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Thursday, March 31, 2005

Robogames coverage

Ambiguous.org's Quinn Norton covers last weekend's Robogames event for the O'Reilly Network:

A sensor board coordinates data from two infrared controllers at 45° and 135° (angled to give some advanced data about the angle of the walls just in front of the robot). The sensor board also takes in data from a front-mounted sonar unit that tells the robot how far away the wall is (bumping a wall in the Trinity challenge is a penalty). Finally, there's a pair of line detectors pointing at the floor. These allow it to see the lines that mark the entrances to rooms, as well as the fire circle and the starting circle.

The last part of Larson's basic board kit is the CPU board, which pulls in data from the other boards, and spits out decisions to the motor.

Many of the decisions about what the sensors are seeing is farmed out to processors on the other boards, which come to an agreement using a subsumption architecture, the distributed decision-making architecture invented by Rodney Brooks in the 1980s. But at the top, the CPU board's Microchip PIC CPU (a 18F6621) uses a traditional maze-solving routine to map its way to the candle.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:44:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Library of Congress deletes whistle-blower's comments

Joe discovered that when the Library of Congress posted the comments it got on the "Orphan Works" proceeding, it failed to redact the personal info of the submitters, simply covering them with a white box, which anyone could see through with a simple copy-paste operation. He complained to the Library of Congress, so they deleted his comment.

I had assurances from the LoC that they had fixed this personal information disclosure. However, working with the folks at freeculture.org, it appears that their "solution" was to remove my comment document only (instead of a more general solution). Moreover, all the original unredacted files are available in the ZIP file they offer... which hasn't been updated.

Man, doesn't anyone know someone at the LoC who can get things done? Well, I guess that's the price I pay for providing feedback (participation tax, I suppose).

Link (Thanks, Joe!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:28:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Euro-RIAA justifies breaking iTunes, endorses fairy-tale of "open DRM"

Charlie sez, "While Jon Johansen ported PyMusique to C#, now called SharpMusique, a head of IFPI Norway says they don't care about PyMusique and that all the blame is on Apple and its proprietary DRM:"

To the degree that iTunes sells music based on proprietary barriers, this is not something that has happened with the recording industry's blessing and celebration. We are skeptical to this. This is a problem Apple has to solve." [...] "As far as I can see PyMusique does not violate the DRM system in iTunes, it only keeps the music away from the (iTunes) program.

It's funny to see the European equivalent of the RIAA saying that Apple deserves to have its DRM broken, of course.

But the REALLY funny thing here is the nonsensical term "proprietary DRM." DRM is by definition proprietary. Even in the "standards bodies" where they are setting out DRM systems, these are not freely implementable -- instead, you have to go on bended knee before a cartel of studio executives and beg permission to have your implementation approved. Shipping an unapproved DRM is a one-way ticket to an anti-circumvention lawsuit.

Among the grounds for refusing to approve an "open DRM" is that you want to include an output to some other DRM that hasn't been approved -- if you build to a "DRM standard," you have to waive your right to contract with anyone building to different standard.

But it gets worse: say you get permission to include an output for some other DRM system that you think your customers want and use. If, at some time in the future, the cartel decides that the other DRM system is no good (say, because Jon Johansen has released OtherDRMMusique), they demand the right to force you to eliminate that DRM from your system -- even if you have a contract with that DRM provider promising to include it.

So you not only waive your right to contract up to the moment that you implement the "standard," but also for the indefinite future.

It's like a schoolyard friend who says, "If you want to be my pal, you have to promise not to talk to the goth kids -- only the jocks." So you end up in a study group with a bunch of jocks and your erstwhile friend says, "I hate jocks now. Stop hanging out with them. From now on, you have to hang out with the D&D nerds." When you protest that if you walk away from your study group you'll flunk out of school, your "friend" just shrugs and says, "I told you when I agreed to be your friend that this might happen. Tough."

Implement a DRM "standard" and be prepared to have your devices redesigned at regular intervals, to the whims of the most paranoid, power-drunk, technophobic executives in the world. Link (Thanks, Charlie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:24:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interview with RFID implantee

Last week, Mark linked to Flickr photos of a guy who had an RFID chip implanted in his hand. The always-fun Body Modification Ezine made contact with the gent, Amaal Graafstra, and posted a lengthy interview. Here's an excerpt:

BME: Now, who actually performed the implant procedure?

AG: As I have not asked the doctor for permission to publish their name, I can’t give that out, but they happen to be a cosmetic surgeon, so it seemed the natural choice. However, it was not hard to find someone to do the procedure; I have many MDs for clients and the day I got my chips, I asked two and both said they’d do it...

BME: Ideally, what sort of accessibility do you hope to see this implant give you in the future?

AG: Well, because I’m writing my own software and soldering up my own stuff, pretty much anything I want. Well, more accurately, anything I have the time and inspiration to do. Ultimately though, I think true keyless access will require an implantable chip with a very strong encryption system; right now I’m only looking at this type of thing in a personal context. As for society at large, nightclubs in Spain are already using RFID chips to let customers put drinks on their tabs and enter VIP lounge areas, and I think Australian pubs are doing the same as well. I’m not sure if they use encrypted implants or not. I was more interested in just getting something simple, cheap, and fun to play with.

Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:19:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boring Boring: Awesome April Fools' parody of Boing Boing

Some anonymous geniuses whipped up this incredibly thorough parody of Boing Boing. I LOLed until my very eyeballs popped out. The detail is frightening (note the "Studious Girls" ads), as is the volume of witty, nuanced little references to actual crap we've blogged. To wit:

HOWTO: De-everybody Boring Boring
Jason Gill says, "Someone has posted a script for GreaseMonkey (a Firefox extension that lets you add your own Javascript code to any website, to remove ads or add features) that automatically removes every post when viewing Boring Boring." We wish we had thought of that.

and

At last, an alternative to Firefox!
Firefox Alternative Chris James sez, "I got so tired of all the updates, lame plug-ins and the W3C evangelism of the Mozilla crowd that I've been looking around for an alternative to Firefox for quite some time. Finally, I've settled on a great free app called Internet Explorer -- and it looks like I'm not alone. According to my site stats, Explorer is running neck and neck with Firefox for marketshare. It's about time somebody gave those thugs at the Mozilla Foundation some competition." Link

Link to "Boring Boring: A Directory of Dull Things." Link to mirror, and Link to another (Thanks for the mirror, Sean). It's a masterpiece. Thanks, smartass(es)!

Update: If you can't access either link, here's a partial screenshot: Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:01:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony to create "iTunes for movies," release 500 films digitally within a year

At a conference in Santa Monica today, Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment SVP Michael Arrieta said:

"We want to set business models, pricing models, distribution models like (Apple Computer CEO Steve) Jobs did for music, but for the film industry," [said Arrieta], "I'm trying to create the new 'anti-Napster."

To that end, Arrieta said, his group plans to digitize Sony Pictures' top 500 films and make them available for the first time in various digital environments within the next year. He said the distribution for films like "Spider-Man 2" will go beyond just Movielink, the video-on-demand joint venture of Sony Pictures and several other major studios, which to date has hosted a limited library of Sony's movies.

For example, Sony plans to sell and make films available in flash memory for mobile phones in the next year, Arrieta said. It also will further develop its digital stores for downloading and owning films on the PC, he said in an interview. Sony's plans--and similar moves by other studios--are likely to avoid empowering any one technology company--such as Apple in the music equation--and allow studios to pocket more of the profits. The philosophy in Hollywood is "Define your own agenda or someone else will for you."

Link to ZDNet story. Previously on Boing Boing: The Cuban Revolution

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:29:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shirky: stupid (c) laws block me from publishing own work online

Clay Shirky tells Boing Boing:

Welcome to the Copyfight. So, at Etech this year, I gave a talk entitled Ontology is Overrated. I want to put a transcript up online, and Mary Hodder, who recorded the talk, graciously agreed to give me a copy of the video.

When she came by NYC last week, she dropped off a DVD, which I then wanted to convert to AVI (the format used by my transcription service.) I installed ffmpeg and tried to convert the material, at which point I got an error message which read "To comply with copyright laws, DVD device input is not allowed." Except, of course, there are no copyright laws at issue here, since I'M THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

Got that? I am in possession of a video, of me, shot by a friend, copied to a piece of physical media given to me as a gift. In the video, I am speaking words written by me, and for which I am the clear holder of the copyright. I am working with said video on a machine I own. Every modern legal judgment concerning copyright, from the Berne Convention to the Betamax case, is on my side. AND I CAN'T MAKE A COPY DIRECTLY FROM THE DEVICE. This is because copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders -- they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity.

Copyright holders in my position, who want to use Creative Commons licensing to share material, are treated as pathological cases, because we're not behaving in the extortionate manner that current regulations are designed to protect.

I've gotten the copy another way, and the transcript will go up, but this is the state of the world, circa 2005: I can be prevented from copying my own words from my own devices, precisely because I want to share them freely, a use the law is perfectly prepared to regard as irrelevant.

Boing Boing reader Thomas provides further evidence of unjust copyright cockblocking:

I have also found that when trying to take screenshots of DVDs (whoever holds the copyright) it is usually disabled by the OS. Similarly, if a miniDV device is asked to record a copyrighted DVD, it will not permit it, regardless of who tagged the disc and who is operating the miniDV device.

The bullshit continues.

d3 says:

I was reading this bb post about Shirky being unable to copy his DVD content using ffmpeg. The software does prevent the user from copying directly from a DVD, but it is possible to copy the .vob files to the hard drive and then ffmpeg will happily convert the files. Personally, I prefer using DVDxDV, which is pretty much a one-click operation from DVD to a DV file. No copying of .vob files neccessary. Strangely, I was just dealing with this issue yesterday. Maybe this can help. I agree that it is ridiculous, but at least there are some people writing tools to help us out.

Leland Johnson says:

The OS doesn't "permit" taking screenshots of DVDs because it's faster to do overlay rendering (direct communication with the video card). Some computers can't update their screens the normal way because it takes more CPU power. If you want to play videos/DVDs and take screenshots of them, the excellent and free Media Player Classic [link below] can be easily forced to never use overlay by selecting the output filter VMR9, which makes screenshots possible.

Link BB reader daniel says:

If you're an os x user, snapz pro x will happily capture screens from a dvd (or anything else you like, in fact). Link

And M. Noel adds:

OS X users who don't want to pay for Snapz can take screencaps of DVDs by using the screencaputre shell (Terminal.app) command. It comes with the OS, so there's nothing to buy. I always type the command into a terminal, move the window as far offscreen as possible, and then press Enter to execute -- so you don't have to see much (if any) of the Terminal window.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:04:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Early bird syndrome linked to genetic mutation

In this week's issue of Nature, neuroscientists report that they've implicated a single gene mutation in Familiar Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome (FASPS), or "early bird syndrome." Often, people who have this condition have no choice but to crash in the early evening and wake up long before dawn. From National Geographic News:

"The net result is you can feel very isolated," (FASPS sufferer Susan) Middlebrook said. "Who wants to party at three in the morning? Nobody I know, and I'm not headed to the local bar to see who's still there." Instead, she quietly cleans the house, makes breakfast, or cuddles up with a book.

About three-tenths of a percent of the world's population lives like this, including two of Middlebrook's sisters, her daughter, and her mother. "Their whole clock is shifted," said Ying-Hui Fu, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco...

The researchers are not yet certain how the gene mutation works to shift people's sleep time. But laboratory experiments suggest mutation slows the activity of a protein called casein kinase I delta (CKIdelta). "The next step is to figure out why," Fu said.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:55:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Library of unusual materials

Inside the basement of King's College London's engineering department, Mark Miodownik curates a "cabinet of curiosities" for materials scientists. He started the collection in 2003 after noticing that his colleagues trashed all kinds of unusual materials at the end of their research projects. From News@Nature:

His collection now includes more than 300 samples, including artificial skin made of rubber composites, and a material known as a superslurper that absorbs 400 times its own weight in water....

Miodownik trawls the globe in search of additions to his collection. On a recent trip to Australia, he found himself in the remote uranium-mining town of Broken Hill in New South Wales. He started hunting through antique shops there to find a special type of glass.

Miodownik explains that in the early twentieth century people thought that radioactive materials had beneficial health properties. For this reason, they manufactured glassware containing uranium, especially in places such as Broken Hill that had an abundance of the element.

In the Australian antique shops, Miodownik flashed an ultraviolet light on various glass pieces to find one that glowed, a sign that it contained uranium. When he found a bowl that did just that (pictured here), he brought it back to London and added it to the library.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:37:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Schiavo parents to sell donor data to direct-marketing firm

The parents of rececently-deceased Terri Schiavo will sell their list of supporting donors to a direct-mailing firm.

The company, "Response Unlimited" pays about $150 a month for 6,000 names and $500 a month for 6,000 e-mail addresses. A spokesperson for the Schindlers confirmed that they had agreed to sell the information, but won't say for how much.

Link (Thanks, Steve). Update Here's a more in-depth piece co-authored by John Schwartz in the New York Times: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:33:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

707 panel as decorative lighting

Todd Lappin has finished installing his 707 jet panel in his house. It looks incredible!

This hangs on one wall of our living room, above the stairway that leads down to the garage. As you walk up the steps, you get this view.

My 707 has come a long way since I first found it at an aircraft scrapyard in Tucson. Here's a daylight view, shortly after I stripped off the paint. The illumination comes from rope lights mounted on the structurally-cool back side. (Next time you rest your head against a window-seat wall to snooze, this is basically what lies underneath.)

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:16:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wing Sings

Her voice sounds like the cry of a shy hamster in whose rectum a hot poker has just been inserted.

The New Zealand-based performer's squeaky, ear-shredding rendition of "Dancing Queen" (Link: MP3) was featured in a South Park episode last week. I really need to get out on the internet more often, I don't know how I missed this -- Jesus, I just figured they'd made the character up.
Link to Wing Tunes, the official Wing website. Her new album of ABBA covers is magnificent: Link. Here's the South Park episode: Wing, first aired 03-23-2005. (thanks, pelle)

Update: %20 says:

I did a cut up of Wing's "My Favorite Things" following Negativland's infamous version. Link to MP3, and try this folder if the direct link doesn't work.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:30:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Government docs torrents

Thad sez,

Wanted to tell you guys about some more cool new torrents I've put up:

- Commission on Intelligence Capabilities WMD report & other key WMD documents
- Betamax legal documents
- Betamax mp3s
- National Security Archive Pre-9/11 intelligence documents

Link (Thanks, Thad!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:22:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wearing John Malkovich: actor launches men's clothing line

Snip from Theater News item:

John Malkovich, the renowned stage and screen actor, is also the designer of the Uncle Kimono clothing line -- and he will showcase his autumn/winter 2005-2006 men's wear collection at a trunk sale to be held at The Performing Garage (33 Wooster Street) in SoHo on Saturday, April 16, from 10am to 5pm. A percentage of the proceeds will benefit The Wooster Group.

(...) According to Malkovich, "Uncle Kimono is a men's wear collection that resonates with the late 1950s Californian beach boys, some Palm Springs Rat Pack, a touch of lounge lizard, and a recollection of a Swiss banker who's been let go."

A few months ago I was out having sushi with some pals in West Hollywood, and a very dapper Mr. Malkovich sat down at an adjacent table with friends. He was dressed in an extremely funky-fresh outfit, so this news comes as no surprise. He is one stylin' guy. Link to news report, and here is John Malkovich's website. Site also includes some pretty cool t-shirts, like the one shown above, but yow -- they're $70 a pop. (via blogging.la)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:04:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Katamari Damacy 2 screenshots

Check out these screenshots for the sequel to Katamari Damacy: "Everybody Loves Katamari Damacy." Christ, I want this game on my Powerbook. Link (Thanks, Tallpat!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:34:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google owns leet-speak version of google.com

466453.com (which spells google.com in at least one variant of hacker number-letter substitution code) is 0wned by Google and resolves to google.com. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

Update: Mark sez, "I believe that 466453.com exists for users who are accessing google via mobile phones that don't have T9 text entry."

Update 2: Tijl sez, "they own gngjd.com as well, but.. that doesn't link to the main page! It's what happens when you type an URL on most phones without going into numerical mode first. T9 is rarely enabled for entering an URL by default (though some phones do). Image the potential! Register gumds.com today, Apple laywers on your doorstep tommorow!"

Update 3:Andrew sez, "http://www.600673.com/ resolves to Google in h4x0r style."

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

Nude phonecam pix put cops in a fix

A police officer is accused of downloading naked photos of a suspect from her own cell phone after a DWI arrest, according to a report. The officer has been "reassigned" pending the outcome of an internal investigation, as has his partner on the force -- while the department looks into reports that he phoned the suspect's home to ask her out on a date.

Snip from a Houston Chronicle story, via Declan McCullagh's politech:

During the arrest, they discovered that the woman had stored sexually explicit photos of herself in her cell phone, and Green downloaded the images onto his personal digital assistant, according to the search request.

Here's a PDF of the warrant to search the officer's PDA: Link. Politech reader Scott H. says:

[This] sure seems beyond the pale of unreasonable search and seizure (small pun). Hypothetically, what if the phone had a picture of the woman in question standing over a dead person in back of her home? Is this a warrantless search and if they find the body in her home is this fruit from a poisoned tree? Do the police have a right to search through all the "data" a person has in thier possession at the time of arrest? What about a USB flash drive? Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt.

Link to EWeek story, and Declan recommends FileVault and PGPdisk as handy encryption utilities. Here are more.

Update: Looks like my blog-mate Mark Frauenfelder covered this item over at The Feature -- Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:10:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Joystick made from chopstick, Tinkertoys, thumbtacks and clothespegs

The Chopstick Joystick is a minimally documented project for building a joystick out of a chopstick, tinkertoys, woodscrews, clothespegs and thumbtacks. That's pretty 1337 right there. Unsurprisingly, it comes from the same people who gave us the Trashcade arcade enclosure built of cardboard boxes. Link (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:03:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Last Woman on Earth movie at Archive.org

One Man Safari recommends Roger Corman's Last Woman on Earth (1960), which you can download for free from The Internet Archive.

I was mightily surprised and impressed to discover it's a sophisticated low-budget gem with lots of cleverly written dialog (by Robert Towne, who later wrote Chinatown), that's more about a love triangle than it is about survival in a world after a nuclear war.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:27:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Exhibit of quack imagery

Philadelphia Museum of Art has a new exhibit tracing the history of patent and quack medicine through posters, pamphlets, and prints:

These range from an early seventeenth-century Dutch engraving, Operation for Stones in the Head, a sleight-of-hand cure for insanity, to Medical Confessions of Medical Murder, a twelve-scene print in which James Morison, a clever marketer of pills, uses quotations from prominent physicians taken out of context to impugn their practices. The Health Jolting Chair, an 1885 color lithograph of a seated woman, demonstrates the ability of electricity to secure the "most highly prized Feminine Attractions"

Link to exhibit page, Link to AP article with photos here and here (via Medgadget, thanks Howard Lovy!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:19:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creepy Crawlers TV commercial

Spike at Bedazzled has a Creepy Crawlers TV commercial. I had one of the orginal Creepy Crawlers kits when I was a kid. I think it might have been the best toy I ever owned. Nearly forty years later, I can clearly remember the wonderful smell of Plastigoop.

They still make Creepy Crawlers, but the "Thingmaker" cooker is now a crappy plastic box with a light bulb heating element and a safety door that won't let you see your creepy crawler cook. Also, the Plastigoop smells completely different -- quite unpleasant. I feel sorry for kids these days.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:12:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Google pre-loads your top search result to eliminate net-lag

Google has added "pre-fetching" for the top result on your searches. This means that when you google for something, the top link is automatically loaded in the background in your browser (this only works for Firefox/Mozilla) so that if you click it, it appears immediately, with no network lag. Link (via /.)

Update: Kwai Chang Caine sez, "the prefetched site gets to set all it's cookies without you knowing (unless your browser is configured to tell you about cookies). Presumably this includes any third party inclusions in the target page."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:40:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Moustache dreams

After seeing my post yesterday about the World Beard and Moustache Championships, reader Rohit Gupta of Bombay points us to this short video by Soumyadeep Paul documenting a moustache competition in Rajasthan, India. I especially like when this entrant plays two nose flutes simultaneously. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:38:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

You Have Died of Dysentery t-shirt from Oregon Trail

This "You Have Died of Dysentery" tee is a loving tribute to Oregon Trail, the classic 80s computer game that challenged you to get your settlers to their destination without their succumbing to cholera, dysentery, or other thermonuclear versions of turista. Jason on Preshrunk has written a lovely memoir of the game:

I spent three arduous weeks trying to circumnavigate the Columbia River. After that, I spent six weeks trying to hunt enough buffalo to feed my party. All the while my party kept dying of dysentery and cholera. It took me five months to beat that goddamn game, but I loved it.

