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Sunday, October 31, 2004

More on Apple's breaking of the iPod -- UPDATED

A number of you have written in regarding yesterday's post about Apple's campaign to remove features from your iPod and presenting it to you as an "update." There are innumberable utilities available to help you move your music from your iPod to your Mac, of course, but that's not the point.

The point is that Apple is devoting time, money, and lawyer- and engineer-hours to breaking your iPod and selling it to you as a "fix."

Imagine if your mobile phone manufacturer enlisted your car maker into ensuring that you didn't use a third-party charger with your cigarette lighter, but instead bought the official, expensive licensed charger. Every time you take your car in for warranty-mandated service, the manufacturer's representative rips out your lighter and puts a new one in that locks out your charger. And when the agent is done, he smiles and tells you he's "updated" your car.

Does the fact that you can go out and find a new third-party charger that works with the new lighter mitigate in the car-maker's favor? Wouldn't you be pissed off that your car-maker was selling you out to the phone company, treating you as a mark to be sucked dry by whatever vendor it decided to do a deal with?

That's what Apple's done here. The music industry has concluded that it can maximize its profits by restricting what you do with your music, and it's signed Apple up to see to it that even if you figure out how to do more that Apple will do its best to take that feature away from you.

In any event, there are many tools to help get your music off your iPod. Here's a link to Open Pod, the one that I've decided on. It's a GPL-licensed tool and looks like it works well. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Update: How to un-cripple your copy of iTunes 4.7

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:49:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US-Iraq bioweapons report by independent UK academic

David sez, "Geoff Holland of the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex (UK), has recently submitted a report to all Members of the UK Parliament with the aim that the US supply of biological materials to Iraq will at last be properly investigated. The report can be read or downloaded from this site. It sets out further evidence of misleading Government statements in relation to the Iraq conflict, considering specifically the Government’s response to the previously overlooked finding of the US Senate ‘Riegle Report’— that in the 1980s the United States supplied Iraq with materials for its biological weapons programme in breach of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention" 428K MSFT Word Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:38:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunted Mansion dollhouse

Bigfigs ("big figures") are the new breed of Disney Park collectables -- they're 18-24" detailed models of ride-buildings and facades. The new Haunted Mansion one is out, and while I can't say I'm very impressed with it -- looks too much like a doll's house and the construction materials are too plasticky if you ask me -- the Haunted Mansion fan boards are all a-twitter. Order 'em from Disneyland DelivEARS at 800-362-4533. Link (via The Disney Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart C-SPAN torrent -- UPDATE

Here's a .torrent for ASF video of the wonderfully subversive Jon Stewart and company appearance on C-SPAN. The video's apparently a little low-quality, be warned. Torrent Link (Thanks, RobW!)

Update: Here's a higher quality video in .torrent form, courtesy of Mike Graham. Thanks, Mike!

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

Working iPod costume

This guy modded his Tablet PC and a rewired USB mouse and built a "working iPod costume." Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:12:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos of decaying Toronto

Kendall Anderson shoots galleries of decaying and abandoned buildings, asylums, factories and warehouses in Toronto and environs. Love this one, from his series shot in an old Toronto Transit Commission "Barn." Link (Thanks, knotpunkt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:09:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sim e-voting machine almost as buggy as real thing

If you're a Sims player you can download this "Dumboold" electronic voting machine, which has almost as many flaws as the real thing from our malfeasant friends at Diebold!

The Diebold Voting Machine is programmed with cheats, bugs and easter eggs, which you can discover and read about by playing around with it. It demonstrates and simulates some alarming problems with real world electronic voting machines, with many surprising effects and subtle interactions:

Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log. When you put the voting machine into debug mode and clear the votes, you will see a dialog with the hillarious picture and story of Baxter the Chimpanzee. In your web browser, you can watch the funny monkey movie showing Baxter erasing the voting log! Now your Sims can monkey around with the electronic Dumbold Voting Machines, go bananas hacking the system, fling poo and corrupt the election results just like the pros!

Link (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bhutan: World's biggest book

Kottke's posted a great item about a presentation he caught at PopTech on the "world's largest book," called "Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom," which retails for $10,000 at Amazon. Says Kottke, "Turning the pages involved a short walk." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stealth Lessig-ing

First, there was Stealth Disco. Then, a dark variant emerged after Abu Ghraib -- the Stealth Lynndie. Now, the Stealth Lessig.

BoingBoing reader Kmr. Tupko in Poland says,

"Lawrence Lessig is present on the web in limited number of images that we've all become familar with -- there's Lessig by the columns, and several of Lessig behind a computer. They've become visual icons. But when I recently googled for Lessig photos, I found these: an entire image directory of this guy posing in these -- cult by now, apparently -- Lessig-like poses. It's like one of those contests, where they say, 'show the contents of your bag/purse,' except here one person just took it upon himself to 'strike a Lessig.' Very creative commons, remix spirit."

Link to a directory of photos showing some guy in Japan "Striking a Lessig." And lo, a meme is born.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:10:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Still the One" songwriter demands Bush campaign stop using his tune

The Bush re-election campaign has been using the 1970s hit "Still the One" without copyright clearance. The songwriter behind the tune wants that to stop.

"I was watching TV, and there all of a sudden was my song, my guitar playing, my voice coming out of the speakers," said the 56-year-old [John] Hall, still a working musician. Hall wrote "Still the One" with his then-wife, Johanna D. Hall. The two as well as surviving members of the band are supporters of Democratic Sen. John Kerry and don't want their work used to promote Bush's re-election, Hall said.

"I'm not just some guy that's stoned out and happened to write a song, and even if I were, it would still be a problem, because you should always ask permission to use the work," Hall said.

Link (Thanks, Rico, and Steve)

Update: BoingBoing reader Brian Carnell points us to a news article which says the Bush campaign claims to have acquired permission from a third-party licensing company.

"Out of deference to Mr. Hall's views, the song will no longer be played," Bush campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said. She said the song had been included in a catalog of music that the campaign's licensing company used to provide music for events."

Link to Detroit News story.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:52:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spoken Word Bananaphone

First a fellow named Andy Zebrowitz recorded himself doing a spoken-word interpretation of Raffi's childrens' song "Bananaphone", inna deadpan William-Shatner-styleee. Then, he posts this masterpiece online. Now, you can download it, and spew Red Bull through your nose laughing. Next, who knows -- some enterprising soul might just transform this file into spoken-word-Bananaphone ringtones. Or better yet, an extended hard trance remix.

Link to site with 622KB MP3 download. Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor)

UPDATE: Ferlinghettified beatnik remix here -- Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:39:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of snapshot zen: stingray smile

Lovely snapshot of a serene stingray from the Coney Island Aquarium [via flickr]. Link to larger, uncropped image. (Thanks, Ivy )

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:22:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Star Wars-inspired "Fallen" wins fan film contest

Hollywood Liberation Army tells BoingBoing, "

Fallen is a machinima music video created in Star Wars Galaxies about a tragic romance between a female Imperial officer and a male Rebel fighter using the song "Fallen" by Delirium. It has just won the Star Wars Galaxies Fan Film Fest 2004.

Link to movie download site, and link to more info on the project.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:06:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To Some Fool, Thanks for Everything! Love, Nigerian Spammer.

BB reader jon rahoi writes,

"Nigerian scammers now appear to be using webdate.com to troll for victims to save 'damsels' in distress. I've posted one damsel's emails leading to the pitch." Excerpt:

# "Hi dear i have added you to my chat friend right now i left an offline for you, hope to catch you on later lol benny and one more thing your physic i like it kool keep it up, lol."

# "Hi its nice to hear from you. Well i into sales of aretifacts and it carried me far and wide but this is my first visit to africa. I am currently in nigeria and its a lovely place. Well i have not visited china before would love to some day and dont worry when i come back i will tell you all about africa when we go out for dinner. Well is nice to hear from you. Lol."

# "Thanks for writing back. I am glad you did. Well i dont know where to start. Well i sold my paintings to a client and he has refused to pay up i have not seen him since the last 3 days i contacted the local police here and they cant seem to find him. I dont have enough money to pay for my hotel bills and settle my agent. Please i want your assistance. I need 450 dollars to add to the money i have so i can payup clear my name and come back home this week, thanks for your kind assistance. Lol benny."

[Jon continues:] "So the whole profile on webdate is just more Nigerian scammers trolling for desperate horny foreigners willing to save a damsel in distress.

"Is it just me, or does Nigeria sound like the bar in House of Games? Does David Mamet live there? Is it near Mos Eisley Spaceport?" Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:00:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New group blog on e-voting

Ed Felten says:

[We've launched] a new group blog on e-voting, from a group of leading experts on e-voting technology. Members thus far include David Dill, Ed Felten, Joe Hall, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Dan Wallach. The site's goal is to provide one-stop shopping for e-voting news and analysis, to the public and the press, on election day and thereafter.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:51:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

False hype and hope about hypo-alergenic GM cats?

As Cory posted below, Allerca is taking deposits for $3,500 cats genetically engineered to be hypo-allergenic. Caveat emptor though. New Scientist reports that geneticists and allergists doubt Allerca's claims.

It is probably possible to create cats that do not produce the most common protein allergen, says Thomas Platts-Mills, director of the Asthma and Allergic Disease Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, US. But he adds that cats produce many more allergens, and that blocking production of the protein could damage the cat's health.

Moreover, Allerca's claims that a technique called RNA-induced gene silencing can work in cats are "unfounded", says Greg Hannon at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, and author of the book RNAi: A Guide to Gene Silencing. So far the technique has been used only in mice.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:58:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Let's Get Ready to Snitch On Our Neighbors!

The Let's Get Ready to Rumble guy is paying cash bounties to people who snitch on their neighbors' "infringing" use of phrases like "Let's Get Ready to Gamble" and "Are You Ready to Rumble?"

Buffer Enterprises, Inc. now offers a cash bonus to those who report a corroborated unauthorized use [resulting in an actual recovery] of the "Let's Get Ready to Rumble,"(R) "Get Ready To Rumble"(R) or "Ready to Rumble"(R) servicemarked phrases ,any paraphrasing of these marks (including "Get Ready To Crumble,"(R) "Are Your Ready To Rumble?"(TM) "Let's Get Ready To Gamble"(TM)), or use of Michael Buffer's famous rendition of his copyrighted "Let's Get Ready To Rumble" recording. This bonus system applies to viable reports [resulting in an actual recovery] of unauthorized use of our servicemarks, copyrights or related rights in or upon TV, radio, the internet, print or in connection with unlicensed products or services such as T-shirts, toys, posters, or other merchandise.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:09:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart will destroy television!

Brian Dear evaluates Jon Stewart-and-co's latest appearance on C-SPAN and predicts that Stewart will destroy television!

The panelists took turns reading from their book, America: The Book. It's amazing how much coverage this book gets on C-SPAN. But these guys are not normal book authors, and they're not there to push the book. They're there to destroy TV as we know it.

I believe that Stewart and company are trying to revolutionize television by tearing down its conventional standards and practices. First, dress inappropriately, like a slacker. Stewart's starting to dress like Bill Murray in the early scenes of Stripes. Second, resort to language that's simply not said on television, certainly not C-SPAN. Speak as many four-letter words as possible, so the television audience members marvel in the fact that there are no bleeps like there are on The Daily Show, only occasional and entirely useless on-screen warnings that this program contains bad language. Duh!

Prediction: Stewart and company are going to get C-SPAN in big trouble, and somebody's going to try to fine or indict C-SPAN for breaking FCC rules. You watch: some congressman is going to take this one for a ride, and sick the FCC on them but good.

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:01:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hypo-allergenic GM cats available for pre-order

Allerca is taking pre-orders on genetically modified, hypoallergenic cats that do not excrete the allergenic protein in their skin and spit.

ALLERCA will produce the world's first hypoallergenic cats, and we expect the birth of these first special kittens in early 2007.

The cat allergen is a potent protein secreted by the cat’s skin and salivary glands. Removal of the allergen will not harm the cats in any way. The resulting hypoallergenic cats will improve the health and quality of life for millions of cat-allergy sufferers.

While some breeds of cats have been promoted as having less allergen than others, scientists that have tested this hypothesis have shown that all cats, regardless of breed, produce allergen. Allerca will produce the first cats that will not affect human allergies.

The first breed of hypoallergenic cat produced will be the British Shorthair, known to be friendly, playful and affectionate. Other popular breeds will follow soon.

Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:40:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Squid biomass exceeds human biomass

Squids thrive in a global-warming world, and the biomass of squid has now exceeded the biomass of humans. Link (via Plastic Bag)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:34:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steampunk mecha-wars

Steam Wars is an elaborate concept for a movie about steam-punk mecha-wars, an alternate history in which th 19th century is dominated by wars between giant, steam-powered killer robots. Link (Thanks, Andy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CodeCon call for proposals

CodeCon is the wicked-nerdy technology conference held each year in San Francisco, at which all presentations must include running code, preferably code that is available for download by the con-goers. They've just posted their call for proposals.

All presentations must include working demonstrations, ideally accompanied by source code. Presenters must be done by one of the active developers of the code in question. We emphasize that demonstrations be of *working* code...

Program Committee:
* Jeremy Bornstein, AtomShockwave Corp., USA
* Bram Cohen, BitTorrent, USA
* Jered Floyd, Permabit, USA
* Ian Goldberg, Zero-Knowledge Systems, CA
* Dan Kaminsky, Avaya, USA
* Klaus Kursawe, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, BE
* Ben Laurie, A.L. Digital Ltd., UK
* David Molnar, University of California, Berkeley, USA
* Jonathan Moore, Mosuki, USA
* Len Sassaman, Nomen Abditum Services, USA

Link (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:18:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Daily Show clips galore

Lisa Rein has just posted 13 clips from the Daily Show over the past couple weeks, including:

The Colbert Report
Ed Helm's DSpan
Flu Vaccine Shortage
Red Sox Winning The World Series
Walmart violating ancient graveyards in Hawaii
Ad for "America, The Book"
Opening bit of 10/20/04
Coverage of the the mudslinging and overexaggerating statements by Bush and Kerry during the last Presidential Debate
P-diddy etc. (Christina Aguilara - sp?) and their "Vote or Die" campaign.
"Stand and Choose" voting ads starring video game characters
Lewis Black on how the Shrub Administration continually wastes our tax dollars on extravagant purchases in the name of Homeland Security and $500,000 parties for the TSA.
The opening bit from 10-19-04
Messopotamia
Iraqi tourism board
Soldiers who refused to go on "suicide mission"
Bush saying that we will "not have an all volunteer army" and then being corrected by someone in the crowd.
Jon Stewart's comments on his Crossfire appearance.
Coverage of second presidential debate.
Drew Barrymore On The Daily Show
Richard Clarke On The Daily Show

Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5, Link 6

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:10:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, October 30, 2004

William Gibson on ObL tape

William Gibson's posted a blistering analysis of Osama bin Laden's latest video.

OBL today is probably a very satisfied, very optimistic man, and if he can skew the last-minute dynamic of the election in Bush's favor, he'll have cause to be all the more satisfied.

And that's the danger, that some crucial percentage of our dimmer, more reactive voters will flash back to 9-11 and the Bush of the bullhorn, the Bush buffeted with the heartbroken grit of Ground Zero, and vote for that -- childishly imagining that such a vote runs counter to the wishes and the needs of OBL, the bearded stickman, the cave-dwelling spider, our new Old Man of the Mountains. Player of the long game.

Link (Thanks, Jamie!)

Update: CJ point out that Gibson's had some second thoughts about this post

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:29:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rogue Taxidermists exhibit

The Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists is holding their first exhibition at the Creative Electric Studios in Minneapolis.

"The organization's mandate is to advocate the showmanship of oddities; espouse the belief in natural adaptation and mutation; and encourage the desire to create displays of curiosity."

And here's a letter from the National Taxidermists Association in response to a request for feedback on the exhibit:

If you are looking for approval for this so called"art", I am afraid you have come to the wrong place. Displays of wounded,bleeding or mangled animals is not in any form,"art" The members of the NTA are truly professional taxidermists and as such can be called artists,and most, if not all, abhor your desplays[sic].

You can surely be called a Rogue taxidermist.

Bill Haynes
NTA Board of Directors
Ethics Chairman
Vice President

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:05:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google desktop for OSX misreported by Reuters and others?

Following up on Google CEO Eric Schmidt's remarks at the Internet Anniversary event yesterday in LA, Sean Bonner says:

While I didn't take super detailed notes (...) notice how I didn't say "Google is releasing a desktop search for OSX!!!!" That's because he didn't say that. Well he sort of did, but not really, so you can understand my surprise this morning when Mac Rumors, MacDailyNews and Reuters are reporting otherwise. They are quoting him as saying "We intend to do it." What a spin!! That is so out of context it's not even funny.

First of all lets keep in mind here that it's 2004, almost 2005 and pretty much ANYTHING that is released for a PC will be released for a Mac, it's just a matter of time. We all know that, and it's not news.

The remark in quesestion was in response to someone asking about privacy issues of Google Desktop and a footnote to their question was if Google was planning an OS X version. The answer was "yes, and no" He went on to explain that because the way Operating Systems work so differently and how built in the Google Desktop is there's no way to just port it over to a different OS so it has to be redone from scratch so while they do intended to do it, it's not something that they are working on, or something anyone should expect soon.

That's how I recall Mr. Schmidt's response, too. Not at all the way it's being reported by Reuters -- and others, who weren't there, re-reporting the Reuters item (ok now my head's spinning). Schmidt also ended that reply by pointing out that as a matter of policy, Google does not "pre-announce" products.

Tim O'Reilly was the "questioner," and in a discussion forum on ArsTechnica he posts this response.

This is Tim O'Reilly. I'm the one who asked Eric the question at his talk about whether we'd expect a Mac version of Google desktop, and I have to say I didn't read his response at all the way the Reuters reporter did! He was fairly equivocal, saying that it was a hard problem, requiring a whole separate project, not just a port, because of the differences in the operating systems. He made no announcement of actual plans to deliver the product, or even that Google was actively working on it

Link to Tim's discussion forum post.

Link to Xeni's partial transcript of Schmidt's remarks.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:43:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fragdolls update -- group blog or astroturf campaign? -- UPDATE

Simon sez, "Thought you might be interested to know that I did some more digging into that Fragdolls link that someone sent in to you, and someone else pointed out was actually some pretty insidious stealth marketing." Link

Update: Emily Jane sez, "Another thing about the Fragdolls: They're BOOTH BABES. In addition to being sponsored by UBISoft, at the Penny Arcade Expo a few months ago, they were UBISoft's entire booth.

"While they try to adopt 'Just a bunch of girls that like video games' as their image, walking around and hearing 'PLAY VIDEO GAMES AGAINST HOT CHICKS!!!' all day definitly reduced the fun of this girl that likes video games.

"And while I realize that a bunch of chicks playing video games is going to be an event just because they're in the minority, the willingness of these girls to be the circus and make girls playing video games seem even LESS normal, totally contradicts what they claim they are all about."

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

Apple to iPod owners: "Eat shit and die" -- UPDATED

If you're an iPod user, you would have done well to have availed yourself of iPod Download, an OS X app that made it easy to move your music from your iPod to your Mac. Of course, Apple hated that poor little app, so it was sometimes hard to find, as Apple devoted expensive laywer-hours to shutting down all the sites that were hosting copies of it. Of course, there's more dough where that came from -- they'll just pass the cost on to you in your next iPod.

As it turns out, you're shit-outta-luck even if you managed to snag a copy. That's because Apple just devoted some expensive engineering hours to updating iTunes to version 4.7, with the "improvement" of breaking iPod Download. That's right -- Apple's spending money seeing to it that features are removed from your iPod. Thanks a whole lot, Apple.

Every time I post something like this, I get a deluge of mail that makes the same tired points, so before you bother, here's some pre-rebuttal:

• Apple didn't have any choice. If they don't play nice with the suicidally stupid record industry, the industry will stop supplying music for the iPod.

  So freaking what? Who's the customer here, me or Sony/BMG? And honestly, there may be some powerful bozon emitters in the halls of the RIAA companies, but does anyone really believe that the record industry will just take its ball and go home at this point? "Sorry, we're no longer making music available for the iPod anymore because Apple has refused to break your personal stereo to our specifications." Riiiight.

• Just don't run the update.

  Yeah, that works. Until they roll the iTunes update into an OS update, like they did the last time they broke iTunes and called it an upgrade.

What's the lesson here? Well, Apple's not on your side, even if you're an Apple customer. If you buy into a proprietary platform where the music industry gets a veto, you're scr0d. Every time you buy an iPod, you are financing legal and technical countermeasures aimed at taking away legitimate features that enable you to do more with your lawfully acquired music and hardware. Link

Update #1: Why it's irrelevant that there are other tools for synching your iPod

Update #2: How to un-cripple your copy of iTunes 4.7

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:39:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunted Mansion tombstone winner "burial" photos

Cary Sharp is the lucky soul who won the $37,500 charity auction for the right to have your own tombstone installed at the Disneyland Haunted Mansion graveyard. This weekend marked his "burial" -- and LaughingPlace has the story with pix.

At the stroke of midnight, Sharp was delivered to the gates of the "Haunted Mansion" in a black horse-drawn carriage, and was greeted by the Mansion's familiar trio of hitchhiking ghosts. He also received a one-of-a-kind miniature replica of the tombstone and a "Death" certificate of authenticity officially recognizing the addition to the attraction. His gravestone is located in front of a quintet of ghostly musicians who eternally perform in the attraction's memorable graveyard scene.

Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:37:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney sued by "inventor" of FastPass system

A man in Tennessee claims he came up with the idea for Disney's FastPass system, whereby one gets a ticket to come back to a ride later without queueing, and sent it as a suggestion to Disney. Disney wrote him a letter back telling him it was a dumb idea, and then -- he alleges -- they implemented and patented it. Now he's suing. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:37:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Group woman-gamer blog -- UPDATED

Fragdolls is a group-blog run by woman gamers. The entries alternate between tales of heroic gaming deeds and gripes about boys who borrow media and fail to return it -- gripping stuff! Link (Thanks, Nate!)
Update: James Everett sez, "you'll notice that Fragdolls is sponsored by UbiSoft, one of the largest publisher/developers around. While mentioning games they play they certainly don't do anything obvious like talk about strictly UbiSoft titles, and their favorite games lists include Nintendo titles like Zelda and Pikmin. But closer inspection reveals that they've tried SOCOM II and blogged about not liking it for one reason or another (mostly valid criticisms it looks like) while simultaneously talking about how much they can't wait for Ghost Recon 2, Ubi's competing military shooter title."

Update #2: Simon sez, "Thought you might be interested to know that I did some more digging into that Fragdolls link that someone sent in to you, and someone else pointed out was actually some pretty insidious stealth marketing.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:33:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Build your own Batphone

Step-by-step instructions for making your own light-up, buzzing, working Batphone with its own cake-dome -- killer! Link (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:25:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Printable Star Wars masks

Check out these downloadable, printable Star Wars Gen 1 masks reproduced from the 1983 classic, "The Star Wars Book of Masks." Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:14:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, October 29, 2004

Nintendo v. Suicide Girls flap immortalized in online comic strip

Penny Arcade features a funny comic about the happily-resolved Nintendo v. Suicide Girls flap. News of that now infamous lawyer-gaffe was first posted here on BoingBoing. Link to Penny Arcade comic, and links (one, two, and three) to previous BoingBoing posts on the topic.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:29:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sean Bonner's dispatches from 35th anniversary of Internet event

I'm sitting inside a UCLA auditorium, next to my friend Sean Bonner. He's been posting blog dispatches from the event all day. Since word got out ahead of time that there would be WiFi here but few electrical outlets, Sean even brought a long extension cord and a power strip to share juice with people. That's how cool he is. Here's a list of Sean's 35th Anniversary of The Internet Conference posts:

* Morning (Link): Bright Side: "Gorillas of the Internet," John Markoff, Gordon Bell, Henry Samueli, Patrick P. Gelsinger, Robert J. Aiken
* Session #2 (Link): Tim O'Reilly, John Perry Barlow, Dan Gillmor, Dave Patterson, Larry Press
* Lunch: (Link) Eric Schmidt and Leonard Kleinrock
* Session #3 (Link) -- The Young Side: The Indigenous Digital Generation. Alan Kay, Clay Shirky, danah boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, Xeni Jardin.
* Session #4 (Link): The Future Side: Pioneers and Visionaries. Bran Ferren, Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence G. Roberts

Link to event home.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:18:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese rock band cosplayers

Scott sez, "Elaborate, post apocalyptic fan-cosplay photos from outside a Tokyo (I think) concert of Dir En Grey. Costumes are mostly too unusual to describe, but gothic nurses, japanese nazis, pregnant schoolgirls come close for some of the pics." Link (Thanks Scott!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:42:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saddam statue leg up for auction

Jens Thiel sez: "A small German auction platform presumably has the left leg of the famous giant bronze statue of Saddam in Baghdad on sale, the CNN-one. Reverse auction price dropping, currently at 82 k euro. The auction is in English and German, there's loads of pics. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:28:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Air Force report on Teleportation Physics

Chris sez: "I subscribe to Steven Aftergood's Federation of American Scientist's Project on Government Secrecy 'Secrecy News' mailing list (that was a mouthful). It's an outstanding (and usually very dry) source of semi-classified material. Steven's been featured on The Daily Show and NPR's On the Media, among a lot of other media outlets. The following was the last entry on today's e-mail, dealing with Air Force research on psychokenisis and recommends further government experimentation to develop the USA's psychokenisis capabilities. It's a true story that I doubt Vonnegut could improve upon..."

The Air Force Research Laboratory has paid for and published a new study on "teleportation physics," referring to the disembodied transport of objects across space.

The author strives to distinguish his subject from the fictional Star Trek "transporter" concept, and notes that "we are still very far away from being able to ... teleport human beings (and even simpler biological entities such as cells, etc.) and bulk inanimate objects...."

But after fifty pages of opaque physics, he concludes with an endorsement of remote viewing, psychokinesis and spoon bending by psychic Uri Geller.

"During a talk that he gave at the U.S. Capitol building, Uri caused a spoon to curve upward with no force applied, and then the spoon continued to bend after he put it back down and continued with his talk," he reports.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:19:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transcript of Google CEO's remarks at 35th Internet Anniversary

I'm at the "35th Anniversary of the Internet" event in Los Angeles, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt is speaking with UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock. Here is a partial, rough transcript of Mr. Schmidt's remarks.

We allocate about 70% of our resources to our core business and 30% to "other" because we never know what that other will become. We also ask our employees to spend 20% of their time on exploration, and those tend to be complementary to our core.

Our agenda tends to be driven by a bottoms-up process not so much traditional strategic planning. Google is trying to solve the next problem not the last problem.

[ Question: Was it serendipity that made google what it became? ] I think the word is luck. The principles from which Google was built do exist in other indstries. Ours is a reproducable model, and others may end up reproducing it and solving other problems. We're just seeing the beginning of this.

Good management is not that complicated, it's about leadership. Some managers need to micromanage everything, but that doesn't produce creativity. If you can figure out a way to tell a story, that's how people learn. they have a beginning middle and an end. if you have the right kind of people and the right kind of values, that can work. The great thing about high tech is that labor is very mobile, and if you want to deal with other people, you are forced to deal with them as peers and equals.

