love it if a friend fixed that while I was away. I first got the idea when I was trying to think of ways to make Orkut or Friendster useful. If there was some API to those apps that let MT know if someone was a best friend or life partner-level connection, they could be granted temporary edit rights on my blog (maybe Flickr's API could let this work for people I designate as a friend and family member, which seems to be the closest form of relationship there).

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:54:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Take Control of Your Airport Network, by Glenn Fleishman

If anyone knows about real-world Wi-Fi, it's Glenn Fleishman. Now he's selling a $5 PDF book on how to set up a wireless network with Macintoshes. If you are having any trouble at all with your Airport network, this book is $5 well spent. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:24:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Sterling visits a windmill museum

Sterling took some great pictures of windmills at a museum dedicated to them in Shattuck, Oklahoma. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:21:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wonder Woman, Superman remixed in French anti-AIDS posters

A French anti-AIDS organization created these ads depicting super-heroes with the disease. Link one, Link two (PDF files). (Thanks, dan)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:45:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eisner liked Fahrenheit 9/11

Joi's at the Fortune Brainstorm event, blogging Michael Eisner's remarks as they're spoken:

He was asked if he regretted not distributing Fahrenheit 9/11. He said no. Disney is not partisan and the movie was clearly political. Disney is an entertainment company. He said Rupert Murdoch said no for a completely different reason. Murdoch said he hated Moore and liked Bush. That's not why Disney didn't distribute the film.

When asked whether he liked the movie, Eisner said he loved it. It was like going to a rock concert. It was entertaining, hilarious. He loved it in a non-political way.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:58:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conference on molecular nanotechnology

Our friends at the Foresight Institute are sponsoring the first-ever conference to focus solely on bottom-up nanotechnology, as envisioned by Richard Feynman in 1959.

"This new meeting series will examine all aspects of advanced nanotechnology, also termed molecular manufacturing or MNT: research status, prospects for disruptive applications, and policy issues — including maximizing access for those who would not otherwise benefit."

On the third day of the event, bloggers Howard "NanoBot" Lovy and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds are co-chairing a panel on Advanced Nanotechnology Policy. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:53:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Infectious fear of mobile viruses

My latest article for TheFeature.com is about the recent hype about mobile phone viruses, the fear of infection, and the reality of protection:

"Mobile phone virus sounds alarm in Moscow!" "World's First Mobile Virus is Not Lethal, Yet!" While the exclamation points are mine, the words are actual headlines from, respectively, The Guardian and Reuters articles published June 16. A proof-of-concept worm had been demonstrated that infects Symbian-based mobile phones with Bluetooth. The wireless public gasped. Computer security experts yawned.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:30:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hersh: children raped at Abu Ghraib, Pentagon has videos

From Daily Kos' partial transcript of a video (link to REAL stream) of Seymour Hersh speaking at an ACLU event. He says the US government has videotapes of children being raped at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Link (via Warren). There's also a piece worth reading in this week's Newsweek about new allegations of rape and sexual torture at Abu Ghraib. Feature includes details on the identities of the Iraqi prisoners shown in those widely-circulated photographs -- including Satar Jabar (charged with carjacking, not terrorism), whose iconic hooded figure with wires attached is derisively described by many Iraqis as the "Statue of Liberty." Link

Update: Geraldine Sealey at Salon on Hersh's remarks:

After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon's custody more horrific than anything made public so far. "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse," Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse. (...)

Notes from a similar speech Hersh gave in Chicago in June were posted on Brad DeLong's blog. Rick Pearlstein, who watched the speech, wrote: "[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."

There are several questions here: Has Hersh actually seen the video he described to the ACLU, and why hasn't he written about it yet? Will he be forced to elaborate in more public venues now that these two speeches are getting so much attention, at least in the blogosphere? And who else has seen the video, if it exists -- will journalists see and report on it? did senators see these images when they had their closed-door sessions with the Abu Ghraib evidence? -- and what is being done about it?

Link to Salon item.

Update 2: BB guestbar alum Russ Kick of Memory Hole reminds us of a post he made in May about the type of as-yet-unreleased evidence Hersh is presumably discussing. Here, Russ quotes Republican Senator Lindsay Graham: "The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."

Update 3: BoingBoing reader Lars has an update from Germany -- some European media perspective on the allegations:

"Report Mainz" is a German TV show/magazine of the SWR (Sudwest-Rundfunk = South-West broadcasting). "Report Mainz" reported already on 5th July 2004 about the potential abuse of children in Abu Ghraib. (Link). A video (in German) of the feature is available at the page (Link to streaming Real file). You can see interviews with persons who testify that they have seen children arrested in Abu Ghraib and who have seen and have heard of a boy and a 12 year old girl terrified (cold water and mud were spilled over them) by guards or military personal. The boy and the girl were then used to terrify their also arrested parents who were willing to cooperate after seeing their children terrified by the guards/military personnel.

Another TV show/magazine covered the issue too: "Kulturzeit", of the German-Austrian-Swiss broadcaster "3Sat" (Link). The main theme in these features is the concern about the fact that children are arrested and that they are used to apply pressure on their parents."