Since I like to show off my scars and broadcast my shortcomings, I adore Busted Tees' "You Have Died Of Dysentery" shirt. It reminds me of swing sets, pizza day in the cafeteria, cub scouts and kickball. Besides, what's not to love about a shirt that basically says "you died from a bad case of the shits"?

Link (via Preshrunk)

Update: Mlahumlaha sez, "In December you linked to this Apple 2 emulator. I think it would be convenient to link to Oregon Trail itself."

Update 2:Chris B sez, "Zug columnist Scott Taylor recently returned to The Trail to see if he'd be able to find love on the American Frontier (or a pixelated approximation thereof)."

Update 3: Matt sez, "The great comic Achewood had a story about Oregon Trail being hacked."

Update 4:Ramit sez, "I originally designed it over at www.BitterShirts.com (and then licensed it out to BustedTees)."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:35:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pulp art of Norm Eastman

In 2003 La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles exhibited the work of Norm Eastman, one of the best known men's adventure magazine illustrators from decades past. Judging from the paintings in this exhibition, the readers of those magazines seemed to like reading stories about Nazis torturing (and in this illustration, cutting the hair of) scantily clad women.
Link (via PCL LinkDump)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:33:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens

I've just finished an advance review copy of The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens, the first installment of a new anthology series edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Jane Yolen. This is an idea whose time has well and truly come: the editors pick stories that are suitable for teens from among the general selection of all the fantasy and science fiction published in the last year.

There's an old bon mot about science fiction: "the golden age of science fiction is 12." When I was about that age, I was haunting my local science fiction bookstore and library, reading everything a could get my hands on, a book every day or sometimes more. Those formative years made me into a lifelong reader of science fiction -- and a lifelong customer for science fiction writers.

But as anyone who attends science fiction conventions knows, fandom is aging without any especially large cohort of adolescents coming in behind it. Young people are still thoroughly engaged with sf, but it's through gaming, comics, and TV/films. All worthy endeavors, but to the extent that they're crowding out novels and stories, it's bad news for those of us who write sf -- and those of us who read it, since publishers won't be able to publish to the dwindling niche of genre readers forever; eventually we'll cross over into a market too small to serve.

And that's why this anthology (and New Skies and New Magics, two anthologies of sf and fantasy for kids edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden) is so important. It's not that the field lacks work that's appropriate for young people; it positively bursts with it. And as Yolen notes in her introduction, the precocious youngsters who come to sf are not easily intimidated by the notion that they are reading books intended for adult readers. But it's not enough: for those professionals and parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and mentors looking to introduce their young friends to the field, it is hard to find the good stuff that will get them started and hook them for life (Jumper and its sequel Reflex, which I reviewed here earlier this month, are good choices for this task).

In creating and sustaining a new series of books that consistently identify quality, age-appropriate science fiction and fantasy, Yolen and Nielsen Hayden are doing important work -- providing a road-map for newcomers to the field, and a friend that they can visit with every year. What's more, the introduction to each story includes a suggested reading list of sf and fantasy novels of note that you should read if you like the story.

The stories in this anthology range from good to brilliant to jaw-dropping. It is relatively short on science fiction, but the main sf piece, Bradley Denton's "Sergeant Chip" is so good that it practically had me in tears on the bus this morning (no surprise, as Denton is one of the field's towering and under-appreciated geniuses, whose Buddy Holly is a Alive and Well on Ganymede is possibly the funniest book I've ever read). Sergeant Chip is the first-person narrative of an electronically enhanced dog serving in the K9 forces of an American military unit occupying a conquered country that is much like Iraq of today.

Many of the other standouts here are "contemporary fantasies," set in the modern world, American interpretations of magic realism, a favorite genre of mine. Kelly Link's "Faery Handbag" and Delia Sherman's "CATNYP" are the best examples here.

As to the rest, they are a taster's menu of well-executed, broadly chosen stories from every corner of the field, from heroic fantasy to straight-ahead science fiction to high fantasy. Brilliantly, the editors have also included Rudyard Kipling's 1904 story "They" -- and they promise that each edition of the anthology henceforth will include one century-old story from the annals of history.

The book should be appearing on shelves any day now -- it has a May pub-date which usually means that it starts appearing in April. If you have a young person in your life whom you want to introduce to a field that will teach her or him the most important lessons the world has to present; or if you are looking to reconnect with the field after neglecting the short story magazines and anthologies, then this book is the one for you. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:29:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yahoo overtaking Google?

Ben Hammersley has a column in today's Guardian about how, feature-by-feature, Yahoo has overtaken Google:

Last month's launch of Google Maps was impressive, but not as cool as Yahoo's placing of live traffic conditions on its map this month. Google's webmail product, Gmail, caused a fuss by offering accounts capable of storing a gigabyte of mail, four times that of Yahoo Mail. No problem, said Yahoo last week, Yahoo mail users can have a gigabyte too. Google's purchase of Blogger gave them a place at the blogger's table, but it has done little with it. Yahoo's blogging tool, Yahoo 360, launches this month, allegedly fully integrated with the rest of the content they produce.

Google has an image organising application in Picasa, sure; but Yahoo just bought Flickr, perhaps the smartest and richest online application ever written. Yahoo has a rich site summary (RSS) aggregator, Google does not. Yahoo has a search engine for online movies, Google does not. Yahoo has quietly launched search.yahoo.com/cc, a search engine engineered to find and index Creative Commons material.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:58:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Biometric car lock defeated by cutting off owner's finger

Andrei sez, "'Malaysia car thieves steal finger.' This is what security visionaries Bruce Schneier and Ross Anderson have been warning about for a long time. Protect your $75,000 Mercedes with biometrics and you risk losing whatever body part is required by the biometric mechanism."

...[H]aving stripped the car, the thieves became frustrated when they wanted to restart it. They found they again could not bypass the immobiliser, which needs the owner's fingerprint to disarm it.

They stripped Mr Kumaran naked and left him by the side of the road - but not before cutting off the end of his index finger with a machete.

Link (Thanks, Andrei!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:53:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Outed Internet plagiarist is just a dumb kid, with a mom

The blogger who outed a plagiarist who offered him $75 to write a college paper has posted a followup -- she got back in touch with him and he's concluded that she's a dumb kid who did a dumb thing, but not evil, per se.

And nothing would have stopped me from turning her in right then, except one thing...her mom turned out to be a nice lady.

I basically had the same conversation with her that I had with Laura. She also swore to Laura's diligence as a student, and knew that I was not lying about the plagiarism. She asked whether this was for money or personal reasons, and I told her what I told you blog people, which is that I was legitimately offended on behalf of all the people I know who take their education seriously. Whatever I said, I'm embarrassed to say that I probably used the phrase "scourge of academia." She expressed her dismay over the thousands of dollars this was costing her every semester for her daughter, and I agreed that that was a shame.

Argh, wrongdoers have mothers, apparently.

Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:45:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunted Mansion-style head as a percussion instrument

Drum|head is an interactive project by Murat Konar, a student at London's Royal College of Art. It starts with a wig-stand with a computer-projected clip of a face on it (this is the same effect used for the "singing busts," "Madame Leota" and "Little Leota" at the Haunted Mansion in they Disney parks). A piezoelectric sensor detects it when you whack the head with a stick, cueing a drum sound and a funny facial-expression animation. The video is hilarious. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:38:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Cuban Revolution

A feature I wrote for Wired Magazine on Mark Cuban's digital cinema plans is now online. The short version, as Wired's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson put it on his blog yesterday -- "Cuban is retrofitting all the Landmark cinemas, which he owns, for digital projection. This not only dramatically lowers the costs of getting films into theaters and ups their projection quality, but will also potentially open that distribution channel to independents who can't afford to print hundreds of huge rolls of acetate and truck them around." Here's a snip:

[Cuban] dismisses talk that the industry isn't ready. "People get frightened about all kinds of things in Hollywood," he says. "That's not my system. I don't have a business to protect. I have a business to build."

It's a business filled with promise - and no small amount of uncertainty and financial peril for the key players. First, the upside: Going digital would be a boon for studios, theater owners, and moviegoers. If studios no longer had to make thousands of copies of each film to deliver to theaters, they could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, the studios spent more than $631 million in 2003 on film prints for the North American market alone. Taking these reels out of the equation could snip distribution costs by up to 90 percent, says Patrick von Sychowski, marketing director at Unique Digital, which places ads in European cinemas. When you factor in the cost for foreign releases and overseas distribution, cutting out the prints translates to an eventual savings of as much as $900 million a year.

Likewise, switching to digital exhibition systems would give theater owners unprecedented flexibility. If a blockbuster packed more seats than anticipated, an owner could quickly reallocate screens that weren't selling as well to handle the overflow. In a film-based world, such changes can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and costly - requiring an additional print from the studio and a reel swap. With digital, they would be nearly instantaneous and come at almost no cost, once the onetime hardware expenses were recovered.

Moviegoers, for their part, would be treated to a future that promises no more out-of-focus projection, out-of-order reels, or scratchy footage on heavily played film. Even more exciting to Cuban is the broader range of content that digital systems make possible: Beyond movies, theaters could offer live, hi-res broadcasts of sports events, Broadway plays, fashion shows, and multiplayer electronic games.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:30:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

German military phrasebook from WWII

Nico sez, "I scanned this original 1943 US Army German phrasebook today. I think the phonetics are very strange and funny." Link (Thanks, Nico!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Arcade cabinet made of cardboard boxen

The Trashcade is a jokey arcade cabinet for your PC made out of taped-together cardboard boxes. Funny! Link (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Principal bans blogging: "not educational"

A Junior/Senior High School principal in Vermont has banned in-school blogging because "blogging isn't educational."

Principal Chris Sousa said the decision to block the site from school was made because blogging is not an educational use of school computers.

But he's also urging parents to keep tabs on their children's blogging, with a particularly close eye to what personal information the student may be posting on sites like Myspace.com.

In 1988, I was the writer-in-electronic-residence for a class of grade 2/3 students in Toronto, reading and helping them with their writing via 14.4K modems using ZModem transfers. Getting them to use to computer to write, revise, and critique one another was an amazingly powerful tool for unleashing their creativity and improving their communications skills. If this prinicpal thinks blogging isn't educational, he needs his head examined: he should be seeking out every student blogger in the school and giving them special time to blog more -- and giving them extra credit besides. Link (via Apophenia)

Update: Pinky sez, "The email address for the principle quoted in the article is sousac@proctorhs.org (found easily on the school's website). I've whipped off an email of protest and indignation. I figured I could make it easier for anyone else to do the same."

Update 2: Many of you have written in with this form letter that Mr Sousa has been sending to those who email him:

Apparently misquoting does not happen outside of Vermont otherwise I would presume that all the wonderful folks who know best would have asked the question, "did you really ban blogging, and say that it was not educational?". We did block the website "myspace.com" and if you have been on it you may know why. I do not wish to explain all the details however it suffices to say that it was not enriching our students education, nor was it being used in any educational venue. We have not banned blogging and I myself have personal experience in using blogging in the classroom.

I am greatly offended by the arrogance that people have to presume that we have not taken advantage of this teachable moment. It seems that you would rather get up on your soapbox and shout then have a meaningful conversation. You are very misguided here and I do not wish to have a reply. Rather I hope that you would refrain from snap judgements based on blurb articles when it comes to judging our educational system.

Suffice it to say, huh? That explains it all right.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:36:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

1927 AT&T film: How to use the dial phone

On the Internet Archive, a stupendous piece of historical film from 1927, made by AT&T: HOW TO USE THE DIAL PHONE. Link (via Memex 1.1)

Update: Michael sez, "As part of a 'Lost and Found Film' course, I recently had to make a film about telephones, and came across the 'How To Use The Dial Phone' film you linked to. What I found more fascinating was 'Dial Comes To Town,' in which a town meeting is held to demonstrate the use of the new dial telephone. An oversized dial, about three feet in diameter, is used during the painfully long instruction."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:44:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photo-counter: DUE TO DECREASE IN DEMAND THIS SERVICE NO LONGER AVAIL

In a photo titled "You are now niche," Stewart reveals a telling sign at an unnamed photo-processing counter: DUE TO DECREASE OF THE FILM DEVELOPING DEMAND, THIS SERVICE WILL NO LONGER BE AVAILABLE AFTER MARCH 31, 2005. Steward is the co-founder of Ludicorp, the company that makes the Flickr software for sharing photos, so in some sense, he's responsible for this. Nice one, Stewart! Link

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

New Dr Who star quits after one episode

Christopher Eccleston did a fantastic job as the Doctor in the new Doctor Who premiere last week. Now he's quitting.

Eccleston, whose first appearance as the ninth Time Lord attracted around 10 million viewers, feared being typecast.

Talks are taking place to replace him with Casanova star David Tennant.

A second series of the new Doctor Who, which will again be written by Russell T Davies and produced by BBC Wales, has already been commissioned.

Link

Update: Nelson sez, "the rest of the series is already filmed. Ecclestone announced he was quitting after the first episode /aired/."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:02:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Anarchist website logs demanded by FBI

On Slashdot: "The details are as yet unclear due to a gag order, but apparently the FBI is once again demanding IP logs from dissident webservers. The sysadmin for flag.blackened.net, best known for hosting infoshop.org and the Anarchist FAQ has responded to an FBI request for server logs. Although he cannot reveal the details of the request due to the gag order, the sysadmin has issued an informal press release discussing his reasons for turning over the information." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:19:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sony PSP stars in South Park episode

Tonight's new episode of South Park stars the mobile gaming gadget as a tool sent by God to separate good souls from evil, and vanquish the forces of hell. Kenny also enters a persistent vegetative state, and a feeding tube plays a supporting role. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:13:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese niche porn: cockroach fetish

For every fetish, there is a website and a DVD -- even this one for those enticed by the combination of cockroaches and Japanese gamines. The cover beckons: "Woman who eats cockroaches!! She is super idol of the MARS SPIRIT!!!"
link (via Fleshbot)

Update: An anonymous BB reader says:

The company that put out the cockroach video makes ALL KINDS of crazy nonsense. This is the page to check once every month or two for the madness: Link. Check it out -- "Holstein"! And that one at the very bottom, リストカット？-- That says "Wrist cut". It's cutter porn! But I don't think anything will ever beat this one: お姉さんのはなくそ -- "Young ladies' boogers"

And Nebu Pookins says,

The DVD is actually made by SOFT DEMAND, as can be seen in the lower right corner of the back of the DVD. I made a post about this DVD on my blog here, with some comments in general about the company that produced it.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:00:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Music industry downturn == funny math and lies

Has the music industry really experienced a downturn? Nielsen ratings say no -- this article explains it all, but Jas_MHz ably summarizes:

RIAA based lost sales on "Units Shipped" NOT cd sold to customer.
RIAA lost sales = record stores hold less stock.
Nielsen ratings based on actual sales = sales are up.
=> RIAA deliberaately misleading everyone and courts.
2=> File Swapping has led to increase in sales.
&=> "Lower Sales" only top 100. Add in non RIAA, non "chart" music sales, long tail sales.
Lies, Damns Lies, Statitics & Supreme Perjury.

Link (Thanks, Jas_MHz!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Suzuki vans modded to look like old VW mini-busses

A Japanese car-craze is modding Suzuki vans to look like vintage VW mini-busses. This gallery sports dozens of examples of the form. Link (Thanks, Ernie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:55:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Card castle made out of server parts

Jon sez, "I just built a card castle out of spare server parts. As far as I know, it is the card castle ever built with four gigs of RAM in it." Link (Thanks, Jon!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:52:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Eight-foot NES controller

Gavin sez, "On Monday, we re-launched what used to be known as The Screen Savers (where we've had Xeni, Cory & Mark on as guests) as Attack of the Show! and to celebrate we created a working eight-foot Nintendo controller. The link goes to Monday's show page which has a video clip of the controller in use. The verdict is still out whether or not it's a world's record but we've got the call into the Guinness people as I type." Link (Thanks, Gavin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:49:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Excellent '70s space-porn-themed pinball machine

Found: one well-aged pinball machine featuring a supremely cheesy space porno theme. Jason Schultz says, "I ran across it on my recent trip to Hawaii in the living room of this alternative health spa steam bath place I stayed for a night. Worked and everything! "
Snapshot 1, Snapshot 2. Warning: includes nipples and rocket ships.

Update: BB reader rodney says:

Here is the entry from the Internet Pinball Database: Link. Lots more photos, plus scans of the original marketing flyer.

Joe Westlake adds,

Last weekend I went to a travelling pinball art exibition hosted by a collector. I was surprised to see that many of the boards are very sexual. I talked to a few people there, including my father-in-law who was a pinball wizard of sorts and was playing when all of these games came out (especially the Bally's machines). Of course the obvious reasoning for putting up such lude boards is to get adolescent males to play.

There is an alright page with alot of this artwork here: Link. Note especially the art of Paul Farris. On a sidenote, the older pinball machines had warnings that they are not to be played by minors. Also these 1950's boards had women in some pretty interesting outfits (like an off the shoulder shirt for a woman up to bat in a baseball game), kinda cool.

Scott Clevenger says:

Here's a link to the "rom" (had to click through an annoying ad) so you can play it on your pinball emulator. Finally, can't skip the ebay search: A Future Spa magnet.

Allen K. says:

The space porn pinball game reminded me of one of my favorites, Xenon. This game was one of the first to feature speech, and the first with female speech. "Enter Xenon!" "Try a tube shot!" "Oh!" "Oh!" "Oh!" Orgasm comes at multiball, of course. The picture to snag part of is this one, making sure to include the bare-breasted alien, the skintight spacesuits, and the infamous Tube Shot: Link.

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

At Hong Kong concert Avril Lavigne sports "Japan is the Best" on arm

From Tian's blog, Hanzi Smatter ("Dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western culture."):

Avril Lavigne was recently in Hong Kong for a one-night show. She obviously had help from someone with a magic marker.

The phrase 日本最高 on Ms. Lavigne was correctly written, but for a WRONG country.

日本 = Japan
最 = most, extremely, exceedingly
高 = high, tall; lofty, elevated

It is translated as "Japan is the best".

Link (Thanks, Tian!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:55:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark Cuban, Longtailer

On the Long Tail blog, Wired Magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson lists ten reasons why Mark Cuban is "today's Long Tail hero." Incidentally -- I wrote a profile on Mr. Cuban's digital cinema plans ("The Cuban Revolution") for this month's issue of the magazine. Excerpt from the ten-point list:

# He's promoting HDTV the right way, by commissioning and distributing content. 
# He's funding the Grokster defense. 
# He's a real blogger, warts and all. 
# He says that he won't use the broadcast flag. 
# He got the idea of reinventing TV a decade ago, and his work lives on in Yahoo!'s excellent video search and music video services. 
# He doesn't believe the RIAA. 
# He sent a team to cover the Iraq elections, live, in high-def. 
# >He has a successful reality TV show. 
# He really gets the Long Tail: "Popular items are just that, popular. My guess however is that in absolute numbers, the long tail of the download distribution curves, both in terms of number of songs and in number of songs downloaded, overwhelm the number of copyrighted songs illegally being downloaded."

Link to blog post. Mr. Anderson also has an op-ed about MGM v. Grokster in today's Los Angeles times, and it's well worth a read. Snip:

What's at stake is the realm of ideas, sliced and diced a million ways. The peer-to-peer music sites are the closest current approximation to the celestial jukebox we all want. Kazaa, for instance, has 25 million unique tracks, dwarfing iTunes' measly 1 million. BitTorrent has more videos than Blockbuster. Much of it is pirated, to be sure, but a significant portion of it — videogame highlights, say — was never intended to be moneymaking in the first place. The problem is that we don't know how to stop the piracy without chilling the creativity.

The main flaw in the case against Grokster is that the action attempts to criminalize a technology rather than a specific use. It also fails to distinguish between commercial content and noncommercial content. Restricting these powerful new distribution tools to fight piracy would hobble the new emerging creative class too. The potential collateral damage to legitimate users is much higher than in the Betamax case.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:44:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Well turns 20

The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link will turn 20 in April. I became a member in 1989 and though I haven't posted anything there in years, the discussions I had there and the friends I made have had a profound influence on my life.

Incredibly, twenty years of living online have sped by since the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link opened to members on April 1, 1985. Twenty years is a milestone in the life of any group or town. A full generation of WELLbeings have changed and been changed by extraordinary experiences together here. Serious celebration is in order through the month of April! WELL members past, present and future are invited to celebrate this milestone with us online and off.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:31:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russian photography from 1917-1945

A Brooklyn art gallery created this stunning online exhibit of their Russian Photography Collection: 1917-1945. This image "Pojarnaia lestnitsa" (Fire Escape) was taken in 1925 by my favorite avant-garde photographer, Constructivist artist Aleksandr Rodchenko. From the exhibit summary:

The collection was assembled as the Soviet Union tore itself apart leaving a tattered social fabric behind. Organized as a history of 20th century photography of the Soviet Union the collection focuses on the categories: Constructivism/Avant-Garde, Propaganda, Photo-Reportage, War Photography, and Socialist Realism which provide the most effective and complete view of one of the most incredible experiments in human history.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:51:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Freedom to Connect conference backchannel and audio

David Isenberg throws extraordinary, thoughtful and intimate technology conferences. Right now, he's hosting "F2C" -- Freedom to Connect -- in DC. In keeping with the principles of openness, the conference's IRC back-channel and streaming cast are open to the public. Here are a couple of sample program items.