There are many uses of the net that are not touched by Google. Peer to peer, and the majority of email traffic. It's very important that people work on internet monitoring, internet scaling, all of the next generation projects -- I don't think any single one is of dominant importance.

We're in a real time world where people who need to collaborate can do so instantly. That has a downside because evil people can collaborate quickly, as well as the good guys, but the overwhelming effect is very positive.

Software businesses, intellectual property businesses have good cashflow if they're run right. A friend who went to business school once told me the only rule you need to know is DNROOC. Do not run out of cash. For us the decision to go public was viewed as a neccesary thing but not something we needed for our operations. People were surprised about the fact that the decision to go public was such a last minute thing, which it was -- we made the decision hours before we filed. We then went through the whole process which was of course widely covered and entertaining in lots of ways. At the end of it, we flew back to our offices and went back to work. Following Monday we had a one hour biefing about what we felt we did right or wrong. We had one of the executives announce the "end of the IPO," and we haven't talked about it since.

The company is about end users changing the world, the good and bad things they're doing out there. It's not about the IPO.

Information on the internet has a very long tail (Ed. Note: referring to Chris Anderson's recent article in Wired.)There are very few things that the entire world is interested in at the same time. The vast majority of people out there are very much engaged in their own daily lives, in a local context very different than yours or mine.

The other thing to remember is that the average person does not want to debug their computer. We prefer instead the idea of a person typing something in and Google -- or someone else -- figuring things out for you. But very few things are organized around that principle of simplicity; we love and appreciate the complexity in technology but people using the internet really don't want that. When you see an ease of use breakthrough, it's such a wonderful thing.

Link to "35th Anniversary of the Internet" event site.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:44:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiny Humans update #5 -- hobbit hair found in cave?

The Age: "The discovery of hair in the Indonesian cave in which a new species of hobbit-sized humans was found has raised Australian scientists' hopes of obtaining their DNA. "If it's hobbit hair, we will be screaming with delight," said Bert Roberts, a member of the Australian-Indonesian team that surprised the world on Wednesday with its discovery that the previously unknown human cousins barely a metre tall had survived until at least 13,000 years ago on the island of Flores." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:41:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiny Humans update #4

Scientific American interviews Peter Brown, who led the startling discovery of Boing Boing's new mascot, the meter-tall human species Homo floresiensis that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 13,000 years ago.

"Looking at the distribution of small-bodied animals around the world today, they tend to occur in rainforests... And certainly that's where small-bodied humans tend to be found. We don't know much about the paleoenvironment on Flores yet, but everything's consistent with it being heavily rainforested back in the Pleistocene and probably heavily rainforested until agricultural humans arrived and started clearing the rainforest. The fauna is consistent with that sort of environment as well. Maybe there just wasn't a lot to eat. The island is only about 14,000 square kilometers, there's not a lot of it there. So I think the most likely scenario is that as part of their adaptation to [having fewer] calories living in a rainforest--and maybe thermoregulation as well--there was this long-term selection for smaller body size."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:41:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eyedropper contact lenses

Scientists at Singapore's Institute of Bioengieering and Nanotechnology have developed contact lenses that deliver eye medication to treat diseases like glaucoma. From New Scientist:

"If the drug is water-soluble, it will be trapped within a network of tiny inter-connected, water-filled channels in the material. If it’s water-insoluble, it will be trapped within nano-spaces in the polymer matrix, and slowly leach out into the channels. In contact with fluid on the eyeball, these channels open up and release the drug."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:26:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NASA image expert says Bush was wearing a device during debates

Dr. Robert M. Nelson is a NASA senior research scientist for NASA and according to Salon, an "international authority on image analysis. Currently he's engrossed in analyzing digital photos of Saturn's moon Titan, determining its shape, whether it contains craters or canyons." He used Photoshop filters to outline the bugle on President Bush's back seen during the first debate, and concludes that it is some kind of "device."

However, our President sheepishly admitted it was "a poorly-tailored shirt." Poor guy. We should send him some money for a shirt that doesn't have big rectangular pooch and a rope hanging from it. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:17:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Camera flash nanowelding

UCLA chemists have welded together nanofibers using an ordinary camera flash.

"I was very surprised," (professor Richard) Kaner said. "My graduate student, Jiaxing Huang, decided to take some pictures of his polyaniline nanofibers one evening when he heard a distinct popping sound and smelled burning plastic. Jiaxing recalled a paper that we had discussed during a group meeting reporting that carbon nanotubes burned up in response to a camera flash. By adjusting the distance of the camera flash to his material, he was able to produce smooth films with no burning, making this new discovery potentially useful."

The technique could also enable polyaniline nanofibers to be used as a solder of sorts, so that other polymers (plastics) can be welded together. Such an approach would be useful in the construction of myriad nanoscale devices such as chemical sensors and membranes. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:54:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eye Spirits

Paul Devereux wrote an interesting article for Fortean Times about macular degeneration, a common cause of vision loss for elderly people. Why is an eye disease interesting to forteans who study unusual phenomenon? Some sufferers experience amazingly strange hallucinations as the brain "fills in" what the eyes are missing.

"The research reveals that the hallucinations can last from a few seconds to several hours and can be of many things, both familiar and unfamiliar to the person viewing them. Hallucinatory content can include inanimate objects, people, animals, plants and bunches of flowers, trees, and complete scenes. Some people see strange things such as monsters, shining angels, or transparent figures floating in a ghostly manner through rooms and hallways."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:30:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anti magnetic ribbon site

This guy is irritated by those little magnetic stickers that look like ribbons. So he is selling anti-ribbons.

Why are you doing this?

We believe that there is strong possibility that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan might be a little far away or maybe even a little too busy to be checking out the pseudopatriotic magnet on the back of a 1986 Geo Metro as it drives down I-95 or sits in an Olive Garden parking lot.

Why do you hate America?

We don't hate America, we hate that people think slapping a stupid magnet on the back of their car has meaning. Mostly everyone in this country supports the troops and hopes they will return safely. Maybe you should be telling them directly in person, on the phone or in a letter and not driving around with a big magnetic banner you probably got at Wal*Mart that simply attempts to prove to everybody but the troops that you support the troops more than everybody else.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:12:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AOL attempts to shame customer from unsubscribing

Jim Hanas sez: "Thought you and your readers might get a kick out of this post, in which an AOL cust service rep -- as I was trying to cancel my account -- asked me what I used the internet for, and when I said I didn't want to answer any questions, he asked if I was 'ashamed' of what I used the internet for.

"John Ashcroft, is that you?" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:22:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Idiocy of the Do Not Fly List

From Ubiquity Magazine

Deirdre McNamer (how appropriate) wrote a story in The New Yorker magazine in October 2002 about a 28-year-old pinko-gray-skinned, blue-eyed, red-blond-haired criminal called Christian Michael Longo who used the alias 'John Thomas Christopher.' His alias was placed on the DNFL used by the Transportation Security Administration. He was arrested in January 2002 but his alias was not removed from the DNFL. On March 23, 2002, 70-year-old brown-skinned, dark-eyed, gray-haired grandmother Johnnie Thomas was informed that she was on the master terrorist list and would have special security measures applied every time she flew. Indeed, the poor lady found that she was repeatedly delayed by a scurry of activity when she presented her tickets at an airline counter, extra X-rays of her checked baggage, supplementary examination of her hand-baggage and extra wanding at the entrance gates. On one occasion she was told that she had graduated to the exalted status labeled, 'Not allowed to fly.' She discovered that there was no method available for having 'her' name removed from the DNFL; indeed, one person from her local FBI office dismissively told her to hire a lawyer (although ironically, he refused to identify himself). An employee of the TSA informed her that 'four other law-abiding John Thomases had called to complain.'

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:13:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iraq update on Bush website blocking non-US vistors

BoingBoing readers from Austria to China to Zimbabwe wrote in to follow up on our post (Link) about President George W. Bush's website blocking non-US visitors with an "access denied" response. One American reader said, "Yeah, well come November 2 I'm planning to give HIM an 'access denied' response with my vote." One BoingBoing reader who requests anonymity updates us the Iraq factor:

I'm the Chief Technical Officer for a satellite internet and network services provider with offices in Baghdad and Arbil, Iraq. We have over 500 installed sites in Iraq, all of them since the end of the war - I came over 15 months ago. Many of those sites are military, and I may be able to provide some new information for you. Yes, my customers are also blocked from accessing Dubya's site. I can't say I really care - I'm a flaming liberal and he lost my vote when his father was still president. But the act itself is particularly odious.

We resell satellite bandwidth on several different satellite providers, among them Hughes Network Systems, Europe, and Tachyon Networks, Europe. All of those customers are shut out. Most military users here have these choices for internet:

1. NIPRNET, the non-classified network the military uses for communications, including AKO (the military mail system).
2. Filtered, proxied systems provided by Segovia or KBR. Locked down by Websence and filtered against most "offensive" content.
3. No internet.
4. Paying personal money for a private connection.

In general, support units such as the US Army Corps of Engineers have access to military internet options. The USACE builds NIPRNET, after all. But the common infantry units have little or no access except what they can scrounge up from personal funds. We sell a lot of cheap end-user satellite systems to these units. These systems aren't cheap by US / terrestrial standards - a 512x128 kbit shared-bandwidth satellite connection is $275 per month, and it goes up - way up - from there.

Those with access to #1 or #2 probably have access to Dubya's site and anything else that attempts to segregate network access by geography. The rest of us will not.

Link to previous BB post on "Bush website blocks non-US visitors"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:12:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steven Johnson's next: "Everything Bad Is Good For You"

Steven Johnson, author of the wonderful books Emergence and Mind Wide Open, has just blogged soem info about his next book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You."

It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: that popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

I call this long-term trend the Sleeper Effect, after that famous Woody Allen joke from his mock sci-fi film where a team of scientists from 2029 are astounded that 20th-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. (In conversation, I sometimes describe this book as the Atkins diet for pop culture.) Over the course of the book, I look at everything from Grand Theft Auto to "24," from Finding Nemo to "Dallas," from "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos," from "Oprah" to "The Apprentice." There's some material about the internet, too, though less than you might suspect.

Link (Thanks, Steven!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nerd folksongs

Jonathan Coulton is a nerd folksinger who writes and performs anthemic, heartfelt songs about laptops, IKEA, fractals, and other geeky subjects. Link (Thanks, Rose!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:14:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Voter fraud against Democrats

This fraudulent letter was sent to a largely Democratic area in Ohio. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:43:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Instant death and a $200 fine

Steve Jurvetson snapped this great sign and posted it to Flickr -- how the hell do they collect? Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:40:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Internet Vets for Truth launch election-week download blowout

An anonymous tipster points us to the launch of an election-related download project organized by a group called "Internet Veterans for Truth." If you're familiar with P2P-politics, you get the basic idea -- though the projects are not related, and don't follow the same content-gathering process.

The site features excerpts (and some full-length downloads) from features including Going Upriver, Farenheit 9/11, Uncovered, a bunch of Jon Stewart and Daily Show clips, and Eminem's Mosh video.

Snip from the internetvetsfortruth.org site:

Subject: The Rumors On the Internets Are True!

The INTERNETS VETERANS FOR TRUTH have launched a new pre-election campaign, "Never Forget," at internetvetsfortruth.org in an effort to educate the voting public prior to the November 2nd election.

The website features documentary content highlighting the records of both George W. Bush and John Kerry. The Internets Veterans for truth invite you to view this documentary evidence as well as to enjoy the social and political commentary of Jon Stewart, Eminem, and others.

We know the rumors on the Internets are true. We invite you to visit and decide for yourself. And please, pass this on to our fellow Americans. Let's blogroll.

Link. Everything's free, natch.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:19:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on Australian national radio about 35th anniversary of 'Net

Earlier today I was a guest on the breakfast show of Australia's ABC Radio National, along with professors Leonard Kleinrock and Alex Halavais. The occasion: an event in LA tomorrow commemorating the 35th anniversary of the internet. (Event link). Here's the list of participants.

Kleinrock is from the Computing Sciences Department at the UCLA, and is credited with having sent the first email-type message in 1969. I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around how badass that is. I am planning to ask him to autograph my laptop tomorrow. Mr. Halavais is assistant professor at the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo. He studies really interesting stuff! Here's a snip from the show summary:

It's the internet's thirty-fifth birthday today. Like any baby, when it was born in 1969, the Internet looked nothing like the grown-up version of today which networks millions of computers. Back then, it linked just a handful of computers. It was the brainchild of researchers from the University of California who wanted to send data from one computer to several others at the same time.

On this day in 1969, a message we might now call an email was sent from UCLA to nearby Stanford University. The moment the 'send' button was hit, a new era of global communications began.

Link to archived radio show, with streaming sound online (in RealAudio only, sorry).

For those of you in Los Angeles tomorrow who plan to stopy by the event -- here's a tip, if you're hoping to blog-while-confabbing. Bring batteries! They'll have wifi in the house, but no electrical outlets in the room where the conference is taking place. Only 50 or 60 IPs available, too, so connectivity could be tough to access if a lot of bloggers show up. See you there!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:52:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK Creative Commons article

Becky Hogge has written an excellent piece in today's Guardian about the Creative Commons in honour of the upcoming Creative Commons UK launch.

On November 1, a group of new copyright licences will be released in the UK, arriving from the US under the umbrella of Creative Commons (CC). The project is the brainchild of Stanford University's law professor Lawrence Lessig, and the licences allow artists to move away from traditional copyright's "all rights reserved" towards a more digital age-friendly "some rights reserved". The different types of licence allow artists to choose which rights they wish to maintain. They could keep the right to exploit works for commercial gain, to veto derivative works or ask to be credited each time their work is reproduced. In turn, those encountering CC licensed works on the internet know immediately how the original artist feels about the use of that work without having to ring lawyers.

Link (Thanks, Becky!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:56:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Work on Brit Library's Free Software archival crawler!

Mark sez, "I run the web archiving programme at the British Library and I've just posted a tender for the development of a smart archiving crawler. The smart crawler is to be free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The project may be of interest to BB readers in the search, document classification and ranking, digital library, or archiving space."

The British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are embarking on a programme to archive resources on the World Wide Web in their respective national domains. To achieve this programme, the British Library as lead partner wishes to tender for a contract to multiple suppliers to provide development services and/or software technology for a Smart Archiving Crawler. This will comprise of a framework controlling and interacting with Heritrix, the Internet Archive's open source archiving web crawler, and modules which provide prioritisation capabilities using document thematic analysis and link weighting.

113k Word Link (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:54:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nintendo apologizes to Suicide Girls!

Nintendo sent the email below to the good people at Suicide Girls. Background here and here.

Hello,

We would like to apologize to you and to those who frequent the suicidegirls.com website for inadvertently contacting you about a fan posting on the website.

We know that many of our fans are old enough to make their own choice about what they want to view on the Internet. We value the support of our fans and we respect their decisions. The letter was sent as part of an ongoing Nintendo program to aggressively protect our younger consumers from the hundreds of sexually-explicit sites each year that use Nintendo properties to attract children. We are proud of our efforts in this area. Unfortunately, the site posting identified in our letter was targeted by mistake.

As a gesture of goodwill, we would like to offer you (and RuneLateralus) a free Nintendo video game system and game of your choice. (...)

In addition, we would appreciate it if you could provide us with contact information for RuneLateralus, or have him contact us directly, so that we may apologize to him. We would be glad to send him a game and system of his choice through you as well, since we do not have his contact information.

Sincerely,
Christie Hamilton
Nintendo of America Inc.
Consumer Service Department

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:19:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

What do George Lakoff and Jenna Jameson have in common?

Bonnie Powell points us to this incredibly odd story from the folks at Chelsea Green, the publisher of cognitive linguist George Lakoff's latest book Don't Think of an Elephant! (Previous BB posts about Lakoff here and here.)

Following reports that George Lakoff's political work Don't Think of an Elephant! had made the Booksense and San Francisco Chronicle paperback bestseller lists, Chelsea Green received word that the book had made #30 on the NY Times paperback list. We were ecstatic, but troubled to see that the book was listed with the wrong author (Howard Dean) and wrong publisher (Ballantine). When president and publisher Margo Baldwin called the Times to correct the information, she was told that the book was no longer on the list at all, as it had been reclassified as a How-To/Self-Help book.

The email exchange between Baldwin and the New York Times is funny, and sad. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:12:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage scary Halloween sounds on MP3

Terrifying (ly cheesy) sound effects from an old LP. Great stuff. Link (via PCL Linkdump)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:34:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homeland Security saves America by busting a toy store owner for legally selling a Rubik's Cube knockoff

Reinvigorated after spending $500,000 on a self-congratulatory awards dinner in which it handed out "lifetime achievement" awards, the two-year old Dept. of Homeland Security went after an extremely dangerous toy store owner who was selling a knockoff of a Rubik's Cube. We can all sleep a little more soundly tonight.

The next day, two men arrived at the store and showed Cox their badges. The lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube. She said yes. The Magic Cube, he said, was an illegal copy of the Rubik's Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

The whole thing took about 10 minutes.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that the Homeland Security agents had it wrong. The Rubik's Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on rival toy's trademark.

Link (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:06:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiny Humans update #3

Michael sez "There may be new impetus to visit Kerinci Seblat National Park in Indonesia. The Orang Pendek may be a living fossil - the same species as Homo Floresiensis, but be very much alive. There are still sightings of such "little people" even today, and none other than Fauna & Flora International, the worldâ€'s oldest conservation charity, is searching for the creature.

They have set up camera-traps in likely areas of forest or in areas where local people have reported sightings. So far the picture that will make world news has proved elusive and as reported sightings get rarer, the naturalists fear that if orange pendek does indeed exist it may be very close to extinction. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:56:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woodring-esque Salamander from old German kids' books

The only thing I know about these scans of pages from a German kids' books about a Salamander is that they are really beautiful and that they remind me of the work of cartoonist Jim Woodring. Link (via The Cartoonist)

UPDATE: Mark Lakata sez: "I saw your post on boing-boing. Those salamander cartoons were free leaflets given out with "Salamander" brand shoes. My mom used to buy them for me when I was young at the local German shoe store (in LA). You would get the cartoons for free. This was in the 70s. Note that there seems to be a big emphasis on the shoes....

Salamander is still in business. I bought a pair of dress shoes last year in Europe.

http://daddytypes.com/archive/2004/10/27/lurchi_needs_a_new_pair_of_shoes.html

http://www.salamander.de/index.cgi?action=frontpage::load_plain&section1=lurchi&template=index

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:53:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

More on the tiny humans who lived in Idonesia

Here are a few notes about my favorite story of the year - the discovery of a race of tiny, tool-making people with heads the size of grapefruits.

Many kind readers emailed me to tell me that these wee folk are not our "ancestors," as much as I wish that they were. Here's one email I received, from a gentleman named Dustin

I saw your Boing Boing post earlier on the tiny Indonesian hominids, and have a small quibble: the headline says "human ancestor" but these creatures, though apparently related to us, are not ancestors. If they existed 13,000 years ago, they'd have co-existed with modern Homo sapiens for at least 15-20,000 years, and with archaic H. sapiens for the 60-190,000 years before that. If anything, they're more like second cousins or something.

My friend Jenn Shreve forwarded an email from Marc Herman, who is writing a book on Indonesia:

I just read your friend Mark's posting on boing boing about the skeleton of the tiny people of indonesia. As it happens, I met one of the anthropologists in on this discovery several months ago at an airport in Indonesia. She was *bursting* to tell someone about it, so after I promised not to report anything, she went on and on about the discovery. It was an excellent way to kill a layover. But the really cool part, which you really should tell Mark, is that these tiny people were recent enough that they likely coexisted with humans who could tell stories; there are, to this day, myths among people in that part of Indonesia of distant human ancestors who had tiny, somewhat stupid tiny friends who lived in caves. There are also many remnants of tiny elephants on Flores island. It appears increasingly likely that this particular island, which is east of Bali, was isolated from predators, so over thousands of years everything that didn't need to defend itself became smaller and smaller, until it became the land of the tiny things. Normal sized people lived amongst all the tinyness. This is real. This actually happened.

  There's a lot of good stuff about the tiny people at Nature.com. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:49:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grand Theftendo - Homebrew port of GTA III to the 8-Bit NES

Derek sez: "Grand Theftendo is a port of Grand Theft Auto III for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is Grand Theft Auto III running on an 8 bit, 256 x 240 resolution, 2 bit colour x 2 bit palette, 1.79 Mhz system, written entirely in 6502 Assembly Language! It includes the entire Portland city!" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:13:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Explosives at Al Qaqaa were stolen after US occupation: photos

After two days of silence on the hundreds of tons of missing plastic explosives in Iraq, the President defended himself by stating that the explosives might have been removed before the US invasion. These photos seem to suggest otherwise. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:09:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Stranger's scariest Halloween costumes

Very scary Halloween costumes for kids based on current political themes.

The Littlest Prisoner at Abu Ghraib: So easy, so quick, and so terrifying!

Lyndie England (Candy cigarette optional.)

Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid: Add a burnt-cork beard and an electric match from the tobacconist, and your little terror is ready to fly!

Link (Thanks, Stephen!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:58:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Calling for volunteers to videotape voter intimidation

Video Vote Vigil wants people with video cameras to record instances of voter intimidation.

On November 2nd please join the army of volunteers who will keep an eye on our democracy. Volunteer here to submit video of disturbances outside polling locations. Enter your contact info and we will send you an email with more information. PLEASE NOTE: We are not asking people to videotape INSIDE polling locations. We want volunteers to monitor the intimidation where it happens -- on the streets outside the polling locations.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:39:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Economist endorses Kerry

A Kerry endorsement from one of the most unlikely sources imaginable. The Economist endorsed Bush last time around, and before that Dole. Link. (Thanks, Glenn)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:27:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickr client from Ecto creator

Adriaan Tijsseling, maker of the brilliant Ecto blog editor -- used by all of us who work on BB -- has just shipped a MacOS X app called 1001, which provides a slick desktop interface to Flickr, including your friends' photos, photo-strems matching your favorite tags, and an easy uploader. Link (via Joi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:41:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How not to save your marriage

A Wisconsin man tossed a live electrical wire into the tub while his wife was bathing, "hoping a near-death experience would save their marriage." From an Associated Press report:

William Dahlby said in court he was only trying to scare his wife the evening of May 9. He told jurors the wire was hooked to a "ground fault interrupter" designed to cut the electricity when the cord encountered water. His wife was not hurt.

Dahlby was convicted yesterday of attempted first-degree murder. Link (Thanks, C-Lo!)

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

Retinal display on display

My latest article for TheFeature is about University of Washington University Thomas Furness's Virtual Retinal Display, a system that paints a video image onto your eyeball with a laser beam.

"The small screens and narrow fields of view of mobile devices don't work well with the human vision system," Furness says. "When we first started talking about VRD, the idea was to create a system that requires very little power but can be connected to a PDA or cell phone to deliver a wide field of view with high brightness. For mobile computing applications where you want to overlay digital information on top of what you see, you need the luminance to compete with the outside world."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:03:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video Vote Vigil

BB pal Jon Lebkowsky says:

"Working with Texans for Truth and Mercury Campaigns, we're putting together a web site to gather videos and images of any disturbances and irregularities that might occur at polling places on election day. We launched yesterday with a QuickTime video of George Bush shooting the finger (though some just linked to the video). We aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented... We're hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we'll have video and photo records which we'll place online as close to realtime as possible.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:58:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update on "Kids who support Kerry threatened with expulsion"

Yesterday, we blogged about a school principal who allegedly threatened students who attended an on-campus Bush speech in Kerry tee-shirts with expulsion. Many of you wrote to say that you communicated with the principal above and that he says:

1. The Bush people rented the gymnasium, and the school was just enforcing their requirement that students not wear Kerry-supporting materials
2. The principal didn't threaten expulsion

I don't buy it: signing up to do #1, enforcing a ban on political expression, at a political event, in a political season, is a betrayal of an educator's duty. And anything a school administrator bans carries with it the implicit threat of discipline. One student reports being threatened with expulsion, the principal denies it. It may be that the principal didn't make the threat of expulsion, but telling students that it is forbidden to do foo implies that students who undertake foo will be punished somehow. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:37:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Collective lunar eclipse photos

Flickr users are using the "eclipse" tag to collect photos of the lunar eclipse from all over the world. Some are breathtaking. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:15:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dremel tool designed for pumpkins

Dremel, maker of the famed rotary tool that is the favorite of casemodders and hardware hackers, have released a special Hallowe'en rotary tool that is specifically designed for elaborate pumpkin carving. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gimli costume extraordinaire

This cosplayer's amazing Gimli-the-dwarf costume is documented here in a build-log that details everything from the construction of the armor to the facial prosthetic. Link (via Ftrain)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:01:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Homeless hygiene

Michael is composing a guide to comfortable homelessness, using a blog to do it. Here's his entry on personal hygiene without a home:

Don't like a dry shave? Nobody does. Buy yourself some generic sex lube. It's only a couple of bucks at Walmart or Target or, really, any drugstore. A little dab and a disposable razor and you can get a nice shave. Rub a thimbleful of water over your face and wipe off to finish. It may sound funny, and of course your razor is ruined unless you rinse it out right away, but this works very well. It's one of my favorite tricks.

A dab of sex gel will help you comb out your hair in the morning, too, and it disappears completely into the hair, as if it were never there.

For washing up, make my homemade, adult version of baby wipes in a bottle. First, find some hand and body lotion that has a scent you'd like to wear, buy some baby oil, and get some relatively scent free shower gel or shampoo. Pour a couple of teaspoons of each into a small water bottle, say half a liter. Maybe skimp a little on the baby oil and be a little generous with the shampoo. Fill the bottle halfway with warm water, cap it and shake to mix. Now take a napkin from your favorite fast food place, saturate it with the mixture, and give yourself a good wipe down. It takes the smell off, trust me. Add a bit of witch hazel to the mix if you like an astringent quality.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:58:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Halloween handcrafted pipes

A reader writes, "Trever Talbert hand crafts pipes. Every year, he makes one or two one-offs for Halloween and auctions them off. Past years' are here. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MMO anthropologists rumbled by MMO players

BuhBuhCuh sez,

Students at the University of Pittsburgh are taking a class on "writing and reading practices in digital environments." This week, they are looking at a MMO called Second Life, and started a discussion on the ethics of researching players - do you tell them you are researching, or does that compromise the research. (A good terra-nova thread).

The 'net works in funny ways, and sure enough, a student told a SL user about the blog. Now the users of Second Life are in an uproar about the ethics of the students researching them without asking first. (Not to mention that the fairly intellectual Second Life community wasn't happy about the insinuations that they are all crazed stalkers.)

There is a long thread in the Second Life forums but registration is required.

Link (Thanks, BuhBuhCuh!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:50:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's interview with GMU's English Dept paper

My interview with Carnegie-Mellon's George Mason University's English department newspaper, English Matters, is online!

On the one hand it was that, as a science fiction writer, we're supposed to be looking towards the future, and it's pretty clear to me that the future involves electronic text. It's very hard to imagine that we'll read fewer electronic words or more paper words as the years tick by and so I wanted to be involved in that practice; I wanted to be one of the people who was a pioneer in that practice, because I'm a science fiction writer and it's what I should be doing.