UPDATE: Evidence to support Hersh's claims in the Taguba Report? Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:22:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phonecammed: Eisner at Brainstorm, wearing Mickey T-shirt

Joi Ito phonecammed this moment of zen at the Brainstorm conference. Link to moblog snapshot, and see Joi's wiki for multiple posts about his experience at the Fortune confab. Including these words from Ted Turner:

[Turner] "The invasion of Iraq was the biggest debacle in the history of the world... except maybe the AOL Time-Warner merger. The AOL Time-Warner merger was bullshit.
[Moderator] You were quoted as saying that signing was as good as having sex for the first time.
[Turner] I was just being a team player. It wasn't really. It was the stupidest move I've ever seen. Almost as stupid as the war on Iraq... Gerald Levine was like Rasputin. He was my enemy. But he said he was my best friend. I said to him, "Gerald, I've never been to your home." But I was a team player. I always pulled for the team. We split the money with Jim Baker 50/50. We used to open the envelopes together as they came in because we didn't trust each other."
[Moderator] Can you start a new empire from now?
[Moderator] No. I'm too old/tired. I'm doing bison... they are the original American cattle.

Update: Observant BoingBoing readers will note that Eisner appears to be fidgeting with a small wireless gadget in Joi's snapshot. Defamer intercepted a copy of the mobile chat session taking place at that very moment between the Disney CEO and Mr. Mouse. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:15:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Powerful shit

London's Science Museum is reportedly considering methods to cut their utility bill by burning human waste or using it to feed microbial fuel cells. Management predicts that visitors' crap could generate 1,530 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

"As with all energy sources, you have to make the most of what is available and we certainly have an abundance of visitors - and almost all of them use our toilets," museum head Jon Tucker told the BBC.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:06:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buck Truck, The Rappin' Trucker

The subject line is about all you need to know, folks. Download and listen to this "disturbing little gem" discovered "at a dilapidated truck stop in Ridgetop, Tennessee." Link (via waxy, thanks, Alex)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:07:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wrist-mounted instrumentation: nerdy cufflinks

I've never had much use for cufflinks (especially since my tux and tux-shirt vanished along with three boxes of prized possessions that I mailed from San Francisco to London), but these ones appeal to the autistically instrument-obssessed nerd in me: an entire line of cufflinks with embedded clocks, thermomenters and compasses. It's enough to make me a) want to buy a pair and b) buy a new tux to wear 'em with. Link (Thanks, Yoz!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:58:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mozilla bug-squashing timeline

This timeline of the discovery of a critical flaw in Mozilla is amazing. It took a scant 31 hours between the moment the bug was first reported to the moment that you could download a patched version of all different Mozilla flavours and derivatives.

July 7 - 13:46 GMT - Keith McCanless files a bug in the Bugzilla Database reporting a new vulnerability. It exploits the windows "shell:" handler and allows a malicious web page to execute a program on a client's computer (The program has to already be present on the computer). McCanless notes that the bug is "BOTH a security concern and a DOS," since if the link points to a nonexistent file, it makes the Mozilla browser spawn off endless amounts of new windows. The bug is marked private since it is security-related; only developers with proper clearance can see it. (source)...

July 7 - 18:16 GMT - Mozilla developer "timeless" creates patch closing vulnerability. He posts the patch on the Bugzilla Database so that other developers can approve it. (source) The bug had been known to the world for a matter of hours before a patch was created to fix it

Link (via Crypto-Gram)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Animatronic band on eBay

For about $15,000, you can eBay bid on this animatronic band, called "The Chirpie Band" and billed as "totally electro mechanical," capable of playing any CD, and "the HOTTEST MUSICAL ROBOT BAND OF THE CENTURY." Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:50:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tulsa TV memories

Mike sez, "With the rise of mega-broadcasting, quirky local television shows have faded into obscurity. Luckily, this site rescues these otherwise forgotten shows that aired in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from the '50s to the '00s. While every American city had its own local flavor, common elements are apparent -- the cheesy horror movie show, the Saturday teen dance party show, and the goofy puppet-based kids show. View all the shows on this detailed site and revel in the evocative memories shared by visitors. A wealth of pictures, audio clips, and video clips adds to the enjoyment. Even if you've never been to Tulsa, this site provides an interesting trip back in time to a simpler era of television." Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Space Mountain 1977 eBay auction

I blog this incredible bit of 1977 Space Mountain paper ephemera on eBay only because I am dead certain that there's no way I would be able to remain in the bidding that is sure to follow.

The thrill of Space Mountain – I had the pleasure of enjoying the festivities of the inaugural flight, “it was great” now I have the opportunity of sharing part of the enjoyment with others by offering these items for sale. ·The Disneyland Line publication - SPECIAL Space Mountain Edition, features all kinds of articles on the concepts and efforts of the show and ride, costume design and facts and figures of the building / ride. ·The Space Mountain WED/Mapo Inaugural Flight invitation for June 2, 1977. ·Disneyland Cast Premiere Inaugural Flight Crew Pin/Button, May 1977 ·The portfolio for the publication and invitation. All of the items are in excellent condition.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:41:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Douglas Adams interview audio from 1988

Alex sez, "An interview with Douglas Adams originally broadcast in 1988 has now been made available online. It was recorded while he was promoting The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul." 24MB MP3 Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Update: Elmotion points out this 90 min RealAudio of a talk that Adams gave at UC Santa Barbara a month before his death. Too bad (shocking, really), that the university chooses to use a proprietary, DRM format for distributing its stuff, rather than an open format.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:33:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hungarian commie statuary graveyard