The Fight for Local Freedom to Connect
Jim Baller, Munis vs. Incumbents
Terry Huval, The Battle of Lafayette

F2C and our other Freedoms
Jeff Jarvis interviews
First Amendment Attorney Robert Corn-Revere

Dan Gillmor, Freedom of the Press
Scott Heiferman, Freedom of Assembly
Rev. AKM Adam, Freedom of Religion
Jerry Michalski, Moderator

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Asking manufacturers for free samples

Iolaire McFadden requests free samples from companies and writes about it at goodiesblog.com. His first shipment of goodies was a box of juice bottles from Old Orchard.

Today, my wife called me all excited because a box of goodies arrived via UPS next day air from Old Orchard Brands LLC! Enclosed was a short letter describing the new Old Orchard Organics Juice line, two Old Orchard six-pack cooler bags, nine paper cups, one bottle of Old Orchard Organics Red Raspberry 100% (juice) and one bottle of Old Orchard Organics 100% Concord Grape.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:51:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Watusi cow with the largest horns I've ever seen

If I had horns this big on my head, I'd be laying down, too.
Link (Thanks, Robyn!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:43:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interviews with electronic music pioneers

New Scientist interviews three pioneering inventors of electronic music technology. Bob Moog invented the Moog synthesizer, Dave Smith is the father of MIDI, Peter Vogel co-founded digital sampler trailblazer Fairlight Instruments. From the conversation with Vogel:

How did you come to work in electronic music?

I was interested in electronics. In a way, being interested in music and not being able to play was a big motivator for me to come up with an instrument that you could make music on without having to do the hard yards at the keyboard. It was sort of advanced laziness. It transpired it would have been a lot easier to learn to play the keyboard, but that's the benefit of hindsight...

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a system for recording TV without the commercials. There will never be any chip you can put in your TV to do this because it's too complicated and expensive. What is required is a signal that is transmitted via a different medium. Our Intelligent Content Engine is now being integrated into recorders and set-top boxes so that when you buy a personal video recorder you can get one that automatically removes the commercials. [The system was launched in Australia in March.]

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:08:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Carboard iPod stand made from an iPod box

After seeing the post about making an iPod dock out of cut-and-fold PDFs glued onto cardboard, Colin had the brainstorm of using the box that the iPod comes in to fashion its docking cradle. The results are fine. Link (Thanks, Colin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:00:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World Beard and Moustache Championships

National Geographic reports on the annual World Beard and Moustache Championships that will take place this October in Berlin:

Another top contender is Jürgen Burkhardt (image left), a 48-year-old photographer from Leinfelden, near Stuttgart, who sports a curled mustache/muttonchop combo about the size of a boomerang.

Left unstyled, Burkhardt's mustache has a wingspan that stretches five feet (one and a half meters) from tip to tip.

The German washes his mustache three times before starting his 30-minute daily styling regime. Needless to say, hairspray factors heavily into its maintenance.

"A nice mustache, also beard, is the result of the perfect harmony of curves," Burkhardt wrote in a recent e-mail interview. "You must have good style with a good form and line."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:53:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Man killed for selling online sword

When 41-year-old Qiu Chengwei of Shanghia learned that Zhu Caoyuan had sold his precious Dragon Sabre, a virtual weapon from the online game Legend of Mir 3, he went to Caoyuan's house and stabbed him to death with a real weapon. Zhu had sold the Dragon Sabre for 7,200 yuan ($800). Link (Thanks, Sean!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:48:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toddlerpedes: doll-torsos and limbs frankensteined together

Johnny Beinart makes his "Toddlerpede" sculptures by frankensteining together the torsos, heads and limbs of dolls so that they become million-armed monstrosities with grinning childish blue-eyed heads, so wrong, eek, lovely. Link (via Monochrom)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sensitive scale can measure a single zeptogram

The most sensitive scale EVAR has been built. It can weigh a single zeptogram. Harpograms Yoctograms to follow.

"I think it's a fairly big step," says Kamil Ekinci now at Boston University in Massachusetts, who was Roukes' student when he did the attogram work. "It's the first time we can think about having devices that weigh single molecules."

But to identify proteins by weight, the scales will have to become another 1000 times more precise, capable of weighing yoctograms (10^-24)g), or individual hydrogen atoms.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Golf as a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game

Shot-Online is a massively multiplayer online golf game. With role-playing. And questing. And golf.

Shot-Online is not just an online sports game either, but it is a highly accurate simulation and a deep role-playing experience. It is the RPG quality that makes Shot-Online the unique game it is, especially with the community interaction and the enhancement and leveling of your character. Speaking of community and role-playing, Shot-Online offers both realistic and rare items drawn from the celebrated history of golf. Practicing every day, competing against players with different skills, allows the gamer to advance their characters abilities. Quests and item exchanging and more add to the community feel.

Link (via Wonderland)

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

Flickr related-tag browser

The Flickr related tag browser: "When you search for a tag all the related tags and the last 36 photos with tag are load. To see more images you just have to click next." Link (Thanks, Bibi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's editorial on chicken companies and copyright

I wrote this editorial for the Edinburgh law school's website on how the copyright wars are being waged today because big technology companies have lost their nerve. It has extra meaning this week, when Grokster is being played out at the Supreme Court, where a tech company has exhibited the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the entertainment industry bullies.

Time was, companies like Sony could be relied upon to spend hundreds of millions of dollars defending its right to market good technology to its customers -- the company spent eight years in court sticking up for the VCR at a time when the consensus among legal scholars was that giving the public the ability to copy movies in their sitting rooms was flat-out illegal.

Time was companies shipped products that sat at the intersection of the limits of engineering and what the public could be convinced to buy: jukeboxes, cable TV, radio, VCRs, MP3 players, you name it, if it was dodgy, cool and likely to freak out an entertainment exec, someone out there would offer it for sale.

Time was that copyright changed whenever some entrepreneur invented something cool and infringing and compelling and the courts or lawmakers legalized it with reforms to copyright.

Times have changed. Today, businesses shrink away from offering general-purpose technology whose suite of uses includes ones that fall outside the confines of today's copyright -- like automatic commercial-skipping in PVRs. They run screaming from businesses that are clearly infringing by today's standards -- like DVD-ripping movie jukeboxes.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

700+ Orphan Works comments at the Copyright Office

Gavin sez, "The U.S. Copyright Office has posted the orphan works comments that were submitted. Over 700 comments were submitted in total. The CO will be accepting comments in direct reply to these through May 9."

• Lessig (for Save the Music and CC):
• Internet Archive (Note: The Internet Archive's comment has some particularly interesting suggestions, including using orphan works under the Creative Commons by-nc-nd license.)
• FreeCulture.org
• Public Knowledge
• Library of Congress
• Microsoft
• Copyright Clearance Center (copyright.com)
• RIAA
• Elizabeth Townsend (Academic Copyright)
• MPAA
• ASCAP
• Samuelson Clinic
• Consumers Electronic Association

Link (Thanks, Gavin!)

Update: Joe sez, " LOC has posted all these orphan works comments in locked PDFs that don't allow copying and pasting of the text? Seems a little silly as the reply commentors will not be able to quote the comments easily... is the LOC going copyright-paranoid?"

Update 2: A different Joe sez, "all email comments submitted to the LoC's notice of inquiry on orphaned works weren't properly redacted. That is, they simply drew white boxes over sensitive information instead of leaving it out of the documents entirely."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:24:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Media lawyer's blog from Grokster hearings

The Media Access Project's Harold Feld attended yesterday's Grokster hearing and has blogged his impressions of the proceedings:

Don Virelli led off for the recording industry. He began with the assertion that Grokster's P2P software has no legitimate uses. The justices reacted skeptically. "Didn't the court below find lots of legitimate uses, such as distribution of public domain works or distribution of works authorized by the rights holders, even if the vast majority of traffic was arguably infringing?" Virelli stuck to his guns, thus falling prey to the trap that has undermined industry so many times in this fight: they over sell.

Scalia then started in on innovation: "But what about inventors? How will they know what people will use this for? Do they get a free ride for a few years to see if the predominant use is infringing or non-infringing?" Again, Virelli went too far. "In reality, these people don't get sued just for inventing stuff" he claimed, while the entire bar section rolled its eyes. Again, the Justices weren't buying. "Inventors need certainty they won't be sued or they won't invent," said Breyer.

Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:05:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

del.icio.us gets funded, Schachter goes full-time

Joshua Schachter, who created the link-sharing service del.icio.us, has taken on some investment capital so he can work on del.icio.us full time. Congrats, Joshua!

I am excited to finally be able to devote all of my energy to working on and improving this site, and I'll also be able to acquire some much-needed infrastructure.

I'm still in charge of the site and still committed to making it as good as it can be.

Link (Thanks, Ian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:48:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Salon: Grokster means the freedom to rip your vinyl and own your data

Salon's Andrew Leonard has posted a great editorial on Grokster:

If the entertainment studios had their way, every time a format changed, you'd have to buy all your records all over again. In their ideal world, we would hold restricted licenses to our content, not ownership. Digital rights management would cripple our all-powerful computers, creating backups would be impossible, and the basic human impulse to share the wealth of information that helps define who we are would be beset with obstacles. This is not paranoia. At every step of the way, intellectual-property-right holders have resisted technological innovations that give ordinary people more scope to enjoy and consume music, television, movies or any other content.

That's why MGM vs. Grokster is so important. The deeper we get into the digital age, the more we will be defined not by our relationships with physical objects but with the data that we have accumulated in our journeys through life. If we lose the right to own that data and do what we want with it, if the power of the computer, and the Net, is taken from us, we're at risk of losing a lot more than a few files -- we stand at risk of losing the evidence that tells us who we are.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:31:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster campout in Wired News

Wired News's Katie Dean covered the Grokster trial in DC yesterday, camping out with the copyfighters who waited all night to get into the hearing.

For entertainment, the file-sharing faithful brought laptops and books. Disabato also brought an iPod shuffle loaded with controversial music from Dangermouse, a DJ known for causing a kerfuffle when he illegally mixed the Beatles' White Album with Jay Z's The Black Album. He also included a bootleg mix called "Piracy Funds Terrorism," by MIA and Diplo, on his iPod. He brought some small speakers to broadcast the music to others in line but wasn't sure if the security guards around the court would let him use them.

As the night wore on, Seth Schoen, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ordered five pizzas to be delivered to the Supreme Court. Others took turns going for coffee.

Peer-to-peer software engineer Francis Crick (the grandson of Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA) made the trip from Los Angeles. He said if the entertainment companies succeed in shutting down peer-to-peer networks, the case will impair the development of new technologies in the United States.

Link (via Copyfight)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:22:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Roger Wood clock with laundry

My old neighbor from Toronto, Roger Wood, is an assemblage sculptor who builds whimsical clocks out of old junk. He has a little mailing list for fans of his where he posts photos of today's creation -- and the latest edition really struck my fancy: a wheeled clock with a pastel-tinted laundry line. Gorgeous. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:16:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Photos of Grokster demonstrators: DON'T TOUCH MY TIVO!

Emily, a DC native, got some great pix of the protestors outside of yesterday's Grokster hearing (carrying signs like, RIAA KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY IPOD and DON'T TOUCH MY TIVO), and posted them to Flickr, tagged with "grokster" -- got your own Grokster photos? Upload and tag 'em! Link (Thanks, Emily!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SciAm apologizes for not endorsing creationism and missile-shields

Scientific American's April Fools Day editorial apologizes for not endorsing creationism, missible defense shields, and the idea that global warming is a hoax.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Link (Thanks, Schpok!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Songs as BASIC programs, alphabetical lists, haiku, predicate logic

Meredith sez, 'The song-reformatting meme from two days ago continues to breed and mutate. Link goes to an Outlook-calendar version of Robert Smith's week according to "Friday I'm In Love". Others worth noting: "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" in first-order predicate logic, "Love Shack" in alphabetical order, various Beatles songs in haiku, the bears in the bed song in BASIC, and John Cage's 4' 33".'

10 let x=5
20 if x>1 then let b$="bears" else let b$="bear"
30 if x>1 then let s$="roll over, roll over" else let s$="I'm sleepy"
40 print x, b$, "in the bed, and the little one said", s$
50 if x=1 then goto 90
60 print "So they all rolled over, and one fell out."
70 let x=x-1
80 goto 20
90 end

Link (Thanks, Meredith)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:59:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Silent rave with wireless headphones

UK's Glastonbury music festival will get around a late-night ban on loud bass by handing wireless headphones out to the attendees, producing a silent rave:

"I like the idea of people dancing in total silence," said Emily Eavis, one of the festival organisers and daughter of the founder Michael Eavis. "Imagine if you were feeling a bit worse for wear and thought, 'This would be a nice quiet place to sit down'.

"You would be completely freaked out to see 3000 people dancing in silence. It's certainly quirky, but our big push this year is keeping the noise down because that's what the council is keen on."

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:46:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Real Doll photography

Photographer Elena Dorfman has a new book out called Still Lovers with pictures of those creepy Real Doll sex toys in quotidian situations.

For many, the idea of the sex doll conjures images of the kitschy inflatable, but these expensive, highly realistic dolls, which owners customize down to the smallest detail, are far from silly, and they perform more than a sexual role for thier owners.For many, the idea of the sex doll conjures images of the kitschy inflatable, but these expensive, highly realistic dolls, which owners customize down to the smallest detail, are far from silly, and they perform more than a sexual role for thier owners.

Link (via thefblog)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:02:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Alarm clock that hides

Clocky is an alarm clock that hides when you hit its snooze button. It was developed by Gauri Nanda at the MIT Media Lab. From the project description:

When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky's shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day.

I don't like being told when to wake up but I've come to terms with the idea that I have to. In designing Clocky, I was in part inspired by kittens I've had that would bite my toes every morning.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:19:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Plagiarism-seeking IMmer pranked and exposed -- UPDATED

Nate Kushner was sitting around one night when he started to get IMs from a college student who was looking to commission a term-paper on Hinduism that was due in the morning. She'd seen something about Hinduism in Nate's AIM profile and so she offered him $75 to write the paper. He wrote a silly little paper, strung her along, pranked her, and then published the whole thing along with her real name on his blog:

Laura K. Pahl: lets talk about it then

Nate Kushner: As long as you understand that plagiarism is not going to free you from the painful cycle of death and rebirth any quicker.

Laura K. Pahl: ok

Laura K. Pahl: so can u help me

Nate Kushner: I think I can. It is my duty, as we are all children in the arms of Chivas.

Link (via Waxy)

Update: It's an April Fool's Day hoax. Shannon sez, "the student doesn't exist, that school is a Christian school (that doesn't teach a course on Hinduism), and it's hosted on a comedy troupe's site that's trying to promote it's new show, and their webmaster is spamming blogs with their story under a variety of fake names."

Update 2: The people who posted this deny that it's a hoax, deny the spamming. You decide.

Update 3: Peter sez, "For what it's worth, Lewis University does, in fact, offer a course dealing with Hinduism:

"19-298 Christianity and World Religions (3) This course compares the teachings of Christianity with the teachings and practices of selected non-Christian religions, possibly including Native-American religious traditions, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The aims of the course are to clarify similarities and differences between Christianity and other religions, to reflect on the problem posed by religious pluralism in modern culture, and to develop a Christian theology of world religions."

Update 3: Henry sez, "A story in Inside Higher Ed (online competitor to the Chronicle of Higher Education) about the Hindu plagiarism controversy. I'm guessing from the university's non-denial that the story is probably legit."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:13:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Loretta Lux's photography

The new issue of the still-excellent Bust magazine has an interview with Loretta Lux, a German artist living in Ireland whose surreal photographs of children are so spookily sweet that they're hypnotizing. According to the Bust article (not archived online), Lux won't reveal her specific Photoshop techniques except to say that "the images are compositions of photos superimposed over painted backgrounds, then finished off with digital alterations." Her online gallery is just stunning. When I have a child, I'd love to commission Lux to photograph him or her every year. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:37:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni Tech on NPR: Changing view of downloading music

For today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day," I report on how the popularity of online file-sharing sevices has affected the way music fans find, distribute and listen to music. I speak with artists Michael Donaldson (aka Q-Burns Abstract Message) and David Byrne, and random folks buying tunes and movies at a record store in Hollywood. The short version? It seems that for many music-lovers, "consuming habits" involve some combination of purchased hard goods (CDs, DVDs, vinyl); paid downloads; and "illicit" P2P or other unpaid forms of tune-sharing. Those complex behaviors may explain in part why some studies show that music sales are up in spite of the fact that P2P use is still high, and growing.
Link to archived audio for this segment, Link to more archived "Xeni Tech" segments on NPR's Day to Day.

Related on Boing Boing: David Byrne launches internet radio station

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:25:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paul Boutin on Make

Slate's Paul Boutin wrote a great review of Make magazine today.

The best magazines build a facade of practical information but really exist to let you enjoy your interests vicariously. No one picks up Car and Driver to decide whether to buy a Ferrari or an Aston Martin—we all just want to read about racing them through the Alps. Most gadget magazines are heavy on photos of the latest Nokias and Sonys—glossy photos from the front and the side and close-ups on the shiny, silver buttons. Make is for people who don't care about what stuff looks like in the outside. It's for the tinkerers who dream of overclocking the real world with Silly Putty and a soldering iron.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:23:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster argument analysis from law student

This law student who attended Grokster has written a stellar account of the argument, giving a good, nuanced analysis of what the lawyers and the judges were up to.

At least some of the Justices, Scalia in particular, seemed troubled by how an inventor would know, at the time of inventing, how its invention might be marketed in the future. How, some of the Justices asked MGM, could the inventors of the iPod (or the VCR, or the photocopier, or even the printing press) know whether they could go ahead with developing their invention? It surely would not be difficult for them to imagine that somebody might hit upon the idea of marketing their device as a tool for infringement.

MGM's answer to this was pretty unsatisfying. They said that at the time the iPod was invented, it was clear that there were many perfectly lawful uses for it, such as ripping one's own CD and storing it in the iPod. This was a very interesting point for them to make, not least because I would wager that there are a substantial number of people on MGM's side of the case who don't think that example is one bit legal. But they've now conceded the contrary in open court, so if they actually win this case they'll be barred from challenging "ripping" in the future under the doctrine of judicial estoppel. In any event, though, MGM's iPod example did exactly what their proposed standard expressly doesn't do: it evaluated the legality of the invention based on the knowledge available to the inventor at the time, not from a post hoc perspective that asks how the invention is subsequently marketed or what business models later grow up around it.

Link (Thanks, Donna!)

Update: Timothy sez, "I'm not just a 'law student,' I'm an attorney with ten years of experience in Supreme Court and appellate litigation."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:18:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ron Jeremy's groantones

In January, Carlo Longino alerted us to Jemma Jameson's "moantones" for cell phones. Now Carlo points out on his new Mobile Music Blog that Ron Jeremy has followed suite with "groantones." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:49:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Audio of Casey at the Bat and two unauthorized sequels

Telltale Weekly, which sells DRM-free audiobooks of public domain works, has just posted a $0.50 version of "Casey at the Bat" and two "sequels" written by a different writer, hearkening to an era when copyright didn't mean that others couldn't fool around with your work.

Ernest L Thayer (writing under the pen name "Phinn") wrote the baseball classic Casey at the Bat: "A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888" for the San Fransisco Examiner. In the century since, the poem has spawned hundreds of sequels, including a handful of updates by sports columnist Grantland Rice.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:10:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

World's baddest-ass amateur roboticists

This month's Wired has a stupendous article on three kids from working-class Mexican migrant families in Phoenix who became amateur roboticists and took home the gold for developing a world-beating subaquatic robot using parts they bought with $800 they'd fundraised.

The Ralph's grocery store near the UCSB campus is done up to look like a hacienda, complete with a red tile roof, glaringly white walls, and freshly planted palms. The guys dropped Lorenzo off in front. It was his bright idea, after all. He wandered past the organic produce section, trying to build up his courage. He passed an elderly lady examining eggplant - he was too embarrassed to ask her. Next, he saw a young woman in jeans shopping for shampoo.

"Excuse me, madam," he began. He wasn't used to approaching women, let alone well-dressed white women. He saw apprehension flash across her face. Maybe she thought he was trying to sell magazines or candy bars, but he steeled himself. He explained that he was building a robot for an underwater contest, and it was leaking. He wanted to soak up the water with tampons but didn't know which ones to buy. "Could you help me buy the most best tampons?"

The woman broke into a big smile and led him to feminine hygiene. She handed him a box of O.B. ultra-absorbency. "These don't have an applicator, so they'll be easier to fit inside your robot," she said. He stared at the ground, mumbled his thanks, and headed quickly for the checkout.