By the same token, I was pretty sure whatever the future of electronic text looked like it wouldn't be distorted in a way that was intended to maximize the degree to which it resembles traditional, non-electronic text – which is what DRM technology does. The objective of DRM technology is to make bits act like atoms. To embrace that as the future of electronic text is to say that the Luther Bible will finally give us a proper Protestant Reformation once they can make the Gutenberg press run on fetal calfskin instead of paper, because everyone knows that a real Bible is on fetal calfskin. Once they can be sure that the Luther Bibles are only printed in Latin and read by priests, then we'll have a proper Protestant Reformation underway, and not until then.

Link (Thanks, Aaron!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:48:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Votergates: Documentaries on electronic voting's failings

Brewster Kahle points us to two excellent, full-length, Creative Commons licensed documentaries on the perils of electronic voting. Confusingly, they are both called "VoterGate."

Votergate 1: "This is an action documentary, following a young team on their nationwide investigation of the current problems with our voting systems and elections procedures. Fast-paced and engaging, this documentary reveals the shocking story of how touchscreen voting systems are highly susceptible to hacking and how these systems are being implemented across the country without the proper checks and balances to insure accuracy and accountability"

Votergate 2: "This film is an investigative documentary uncovering the truth about new computer voting systems, which allow a few powerful corporations to record our votes in secret. But the film is not just a warning. It strongly concludes that elections are harder to defraud when voters turn out in big numbers. This documentary is designed specifically to help viewers navigate past the fear and spin already being thrown at this critical issue." Link to the first movie, Link to the second movie

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:43:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

For sale: action against bloggers

A PR company is selling services "to take action against bloggers!"

"(PR client) is a market intelligence and media analysis services firm. (PR client) is working with F1000 companies who are using our services to Manage and Monitor Digital Influencers (such as blogs, message boards, user groups, complaint sites, etc.) as an intelligence and threat awareness tool. (Person's name), CEO could talk to you about 'What F1000 Companies are doing to take action against bloggers' and 'How companies are taking steps to protect their corporate reputations from bloggers/digital influencers.'"

Wow, I guess PR really is the opposite of blogging. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Five years' blog-posts in a single textfile

Tom Coates has hit his fifth bloggaversary, "five full years of random plasticbag.org posts - 4175 of them in fact, plus 1517 links in the linklog (before I moved over to using delicious to manage them in the last couple of weeks). In terms of the non-linklog posts alone that works out at over two posts a day, each and every day of each and every week, of each and every month, of each and every year since November 1999...I've written in excess of 1.1 million words over the last five years. To put that in perspective, English versions of the Bible have only around 750,000 words in them. I've written a bible and a full third of a sequel."

Here's the provocative notion: "there must be any number of ways to visualise that data or explore it or rip it apart or whatever. So here's the dump: Every full post made to plasticbag.org over the last five years."

Boing Boing's fifth is coming up in January -- we'll have about 17,000 posts by then. Maybe we'll do this too! 7.4MB Textfile Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:35:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush's one-finger salute

Here's a clip of GW Bush in classic form as he prepares to be videotaped. Link (Thanks, Nick!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:24:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nintendo lawyergram to Suicide Girls -- UPDATE

Following up on earlier news today about a hilariously clueless cease-and-desist from Nintendo's attorneys to softcore website Suicide Girls -- the implications of which are as stupid as they are far-reaching -- BoingBoing reader Josh says,

Hi Xeni, I called the S.F. and the Seattle offices of the law firm representing Nintendo here, Perkins Coie. They not only seem to not know about this, they can't even look at it because their firewalls won't allow them to get to porn sites. (Ed note: BWAAHAHAHAHAH!)

I've emailed someone in their offices the posts so I expect this'll get cleared up inside a day or two.

Link to previous BoingBoing post with full text of the laughably logic-lacking lawyerletter. I've known some of the partners at Perkins Coie in the past -- sharp, tech-savvy, forthright folk. I can't imagine this silliness will go too far.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:16:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Conservative Sinclair Media Group tied to Porn?

Sinclair Media Group, the broadcasting conglomerate which famously aired an anti-Kerry smear program last Friday, reportedly has links to the adult biz.

Sinclair is ran by David Smith, who in the mid-1970s was a partner in a company called Cine Processors, according the Los Angeles Times, which cites public records and a former partner in the company as sources. David E. Williams, Smith’s partner in the business, told the Times that Cine Processors’ sole business was the development of 8mm pornographic films.

Link to AVN article, which refers to an LA Times story: Link, site reg. required. (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:13:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian TV transgressivist TV show

Nerve is a new Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show featuring short clips on outre and transgressive subjects, like scrotum--waxing, grafitti writing, and wearing a burkha. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:58:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Portrait-murals made from dominoes

Domino Artwork has downloadable PDFs explaining how to make large portraits of Abe Lincoln and MLK out of 12 sets of double-nine dominoes. Link (Thanks, Bob!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:38:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Appropriation-friendly library opens in San Francisco

Rick sez,

We've built an appropriation-friendly library in San Francisco and are now welcoming visitors.

The Prelinger Library is an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, print ephemera and government documents, located in downown San Francisco, California, USA.

Though libraries live on (and are among the least-corrupted democratic institutions), the freedom to browse serendipitously is becoming rarer. Now that many libraries have economized on space and converted print collections to microfilm and digital formats, it's become harder to wander and let the shelves themselves suggest new directions and ideas. Key research libraries are often closed to unaffiliated users, and many libraries keep the bulk of their collections in closed stacks, inhibiting the rewarding pleasures of browsing. Despite its virtues, query-based online cataloging often prevents unanticipated yet productive results from turning up on the user's screen. And finally, much of the material in our collection is difficult to find in most libraries readily accessible to the general public.

Most important of all, people wishing to copy library holdings for research and transformative use often face difficulties in making legitimate copies. Since the act of quoting and recontextualizing existing words and images is indistinguishable from making new ones, we think it's important for libraries to build appropriation-friendly access into their charters, and we're trying to take a big first step in this direction.

Link (Thanks, Rick!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:34:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Doom 3 casemod

This Doom-3-inspired casemod is completely excellent, from the glowing red windows to the realistic fake rubble around the base. Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:28:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiny Human Ancestor Found in Asia

Yow! This is the best thing I've read all year. National Geographic reports that "Scientists have found fossil skeletons of a hobbit-like species of human that grew no larger than a three-year-old modern child. The tiny humans, who had skulls about the size of grapefruits, lived with pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons on a remote island in Indonesia as recently as 13,000 years ago." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:56:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

God Hates Rags

It's all a url pun on the infamous "godhatesfags.com." BoingBoing reader Alex K. says, "The site came about as a part of the short film hosted on the site, 'Felt: Tearing the Fabric of America.' The short film is a damn funny mockumentary replacing the focus of ire and derision from homosexuals to puppets. Down with the Felt Agenda! Adam and Eve, not Adam and Sleeve! Jim Henson has been in HELL for 14 years, 5 months and 11 days ! " Link to godhatesrags.com, and link to movie. Actually, God Hates Rather a Lot of Things: Link. Here's a particularly promising url: Link (Thanks, Wayne Correia!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:46:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nintendo to sue SuicideGirls?

UPDATE BELOW

No, this ain't The Onion. But it is ridiculous. Suicidegirls founder Sean says:

I got this email this morning from the law firm that represent Nintendo. They are claiming that the member RuneLateralus listing Zelda and Metorid as his favortie video games in his profile is an infringement on Nintendo's intellectual property. I enjoy an ice cold coca cola on a hot day. Do you think Coca Cola is going to sue me for posting that?

Remember, kids, lawyers are evil and all they want to do is figure a way to bill you more of their time. Nintendo is actually paying these people to threaten me over RuneLateralus favorite video games listing on his profile. What a bunch of morons.

Link to SG blog post with full text of Nintendo nastygram. (Ed. note: SuicideGirls is a sponsor of BoingBoing)

UPDATE: Link to update post

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:32:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

President Bush's website now blocks non-US visitors

UPDATED.
BoingBoing reader Stef was among many to alert us to news that as of Monday morning, "George W. Bush's website now blocks all non-US traffic. Wonder how the US citizens living/working overseas feel about this?" Link to BBC report (which references BoingBoing as a source). The server reply is "Access Denied. You don't have permission to access 'http://www.georgewbush.com/' on this server."

Reader Daen de Leon points to the Netcraft report here: Link

Reader Supi in Finland says, "Guess Bush really hates us foreigners. Finnish news article here. In brief: GWB's publicist turned media to ask questions from Bush's internet campaign manager Michael Turk, who never bothered to reply. You can of course access the site via a proxy, but that's little bit too complicated for most of the people. Well, at least we are left with this "mirror" of Bushs site -- georgewbush.org (brought to you by whitehouse.org -staff). And johnkerry.com works just fine from Europe."

Reader Marco Montemagno in Italy says, "On this page I uploaded a screenshot [of what happens when I try to access the Bush website."] Link

Reader Michael Maas asks, "Can US soldiers in Iraq access GeorgeWBush.com?" [Ed note: I'd assume so, if they use military networks rather than regionally-managed ones -- but I'd welcome an authoritative answer.] See update below.

Canadian reader Anne Galloway says, "Just to let you know there is no problem accessing Bush's site from Canada." And Tarik in Barbados says, "You know can access Bush's site from Barbados no problem, including that awful Kerry flash game." Reader Tom Biro adds, "I work for a company based in Germany, but I am working (and have lived - forever) in New Jersey - since our whole network proxies out of Germany, I'm unable to visit this website. I imagine I'm not the only person actually here in the States having this problem. The number of expats this affects is probably pretty huge. "

Swiss reader Guido says, "The ISP behind georgewbush.com seems utterly incompetent. The following two links work just fine from Switzerland: https://georgewbush.com/, and http://65.172.163.222/. The 'normal' homepage, however, doesn't work." Thanks, Guido. It must be hard work, keeping up with all those internets!

Dave Cross says, "To counter the barring of georgewbush.com someone has set up a http://georgewbush.co.uk -- which is just a redirect to michaelmoore.com."

UPDATE: Can US servicemen and women, reporters, and contractors in Iraq access georgewbush.com? Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Iraq, and he tells BoingBoing: "I just tried. Access denied." Some US readers with enlisted friends and relatives stationed overseas echo that. Reader John J. says, "My sister's stationed in Germany; she tried it and got that 'access denied' response." But an enlisted reader requesting anonymity says, "I am a Lt Col serving in Northern Iraq - all of us serving here are on .mil domains - we have no problem getting to the site."

Reader Jim in Germany says, "It is probably done by this tool: Akamai EdgeScape. This is how it works -- Link. And this link shows you the way how visit it anyway ;) -- Link. My article in my blog (in German, sorry) Link." And Jason in the UK says, "This is the link to the origin server that Akamai uses to pull in content to the network. This link is still accessible to me in the UK."

Joi Ito has more: Link. No official word on why from the Bush camp, but internet monitoring firm Netcraft said "the pattern of traffic to the website suggests that the block was not due to an attack by vandals or hackers."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:38:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To do in NYC tonight: Art-hacked Voting Booths

BoingBoing pal Cameron Sinclair says:

"50 artists were given Votomatic voting booths from the 2000 Florida election. Naturally they fucked with them. Tonight they will be auctioned off in New York City.

"Participating designers and artists include David Byrne, Christo, Frank Gehry, Milton Glaser, Hugh Hardy, Maira Kalman, Richard Meier, David Rockwell, Stefan Sagmeister, Ed Schlossberg, Robert A.M. Stern, Brian Tolle, Yeohlee Teng, and Diane von Furstenberg."

Link to details on Benefit Reception and Silent Auction - Wed, Oct 27.

Shown here: SIT ON THIS, designed by Tucker Viemeister, Kai Williams, Philip Refior, and Silas Warren of Springtime USA. Materials: Pink corduroy, foam rubber, and iron-on patches. “The abstract form of the Florida voting booth reminded us of a chair. We shortened the legs, made a corduroy slipcover, and BINGO! It’s almost a proverbial La-Z-Boy. To wake up the complacent citizen, we wrote on the seat: Do Not Rest Until Your Vote Is Counted.”

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:25:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wedding in Star Wars Galaxies

There have been many weddings in gamespace before, but this service in Star Wars Galazies -- documented in loving high-resolution on this page -- takes the cake. A beautiful service, a honeymoon suite with black satin sheets, and Vaseline on the lens as the couple moves to virtually seal their vows. Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:20:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hipster "VOTE" e-cards

BoingBoing pal Lynda Keeler says:

"Hipstercards features dozens of designs contributed by digital artists and graphic designers. The cards are free, easy to send and wildly creative in how they incorporate the 'Vote' message. The beauty of these eCards is that they can quickly travel from person to person -- so they can cycle beyond your initial circle of friends and reach people who may not be as committed to voting and are in critical states."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:10:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sprint Says Treo 650 WILL Support Bluetooth Dialup

Following up on this previous BoingBoing post, Mark Hedlund says,

Earlier this week BoingBoing linked to my blog post about Bluetooth being disabled on the new Treo 650 for laptop dialup. I got a note this morning from Sprint PR saying that they do plan to support laptop dialup over Bluetooth on the Treo 650. The phone will ship without it, but they will release a software patch to enable support -- no firm release date given.

Link. And here is my response: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:07:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Happy 10th birthday, internet banner ads -- and HOTWIRED

BoingBoing reader Oivvio Polite says, "AdLand celebrates the banner ads tenth birthday, showing the first banner ad ever and AT&T 'you will' banner, and the commercials from 1994 that go with it. The banners turned ten years old October 25 2004." Link

And Wired News Editor Kourosh Karimkhany says, "BTW, the first site to run that ad (actually, to inspire AT&T to create those ads) was Hotwired. As it happens, today the ol' timers are getting together for the 10th anniversary of Hotwired."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:19:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Danger to Mac users: "Eat shit and die"

Joel sez, "Check this out: A group of developers built an OSX iSync client for the Sidekick II, then didn't get approved by Danger/T-Mobile, meaning Mac users are effectively cockblocked from syncing because of the locked-down nature of the platform."

I publicly apologized last year for recommending the Sidekick to people. Danger lied to the press and its customers about the platform, then went on record saying that it intended to sell its customers out to media companies.

Now it's screwing over Mac users who want to have a means of migrating their own data off their devices. If you do business with Danger after all this, you need your head examined. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:48:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mario-playing robot

Check out this awesome Mario-Bros-playing Lego robot -- it's a set of articulated Lego arms that press the buttons on a NES controller in a preprogrammed sequence that completes the first level of Super Mario Brothers. Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:13:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Super Mario Brothers on Ice video

Gerry sez, "This is easily the most surreal thing I've seen this morning so far. It's an old Super Mario Brothers...on Ice special from apparently ABC from I'd guess about 1988. Hosted by Jason Bateman and Alyssa Milano. You have to watch this." 14.9MB Quicktime Link (Thanks, Gerry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:10:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kids who support Kerry threatened with expulsion -- UPDATED

Kids at Richland Center High School in Richland Center, WI got a chance to meet George W Bush during an official visit. However, any student who turned up wearing a pro-Kerry pin, hat or shirt was threatened with expulsion.

Here's the contact information for the school officials, who have betrayed the trust we put in them as educators to teach democratic fundamentals, like open debate, dissent, and freedom of expression.

Richland Center High School
23200 Hornet High Rd
Richland Center, WI 53581
Phone: (608) 647-6131

Here’s the principal:
John Cler
608-647-6131 x1590

Here’s the local superintendant of schools:
Rachel Schultz
608-647-6106

Here’s the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction:
1-800-441-4563

Here’s the state superintendent:
Elizabeth Burmaster
state.superintendent@dpi.state.wi.us

Link

Update: Many of you wrote to say that you communicated with the the principal listed above that that he says:

1. The Bush people rented the gymnasium, and the school was just enforcing their requirement that students not wear Kerry-supporting materials
2. The principal didn't threaten expulsion

I don't buy it: signing up to do #1, enforcing a ban on political expression, at a political event, in a political season, is a betrayal of an educator's duty. And anything a school administrator bans carries with it the implicit threat of discipline. One student reports being threatened with expulsion, the principal denies it. It may be that the principal didn't make the threat of expulsion, but telling students that it is forbidden to do foo implies that students who undertake foo will be punished somehow.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:52:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rolex's dumbass lawyers threatening lists receiving fake-Rolex spam

Fantastic TidBITS article about Rolex's moron lawyers sending a cease-and-desist letter to John Gimore for hosting the archive of a mailing list that includes a spam for fake Rolexes.

Since the FreeS/WAN list is archived on the Web, Rolex Watch U.S.A., Inc. (remember Rolex? It's an article about Rolex) found the post in searches for the counterfeiters of Rolex watches. It's obvious to anyone over the age of 13 (and probably lots of people under that age) that the spam appearing in the FreeS/WAN archive is something that happened to the FreeS/WAN list, not something that the FreeS/WAN list intentionally propagated. It was an accident, and an unfortunate one at that. But obvious though this is, a group of highly paid attorneys hired by Rolex couldn't figure this out and sent a cease-and-desist letter (undoubtedly accompanied by twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one) to John Gilmore telling him that, as the person who registered the freeswan.org domain, he could be liable for damages up to $1,000,000 for posting content that violated the Rolex trademark, promoted counterfeiting, and diluted Rolex's intellectual property rights. Now that's adding injury to insult! First spam makes it through to a list you run, and then you're threatened by lawyers because of it.

Link (Thanks, Henry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:17:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Caseless casemod

Now this is a casemod: the components are suspended on old Cat-5 cable and coat-hangers, floating free in the air; it's like hydroponics for PCs. A caseless mod! Link (Thanks, Zed!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:14:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tube-amps in chrome and beauty, hand-built and gorgeous

Electron Luv's hand-built tube-amps are works of art. Fantastic stuff. Link (Thanks, Rich!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:12:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fahrenheit 9/11 free to download

Marc Perkel sez, "I'm distributing Fahrenheit 9-11 on my web site. I spent $2000 to buy 100mb line for 2 weeks before the election. If you haven't seen it - take a look and pass the link around." Link (Thanks, Marc!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:08:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Modesty hacks for fashion-conscious Mormon youth

Jen magazine offers tips for fashion-conscious young Mormons who want the latest styles, but don't want to show off their midriffs.

Fashion Fixes
Jeans too low?
Shirt Too Short, Sheer or Low Cut? Pants Too Low?
Skirt too short? Pants too low or tight?
Can't Find Jeans That Cover Your Stomach?

Answers to these perplexing problems can be found here. Link (via Growabrain)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:02:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mysterious hums heard round the world

The always fascinating Things Magazine has a terrific entry about strange hums that have confounded authorities and hapless citizens for years.

More on hums, which some have dubbed the Taos Hum, 'a low-pitched sound heard in numerous places worldwide.'

So what is the Taos Hum? Spurred on by complaints that the 'Bristol Hum' (which has driven at least one person to suicide) was caused by faulty gas pipeline equipment, British Gas undertook an investigation, canvassing 33 hum sufferers. Of these, 80% were found to have hearing problems, but 20% were genuinely hearing something. Further investigation found that the noise was actually originating from a number of distant sources, including distant machinery, and were 'being amplified by the geometry of particular rooms' in the sufferers' houses.

Related, the concrete sound mirrors on the South Coast, designed to listen in for fleets of approaching enemy bombers in the days before radar.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:03:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Howard Stern v. Michael Powell on radio show call-in line

BoingBoing reader douglips says,

This morning, Ronn Owens interviewed Michael Powell on KGO radio in the bay area. About 15 minutes after starting the interview, Howard Stern called in. Fur flew.

ASX Link, Real Audio link, and MP3 Link (thanks Erik) Howard kicks in at 32:20 or so into the streams.

Update: BB reader cowicide says, "I noticed your new mp3 download is pretty huge for most people. This might help people out who aren't on broadband: Small (680KB) file, edited to just air Howard's part of the show. Link." Thanks, cowicide!

Update 2: Link to CNN story, and Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine blog says, Here's a transcript of the Howard Stern v. Michael Powell confrontation: Link." .

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:06:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iPod photo

Gizmodo's got the details on the new color iPod Photo. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:31:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Battelle 1000th post on Searchblog

John Battelle 1000th post (congratulations!) on his Searchblog is a great summary on Mary Meeker's "Update on the Digital World."

Meeker: ...And if there are hundreds or thousands of thought leaders and motivated, interested parties on the Internet with the ability to publish news or insights into any number of local or global issues, then it is safe to say that these blogs often become both the first source of news, a vital proving ground for authors and a source of potential community for other interested parties. For example, you’re probably going to get far more Boston Red Sox specific-content from a blog about the Red Sox made by a die-hard fan than you will from a random sports page, especially if you’re after opinions and community.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:21:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

new poster from Eboy: Superbroncobattle

Eboy, a group of isometric pixel wizards, has created a new poster titled "Superbroncobattle." The detail shown here is just a sample of the entire image, which will kick your eyeballs and leave bruises. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:14:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The American Conservative chooses Kerry over Bush

Chris sez: The American Conservative magazine, headed up by Pat Buchanon, has come out in favor of Kerry by coming out against Bush:

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal -- Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it -- and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

Link

UPDATE: Anonymous sez: If you look closely, you'll notice that their editorial staff was split and so they each did a seperate endorsement. Among the staff, they pretty much endorsed everyone from Bush to Badnarik to (shockingly enough) Nader. To say they endorsed Kerry is accurate, but also very misleading. One editor endorsed Kerry, the rest endorsed others.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:55:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

JG Ballard quotation book

I'm eagerly awaiting the release next month of JG Ballard Quotes: Does The Future Have A Future?--a pocket-sized book of profound and mind-bending JG Ballard-isms. My all-time favorite fiction writer, Ballard is the prophetic British novelist behind such dark, twisted, noir masterpieces as Crash, Concrete Island, and Cocaine Nights. The new book of quotations, published by our counterculture chronicling friends at RE/Search, is illustrated with photographs by Ana Barrado, Charles Gateweood, and others.

"The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology." --JG Ballard

Your best bet is to order the book directly from RE/Search! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:02:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BoingBoing endorses John Kerry for President

You may have noticed that the BoingBoing masthead looks a little different today. We've added a link to Apple "Switch" ad director Errol Morris' videos depicting former Bush supporters who will vote for Kerry in 2004. We've also added a banner for moveon.org.

When Mark first launched the BoingBoing weblog, it began as a sort of publicly-viewable personal scrapbook of "wonderful things." More than four years later, with four more participants added to the mix, that is what this project remains.

It may seem odd for a scrapbook to endorse a presidential candidate. But Mark, Cory, Pesco, John and I -- the people who keep this scrapbook alive -- share the conviction that John Kerry is the candidate best suited to lead America for the next four years. And we want you to know why.

In recent days, a growing number of news organizations have posted eloquent endorsements for Kerry. Some of them are particularly suprising, because they come from such unlikely sources. We encourage you to read them, and consider their content.

For us, the choice for Kerry involves simple things. Justice, liberty, privacy, transparency. Freedom of speech, thought, and technological expression. A woman's right to choose. Equal access to health care, education, and economic opportunity for all. The rule of law, at home and abroad. Peace. The enduring value of the American Constitution.

These are wonderful things. The Bush administration has proven both inability and unwillingness to protect them. In 2004, Kerry is the one.

We urge all eligible BoingBoing readers to exercise their right to vote in this election. Democracy is a wonderful thing. It won't survive without your participation.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:38:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Printer cartridges aren't copyrighted works

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to break software locks. Under that theory, Lexmark sued a competitor, Static Controls, for making compatible printer cartridges because refilling the cartridges necessitated resetting the cartridge software, and doing that meant breaking the lock that intended to keep you from refilling your cartridge. Get that: they claimed, basically, that the printer cartridge was a copyrighted work, and that by refilling it, you were pirating it.

Anyway, this is so much bullshit, it makes your head spin. And as of today, the appeals court agrees: Lexmark can't use the DMCA to prop up its business-model of charging you a 1000 percent markup on its inkjet carts. Neener, neener, neener. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:05:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Glucoboy

Designed for children with diabetes, Glucoboy is a blood glucose meter cartridge for the Nintendo GameBoy. From an interview with inventor Paul Wessel, founder of Guidance Interactive Healthcare:

"My son Luke was diagnosed at age three with Type 1 (diabetes). At about age six Luke began losing his glucose meter way too often. But he knew exactly where his GAMEBOY was, even if it was under the sofa. So I thought - Why not combine the two devices into one."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:01:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jungle Cruise skippers get their guns back

Disneyland's Jungle Cruise skippers have long been the bull-goose studs of the park: Walt's favorites, these castmembers got to fire actual blanks from a real pistol at a (fake) hippo and tell bad jokes about it. Sure, from time to time one would drop his gun in the drink and they'd have to get the frogmen to dredge the firearm back up before they could restart the ride, but damn, it was worth it just to have a real pistol in the hands of a 17-year-old with a bad sense of humor. Then they took the guns away -- shooting at hippos was deemed inappropriate. Now, Disney's embarked on a quest to get back to its roots now, and they're giving the Jungle Boat skippers their guns back.

Giving the Jungle Cruise skippers their guns back is what seems to have delighted visitors the most, however.

"At least once a week somebody would get off the boat and say, `Hey, what happened to the guns?'" said Ribble's daughter, Sherri, one of the ride's operators.

Now, she says, people burst into applause when she opens fire.

Link (via Waxy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:59:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bad restaurant art HOTORNOT

Last year, I found myself in a restaurant with Johannes from Monochrom, a cool techno-art collective in Vienna. Johannes, espying a vile painting on the wall, began to photograph it and discuss it learnedly as it fit within the pantheon of bad restuarant art -- he was, it turned out, a connaisseur.

No you can share his passion. The Monochromniks have put up a hot-or-not style site for posting your photos of dreadful digestive aids. The next time you find yourself looking at an eatery painting that looks like it came free with the cheap chrome frame, snap a shot, upload it it and share. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:53:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kerry's haunted retreat

The Times Online has dug up the spooky secret history of John Kerry's Rocky Mountain retreat, a barn that Teresa Heinz Kerry's former husband imported from Suffolk, Great Britain. The building's former address, Rookery Farm in the village of Elmsett, is known to be haunted by the ghosts of a father and son who hung themselves in the barn in the 19th century after going insane.

The owner of Rookery Farm in Suffolk told The Times that she had detected an unexplained presence in the farmhouse on several occasions since moving there in 1992. Julie Hunn, 47, a legal secretary, who lives at the farmhouse with her husband, Andrew, said: “Sometimes you’ll just get a feeling that there’s somebody there or you’ll see a shadow. It’s happened two or three times since we moved here.”