Prehensile sez, "Seeing the post earlier about Stalin World reminded me of this hella cool statue park just outside of Budapest, which I visited last summer. Along similar lines as Stalin World, it's where they put all the old Communist statues that they ripped out of the city. Here's a Flickr album of the photos I took of the amazing monuments they preserve there." These really are quite striking. Link (Thanks, Prehensile!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First-gen Imagineer Sam McKim dies

Sam McKim, the gen-one Imagineer who designed the first souvenir park maps, has died of heart failure at 79. Link (Thanks, Elizabeth!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:37:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA's INDUCE Act letter deconstructed

The RIAA has sent a letter to Congress, calling on it to pass the iPod-criminalising INDUCE Act. Ernest Miller has deconstructed the letter line by line, countering its claims.

That taking has consequences, human and creative. [Some of the consequences are good, some are bad. Separating them, however, is a pain and may not be possible.] My companies make money almost exclusively from the sale of our creative product. [And they still can, they will have to make some adjustments to their business model.] We don't have a performance right on radio and therefore derive no income from radio play. [Welcome to the wonderful world of "when Congress tries to dictate business models." And so, the RIAA proposes a sequel.] We don't make money from artist tours or merchandise. [And why is that? Is there a law against it? If so, I would recommend it be repealed.] We don't make money from endorsements of other products. [Is someone stopping them from doing that?] We just sell recorded music. [You're free to structure business however you like.]

We take profits from sales – when we're good and lucky enough to get them - and plow money back into the search for that next great talent who will thrill music fans around the globe. [I guess the industry must have been bad these last few years.] When we think we have found that talent, we invest huge amounts to sign, nurture, promote and distribute their creative product. [And the RIAA is the only way talent can be found and promoted, because?] Our economic vitality is based on generating hits – finding special talents that enjoy strong commercial appeal. [And we should care about the hit-maker mentality, because?]

Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:30:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickr and Feedburner shipping cool photo syndication tools

Ludicorp, who make the awesome Flickr photo-sharing service, have signed a deal with Feedburner to develop new tools and standards for syndicating photos -- and they've released their first technology, called "splicing." (Disclosure: I am on Ludicorp's advisory board)

Splicing gives people the ability to offer a single RSS feed which contains a chronologically ordered arrangement of their photostream from Flickr and the feed from their existing blog (so you might end up with something like blog post, blog post, photo, photo, photo, blog post, photo, blog post, photo, photo, and so on).

Part of the story is this: photos are a perfect application of RSS. You can stick an html reference to a photo into a feed right now, but our namespace will allow for passing along the social context of the image: the raw pixels have value, but the title, description, comments, tags and notes, along with things like EXIF data add a whole other dimension of value.

Link (Thanks, Stewart!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:27:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stalin World photos

Some time ago, I wrote about Stalin World, the Soviet themepark in Lithuania, wishing I had some photos of the evirons -- now I do. This guy's site has some (low-res) pix of the statuary and grounds on offer at Stalin World. Link (Thanks, Mind!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:25:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lou Reed wants remixes

Lou Reed has endorsed remixing of his work -- he should adopt a Creative Commons remix license to legalise it!

"I've been getting all these great mixes sent to me out of the U.K. for years and years," he told Attitude magazine, "and I just started saying to the record company, 'Look, I really, really love what they are doing.' I think that my record company was a little taken aback but, genuinely, if I could make that type of music then I would. If I could master the equipment then I would love to. Maybe I will now that I've got my own studio set up."

Link (via Creative Commons)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:51:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Canadian Creative Commons Licenses underway

Andrew sez, "The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic is porting the Creative Commons licensing system to work under Canadian copyright law." Woohoo! Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:47:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Models from Space: 1999 model-maker

Here's a wonderful gallery of the models of Martin Bowers, who did the model-work on Space: 1999 (some are for sale!). Link (Thanks, Asi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:46:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ICANN emancipate domain owners from scummy registrars

Congrats to the good fighters at ICANN, who have won an important battle today that makes it easier to transfer your domain from one registrar to another without risking losing it in the process (my last two Network Solutions registrations ran out this month and they're now safely ensconsed with the good people at Tucows/DomainDirect, who are my absolute favourite registrars). Ross calls this the Emancipation Proclamation for domain-owners, and he's not far wrong.

* streamlined definition of responsibilities as it relates to the management of the domain name. Under the new policy, only the Administrative Contact or Registrant can authorize a domain name transfer to a new service provider. This was extremely unclear in the old policy and led to a lot of abuse and confusion.
* minimizing Registrar gaming and abuse. Under the old policy, it was quite common for unseemly Registrars to abuse their position and prevent outgoing customers from transferring to a different service provider.
* introduction of arbitration. The new policy includes several policies designed to "fix" problems before they are taken to the courts. The old policy didn't make it easy to fix problems and often relied on the good graces of usually uncooperative policies. The new policies fix this by introducing undo procedures and a dispute resolution process designed to make it fairly easy and relatively inexpensive for Registrants and Registrars to fix problematic transfers.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:42:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Origin of colour-trends

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written an amazing, heavily linked, well-researched piece on the Color Marketing Group, a trade association that determines each season's "in" colours and dictates the national pallette.