"I hope you win," she called out, laughing.

Link (Thanks, Greg!)

Update: Greg points out that there's an online tipjar for donating to the kids' college fund

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:55:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Translucent tombstones

Lundgren Monuments makes glass tombstones.

Radiant and incredibly tactile, Lundgren Monuments are designed for the individual who defies definition, and in the setting of a memorial park or cemetery they are glowing beacons that stand out amongst the traditional stone memorials.

Link (Thanks, Kirsten!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:31:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fungus from agarwood smells addictively good

Pete Farmer says: "On a recent trip to the Mid-East, I noticed that I was strangely attracted to a particular type of incense, which seemed to be quite common. A Syrian companion told me it was called 'oud', and explained that it was formed by a fungus which attacks the agarwood tree. Although this was new information for me, it has been known throughout antiquity. He took me to a specialty shop, where I purchased a very small amount of this rare and precious material.

"On my return, I declared the stuff at Swiss customs, and after a brief delay, they told me it was okay. Research on the 'Net lead me to U. of M.'s interesting site. It has had a similarly compelling attraction on my whole family, and has become somewhat of an addiction. Beware: if you're the type of person who succumbs easily to substance abuse, once you try this stuff there may be no going back! Weird." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:16:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Large catfish attempts to swallow small basketball

A large catfish with a child's basketball stuck in its mouth was spotted swimming in a pond in Wichita. The photos here show how it was saved by a man who cut the ball and pulled it from the catfish's mouth.
Link (Thanks, Life Sucks Sometimes!)

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

Upcoming.org gets an API

Waxy sez, "Upcoming.org, the social calendaring site I created in my spare time, now offers a ton of spanking new features. Among the big changes: a complete API for doing your own development, and support for tagging, e-mail/SMS reminders, and personal events. Why the sudden flood of activity? Blame Jon Udell, who posted this column inspiring me to do a week of nonstop coding." Link (Thanks, Waxy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:56:31 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF staffers blogging this morning's Grokster hearing

The EFF staffers who attended the Grokster Supreme Court case this morning are out in the air -- and blogging. The EFF Deep Links blog is accumulating posts from staffers who've found WiFi or whose handhelds are online.

At the oral arguments in MGM v. Grokster before the Supreme Court today, it was hard to tell which side a majority of the justices fell on. But one thing was clear: they were asking the right questions.

Over and over, the justices hammered the lawyer for the RIAA and MPAA with questions about the potential impact of a ruling in their favor against small inventors -- the "guy in the garage" as Justice David Souter put it. Justice Stephen Breyer also grilled MGM's attorney about whether lawyers who advise technologists -- for example, the inventor of the next iPod -- could give any assurance at all to their clients under MGM's rule that if he would not be sued at some point down the road for copyright infringement.

Justice Scalia was also skeptical of the plaintiffs' arguments, questioning whether their proposed "primary use" test made any sense, given that the balance of lawful versus unlawful uses of technology are constantly changing.

Justices Ask the Right Questions in MGM v. Grokster, Grokster: From the Courthouse Steps, EFF Goes to Washington (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:46:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF attorney versus former solicitor general on CSPAN

Here's some great video of my cow-orker Fred von Lohmann, EFF's senior IP attorney, schooling former Solcitor General Theodore Olson on the Grokster case. Fred wipes up the floor with this dude. Link (Thanks, Copyleft Fan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:05:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Testing Tasers on swine

A researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is launching a study where he'll zap pigs with stun guns. Bioengineer John Webster is testing his hypothesis that the 50,000 volt shock by itself may not be as deadly as critics claim. From the Associated Press:

Webster suggested some of the Taser-related deaths were from a rare condition known as malignant hyperthermia, in which bodies essentially overheat. He will test that theory on swine that have been specially bred to have the condition.

Other suspects may have died if potassium that is released into the blood stream after muscle contractions caused by a Taser shock reached the heart, Webster said. Cocaine use might be another factor, he said...

While all the pigs will be filled with anesthesia, they will be euthanized after the experiments, said Webster, who predicted about 30 pigs would be used. The research could create a computer model that would eliminate the need for more animal testing, he said.

Representatives from PETA are pissed. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:29:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How HDTV killed firefighters, birthed the Broadcast Flag, and screwed America

This long, excellent article on the history of broadcast spectrum allocation in America is the single best explanation of the mess that we're in today. In short: greedy broadcasters tricked Congress into giving them free spectrum for a second set of digital channels, so that Americans who bought digital TVs would have something to watch. Then they did nothing with them. Meantime, cops and firefighters and EMTs are (literally) dying for some of that squat-upon spectrum so that they can coordinate their rescue efforts. Remember how everyone rhapsodized about how postmodern it was that the World Trade Center rescuers used cellphones and Blackberries to stay in touch? It wasn't because the private sector's phones are designed by smarter people than the emergency-squads'. It's because there's no spectrum available to emergency workers because the broadcasters (now largely owned by or affiliated with movie studios and cable companies) have stolen it all from the American public.

This stuff was used as the justification for the Broadcast Flag, too -- spectrum allocation is practically the root of all evil in America, when you get right down to it.

From the beginning, the key combatant has been the National Association of Broadcasters, which organized itself into a lobby in the 1920s, even before the Federal Communications Commission was formed in 1934. For more than 75 years, the NAB has been fighting to help the broadcasting industry hold on to its slice of the spectrum -- the frequencies TV and radio stations use for their broadcasts -- in the face of demands from competing technologies and rival industries, and even public safety concerns.

In the 1980s, when the FCC appeared ready to reallocate some of the spectrum for public safety, the NAB persuaded Congress to block the commission and hold off the change because, the broadcasters said, they needed the spectrum to develop high-definition television. Yet soon thereafter, the broadcasters abandoned HDTV, and it nearly died

Link (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:34:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Carlo Longino's Mobile Music Blog

Frequent BB contributor Carlo Longino is a friend of mine and Mark's and also an editor/writer at TheFeature. His insights into myriad mobile tech topics are sharp, informed, and easy to grok. Carlo's still hammering away at TheFeature but he just launched the Mobile Music Blog to cover "the convergence of music and mobile communication technology." Yesterday he ranted on the delay of Motorola's iTunes phone and the impact of the Grokster case on mobile music. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:46:34 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fundraiser for ill blogger

Alameida sez, "I am running a fundraiser for Gary Farber, of amygdalagf.blogspot.com. He is a great blogger, one of the first on the scene, and he is also gravely ill and without health insurance or a job. I am making personalized mix CD's for whoever donates $15 or more to him through the paypal link at our site (people have to fill in the "message to sender" portion with their shipping address and specific music requests.)" Link (Thanks, Alameida!)

Update: Gary sez, "I've been gravely ill, on several occasions, but presently I'm merely suffering from various ailments, some of which are responding somewhat to medication, and others less well. But while my blood pressure keeps making the medicos look at me like my head will explode a la Scanners any second, and the heart is rather unpredictable, and without listing all my other ailments and problems, I think 'gravely ill' is a stretch at present"

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Liveblogging Grokster

Several bloggers -- include EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer -- are in DC today for the Supreme Court hearing on Grokster, where the movie studios are asking the court to criminalize any technology where the designers have failed to anticipate the ways in which it could be used to infringe and designed to block it (e.g., email, photocopiers, the Internet). They're blogging it and posting pictures, too. Wendy Seltzer Link, Machination.org Link, Photos (Thanks, Cyrus!)

Update: More Groksterblogging: SCOTUSBlog (Thanks, Donna), Nickdiscredit's Livejournal (Thanks, Justin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:39:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 28, 2005

CC-licensed papercraft iPod stand

Piers sez, "Seeing as the new iPods don't come with docks, and no-one wants to spend $30+ on a bit of plastic or metal to stand their iPods on, I've drawn up a template for a simple, functional and attractive iPod stand you can download as a pdf, print out, stick on some card and assemble. It's also released under a Creative Commons licence so anyone can distribute it or make improvements to the design and re-distribute it." Link (Thanks, Piers!)

Update: Mark has added an "iNo" (old Apple mouse with a pair of cheap headphones glued to it) to the papercraft stand to make a very cheap techno-fashion statement.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:43:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Contest to produce in-game book based on Cory's next novel

When my next novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town comes out this July, I'm going to do an in-game signing and talk in Second Life, the massively mutiplayer online world (I did this before, for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it was really fun!).

To commemorate the event, Second Life's Wagner James Au is coordinating an in-game contest to design a virtual book based on the text of the novel, a digital 3D object wiht turn-able pages, etc. I really hope that what they end up building is more than a simple 3D version of a meatspace book, though: electronic text is so much more protean than printed words, so it would be a shame to constrain it to behaving the way that dumb matter does.

...[F]or the next couple months, in preparation for Cory's appearance, Residents will be creating book prototypes, and submitting them to me for an in-world expo, so the community can choose which one provides the best in-world reading experience. Within 48 hours of the announcement, one Resident had already submitted a screenshot of his own prototype (bottom screenshot), which sharp-eyed readers will recognize as the opening page to Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the novel he discussed with Residents at the first Book Club. The one to win the most votes at the Expo will get the honor of publishing Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Second Life. (Though of course, my personal hope is that this also helps launch a mini-explosion of virtual book technology in-world.)

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:38:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Byrne launches internet radio station

Musician and artist David Byrne, known most widely as co-founder of the Talking Heads, has just launched an internet radio station that streams the music he digs. I spoke with Mr. Byrne earlier today about the project for NPR's "Day to Day." Part of the interview will be included in a segment airing on the show tomorrow about filesharing and cultural change -- but here's more.

XJ: How do you feel about the fact that some of your fans are downloading your music for free?
David Byrne: It's a mixed bag. Sure, I would love to have compensation for that. But the argument of record companies standing up for artists rights is such a load of hooey. Most artists see nothing from record sales -- it's not an evil conspiracy, it's just the way the accounting works. That's the way major record labels are set up, from a purely pragmatic point of view. So as far as the artist goes -- who cares? I don't see much money from record sales anway, so I don't really care how people are getting it.

XJ: You've said that from an artist's perspective, one creative challenge of a cultural shift towards downloading individual songs is that when we're choosing what to download -- whether for free, or from fee-based services -- we tend to pick tunes we already know we like. Can you explain what you mean?
DB: I notice that the work of mine that tends to be downloaded most is the typical stuff, the hit singles, older Talking Heads material. From a creative point of view, the downside of that is that it becomes a kind of lowest common denominator -- you might not have as much of an opportunity to hear the full range of an artist's work as when you're buying an album. There's value in being exposed to things you didn't know you want. When you walk down the street, you have experiences that are unplanned and accidental that may expose you to new ideas, new things... it isn't just a matter of running an errand, or achieving a specific goal. It's about the accidental things that happen to you along the way.

XJ: So online radio is one way to invite that sort of pleasant accident?
DB: I think so.

XJ: How tough was it to put the radio project together?
DB: I was surprised at how easy it was. There were legal issues to consider, licensing fees to be paid. But there are a couple of companies out there who will do licensing for you, and the fees weren't too prohibitive. Probably a larger fee than an individual would be happy paying. The fee range means it's not like everyone will be happy to put the contents of their ipods online any time soon -- legally, anyway.

XJ: How do you find the music you like?
DB: Often, I buy CDs online. I like to listen to a sample, see if it lives up to what I've heard. Usually word of mouth or a review sends me looking. I've also downloaded -- I guess you could say illegally downloaded -- some songs. Not that I do this all the time. But sure, I'll do that to get an idea of how something sounds, particularly if it's hard to find a decent sample at an online store. I don't use really paid download services, because I figure -- why pay for music that I know isn't going to be CD-quality. At some point, the quality on those services will become higher. But I want higher quality right now with whatever I have to pay for. So I tend to buy CDs most of the time.

XJ: What will we hear on Radio David Byrne?
DB: Basically, whatever I'm listening to. I'll update it every couple of weeks. People sometimes ask me what I'm listening to, and I'll reel off a list of records. About halfway through the list, their eyes usually glaze over, and it's apparent they've never heard of the artists. So I thought -- well, let's make this easy. If people have any curiosity, let's make that stuff available, let people see for themselves what they think.

Link to Radio David Byrne. It's also available via iTunes in the "Eclectic" category.

Link to Xeni's related NPR story for "Day to Day."

Previously: Turning Heads with PowerPoint, David Byrne hearts PowerPoint. (Photo: David Byrne in Los Angeles, shot by XJ in 2004)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:28:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Derren Brown, mentalist

The New York Times profiles Derren Brown, a British mentalist whose stage performances and TV specials are apparently a huge hit in the UK. He seems to be a master of Neuro-linguisitic Programming. From the article:

Brown taught himself hypnotism, branched out into standard forms of magic and began performing in pubs and at parties.

One night, having just performed a particularly elaborate card trick, he realized that what he had enjoyed most was not the trick's execution, but its psychology, the interplay between magician and subject.

Brown devised a new approach that combines magic and psychology, tricks of the hands with tricks of the mind. Each of his programs starts with a disclaimer in which he asserts, essentially, that he is not supernatural, only clever.

Link to article and Link to streaming video clips of Brown's mindtricks, including explanations

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:58:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pop Surrealism show in Pueblo, Colorado, May 7th

Roq la Rue galley owner Kirsten Anderson is curating a museum show based on her book, Pop Surrealism. It opens May 7th at Sangre De Christo Art Center in Pueblo, Colorado and will feature almost all the artists in the book. Kirsten says: "But what is really cool is all the concurrent shows -- a motorcycle show, a tattoo art show, and a pinstriper show!"
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:21:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

P2P studies say that it's not hurting music

Copyfight's Alan Wexelblat has a doozy of an editorial on the pseudoscience behind claims that P2P is costing the music industry money:

...[E]very study that has been done since Napster has shown that music sharing has no negative effects on music sales (CD or downloaded). In fact, some show a positive effect. If that message got into the public consciousness the Cartel would be much worse off. Therefore, they've done all they can to frame the debate in terms of their scares, not science. So we have the scene - surely worthy of Beckett - in which a certified class of 27,000 songwriters and music publishers will argue against Grokster, as Tony Mauro put it on law.com "casting it as a life-or-death struggle over theft of their means of livelihood."

There's just one eensy weensy problem here - NOBODY's livelihood is being stolen. It's just not happening. There were no WMD in Iraq, there was no cocaine on that boat (*), and music sharing does not cost artists money.

Link

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

More anti-Beatles agitprop

More fabulous cover art from another anti-Beatles religious pamphlet penned by David Noebel, author of such insightful works of music/culture criticism as Communism, Hypnotism, and The Beatles (1965), The Marxist Minstrels: A Handbook on Communist Subversion of Music (1974), and The Legacy of John Lennon: Charming or Harming A Generation? (1982). Click image for a better view. (Thanks, Mike Ransom!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:23:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

McD's will pay rappers for name-checking Big Macs

McDonald's will pay rappers if their Big-Mac-praising songs are played on the radio.

Though it's not offering money upfront, the fast-food giant is willing to pay rappers $1 to $5 each time songs with the plug hit the radio, according to today's Advertising Age. McDonald's hopes to have its signature sandwich in several songs by summer, the mag says.

Link (via Copyfight)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:10:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pelt-covered Smart Car

It would take quite a few departed housepets to cover a Smart Car. Hopefully it's "fun fur." Link (Thanks, Margaret Marks!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:04:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Decrepit Russian embassy in Thailand photo-tour

The old Russian embassy to Thailand sits vacant and derelict in Bangkok. This photo-tour is a room-by-room crawl through its rusting bones, including the s33krit metal-lined dungeons! Link (Thanks, Jit!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:49:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SciFi channel's podcasted Stargate commentary

Mitch sez, "SciFi.com is distributing MP3 files that you listen to while watching episodes of "Stargate: Atlantis" with the sound muted. Download the files to your MP3 player, bring the player into the living room, get comfortable, and start the PLAY button on your MP3 player when you hear the voice-over say, "Previously on 'Stargate: Atlantis.'"" Link (Thanks, Mitch!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:46:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney dooms self with moronic Bluetooth boycott

We live in a weird, temporary bubble during which it is actually possible to sell people ringtones and video and crap for their phones, because mobile phones usually come locked down and unlocking them isn't a common practice yet. So there's this temporary opportunity for media companies to bleed their customers for music and movies they already own in tiny, stripped down "mobile" versions, and any company that doesn't get in on the act now is gonna lose its chance soon, as market forces drive phones to more and more open states.

Which is why Disney is blowing its own goddamned brains out by refusing to sell any of its stuff via mobile phones' Bluetooth connections. I mean, all this crap is already available on Kazaa as MPEGs and MP3s, where anyone in the world can download them, but Disney is freaking out because they're worried that someone 10 feet away from me and I might trade our Mickey wallpaper.

They're boycotting Bluetooth until such time as Bluetooth starts to include DRM. I participate in standards efforts for DRM, and they are slow, contentious and ultimately fruitless. Which means that by the time DIsney wakes up and recognizes the future that's gnawing at its ass, the opportunity will be gone.

Dear fellow Disney shareholders, we need to get this company back on the rails before it outsmarts itself into bankruptcy.

Walt Disney Co., for one, won't allow its wireless partners to deliver any of its ringtones, video games and other content to phones with Bluetooth or infrared, another technology for direct connections between devices, until the industry adopts a more secure format to prevent unauthorized sharing and copying.

Link (Thanks, Joel!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:36:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Create a posting loop with gmail and Blogspot

Pablo set up a Blogspot blog using Google, and a gmail account, likewise. Then he set his gmail account to forward to his blog's post-via-email address and his blog to send update alerts to his gmail account. The resulting loop resulting in his post being run 400 times in one day before his gmail account started to bounce the notifications. Link (Thanks, Pablo!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:06:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gaylord robot puppy commercial

Aibo's got nothing on the 1960s robot dog Gaylord. It's another Marvin Glass wonder, and Bedazzled has the TV commercial for it. Caution: contains jingle that has earworm qualities.
Link

UPDATE: Steve Doggie-Dogg says: "The jingle for the Gaylord commercial was written by the cartoon music genius, Raymond Scott. (Powerhouse, Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals, etc.)"

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:55:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Why RFID-chipped US passports are a bad idea

Bill Scannell says:

In a misguided attempt to make US passports more secure, the US Department of State plans to put radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in all new passports.  This RFID chip will contain the same information currently on our passports, including the passport holder's name, date and place of birth, passport number and photograph.

From identity theft to identity death, an RFID-chipped US passport means good news for the bad guys.

I don't expect my country to actively protect me when I am abroad, but I do expect it to not put me actively in harm's way. I don't need a beacon that is an advertisement for my potential victimhood, "Look, over here, an American! Need cash? Credit cards? Want to make a splashy political statement for the news? Act now!"

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:31:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Meet the Chinese Beatles

Tian says: Regarding the "Bizarre anti-Beatles pamphlet located", I have found an old "Meet the Beatles" album cover in Chinese.

1. Notice all the band member's eyes? They have been changed to make them look more 'Asianized' (and in John Lennon's case, more stoned).

2. The phonetic translation of the band name "beatles", actually means "disheveled hair" in Chinese."
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:29:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

No-glue penny sculptures

Lots of pictures of pennies stacked in neat configurations without the use of glue.
Link (Thanks, Robert!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:48:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cool Tools: Poison ivy rash cure

The new Cool Tools reviews Zanfel, an ointment ($40 per ounce) to relieve poison oak and ivy itching.

Within 30 seconds of treatment, the itching stops. Really. It's the only product I know of that chemically binds the urishol which is causing the problem.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:52:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark Cuban will fund Grokster's legal battle

Dallas Mavs owner and serial digital entrepreneur Mark Cuban, whose digital cinema plans I profile in the current issue of Wired Magazine, has agreed to fund the legal defense of P2P service Grokster. Link to Cuban's blog entry, "Let the truth be told…MGM vs Grokster"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:46:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Massive Quake hits indonesia, tsunami feared

An 8.2 quake has struck the same fault line in Indonesia which triggered the disaster last December. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:26:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pet pillows

Nevada taxidermist Jeanette Hall offers an interesting alternative to stuffing and mounting a deceased pet:

Each pet pillow is hand made from the fur of your pet and made into a pillow that you can display. On one side of the pillow is your pet's fur and the other side of the pillow is your choice of fabric. These soft, huggable pillows are a great way to enjoy your cherished pet...

Pillows range from $65 for a domestic cat to $150 for a horse. Link (Thanks, Alex Boucherot!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:16:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Israel's nanotech-powered superhero

Over at the NanoBot, Howard Lovy introduces us to Israel's first "nanotechnology-powered" superhero, The Golem. The superhero stars in a new daily comic strip hosted on Ynetnews.

Howard writes: Golems are clay creatures of Jewish legend brought to "life" by rabbis who can master the correct Kabbalistic incantations. Mary Shelley was said to have been inspired by them when she created Frankenstein. The most famous of these Jewish Frankensteins was the 17th century Golem of Prague, created out of clay and brought to life with one word, "emet" ("truth"), placed on its forehead by Rabbi Jehudah Loew...