Maybe it's Karl Rove. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:37:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIP, John Peel

Reader Mark Middleton says, "[Legendary BBC deejay] John Peel ruled in the 70's/80's bringing alternative and punk to UK listeners. An immense loss." About the man who launched bands from David Bowie to Joy Division, Warren Ellis says, "Peel broke every major musical movement of the last forty years in Britain." Link to obituary on BBC, and link to listener tributes.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:09:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni at 35th Anniversary of the Internet event in LA

If you're in Los Angeles this week, I hope you'll consider joining me at the 35th Anniversary of the Internet event taking place at UCLA, on Friday October 29. I'll be speaking about blogs and media. There's an amazing list of speakers I'm *really* looking forward to -- They include John Perry Barlow (EFF), Gordon Bell (Microsoft), Bran Ferren (Applied Minds), Dan Gillmor (San Jose Mercury News), Alan Kay (UCLA), John Markoff (NYT), Clay Shirky (NYU), Eric Schmidt (Google), and Ethan Zuckerman (Harvard), and others. Looks like it's going to be great. Link to event details.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:02:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites Iraq dispatch: Layla, part 3

NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites posts a dispatch to his blog before from Falluja. Link, and link to previous post in series.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:09:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Justin Hall's crazy Tokyo cosplay video report

Mark Hurst says, "[Check out this] bizarre short movie on cosplay, filmed at the Tokyo Game Show, by justin "links from the underground" hall." Link to "Robin in Wonderland," Link to more of Justin Hall's recent Tokyo observations -- Mini-Documentary on Tokyo Game Show 2004: Link, and an item in TheFeature.com about mobile phone games that use PhoneCams. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:07:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coolest Ethernet cable ever, EVER

Back in 2001, I thought that this was the coolest Ethernet cord, ever, but I was wrong. Its successor, the new Roadwired CORDZ Multi-Connection Survival Tool is a generation more cool and more versatile. Cased in rugged safety yellow plastic, this retracting 7' RJ-45 cable comes with a set of snap-on ends to convert it to a phone cable, a cross-over or an extension cable. This one went straight into my shoulder bag, and I don't think I'll ever leave home without it. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:04:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RNC fear-phrases video

This video pieces together all the instances of speakers at the RNC saying things like "terrorism," "September 11th," and other fearmongering buzz-phrases. It's actually startling to get a sense of how much reptition of the talking points went on at the convention: could they really be this blatant? 5.2MB Quicktime Link (via Lawgeek)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:04:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, October 25, 2004

Putting all the car's bits in the wheels

Michelin's shown off a concept car whose "active" wheels contain all the elements you'd expect to find in the car itself: "Why not ... use the space within the tire to put as many components as possible, including all the suspension, and make it active, and put in an electric motor, and even eliminate the need for a mechanical transmission?" Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:59:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

File-sharing grows despite lawsuits: neener neener neener

Yet another study has confirmed that the RIAA's plan to stop file-sharing by suing thousands of fans has failed. Maybe they just haven't sued enough of us. There are about 70MM file-sharers in the US -- maybe once the studios have bankrupted, say, 35 million of us we'll get the message.

"We wanted to examine the truthfulness of reports claiming declining P2P traffic and help the community make reliable assumptions concerning P2P traffic estimates and trends," wrote Thomas Karagiannis, a doctoral candidate in computer science at UC-Riverside, in an e-mail. "The assertion of declining P2P traffic was in direct contrast to the constant increase of P2P activity over the last year and counterintuitive to the fact that P2P applications are still the top most downloaded applications (on) the internet."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:51:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wikipedia for news

Wikinews is to news what Wikipedia is to encylopedic-style reference material: a publicly editable site for comprehensive coverage of current affairs. It has posted a mission-statement and requirements and is calling for votes from the public on whether it should actually launch.

We seek to create a free source of news, where every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

Wikinews will already be useful even if we start out by having relatively few original reports - because it will provide free, neutral, aggregated summaries of the news from elsewhere. It will already be useful even if the subject range which we cover will initially be full of gaps - because in these subject areas, we will already benefit from the collaborative wiki model. It can grow to become more useful every day.

While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. Thanks to copyleft, anyone can create their own free news source - even a non-neutral one - on the basis of our work. Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.

Link (via Joi)

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

US dollar tanks so hard, Cuba abandons it

As someone who earns his living in US dollars but lives in the UK, I'm keenly aware of the plummeting value of the post-fiscal-responsibility greenback. Turns out I'm not the only one worrying about his wealth vanishing down the US deficit: Fidel Castro has ordered Cubans to stop trading in dollars and switch to Swiss Francs, Euros and Pounds Sterling.

Cubans and others on the island can still hold dollars in unlimited quantities and can change them into pesos before the new policy takes effect. But they will have to pay a 10 percent charge to exchange dollars afterward. There will be no such charge on changing other foreign currencies, such as Euros, into convertible pesos.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:41:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Build a $100 GNU/Linux machine

Fantastic Slashdot thread, in response to MSFT's Steve Ballmer calling for a $100 PC: build a $100 GNU/Linux PC out of new, readily available parts that already have Free Software drivers.

$18 - Celeron 700MHz 66MHz 128K FCPGA CPU OEM (socket 370)
$25 - ASUS MEW-AM Mainboard Socket 370 supporting Intel Celeron 300~533+ Onboard sound/video
$40 - 1 512mb Stick of PC100 Ram $58 if 2 256mb sticks are required.
$3 - Encore - 10/100 VIA Chipset NIC
$24 - COMP-USA ATX Case w 250W Power Supply.
$2 - Generic heatsink

Total = $112

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Make sure California's votes get counted

If you're a Californian and you want to make sure your vote counts, check out Paper or Plastic?, EFF's latest Flash campaign, created by the talented Ren Bucholz and friends. Non-Californians: pass this on to your Californian friends!

Electronic voting machines will be used in 10 California counties during the next election. However, every California voter has the right to request a paper ballot, which can be used in a recount and verified for accuracy by each voter. Some election officials are trying to keep this choice a secret, so we want to make sure that you know about the availability of paper ballots. If you live in Alameda, Merced, Napa, Orange, Plumas, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Shasta, Tehama, please pass this to your friends and neighbors.

Link (Thanks, Cindy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pitcairn rapists convicted but not jailed

Pitcairn Island, population 47, is one of the most remote place in the world, inhabited by descendants of the mutineers of the HMS Bounty who washed up there in the 18th century. More than half the men on the island were accused of systematically raping the young girls on the island, in charges going back more than 40 years (they claim that this "tradition" merely follows the Bounty mutineers' example set with their Tahitian brides). Now six of the seven accused have been convicted, though formalities are keeping them out of jail for the moment.

Pitcairn, with an area of just five square kilometres, has no safe harbour and is too rocky for an airstrip. It has no paved roads, no sewage treatment system and no landline telephones.

Visitors must fly to an outlying French Polynesian island and then travel by boat for 36 hours to get there, ending their journey in a longboat, riding the surf that crashes on to the island.

Islanders fear that the Pitcairn community, with a population of only 47, will not survive if the six are jailed.

Many of the men operate the island's only boats, which are lifelines to the outside world, ferrying in essential supplies.

Link (Thanks, Cyrus)

Update: Zach sez, After following the Pitcairn Island link I noticed that smh.com.au now requries users to register. For those wishing to view the article and future articles from this site they can use the following details:

username: boingboing
password: boingboing

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:12:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Biggest threat from DRM

Mitch Wagner's written a good piece for Security Pipeline about the danger to the labels if DRM works the way they want it to:

DRM is invisible only when users only want to use data in ways foreseen by the publishers.

DRM makes it harder for consumers to invent their own ways of using technology. A user wishing to listen to digital content on a new type of device needs to go to the media companies first, and ask, "Mommy, may I?"

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fantastic political Flash against Cal Prop 69

California's Proposition 69 makes it legal for the cops to collect DNA from innocent people and store it indefinitely, and makes it nearly impossible for you to get your DNA back from the criminal database. So this anti-69 Flash is worth watching for the message, but I'm blogging it because it is, second-by-second, one of the most effective political pieces I've ever seen. Excellent, compact, on-message copywriting and great layout/design/pace. Link (Thanks, Cindy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:56:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pez dispenser USB drive mod

This is an awesome Pez dispenser mod that turns your favorite Pez-head into a USB thumb-drive (and turns the Pez container into a case for the drive). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:52:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired/Creative Commons concert audio .torrent

A reader writes, "LegalTorrents has posted a 320kbps MP3 version of November 2004's freely distributable Wired Magazine cover CD - includes Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Dan The Automator, Gilberto Gil, Cornelius, and many more Creative Commons-licensed tracks - unmissable." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ashlee "OMG how does this lipsynch stuff work?" Simpson videogate

Regarding recently disgraced acid reflux poptart Ashlee Simpson, BoingBoing reader Kevin says, "She's asking for advice on her own message board."

Subject: How do I get rid of all those videos.
10/24/2004 8:35:08 PM - by Ashlee Simpson
Ok you people know the internet, I'm going to get rid of all these videos posted on other websites, how do i delete them?

Link to message board post, and link to schadenfreudealicious news roundup courtesy of Gawker.

Now, in all fairness -- we have not verified that this post was in fact penned by the real Miss Simpson. Honorary factchecker and wet blanket Jeff "Koganuts" Koga says,

Per a Stereogum comment (Link), The "Ashlee Simpson" who posted the comment you quoted from (notice no photo) (Link) differs from the real Ashlee Simpson (photo, link at the top of the forums pages) (Link). Still, both Ashlee's stats and date of registration are the same, so who knows why she's registered twice? Maybe she forgot her password? :-)

Update: Will the real poptart please stand up? BoingBoing reader and nerdetective Chris Gsell says html source proves the post-er in question is definitely not Ashlee verité:

Hey, just thought I would give you a heads up and let you know that the posts from the author whose profile page does NOT have the picture is not the real Simpson. I say this because if you examine the source of this page, you will see this HTML code:

<td align="right" valign="top" class="txtLabel">Status: </td> <td align="left" valign="top" class="txtBox">Host</td>

On the "fake" profile page you will find this code:

<tr> <td align="right" valign="top" class="txtLabel">Status: </td> <td align="left" valign="top" class="txtBox">Registered User</td> </tr>

...with some javascript below it to spoof the Status field.

Thanks, Chris!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:35:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amateur art at Arizona State Fair

Cardhouse goes to the Arizona state fair, takes pictures of the amateur art competition, and makes funny comments about it.

Originally I didn't notice that in this piece (by Schuyler Graham) the name of the glue is "Love All." There is nothing that can bring the earth together more than a liberal application of seventeen kascrillion tons of glue. It's hard to lift up a gun, or anything really. Don't dilute! Ok!

Link (Via Scrubbles)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:34:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Air Force zero-G cat-tossing video flies again

UPDATE: Earlier today, the uber-bizarre "Cat Tossing in Zero G" video we blogged over the weekend was taken off the Air Force website where we first spotted it. BoingBoing reader Leonard has since mirrorred the video. Zero G cat flies again! Link to new download site (2MB QuickTime .mov), and link to previous BoingBoing post.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:17:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Zombie-movie remix contest

Just in time for Hallowe'en: a zombie-movie-remix context from the Free Culture people!

1: Raise the Dead. Get out your video editing tools and download a slice of George A. Romero's classic 1968 horror flick Night of the Living Dead. Romero's original, idiosyncratic, super-low-budget vision of a broken world filled with animated, cannibalistic corpses has filled the imaginations of moviegoers for decades. Indeed, it's the film that gave birth to an entire genre: the apocalyptic zombie horror movie. [More]

And because it's in the public domain, anyone can borrow pieces of it to make a music video, comic short, or other art. Which is what we want you to do. To really get your creative juices flowing, hook yourself up with another piece of re-mixable art: the 2003 student film "Amid the Dead." [More]

It's available for download here for the first time, under a Creative Commons license that gives you permission to play mad scientist.

Step 2: Go Mad – Invent! Take a piece of Romero, mix it up with some Amid the Dead, and add your own special twist. Use your imagination to build your own new piece of art.

Step 3: Give it a ReBirth Certificate. Tag your new creation with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. It not only lets people feel safe to use your work without having to phone you and a team of lawyers, but it prevents someone else getting their own team of lawyers and turning your work into a big commercial franchise that everyone else has to pay to use.

Link (via Creative Commons)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:22:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: Broadband over power line

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I speak with host Noah Adams about a form of broadband connectivity called BPL, or broadband over powerline.

Earlier this month, the FCC opened the door for more consumer trials and wider deployment of the technology, which delivers internet connectivity through the electrical system in your home or office. What you may already know is that BPL could soon rival other consumer options like DSL and cable internet, delivering speeds of 2-3 Mbps through ordinary power jacks. More choices means more competition, and that likely means lower prices.

What you may not know is that beyond cheaper, ubiquitous internet -- BPL could potentially revolutionize the way electrical power is priced, managed, and delivered.

Link to archived audio for today's program, Link to NPR Day to Day home. Link to recent FCC newsletter edition which contains details on the October 14 announcement. Here's a link to some of the ARRL's concerns about the fact that BPL can cause interference with amateur ("ham") radio frequencies under certain circumstances. The FCC acknowledged this issue as it gave BPL the go-ahead on October 14.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:15:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This is not my beautiful house

When a Douglasville, Georgia woman returned home from a 2 1/2 week holiday to Greece, she found that a total stranger had moved into her house, ripped up the carpet, changed the photos on the walls, and was wearing clothes from her closet. The squatter also switched the utilities over to her own name and installed a washer and dryer. Link (via Fortean Times)

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:06:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Leafy Sea Dragon gallery

Photos and short videos of an exquisitely bizarre looking fish called the Leafy Sea Dragon. As good as discovering complex life forms on another planet. This makes me want to get an aquarium. Link (Thanks, exomorph!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:44:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Satan's army

The British Armed Forces has officially recognized a naval technician as a satanist, meaning that he can conduct satanic rituals on board the HMS Cumberland. This is a first for the Royal Navy.

“I didn’t want to feel I couldn’t get out my Satanic Bible and relax in bed. I didn’t want to bite my tongue any more when dealing with idiots,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:27:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Frogs levitated by ultra-powerful magnets

Following up on yesterday's post about cat-tossing in zero gravity, we now direct your otherwise productive time to these spectacular Quicktime movies of helpless little frogs being levitated by really huge magnets. Strawberries, grasshoppers, and globs of water also get the "weightless" treatment. Link (Thanks, Eric!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:01:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to Lose Treo 650 Customers, by Sprint -- UPDATED

UPDATED BELOW

The much-anticipated new Treo 650 was unveiled by PalmOne today, and BoingBoing reader Marc Hedlund says,

[It has] a bunch of new features, including Bluetooth. Unfortunately the rocket scientists at Sprint decided to turn off Bluetooth for dialup from your laptop (though other networks allow it). Why? Well, they want you to buy *another* $250 product from them (their "connection card") so they can charge you as though you own two cell phones. The phone looks great -- too bad Sprint decided its customers are idiots.

I'm a Sprint user, and I'm a prime example of a likely upgrade candidate for the Treo 650. I don't use a PDA phone right now, and have been thinking the 650 or something like it might make blogging and communicating on-the-road a whole lot easier. But dumb-ass pricing moves like this one are making me seriously consider a carrier switch. Link

UPDATE: Sprint has since announced that it will not levy the $250 fee. Details here. Cool!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:47:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart on CSPAN

Brian sez, "If you like Jon Stewart, you MUST watch this "American Perspectives" interview with him that is now available at the CSPAN site. It was recorded within 24 hours of the recent Crossfile incident. MUST-see television." Link, Alternate Link (Thanks, Brian and Qburns!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:37:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aesthetic Apparatus "Dubya Says" poster

Political satire poster from Minneapolis-based undercover design team Aestheric Apparatus. This model is available with a variety of purported Presidential quotes, including:

# "I figure since I can't use it at camp x-ray anymore"
# "Hey, let's snort coke off this donkey's balls."
# "And then you just simply put the voter in what I call the "freedom machine.'"

Link to details for this image, link to more Aesthetic Apparatus posters, link to group's home page. (thanks, Siege, and Matt Jacobs!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:36:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons-licensed jazz sheet music, Wired CD out

Following up on this post about knitting patterns, BoingBoing reader Oren says

Thought I'd let you know that my jazz trio, Whispering Johnson, recently released some new recordings of original tunes (the Birthday Numbers) and we've made not only the audio but also the sheet music available under CC Sampling Plus licensing.

As far as I know it's the first time sheet music has been released with this kind of license. We think they're really good compositions, and we hope others will take them, play 'em, write lyrics for 'em, reharmonize 'em....whatever. It's the old jazz tradition, formalized for our times (which unfortunately seem increasingly hostile to the kinds of informal sharing and extension that have always fostered creativity).

Link

And while we're at it -- the Wired Magazine CD with CC-licensed tracks is out on newsstands now. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:28:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's All About Symbian interview, part two

A week ago, I blogged part one of an interview I did with All About Symbian when I was in Edinburgh, about science fiction, civil liberties, Creative Commons, and mobile technology -- now part two is online.

"It's a great phone, but I'm scared to do anything with it." For a man toting the fastest PowerBook ever made, and completely in touch with the electronic world, this surprises me. "I'm largely scared of doing any of the advanced things on my phone mainly due to the cost. And by the cost I mean the ridiculous per megabyte data pricing everyone in Europe seems to have. In the States I had a simple data phone, nothing fancy. But with it I had a $50 a month unlimited data plan. A true unlimited plan, not an unlimited plan until you reach 10mb of Wap Data. Because it was flat rate, it meant that I could take risks and chances with services. I would play with the phone and see just what is possible, because I knew I would never get stuck with on of those bills where you go 'Shit! How did I spend £100 looking up the football scores?!?' So that's scared me off."

Link (Thanks, Ewan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:08:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Accidental PC-to-garage-opener mod

An upgraded PC has turned itself into an unintentional emitter that works a nearby garage-door opener when a certain video game is played on it.

I recently purchased a Sapphire 9800XT 256MB AGP 3D card off Ebay, modded with a Zaltec VGA heatpiper cooler. So, the graphics card is awesome; I get to finally play Deus Ex 2 (pretty fun). The problem, however, is now my GARAGE DOOR OPENER won't work whenever I'm playing the game! I've tried this out several times, and it seems as though there is interference whenever I'm playing a computer game.

Link (Thanks, Alice!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:02:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Porn trompe l'oeil

It's not what you think. WARNING: THIS SITE CONTAINS IMAGES. Link (Thanks, Bruce).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:45:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Identity Theft: What it is, How to Prevent it, and What to Do if it Happens to You

I finished Rob Hamadi's Identity Theft: What it is, How to Prevent it, and What to Do if it Happens to You yesterday, and am feeling vaguely freaked out today.

Hamadi assembles dozens of identity-theft cases in short narrative form, like little cautionary tales, and then strings them together with some interconnecting material to show you who commits identity theft, who falls victim to it, how identity thieves work, and what steps are most likely to mitigate the threats. Also, and importantly, he describes which steps won't make an appreciable difference in identity theft -- like biometric ID systems -- and how companies' imperiousness (demanding you identify yourself at every turn and taking copies of your ID) negligence (throwing those copies out unshredded) and foolishness (demanding easily forged documents like gas bills as proof of ID) make us all more vulnerable.

My take-away from this is that there are some steps that we can individually take to improve our security against identity theft -- buy a good shredder for your credit-card receipts, don't recite your account numbers aloud into your mobile phone on a crowded bus, make up something other than your mother's maiden name to use when asked to give it as a security password -- that the main identity theft risk needs to be addressed by calling companies and agencies that compromise our identities to account. When the hotel you've checked into takes a photocopy of your driver's license, you can storm out in a huff, but that's not a sustainable way of behaving, especially when they all start doing it. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:45:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kids online turn into creators

Foe Romeo reports on fascinating research suggesting that the Internet turns kids into creators, not consumers, of media.

Even more interestingly, the study found that 17% of young people have sent pictures or stories to a website and "online creativity can be encouraged through the very experience of using the internet." That is, the more time kids spend online, the more likely they are to produce their own content. And interaction breeds interaction. Does that mean we can safely assume that as internet usage increases its media timeshare, more and more people will become creative producers as well as consumers?

And does online game play in particular have any connection to this increased propensity to create? Nathan Combs recently suggested in his Socially Charged Software post that multiplayer games have a "MODder dimension", where "content is more than just accumulated and integrated, it is the product of collaboration and a shared value system of production: from inspiration through validation." (See Habbo Hotel's fan sites, for example.)

Link (via Plastic Bag)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:20:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why market-forces can't correct DRM

Advocates of DRM talk about the ability of the market to find a balance between features and restrictions, because people whose freedom has been unduly restricted will make future purchase decisions that will put the overly draconian DRM systems out of business. But check out this cautionary tale of a guy who bought a home-media centre, started recording his favorite shows to DVD, and then:

Turns out that a couple of days ago, HBO started encrypting all of its programs with CGMS-A. They allow you to "copy" a program that you record from their signal once. The trouble is that they consider that one-time copy to be recording the program onto your hard drive, not taking it from the hard drive to a DVD. THAT SUCKS OUT LOUD and I am extremely angry, as you can imagine. The files are HUGE and, even though I have a 200 gb hard drive, I can't keep them there forever. MediaCenter records tv shows with a dvr.ms extension.

When he bought the media centre, it did the thing he wanted it to do with the shows he wanted to do it to: it's like buying a VCR to record the World Series, taking it home and satisfying yourself that it works. It worked.

Then, months later, it stopped working. He could no longer record his favorite shows. Why? Well, because the cablecaster decided to remove a right from him. And because Gateway, the company who sold him the equipment, decided to collaborate with the cablecaster in screwing him out of that right.

When this guy goes back to the store, what should he do to protect his next investment? Say he buys an HP device next, having concluded that Gateway won't look out for his interests. He takes it home and finds that it works fine for his purposes (maybe HP has a "better" deal with HBO that will let him burn more-restricted DVDs from his HP media-centre), then, a couple months later, the cablecaster switches on another flag and suddenly his video won't work.

Where's the market-force here? Should he stop being an HBO customer? A cable customer? A customer for only those PCs that he builds himself and installs a copy of GNU/Linux on?

What purchase-decision can he make or avoid in order to signal to the market that this kind of restrictiveness is unduly harsh and he won't pay for it any longer? Link (via Hack the Planet)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:18:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Knitting patterns under Creative Commons licennse

Knitting geek and BoingBoing reader Rose says,

Knitty is a web-published knitting magazine that normally comes out quarterly. They've done a special issue for breast cancer awareness that's just come out, and they've published it under a Creative Commons license. (see the last page of the special issue for details). This is the very first time I've seen knitting patterns published under a CC license, and I think it's splendid!

Link (PDF)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:15:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Funny jokes from Defective Yeti

Defective Yeti did a "funny jokes I heard recently" post and invited more from readers. As with any list of jokes, there's a certain proportion of unfunny, offensive or dumb jokes, but there are at least a dozen that made me laugh aloud.

Person 1: Knock knock.
Person 2: Who's there?
Person 1: Control freak.
Person 1: Now you say "control freak who?"

Q: Why can't engineers tell jokes timing?

How many kids with ADD does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
LET'S RIDE BIKES!

A duck goes into a bar and asks the bartender, "Got any grapes?" The bartender says, "No. This is a bar and we don't sell grapes." The duck leaves.

The next day, the duck goes back to the bar and asks, "Got any grapes?" The bartender says, "I told you yeaterday. This is a bar and we don't sell grapes."

The following day, the duck returns and asks,"Got any grapes?" The bartender loses it. He grabs the duck by the neck, and yells, "I already told you twice! This is a bar! I don't have any grapes! If you ask me again, I'll nail your beak to the floor!"

The next day, the duck goes in the bar and asks, "Got any nails?" The bartender sighs and says, "No, we don't have any nails." The duck says, "Good. Got any grapes?"

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:07:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Updated: Nielsen: User-education won't fix security

Jakob Nielsen's AlertBox is a good source of cranky, well-structured rants about what's wrong with the interaction design online. This week's is about security, and why user-education is not the answer. Our tools conspire against us to make us less secure, and if we're to be made more secure, our tools will have to be enlisted to work on our behalf. I'm particularily enamoured of recommendation number one: I think that "Encrypt Everything" should be the watchword of the security movement.

So many systems -- from Yahoo's login screen to most ISP-provided POP mail to iChat/AIM to all those reg-required news-sites -- default to you sending your password in the clear or even require you to do it, it's a crine shame.

Especially given how many passwords we need to generate these days and the concomittant inevitability of recycling passwords, which means that your throwaway NYT-LAT-WashPo password, which you send in the clear every time you login to one of those sites, may suddenly become associated with your credit-card number when you buy access to an article out of the NYT archive. Now you're sending a password that unlocks limited spending authority on your credit-card in the clear, potentially several times a day. Gee, thanks, NYT.

# Encrypt all information at all times, except when it's displayed on the screen. In particular, never send plaintext email or other information across the Internet: anything that leaves your machine should be encrypted.

# Digitally sign all information to prevent tampering and develop a simple way to inform users whether something is from a trusted source. This might, say, replace current stupid security warnings that people don't understand because they expose the guts of the technology. ("The security certificate has expired or is not yet valid." Aha. And what does that mean to a normal person?)

# Turn on all security settings by default since most people don't mess with defaults. Then, make it easy to modify settings so that users can get trusted things done without having to open a wide hole for everybody.

# Automate all updates. Most virus software downloads new virus definitions in the background, which is a good first step. The automated patching introduced with Windows XP's SP2 is also an improvement.

# Polish security features' usability to a level far beyond anything we've seen so far. Security is inherently complicated, and it's something users don't care about (until it's too late). The user interface requires the ultimate in simplicity. Heavy user testing and detailed field research are a must.

Link

Update: In fact, if you look at the source code for login.yahoo.com (for the "standard" security) you'll see that the form uses:<form method=post action="https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?cm3nqsgq0mv6j" autocomplete=off name=login_form onsubmit="return hash(this,'http://login.yahoo.com/config/login')"> What that does is if you have javascript enabled, it creates an MD5 hash of your password (plus an included challenge) and sends that along with your userid. If you don't have javascript, it defaults to sending everything via https. Effectively your password is never broadcast in the clear, only your userid, which is public information anyway.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:56:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MMO based on Disneyland

UPDATED: Disney is working on a massively multiplayer game based on Disneyland. Oh please oh please oh please let this rock like the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and not blow diseased animals like the Haunted Mansion movie!

Disney also is working on something called Virtual Magic Kingdom, an online version of California's Disneyland built on the same technology as multiplayer online games.

Rasulo didn't say when the cyberpark would open, but he promised it would be "almost as magical as visiting one of our parks in person."

Link (via Ambiguous)

Update: A Disney insider writes, "Virtual Kingdom is a proposed MMORPG that Disney might launch. I've seen the storyboards and heard the pitch. Think Kingdom Hearts as an MMORPG, not Disneyland, visiting the various 'worlds' of Disney. Possible innovations include visiting physical locations (theme parks) and watching TV or listening to radio for special codes that unlock perks inside the game. Yes, they know Persistent World games are hard. Yes, they know grief players and powergamers will have to be controlled. No, it's nowhere close to being released or even in alpha code."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:21:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cat-tossing in Zero-G -- Seekrit Air Force Movie

UPDATED. Moments such as this make the thankless, burdensome toil of bloggerhood worthwhile. BoingBoing reader Vann says, "I wish I'd stumbled across this clip before your zero-G flight." I couldn't agree more.

Link to quicktime movie of some people throwing a live cat around in zero gravity on a "vomit comet."

The file is linked from an Air Force website for an online education class called " COCKPIT PHYSICS: Physics Instruction for the Twenty-First Century." The website doesn't appear to be a joke, nor does the cat-tossing QuickTime clip, presumably intended to illustrate the science that governs cruelty to fluffy, innocent housepets in reduced gravity environments.

While you're visiting the Air Force website, don't miss this equally invaluable physics lesson (Link):

#1 If you are outside in a lightning storm, you may notice that your hair starts to stand on end. Why do you think this happens? Some good advice is to stay indoors during a lightning storm. If your hair is standing up, then you are in extreme danger.