I knew what was up with the big khaki push. Remember that one? Ads everywhere saying "Hemingway wore khaki"? We'd all been wearing black for several years. We had black levis, good black skirts, black leather or denim jackets, little black dresses—a great installed user base of basic black clothing, plus the colored stuff we wore with it. I hadn't heard anyone sighing for the return of khaki, and if I had, I'd have pointed them to one of the WASP mail-order catalogues. What's the big deal with khaki? It gets dirty too easily, and for a lot of people it's an unbecoming color. But there's only so much new black clothing you can sell a happy consumer who already has a closet full of black-and-coordinates; so the clothing industry pushed khaki remorselessly.

Link

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

Mena Trott steps down as SixApart CEO

Mena Trott has stepped down as CEO of SixApart, makers of Movable Type and TypePad, in favour of Barak Berkowitz, one of their Series A investors. Mena's written a heartfelt appreciation of Barak that is an instant classic -- a unique example of a company founder's sincere desire to see her efforts bear fruit, even if she's not's in charge any longer (though she's staying on as President).

At our office, we had phone cables running up and down walls and doorframes and across the floor. This mess was around for months until one day Barak came to work with a T-shirt, some tool-belt type thing and some device to do phone wiring. During the course of the afternoon, Barak installed our phone lines and cleaned up the office.

Incidentally, while he was doing this, Maile, our administrative assistant came in for her first interview with us and saw Barak. A week or two later when we called her in for a second interview I asked that she speak with Barak so that he could interview her as well. After we hired Maile and explained who Barak was she laughed and said "Oh, I thought he was the handyman and that this company really liked to get everyone involved!"

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:35:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unlinkable NYT doomed to google-obscurity

The NYT's registration system and expiring pages have doomed them to google-obscurity. Wired News argues that they've gone from being the paper of record to a Web-era irrelevancy, and all to protect a Lexis-Nexis agreement and to bring in two to three percent of the digital division's profits.

But recently, when I googled the terms "Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib" -- certainly one of the most intensively covered news stories of the year -- the first New York Times article was the 295th search result, trailing the New Yorker, Guardian, ABC and CBS News, New York Post, MSNBC, Slate, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Denver Post, USA Today, Bill O'Reilly on FoxNews and a host of others news sites.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:30:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney's $80 million mistake: Fahrenheit 911

Disney -- cash-strapped and slumping -- made an enormous mistake when it declined to distribute Moore's latest blockbuster, Fahrenheit 911.

Michael Moore's headline grabbing documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which Disney declined to distribute, grossed more than $80 million in its first three weeks of release, more than any Disney film this year and any documentary ever.

"It's held up fairly well," said Andy Spencer, a '96 graduate who works at Raleigh's Rialto theater. "It was two weeks straight of either sellouts or virtual sellouts."

Link (Thanks, Pat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:23:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Man flashes authorities during airport screening

An untrusted traveler going commando drops trou and flashes airport security when he becomes frustrated with the anti-terrorist screening process. And a movement is born: The Freedom Flash!

[Daryl] Miller then said, "There, how do you like your job," thus ending the screening, according to the police report. He was charged with indecent exposure and released on $300 bail. "We've never had anybody do that before," said airport police Lt. Matt Christenson. "But it's not abnormal for people to become frustrated with the screening process."

Miller also became belligerent during the screening, Transportation Security Administration officers told police. One TSA employee also told police that Miller had a note inside a magazine in his bag with an expletive, and told a TSA employee "Oh yeah, it's for you" when asked who the note was directed at. "This person exposed themself in a public area, a clear violation of the law, and we needed to take some action on that, otherwise everybody would be dropping their pants," Christenson said.

Link (Thanks, Q-Burns!)

Update: Sacre blog! Reader Kurt H. says: "Not the first time someone has gotten pissed at airport security and stripped. Back in 2002, a French woman got upset and took off her top."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:31:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Show of support for Seattle photoblogger harassed by authorities

Kate from Seattle.metroblogging.net says:

In a follow-up to your Boing Boing post about the photography student's odd run-in with Homeland Security , a peaceful protest is being organized in response.

More details about the public show of support here: Link. (Ed.: "Photoblogging is not a crime" t-shirts are inevitable...)

Update: Seattle Times story here. And a Seattle Post-Intelligencer column ends with this line: "I don't think Ian's a spy. Ian loves America. Ian's crime was being a brown man with a camera in hand during a time of runaway fear." (Thanks, Ari!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:19:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Music to Phonecam by: Kill Bill Vol. 2 Mashups

During this weekend's launch of the SENT phonecam photography show (press coverage here), pics submitted by the public were displayed on iMac screens, refreshing automatically every few minutes (link), while iTunes blasted some groovy mashups. Many at the show asked about the tunes, so here is one highlight from the playlist. I'll post more over the next few days -- don't want to spoil you with a jam overdose.

The tracks people seemed to dig most were all from an amazing mashup album by a group of DJs called Hanzo Steel -- remixes inspired by the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume 2. My favorite track: "Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down" (Link to free MP3 track). The track includes samples from: "Bang Bang My Baby Shot Me Down" by Nancy Sinatra, "Big Beat" by Billy Squier/"Fix Up Look Sharp" by Dizzee Rascal, "Apache" by the Incredible Bongo Band (as used by Nas), "Take Me To The Mardis Gras" by Bob James/"Peter Piper" by Run DMC and audio samples from many of the original Kung Fu films which are referenced in Tarantino's movies. I can't stop playing this track. It scratches the funk spot in my brain.