Since then, the golem has come to symbolize how the "creations" of man can go horribly wrong. I wonder if this comic's creators are aware that if they are to stay true to the golem legends their superhero must ultimately fail. The moral of the Jewish myth is that it is dangerous for mankind to "play God," or to "alter nature" by giving life to clay...

In this modern version, it's government bureaucracy that goes awry. The first comic begins with Professor Finstein's "Israeli Super Hero Project" about to become the victim of budget cuts. He convinced the government to build it using "these very small appliances," which turned out to be nanobots, of course. What he did not say was that he neded "67 trillion" of them to build a proper super hero. "Oy vey .." exclaims the guy from the Israeli budget office.

Link to Nanobot post, Link to the comic

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:00:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bizarre anti-Beatles pamphlet located

I appreciate all the readers who emailed me pointers to possible sources for David Noebel's rare Communism, Hypnotism And The Beatles pamphlet from 1965. Special thanks to BB pals Ken Sitz and Bill Geerhart of the magnificent site Conelrad, purveyors of the finest mid-20th century American weirdness, from Cold War films to atomic age LPs. Here's their page on David Noebel's classic spoken word LP The Marxis Minstrels: The Communist Subversion of American Folk Music. The audio samples are a laff riot. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:49:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Podcast: Xeni interviewed on "The Gadget Show"

Following in the footsteps of my blog-mate Cory, I was interviewed on Richard Giles' Australia-based podcast radio program "The Gadget Show." Link to interview, and here is Cory's earlier appearance.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:35:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

QTVR of Taiwan independence protests

Shot by Walker Young in Taipei: QTVR pano of protests in Taiwan this weekend.
Link (thanks, Hans)

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

Sony must halt PS controller sales, pay $90MM for patent infringement

A court has ordered Sony's games division to halt US sales of a Playstation controller and pay more than $90MM to Immersion, a small Silicon Valley tech company, over infringement claims. Link (thanks, Dave)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:21:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flowerbomb: smells like IED spirit?

I was walking past Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills on Saturday, and phonecammed this in the window: "Flowerbomb," a new perfume by Viktor and Rolf. The display consisted of a gigantic, grenade-shaped perfume bottle streaming a cascade of red rose petals. There's even a little pull-thing sticking out of the side to activate the spray. Just like on a real grenade.
Link to full-size phonesnap in my Flickr stream, link to the perfume maker's website, here's a news clip. Truth is stranger than fiction, n'est-ce pas?

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

Friendster, the movie

Old Hag sez:

Variety reports that Topher Grace will star in an untitled Harold Ramis ("Groundhogs Day") comedy that will be based on the popular web service, Friendster.com. Gustin Nash will pen the screenplay. Topher will play a character that will utilize the website, as well as instant messaging and camera phones, as he looks for love on the Internet.

Link (Thanks, Susannah)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:56:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robogames 2005 photos

A plethora of pixels from the ROBOGAMES in San Francisco this past weekend. Link to Scott Beale/Laughing Squid's batch, and Link to more by Thomas Hawke.
Link to Robogames home.

Previously on Boing Boing: Robolympics photos!, More Robolympics photos, Still! More! Robolympics! Photos!, Son of Bride of Robolympics Photos!.

Xeni's Wired News report, 2003: Let's See, Roborace? Roborally?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:34:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robotic mating proposal

Jason Striegel wrote an interesting post for Hackaday about a proposed sexual evolution mechanism for robots. He tells Boing Boing:

Using Lego Mindstorms, you can create simple robots that have the ability to mate (swap a simple software genome) and evolve (random chance of single point mutations). Mutations that make a robot unfit for traversing its environment or unable to mate will effectively drive it toward extinction as it cannot pass on its genes.

It's a pretty interesting experiment, as you can watch novel behaviors emerge with each generation. Even more interesting are the possible applications for an evolution based robotic platform. Two things that immediately come to mind are sex-based software upgrade mechanisms for distributed machines and distributed robot cultures that can adapt as a group to be optimized for communication in an environment, rather than being explicitly programmed for the task.

Now, I couldn't find any specific reference to fembots with gun-boobies in Jason's post, but any excuse to post this jpeg's a good one. Link

James P. Howard says:

This is ancient technology. Start with the Wikipedia article on genetic algorithms (Link) and for an excellent lay introduction, suggest "Artificial Life" by Steven Levy (Amazon Link)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:26:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese pop group gets punk'd over "Ringu"

Sean Bonner blogs a rather funny video of the J-pop stars Morning Musume watching Ringu and then "totally being messed with," as Sean puts it.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:19:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

May the Pez be with you: Star Wars dispensers

Pez is offering a limited edition of Star Wars-themed dispensers: 10,000 each of the Colored Crystal Darth Vader, Colored Crystal Yoda and Golden Glow C-3PO.
link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded, and thanks for the hed, interestingdrug).

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

Economist: assault on filesharing by entertainment biz is senseless

Tomorrow, the US Supreme court will hear arguments in MGM v. Grokster, a case which will determine the fate of internet filesharing apps -- and any other tech invention that could potentially be used for copyright infringement. This news analysis piece in the Economist says "attacking the technology behind file-sharing could stifle innovation without tackling the industry’s long-term problems."

But even if the entertainment business manages to coax more users into paying for legal downloads and succeeds in court against Grokster and StreamCast, its problems are unlikely to go away. True, a Supreme Court ruling in the industry’s favour would put paid to other P2P services. But it is not clear that curbing illegal downloading will translate into extra sales for the music business. A rush into legal downloading would hardly be good for sales of CDs: some cannibalisation is inevitable. And perhaps the decline in global sales is indicative of a far greater problem for the music industry—consumers simply think that many of its products are just not worth paying for

Link (Thanks, Ryan).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:03:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Black market Soviet space program detritus

Russia's flea markets and online auction sites teem with stolen detritus of the Soviet space pragram. Wired has a good article with interviews with the dealers and buyers. The look and feel of commie space junque is completely awesome: there's a Russian science fiction publisher that finances its trips to American conventions by selling off thousands of kitschy Soviet space pins and memorabilia, stuff with the design feel of a Gernsback-era flying wing or phallic rocket-bomb. I can totally see how the actual detritus from the actual program would pose a nearly inescapable lure to a certain species of craphound.

I'm talking to a vendor named Vladimir, who, to protect himself from the bitter cold, has put on a pair of orange space gloves, which he swears belonged to Gagarin, and a bubble-shaped space helmet. A $2,000 price tag hangs off his right pinkie, and a $1,000 marker dangles from the helmet. Eager to make a sale, Vladimir lifts the face shield, revealing a set of bulging eyes and a two-day beard. "So," he says, speaking English with a heavy Russian accent to a tourist snapping a photo, "you wanna be a spaceman?"

Vladimir's stall is among hundreds that line Izmailovo's muddy pathways like a set of crooked teeth. Vendors hawk everything from pirated DVDs to antique rifles, just like any weekend market in the US. But Izmailovo's proximity to the famed cosmonaut training ground Star City - 90 minutes away by pothole-riddled streets - makes this bazaar unique. There are dozens of vendors peddling the same kind of wares as Vladimir. With a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his mouth, he shows off artifacts that would be right at home in a museum clearance sale - an $800 leather headset, a $1,000 heat-resistant jumper with a Russian flag on the sleeve, and his prize, a $40,000 space suit from a 1971 Soyuz spacecraft.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:23:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunted book shelf gimmick

This haunted book shelf gimmick uses a system of hidden levers to make the books on the shelf slide in and out of their own accord -- can be run from a switch or motion-sensor. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:13:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apron of flesh made from gruesome latex faces, hair, ears

The Apron of Flesh is a moulded latex apron that appears to be made out of stitched-together faces that have been gruesomely flensed from their owners' skulls. Includes real fake hair. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:11:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Sf story formatted for PSP

Mike of Pocket Switched Press sez, "We took our 2nd Technology Fiction title ('Moving Pictures', a story about a band of garage Spielbergs using Machinima to upset the Hollywood business model; published under Creative Commons License) and re-formatted it especially for the 9:16 screen of the PSP (e.g. essentially 166 JPEGs you read with the PSP tilted into portrait mode using the clear shoulder buttons for page-down/page-up)." Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:39:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hugo nominations 2005

This year's Hugo nominees have been announced and it's an amazing British invasion -- my pal and collaborator Charlie Stross has picked up three noms this year!

# The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
# Iron Council by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
# Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross (Ace)
# Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
# River of Gods by Ian McDonald (Simon & Schuster)

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:06:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PSP web-browser roundup

Here's a great round-up of getting a browser running on your PSP handheld game console -- hackers have gone nuts on this thing, extending its capabilities more than has been done on any of the other handhelds, and in just a few days. Link (Thanks, Phil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:04:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nepali media crackdown thwarted by bloggers

Sage, of the International Nepal Solidarity Network sez, "The King of Nepal closed all communications on February 1, and for 5 days Nepal had no access to internet or phones. Since then there's been strict censorship of the press." Link (Thanks, Sage!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:15:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pop songs as outliner lists

A silly LiveJournal experiment with turning a song into a outliner-style list has spawned several dozen posts in which enterprising users do the same to their favorite numbers: funny!

* Things I ain't afraid of:
  o no ghost

* Strange things in the neighbourhood (partial list):
  o seeing things running through head
  o invisible man sleeping in bed

* Things that make me feel good:
  o bustin'

* Who you gonna call:
  o Ghostbusters
  o I can't hear you
  o Louder

Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:13:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bhutan's cool online constitutional convention, marred by weird-ass copyright

Flotsam sez, "It's a unique event when a country drafts its first constitution. Even rarer is one that exposes it to the world in a PDF. The latter is even more noteworthy when the country is one that has successfully protected its culture and heritage from outside influence. The draft Constitution has been released in both Bhutan's indigenous language, Dzongkha, and English. Any country that says 'gross national happiness is more important than gross national product' has to be a model for the rest of the world."

So cool. Inexplicably, the constitutional site is marred with "Copyright(c) Constitution Drafting Committee. All Rights Reserved." They've even obfuscated their html. Because goodness know you wouldn't want your constitution being pirated. Link (Thanks, Flotsam!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Python script for uploading to Flickr

CJM sez, "This is just a simple python script that looks in a directory, and will upload what ever is there to your flickr account. It keeps track of what it has uploaded, and that is about it for features. The code is available to do whatever you wish with it." Link (Thanks, CJM!)

Update: Antrix sez, "Michele Campeotto has written the nice FlickrClient interface for those with more ambitious visions of mating Python and Flickr."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:59:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

MoblogUK's photos of the week as a movie

Alfie sez, "This is why I love CC licensing, I can grab the best images over the week at moblogUK, head over to CCmixter or a bunch of other excellent sites, and have fun making stuff like this." 5MB Quicktime Link (Thanks, Alfie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:23:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mac BitTorrent client with 3D swarm-visualizer

Bits on Wheels is a Mac-only BitTorrent client that shows you your current downloading "swarm" as a 3D visualization. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:28:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fan-soundtrack for Sound of Music called "Rolf is a Nazi"

A bunch of musicians who know each other from the Songfight site (think of it as photoshopping contests for musicians) have collaborated on an album of Sound of Music covers called "Rolf is a Nazi." Lots of good stuff, but the standouts here are definitely Do Re Mi and Climb Every Mountain. Link (Thanks, Fluffy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:03:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO: defend yourself against domain trademark shakedowns

Hank's TaubmanSucks site exhaustively details the legal wranglings that ensued when he registered a domain with the same name as a mall that was under construction near him, for the purpose of posting fannish reviews of the mall once it had opened. The mall's lawyers, halfway across the country, brought him to court for trademark infringment, and Hank defended himself, with help from advocacy groups like Public Citizen and the ACLU, and eventually prevailed. He's detailed every step of his work from initial letter right through to judgement -- it's practically a HOWTO for defending yourself from routine trademark shakedowns. Link (Thanks, Hank!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:58:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Social calendar for copyfighters

CopyNight is a site where copyfighters can list their local events by city, a kind of social calendar from trademark, copyright and patent reform. There's a monthly worldwide event and you can add your own local events as well. This is the brainchild, in part, of EFF Activist Ren Bucholz, and as he says, "building community around free culture is so important for our long-term success."

CopyNight is a monthly gathering of people interested in ensuring freedom for artists and tinkerers, fostering innovation, and restoring the balance between the public interests and intellectual property rights holders for the benefit of all.

We're going to have kick off events on Tuesday, March 29, when the Supreme Court will hear arguments about the future of file sharing. We already have events scheduled in San Francisco, D.C., and New York, but we'd love to have one in your neck of the woods as well. If you're interested, just pick a venue (bar/restaurant/your apartment) and drop me a line with your contact info by Wednesday night (March 16). We'll start publicizing the events this Thursday, and I believe that EFF & other groups sending announcements to their members too. » login or register to post comments | read more

Link (Thanks, Ren!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:29:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scottish Creative Commons draft license

The Creative Commons England/Wales licenses lauched earlier this year, and now there's a draft Scottish CC license to accompany them (Scotland's legal system contains key copyright differences from the English/Welsh system that preclude a single UK license). Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brazilian open microorganism bank

The Brazilian government is funding an open collection of indigineous microrganisms that will stave off the practice of foreign companies coming to the south, taking what grows there, and locking it away in patents that the countries of origin can't afford to license.

The microbe bank — dubbed the Brazilian Collection of Environmental and Industrial Microorganisms — is housed at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and was inaugurated on 24 February.

''We intend to put this collection at the service of the scientific and industrial community, by preserving, identifying, maintaining and distributing these microorganisms,'' says biologist Lara Sette, the collection's curator...

Specimens in the 'public access deposit' will be available to public and private institutions to use for research or teaching. The 'safety deposit' will house specimens whose identity and related information are kept confidential and to which access will be restricted.

The third section will include specimens deposited to satisfy Brazilian legal requirements, which state that a sample of any biological material moved between public or private institutions, nationally or internationally, must be deposited in an institution accredited by the Ministry of Environment.

Link (via Worldchanging)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:10:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

If the Constitution was a EULA

The current administration has spent the past four years treating the Constitution as though it were a EULA and subject to change without notice. Slate's "Important Changes to Your Citizenship Agreement" reviews some of these changes in a compact and helpful form.

SECTION 5 The Freedom of Speech section of the Agreement is amended to distinguish between Regular Preferred Speech and Non-Preferred Speech. The Non-Preferred Speech rate applies to all speech which is not in good standing as defined under the "Preferred Citizen Rate Eligibility" section of your Agreement. Both the rate and your freedom of speech may vary based on changes in the National Terror Alert Level...

SECTION 16
This amendment affects the Right to Privacy section of your agreement. Under the new terms, the Right to Privacy must be applied for on an individual basis. To apply for your Right to Privacy, you must send your full credit history, a copy of your party registration and church membership, a complete set of fingerprints, a DNA sample, and two (2) passport-size photographs of your bedroom to: National Privacy Registry, Washington, DC, 20012-3006, att: Doris.

Link (Thanks, Lee!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:00:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reactionary school-boards' block-buy eliminates sex from text-books

Southern school board buy their textbooks in a block, lead by the purchase decisions of Texas's board. "Liberal" school boards make individual purchase decisions. That means that reactionary anti-sex-ed and anti-evolution agendas dominate the editorial decisions at textbook publishers, which has led to the elimination sex-ed from every current health text in America and will shortly do in evolution as well.

There is a substantial buying bloc--namely, school boards in southern states--that follows suit with whatever the state school board of Texas does. These states buy textbooks uniformly, statewide. Most "blue states" buy district to district, so there is no unified bloc per se to counterbalance the southern states where points of politics are concerned. So this bloc of southern school boards has an unrivalled power to influence the choices of the major textbook publishers in the country--of which there are only like four, anyhow. Basically, they don't publish anything the school board of Texas doesn't buy.

You can see where this headed, but it's already shockingly total. Right now, a sex ed textbook that isn't "abstinence only" cannot be bought in the United States. Not a current one, not from any major publisher. There are inroads against evolution as well, but sex ed has basically been exterminated.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:57:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster briefs torrent

Thad sez, "This is a torrent of all of the briefs submitted re: MGM v. Grokster, in the zip format provided on the U.S. Copyright Office site." Torrent Link for 74 briefs in 20.7MB

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:51:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Starbucks' cup-aphorisms enrage "conservatives"

Starbucks has been printing witty and pithy aphorisms on its paper cups, many of them from "liberal" thinkers (it's alarming that Chuck D is considered a "liberal;" if I were him, I'd demand to be considered "radical" -- "liberal" sounds so soppy and weak-kneed).

So right-wing Starbucks customers have gathered to protest this, demanding that Starbucks give equal representation to "conservative" thought. And to judge from the comments on the Starbucks site, it's clear that environmentalists don't count as conservatives.

I think they should get lots of good conservative quotes, like John Gilmore's "If you're watching everyone, you're watching no one," and Lincoln's "If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and its finisher," and Jefferson's "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

The problem, critics say, is the company's list of overwhelmingly liberal contributors, including Al Franken, Melissa Etheridge, Quincy Jones, Chuck D. Of the 31 contributors listed on Starbucks' Web site, only one, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, offers a conservative viewpoint.

Considering Starbucks sells millions of cups of coffee each day - some specialty drinks at $4 and up - it's no surprise some customers have complained to Starbucks' Web site, labeling the campaign "offensive" and the company a proponent of "the destruction of family values and virtues."

"I want to enjoy your product without having Earth Day Network propaganda thrust at me," wrote Malachi Salcido of East Wenatchee, Wash.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:38:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 25, 2005

Cadbury Trademarks The Color Purple, and they're not alone

How does a company trademark a color? Boing Boing reader Rob says,

Because it's Easter, I find myself in the possession of a Cadbury chocolate product. What do I find on the back?

"Cadbury, ellipse device, dairy milk, the glass and a half device and THE COLOUR PURPLE are Cadbury Limited trademarks used under licence in New Zealand by Cadbury Confectionery Ltd."

All our purple are belong to Cadbury Confectionery Ltd.!

Link

Update: Kevin Fox sez

In regards to Cadbury trademarking the color purple, four years ago I was working as a boom operator on an independent film and noticed that the boom manufacturer, Mr.LongArm, had trademarked the color yellow. I thought it was funny enough to document. blog post (tangential), and photo.

MartinS in Germany says,

Check my compatriots: been there, done that. German Telecom also thinks they own the letter "T". Link one, Link two.

Thomas J. Brown says:

In addition to Cadbury trademarking the colour purple and Mr. LongArm trademarking the colour yellow, my mum used to work for an ad agency that held an account with McDonalds. They have specific shades of red and yellow that are trademarked. I've also heard tell that Mattel owns green (G.I. Joe) and pink (Barbie).

Bill Bradford says, "Don't forget UPS Brown, which is Pantone color 0607298."

Esben says:

The artist Yves Klein patented his own special Ultramarine. It's a wonderful colour, with amazing clarity. His patenting it is still a matter of discussion in the art world: Link

Nick Douglas sez:

The trademarked colors only apply to uses of those colors in certain marketing. Trademarks, unlike other intellectual property, are violated by using them in a devious way to confuse consumers within an industry. I can use UPS brown in all my hamburger billboards. I can't use it in my delivery-company billboards. I also can't use the UPS logo on my hamburger billboards to imply that UPS sells, for some reason, my hamburgers. Basically, using Cadbury purple to sell deck chairs won't imply that Cadbury is associated with them. The judge would find that I'm not using Cadbury's trademarked color in a way that dilutes Cadbury's brand, confuses their customers, or implies false connections.

Brian says:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled about 10 years ago that colors may be trademarks here. Green-gold drycleaning press pads were the issue in that case: Qualitex v. Jacobson Products.

An attorney who asks to remain anonymous says:

Tiffany Blue is probably the most famous trademarked color - but just b/c Tiffany trademarked it - they only own that blue in situations where it could be confused with their products. You could paint your house that color, for example, without having a problem.

Also, a ton of companies have probably trademarked the color yellow - but they only get it for that product. Stanley could trademark yellow screwdrivers, caterpillar could trademark yellow bulldozers, and 'Mr. Longarm' has apparently trademarked yellow booms. Given the wide range of products Tiffany sells, and the uniqueness of their shade of blue, Tiffany probably owns that blue for just about any kind of box that jewelry or other gift could come in. All they have to say is, your honor, if your spouse gave you a box that color blue, would you assume it came from Tiffany & Co.?

Patent Attorney Stephen M. Nipper says:

There are actually quite a few "nontraditional trademarks" (background, and more background). Some examples I can think of: pink insulation (Owens-Corning), NBC's "ding ding ding" sound (Reg. No. 523,616), and plumeria-scented sewing thread (Reg. No. 1,639,128).