Words to live by.

UPDATE: The Air Force website where this was first spotted has removed the cat-toss video. New download location details in this update post: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:50:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Awesome figurative art from drinking straws

I don't know much about the source of these images, reposted on a Portuguese language blog, but they depict a man creating amazing sculptural scenes from ordinary drinking straws. Throw forty million and some rotoscope at it, and who knows? You may end up with something that could kick Shark Tale's ass. Link (Thanks, Jose Luis Orihuela)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:38:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smart swatches

MIT researchers are developing fabric swatches outfitted with sensors, microprocessors, and conductive velcro. The "electronic patches" can be quickly slapped together to provide different functionality in various form factors. From New Scientist:

To make a bag that prevents people forgetting things, (the inventors) have equipped a module with a radio antenna and receiver. The unit is programmed to listen for signals from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on objects like cellphones, keys and wallets.

A sensor module in the bag’s handle detects when the bag has been picked up, indicating that the owner might be leaving. This triggers the reader to check through the objects the computer module has been programmed to look for. If it does not detect a required item, it uses a voice synthesiser module in another patch to warn: “Cellphone, yes! Wallet, yes! Keys, no!”

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:51:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, October 23, 2004

Q for the anti-globalist set

My friend Natalie Jermijenko, a mad engineering prof who has invented such kickass nift as feral robot dogs is interviewed today on WorldChanging. Here's her talking about her role as "Q" for the anti-globalist set, designing mediagenic gizmos to take to demonstrations.

There are Italian and Spanish direct action groups, very well trained in direct action. They’re doing marvelous actions using blow up pool toys, big happy smiley faces on the strike zones [parts of the body would be likely to be hit by police] so they can protect themselves. Putting pockets into these bright clownish costumes they wear, both mediagenic and highly visual, but also with room for putting in an empty two-liter soda container, with their tops on. These make good protection in the strike zone.

Nonviolent defense is a long tradition. Profoundly misplaced, but necessary. I wish our energies could be better spent. Nonetheless, their threat has to be answered. And systematically, we have to answer every threat of this abuse power, of criminalizing political process, the political right to gather with a nonviolent method.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:07:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eminem's anti-Bush anthem leaked online

Updated: An audio excerpt from Eminem's new anti-Bush song "Mosh" can be downloaded here, from The Regular. Quoth the caucasian rap superstar in a Rolling Stone interview, "Bush is definitely not my homie." Link

An anonymous reader points us to two links for listening to Eminem's "Mosh" in its entirety. Real Audio Link, ASX link.

BoingBoing reader David Stein sends a transcript of the song's lyrics: Link

Reader dapulli says, "On wednesday Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 in the UK gave out the link to the download of this track on national radio. You can listen to him doing so here on thursday about 90 minutes into the show -- Link"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:05:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYC subway turns 100 -- how did that tech boost shape city?

Newsweek's Brian Braiker on how the NYC subway system -- mobile technology from an earlier era-- made the city what it is today.

When the Dutch East India Company set out to build New Amsterdam in the 17th century, it was not as a religious settlement but as a business center. Then Alexander Hamilton decided that New York City was not going to be the agrarian society envisioned by the founding gentleman farmers of Virginia, but an economic engine driving the nation’s commerce and mercantilism. Gov. DeWitt Clinton, who served two nonconsecutive terms (1817-22, 1825-28), followed his lead -- and built the Erie Canal. The canal was the very key to making New York’s port the country’s greatest, eclipsing Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia and Norfolk, and turning the city into a center for national commerce, as well as a gateway to the West. New York thus arguably owes its commercial success to one source: the ability to move goods and people from one place to another efficiently and en masse.

Enter the subway, which turns 100 this month. If anything truly revolutionized the way New Yorkers live, work and play, it’s the subway. On any given weekday, 4.5 million people travel on the 6,400 cars that run along 722 miles of track beneath the city’s five teeming boroughs. For all their complaints about it -- the dirt! the crowding! the noise -- the subway remains nothing short of the miracle it was when the subway opened in 1904.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:58:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

L Ron Hubbard bio-play acted by kids

A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant is a play starring children, telling the story of the life of L Ron Hubbard. It's just opened in LA after a successful run in NYC.

The play is pretty much what the title implies: an unauthorised pageant performed by - but not necessarily for - children that tells the story of the life of Church of Scientology founder and main man L Ron Hubbard. And before you ask, the L, we learn, stands for Lafayette...

As soon as the Church got wind of an LA Times piece on the production, several editors on the paper received calls from the guardians of L Ron's flame urging them to pull the article. Nothing unusual about that, as any entertainment PR will tell you. But things took a more sinister turn when the phone calls started.

"The parents of one of the kids in the cast were called by members of the entertainment industry that were Scientologists," says Timbers. "They were told that if they were to continue with the show that it might be bad for their future career."

Link (via JWZ)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, October 22, 2004

Silent, eerie plane-crash footage set to music

Last week, we blogged some killer NASA test-footage of an airplane full of crash-test dummies silently crashing into an experimental airstrip and bursting into flame while the dummies jerked violently back and forth. Coudal Partners sponsored a juried contest to set this footage to music, with fantastic results. Link (Thanks, Edgewood!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:54:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How Nintendo censored US games

Great piece detailing Nintendo America's censorship rules that were used to tone down Japanese games for the US audience, removing skin, violence and fun.

This strict "no blood" policy came to an embarrassing climax following the SNES release of Mortal Kombat. Mortal Kombat had been one of the most violent games for the Sega Genesis, with wall-to-wall blood and guts. The graphic violence was one of its chief sources of appeal. When the game was released on the SNES however, in coordination with Nintendo's content guidelines all the blood had to be removed. Instead, when the characters smacked each other gray"sweat" flew out of their bodies, certainly a painfully awkward compromise. As well, the gory "fatality" moves, in which characters could formally execute their opponents by decapitating them or ripping out their heart were all removed. The game was a huge commercial failure for Nintendo compared to the success of the Genesis version, and the experience is credited with promoting a significant shift in Nintendo's attitudes towards video game violence.

Link (via Waxy)

Update: Tim sez, " "Friendships" are present in all major versions of Mortal Kombat II, including, most importantly the original arcade version. They were not (at all!) introduced by Nintendo in the SNES version to tone down the violence, as this fellow asserts."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:51:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark interviewed on MacRadio

I was interviewed by Louis, the host of MacKaos, on Tuesday. I talked about Make magazine and the origins of bOING bOING. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:15:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Howard Lovy wins Foresight Prize

Congratulations to BB pal and NanoBot blogger Howard Lovy who won this year's Foresight Institute Prize in Communication, recognizing "outstanding journalistic or other communication endeavors that lead to a better public understanding of molecular nanotechnology or other key emerging technologies of high social or environmental impact. Here's a bit from Howard's excellent acceptance speech:

Thank you very much for honoring me with what my 13-year-old daughter calls the "Dork of the Year" award.

"She, and everybody else, tells me I'm obsessed with nanotechnology. Guilty. But I look at it much differently than most of you in the room. I'm not obsessed with it as a technology, as a science, as a means of saving or destroying the world, or making a quick buck, or gathering government grants, plotting world domination. That's not what I do. Nanotechnology to me is, pure and simple, a … great … story. It's a story that contains, within it, many chapters large and small. My God, it's a story of grinches and greed, it's a story of men and women with vision, it's a story about humankind's relationship with the world around..."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:22:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Rapper's Delight" babelfished into Italian, then back into English

Someone out there on the internets claims to have plugged the old-school hiphop classic "Rappers Delight" by Sugar Hill Gang into the online translation service Babelfish. First, they translated it into Italian, then used the same automated service to zap it back to English.

It can be in a position to flying entire with the night, but can oscillate a party ' to work to the light in advance payment?
It cannot satisfy it with its screw without fine small, but I can break off it outside with my excellent sperm!"
I go I make it, I go I make it, I I go make it, make it, make it.
' they are ' I here I am here, I I am great hank of prohibition, I I am everywhere
The shooting just your hands in on the air and left hardy as in you it is not taken care hardly
We make it, is not arrested, the y' all, a tock of the heartbeat, the y' all, you is not arrested!
Goes the hotel, the motel, whatcha that it goes to make today? (opinion that what)
I am going to obtain a girl of Moscow, andante to obtain the somunchank, eliminate in def a OJ,
Everyone goes, " hotel, motel, inn of festivity"

It reads like spam! Just add a couple of mortgage and v14gra lines. Link (thanks siege)

While we're on the subject, have you noticed how spam these days is the best conceivable source for band names? I mean, while I was publishing this post you're reading now, the following arrives in my in-box:

cannabis camille. chard the itsappian
tribesman blimp marksman torr checkup. drawn we cottrell,
expurgate we harelip Yexpand crayon?
I flack slim pursuant passer drank me albanian louisville dump,
answer is pertain fritz anneal clank chaperon

I mean -- Cannabis Camille? No amount of cheap beer and bong hits in college could possibly result in such brilliance. It begs to belong to an unlistenable all-girl stoner band. They'd play, like, String Cheese Incident covers or something. With extra-long guitar space jam interludes, as if the original ones weren't long enough. And Chard The Itsappian sounds like such a great name for a vegan deathmetal outfit. Or the illicit (and biologically impossible) love child of DEL: tha funkee homosapien and Dan the Automator.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:17:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Composer Philip Glass sues "Celsius" filmmakers

BoingBoing reader Greg says,

Philip Glass is suing the producers of Celsius 41.11, a vehemently anti-Michael Moore and anti-Kerry movie, for unauthorized use of parts of his musical score for "Powaqaatsi." They've used it already in commercials, and "if the music was heard in the movie, which is being released today in 40 cities nationwide, [Glass] would consider seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the film from being shown."

reg-free Link to NYT story

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:28:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To do Sunday part 2: Jon "I'm not your Monkey" Stewart on 60 Minutes

Before his now-legendary CNN "Crossfire" appearance, Jon Stewart sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes Correspondent Steve Kroft to discuss his gripes with cable news in America. Kroft's profile of the Comedy Central "Daily Show" host airs this Sunday, Oct. 24, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. Link

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

To do this Sunday: Remix Radio

On the Creative Commons blog, Glenn Otis Brown writes:

At 2pm this Sunday on the Bay Area's KALW (91.7), Benjamen Walker's "The Creative Remix" will debut on the airwaves. The main point of the show: "If remixing is an art form why are the lawyers running the conversation?" Follow Ben, whose insight and sense of humor have drawn him a cult radio following, as he speaks with artists about traditional kinds of collage -- like DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album -- but also art you might not have considered "remixing" -- historical fiction, for example, or an ancient poetic form called the Cento. Read more about the show. And Bay Area people, mark your calendar: 2pm, this Sunday, KALW (91.7).

Link to live stream.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:15:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Poll shows that Bush supporters lie to themselves to feel better

The Sept. 11 Commission found that there were no substantial ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda, and Charles Duelfer's report states that Iraq had no significant WMD program. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of supporters of the President take comfort in pretending that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and pretending that there were significant ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

In addition, the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes' survey also found that a majoroty of supporters of President Bush mistakenly believe that the President supports the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the treaty banning land mines, when he in fact opposes them. A majority of Bush supporters also think that most of the people on the world hope the President is re-elected. This is not the case.

Steven Kull, program director, said that Bush supporters' "resistance to information" on several fronts reflected a powerful bond with the president formed after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the perception - shared by Kerry supporters - that Bush still asserts that Iraq had WMD.

...

"To support the president and to accept that he took the United States to war based on mistaken assumptions is difficult to bear, especially in light of the continuing costs in terms of lives and money," Kull said.

"Apparently, to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Bush supporters suppress awareness of unsettling information."

A spokesman for the Bush campaign, Reed Dickens, said the perceptions on weapons were understandable "given that it's only in the last few weeks we've had this definitive finding" of the Duelfer report.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:07:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Prosthetic memory hardware

Wired News has an interesting article about the quest to create an artificial brain prosthesis. University of Southern California professor Theodore W. Berger, whose work we've previously blogged, is making headway on an implantable chip that functions like the hippocampus. That's the part of the brain that creates memories for storage.

"The team expects it will take two to three years to develop the mathematical models for the hippocampus of a live, active rat and translate them onto a microchip, and seven or eight years for a monkey. They hope to apply this approach to clinical applications within 10 years. If everything goes well, they anticipate seeing an artificial human hippocampus, potentially usable for a variety of clinical disorders, in 15 years."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:59:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nobel laureate Francis Crick's last filmed interview

Filmmaker and BoingBoing reader Chris Thorpe says,

We've been filming the great and the good of science and film for a while. The aim is to provide coverage of as many areas as we can, [with subjects] telling their life stories in their own words. Sadly, Francis Crick died last month, but we were lucky enough to gain permission to place online his last ever filmed interview which has never been seen publicly before today. The site is subscription only (it's video on demand and we have to find a way of paying for it somehow!) but some clips are available free in the trailers area. The press release can be found here: Link.

Crick on "The Scientific Mind" -- Link. Crick on "The Beauty of the Double Helix Model" -- Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:00:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Israeli Air Force's official bird watcher

Ornithologist Yossi Leshem saves lives and millions for the Israeli Air Force by tracking bird migration and predicting their flight patterns. From an interview with Leshem in New Scientist:

"Israel has a higher density of fighter aircraft in its airspace than anywhere else in the world. So there is a huge conflict between flying machines and flying birds. Collisions are a big danger, for the birds of course, but also for our aircraft. Many more Israeli aircraft have been downed by birds than by enemy air battles in the last three decades... When a white pelican weighing 10 kilograms hits a plane going at 800 kilometres an hour, at the point of impact there will be a force exerted on the plane equivalent to about 100 tonnes. It's devastating"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:33:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Living brain in a jar

A scientist at the University of Florida has cultured 25,000 living rat neurons into an in vitro brain capable of controlling flight simulator software.

“It’s essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom,” (bioengineer Thomas) DeMarse said. “Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network – a brain.”

The brain and the simulator establish a two-way connection, similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies. By observing how the nerve cells interact with the simulator, scientists can decode how a neural network establishes connections and begins to compute, DeMarse said.

Link (via Science Blog)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:09:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Errol Morris "Switcher" ads with former Bush supporters who will vote for Kerry

Academy Award documentarian Errol Morris (who directed Apple's switcher ads) has created about 50 "switcher" ads for Kerry that are now on his website. A couple ran on MoveOn but most of them never appeared on the Web or TV. Now you can see them all on Morris' site. They're amazing. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:55:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HP sends Sun's President a nastygram for blogging

Back in August, the President of Sun Microsystems posted a little dig at HP on his blog, saying:

To me, HP's problems spawn from the death of... their operating system, HP/UX. Like IBM, they've elected to ask their customers and ISV's to move to Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows on x86 systems. And if you're an ISV, how does that differentiate HP? - they're a box vendor. If you're a customer, where does that leave you with your HP/UX investments? Facing untimely change - with a vendor no longer in charge of their OS.

Pretty innocuous, right?

Well, HP didn't think so. They had their jackass lawyers send a nastygram to Sun, demanding that they take down the blog entry. Riiiiight.

Give it to Sun -- they didn't waver. Instead, they sent their own nastygram right back, and promptly delivered both letters to the ChillingEffects clearing-house for public humilation.

Once again, in certain of the places this is a statement of opinion by Jonathan Schwartz. His opinion is based on his good faith assessment of the current climate of HP. Alternatively, however, Sun will also stand behind this as a statement of fact that is true and accurate based on the above substantiation. As detailed by the above facts, we have seen signs that HP is abandoning HP/UX.

Jonathan Schwartz's opinions and even his vigorous debate on this subject as well as Sun's product comparisons and dialog on these commercial matters are inherent in Sun's competition with HP and are part of the free market system in which our companies operate. For our statements of fact, Sun has valid, objective and verifiable evidence. Accordingly, and based on the above, Sun affirmatively stands by its claims regarding HP/UX and will not agree to cease making such truthful and/or subjective claims.

(Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:29:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dutch public-service images entering the public domain!

This is so freaking cool: the Dutch Parliament has unanimously some Dutch Parliamentarians declared that most images owned by Dutch public broadcasters should be posted to the Internet and dedicated to the public domain. This is astonishingly great forward-thinking from what has always been one of the best Parliaments in Europe.

He described the problems he encounters in his work: "Technically, there are increasing distribution possibilities. However, [distribution] rules are the obstacles. Even a broadcaster's own production rights forbid online distribution. Programmes made with public funds belong in the public domain."

"Based on my experience in education, you just about have to fall on your knees and beg for images. This is ridiculous," said Ms Broekers-Knol, member of the Upper Chamber, supported by her fellow parliamentary colleagues.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:24:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RSS feed of the comments on Flickr photos you've commented upon

One of the big problems with commenting on others' blogs, Flickr photos and so forth is that you have to remember to go back to the entry to see if anyone's replied. Now, Flickr has solved part of the problem by letting you see the comments on all the photos you've commented upon as an RSS feed. This is a life-saver -- now I want one for TypePad, Slashdot, and all the other places I post. Link

Update: Turns out you can get responses to your Slashdot posts by email! (Thanks, Jamie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:20:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copy files between thumb-drives without a laptop

The FlashpontX is a $99, 512MB USB thumb-drive, with a twist. It has a female USB jack, and if you plug any other USB drive into it, any files in your "share" directory on the thumb-drive will be automatically copied over to the other key. So you can copy all your files even if you don't have a laptop handy. I've got my current 256MB thumb-drive strung on the wrist-strap of my phone, so it's always with me -- it'd be great to be able to just load up a share-point wiht a ton of stuff like the Wired CD, my latest novel, and so on, and hand it out to friends when we get togehter for coffee for fast drive-to-drive copying. Link (via Engadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:16:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Windows error on giant Toronto animated billboard

Windows errors on giant public billlboards are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto's Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with "Toronto." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:09:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Infringing Economist ads and the right of attribution

I've been having a recurring argument lately about the morality of "attribution" and how bad it is to make money off of someone else's creation. But take this (terrific) Economist ad (the ads in London are about 1000x more clever than their American counterparts, and about 10x more clever than their Canadian cousins). It is clearly making money off of Scrabble, so should it give them a cut? How about attribution? "The Scrabble tile and Scrabble are Registered Trademarks of Hasbro, Inc."? The whole point of the ad is that there's no text EXCEPT the text on the tiles; it would, IMO, substantially weaken this piece to add an attribution line. Should they have to, anyway? This is what Lessig means when he talks about If Value, Then Right thinking. If there's some value in something, then someone must have a right to it. But would giving Hasbro a piece of the action encourage Hasbro to make better games? Will not giving them a cut discourage them from making more games in the future? Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:23:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, October 21, 2004

History of betel chewing

When Carla and I traveled around Malaysia and Singapore in the mid-80s, we were excited to try betel nut. It's a seed that you mix with a little lime powder (calcium carbonate) and wrap in a leaf. Then you stuff the quid between your lip and gum. I didn't detect any psychoactive effects from the stuff, but it did turn my saliva a pretty red color. As a former Cophagen snuff addict (I haven't used it in 20 years), betel was an interesting substitute. Link (via growabrain)

UPDATE: Suresh Venkat sez "should be careful with the betel leaf ;). it is the preferred after-dinner digestive in India, where it is called 'paan', and is sold on streets often right outside a restaurant.But there they often mix tobacco in it for that extra kick. Needless to say, mouth cancer follows shortly thereafter...

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:19:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Soviet heroes awards

Things Magazine reports on a site about old Soviet Military awards.

The Order of Maternal Glory, 1st class, was awarded to mothers of nine children. If you had one more, you got the Order of Mother Heroine. Awards came with serious benefits. If you became a Hero of the Soviet Union, you also got "first priority on the housing list, 50 per cent rent reduction, reduced taxation rates (in 1985 this was changed to tax exempt status), up to an additional 15 square meters in living space, free yearly round-trip first class ticket, free personal bus transportation, free yearly visit to sanitarium or rest home, as well as entertainment and medical benefits."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:17:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunted Mansion tombstone auction closes at $37,400

Disney's charity auction for the right to have your name on a tombstone at the Disneyland Haunted Mansion has closed, with a top bid of $37,400.00. Link (via The Disney Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:18:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2004

Nobody says it like Hunter S. Thompson.

Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners. Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:36:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired News on Make

Wired News ran an article today about Make, the new DIY tech magazine that O'Reilly Media is launching early next year with BB's own Mark Frauenfelder at the helm!

The can-do attitude of old hobbyist magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics inspired the spirit of the new magazine, (O'Reilly VP Dale) Dougherty said.

"That was kind of lost in the '70s and '80s when people started becoming more consumers," said Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of Make. "People didn't need to make things anymore. It was cheaper to buy them."

While that still may be true today, "there is a satisfaction in making something rather than buying it," he said.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:26:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disturbing (but worksafe) photograph

From Warren Ellis:

The guy in the middle is the famous and pioneering American private investigator Jay J Armes, who lost both his hands in an explosives accident as a kid. He learned to use those hooks they gave him and became immensely successful and wealthy. He's the guy who rescued Marlon Brando's son from kidnappers. I mean, this guy once had his own action figure (my little brother owned it).

Link

BoingBoing reader Lloyd Vancil says, "The action figure is still out there. Isn't the net wonderful? Link." (Ed. note: OMG check out the "bio-kinetic hand" action!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:05:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Science and fiction

The cover story of this week's Science News is about how TV and movies--from A Trip To The Moon to CSI-- can be good points-of-entry to educate the public about real science:

During his physics classes, (high school teacher Tom) Rogers also presents accurate cinematic depictions of science. "It's harder to find good stuff," he notes.

For example, he shows excerpts from 2001: A Space Odyssey to teach the concept of artificial gravity. In the film, it's generated along the rim of the rotating space station by centrifugal force. Students use visual clues to estimate the size of the space station and its rate of rotation. They then plug those numbers into the appropriate formula. If they do this correctly, they determine that the gravity at the outer rim of the station is about 90 percent of that on Earth.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:11:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jay and Silent Bob coming to Degrassi

Jay and Silent Bob are coming to the Canadian cult TV show Degrassi: The Next Generation!

"It's like When Worlds Collide, y'know? I'm a big fan of things like when Spider-Man and Daredevil meet. I go ape-(bleep) and bust a nut," said director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy), who is finally getting his chance to take part in the cult series he idolizes by starring in a three-episode arc on Degrassi: The Next Generation.

In a hilarious and profane press conference here yesterday with past and present Degrassi cast, creator Linda Schuyler and her creative team, Smith confirmed that he and pal Jason Mewes (aka "Jay" from Clerks and Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back) will start filming their parts next week through mid-November.

The episodes, which will air early next year, have Kevin Smith playing himself directing the next Jay and Silent Bob movie, "Jay And Silent Bob Go Canadian, Eh?" In the fictional film, the slacker duo come to Toronto because they need to get a high school diploma and no school in America will take them.

Link (Thanks, Amanda!)

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

Wireless Music's Social Sound

My latest article for TheFeature is about the future of mobile music technology:

Seventy-five years ago, a group of eager engineers convinced entrepreneur Paul Galvin that young people would do well with some mood music when they went parking on Lovers Lane. The following year, Galvin Manufacturing Corporation launched its first car radio, named by fusing the words "motor" and the suffix "ola," borrowed from the popular Victrola phonographs. In 1930, the state-of-the-art Motorola car radio defined music in motion. The next revolution in mobile music wouldn't happen until 1979. Indeed, this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sony Walkman, wearable technology that provided young people with a private soundtrack for the movie of their lives. Since then though, the song has remained the same... Listen carefully though, and you'll hear the opening strains of new mobile listening experiences in development at research laboratories around the world.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:03:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amy Jenkins banned work premieres tonight in Boston

The Audrey Samsara, a video work by Amy Jenkins that was commissioned by the Salvatore Ferragamo company and subsequently deemed too "distasteful" to display in their 5th Avenue store, will finally be publicly shown for the first time tonight, October 21, in Boston. (Background here and here.)

"Samson Projects, Boston’s newest contemporary art gallery, and Newbury Street’s 9 Months, announce a new arrival: a provocative one-night exhibition and fashion show on Thursday, October 21. A video installation by Brooklyn-based artist, Amy Jenkins, will be shown on a 60 inch plasma screen. The same evening, the latest belly-baring, runway maternity looks will be modeled by local, pregnant celebrities."

For those unable to attend this special one-night screening, the work will also be part of Jenkins's upcoming solo show opening in February at the Kustera/Tilton Gallery in New York City. Tonight's event is from 6:30-8:30pm. Link

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

Hallowe'en mix-disc of all time

UPDATED AGAIN: Check out these two amazing downloadable mix-discs of Hallowe'en rarities and oddities -- Boris Karloff, the Groovie Goolies and the theme to Casper the Friendly Ghost! Man, this is what the Internet is for. (BTW, if you wanna post this as a .torrent, the Oddio Overplay people are cool with it -- just email Otis and me so we can post links to it) (Update: there's now a torrent of disc one online) (Update disc two is up as a torrent too now)

Disc One:

01 Tarantula Ghoul and The Gravediggers - Graveyard Rock
02 Don Hinson and The Rigamorticians - Riboflavin-Flavored, Non-Carbonated, Polyunsatured Blood
03 Movie Trailer - Vampire Playgirls
04 Bobby Bare - Vampira
05 The Crewnecks - Rockin' Zombie
06 Griz Green - Jam At The Mortuary
07 Movie Trailer - Monsters Crash the Pajama Party
08 The MSR Singers - Monster Man
09 The Abominable Surfmen - Monster Surfer
10 Bobby 'Boris' Jones - Surfer Smash
11 Jupiter Jones - The Spook Spoke
12 Bob Mcfadden and Dor - I Dig You Baby
13 Movie Trailer - The Mind of Mr. Soanes
14 Albert DeSalvo - Strangler In The Night
15 Kenny and The Fiends - House on haunted hill
16 Winchell's Donut House Halloween Record - Hear The Monsters (Spooky Sounds and A Spooky Tale)
17 Buddy Morrow and His Orchestra - The Raven
18 The Modernaires - The Rockin' Ghost
19 Bob Rosengarden and Phil Kraus - Satan Takes a Holiday
20 Boris Karloff and Friends - Ha Ha Ha/The Bride Of Frankenstein
21 Movie Trailer - Brain Eaters
22 Groovie Goolies - Goolie Garden
23 Hap Palmer - Haunted House
24 Bruce Haack and Norman Bridwel - The Witch's Vacation
25 Sounds of Terror! - Burned at the Stake
26 Louise Heubner - Intro Orgies, A Tool Of Witchcraft
27 Marty Manning and His Orchestra - Night On Bald Mountain
28 Criswell - Someone Walked Over My Grave

Link, Link to .torrent of disc 1, Link to .torrent of disc 2 (Thanks, Otis!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:30:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Update on confiscated Indymedia web server controversy

Micah from Indymedia says,

Richard Allen, Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield UK and Jeremy Corbyn (MP for Islington North) posed official Parlimentary questions to the Home Office about what happened with the Indymedia servers. Their response indicates that no UK law enforcement agencies were involved, see here for the full response:

Caroline Flint [holding answer 18 October 2004]: I can confirm that no UK law enforcement agencies were involved in the matter referred to in the question posed by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam.