Here are two more freebies from the same disc: "Twisted Nerve (Biter's Revenge)" (Link to free MP3). Includes "Twisted Nerve" by Bernard Herrmann and "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson. And "Ironsides" includes "Ironsides" by Quincy Jones plus Divine Styler. (Link to free MP3).

Link to Hanzo Steel home (check the fine cover art! Buy the CD!). Check out SENT in person through Saturday July 17 (12-5pm daily) at the Downtown Standard Hotel in LA. Oh, and the image shown here is one of the 1500 +/- phonecam snapshots submitted by the public. You can never have enough phonecam pics of hot electroclash babes licking themselves in the mirror, I always say. (Thanks for the free tracks, Hanzo Steel!)

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

More Roomba hacking

Another group of hardware hackers have at a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner:

"For higher level control, we've attached a Virgin Webplayer. The Webplayer was sold as a loss leader for Virgin's internet service in the late 90s, and thus can be found on ebay for under $100. It has two serial ports, a 200MHz Geode processor, 64M ram, and a miniPCI port. Thus, we can give it an 802.11b card, a webcam, and a usb-serial adapter."

Link (via MetaFilter)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:59:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moblogging Fortune's Brainstorm Con in Aspen

Cameron Sinclair, the man who co-founded a very interesting organization called Architecture for Humanity, is mo-pho-blogging Fortune Magazine's Brainstorm Conference. Here's a Link to the blog.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:56:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Miniscule of Sound

This sounds pretty funny en pixel, and I'm sure it'd be even more if you stumbled on it at a humongoid ravefest with e'd out dancing bodies as far as they eye can see. It's a parody of techno music industry media gigantor Ministry of Sound.

Following on from the ice-cream van dub sound system and the piano bar on wheels, i'd like to draw your attention to the Miniscule of Sound. i've been going to summertime festivals in the uk for years, and these guys have been on the circuit for almost a decade. It's basically a converted horsebox kitted out on the inside with disco ball, coloured lights, day-glo fluffy roof, light-panelled dancefloor, and a dj (usually) dressed as one of the vilage people playing something cheesey on a tiny pair of decks. The door staff on the outside advise us they are "'avin it tiny!" on the way in. Club capacity is about 8, maybe 9 at a squeeze. As clubbing experiences go, it's one of the best and it's free. If you see them at a festie this year, pay them a visit.

Link (thanks sim0nkey!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:46:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New issue of RU Sirius' NeoFiles

RU Sirius has just published his eighth issue of NeoFiles, a mind-bending online magazine about technology and human potential. In the new issue, transhumanist Max More talks about the Extropians, Pat Kane discusses play as work, and Tom Greco explores the real value of money. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:43:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tech and Hollywood heavyweights create content coalition

From John Borland at CNET:

Several high-profile technology companies and movie studios are expected to announce Wednesday that they have formed a coalition to ensure that high-definition video and other content cannot be pirated in home networks.

Sources familiar with the group's formation said the initial members include IBM, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Warner Bros., Disney and Panasonic. The announcement is scheduled to be made at the cross-industry Content Protection Technology Working Group (CPTWG) meeting in Los Angeles, although last-minute membership changes could occur before then.

The alliance marks the culmination of years of tentative and often suspicious contact between the high-tech industry and Hollywood. It will be aimed at developing specifications to protect copyrighted content such as movies inside home networks. If the group is successful, a consumer might be able to download a high-definition movie, store it on a PC, watch it on a television and transfer it to a mobile device to watch while traveling.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:36:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Internet Archive additions as RSS

This is an RSS feed for new files added to the Internet Archive (images, music, video): lots of amazing serendipity here! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:24:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

National Barbie in a Blender Day

Freeculture.org is throwing a "National Barbie in a Blender Day" to celebrate the victory over Mattel, which sued a photographer for taking pictures of nude Barbies.

Freeculture.org has launched an official site for the National Barbie-in-a-Blender Day project, at www.barbieinablender.org. Users are invited to submit artistic pieces inspired by Forsythe's "Food Chain Barbie" series to blended@barbieinablender.org for the site's upcoming gallery of submitted work.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:15:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Druid busted for possession of a sword

A 26-year-old druid was arrested in Portsmouth for going to the hardware store while wearing his ceremonial sword:

About a dozen fellow members of the Insular Order of Druids sat in the court's public gallery, while chief druid King Arthur Pendragon, wearing white robes with a red lion emblazoned on the front, acted as Williams's legal adviser.

The sword, named Talisen, has been confiscated by police as evidence.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:01:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!

Waxy's dreamt up a fine net.sport: viewing Amazon reviews ranked from lowest rating to highest: he calls it the "Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!" and he's posted some of his faves and invited his readers to do the same.