And John L. Welch says,

Here's a post from my blog regarding trademark rights and "trademarking:" Link. By the way, "trademark" is not a verb. One can "patent" an invention, and thereby acquire certain exclusive rights in the invention. But one can't "trademark" anything. Trademark rights in the USA are acquired by use. One may choose to register the mark with the USPTO, and it's a good idea to do so, but that is optional. There's no such thing as "trademarking." One can register a mark, but the trademark rights have already been created through use. [Copyrights work the same way. As soon as one creates a work, he or she owns the copyright in the work. Registration is optional, but again a good idea, and indeed necessary if the copyright is to be enforced against infringers].

Companies often claim trademark rights in words, colors , shapes, etc., but that does not means those claims would hold up if tested. One often sees the "TM" or "SM" symbol used next to an alleged mark, but those symbols mean nothing more than that the user claims to own a trademark. The symbol does't even mean that an application to register has been filed. Anyone can put TM or SM on anything they want.

Use of the R-in-a-circle symbol, however, means that the mark has been federally registered (and thus has passed the muster of the USPTO examination process).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:31:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ex-coder's account of life as a bike courier

Duff is an ex-coder in Toronto who took Neal Stephenson and William Gibson to heart, and gave up programming to become a bike-courier, shedding pounds, getting hit by cars, and working the best job in his life. This K5 story covers the joys of couriering in depth. i used to ride a bike winter and summer in Toronto, and it was amazing. These days in London I'm still looking the wrong way when I step off the kerb about half the time, so I'm not getting near a bicycle until I can get my subconscious retrained.

As a courier, you will get hit by cars. It is an occupational hazard. Most of the skill involved in being a bike courier relates to making sure you never occupy the same space as a car at the same time. Even so, no matter how hard you pedal, you can't outrun the law of averages...

Personally, I have been hit twice while working. The first time was by a cabbie who changed lanes into me. I was knocked from my bike. My front wheel and shocks were damaged, but i wasn't. The second time was a door prize. As i rode north up Yonge, someone opened the door of their parked car directly into my path. This one was very scary, as the fall sent me rolling across three lanes of busy traffic, but both my bike and my person came out of it unharmed.

One thing I was surprised to discover is that pedestrians are almost as dangerous to the full-time cyclist as drivers are. Especially if you indulge in sidewalk riding, but frequently even if you stick to the road, people will dart in front of you or suddenly stop or change direction without even the most cursory glance or indication of intent. A car, at least, can't change its direction of travel by a full 180 degrees in half a second. Personally, I have never hit a pedestrian, but on at least two occasions I have bailed in the process of sudden evasive manoevers which they required of me.

Link (via AccordionGuy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:00:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tigger boning Tickle Me Elmo: Smart toys acting dumb

Stick a Tickle Me Elmo and an electronic Tigger together and they will simulate a really dirty sex scene, as captured on this video. Smart toys from different vendors are really overdue for combinatorial unintended consequences. 1.9 MB WMV Link (Thanks, Ben!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:11:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

US sabotaging efforts to create humanitarian copyright and patent policies

Donna sez, "In the aftermath of India being forced to adopt patent law that quite literally kills people as a condition for joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), US representatives at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are moving to counter efforts by developing countries and numerous non-government organizations (NGOs) to bring public-interest considerations -- like protecting human health -- to its decision-making.

"Specifically, representatives have reportedly been circulating a draft paper that attempts to reframe the problem, arguing that WIPO is already addressing development issues and proposing merely a 'WIPO Partnership Program' -- an Internet-based database to bring together 'donors and recipients of IP development assistance.'" Link (Thanks, Donna!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:06:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Send Frist photos of your ailments for diagnosis

Senate Majority Leader and noted jackass Bill Frist is an MD, and he says that he can tell by looking at the Schiavo videos that she's not in a persistent vegetative state. His awesome diagnostic powers demand to be tested, and the interweb provides the perfect means to discover their scope:

Take a digital picture or video of your medical problem – tennis elbow, acne, runny nose, hemorrhoids, or whatever ails you - and send it to the doctor in charge of the US Senate and your health care.

Everyone, take two minutes and upload your photos to Flickr.com. "Tag" the photo "Frist." If we get critical mass, we'll send everyone's photos to Dean Rosen, the good doctor's Health Care policy director!

Link (Thanks, Micah!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:04:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gigantic WWII Japanese plague-rat sub discovered near Hawaii

Hawaiian divers have discovered a gigantic, intact Japanese WWII sub, that was orginally intended to carry plague rats to America.

The submarine is from the I-400 Sensuikan Toku class of subs, the largest built before the nuclear-ballistic-missile submarines of the 1960s.

They were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high and could carry a crew of 144. The submarines were designed to carry three "fold-up" bombers that could quickly be assembled...

An I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Their mission, which was never completed, reportedly was to use the aircraft to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities.

Link (Thanks, Gary!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:01:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fox is advertising on Grokster, also suing to put Grokster out of business

Grokster goes to the Supreme Court next week, where the MPAA studios are suing the P2P company over producing a tool that can be used to infringe copyright, and nevermind that it has lots of non-infringing uses too. Ironically, Fox, a leading MPAA member, is actually advertising its movies on Grokster:

TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP., currently suing Grokster and Morpheus for alleged copyright violations enabled by their peer-to-peer technology, apparently advertises through software bundled with Grokster, according to adware researcher Eric Howes. Howes reported Thursday afternoon that he was served a full-screen trailer for the DVD of the 20th Century Fox movie "Fat Albert," after downloading all of the software bundled with Grokster--eight separate adware programs.

Link (Thanks, Molly!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orphan works: what's wrong and how to fix it

Jamie Boyle and Duke U's Center for the Study of the Public Domain have produced two excellent reports for the Copyright Office on the plight of "orphan works" whose rightsholder cannot be located. The reports talk about the real-world problems and suggest practical solutions to them.

"Orphan Works" probably comprise the majority of the record of 20th century culture. These works are still presumably under copyright (only works published before 1923 are conclusively in the public domain), but the copyright owner cannot be found. The default response of archivists, libraries, film restorers, artists, scholars, educators, publishers, and others is to drop copyrighted work unless it is clearly in the public domain. As a result, orphan works are not used in new creative efforts or made available to the public due to uncertainty over their copyright status, even when there is no longer anyone claiming copyright ownership, or the owner no longer has any objection to such use.

Link (Thanks, Jamie!)

Update: Gavin points us to FreeCulture.org's orphan works comment."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:17:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rep. John Conyers: Bloggers have rights too

BB pal Brad King points us to this op-ed on freedom of speech and blogs by Congressman John Conyers, and says,

I thought this was interesting, particularly since the courts seem to have forgotten about that whole First Amendment, freedom of the press thing. After all, our boy Thomas "these are the times that try men's souls" Paine wasn't a journalist. He was an old fashioned blogger -- leaflets and pamphlet style.

Link. Conyers (D-Mich) is the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:55:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

State workers protest horrific government crackdown on their Solitaire playing

Snipped from Declan McCullagh's politech list:

"...Goofing off on the cubicle computer may be today's version of the coffee break. But now some state lawmakers want the fun and games to stop - at least on company time. Saying taxpayers would be "outraged" to know how much work time is frittered away by insurance-commission secretaries and DMV employees honing their solitaire and Mine Sweeper skills on the state's 50,000 computers, Catawba County Republican Sen. Austin Allran has sponsored what may be the country's first anti- solitaire legislation..."

Link to news story in the Christian Science Monitor

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:49:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Profile of two bounty hunters

The Houston Press profiles bounty hunters Jason McKee and Sammie Valero:

Valero looks over the docs and then asks to see the fugitive. "I'm not going to arrest her," he promises. "I just need her to verify all of this."

The boyfriend coaxes the woman into the living room, where she stands with water welling up in her big green eyes.

"Hello," says Valero. "You're under arrest."

"You lying motherfuckers," yells the boyfriend. "Get the hell out of my house. You lied to me."

"I don't have to tell you the truth," says Valero. "I'm not a police officer."

Link (via Disinformation)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:05:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pediatric center's bad logo

Badly-executed logo for a pediatric center in Virginia. (via Fark)

UPDATE: Brandon Abell points to this photo of the center's facade. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:27:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hits of backwards masking

An article this week in the Salt Lake Tribune about backwards masking in rock music linked to Jeff Milner's classic "Stairway to Heaven: Backwards" site. Jeff has added a few more recent tunes to the satanic jukebox of sin, including Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time":

Play forward: "With you I lose my mind give me a si..."
Reverse play: "Sleep with me, I'm not too young."

and the devious "Pokemon Rap":

Play forward: "Gotta catch 'em all, gotta catch 'em all (yo), Gotta catch 'em all, gotta catch 'em all (yeah)"
Reverse play: "I love satan, I love satan. I love satan, I love satan."

My all-time favorite though is Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust." As kids, MTV.com writer Gil Kaufman and I played the song backwards for my dad to prove that the rumors were true about a hidden suggestion to "smoke marijuana." My dad shrugged and said he thought is sounded more like "go to California." Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:12:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pistol hairdryer

It's a hairdryer shaped like a pistol, with the switch wired to the trigger. Advantages: bad-assness. Disadvantages: likely to get your suitcase seized by the TSA. Link (via Shiny Shiny)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:13:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Matrix online game hires real actors to play in-game characters

The Matrix Online (a massively multiplayer online game based on the Matrix franchise) has hired a troupe of 20 actors to hang around in game and in character, advancing the story and generally making it all seem more disbelief-suspendingly real.

Since the close of the beta, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced that it has employed a troupe of 20-odd people whose job it will be to enact narrative scenarios in The Matrix Online live. These people will assume the roles of popular characters, interact with players, and generally move the stories in ways that only live "actors" can. And though it appears that the story hasn't officially commenced, a few players on the Method server were treated to a pretty slick sample of it this afternoon: an extended pep-talk by none other than Morpheus himself. (See the screenshots for proof.) But this is an Out of the Box report, so here are our first impressions of the game so far.

Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:22:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Persistent Vegetative States can and should be use to advance many causes

This Craigslist poster has the right idea: donate your persistent vegetative state in advance to be cynically manipulated for the cause of your choice.

If I am rendered comatose and determined to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for a period longer than one month and if no imminent cure is forthcoming, I do not wish to be kept alive by artificial means including but not limited to nourishment, hydration, etc.

However....

If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook. Here is a list of top-tier causes I support and will continue to support, both while in my PVS and after my eventual death.

* Debt Relief to Impoverished Nations: I will agree to stay in a PVS for an indeterminate amount of time if the United States aggressively pursues a policy of debt relief and debt forgiveness to developing and impoverished nations.

* Nuclear Disarmament and De-escalation: I will agree to stay in a PVS for a open-ended period of time if the United States aggressively pursues a policy of nuclear disarmament and de-escalation. By this I mean desisting from developing new bellicose nuclear technologies and providing significant non-military incentives for nations to avoid nuclear armament.

Link (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:20:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pac Man grenade

There's lots to like at LA's I Am 8 Bit show, but the Pac Man Grenade is really tops. Link (via JWZ)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:16:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 24, 2005

Prankster puts joke names on plants sold at market

Funny person added bizarre signs to plants sold at a Thrifty Drug store: "Thompson's Felchings," "Variegated Obsequium," "Heinous Welsh Squash," and "Killer Green Bud."
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:07:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Terri Schiavo status Firefox extension, Daily Show clip

Boing Boing reader Nik says,

I wrote a Firefox extension that sits in the status bar of Firefox, and tells you at a glance the morbidity status of Terry Schiavo.

Link.

Also, the Daily Show ran a superb segment tonight poking fun at the extreme media weirdness around the Schiavo case: Link to video in WMV or torrent. (thanks, Gerry)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:48:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fund established to help Iraqi orphans

In January, I wrote about the tragic shooting of an Iraqi family by US soldiers that orphaned nine children. Today, a Boing Boing reader named J. Tony Smith emailed me with some good news. The photographer of the heart-stirring images reports that a fund has been established to benefit the children. The following is from an email that the photographer sent to Tony and other people who were moved by the photos.

I'm Chris Hondros, a photographer for Getty Images, and if you're getting this email you wrote me in the aftermath of the terrible incident I photographed in Tal Afar, Iraq, in January.  If you recall, five children were orphaned by U.S. troops who mistakenly shot up their car when they approached a foot patrol.  The pictures of the incident have run all over the world and already done much to address the issue of checkpoint shootings in Iraq. 

Many of you expressed a desire to help the family; I'm happy to report that a website for donations has now been set up, www.hassanfamilyfund.org.   Money donated to the cause will first go to arranging medical care for Racan, a boy in the car who's spinal column was damaged by one of the bullets and will never walk again unless treatment outside of Iraq is arranged for him.  (Humanitarian workers and others in Iraq are working toward this now.)  Excess funds will go to the extended family (the Hassan's had nine children) and to civil projects in Tal Afar itself, most likely a school built to commemorate the deaths. Any help you can give will be appreciated.

More information about this story is available in a story in this week's Newsweek magazine, available online at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7245228/site/newsweek/

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:39:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free open WiFi on Tacoma-Washington train, courtesy WiFi hacker

A Seattle wireless hacker rides a commuter train from Tacoma every day with a battery-powered WiFi hotspot in his backpack that's linked up to the Internet with a 14.4 144k wireless modem. Catch his train and get free WiFi on your commute.

The open wireless node can be found in the first car of the last morning train and in Car 403 on the 5:10pm return trip. Use SSID "FreeInternetAccess" or "seattlewireless" to connect - You may have to assign yourself an IP in the range 192.168.0.0/24 and use the Default Gateway 192.168.0.1 as the DHCP is sometimes flakey

Link (via Make)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:13:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Incinerator for iTrips made from model rockets

A blogger had her dead iTrip replaced by the manufacturer, who asked for photographic proof that she'd destroyed the old one. So she built an iTrip incinerator out of model-rocket engines and then lovingly photographed and described her build, up to and including the moment of iTrip immolation. Link (via Make)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:11:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PEZ MP3 player are go!

The PEZ dispenser/MP3 player is go! The guy who hacked an MP3 player into a PEZ dispenser now has a license to make an actual commercial product based on the design:

# The first version will be 512mb.
# Their will be six buttons along one of the skinny sides.
# Their will be an LCD screen.
# The head will be removeable and compatible with existing PEZ heads.
# The first production run will be small and made in the USA.
# The first production run will be early summer.
# Supports MP3, WMA, OGG, USB 2.0, mounts as flash drive.

Link (via Make Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:07:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Octopuses dressed up as sea coconuts sneaking on two legs

Nature reports on findings that octopusses like to put sea coconuts on their heads pretend to be sea coconuts or pose like hunks of coral and tiptoe around on two of their legs like Wile E Coyote pretending to be a shrub. The video footage of the sneak octopi is laugh-out-loud funny! Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:59:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tea in pill form

Love the taste, fussiness and brown teeth of tea-drinking, but don't have time to boil a kettle? No worries: tea in a pill!

Indian tea scientists have produced a tea-flavoured pill that can be chewed or quickly dissolved in hot or cold water.

The brownish tablet weighs 0.3 grams and consists of 80 percent tea and 20 percent other flavours -- a combination the inventors at the Tocklai tea research centre in Assam say peps you up just like a traditional cuppa.

"You can suck it, chew it or dissolve it in water the way you like to have it and still feel the taste of a real cup of tea," said the centre's director, Mridul Hazarika.

Link (via Fark)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:34:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T Rex guts excavated

The remains of a T. Rex with intact blood vessels and blood cells have been recovered:

The field team used standard procedure as they excavated the bones, wrapping them in plaster jackets before transporting them..

This particular dinosaur fossil was too big to lift and they reluctantly cracked a thighbone.

Usually paleontologists put preservatives on fossils right away, but Schweitzer has been trying to find soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, so this one was left alone.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:21:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Future of Music Coalition event in DC, April 12

Brian Zisk sez, "On Tuesday, April 12 join the Future of Music Coalition in Washington for DC Policy Day 2005. This will be like a mini one-day version of our Policy Summit but with a laser-beam focus on four issues that are emerging in the Courts, Congress and at the Copyright Office... Over the course of the day, experts representing a wide range of perspectives will focus, discuss and debate:

• Copyright in the Courts and Congress
• Digital Audio Broadcasting & the Future of Radio
• Low Power FM & Community Voices
• Health Insurance and Musicians"

(Thanks, Brian!) Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hellraiser casemod with glowing embedded Pinhead

This Hellraiser casemod (complete with red-glowing embedded Pinhead) is stupendously badass. Even the mouse has heads embedded in it. Link (Thanks, Arlen!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:12:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canada's DMCA proposal: not great, could be LOTS worse

The Canadian government has introduced its draft legislation for a "Canadian DMCA" -- a suite of laws to bring Canadian copyright into harmony with the bad treaties that broke the American copyright system in 1998 with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In many respects, this is vastly superior to the US version -- after seven years of horror stories, it would be criminally stupid for any government to consider a law as bad as the DMCA -- but there are still some substantial problems.

Michael Geist, the Canadian academic copyright lawyer and columnist, has a great first look at the new proposal:

The package will include an anti-circumvention provision applied to copyright material. There is no mention of extending the provision to devices (as is the case in the U.S.) and the specific reference to applying the provision to copyright material suggests that the provision will limit its applicability to circumvention to commit copyright infringement. The rights management information is similarly limited to instances to “further or conceal copyright infringement.” While no anti-circumvention provision would be better, this suggests that the Canadian provision will feature some real balance.

Moreover, the FAQ makes clear that “the circumvention of a TPM applied to copyright material will only be illegal if it is carried out with the objective of infringing copyright. Legitimate access, as authorized by the Copyright Act, will not be altered.” This is very different from anti-circumvention provisions found in the U.S. However, the FAQ also notes that circumvention for the purposes of private copying will not be permitted, meaning people may find themselves paying for a CD and paying a levy on blank CD yet unable to make the copy of the underlying CD.

Link

Update: Ian sez: The government has posted the full text of all 700 comments from the public review process.

Included are Cory Doctorow's submitted comments and Tod Maffin of the CBC's Definitely Not the Opera has identified some broadcasting-related submissions:

• Canadian Association of Broadcasters
• SOCAN: Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publisher of Canada
• National Association of Broadcasers (American group)
• ACTRA: Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television, and Radio Artists
• The Association for Media and Technology in Education in Canada (AMTEC)
• Canadian Cable Television Association (CCTA)
• Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA)
• Copyright Coalition of Creators and Producers
• Periodical Writers Association of Canada (PWAC)
• Writers' Guild of Canada
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)/ Société Radio-canada(src)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:58:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Record sales up, P2P sales up -- RIAA's story doesn't add up

According to the RIAA, CD sales are increasing. Now, the RIAA also says that P2P destroys music sales, so it follows that if they're selling more CDs there must be less P2P, right? Uh, no -- file-sharing is up, too (so CD sales should be falling right?).

So is it possible that CD sales and P2P are decoupled (as all the quantitative, independent research indicates), and that the downturn in CD sales is better laid at the feed of bad business, a bad economy, fewer albums and more things competing for entertainment dollars (cough games cough Internet cough).

The number of CDs and other music products shipped from record labels to retail merchants rose 2 percent last year, to 814 million units, the first annual increase in five years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:50:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Early Apple sound designer Jim Reekes corrects Sosumi myth

Earlier this week on BB, I pointed to Jon Lech Johansen's blog "So Sue Me." Several astute readers reminded us that the blog's title is thought to be a punny reference to "Sosumi," an Apple system sound file with a colorful history. Over time, it became a widely mis-reported bit of computing lore.

Jim Reekes was the engineer on Apple Sound Manager for System 7, and he created the Sosumi sound -- so I asked him to set the record straight. Here's the Wikipedia entry (which is now being updated), and here's Jim's reply to Boing Boing readers!

I avoided telling this story while I was at Apple, but now I love to talk about it. Back in 1989 when Apple Corps (aka the Beatles) sued Apple Computer, System 7 was still under development. One of the new features of System 7 was the new Sound Manager (which I wrote, and have patents for it!). I created a sound called "Chime" (although everyone tells me it was "Xylophone", but I had a large collection and was busy naming them all so maybe it was Xylophone). Anyways, Apples' legal department left a message for the person in charge of the System 7 disks, Sheila Brady. We had spent many late nights on System 7, and sometime after midnight in comes Sheila to tell us we have to change the name of the new sounds I had just added.

But before I get ahead of myself, I was also supplying the legal team with documentation, emails, and even header files of the Sound Manager. I was also very close to the MIDI Manager product development, which Apple Corps considered proof positive. (BTW: I have a postcard invetation to a music conference showing a keyboardist, Apple logo, and the words "Compose yourself", which was also proof positive). Anyways, I was getting really tired of this whole thing when the laywers told me I had to change an API from the "noteCmd" to "frequencyCmd" (and thereby breaking applications). I knew I had to find my revenge.