Link to previous BoingBoing coverage: one, two.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:30:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Samsung releases 5 megapixel camera phone

Available in South Korea later this year -- 5 luscious megapixels of pure phonecamming pleasure from Samsung. Link to /.'s roundup of news coverage.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:20:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Forest creatures frolic with Grandaddy

This video from the band Grandaddy reveals (choose one):

(1) what you'll see at the dentist's office when the gas kicks in
(2) a Furry Fetish website come to life, minus the creepy sex stuff
(3) where lonely old sports mascots crawl off to die.

Link to quicktime video for "Nature Anthem." Not new but still worth a stream. (thanks, David)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:12:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hollyw00t

Moment of phonecam zen at an Austin, Texas movie theater marquee, courtesy of Wil Wheaton.

BoingBoing reader Stiv says, "That movie theater building currently houses Warthog: Texas (a computer game company, Link). Located on South Congress [street], the building used to be an adult theatre named Cinema West that got converted during the tech bubble. I fondly remember the porn titles they'd run on the marquee (my favorite was Passage through Pamela)."

Link to original. (thanks, Sean)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:51:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

$600K for GOP PDAs?

BoingBoing reader Ron Hovingh says,

My dad, dear misguided soul that he is, gave some money to the RNC but listed one of my e-mail addresses because he didn't have one at the time. So I've been getting urgent GOP "Give money now!" e-mail since last spring.

The latest RNC newsletter urges a contribution of $200, which it said "will pay for a PDA to help our canvassers contact Republican voters quickly accurately" and notes that "the RNC is shipping 3,000 out to volunteer captains."

I suppose $600,000 is a drop in the bucket if you're still coasting on Enron donations, but I have to wonder: 1.) What PDAs still cost $200? 2.) Do they get to keep the PDAs, and isn't this bigger partisan payola than Michael Moore giving away clean underwear?

But not so fast. BoingBoing reader Mark Pike urges us to refrain from playa-hatin' on partisan PDAs.

I'm working on the campaign right now trying to increase Dem. voter turnout in FL. With regard to the PDA stuff, canvassing operations have been using them to enter data at houses about voters. They use them to store maps of neighborhoods. This helps them control their databases and collect information more efficiently. There's no way canvassers get to keep the PDAs.

Also, when contacted voters reveal their preferences and begin discussing what issues are important to them, some of the canvassers use the PDAs to show commercials and videos that specifically target the things voters are discussing.

Look into it a little more. It's pretty fascinating how much technology is being harnessed by campaigners this year.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:42:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Delta flight attendant suspended for blogging

An anonymous BoingBoing reader says,

"Queen of Sky is a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines. Three weeks ago she was suspended without pay for the sole reason of posting pictures in uniform on her blog. She was given no warning or chance to remove the pictures before that time. Queen of Sky has since removed the pictures from her blog, but one of them can be found here: Link."

More on Cathy Seipp's blog, Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:37:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CC-licensed sf novel

Chris Carlsson has just released his first novel, "After the Deluge," as a Creative Commons-licensed download.

A teenage arsonist threatens a partially submerged mid-22nd century San Francisco. As a Public Investigator "€œtryout"€ seeks evidence across the utopian city full of canals and veloways, political and social conflicts erupt. When there is no such thing as property, what is crime, and how does a utopian society protect itself from bad behavior? Should scientists be as free as artists to create? What is a "free market"€ for work without and money and commodities?

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Creative Commons in 20 words or less

Jason Fried from 37 Signals has launched a challenge to clearly describe Creative Commons's value-proposition in 20 words or less. Go help!

"Legally share your work without losing copyright protection..."

Free legal service for intellectual property creators looking to share.

Share your cake and keep it too

"Legally share your work without losing copyright protection."

Alternative to traditional copyrights that allows authors and artists to share their work and still protect the specific rights important to them.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whales can't sue

Denise sez, "Ninth Circuit Judge Willy Fletcher, no doubt with some degree of wistfulness, concluded in a decision published today that the world's Cetacean Communty lacks standing to sue George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld over the Navy's use of low frequency active sonar."

We are asked to decide whether the world's cetaceans have standing to bring suit in their own name under the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. We hold that cetaceans do not have standing under these statutes.

Link (Thanks, Denise!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:53:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kidnapped Aussie uses Google to verify identity and secure release

An abducted Aussie journalist convinced his captors that he wasn't a spook by directing them to a search-engine.

[H]is captors agreed to release him after they were convinced he was not working for the CIA or a US contractor...

"They Googled him and then went onto a web site - either his own or his book publisher's web site, I don't know which one - and saw that he was who he was, and that was instrumental in letting him go, I think, or swinging their decision," he told AP news agency.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:52:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Glenn's seven point sleep program for new parents

New dad Glenn Fleishman has learned seven ways to help his baby boy sleep through the night.

5. Small noises should be ignored at night. We were pretty ready to jump up and feed or comfort Ben when he made any sound at night. And that was fine in his early weeks when he wasn't a good sleeper and his melatonin hadn't kicked in to start helping him tell night from day. But more recently, we were still doing it. Our post-partum doula/sleep consultant said more or less, he'll tell you when he needs something; his peeps and snorts can be safely ignored because he'll rise out of heavy sleep into light and back into it many times a night. She was right. The minute we started waiting for real action--not minutes of screaming, but a real "wah wah"--we started getting real sleep. It's tough. But it's the way to go and doesn't damage the kid. When you leap up every time he or she peeps, you're disturbing his or her sleep, the sleep folks say.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:12:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Godzilla v. Hollywood

Soon, a scaly lizard demon will trudge down Hollywood Boulevard. Mactresses shriek, clutching their knockoff Prada handbags. Trannies, junkies, and star map sellers scatter in all directions. Squinting through heady smog, the monster flails two little arms impotently in the air. He belches smoke, and groans a terrifying groan. Then -- splat! One clawed hand smacks down into a grey puddle of moist cement.

No, I'm not talking about Jack Valenti. On November 29, Godzilla finally gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Link to blogging.la post, Link to Japan Today story, and Link to Godzilla, Final Wars -- the 28th Godzilla film, due out on 12/4/2004, and purportedly last in the series.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:17:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

t-shirts: I heart Internets, I hear rumors, I heart Jon.

Show your love for the internets, and your faith in our presidentiary, with official "I HEART THE INTERNETS" merch. Link (Thanks, Chuck)
BoingBoing reader optimus says, "Oh, snap! The 'I Heart' tshirt model totally got the drop on us. Ours, though, has a totally 31337 IBM PC for optimal internets use." Link
BoingBoing reader thom says, "In a similar vein, there are some t-shirts with the 'Stop... Hurting... America' quote of Jon Stewart." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:43:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Q-Burns Abstract Message online listening party

Michael Donaldson, aka Q-Burns Abstract Message, may be the hardest working man in funktronica. When he's not gigging in big cities or remote locales -- Siberia and Iceland were two recent tour stops -- he's cutting, pasting and tweaking his inimitable brand of soulful grooves.

A new CD remix collection of his work was released this week. Future Past Tense documents selected tracks from 1998 to present, and you can listen to the entire album online by way of a spiffy flash player here: Link. Admission to the listening party is free, but strictly BYOB: bring your own broadband.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:36:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sex and mobile tech zeitgeist watch

File under "strangest patents of all time." Sounds like the cellular equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

Mobilehookup's patent pending 'Talk Now' combines text messaging's fun and convenience with speed-dating's functionality. A key industry innovation, 'Talk Now,' allows Mobilehookup members to further pursue a budding connection by talking live - for five minutes - on the telephone while protecting user privacy and anonymity. (...) One of the fastest growing communities of its kind in Canada, Mobilehookup offers 'Talk Now' users the unique opportunity to get to know a person better without having to exchange key personal information - like phone numbers or addresses. Not only does this mean members retain control of the dating situation but similar to speed-dating, they are better equipped to quickly decide whether or not to continue with a relationship.

Easy to use, 'Talk Now' is activated by sending a message to the Mobilehookup server. After getting approval from the other party, the Mobilehookup server connects the two members by bridging a telephone call, ensuring that total anonymity is maintained. Whether they're simply having fun or connecting with a potential life partner, the members receive five minutes from VoCoMo to talk to each other.

Link to ultra-bizarro press release (thanks, Jason)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:23:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photoshop contest: Bill O'Reilly's next book cover

Falaphilia, schadenfreude, and loofah sponges ahoy. Fark invites all to photoshop the cover of recently scandalized Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly's next book. Link (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:00:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mad Cowboy Disease

Clever tees benefiting "Downtown For Democracy," a political advocacy group comprised largely of hipsters. Link (via Hint)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:52:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stephen King finishes the Gunslinger books

For more than a decade now, I've been reading Stephen King's Gunslinger books; the series he started writing as a teenager and has finally finished with the seventh volume, called The Dark Tower.

The series is loosely based on Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and it's a magic-realist, metafictional, cowboy, horror, fantasy, science fiction saga epic that runs nearly a thousand pages to the volume, and took the man a lifetime to write.

The seventh volume highlights all that is good and all that is poor in this series. It is, of course, self-indulgent. This series contains (lots) more verbiage than the Bible and Kapital combined, and says much, much less than either. Of course. It goes without saying. King is indulging his imaginaton, and we have to indulge his indulgence if we're going to enjoy this.

And it is marvellously enjoyable. From the first page of the first book, I've been quietly engrossed in the outcome of King's questing heroes. And at the end of this seventh book, I found out how it all came out, and I wasn't disappointed. This was a tale worth traversing.

If you ask me, these are King's best books. The basic premise -- a cadre of mystic, gunslinging knights traversing the worlds and all time to reach the mcguffin that holds the universe together -- is the perfect, relentless drummer, pounding out the tempo of the story, dragging them through hardship beyond hardship. The science fiction elements are cool; the fantasy elements are heroic; the horror elements are creepy as hell. The plot doesn't slacken, and the characters are deeply and thoroughly drawn.

i'm glad it's over, though. After thousands and thousands of pages, I just wanted it to end. And I'm grateful it ended so well. Link

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

Mindball

Ealier this year at the Wired NextFest, I played a prototype of Mindball, a game developed at the Interactive Institute where two players sit at a table and control a small steel ball with their EEG activity. (Actually, your brainwaves control a magnet under the table that moves the ball, but it *seems* as if you're controlling the ball directly.) By relaxing your mind, you can make the ball roll over to the opponent's goal. So to win, you have to "out chill" the other person. I was skeptical, until I actually sat down to play against my friend Nick Philip, an ambient DJ/artist who is in the business of chilling. He beat me every time.

Now, Interactive Productline is selling Mindball tables for US$20,000. It would make a great addition to any man or woman-of-leisure's rec room. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:04:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neal Stephenson's Slashdot interview

Neal Stephenson's Slashdot interview is live -- he doesn't do a lot of press, but boy he's sharp.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:58:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sea monster

This monstrous sunfish washed up on a beach in Puponga, New Zealand. Link

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

Dubya's bulge is an iPod

UPDATED: Joi Ito found this great iPod-ad send-up. Link, Link to original

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Archive talk in London next week

Next week, the LWT in London hosts a talk called "BBC Creative Archive: Fuel for a Creative Nation," with Paula LeDieu, the visionary director of the BBC's Creative Archive project, through which the contents of the BBC's amazing vaults will be placed online under a Creative Commons license for reuse and redistribution by the Britons who paid for it all in the first place.

When: 28 October 2004, 18:45 for a 19:00 start
Where: Venue - LWT South Bank, Upper Ground, SE1, London. (Nearest stations are Waterloo and Southwark: map) Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:11:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons's new website

The Creative Commons website relaunched today with a really clean new interface -- great work, guys! Link (Thanks, Mario!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:39:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Toilet seats with LEDs

These LED-illuminated, battery-powered, motion triggered toilet seats are bad-ass, but not $250 worth of bad-ass! Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:17:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart on his Crossfire appearance

UPDATED: Here's a clip from Jon Stewart's Daily Show monologue following on his now-legendary Crossfire appearance in which he post-mortems his performance. Very good stuff. Link New Link, Crossfire's response (via Waxy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:54:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of President joking about non-existent weapons of mass destruction

Remember when the President delivered a rip-roaringly funny monologue about not being able to find weapons of mass destruction? Here's a video clip of the event, interspersed with the not-as-funny consequences of the President's mistaken insistence that there were WMDs in Iraq. Link (Thanks, Gregory!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:54:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CIA 9/11 report suppressed by the President

npr sez: "This is a secret report by the CIA that names names in terms of 9/11 responsibility but is being supressed by Bush. People who aren't registered at LA Times can read the full text of the article here.

"The agency directorate is basically sitting on the report until after the election," the official continued. "No previous director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by Congress." None of this should surprise us given the Bush administration's great determination since 9/11 to resist any serious investigation into how the security of this nation was so easily breached. In Bush's much ballyhooed war on terror, ignorance has been bliss. The president fought against the creation of the Sept. 11 commission, for example, agreeing only after enormous political pressure was applied by a grass-roots movement led by the families of those slain. And then Bush refused to testify to the commission under oath, or on the record. Instead he deigned only to chat with the commission members, with Vice President Dick Cheney present, in a White House meeting in which commission members were not allowed to take notes. All in all, strange behavior for a man who seeks reelection to the top office in the land based on his handling of the so-called war on terror.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:16:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free teeth flossing gadget

Kevin Kelly notes that you can get a free sample of the Reach Access Flosser he reviewed in Cool Tools by filling out this form here. Get your sample today and help us realize our goal to make Boing Boing readers the cleanest mouthed people on earth. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:11:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video: What's happened to George W. Bush's brain after 10 years?

luminifer sez: "This site has clips of a GW debate from 10 years ago, and clips from recent speeches/debates. The difference between the eloquent GW 10 years ago and what we have now is astounding, and maybe doesn't bode well for the future."

For [James Fallow's] article, rather than talking to campaign spinners for each side and reporting what they said, he dove into the archival record of each man's debates, and made an astonishing discovery: 10 years ago, George W. Bush was an articulate, forceful debater. Tough to belive, but when Fallows reviewed the tapes of Bush's 1994 debate with Anne Richards, he found that not only did Bush win the debate, but he spoke well.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:44:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Belarus busts American for providing VoIP, being an entrepreneur without permission

Authorities in Belarus -- the land of my forefathers -- have arrested a man for using and providing voice-over-IP services. Check out the way they characterized his activity, "damage to the country's communications providers," whew!

US citizen Ilya Mafter has been detained in Belarus because he was believed to have caused about 100,000 US dollars in damage to the country's communications providers, the Interfax news agency cited sources in the State Security Committee as reporting on Tuesday.

"A preliminary report suggests that damage of about 100,000 US dollars was caused to Belarussian communications providers, including the Beltelecom company, as a result of illegal communications services using IP telephony that were organized by Mafter," the source said.

The US citizen, who was detained on Oct. 16, is also suspected of "working as an entrepreneur without registration or permission," said the source.

Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gramophone DIY kit

This £16.95 kit was developed at Middlesex University -- it's a collection of materials and DIY instructions for building a mechanical gramaphone. It even comes bundled with a pair of old 78 RPM discs to test it with. Link (via Red Ferret Journal)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bling Bling Medallion: world's most branded thing

The Bling Bling medallion (composed of "layers upon layers of gold plated logos") is the world's "most branded thing." Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Firefox raising $ for NYT launch-ad

Firefox -- the slick and thin version of Mozilla intended for civilian use -- is going 1.0 soon, and the Mozilla Foundation is plnning on taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times trumpeting the occasion. They're taking donations and they've raised something like $30k so far. Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:11:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

U2 set to release iPods loaded with new album

Reuters is reporting that:

U2 and Apple Computer Inc. are expected to announce next week that they have signed a deal to sell custom iPods. According to a source, the Irish rock band's upcoming album "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," due Nov. 23 via Interscope Records, will come preloaded on iPods that will be available the week of street date.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:56:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's DRM talk in Hebrew

Ran Yaniv Hartstein has translated my DRM talk into Hebrew. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:26:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rudy Rucker starts a blog

Novelist, computer science professor, and former BoingBoing guestblogger Rudy Rucker launched a blog today at rudyrucker.com. He says the project was "driven by a desire to post a great topical cover of the old protest song 'Eve of Destruction' by Al Buzzo of Geneseo, New York." Link. (scroll down for blog).

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

That personal touch

Carlo says: "A woman gets a picture of a sack from a customer service representative, then the customer service representative gets the sack." Apparently, a telephone help agent from Orange in the UK tested a client's new cameraphone by sending her photos of his dick. "Of course the real problem," Carlo points out, "is that nobody looks big on a 2-inch phone screen." Link (via TheFeature)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:18:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Drum machine

The Pneumatic and Electronic Actuated RoboT (PEART, after the drummer for Rush) is a machine that pounds the skins based on MIDI signals. The rig was built by students at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. (Notice the impressive pile of junk hardware visible in the "practice space," most likely a utility closet in their lab.) Link (via Engadget)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:08:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TV sends S-O-S

An Oregon man's Toshiba TV transmitted an international distress signal at 121.5 MHz that was detected by satellite. Civil Air Patrol responded and demanded that the man turn off his tube or pay $10,000 per day in fines for crying wolf. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:58:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blogs as tool for direct citizen/lawmaker dialogue

In this blogging.la comment thread, LA City Councilmember Eric Garcetti engages in dialogue with some of his constituents. Pretty cool example of the potential of blogs to facilitate government accountability and public discourse. Link (thanks, Sean)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:43:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ScienceMatters@Berkeley

In this month's issue of ScienceMatters@Berkeley:

* Supernovas illuminate dark energy

* Neurobiology's lighter side

* A twist on Cancer DNA

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:39:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tiny remote shuts off almost any TV in a public place

Great Wired News article about TV B-Gone, a keychain fob that you can use to turn off bothersome TVs in bars, airports, etc.

The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:37:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ben Folds on Shatner

William Shatner's surprisingly good "Has Been" album was produced by alt.pop pianist Ben Folds. BB pal John Alderman just conducted a really insightful interview with Folds for MP3.com.

(Shatner) had so many ideas, and they're ideas coming from a 73-year-old actor. And that's a great perspective. It's moving. We hear kids all the time. Rock and roll is--and should be--a kid's place, and they're coming of age--18 years old--and they're going, "There's something out there. I want to get it. There's something." And those things that they're saying... They've been said over and over, which is OK, because this is their first time living. But what Shatner's saying in the record so much is that he still feels that at 73 years old. It's like you don't just age to 25, 30, 40 years old--and all of a sudden you know everything. It's that perspective that bridges any kind of generation gap you could have in rock-and-roll music.

As I'm saying it, I think it's kind of monumental. I don't know that anyone's ever done that before--actually said, "I'm 73 years old, and I cannot get my s*** together." That's cool!

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:34:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

This guy uses ultrastrong magnetic field to shrink coins

This guy uses ultrastrong magnetic field to shrink coins. Link (Mirror site link) (Thanks, Kim!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:27:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Review of "The Last Starfighter: The Musical"

Doesn't get much nerdier than this, folks. From filmmaker and former BoingBoing guestblogger Jason Scott:

1982. Atari Games, to celebrate the creation of their Atari 2600 Pac-Man Game (which, I might add, was one of the most pathetic, slapdash, slipshod piece of programming ever to churn out of a development studio) held a massive "Pac Man Day" in Citicorp Center in New York City. Being a confessed "Pac Maniac", I couldn't resist. To complete the picture, you have to know that I had that great uncontrolled 11-year-old hair of unequal length, and an old army fatigue jacket with a "PAC MAN" t-shirt transfer on the back. Now, it was me and literately THOUSANDS of kids jammed into the inadequately-planned celebration area at the Center, with all of us vying for places to stand and have fun. They had the contest, which only had maybe a dozen of us actually show enough nerve to go up on stage, and due to a REALLY LOUD chomping sound, I placed somewhere around third. Of course, this is up to dispute, because the place essentially turned into a riot (I can still recall my father up on a balcony, screaming at me to stand against a wall so I wouldn't be stepped on) and they generally just THREW stuff into the crowd, but I was third.

This is a memory I will hold dear until all of time. It was not a depth. It was a pinnacle. It was a heady, breathless moment in time in which my own fannish interest in something led me to a situation, a unique situation, that could barely be explained to others without sounding truly off-the-wall, absolutely beyond saving. And like many such unique events, you hold a fear in your heart, beyond the memory, a fear that as time goes on you will not feel such things again.So, as I sit here typing these words to you, I know I have achieved something of equal, deep geekdom. I have attended an off-broadway musical based on The Last Starfighter.

Link to Jason's blog entry, Link to The Last Starfighter show details.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:06:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google Desktop + Hello + orkut = bad news?

BoingBoing reader Adam says,

There's some idle suspicion that Google intends to expand their functionality to include sharing of desktop files. This seems pretty likely given their acquisition of Picasa, which included something called "Hello" - an IM-like application for chatting and sharing pictures. Moreover, if they decide to merge this with orkut, to allow file sharing just with your friends network, then that's a pretty compelling offering.

HOWEVER... The orkut terms of service are still extremely unfavorable to the end user. This is not too bad when it just applies to your profile and to chats on their message boards. It is REALLY bad when it applies to other forms of personal content that may be shared using the system.

I blogged this earlier: Link. As I said, this is just idle speculation, but it seems like something we all ought to watch out for.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:57:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark Cuban: Give it away give it away now

Broadcast.com billionaire, Dallas Mavericks owner, and "Benefactor" star Mark Cuban is giving away a bunch of ideas for new businesses on his blog. They're potentially patentable, he says, but he's not inclined to file.

Cuban's ideas--like others that have materialized on his Web log--center around the emerging industry for personal video recorders (PVRs), such as TiVo, and video on demand (VOD). VOD is not as widely available as PVRs are, but the idea has shown some recent signs of life with a movies-on-demand deal between TiVo and Netflix, and with the VOD service--offering mostly obscure programming--of Akimbo.

Link to CNET's story.

Cuban says, "If I were a patent terrorist like some, I could probably even patent these ideas. Isn’t it a shame that in this country today, you can have nothing more than an idea, do nothing with it, but still have a chance to make money?" Link to Cuban's blog entry with details on the proposed ideas.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:36:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coming soon: babies with three biological parents

In the Observer (UK), a story about proposed scientific experiments that would result in children being born with three biological parents.

UK medical authorities say they will almost certainly approve the application in the next few weeks. The aim of the technique is to prevent mothers passing on degenerative genetic diseases to their children. But campaigners say it could lead to significant increases in elderly women having children. They also claim it represents an unacceptable step towards the creation of designer babies.

'By creating a child with three genetic parents, these scientists are taking the first step towards genetic engineering of human beings. That is not a direction in which we should be going,' said Dr David King, director of Human Genetics Alert.

Link.

BoingBoing reader Chris says, "Actually, this is not completely new: Link."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:41:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fun with scissors

BoingBoing reader Kenny says, "We were having a debate about the term 'Pair of scissors,' and decided to do a Google 'Feeling Lucky' search on 'Why a pair of scissors' (without the quotes). Try it! Then be sure to read through the FAQ section." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:41:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's Edinburgh talk video .torrent

Video from my talk at Edinburgh University, "Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rooms to Make the Web Illegal, and You're Not Invited" is now online as a .torrent, thanks to Torrentocracy. Link (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:54:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Live-action women's Dungeons and Dragons show

Dungeon Majesty is a cable-access TV show in which four young women play Dungeons and Dragons -- the show is intercut with Z-grade green-screen masks of them staging D&D fights in front of fakey caves or deep in spooky woods, and illustrated with flip-book animations fo D&D monsters drawn in pen on lined paper. This is really fantastic stuff -- it's got nerd pride to burn, and production values that make MST3K look slick. Wish they'd put up .torrents of the shows, but the video teaser is pretty entertaining in and of itself. Link (Thanks, Star!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:09:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

California cooking the paper-ballot option

California may have a law requiring its electoral overseers to offer paper ballots to voters this election, but the people who run the elections want to fix it so that you never find out about it.

Pollworkers in Santa Clara County are being trained not to offer voters a chance to use paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has learned. California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley mandated in May that all polling places offer a paper ballot option, which would allow people concerned about e-voting machine reliability a chance to vote on paper ballots at the polls. But pollworkers in Santa Clara County are being instructed not to tell voters that this option is available. Instead, they will make paper ballots available only if voters specifically request them.

Ed Cherlin, a pollworker being trained in Santa Clara County, said he was very disturbed to learn that he was not supposed to mention the paper option. "I object to the government telling me that I can't tell people about their rights," he said.

Link (Thanks, Tracy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:34:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, October 18, 2004

Pop Surrealiam book signing in LA at la Luz de Jesus Gallery

My friend Kirsten Anderson is going to sign her new Pop Surrealism lowbrow art book at la Luz de Jesus Gallery from 7-11pm on October 23rd. Many of the featured artists will also be there: Mark Ryden, Marion Peck, Todd Schorr, Lisa Petrucci, Anthony Ausgang, and The Pizz will be there to sign copies. (Here's Bruce Sterling's take on the gallery) Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:03:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dreaming of the single-chip mobile phone

I wrote an article for TheFeature about two recent University of Michigan announcements that could lead the way to a mobile phone on a chip.

[T]oday's mobile phones -- not including ones that have non-traditional form factors -- have become about as tiny as human anatomy allows. Does that mean miniaturization is coming to an end? For the phones themselves, the answer is probably yes. For the components inside the phone, the answer is definitely no.

The advantages to shrinking and integrating the internal components of mobile phones are obvious. Component miniaturization means that manufacturers can pack more functions into phones, and integration ultimately leads to lower manufacturing costs.

At the Wireless Integrated Microsystems Engineering Research Center (WIMS ERC) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, two different research projects -- one involving antennas and the other involving frequency resonators -- could help achieve a long sought-after goal -- a true single-chip wireless transceiver.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:30:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weinberger: Photo-organizing infocalypse looms

This morning's roundup of this month's Wired missed this fantastic article by David Weinberger on the coming infocalyptic disaster when we all have a squillion photos with no metadata.

Thus, the metadata most of us attach to our photos is pretty pathetic. We can name them when we transfer them to a computer, but most people don't bother and end up with a hard disk full of photos with names like DSC00012.jpg and DSC00234.jpg. As the years go on, DSC00234.jpg will become an archaeological artifact that might as well be labeled Don't_Know_Don't_Care.jpg. If we're to have any hope of preserving our memories, we'll need to be more clever than that. Much more clever.

What do you do if you're too lazy - or overburdened or preoccupied - to tag your photos? Let a machine do it. Digital cameras already capture critical data points at the moment the shutter clicks. Most models record - in the image file itself - not only the date and time a photo was taken but also the focal length, the aperture setting, and whether the flash fired. These tidbits can provide clues about whether the photo was taken indoors or out, during the day or at night, focusing on something close up or far away. Scanty metadata, but potentially helpful.

But why limit the possibilities to what today's cameras can do? The image file format most cameras use includes fields for longitude and latitude, in anticipation of the day when global positioning systems are built in. That day could be soon. Cell phones already gather some positioning information, and by the end of 2005 all new cell phones in the US will be locatable to within 500 feet or so. Establish a Bluetooth wireless connection between phone and camera and the camera will know where it is. Web sites already exist that use GPS data to let you upload photos pegged to spots on maps, and a Stanford research project compares photos with shots of known locations, automatically annotating snaps with information about where they were taken.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:02:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fleshbot -- the film company-- releases lost porno flick of Ed Wood

Holy media meld, Batman! Resurrecting a 1971 hardcore feature from legendary kitsch auteur Ed Wood, Fleshbot becomes a film distribution company. Fleshbot says:

In 1971, Ed Wood's "Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love" -- one of the last of over two dozen porn flicks made in the 1960s and early 70s by the cinematic genius responsible for such classics as "Glen or Glenda?" and "Plan 9 From Outer Space" -- opened at the Hudson Theater in Times Square for an extremely limited run ... and the full hardcore version of the film hasn't been seen in its entirety since. Until this month, that is, when it becomes the first DVD released under the Fleshbot Films imprint. Yes, we're very proud. Wherever he is, we hope Ed is too.