Beach Boys, "Pet Sounds"

* "This is not the Beach Boys. It can't be. Why? No beach songs! I thought it was some kind of joke. All 'Pet Sounds' offers is the opportunity to hear Brian Wilson whine for forty minutes, backed by elevator music."
* "It's full of bland harmonizing by guys that could barely swim."
* "The lyrics consist of commonplace rhyming conversational prose, totally lacking in imagery, metaphor and anything else that separates verse from poetry."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:35:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Patent-scammers use bad analogies to defend worse business practices

My cow-orker Jason Schultz is running EFF's patent-busting project, and high on his list of damaging Internet patents is Acacia Research's patent on streaming media. Acacia has pursued this patent by targetting porn companies and extracting settlements in order to fund a war-chest that it is now using to sue bigger media entities -- presumably this trail ends with orgs like the BBC, CBC, and Live365.

Adult Video News (AVN) interviewed Jason and some of the Acacia people about the ongoing work to bust the patent, and the Acacia people busted out this bizarre analogy about stealing SUVs ("If someone broke into your garage and stole your SUV, and put a speaker on the top, and was driving around the neighborhood making some political statement, trying to get your SUV back wouldn't be trying to stifle free speech, it would be you trying to get your property back. If somebody is using your property, you have a right to stop them or receive a license or receive royalties").

Jason's repsonse was classic:

"There's no question now that an SUV in your garage is something you own. But here there's a real question as to whether Acacia actually invented anything new or simply is claiming monopoly on technology that millions of people use every day to express themselves," Schultz told AVNOnline.com.

"And the other thing is, I don't have to break into your garage to steal your SUV to express myself in the physical world. But I can't think of a modern Website, especially news Websites, that don't depend on streaming some kind of audio or video to express themselves on the Web. It has become a fundamental part of free expression online," he continued. "And I would say it has become the predominant method for artists and news organizations to connect to their audiences. [Acacia] doesn't want to own just the SUV, [they] want to own every single automobile and stereo system in the world, to use [their] contorted analogy."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:38:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Deaths at Disneyland

Here's a trip through all the deaths that have taken place at Disneyland, with photos of the widowmaking apparati. The author does a good job of separating the urban legends from the truth, and pointing the finger at whomever it deserves to be pointed at (sometimes Disney, sometimes foolhardy guests). The over-the-top cussin'-and-rantin' style is very nice.

Although the presumed allure of the PeopleMover during a graduation takeover of the Magic Kingdom would be hopes for a nice view of the Anaheim skyline and a hummer, the usual proliferation of the drunken testosterone penned another chapter of the ride's storied existence in blood during the summer of 1980.

Gerardo Gonzales had presumably never heard of the name Ricky Lee Yama when he boarded the sluggish trail of candy-painted tram cars that night, which is a shame. Aside from sparing his parents the embarrassment of recounting his story to relatives at the wake, it would have also denied an opportunity for ironic history to repeat itself. Sadly, this wasn't the case.

Link (Thanks, Spencer!)

Update: Chris sez, "The story posted on Disneyland deaths has at least one big error. The most recent mentioned death spoke of the wrong person. The 43 year old woman supposedly killed survived the accident, although she suffered a severe injury. Her husband, Luan Phi Dawson, however, died tragically. He was a fine software engineer on Microsoft Word and deserves to be remembered."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:32:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Futuristic sleep-pods at Empire State Building: $14/20 min

MetroNaps is a business that operates an urban napping service in the Empire State Building, offering customers the opportunity to reclilne in a hooded, electrified Bond-villain "MetroPod" and get a "lotion, facial spritz and lemon-scented hand towels" when you're done. They'll even deliver lunch to your pod. The rate is $14 (and up) for a 20 minute nap. Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:27:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sega Saturn emulator in open source

Cassini is an open source Sega Saturn emulator that plays a number of commercial Sega games. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:22:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Virtual Oz theme-park created in online game

A player in Second Life (a highly user-modifiable massively multiplayer online game) converted her private in-game island into a virtual Oz themepark as a gift for another player. The elaborate project involved in-game collaboration between virtual costumers, set designers, programmers, and musical scorers. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:16:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Before weblogs, "blog" was a kind of cocktail at sf cons

Ev searched Google's Usenet archives for early uses of the term "blog" and uncovered a science-fiction fannish cocktail called the "blog" that predates weblogs by years:

You should be aware that Blog was originally devised by British fans in the 1950s. There were two versions. A Liverpool fan named Peter Hamilton came up with the recipe for Blog Mark I, which consisted of "a brandy and egg flip base, to which was added black currant puree, Alka Seltzer, and Beechan's Powder. It effervesced." A second, simplified version (Blog Mark II) was produced by hotel barmen at the first Kettering Eastercon (1955) and consisted of "a half-pint of cider and a measure of rum." Anybody know what `egg flip' and `Beecham's Powder' are? (Quoted material taken from p.168 of A WEALTH OF FABLE, by Harry Warner, Jr.)

Link

Update: Neal sez: Dr. Seuss's "The Shape of Me and Other Stuff" contains these lines:

'And speaking of shapes/now just suppose/you were shaped like one of these!/or those!/or like a Blogg/or a garden hose!"

The Blogg in question is pictured only in silhouette (like everything else in the book); it looks sorta like a bipedal camel.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:07:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hulkblog SMASH!

The Incredible Hulk's blog is incredibly funny -- I actually snarfed.

Sunday, July 04, 2004
Hulk saw movie about bug-man and it was good but needed more smashing.

AND HULK DID NOT GET SNIFFLY DURING ROMANTIC SCENES SO IF YOU HEAR IRON MAN OR THOR TALKING ABOUT IT THEY ARE LIARS.
Posted by: Incredible Hulk / 4:15 PM // Comments (3) | Trackback (0)

Thursday, June 24, 2004
HULK AT LIBRARY USING COMPUTER.

SHHHH.
Posted by: Incredible Hulk / 10:32 AM // Comments (4) | Trackback (0)

Link (via Kottke)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:05:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tolkien estate claims trademark for "shire"

The Tolkien estate and Warners have sent out a lawyergram to the owner of shiremail.com, arguing that the word "Shire" belongs to them. The Register traces over 1,000 years of usage of the word "Shire" in England, and enumerates many towns with the word "shire" in their names across the English countryside.

n fact, we don't think it would be too provocative to suggest that JRR Tolkien may have been inspired by over a thousand years of common history when he first came up with the name "The Shire" as the idyllic home country of the books' main protagonists, the hobbits.

However, the legal letter claims that "goodwill in the name has been achieved through sales of such books". Certainly The Shire sounded rather nice as presented in the fictional books, but we suspect the goodwill towards the area in which people live was there before Mr Tolkien even put pen to paper.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:03:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help squash bugs in the next edition of Eastern Standard Tribe

The paperback edition of my novel Eastern Standard Tribe is in production, and my publisher has requested an errata sheet with collected typos, spelling errors, consistency problems, etc. Last year, William Gibson solicited message-board feedback from his readers to help him produce the errata sheet for the paperback of Pattern Recognition, but I wanna go one better, so I've put up a Wiki (a kind of web-page that anyone can edit) for anyone who's got a favorite EST correction that s/he wants to see made in the next edition.

Changes are due by July 21 -- thanks in advance! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:45:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suggesting a link? Use the form

A quick reminder: we prefer to get Boing Boing submissions via the suggest-a-link form. Sending your submission there formats it for easy conversion to a blog-post, distributes among multiple editors (increasing the chance that it will get picked up), and simplifies our existence greatly. I, for one, won't consider Boing Boing suggestions via direct email, IM or the like -- just not enough hours in the day to do it the hard way. Thanks! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:06:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

All-reality TV channel to be launched by Fox

Fox is starting a cable channel devoted exclusively to the programming genre everyone loves to hate. They're actually not the first to take a crack at 24/7 reality TV -- I wrote this piece for Wired Magazine last year about Larry Namer's Reality Central, a startup network that's still having a tough time getting off the ground. Pass me a pig bladder and a box of mealworms -- gonna be a long night in front of the tube. Link to more on the Fox reality channel launch. (Thanks, Jon)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:02:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Craphounds in Manhattan: NYC Mongo

Mongo: Adventures In Trash is a new book by Ted Both, a South African who moved to NYC and furnished his apartment with goodies found in kerbside trash ("Mongo" in NYC picker-parlance), then chronicled his adventures with Manhattan's trashers, divers and pickers.

Like good mongo, the New Yorkers of Botha's book were hard to find. It took him two years to collect the cast of New Yorkers portrayed in his book. Some were open to talking about collecting other people's trash and reusing it, others were more reserved.

"It was a gradual process. I approached a lot of crazy people. They swore at me, they chased me away and they started running. You start to know how people are going to act," Botha said while on his way to visit one of the collectors in his book -- a New Yorker named Dave who uses a metal detector to parse through silt from sewers.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:09:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mexico's Bionic Attorney General

Dave sez: El Universal (Mexico City) is reporting that the Attorney General of Mexico, Rafael Macedo, had a microchip inserted under the skin of one of his arms to give him access to a new crime database and also enable him to be traced if he is ever abducted.

Bloomberg news added "about 160 Mexican officials will carry the microchip" and that "the chip can't be removed, but will be deactivated after Macedo's term as attorney general expires." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:40:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese geek status hierarchy

Fascinating chart of the Japanese geek status hierarchy. Link (Thanks, Zed!)

John sez: Note that the link Mark Frauenfelder posted earlier today, the "Japanese geek status hierarchy," is a clear rip off of/homage to Lore Sjöberg's geek hierarchy.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:22:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hummer H2 finger flipping photo gallery

Countless pictures of people flipping the bird at Hummer H2's.

The H2 is the ultimate poseur vehicle. It has the chassis of a Chevy Tahoe and a body that looks like the original Hummer; i.e. it's a Chevy Tahoe in disguise.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:15:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spambaiter takes idiot 419er for a ride

BBC article about a Nigerian scammer who was tricked into painting his chest with a red "9" on it. Link (Thanks, Stresspuppy!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:06:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Backyard Coaster

The Blue Flash is a roller coaster that John Ivers constructed in his rural Indiana backyard.

"I love to go to amusement parks and ride the the rides, but I can't stand waiting in line... To be honest with you, I'm not an educated engineer or mathematician or anything like that. It was more or less trial-and-error."

Here's a radio piece on Ivers and his coaster from WYNC's "The Next Big Thing." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:01:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Happy Talk From Hell" -- Salon reviews Outfoxed

Salon has a review of the new documentary about Fox news, called Outfoxed, which went on sale today and is now the 11th best-selling DVD on Amazon.