Link, and I am so buying the DVD immediately (not worksafe)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:55:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Torrented Stewart-on-Crossfire audience outstrips cable audience

Best guess is that the Bittorrent downloads of Jon Stewart on Crossfire have outstripped the size of the audience for the cablecast of Crossfire.

The iFilm version currently has 99,228 views. Sites don't make Blogdex without 250,000 views. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe 350,000 is more viewers than the original Crossfire interview probably had. (I can only find that CNN averages 757,000 viewers during prime time).

Update: From the time I posted this until the time I finished an email with similar content, 40,000 people viewed the iFilm version of the Crossfire interview. Everytime I've checked BitTorrent, there have been more than 100 people sharing the file.

Another Update (10/16/04 7:56 PM): Leonard Lin is saying there are 4,000 BitTorrent seeds and his Apache server is now "handling 100+ simultaneous connections and avg'ing 7.0MB/s right now, 25GB/hr"

Yet Another Update (10/17/04 7:47PM): The Stewart/Crossfire torrents are now number 5 on Blogdex and has 291,863 on iFilm. The BitTorrent page lists 54,206 download, but I can't imaging how they're coming up with this number.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:19:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sushi USB drives

These are easily the coolest USB gizmos: light-up chunks of plastic sushi with USB memory inline. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:16:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark interviews Love and Rockets' co-creator Jaime Hernandez

In the October edition of Graphic Novel Review, I interviewed Love & Rockets' co-creator Jaime Hernandez, who has been creating comics about the same cast of characters for nearly a quarter of a century. Fantagraphics has just released a 700+ page book, Locas, which anthologizes most of Jaime's work from the comic book.

Now that you are in your 40s and your characters have aged along with you, have the things that have happened to you as you've grown older played a large part in the way you look at the world?

I do really pay attention [to] how life is in the mid-40s and how it affects them. Even if we try not to live life by this timeline, we do. You're at a certain age where you say, "Where do I go from here? Do I want a family? By the time I'm this old, do I want a house?" Things like that. When you're younger, you don't think about that stuff, and some people are forced to think about it. It doesn't work out that well for some people. And so, so that's what I think about a lot. I think about which of my characters are going to slide into old age gracefully and which ones are going to go in kicking and screaming. That's an important point in my work right now. That's one of the things I think about a lot. "Ok, I'm doing a character here, where are they going? They're this age, they should be at this point, or maybe not, why aren't they? Why aren't they married and have kids?"

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:46:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ramachandran lectures

Following on Xeni's post below about neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, here's a link to Real Audio recordings of his excellent Reith Lectures from last year on the subject of the Emerging Mind. Lecture #4, Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese, is a wonderful introduction to synesthesia. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:29:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Asexual pride

New Scientist has a long feature on asexuality and how online communities of asexuals are declaring their non-desire to be "as valid an orientation as being straight or gay."

The amazing degree of variation in the experiences of asexual people suggests that the underlying causes of their lack of sexual attraction are very different. Some asexuals might simply have extremely low sex drives in spite of an innate orientation towards males or females. Other asexuals might form a fourth category of sexual orientation in addition to the hetero-, homo- and bi-sexual ones, namely people who are attracted to neither gender, even if they have normal sex drives.

There is no official definition for asexuality yet, but it probably needs to take all these variations into account, says Anthony Bogaert, a psychologist and human-sexuality expert studying asexuality at Brock University in St. Catherines, Canada. “The place where we draw the line is the desire to interact sexually with other people,” says Brian (name changed), a navy veteran from Virginia. When it comes to having children, some asexuals say they would like to have a baby, but most would use IVF to avoid having to have sex.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:18:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Synesthete psychics

Researchers from the University College London propose that people who see auras may actually have a rare form of synaesthesia, a cross-wiring of the senses. Psychologist Jamie Ward studied a woman identified as GW who saw certain colors projected around people she knew and in response to hearing their names. Ward says:

"The ability of some people to see the coloured auras of others has held an important place in folklore and mysticism throughout the ages. Although many people claiming to have such powers could be charlatans, it is also conceivable that others are born with a gift of synaesthesia. GW does not believe she has mystical powers and has no interest in the occult, but it is not hard to imagine how, in a different age or culture, such an interpretation could arise."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:39:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kevin Sites Iraq blog: Layla, part 2

NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is in Falluja this week. He adds two new dispatches to his blog, including this snapshot of traveling hula girl Layla (background) with some new friends. Link to Layla, part two, Link to Flying Dutchman. (and happy birthday, Kevin!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:21:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EDGE: The Astonishing Francis Crick

V.S. Ramachandran writes in John Brockman's EDGE zine:

Everyone knows that [Francis] Crick (along with his colleague James Watson) unraveled the double helical structure of the DNA molecule but not everyone appreciates the even greater contributions he made soon afterwards. He went on to decipher the genetic code (three nucleotides coding for an amino acid; the mechanism of DNA replication, the transcription of the code by mRNA and its subsequent translation into amino acid sequences mediated by transfer RNA) With these achievements in place Crick soon came to be regarded as the founder of the new science of molecular biology and occupied the same place in twentieth century Science as Darwin did in the 19th century.

Link

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

Muppet Fan Halloween Parade 2004

BoingBoing reader Caines says, "ToughPigs.com has published the first installment of its annual Muppet Fan Halloween Parade. This year's parade starts off with more than a dozen fan-made Beaker costumes." Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:25:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Sterling becomes a design professor

On his Viridian Design mailing list (which just turned 6 years old), author / genius / ecological oracle Bruce Sterling says:

I have been asked to take a year-long guest residency, teaching design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

This school is in the Los Angeles basin, the epicenter of Southern Californian car culture, the etymological origin of the term "smog," and a metroplex that arm-wrestles Houston every year for the crown of the most polluted city in the USA. If there's a heart to the Greenhouse beast, well, it can't be far from Pasadena.

I'm taking the job. It's time to become the change we want to see. For the year 2005, the Viridian Pope-Emperor is becoming a design professor. I have a number of ambitious developments in mind for Viridian list, because, starting January, design will become my career. I'm leaving Texan and I'm becoming Californian. For a while, anyhow.

The full text of this mailing list post isn't yet available online -- but when it is, it will be right here: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:15:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FiASCO

Former Nerve columnist Grant Stoddard now has an ironic electro-porno-kitsch-clash band called F i A S C O, which must be typed with extra spaces and caps to emphasize its overthetoppedness.

Often-BoingBoinged photographer Clayton Cubitt shot the stills for their website, and the video for their first single is nonworksafe genius.

Link to website. High-bandwidth Quicktime video link, Low-bandwidth link (video contains ironic nudity).

Fleshbot has more on "the making of" -- the video's comprised entirely of borrowed clips from a classic '80s TV show:

Anyone who's watched Manhattan cable television over the past 27 years needs no introduction to Robin Byrd, the pornstar-turned-Oprah of the smut set whose late night talk show has featured practically every adult entertainer ever to grace the marquees of the strip clubs of Times Square (back when Times Square actually had strip clubs, that is.) New York City band Fiasco pays homage to Robyn and her many guests over the years—not to mention their hairstyles, lycra unitards, and box-bangin' dance moves -- in a cleverly edited new video for their song "Those Feelings" ... lie back, get comfortable, and enjoy.

Link to Fleshbot post.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:01:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Zeitgeist watch: Bushkilledsuperman.com

Stem cell politics, comic mythology, and the death of Christopher Reeve all collide here. Link to Bushkilledsuperman.com. (The art shown here appears on an unrelated blog. All the same meme, though).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:45:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bush's faith-based reality: "Without a Doubt"

Author and former WSJ national affairs reporter Ron Suskind has a riveting piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine.

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Link (via William Gibson's blog)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:45:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barlow: Exit Strategy

John Perry Barlow blogs about a mid-air encounter with a security industry CEO who was on his way to Baghdad.

We didn't find it difficult to get along despite the obvious political differences we'd had during the decades when he has been literally engaged in war-mongery and I have been a hippie peacenik. The interesting thing was that we didn't disagree on much now. We both believed that the invasion of Iraq and its subsequent occupation was a tragic catastrophe that could only get worse.

"I'll tell you," he said, "before we get out of Iraq, it's going to make Viet Nam look like a good idea." And this from someone who thought that our clandestine overthrow of the Sandinistas, in which he had taken part, "was" a good idea. But now he's mostly in it for the money. Besides, armed conflict is what he knows.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:37:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US voters: today is voter registration deadline in some states

BoingBoing pal Bart Cheever says [to mostly California-resident pals],

Today, Monday October 18, is the deadline to register to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. To be able to vote your registration form needs to be postmarked by midnight tonight.

You can download registration forms and info from DeclareYourself.com. Physical forms are available at the post office, library or at your local registrar of voters (you can find the location of the registrar nearest you at vote-smart.org)

So -- if you haven't registered, take a couple of minutes to download the form, print it out and drop it in the mail. Don't wait until later, do it now!

BoingBoing reader Dan writes,

True, today is the last day to register to vote for those in California, Kansas, and South Dakota, but the deadlines are later for other states (see the linked page on the FEC website). In fact, in my home state of Maine, you can actually register to vote in person up to and including election day!

Link to list of State Voter Registration Deadlines.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:33:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chinese company claims "Happy Birthday" as trademark

Jason Schultz asks, "Will they sue kids who give competitors' toys at birthday parties where they sing the song?"

The words “Happy Birthday” can no longer be legally used if they are pinned to any other product, as a private Chinese company has claimed to have registered them as its trademark in 25 countries, including the US, Japan and European Union members this month. The Fufeng toy plant in East China’s Anhui province said it has more than 70 products with the “Happy Birthday” brand, including industries like toys, dresses, shoes and hats. With increasingly fierce competition in the world toy market, the company realised the importance of branding.

Link

BoingBoing reader Neil Turner says,"The song, Happy Birthday To You, is actually copyrighted, according to Snopes, and the copyright doesn't expire until 2030. This means that any time the song is used in films, TV shows etc. royalties have to be paid. Link."

On the derivative works tip, BoingBoing reader Neil says, "Ever notice how when you go to a restaurant like Red Robin or Applebees, they'll sing birthday wishes for you using their own 'special' songs? It's so they don't have to pay royalties for singing Happy Birthday! I wonder if that'll all change in 2030."

BoingBoing reader Eric A. Farris says, "The copyright of the song Happy Birthday to You was used as a story element in the first season of the most excellent and now defunct Aaron Sorkin sitcom Sports Night, episode four, Intellectual Property. A 'script' of that episode is here: Link."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:29:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyright v Creativity tomorrow night at University of Reading

Tomorrow night, I'm chairing the University of Reading's "Copyright vs Creativity" night, wherein Dr Andrew Adams, School of Systems Engineering will run down the UK and international perspective on copyright, creativity and the net. Open to the public, completely free, be there or be square:

What: University of Reading's Copyright vs. Creativity night
When: Tuesday October 19, 8pm
Where: University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus, Palmer Lecture Theatre (Map)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:06:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory interview on All About Symbian

Last week in Edinburgh, I did an interview with Ewan Spence, the co-editor of All About Symbian, on science fiction, civil liberties, Creative Commons, and mobile technology -- part one just came out today. Link (Thanks, Ewan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:50:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Magic-realism as Weapon of Mass Destruction

Chris Nakashima-Brown is a Texas science fiction writer, popcult savant, and IP attorney. He writes like a cross between William Gibson and Mark "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist" Leyner -- these magical, hyperdense sentences that are each of them nearly haiku of amusant culture-jammer archness. The plot of his latest story is the use of Borgesian magic-realism as covert weapons of mass destruction, and its online gratis at Strange Horizons. Here's a taste:

I had my 9 a.m. acting class (Shatner method) to teach to our platoon of body doubles. Ali was the star out of the three unemployed Saddams we had recruited. He was dating J. Lo #2, Esmeralda Nuñez, and we needed to get them ready for their first op—a masterful bit of paparazzi placement I'd engineered for the next slow news week...

Womack set up his 12-inch Presidential Aviator George W. Bush in an on-deck leadership pose between the ketchup and the salt shaker. Fully outfitted with flight suit, pressure gear, and sidearm, the Prez usually stayed on the dash of Womack's Lincoln Continental, but turned into a worry ball when the boss was preoccupied. A worry ball that also served as a vehicle for Womack to practice the masterful voice-throwing he had honed in two decades as a practitioner of dirty tricks and kids' party ventriloquist.

"We're working hard to put food on your family," said the mini-Prez. "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:33:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hong Kong Disneyland Feng Shuied

Disney's Hong Kong Disneyland plans have been modified by a Feng Shui specialist brought in to consult on the job.

Esther Wong, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong Disneyland, said that the company had rotated the orientation of the entire park by several degrees in the early design phase after consulting a master of feng shui, a Chinese practice of seeking harmony with spiritual forces.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:47:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wired: tiny cars, objectifying cool and anti-Darwin

Finished the new Wired yesterday -- in addition ot the already-mentioned-here Long Tail article, there were three other very noteworthy features that had me engrossed from the first graf:

• The Smart Car: a $10,000 plastic car with an integrated steel roll-cage that you can buy out of a vending machine. They park two to a parking space and get 50% better mileage than a Prius. These things are all over the road in Europe, but to make them work for the US market, they're rolling out an SUV -- a tiny, cute, fuel-efficient SUV.
• fMRIs to measure cool: a hipster scientest is putting peoples' heads in a functional MRI box and showing them pictures of cool and uncool objects to see how dorks' and beautiful peoples' brains differ; charmingly told by a dorky scientist ("Fifth grade was also the year that I discovered, to my shame, that the seventh grader I had privately idolized was actually the class dork, a turtleneck-and-glasses-wearing nerd incarnate"), the kicker is the junk science behind the interpretation of the results and the triumph of nerdliness over flash.
• Anti-Darwinists: Religious fundies (and, strangely, George Gilder) have gussied up Creationism with a cloak of information-theory science rhetoric and have successfully lobbied various school districts into getting "Intelligent Design" (dishonest new buzzword meaning "God|Aliens are responsible for humanity") onto the curriculum alongside of Darwin. Infuriating piece, and a textbook example of dirty poltiicking; the author does a fine job of deconstructing the arguments of the Creationists.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:34:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cartoony smoothie-maker

Disney has introduced a new, cartoon-styled "smoothie-maker" -- looks awesome. Wish my kettle, stove, and laptop all had this kind of Max Fleischer coolth. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:21:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CAPPS II's brother: you can stop it

Bill Scannell sez, "CAPPS II may be dead, but its evil step brother 'Secure Flight' will live if we don't complain loudly enough. If something isn't done soon, the passenger records of over 54 million Americans will be handed-over to the TSA by the airlines. The time to file your comments is now. We've built an interface that links directly into the 'Secure Flight' comments database. Deadline: 25 October."

To the Department of Homeland Security, you are no longer an American, you are a potential terrorist. Unless immediate action is taken by you, anyone who flew on any airline in the United States during the month of June 2004 will have a government dossier opened-up on them.

In order to test a new Orwellian airline security program called 'Secure Flight', the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration will force the airlines to turn over all their their passenger's travel records -- which include everything from credit card numbers to whether a kosher meal was requested -- from June of 2004.

If this test isn't stopped, there will be little left to stop the TSA from running checks on everyone who flies. 'Secure Flight' will make our country less like the America we grew up in and more like Communist East Germany circa 1974. All patriotic Americans must work to make sure this invasive, unconstitutional program never comes to fruition. Homeland Security needs to stop treating ordinary American citizens like criminals.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:11:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ads too risque for the clients

Zeldman has compiled an Ad Graveyard of rique print and Web advertisements that were rejected by clients of ad agencies. Some are quite funny, some are shockingly tasteless ("The said it would take three more bullets: The Beatles Reunion"), all are worth a look. Link (Thanks, Matthew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:10:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P Politics: make political clips and send 'em on

P2P Politics is a new, nonpartisan site put up by Aaron Swartz, J Christopher Garcia and Larry Lessig that enables users to pick from short video campaign ads from supporters of the Dems, GOP, and Naderites and send them to friends with a single click. So far, only Kerry supporters have answered the call for clips, but Republicans and Naderites should get up, make some video, and send it in. All you need to do is shoot a video, slap a Creative Commons license on it, and the Internet Archive will host it while P2P Politics distributes it. Link (Thanks, Larry!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:07:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, October 17, 2004

UPDATED: TiVo jumps the shark with dumbass DRM system

Matt Haughey, editor of the PVRBlog, writes, "This is an appalling example of TiVo baking DRM into their brand-new uber-expensive DVD burning TiVos. If you have a non-DVD tivo and you buy this new DVD-R model, you may transfer shows to the new TiVo, but you *can't* record those shows to DVD. It's totally insane and a sign that maybe TiVo is starting to drink the DRM kool aid, by going so far as to keep die-hard TiVo owners from recording shows within their own house, unless they recorded it on a single unit." Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Update: Kevin sez, "I called Pioneer and TiVo to see if there was a way around this, but they said they weren't trying to prevent us from doing this... it was a codec/compression issue. OK, fine. I can see that having the additional DVDR hardware in one box would give you options the standard Series2 wouldn't have for encoding, but TiVo needs to make potential customers aware of this limitation."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:41:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Court: War on Terror is no excuse to trample liberties

Light sez, "This is an exceptionally cool - the Federal Circuit Court unanimously threw out the Georgia government's attempts to force protesters through metal detectors because the terror threat is elevated."

"We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War of Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over," Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the three-member court. "September 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country."

Link (Thanks, Light!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:17:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Plane full of crash-test-dummies crashing, blowing up:video

CoolGov has a great post on Federal regulators' experimental, deliberate crashing of airplanes full of crash-dummies into remote airstrips in order to determine the "crashworthiness" of airplanes. The silent video from inside the cabin is eerie and incredible -- way cooler than any special effect I've ever seen. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:59:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Muslim convert's veil sparks couture controversy in Italy

As Bruce Sterling recently asked on his blog -- "Milan or Tehran?" Well -- neither. Drezzo, Italy, where an Italian mother of four who converted to Islam has been fined $100 for wearing a veil that hides her face. Sabrina Varroni's case has inspired a dispute between politicians, civil liberties advocates, and fashion designer Giorgio Armani. Link to NYT article (Thanks, Jose Marquez)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:15:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony bullies Retropod off the net

Sony sent a bullying shut-down notice to Retropod, a website selling hand-made iPod cases made out of recycled Sport Walkman housings. From defending consumer rights in the Supreme Court in the 1984 Betamax case to this in 20 years: what a pack of sellout assholes. Hey, fuck you too, Sony.

Sony recently learned that you are selling a case for carrying an iPod personal stereo that is made from a WALKMAN tape player. The product is being offered at your website at www.retropod.com.

Your use of casings for such a purpose is a clear infringement of the SONY and WALKMAN marks because it is deceptive. Consumers likely will be misled and deceived into believing that Sony is somehow connected with the iPod personal stereo when in fact it is not. (and now the important part) Moreover, they will be misled into thinking that Sony is backward in its design of products and is going away from miniaturization, as the size of the tape player housing is quite large by today's standards.

Link (Thanks, 555Rgne!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:37:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney's own copyright law bites it on the ass

Disney's being sued by a kids' hospital that has the rights to the Peter Pan novels. The hospital says that the 1998 Sonny Bono term-extension (a law that Disney bought in order to ensure that its earliest cartoons didn't enter the public domain) covers the Peter Pan stories and so Disney owes it royalties on a sequel that a publishing subsidiary put out. Disney says that the law doesn't cover the Pan books -- and that it should know, since it paid for that law! -- and now they're going to court.

As Lessig notes, Disney is right -- the Pan books are public domain. But as Jason Schultz demonstrates, the temptation to wax neener-neener here is nigh-insurmountable ("When will Disney stop stealing from the public domain? I mean really, it's just like taking a CD from a record store without paying for it... except that the record store owner is dead... and well, the store is really the compendium of human knowledge.. and the CD is part of our collective cultural history. Whatever. Theft is Theft, right?")

This weekend sees the UK premiere of a film about Barrie's life, "Finding Neverland" -- starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet and Dustin Hoffman. The hospital will receive royalties from book excerpts portrayed in the film.

But the hospital charity says is getting nothing from "Peter and the Starcatchers" -- which has been on the New York Times best seller lists, has had an extensive author tour and has its own Web site. They say the book has been published without its permission.

A spokesman for the hospital told CNN that Great Ormond Street held the copyright to Peter Pan in the United States until 2023 -- although it runs out in EU countries in 2007 -- and said: "We are considering our options."

Disney, meanwhile, has insisted that Peter Pan is out of copyright in the United States.

"The copyright to the J.M. Barrie stories expired in the U.S. prior to 1998, the effective date of the U.S. Copyright Extension Act, and thus were ineligible for any extension of their term," Disney said in a statement to the Daily Telegraph.

Link (via Copyfight)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:21:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Be a character in Shetterly's next novel

Will Shetterly, the brilliant author of the incredible novel Dogland (a magic-realist novel set in 1950s Florida, told from the PoV of a boy who's father has opened a dog theme-park -- a heartbreaking and magical novel about race politics, theme parks, and the Foundtain of Youth) is auctioning off the right to appear as characters in his next novel. And in order to make sure that those who can't afford the bidding aren't shut out, he's also giving away the chance to be a character in his next book as a piece of postcardware:

'm very grateful to the people who are bidding on eBay for two chances to be a character in the book, and three chances to be its patron. But I realize a lot of people can't afford to bid. So I'm offering a drawing: You or a character of your choice, a person or a pet, now have the chance to appear for free in a cameo in the novel.

Link,/a> (Thanks, Will!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:14:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, October 15, 2004

Bollywood election satire cartoon

"Who wants some dishoom?" is a Flash spoof cartoon about the US presidential elections. Cast includes John Kerry, George W. Bush, Ahnold, and Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. Like many Bollywood movies, on whole it's not that great -- but the dance numbers are hotter than vindaloo. Link (thanks, Hob Gadling)

OK, but what does it all mean? BoingBoing reader Sameer says, "Dhishoom is like saying 'Biff,' 'bang,' 'wham,' or 'pow' -- Also the most common soundtrack dub during Bollywood fistfight scenes. Ususally used as "Dhishoom-Dhisoom.'"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:43:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance on bittorrent

One of the most powerful televised exchanges in recent history. Stewart hits it out of the park. BoingBoing reader bryan says, "Jon Stewart blasted the hosts on CNN's Crossfire for hurting the democratic process instead of helping. He also calls Tucker Carlson a dick. Bittorrent: Link, and transcript here.

BoingBoing reader Hal points us to Salon's coverage (Link), and describes the interview/buttkicking alternately: "Tucker Carlson gets his ass handed to him on a platter -- without falafel to sweeten the taste."

In Salon, Charles Taylor says:

I've heard people talk about "The Daily Show" as an oasis of sanity, a public service. I couldn't agree more. Stewart's appearance on "Crossfire" was another public service. He went on and acted as if the show's purpose really was to confront tough issues, instead of being the political equivalent of pro wrestling. Given a chance to say absolutely what he thought, Stewart took it. He accomplished what almost never happens on television anymore: He made the dots come alive.

Here's an alternate BitTorrent link: Link. (Thanks, yatta)

Also, Ifilm has a stream here: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:24:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

"Natural Thing" film at Illegal Art

Matt Conroy sez: "I saw your inclusion of the Christopher's sex ed mp3's at Boing Boing, and thought you might be interested in a video piece "Natural Thing" that my wife and I made as part of the video group Paul Harvey Oswald using that very record.

"It's available at Illegal Art. Scroll down to the Paul Harvey Oswald entry." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:10:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Downhill Battle launches "Slashdot for politics"

The folks behind Downhill Battle have launched a new news-site called The Regular, an hourly politics blog from some sharp copyfighters.

We were wondering why there wasn't slashdot for politics. Could it because there are already really good political blogs? Well, we think it's about time to use Slashdot's really good format where the efforts of a whole community go to make really good news stories. Thanks, Slashdot, for blazing this trail.

We have good reason to think that filesharing is participatory culture in the making. And that's what Downhill Battle is really about. Our next step is to hit the politics industry and we hope we can hit it big. We're working on getting something out the door that's participatory culture for politics; the same way that the current music industry isn't what music is about, participatory politics is not just about electoral politics. Our bread and butter will be housed at ParticipatoryPolitics.org in the future.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:30:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sleepwalking sex

The BBC and New Scientist report on new scientific findings around the phenomenon of "sleepwalking sex."

Mr Buchanan told the Australasian Sleep Association how a patient of his, who was a respectable middle-aged woman with a steady partner, would leave the house while sleepwalking and have sex with strangers. The woman was totally unaware of her double life until her partner became suspicious and found her engaged in the act. "He was aware of some sleepwalking and there was circumstantial evidence, including the unexplained presence of condoms around the house," Mr Buchanan told the conference.

But enough with the (marginal) news. Fleshbot seizes the occasion as an excuse for a pile-on of "sleep fetish" sites. Who knew? Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:14:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on sale now for $11.95

Some guy on Amazon is selling Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) for $11.95, and says he'll ship it in 1-2 business days. Too bad Apple isn't releasing Tiger until mid-2005.

Here's a screen grab of the page, since it's sure to be pulled soon. Click for enlargement. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:52:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Mixed Media Zen

mark mothersbaugh
gum blondes
eddie breen
martha bruin degen
c.m. botz/f. glessner lee
biggles odd objects
david c. roy
roger stevens
neo kaiju
jason salavon
kiki smith
Image: detail from one of ex-DEVO-er Mark Mothersbaugh's works at mutato.com: "Two Teddies for a Happy Rabbit; Stow, Ohio".
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:55:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to get off the fed "do-not-fly-list"

This article on MSNBC indicates that getting off the controversial "do-not-fly-list" is as simple as modifying your name. Add a middle initial or a suffix, and you'll b0rk the data management system. The system seems to be so poorly designed that it cannot prevent false positives -- but may also allow an actual terrorist to slip past by just inserting a middle initial. Link (via Declan's politech list)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:45:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photo gallery of Bush bulges

President Bush either needs a new tailor or he has something strapped to his back. Here's a gallery of photos. In some of them, the bulge is evident. In other photos I see either normal fabric pooching or nothing. Link (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:35:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Documentary film on BBSes debuts from ex-BoingBoing guestblogger

Former BoingBoing guestblogger Jason Scott says,

I'm happy to announce that the BBS Documentary I talked about so much is now in pre-order on the page. If people order before the 10th of November, they can send me a paragraph that will be included in the 3-DVD set. Also, I'm having a "beta premiere" where I show it to folks before going in for the final round of editing. That's happening November 6th AND 7th (after all, there's 7 episodes) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's been a long three years!

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:33:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Feebs want names of everyone who read ObL bio

Zed sez, "A library in Washington is fighting the FBI's subpoena of the names and addresses of everyone who's checked out _Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America_. Why is the FBI so interested? Because someone wrote a Bin Laden quote, 'Let history be witness I am a criminal' in the margin."

Because of privacy policies, the library does not give out circulation records without a court order. When the FBI got a grand jury subpoena, the library filed a motion to quash it -- citing the rights of all people who use the library.

"Like the right to read and to read the material of one's choice without fear that someone will come around with questions about why you chose that book," said Garrett.

The FBI withdrew the subpoena, reserving the right to file it again.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office says they are not permitted to discuss anything that involves the grand jury.

If the feds had demanded the records under the Patriot Act, the library would have had to hand them over without question and without help from the courts.

Link

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

Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction

I've just finished reading the sixth Adrian Mole book, Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction. Adrian Mole, the titular diarist of the series, is basically the same age as I am; I practically memorized the first two volumes while I was in high-school, especially the incredible, awful poetry that puts Vogons to shame ("Pandora/I adore ya/I implore ye/Don't forget me" or the immortal:

Norway! Land of difficult spelling.
Hiding your beauty behind strange vowels.
Land of long nights, short days, and dots over 'O's.
Ruminating majestic reindeers
Tread warily on ice floes
Ever aware of what happened to the
Titanic.
One day I will sojourn to your shores
I live in the middle of England
But!
Norway! My soul resides in your watery fiords fyords fiiords Inlets.

)

As the years went by and Adrian aged, I found myself more and more engrossed in his life. Townsend, his author, walks us along a tightrope balanced over torture comedy (a la Fawlty Towers) and genuine pathos through the first five books:

1. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three Quarters
2. The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole
3. True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, Margaret Hilda Roberts and Susan Lilian Townsend
4. Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years
5. Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years

The story really picked up in book five, with Adrian's television career as the host of Offaly Good, a British cookery show devoted to entrails, at the height of the Mad Cow scare.

Book six is much, much better, though. Townsend is appalled by Blair's leadership and the invasion of Iraq, but rather than turning this into an anti-war manifesto, Townsend creates a convulsively funny running gag around it: Adrian has cancelled a holiday in Cyprus due to Blair's warnings that Saddam's WMDs could target the island, but his travel agent won't refund his £57.10 deposit until evidence of the WMDs is put forward.

I don't think I've enjoyed an Adrian Mole book so much since the original two. There's a lot of real pain and hardship in this story, not played for yuks at all, but whenever the tale gets too heavy, Townsend busts out one of Adrian's characteristic, tight-assed priggish observations about the world around him and just floors me.

A new Adrian Mole book is like a welcome letter from an old, beloved, frustrating friend. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:17:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Be the 1,000th ghost at Haunted Mansion Disneyland

Holy crap, I think my brains just exploded. This is the best thing ever. I mean, EVER.

In an effort to raise funds for The Boys and Girls Clubs of America, DisneyAuctions.com is holding a "spirited" event that will allow the winning bidder to receive a personalized "tombstone" in the finale graveyard scene of the attraction with a humorous epitaph (inspired by the lucky bidder's interests and hobbies) written by the team at Walt Disney Imagineering.

But wait. There's more. The winning bidder will also receive a one-of-a-kind miniature replica of the tombstone and a certificate officially recognizing him/her as an Honorary resident of the Haunted Mansion; and the successful bidder and a guest will be spirited away from his or her hometown to Disneyland in time for a midnight "burial" ceremony on Thursday, October 28, officially placing the tombstone in the graveyard of the Haunted Mansion.

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:03:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-shirts from Real Genius

Adam sez, "After a recent viewing of Real Genius I was compelled to own an “I Love Toxic Waste" t-shirt. However, my search for the perfect shirt was extremely frustrating. Unable to find a decent replica of the shirt, I decided to make my own. During the course of the project, my appreciation for Val’s (Chris Kinght's) other t-shirts grew as well. I realized that if I was going to recreate one shirt I might as well make them all (or at least those worth remaking). Every aspect of the original shirts has been studied and recreated with great fidelity." Link (Thanks, Adam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:54:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schoolhouse Rock that tells it like it is

Pirates and Emporers is a pitch-perfect send-up of the "Schoolhouse Rock" musical civics cartoons of the 1970s -- easily the most-compelling educational materials aired on US TV -- in which the dark history of US international policy (funding terrorists, arming atrocity-mongers) is set to jaunty music and simple animation. Link (Thanks, Cassidy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:51:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

In-game motivational posters

One of the maps for the first-person shooter Counter Strike is called "cs_office," and contains everything you'd expect in an office, including these screamingly funny motivational posters with gamer themes (CAMPING: Doing unto others before they do unto you; HEADSHOT: Those who can, do -- those who can't complain; etc). Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:28:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Kevin Sites Iraq dispatch: Rivers Run Through It

NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites posted this dispatch to his blog before departing Baghdad for Fallujah this week,

When I see them in the river -- the 40-foot, olive-green boats -- all I can think of is Apocalypse Now. When, I wondered, would Captain Willard climb aboard and motor up the Mekong Delta on his way to terminate Colonel Kurtz's command with "extreme prejudice."

The surroundings even smacked of the cinematic version of Vietnam, muddy river banks broken up with patches of stiff, thin reeds, fisherman in small wooden boats plumbing the opaque green waters for tonight's meal.

But this is obviously a long way from that war zone. Twenty-nine years and a few thousand miles. We are on the banks of the Euphrates River in Iskandaria, Iraq. In moments we will be pushing off into a steady current and an uncommonly serene Iraqi dusk.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:45:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First ever "gay IPO"

Today, San Francisco-based online media company PlanetOut became the first gay-directed business to trade publicly on a major exchange. The ticker symbol: LGBT, an acronym for "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender." How's the stock doing? Super, thanks for asking! Link (Thanks, Wayne)

Update: BoingBoing reader Darryl says, "No to quibble, but the Satellite was a 'Gay' media and property development group that floated on the Australian Stock Exchange on September 23 1999. They went into administration (rather like bankruptcy in the US) in November 2000 and the court cases continue to this day. Here's an overview: Link. Business press comments "back in the day": Link. And the court case continues: Link."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:01:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The tyranny of email

Interesting article on how to deal with email more effectively.

I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows.  It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into "right brain mode", and really focus on a problem. 

Unlike face-to-face conversation and 'phone calls, people can communicate via email without both paying attention at the same time.  You pick the moments at which you pay attention to email.  But many people leave their email client running continuously.  This is the biggest baddest reason why email hurts your productivity.  If you leave your email client running, it means anyone anytime can interrupt what you're doing.  Essentially they pick the moments at which you pay attention.  (Even some random spammer who is sending you a crappy ad for a get-rich scheme.)  This is bad.

Link (Via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:47:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage Peanuts pins

Matt Hinrichs received a complete set of Peanuts pins from the 1950s as a gift. Time to get jealous. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:39:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neuromarketing soda

Princeton psychology researcher Samuel McClure and his colleagues conducted brain scans on people to understand why some prefer Coke and others have a taste for Pepsi.

In their study, the researchers first determined the Coke versus Pepsi preference of 67 volunteer subjects, both by asking them and by subjecting them to blind taste tests. They then gave the subjects sips of one drink or the other as they scanned the subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this widely used imaging technique, harmless magnetic fields and radio signals are used to measure blood flow in regions of the brain, with such flow indicating brain activity levels. In the experiments, the sips were preceded by either "anonymous" cues of flashes of light or pictures of a Coke or Pepsi can.

It turns out that the choice is based to some degree on "visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans that consume the drinks." I bet next year's NeuroMarketing conference won't be cancelled due to low registration. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:12:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bill O'Reilly's alleged falafel fetish now has a name

Link to http://www.falaphilia.com.

fa·la·phil·i·a (n.)

1. Obsessive fascination with ground spiced chickpeas shaped into balls and fried.
2. Erotic attraction to or sexual contact with garbanzo beans, coriander, and cumin.
3. An abnormal fondness for being in the presence of middle eastern foods. Also called taboulehmania, hummulingus.
4. Sexual contact with or erotic desire for a falafel.

Background on the sexual harassment suit filed by a former subordinate of the famed Fox News anchor here: Link. BoingBoing reader Anna wonders if the whole debacle might be more accurately described as a case of Batata Harrahssment. I don't know, but get ready for lots of bad puns on good food.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:01:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Printer forensics

Remember the Brady Bunch episode where the family traces a letter from Jan's "secret admirer" to Alice's typewriter? Of course you remember it. Now, researchers at Purdue University have developed a similar technique for laser printers. Law enforcement would use the approach to bust counterfeiters and forgers.

The technique uses specialized software to detect slight variations, or "intrinsic signatures," of printed characters, revealing subtle differences from one printer to another. Even printers that are the same model have slight flaws and variations in their mechanical systems. These variations result in subtly different characters.

"We have observed variability from printer to printer within a single model, " (researcher Jan) Allebach said. "That’s because for a company to make printers all behave exactly the same way would require tightening the manufacturing tolerances to the point where each printer would be too expensive for consumers.

Link (via Slashdot)

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:39:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Vintage Christian sex instruction LPs

Postfun reviews old Christian sex-ed records.

Dad lights up his pipe and starts talking about nocturnal emissions.

DAD: One of these nights before too long you may find some of it (semen) passes off in your sleep . . .

BOB: (worriedly) But Dad, that's wrong, isn't it?

DAD: No, son, it's not wrong . . . No, it's true that to waste the seed deliberately - to do anything knowingly to make it come is a very grave sin. Because God designed that secretion in a man for one purpose. That is to be, well, like one of his raw materials in the creation of a new life . . . Wet dreams are different. Sometimes the supply of semen becomes too great before a man is married and these dreams are sort of a safety valve . . .

BOB: But Dad, why do fellas get these feelings before they get married?

Dad responds with a metaphor popular in the softcore films of Zalmon King. That is to say that God made sex as necessary as food for survival. Dad adds that sometimes this procreative desire inconveniently appears before the wedding vows are taken and the bloodtests are registered with the county seat.

Link (Via Sound Scavengers)

UPDATE David sez: " Here are four mp3's from the Sex Instruction LP that you recently wrote about.

How Babies are Born

Girls and MenstruationThe Problem with Growing Boys (which you quoted)

The Marriage Union

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:00:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brain implants

A 24-year-old quadriplegic is now able to control a computer with his thoughts. This summer, the man was implanted with the Cyberkinetics BrainGate chip. The tiny device, containing 100 electrodes, was installed in the patient's motor cortex. Apparently, the connection is good enough that he can even play videogames and check email. From a Nature.com article:

The BrainGate allowed the patient to control a computer or television using his mind, even when doing other things at the same time. Researchers report for example that he could control his television while talking and moving his head.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:50:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni on NPR: Dub Reggae Ice-Cream Truck

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I ride with Aurelito and Shakespeare, two Los Angeles-based DJs who have converted a '69 Dodge ice-cream truck into a mobile reggae sound system. They drive the truck all over they city -- to the beachfront, to the financial district, everywhere -- spreading sweet sonic scoops of double-dip dub for all to hear.

Link to archived radio program. This NPR.org website feature includes three streamable songs from the duo, as well as some photos I took while we were cruising around in the ice cream truck.

Here is a more complete gallery of the images I shot during that most unusual of LA street adventures: Link.

Shown here: Shakespeare looks out the back of the multi-colored dub reggae bus (Link to full-size).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:34:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kids' anatomical illustrations

This gallery of second graders' anatomical drawings is really wonderful. The work reminds me of Outsider Art.

"You will notice how exceptional the drawings are - giving evidence to the premise that children learn so much more when the topic is of interest to them."

Link (via Reality Carnival)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:33:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

William Gibson reblogging

William Gibson is blogging again:

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie."

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:20:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wil Wheaton reads from Just a Geek

Wil Wheaton, the former Wesley Crusher of Star Trek: TNG, is one of the most interesting geeks I know. Geeks, as a species, come from fantastic and variegated backgrounds -- doctors, lawyers, ditch-diggers and shop-clerks; it's a salutory effect of the absence of any real professional practice of geekdom. All that's required to be a geek is to geek out -- to pick up a computer and find something there that speaks to you, loudly and compellingly.

Wil has written a very good memoir of his journey to the present day, called Just a Geek (my blurb: "Here's the gimmick: Wil isn't *just* a geek. He's a geek who's come to nerdvana -- the Paramount lot where they dropped the first Trekbomb and forever changed the world -- to tell us that it's not all it's cracked up to be. He's also a geek who can *write*. Finally, he's a geek who's unafraid to sit at the keyboard and open a vein: there's a lot of scorching honesty mixed in with these convulsively funny memoirs."), published by O'Reilly.

Wil recently appeared at the Gnomedex convention and read an hour-long excerpt from Just a Geek, and the ITConversations people have put it online. Link (Thanks, Wil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:04:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Indymedia's servers returned

Micah from Indymedia sez,

Indymedia harddrives have been returned to Rackspace. Yesterday we received an email from a yahoo address that we could not confirm, but now we know for sure they are being returned. We are requesting that they do not boot them, and they are being treated as hacked/infected, we will dd the drives and then perform analysis on them. We still have no idea what the deal is:

We received the drives for these servers back this morning, they are currently in the servers.

Jeff:

I know that you have gone through more than I can possibly understand. I was just told that the court order is being complied with and your servers in London will be online at 5pm GMT.

I will pass along anymore information that becomes available and that I am allowed to.

Again, I do not have the words to understand nor express the feelings and emotions you have endured since this began.

Regards,

Jason Carter
Business Development Consultant

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Three debates' audio in torrents

You asked for it, you got it: the complete audio of all three presidential debates in MP3, packed into a single three torrent files on the Internets. Courtesy of the good folks at Torrentocracy. Link to third debate Link to second debate Link to first debate (Thanks, Gary and Guido!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:52:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Drug-smugglers' coolest secrets

Microgram Bulletin is the DEA's publication for tracking the ingenuity of drug smugglers -- from hollow, heroin-filled lollipops to heroin formed into machine parts to coke-filled Evian bottles to marijuana-based peanut butter to my personal favorite, this hollowed out biography of Princess Di filled with cocaine. Man, I've never seen a more thorough glamorization of drug smuggling! It seems the narcotraficante set has an entire army of James Bond Qs laboring in underground labs pumping out Viagra-lookalike Ecstasy and secret-agent hashish chocolate bars. Link (via CoolGov)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:50:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Warren Ellis launches Telepathine

A fresh source of free radio and fresh digital culture from Warren Ellis:

The telepathine playlist is donated music and performance by invited artists. It uses the radio.blog system to stream the audio as compressed Flash files. Most if not all of the telepathine artists have their featured works available as micropay or free downloads, accessed through their biography pages below. Mperia is telepathine's preferred stage for mp3 preview and purchase.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To do in LA: RESFEST, now through Sunday

The Los Angeles edition of this planet's coolest digital film fest began today and continues through Sunday. Details on the coming five geektastic days and nights of pixelated culture are here: Link to schedule, film listings, and ticket purchase info.

If the graphics throughout the website (and on-site at the RESfest event) look familiar, that's because they're the work of often-BoingBoinged artists Kozyndan. Remember that amazing panoramic poster they did for the SARS Art Project? Link to The Yum-cha Militia (My Mother thought she had SARS, but it turned out to be PMS) (buy a print online for $25! I have one on my office wall.)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:56:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BMW miffed over results in "Ask Jolene" adult search engine

If you hunt for the term "BMW" with porn search engine AskJolene.com, results may include pornographic photos with images of BMW cars. German car manufacturer BMW AG is not pleased, and has accused AskJolene.com of trademark violation. Link, and Fleshbot has more. (thanks t3knomanser)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:49:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wacky art car desktop wallpaper jpegs

Gigantic desktop images of an obsessively complicated 1986 Ford WOW Bus art-car. 25,000 pieces. Good heavens. Link (Thanks, Nico Boll!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:36:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Snap, crackle, moan: Rice Krispies vibrator

BoingBoing reader Gerald says,

"A friend of mine noticed that the giveaway electric toothbrushes in boxes of Kellogg's Rice Krispies breakfast cereal can double as vibrators. Dunno if they're being given away in the States, but in Canada you can't escape them. She took pictures; they're blurry, but the point is clear [particularly when the toothbrushy half of the two-part device is removed].

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:13:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

AZ high school students build hydrogen powered car

BoingBoing reader Simone says,

"This car runs off hydrogen that the vehicle itself produces using water and solar power. No big whoop, right? Car manufacturers have allegedly been exploring this technology for years. However, THIS particular car was built by high school students. Unreal!"

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:08:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fox News producer sues Bill "Shut Up" O'Reilly for sex harassment

Smoking Gun says:

Hours after Bill O'Reilly accused her of a multimillion dollar shakedown attempt, a female Fox News producer fired back at the TV star today, filing a lawsuit claiming that he subjected her to repeated instances of sexual harassment and spoke often, and explicitly, to her about phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies. Below you'll find a copy of Andrea Mackris's complaint, an incredible page-turner that quotes O'Reilly, 55, on all sorts of lewd matters.

Based on the extensive quotations cited in the complaint, it appears a safe bet that Mackris, 33, recorded some of O'Reilly's more steamy soliloquies. For example, we direct you to his Caribbean shower fantasies [Ed. note: said tropical fantasies include use of falafel as a marital aid -- last graf on this page: "... I would take your other hand with the falafel thing and put it on your pussy." Step aside, Atkins Porn! ] .

While we suggest reading the entire document, TSG will point you to interesting sections on a Thailand sex show, Al Franken, and the climax of one August 2004 phone conversation. (22 pages)

Link (Thanks, Sean)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:00:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless tech glossary

Wireless tech expert and "WiFi Toys" author Mike Outmesguine has posted a handy overview of wireless tech terms on TheWirelessWeblog. From Bluetooth to ZigBee, from WEP to WPA to UWB, it's all here. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:50:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Silver dollars minted from Twin Towers metal are bogus

Remember the company that was selling commemorative silver dollars minted from money retrieved from a safe at ground zero? Turns out they weren't made from 9/11 silver. In addition, they aren't made of silver and they aren't dollars. A NY court has halted the sales of them.

[Judge] [New York Attorney General] Spitzer said the sale of the silver dollars — emblazoned with the World Trade Center towers on one side and the planned Freedom Tower on the other — is a fraud. He's investigating whether the silver actually came from the ruins of the twin towers.

Spitzer said the National Collector's Mint, based in Port Chester, N.Y., falsely claims that the coins engraved with "In God We Trust" are legally authorized silver dollars.

Spitzer said the coins, produced by a Wyoming company called SoftSky Inc., are advertised as nearly pure silver when they're only silver-plated.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

UPDATE Here's an excellent Wikipedia article about the coin.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:29:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Elfriede Jelinek's home page

Former BB guest blogger Jenn Shreve points us to the Compuserve-hosted, Bambi-enriched Web site of Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature.

Jenn says: "Based on what I've read about her books, the film version of the Piano Teacher, and clips on the BBC showing scenes from her plays that involved almost-naked fat old men spanking one another among other things, she's a rather fearless, political, experimental writer. A bold choice for the Nobel committee." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:16:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Push Pin

In 1954, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Ed Sorel founded Push Pin Studios and transformed graphic design forever. Unapologetically drawing from the entire history of visual culture, from German woodcuts to Art Nouveau to 1930s comic art, Push Pin created a fresh, witty, surrealist, and thought-provoking style that (re)united illustration with typography and design. Many of today's edgiest graphic designers owe it all to Push Pin, whether they realize it or not.

BB co-conspirator and Chronicle Books editor Alan Rapp is helping bring the joy of Push Pin to a wider audience with The Push Pin Graphic, a collection of the studio's signature periodical produced from the 1950s to the 1980s. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:06:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Square bacteria

Researchers have managed to grow this square bacterium in the laboratory for the first time. The square bacteria was first discovered twenty-five years ago in a salty pond near the ultra-salty Red Sea. To grow it in the lab, the scientists used a culture with the salt concentration of soy sauce. From an article in Nature:

The microbe is also extremely tolerant of magnesium chloride. According to (University of Groningen scientist Henk) Bolhuis, this makes it a model organism for studying what life might be like in extraterrestrial corners of the solar system, such as the magnesium-rich brines on Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:43:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monsanto stole patented wheat from Indian farmers

Monsanto had taken out a patent for a "genetically modified" strain of wheat. Today, they lost that patent in Europe, after Greenpeace proved that the wheat in question had in fact been selectively bred by Indian farmers and had not emerged from Monsanto's labs.

The European Patent office in Munich had granted a patent to Monsanto on May 21, 2003. The patent covered wheat exhibiting a special baking quality that Monsanto claimed to be its invention.

However, Greenpeace proved in its opposition that the wheat variety was bred by Indian farmers for improving its baking quality and it was not a genetically-engineered invention as claimed by Monsanto.

Link (Thanks, Jason!)

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

eBay-resistant games economies

Randy Farmer has just posted his upcoming State of Play 2 conference paper, called "KidTrade: A Design for an eBay-resistant Virtual Economy." Dan Hunter at Terra Nova sums it up nicely.

He suggests that there are virtual economy models that are resistant to eBaying, and which (talking to game devs) "may be suited better to your property, especially if externalizing virtual object markets will be harmful to the health and/or profitability of your product." He outlines one instantiation of such a model for an "eBay-resistant economy, designed for children to trade scarce virtual objects without fear of being cheated by smarter, craftier (adult) traders who are generating a lifestyle-supporting income from eBay-ing the kids’ poor trades."

Link (via Terra Nova)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iiRobotics, Edinburgh's toy robot store

I'm on my way out of Edinburgh today, having given my talk yesterday, but before I split, I made a point of dropping by iiRobotics, the collectable robot store just off the Royal Mile. iiRobotics has an amazing selection of vintage and new toy robots, from craquelure-crazed 1950s tin jobs to modern Robosapiens, and is staffed by a pair of friendly, knowledgeable robots enthusiasts whose personal ardency for robots was really delightful. They've got most (all?) of their inventory online and for sale. I did about a third of my Xmas shopping today... Link (Thanks, Alice!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:25:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

E-Voting roundtable

SiliconValley.com is running an online roundtable this week about the security and trustworthiness (or neither) of E-voting. Panelists include Dan Gillmor, David Dill, Mischelle Townsend, and a host of other tech journalists, engineers, and voting activists. Readers can also submit questions.

"Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems declined to participate in this discussion."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:21:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Novelty dynamite clock

This novelty "dynamite" clock is one of the coolest, most subversive uses for a generic digital clock that I've ever seen. However, at $125 per, I'm tempted just to make my own. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:03:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moment of environmental apocalypse zen: airplane exhaust scars

Doug says,

"Some time back, one of the Boingers posted an article about the environmental effects of airplane traffic. To further support this article that may or may not exist, I submit today's Astonomy Picture of the Day that shows plane contrails like scars on the land. Link.

And a "contrail count for kids" program over the next two days: Link."

From an April, 2004 NASA press release about the environmental effects of plane exhaust:

NASA scientists have found that cirrus clouds, formed by contrails from aircraft engine exhaust, are capable of increasing average surface temperatures enough to account for a warming trend in the United States that occurred between 1975 and 1994.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:25:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gay accent

Years ago, I blogged about the Fannish accent -- the pronunciation commonalities among sicence fiction fans, which seemingly predate their involvement in fandom (IOW, people are fans because they have the accent, not accented because they're fans). Now there's some research indicating the existence of a gay/lesbian/bisexual accent, too.

Vowel production in gay, lesbian, bisexual (GLB), and heterosexual speakers was examined. Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation. Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /[open aye]/ than heterosexual women. Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men. However, the vowels of GLB speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns typical of the opposite sex. These results are inconsistent with the conjecture that innate biological factors have a broadly feminizing influence on the speech of gay men and a broadly masculinizing influence on the speech of lesbian/bisexual women. They are consistent with the idea that innate biological factors influence GLB speech patterns indirectly by causing selective adoption of certain speech patterns characteristic of the opposite sex.

Link (via Plastic Bag)

Update: Dana sez: "Bailey is the author of a book titled _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, about transsexuals. Aside from the fact that he was sleeping with some of his research subjects (usually considered a bit of a conflict of interest), the guy has some rather... prejudiced ideas about gender and sexuality. He seems to be associated with a group called the Human Biodiversity Institute -- which sounds reasonable enough, until you find out it's a group of right-wing Eugenicists who argue for things like a 'gay germ' and support the guy who wrote _The Bell Curve_, which 'proved' that blacks are dumber than whites.

"There's an enormous clearinghouse of info about Bailey, the problems with his general theories, and the formal research misconduct (sex for SRS recommendation letters, frex) and ethics violation charges (practicing clinical psychology without a license) which are being investigated as I type."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:59:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Antique scientific and medical instruments for sale

"Radio Guy" is an antiques dealer specializing in beautiful old medical and scientific instruments, with a good line in vintage and antique toys. His wares are expensive, his site is very hard to get around (it's all giant imagemaps and every click spawns a new window, argh), but gosh, these are some pretty artifacts. Link (Thanks, Skye!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:46:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Theory of Fun: Understanding Comics for games

Raph Koster was creative lead and lead designer on Ultima Online and Ultima Online: The Second Age, and the creative director on Star Wars Galaxies -- today, he's the Chief Creative Officer for Sony Entertainment (the division that does the video games). His new book is called Theory of Fun for Game Design, and I was lucky enough to read a review copy last month.

Raph's intention here is to write a Understanding Comics for computer games: an accessible, lay-oriented text that explains, finally, what this medium means. Why are grownups playing games? What makes a game fun? What do games do to the way twe perceive the world? What do games do to the way we change the world?

Charlie Stross and I have been tossing around an idea for a novel set in a Massive Multiplayer Online game, revolving around the virtual-property-rights debate; Theory of Fun made me rethink big chunks of that book.

Theory of Fun is available for pre-order on Amazon now, with the pub-date listed as November. If you're a gamer, this should be your Xmas prezzie to your non-gamer friends; if you're not a gamer, this is the book for the gamer in your life.

In recent years, much study has been centered on gender differences in particular. One researcher in the UK, Simon Baron-Cohen, has concluded that there are “systematizing brains” and “empathizing brains.” He identifies extreme systematizing brains as being autistic, and ones just slightly less so as being those diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome. The distribution curve of systematizing brains versus empathizing brains, according to Baron-Cohen, is apparently influenced by gender. Men are more likely to have systematizing brains, and women more likely to have empathizing brains.

Gender differences have finally become acceptable to discuss without accusations of sexism. It’s important to realize that in all cases, we’re speaking in generalities, of averages. On average, females tend to have greater trouble with certain types of spatial perception—for example, visualizing the cross section of an arbitrary shape that has been rotated to a different facing. Conversely, males tend to have greater trouble with language skills—doctors have long known that it takes longer for boys to become verbally proficient.

It speaks of the power of videogames that they can actually change this. After all, the equation is both nature and nurture. There has been research showing that if women who have trouble with spatial rotation tests are given a videogame that encourages them to practice rotating objects and matching particular configurations in 3-d, that not only will they master the spatial perception necessary, but the results will be permanent.

According to Baron-Cohen’s theory, there are people who have high abilities in both systematizing and empathizing. One would surmise that these people tend to go into the arts, which are both heavily systematic and also require a high degree of empathy. Baron-Cohen postulates that having high abilities in both is a contraindicated survi