Take the network's "some people say" mantra (as used in my first paragraph, above). I had watched plenty of Fox News without ever noticing this -- it's a way of introducing commentary, and specifically the reflexive right-wing views of the presumptive Fox core audience, into what is supposed to be news coverage, while appearing to not quite endorse it. "Some people say that criticizing the war at a time like this is letting down our men and women in uniform," or "Some people say Richard Clarke is a political operative who's trying to sell books." (Or, yes, "Some people are saying that John Kerry looks French!" -- uttered with a peculiar mixture of consternation and delight. Gosh, what a weird idea! But now that you mention it ...!)

Also, here's Fox's scary rebuttal to the documentary. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:57:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to complain to Patriot Act flipfloppers

Jim sez: "Late last week, the House rejected an amendment to the USA Patriot Act that would have curtailed some of the more contentious provisions. It turns out that the GOP kept the vote open for 23 minutes in order to strong arm persuade a few of the more vertebrate-challenged congressfolk. Nine congresspeople, all Repbulican, changed their vote from supporting the ammendment to rejecting it, most likely after being pressured by the White House and/or Republican attack dog Tom deLay. This site lets you know who these waffling flip floppers are and how to give 'em a piece of your mind." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:42:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mothersbaugh's happy mutants

Mark "Devo" Mothersbaugh has created a stunningly surreal series of manipulated antique photographs. Many of them are displayed in vintage daguerrotype frames. From the artist's statement:

"It was in the early 1900's that Rorschach and other psychiatrists developed hunches regarding symmetry and the internal workings of man. Humans, great pretenders to bi-lateral symmetry, are in actuality, closer to potatoes in their lack of precise symmetry. A close look reveals what is truly inside the people around us."

Mothersbaugh's Beautiful Mutants collection is currently touring galleries around the United States. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:53:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Howard Rheingold's bad experience with the Treo 600 and Sprint

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs and a lot of other wonderful books about the social effects of new technologies, recounts his frustrating customer service experience when he took his broken Treo 600 to Sprint:

[T]he indifferent young man I talked to at the Sprint store in the Bonair shopping center in San Rafael, California then said that they didn't do repairs or diagnostics and didn't know who did. He actually SURFED THE WEB to give me the phone number of Palm. So I called Palm, who told me they could deal with everyone's Treo 600 except Sprint's. They directed me to a third party repair service whose voicemail sends you to the web.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:31:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Digital movieblog includes short films from Chernobyl and Ethiopia

Luuk Bowman's collaborative movieblog Tropisms is starting to move again, after a long silence.

Tropisms started in 2002 as a personal videolog or "vlog," a weblog that integrated streaming video-files with a travel diary. The site has grown into a collective movieblog with a small group of participating filmmakers. Peter Boonstra and Marcel van Brakel (NL) are currently in Chernobyl, where they upload movies in an internet cafe. Josh Koury (VS) traces his aunt and uncle that have been stationed to a small section of backwoods Tennessee by the military. Earlier this year, Luuk Bouwman (NL) went to Ethiopia to find out about computer love in a place usually associated with famine. Tropisms is a heavy site, it uses flash and quicktime streams, so a broadband connection is needed. On Macs, Mozilla is preferable.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:13:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Now that's mobile entertainment: eccentric dude's piano bar on wheels

Following up on yesterday's post about the ice cream truck converted into a reggae dub soundsystem on wheels, Bill Pollock says: "Harrington King (whose business cards read "Spiritual Optimist") regularly parks his custom piano bar on wheels at various places down midtown [Sacramento, California] most weekend nights. Its cozy inside, appropriately piano bar-y with assorted bongos for those who feel moved to play. An awful photo but decent writeup avaialble via the News & Review (Link) and the traveling piano bar has its own website (Link)."

On the piano bar website, an archived interview in the Sacramento Bee, in which the eccentric dude says:

(Reporter) Do you have a favorite weekend song to play?
(King) I've got a Sacramento song that people like.
(Reporter) What's that?
(King) I don't know. I guess it's called "Sacramento Song."
(Reporter) You go to any music spots around town?
(King) I am a music spot around town.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:57:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Extreme doctoring

Kevin Fong was dubbed "Spacedoc" by Esquire magazine's list of "most influential men under 40." From Everest to orbit, Fong studies how the body reacts to extreme environments. He hopes his research on trauma will help physicians treat all critical care patients. New Scientist has a long interview with Fong:

"When you get down to the nuts and bolts, critical care is chiefly about one thing - getting oxygen molecules and putting them into the cellular machinery so that they can be used to make energy. At high altitudes, for example, you have healthy people who have extremely low levels of oxygen in their bloodstream by virtue of their physical environment. And somehow they manage not just to be alive but to climb mountains. If you show measurements of the blood oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in a mountaineer on top of Everest to a critical care physician, they will say: "When did this patient die?" The numbers don't look compatible with life. How someone can go to the edge of human survival and come back to live a healthy and productive life is what critical care is all about. I've begun to regard intensive care as another extreme environment."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:33:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling's Singularity speech audio

Bruce Sterling's speech to the Long Now Foundation on the Singularity is a corker. He really is a *hell* of a speaker. 70.1 MB MP3 Link (via Sylloge)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:47:10 AM