So, upon hearing I had to change the name of my new beep, I immediately thougth of the perfect name, "Let it Beep". Of course, I was joking but it was brilliant right? As everyone was laughing, someone even took me seriously and said I could never get away with that! I said, "so sue me" and that's when I realized my scheme. I told Sheila the new name would be spelled "s-o-s-u-m-i". I asked she return the message to legal, but not to use voicemail (since she'd have to pronounce it) and instead send an email with some story about it being Japanese and not meaning anything musical. (so I don't know what she actually told them).

I'm very happy the name remains a part of the Mac culture. There's a source of trademark lawsuits that contains a side bar about the Sosumi story. It seems most people have copied this as the source for the myth. At least it's the earlist source I can recall. Back then, see, there wasn't a WWW but I did "leak" the story through Usenet once: Link to PDF file.

PS: I am also responsible for the startup sound that has shipped since 1991, with a few exceptions like the guitar strum from Stanley Jordan heard on the first PowerMacs. Every time I hear a Mac starting, I smile.

PPS: Apple took us to the opening day of Jurassic Park. I jumped in my seat when Steven Spielberg used my sound when they rebooted the park's computers!

PPPS: I love BoingBoing.

Link to a very very long /. thread regarding DVD Jon and PyMusique, which includes a comment spat with Jim over the Sosumi myth. Jim adds, "Funny, it may actually be true. The sosumi beep may have originally came from Crystal Quest!" (Thanks, Apple alum Wayne Correia!)

Update: Boing Boing reader Anna adds,

Just a side note to the "Sosumi"-story: Jim Reekes will recognize a lot of his work in this minimalist song composed solely from Mac System 7 sounds: Link (61 kB .wav-file).

Alex Rosen says,

"The Windows version is WAY better: Link."

Andreas Niemand says,

Here is a song with the start-up sound of all them beloved macs: Link.

Jim Reekes replies:

"After listening to the funky mac song, I remembered where I got the 'quack' sound. It was the file system engineer impersonating a duck."

John Worthington chimes (heh) in:

I wrote the MIDI Manager and an earlier version of the Mac sound manager. Jim Reekes' story of Sosumi is exactly the way I remember it. As an aside, one of the scariest points of my career at Apple was getting a big, bound book of testimony from the Apple Corp suit. It was a very official looking document. There, about half way through was a blown up screen capture of the MIDI Manager "About Box," complete with lots of musical notes and my name in giant letters. The lawyers at Apple were less than thrilled. I've made it a point to avoid Apple lawyers in dark alleys ever since. Can't be too careful.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:22:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kyrgyz government blog crackdown update

Boing Boing reader Paul says,

This is regarding the article you posted today on Kyrgyz .gov hijacking news websites. The article stated that there is a lack of foreign correspondents (true) and public access to the internet. As far as I know the Kyrgyz government has been progressive with public internet access and when I was there a year and half ago they had modern computers running XP with available peripheral devices such as scanners in the post office of nearly every town (including small towns of a few thousand people).

For recent pictures "on the ground" pictures from the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society see here, blog photos here, Muslim Uzbekistan (AP/Reuters) photos here.

The best Kyrgyz blog would probably be: registan.net , also http://blog.kz/.

For Peace Corps blogs: kyrgyzstankid.blogspot.com/ , kyrgyzsean.blogspot.com/, courtneycalvin.blogspot.com/,kumys.com, charlesinkyrgyzstan.blogspot.com/

And a plug for a good friend who keeps me up-to-date from slightly less volatile Azerbaijan (Caustic Commentary From The Caucasus) - carpetblog.blogspot.com/

Previously on Boing Boing -- Report: Kyrgyzstan government hijacking news websites

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:52:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oddly flavored condoms in Shanghai

BB Reader Dan Washburn in Shanghai says:

While Bliss paid our bills recently during a trip to a typically unfriendly neighborhood KEDI market — many bills get paid at 24-hour shops here in Shanghai — I perused the condom display rack, always good for a laugh. Always, indeed. Flavored condoms. Ice Cream. Green Tea. And, my personal favorite, Ordinary.

I find the concept of flavored condoms humorous to begin with, but I’ve also never had to taste a condom. So I guess they serve their purpose. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, right? (Or, in this case, it actually prevents it from going down.) Ice cream? OK, I guess I can undertand this one. But there are many flavors of ice cream out there. Let’s hope it’s not Mississippi Mud Pie or Moose Tracks or Brownie Batter or anything that ends in “nut crunch.” Something like Karamel Sutra seems appropriate. But, hell, it’s probably Green Tea Ice Cream.

Link.

Update: Reader Alex Krupp adds,

"If you look closely at the picture, you will notice that it features Matcha in a bamboo scoop which is indicative of Japanese tea ceremony. So although these condoms were sold in Shanghai, I suspect that they were actually produced in Japan."

And Christopher Filkins says,

Not to put too fine of a point on it but the condoms were likely produced in Malaysia or Thailand for a Japanese condom manufacturer for re-sale in the Chinese market, most likely in fact specifically for the Hong Kong market.

Alan says,

The condoms are produced by Atsina Holdings Limited out of Hong Kong. This link has the list of flavors on page 18. Thankfully they do not have "squash" flavor.

Amara adds,

If garlic is your thing, you can find garlic-flavored condoms at the Stinking Rose Restaurant online store. (click on the "Miscellaneous" link).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:32:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

U.F.O. Hawaii radio show

In recent months, Künstler Treu has been hosting a one-hour remix show for a south german radio station. As he puts it, "it's unusal music from all over the world mixed in various layers using cubase." I love it. Link to 50MB MP3 file

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:04:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO make a gravity-defying room

Two UC Berkeley students explain how they transformed their co-op room into a mind-bending, gravity-defying suite of surreality:

The way this all got started was that my friend and i were sitting around at dinner chatting about what to do for the upcoming room-to-room party. We went through a whole bunch of ideas for room themes. And then — you know how, sometimes when you're bored, you look up and imagine what it would be like if gravity turned upside down and you got to walk around on the ceiling? (Does everyone have this daydream?) Anyway, we both mentioned it at the same time, and then it dawned on us that we could make it happen. Or a variant, anyway. I think sideways actually works better than upside-down, because then you can integrate real people into the scene in strange ways.

Link (via Fark)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:02:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Podcast Network: Tech Conference Channel

Ewan Spence says: "Put simply, Crow and I spent a lot of Etech running round with a MiniDisc recorder (who needs these 96kbps Ipod hacks when you can record in Uncompressed PCM Wav) talking to as many people as ossible (and recording a few of the seminars as well). The result is the first of four podcasts from ETech, now up at 'The Podcast Network (insert marketing spiel of we have lots of channels and hosts and casts, 10 shows and rising, along with serialised a radio play).

"The first show has material from Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow, Music Brainz, The Attention Screen Guy, Phil Torrone, Mike Rowehl, Rael Dornfest, and the behemoth of James Larsson wondering "is it a coincidence that fire is binary?'" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:51:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Palm Pilot inventor starts company to neocortex-style computer memory

Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot, has started a new company to model computer memory after the functions of the human brain. Here's 20-minute NPR interview with Hawkins in MP3 format. And here's an excerpt from a book he co-wrote with Sandra Blakeslee, called On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:49:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Touching new interfaces for mobile phones

My latest article for TheFeature is an interview with Nokia's "oracle" of concept development, Matt Jones, about tangible interfaces and embodied interactions.

TheFeature: Can you give a concrete example (of a tangible interface)?

Jones: We're looking at how touch can be used to execute a number of tasks or interactions so you don't have to switch contexts from the real world to the world inside the screen. For instance, one person could touch his device to someone else's and give them a "digital gift," to borrow a phrase from our old boss Marko Ahtisaari. That digital gift might be something as simple as a URL or a photo that I've taken of a moment we just shared.

TheFeature: Awww. That's sweet.

Jones: Well, I don't want to get too Hallmark about it. All joking aside though, the touch technology provides measurable quantitative differences in the efficiency by which people can complete that kind of task. In terms of the measurements that people wearing white coats take inside usability labs, touch technology could reduce the number of interactions required by an order of magnitude. To set up a swap over Bluetooth might take twenty or thirty clicks. This completes the interaction with one touch. Although, for security purposes, we also have a confirm button. There's something very human about giving someone a gift while looking them in the eye and touching the devices together instead of both people squirreling away in the interfaces trying to do the data exchange.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:42:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Running vampire bat

Cornell University scientists captured a Muybridge-esque video of a running vampire bat. Apparently, the vampire bat is the only bat known to run. From Science News:

(Researcher Daniel Riskin) placed each bat inside a cage about the size of an elongated shoe box with a customized treadmill as the floor. At first, the bats strolled along. When Riskin sped up the treadmill to more than 0.5 meter per second, he was startled to find that bats started bounding, pushing off with their powerful forearms. The maximum speed clocked was 1.2 m/s.

"It's not often in science that you have the eureka moment like we did," says Riskin. "I'll always remember just looking over at my coauthor John Hermanson and he looked back at me, and we just started laughing."

Link to article, Link to .mov of running bat (Thanks, Squidocto!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:36:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Quake is ten!

This year's QuakeCon marks the tenth anniversary of Quake -- a whole decade of fragging.

The gathering was first held in the summer of 1996 by a few IRC pals who wanted to meet face-to-face. According to the organizers, "less than 100 attendees gathered at the Best Western in Garland, Texas, that first year to play and talk games and compete." Last year's event drew a record 6,000 attendees; this year's is expected to bring even more.

Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:11:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Lucky German lotto winner is good news for pigeons

The largest lotto prize winner in German history is gonna splurge on a really amazing house for his pigeon friends.

The man said that the first thing he would do is buy a remote house in the countryside where he can build his giant pigeon loft and breed pigeons without disturbing the neighbours.

Link (via Fark)

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

Lessig in Edinburg on April 2

Larry Lessig is coming to Edinburgh's Science Festival on April 2:

Leading lawyers, journalists, and technologists, including Professor Lawrence Lessig, champion of the Creative Commons initiative, will debate the future of ideas and how best to promote creative work in a digital world, at a panel discussion as part of this year's Edinburgh International Science Festival.

The talk "Cyberlaw: who controls access to ideas on the net?" chaired by Lilian Edwards of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law ("the AHRC Centre") , will be held on the 2nd April 2005. The lecture is open to the public and tickets for the event can be purchased from http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/

The panel will discuss whether the unprecedented opportunities the Internet offers for the sharing of creative works, globally and at next to no cost, are being impeded by outmoded laws and business models.

Link (Thanks, Lilian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative Commons search engine from Yahoo

Yahoo has launched a Creative Commons search engine that lets you do things like search for freely reusable photos of the Empire State Building, or stories licensed for noncommerical reuse, etc. I confess that I use Google for most of my search needs, but this is both brilliant and obvious -- how is it that stodgy old Yahoo beat the tar out of Google on this one? Link (Thanks, Lucas!)

Update: DeWitt sez, "I added a Creative Commons search as one of the very first columns on A9 during our launch of OpenSearch last week at ETech."

Update 2: Doug sez, "And I wrote the CC-hosted search-engine that A9 scrapes last fall..."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:03:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How Japanese-equivalent QWERTY was invented

Great history of the early days of Japanese typewriters:

The time was ripe for a Japanese typewriter, but the daunting structure of the written language, with its multiple scripts and thousands of characters, stymied early attempts to develop one. Into the breach stepped inventor Sugimoto Kyota (1882-1972), often hailed as the Edison of Japan. Sugimoto began by studying the relative frequency of individual kanji, eventually arriving at a minimum set of some 2,400 characters (unabridged Japanese character dictionaries list as many as 50,000).

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:01:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Infringing teenager's awesome They Might Be Giants video

Shawn sez, "Dave Logan is a high school senior who just finished his latest animation, which is a music video for They Might Be Giants' excellent song 'Bloodmobile.' This is a really excellent video, and I hope we can all appreciate a good science song. I think this is pretty in-fringe-ified, but I imagine it's just a matter of time before it's available on the Giants' site. What's the status of student work and fair use anyway?" Link (Thanks, Shawn!)

Update: Sharon sez, "Bloodmobile Video Theater plays an original cartoon with music, created by They Might Be Giants especially for this exhibit, displaying how blood transports chemical messages, nutrients, and oxygen through the body." It's part of the very cool Giant Heart exhibit. The video showed at the exhibit reminds me of the Schoolhouse Rock animation. Never seen it out on the web though."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:57:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Sims-style anti-teen-pregnancy ad from Belgium

This is a very clever anti-teen-pregancy ad produced by the Belgian health authority (inexplicably, it is in English). The advert uses animation in the style of The Sims to depict a teen mom being run off her feet and gradually losing her shit completely -- funny and sobering at once. 4.2 MB Quicktime Link Better Link, courtesy of David. (via Waxy)

Update: Bill sez, "Belgium is kind of a mishmash country - you've got folks who speak French in the south, folks who speak Flemish in the middle, and folks who speak Dutch in the north. None of whom want to give up their culture, and most of whom carry centuries worth of animosity towards their countrymen. As a result, English is the official language of the country."

Update 2: RC sez, "The official languages in Belgium are Dutch, French and German. Flemish and Dutch are the same language, but often locals can hear if someone was raised in the Netherlands or in Belgium." Yeah, it sounded odd to me too -- whenever I'm in Brussels, I end up speaking French.

Update 3: Angus sez, "Dutch and Flemish are indeed the same language (give or take some idioms and vocabulary items), but even non-native speakers can quickly learn to distinguish between Dutch speakers and Flemish speakers."

Update 4: Daan sez, "I sort of object to my country being called a 'mishmash. Yes, Belgium has Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north, French-speaking Walloons in the south, and a small number of German-speaking people near the border with Germany. (Brussels is officially bilingual Dutch/French.) I also object to this: '[...], and most of whom carry centuries worth of animosity towards their countrymen.' This is patently untrue. I think this paints a wrong image of Belgium.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:54:03 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Transparent screen illusion: set laptop's wallpaper to a photo of the wall behind it

Transparent Screens is a Flickr photoset of laptops whose deptop wallpaper has been set to a digital photo of the walls and windows behind them, so that they appear to have totally transparent displays. The effect is striking. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:50:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Instant Phonecam Karma Police

BB pal Jeff 'Koganuts' Koga sez:

A friend of mine recently had a road rage incident with an aggressive cell phone-toting, bird-flipping SUV driver on the 110 Freeway in Downtown Los Angeles. But in this particular case, not only did my friend document it with a digital camera, but said driver was pulled over by the CHP! Who says there isn't a little thing called karma in the universe?

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:30:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Woman finds finger in Wendy's chili

No, it's not an urban legend. Yesterday, a woman at a Wendy's in Santa Clara San Jose, California put a spoonful of chili in her mouth, paused, and spit out a human fingertip. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Martin Fenstersheib said today the woman was horrified "due to the unpleasant sensation of having this (object) in her mouth...."

The restaurant at 1405 Monterey Highway was temporarily closed Tuesday night to allow health officials to impound the remaining chili, which was prepared on site, using a variety of ingredients. Health officials also seized all of the restaurant's remaining stock of ingredients, which will be inspected, and traced back to their manufacturer.

Since all of the workers at the restaurant were in possession "of all 10 of their fingers," health inspectors assume the finger likely entered the food chain as a result of the manufacturing process, according to county Environmental Resources Director Ben Gale.

Link (Thanks, Dr. Maz!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:53:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RFID self implant for car access

Did this guy really cut his hand open to put an RFID chip in it so he could automatically open his car's locks? Here are his Flickr photos. You be the judge. Link (Thanks, Allen!)

UPDATE: Roo says: It seems a doctor did it for him. See the penultimate question here.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:30:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Diving pig electrocuted

Big Red the diving pig was electrocuted when it dived into a pool of water that had a live wire connected to it by mistake.

The 4-month-old pig dove off a 4-foot-high diving board into a water tank, Randall said. Big Red sank to the tank's bottom after touching the ramp, he said.

Randall said the water was so charged with electricity that he couldn't get into the tank until all the power was off, which took a few minutes.

"I jumped in the water and gave the pig mouth-to-mouth," he said.

Velma Randall grabbed Sweet Georgia Brown, which had dived into the water at the same time as Big Red, and hauled it out by the ear before it touched the ramp, Virgil Randall said. He said his wife received a shock as she got the pig out.

Link (Registration username: boing, password: boingboing, email statesman.3.ottomatik@spamgourmet.com) (Thanks, Carlo!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:04:06 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rare NoKo literary gems written by Kim Jong Il

If I weren't trying so hard to reduce my POC (piles of crap) quotient, I'd yank out the PayPal right now and buy some of the amazing North Korean books and handpainted movie and propaganda posters offered on this website. Shown here, "On The Art of The Cinema" and "The Great Teacher of Journalists," two tomes penned by film buff (not a joke) and dictator Kim Jong Il. Link (Thanks, Clifford Son).

Previously: North Korean comics and propaganda on the web, North Korea promotes vacations with wacky Flash movie, NoKo sex animation, Technology pokes holes in NoKo isolation, NoKo wages war on long hair

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

To do in LA: arts journalism panel Thursday night

If you're in LA Thursday night, join me at this event! Art.Blogging.LA's Caryn Coleman and a group of art critics will discuss why the Southern California art world is blowing up all crazy-like -- while writing about the arts here ain't. When they finish talking, there's free beer, live gesso wrestling, and a wet smock contest. Oh, alright. Even without that part, the event promises to be more lively than most journo confabs. Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:29:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Report: Kyrgyzstan government hijacking news websites

Boing Boing reader and journalist Hans Henrik in Denmark says,

I published a disturbing story on my blog today about the ongoing online war between the government and the opposition in Kyrgyzstan.

Apparently the new government in Kyrgyzstan are hijacking opposition newspapers sites and are now pointing their URLs to government friendly news sites.

It is still a mystery what is going on in Kyrgyzstan. The newspapers in the country are nearly all government controlled or friendly towards the government in such a way that they can not be trusted when covering the ongoing dispute between the opposition and the newly elected government.

The situation gets more blurred by the lack of foreign correspondents and public access to the Internet in Kyrgyzstan. This means no bloggers or eyewitness.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:05:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

FEC to bloggers: chill, you're still exempt from most campaign finance laws

Political bloggers in the United States will continue to be exempt from most campaign finance laws, according to highly anticipated rules released by federal regulators today. Link to Declan McCullagh's politech post, and link to his CNET news article.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:59:56 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple Motion Sensor as Human Interface Device

Boing Boing buddy Eli the Bearded sez:

Some Apple Powerbooks have a motion sensor inside that allows the computer to detect how it is being moved. This is useful for, eg, emergency harddrive head parking when a sudden fall is detected. Amit Singh, while preparing for a book on OS X internals, has written several programs that use the motion sensor for other purposes. This page mentions those and then goes into great detail about a device driver to use the motion of the computer as a substitute mouse.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:50:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wanted: Communism, Hypnotism And The Beatles

Last year, Mark posted this amazing cover art from a religious tract published in 1965. (Click the image for a better view.) If you have a copy of this pamphlet that you'd be willing to part with, please let me know. It's for a good cause. I promise. ; ) Please drop an email to david(at)pesco.net. Thanks!

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:28:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First sight of alien planets

Astronomers used the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope to see planets outside our solar system for the first time ever. Previously, scientists have inferred the existence of more than 100 planets by detecting a gravity-induced wobble or shift in light in the stars that they orbit. Yesterday, the astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Goddard Space Flight Center announced that they directly observed the infrared radiation emitted by two planets 153 and 500 light-years away. (Seen here is a NASA artist's concept.) From the New York Times:

They said directly measuring light from the planets was a major step in the quest to understand what alien planets are made of, because different molecules in the atmosphere absorb infrared light in characteristic ways and allow scientists to compare these alien planets to those in the solar system. Ultimately, astronomers would like to know if Earth, with its ability to evolve and support life, is unique or common in the universe....

Dr. Geoffrey W. Marcy, a planet hunter at the University of California, Berkeley, called the results "the stuff of history books" and added, "With this result, we are closer to understanding our own human roots, chemically, among the stars."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:34:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Katamari Damacy glass beads fundraiser

A LiveJournaller's crafty mom is making these $3 Katamari Damacy (amazing, surreal Japanese video-game that will haunt your dreams with tetrisvision-like hallucinations of rolling everything around you into a giant ball) glass beads "so that we can afford to go to Anime Central!" Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:14:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chat with Sin City director Robert Rodriguez

Newsweek's Brian Braiker sez:

This Friday we're hosting a chat with "Sin City" director Robert Rodriguez ("Spy Kids," "From Dusk Till Dawn"). BoingBoing readers interested in participating can submit questions at any time and the director himself will answer them on Friday.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:19:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

North Korean comics and propaganda on the web

In this post, blogger Raul has collected a splendid cluster of links to Chinese Propaganda and North Korean comics. My eyeballs are loving of it.
Link (Thanks, Becky Yun)

Previously: North Korea promotes vacations with wacky Flash movie, NoKo sex animation, Technology pokes holes in NoKo isolation, NoKo wages war on long hair

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:17:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scandal-plagued Fujimori says, "Let them drink Fuji-Cola!"

Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who was booted from office after a corruption scandal, will finance future campaign hopes with sales from an eponymously-named soda.

He has given his backing to Fuji-Cola, a new drink he claims will "quench the thirst of popular discontent". The former president's supporters want the drink to boost his profile and fund his campaign for re-election in 2006. Mr Fujimori fled to Japan in 2000 as his decade-long presidency collapsed in allegations of corruption and torture. (...) According to local media, Mr Fujimori's son Kenji has applied for Fuji-Cola to be registered as a trademark for the manufacture of beers, mineral waters and fizzy drinks.

Pero el ex-presidente no confirmó si la bebida es destilada de la sangre de los torturados y desaparecidos Peruanos...

Link to BBC story, y aquí hay otro reportaje en español: Link (Thanks, Luminifer)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:09:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RoboGames in San Francisco this week, 25-27 March

David Calkins of The Robotics Society says:

Robots return to San Francisco to take over the world! 450 robots have registered to compete in the 2nd annual RoboGames. Combat bots, autonomous AI bots, and those cool walking androids from Japan wil all be there. March 25-27th at SFSU. Tickets are cheap! Press release is here. Oh, and the USOC is suing us again becuase they claim exclusive right over the term "Olympics." It's just not a good day without a C&D from The Man.

Link.

Previously on Boing Boing: Robolympics photos!, More Robolympics photos, Still! More! Robolympics! Photos!, Son of Bride of Robolympics Photos!.

Xeni's Wired News report, 2003: Let's See, Roborace? Roborally?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:53:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rock'em Sock'em Robots

The Marvin Glass toy cartoons never end at Bedazzled! This time, Spike has made available the commercial for Rock'em Sock'em Robots. A great commercial for a great toy.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:48:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japan to free Bobby Fischer, controversial chess champ

Boing Boing reader John Duffell says,

Bobby Fischer, former world chess champion and a wanted man in the U.S. who's been held by the Japanese government for the past 8 months, will soon be freed. Fischer has been granted Icelandic citizenship, prompting the Japanese to allow for his release to Iceland. He's wanted in the US for breaking international sanctions in 1992 when he played a chess match in Yugoslavia. Fischer also pissed off a lot of people on 9/11, when he went on Philippine radio to commend the 9/11 hijackers for the WTC attacks.

Snip: "The former champion has many supporters in Iceland, after playing a world championship match there in 1972 at the height of the Cold War, beating the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky. 'Mr Fischer is a true Icelander now,' Iceland's ambassador to Japan, Thordur Oskarsson, told Reuters news agency."

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:45:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PowerBook designer cooks up Apple products of the future

Fasten your drool cups: Business 2.0 presents five imaginary Apple products, as envisioned by Pentagram, the product design company that was founded by Bob Brunner, who designed the PowerBook.

UPDATE: Simon Gatrall says: "I used to work at Pentagram under Bob Brunner. Bob did not found Pentagram. Bob is a partner. Pentagram was started in London in 1972 by five partners, Bob didn't become a partner until 1996. There are now 19 partners. He did help found Lunar Design in 1984."
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:20:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Glucose-sensing contact lenses

Bioengineers at the University of Maryland are developing contact lenses that change color in response to changes in blood sugar. The approach would benefit diabetics who traditionally use skin prick tests to monitor their glucose levels. One of scientist Chris Geddes's prototypes requires the wearer to use a handheld device that flashes a blue light at the eye and measures the glow. From New Scientist:

Geddes' team is looking at several options for users. Rather than having the entire contact lens glow, tiny sensor spots could be placed around the contact lens. Those spots could monitor glucose, as well as sodium, cholesterol and potassium...

The group is also working on a contact lens that would change colour like a traffic light - from green to yellow to orange to red - enabling the wearer or an observer to determine a broader range of blood sugar level, from too low to too high.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:42:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How not to land a helicopter

This video may be old news, but I'd never seen it before. A military helicopter tries to land on a ship and, well, fails. Link to 2.6mb WMV file (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Along those same JG Ballardian lines, the House of Rapp has a gallery of links to other aircraft crash videos. Link

UPDATE: BB reader Nicholas Evancich found the sad story of the helicopter crash. From the Unofficial US Navy Site:

On Dec. 9, 1999, a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter, with 18 people on board, crashed while attempting to land on the Navy tanker PECOS (T-AO 197) during a training exercise. The chopper's landing gear apparently snagged a metal safety net and the helicopter flipped over into the water and quickly sank. Eleven Marines were rescued by special warfare crewmen on two nearby boats. But six Marines and a sailor drowned, their bodies recovered later from the sunken wreckage by an unmanned submersible vehicle. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:31:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bizarre Brady Bunch opener parody

This guy did a great job of filming himself as all eight characters of the Brady Bunch for the famous tic-tac-toe opener. The video is pretty surreal.
Link (Thanks, Santos!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:15:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hobbit bones in bad shape

Sadly, the bones of BB mascot Homo floresiensis were apparently terribly damaged by Indonesian scientist Teuku Jacob who "borrowed" the bones for quite some time and was extremely reluctant to return them. Jacob was not convinced that Homo floresiensis is a new species of "little people" at all, but rather a deformed pygmy. The scientists who discovered the bones claim that the remains were trashed when Jacob's team tried to make rubber molds of the delicate bones. From USA Today:

"The equivalent in the world of art would be somebody slashing the Mona Lisa and then trying to fix it with chewing gum," says paleontologist Tim White of the University of California-Berkeley, who was not on the discovery team.... (Pesco's profile of White here.)

"If some breakage took place on any bone, it must be during the transport in Yogyakarta or from Yogyakarta to Jakarta," Jacob says. "Both mandibles were intact until the last minute in our lab, as proven by photographs taken on the last days." He did not respond to a request for the photos...

Discovery team member (Richard) Roberts scoffs at the notion that travel caused all the damage: "Like the addition of a glued-on chin?"

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:07:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of Martian lunar solar eclipse

Here's something no human, save John Carter, has ever seen before: a Martian lunar solar (thanks, Paul!) eclipse. The tiny video shot by one of the Mars rovers captured Deimos zipping past the face of the sun.
Link (Thanks, Bram!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:04:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Reflex: brilliant, page-turning sequel to Jumper

Steven Gould's Jumper was one of the great sf novels of the 1990s -- one of those rare books that can be read either as a young adult novel or a book for adults; like Ender's Game or vintage Heinlein.

The story concerns Davy Rice, a young man from a flyover state who is about to receive a beating from his alcoholic father when he flinches away and discovers that he can teleport. The story is a really thorough working-over of all the ins and outs of what being a teleport would really mean, as Davy goes from picked-on kid to terrorist-fighter who's being chased by the NSA.

Gould is a master of many things, but first and foremost, he's the king of pacing. I've read Jumper half a dozen times, each time after the first only intending to find a beloved passage and getting sucked into reading the book from cover to cover.

Now there's a sequel to Jumper, called Reflex, and last night I ended up burning about two hours' worth of jealously hoarded sleep-time to finish this thing.

Like Jumper, Reflex is a snappy, cracking yarn that you will be hard-pressed to put down. Like Jumper, it is a thoroughgoing exploration of the implications of teleportation, and like Jumper, it is a relatively subtle and interesting investigation into the nature of terrorism, anti-terrorism, power and atrocity.

Reflex concerns itself mostly with the travails of Millie, Davy's girlfriend from Jumper, now his wife of ten years. She's as strong and likable a female character as Davy is a male hero, making this a perfect bookend to book one.

This kind of book doesn't come along all that often, and when it does, it's cause for celebration -- run, don't walk. Link

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

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

EFF appeals Apple versus Online Journalists

EFF has filed an appeal in the Apple V Doe case, where Apple is trying to use the law to get online journalists to reveal their sources despite the Constitutional protection of reporters' sources.

EFF today filed a petition for appeal [PDF] in Apple v. Does, arguing that the central issue in the case is not "the merits of Apple's trade secret claim nor even the potential liability of these non-Party reporters should Apple ever sue them (it has not). Rather, the question is only whether Apple may ride roughshod over the reporter's privilege and the reporter's shield in its eagerness to obtain evidence."

In other words, can Apple do an end-run around the California reporter's shield and the journalist's privilege under the federal First Amendment by forcing a third party (in this instance, Jason O' Grady's ISP) to divulge a reporter's confidential sources? If so, can it do so without first exhausting all other means of securing the information?

Remember, these reporters did not steal any information from Apple, bribe any Apple employees, or break any non-disclosure agreement. They are not defendants in any criminal action, and no criminal investigation is underway. Yet the trial court applied the consitutional reporter's privilege as though this were a criminal case. It even compared these journalists to "fences" in stolen goods.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:20:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DRM blog

The DRM Blog is a good blog for op-eds, news links and other resources for understanding DRM. I just added it to my RSS reader. Link (Thanks, Jimmy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Does DNA have a backup in RNA?

Becky sez, "According to a report in the journal Nature, one plant appears able to revert to genetic code that doesn't contain a mutation that its parents had, i.e., it appears to have some kind of backup. The authors of the paper theorize that the backup may reside in molecule RNA somewhere, and that stress may trigger the reversion. If this turns out to be the case in other species--like, oh, say, humans, and the lead author suggests that could be so--not only will we have to rewrite the genetics textbooks, but locating the RNA backups and/or learning how to trigger them might be a new route to cure of diseases with a genetic component." Link (Thanks, Becky!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:11:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free Software Foundation meeting this Sat at MIT

 John sez, "but the Free Software Foundation associate membership meeting is this coming Saturday, March 26, at MIT's Stata Center in Cambridge, MA. The meeting will feature a solid day of presentations from Lawrence Lessig, Eben Moglen, Richard Stallman, and other free software luminaries. The members get a chance to hang out, eat good food, maybe even sign some GPG keys. We said the RSVP deadline was March 18th, but we'll still take 'em if people want to sign up as a member and then RSVP." Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Adult mag covers in Engrish

NSFW. Gallery of Japanese adult magazine covers which lost -- or gained -- something in translation. Some are yuk-worthy for typos, while some are supremely weird for other reasons. Wondefule titles like "Mouth Pet" and "Back Frash" will have you screaming "Sweet Panch!" and "The Fuck!" in no time. I mean, really, you won't Beleaue Your Eyes.
Link (via Fleshbot)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:48:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Security through obscurity: Mac Mini hidden in old Dell desktop

BB reader Matt Billings says:

I work in a semi-public area, and I didn't have a way to lock down my new Mac Mini [to prevent theft]. I needed a way to have it function, but not be too visible. But I had an old Dell case I wasn't using anymore and the gears started turning... after gutting the drive bays, it was almost a perfect fit. I figure nobody would take a second look at this old box. Here are the results.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:07:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jon Lech Johansen's PyMusique re-opens iTunes Store access

BB reader Alfie says "Jon Johansen has re-opened the Itunes hole recently blocked by apple, making 3rd party accessible again."

The entry on Jon's blog (the site's appropriately titled "So Sue Me") reads:

The iTunes Music Store recently stopped supporting iTunes versions below 4.7 in an attempt to shut out 3rd party clients. I have reverse engineered the iTMS 4.7 crypto which will once again enable 3rd party clients to communicate with the iTMS.

Link to blog post.

Image: Declan McCullagh for Wired News. (thanks also, Rik, Phillip, and Andreas)

Previously: DVD Jon creates DRM-free iTunes interface "PyMusique", Apple blocks DVDJon's PyMusique app

Update: Regarding "So Sue Me," BB reader Xopl sez: "There's more than one reason Jon Johansen chose that title: Link."

Update 2: CNET's John Borland has more: Link to "'DVD Jon' reopens iTunes back door."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:40:01 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The Birth of the Notebook

Chris Null has written a great article about the early history of portable PCs for Mobile PC magazine.

Inspired by the IBM 5100 and Xerox's Notetaker -- a 48-pound machine with a keyboard that folded over the display -- Osborne's eponymous computer was cobbled together from the cheapest parts he could find. The Osborne 1 hit the market at $1,795, with dual floppy drives and a 5-inch CRT. Flip the keyboard over the front, latch it on, and your 24.5-pound computer was ready to go wherever you needed it. Osborne had amazing success with the product, but it was fatally crushed by the birth of Compaq in 1983, which copied the Osborne carefully while adding one killer feature: IBM compatibility.

Link

UPDATE: Stefan says: "I actually worked on an Osborne in the early '80s. The college SF club had one. We used it to lay out the schedule and generate individually numbered tickets for our SF convention. I recall using the included BASIC to create a program that would generate a Superbowl betting grid.

"One of the big selling points for the Osborne was the software. The company pioneered the concept of bundling. In addition to the CP/M operating system, you got WordStar, a spreadsheet, a flat-file database program and so on. It even had a nice app for reading and writing PC-format disks.

"The computer itself was, frankly, a piece of shit. The monitor was 52 columns wide; when your typing reached the end of a line the display shifted left. It was terribly susceptible to static shock. You learned to save your work every few minutes in dry weather, because resets and lockups were a regular occurrence."

UPDATE: Our own David Pescovitz wrote an excellent piece about the Osborne for Salon back in 1999.

UPDATE: AHM says "As long as we're waxing nostalgic, it may be worth noting that the Trenton Computer Fest is happening on April 16-17, 2005. This year, TCF celebrates it's 30th year(!) by moving back to The College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State College) and with a demonstration of a number of vintage computers, courtesy of the members of MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro-Computing Hobbyists). Who knows, you might even see a working Osborne there."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:07:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Digital Cinema: Ireland's movie theaters to convert within a year?

The current issue of Wired Magazine includes a feature I wrote about digital cinema -- interviewees include d-cinema evangelist and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban; filmmaker James Cameron; and hardware makers including Texas Instruments and Sony. It's not online yet, but I'll be posting related news clips here on Boing Boing, and will blog the Wired piece as soon as it's up.

Today: news of a planned digital cinema network throughout the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with the ambitious goal of converting all of the country's movie theaters to digital format within about a year.

"The digital projection offers picture-perfect quality and significant cost savings," says Moira Horgan, the head of marketing for the Irish Film Board. "The boxes are being inserted as we speak."

Avica Technology is bringing the digital presentation systems to 515 screens throughout Ireland to run alongside traditional 35mm film projectors, says Kevin Cummins, spokesman for Avica Europe, the European arm of the Santa Monica, California, digital cinema technology and services company.

"Digital can reduce the cost of distribution, eliminating the need for costly reels of film that need to be printed, delivered, collected once the cinema is done showing the movie, and then destroyed," Cummins says. "From the (average viewer's) point of view, digital provides picture-perfect quality. The movies just look a lot better, from the first showing through to a thousand showings."

Link to Ireland Putting Digital Films in Every Cinema (PC World). (Thanks, Chris Anderson!)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:03:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tow Truck Drivers Push Cars into Tow-Away Zone then hold cars for ransom

Tian says: "On March 7th, I took photos of a tow truck driver that damages a vehicle then tries to get away in Phoenix.

Sunday night (March 20th), Phoenix news channel 15 used a bait car and discovered that local tow truck company(s) would actually push cars into tow-away zone first, then held the cars as "hostages" for ransom."

I just watched it. The TV crew set up a white SUV as a bait car, and parked it legally. Time and time again, tow trucks would push the car into a red zone, snap a photo, and tow it away. Of course, when the TV crew showed the owner of the tow truck company how his drivers had pushed the car into the red lane, the owner denied responsibility. "I didn't push it," he said.

Arizona lawmakers have been half-heartedly writing legislation to stop this (isn't it illegal to do this already) but the tow truck has so far been able to convince them not to ruin the good thing they've got going. Link to RealMedia file. The segment starts about 20:15 into the broadcast.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:47:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mashup: M.I.A. v. Super Mario Bros. = Super Galang Galang

M.I.A. and S.M.B. combine to form Super Galang Galang. The mixmaster is Josh "cry.on.my.console" Last.Name.Omitted (who will be playing with M.I.A. in Manchester UK next month: Link). Also check out the Britney-vs.-M.I.A. track. Link (Thanks, Justin, and whoever corrected me on the credit issue, I accidentally deleted your identity.)

Previously: MIA for intergalactic overlord, MIA is, well, MIA due to visa troubles while entering US

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:41:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

License plate scanner will bust people with overdue library books

Car towing companies are as bad as garbage truck companies. (Want irrefutable proof? Here's a damage-causing tow truck driver caught on camera, and here's a damage-causing garbage truck driver with photographic evidence of his wanton disregard for other people's property.)

Now, tow truck companies have a new way to make money. They drive around with a setup called Bootfinder. The system consists of a digital camera, character recognition software, and a laptop with a database that has information tagged to license plates. The tow truck drivers cruise around streets, scanning plates, looking for people who haven't paid various city fees and taxes. When the the laptop beeps, they hitch the car to the truck and tow it away.

According to Forbes, Arlington county in Virginia "has found a new task for its surveillance camera: Starting in March it plans to use the BootFinder to nab people who are on the county's rolls for just about anything, from late park and recreation fees to overdue library books.

And according to thenewspaper.com ("A Journal of the Politics of Driving) "If the car's owner is listed as delinquent, the car can be towed -- and if the owner doesn't pay within 10 days the car is auctioned." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:27:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

David Goldin's collage and illustrations

I love illustrator David Goldin's cartoony collages and illustrations. Bits of his work have been featured in Fantagraphics' Blab anthologies, but Goldin's Web site provides a mind-blowing picture of the breadth of his talent. His X Collages are surreally sinful too. Link (via Drawn!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:18:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amputee wannabes

The New York Times delves into body integrity identity disorder, a psychiatric condition marked by an overwhelming desire to have one more limbs amputated.

According to (Columbia University psychiatrist Dr. Michael) First, people with body integrity identity disorder are quite specific about how many limbs they want amputated, and where. The most common is the left leg above the knee; the least common is a finger or toe. "Some people actually know the exact spot where they want the amputation," said Dr. First. "Not just above the knee, but four inches above the knee."

Anything short of that specific site can be insufficient. One man from Dr. First's sample had a lifelong fixation on being a double leg amputee. After a shotgun accident, he lost his left arm. Amazingly, this did nothing to diminish the intensity of the man's desire to have his legs amputated... "When the first sex reassignment was done in the 1950's, it generated the same kind of horror" that voluntary amputation does now, Dr. First said. "Surgeons asked themselves, 'How can I do this thing to someone that's normal?' The dilemma of the surgeon being asked to amputate a healthy limb is similar."

Still, the analogy is imperfect. "It's one thing to say someone wants to go from male to female; they're both normal states," Dr. First said. "To want to go from a four-limbed person to an amputee feels more problematic. That idea doesn't compute to regular people."

Link

UPDATE: Annemarie Bridy writes:

"I published an article in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics last spring (2004) that speaks directly to the issue and that challenges the assumptions underlying Dr. First's proposition that elective amputation is different from sex-reassignment surgery in that those seeking sex reassignment desire to go from one 'normal' state to another (whereas apotemnophiles want to be 'abnormal').  The title is "Confounding Extremities: Surgery at the Medico-ethical Limits of Self Modification."  My take is that apotemnophilia offers bioethicists and their ilk an opportunity (which they are so far declining to take) to examine and maybe question their disciplinary assumptions--unique to medicine or psychiatry or bioethics or whatever--about what is "normal" with respect to the appearance and function of the body.

I think the psychiatrists and bioethicists who approach this problem unfortunately approach it from inside a conceptual box of fairly limited dimensions. In the article, I tried to call attention to the existence of this box and to the problem it might represent for our attempts to understand and treat people who put pressure on our assumptions about bodily integrity by desiring to be disabled."

Link (to PDF of article)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:50:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Onyanko Club: '80s Japan-pop with weird sexual references

Boing Boing pal Todd Lappin says, "Marxy has an interesting series of posts on his blog about a mid-80's Japanese girl group called The Onyanko Club, which translates loosely as Pussy Club (with very similar connotations). This is must-read/listen stuff, in a jaw-dropping, Hello Kitty-meets-Peaches kind of way."

Snip:

In 1986, the Pussy Club hit Number One on the Oricon with their peppy surf-rock ode to sexual harassment on the public transportation system: Otto Chikan! (mp3). The word "chikan" means "male sexual pervert" and also refers to the action of men feeling up women on the subways. Not exactly a term that just screams "pop song chorus." The song starts as an anti-chikan rant from a high school wanting revenge on the suspcious males in her train car, but turns out, she was wrong to complain: the creepy kid in thick glasses just wanted to give the girl a love letter. Crisis averted.

The song seems to say: these men who appear to be in the art of - excuse me for this one - chikan'ery in fact have pure romantic intentions (love letter). Don't jump to conclusions, little girls!

If you dig that one, don't miss "Stop it, Teacher!" an upbeat pop morsel about a tenured pedophile.

Onyanko Club I: Link, Onyanko Club II: Link, Onyanko Club III: Link, WTF does chikan mean: Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:38:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New x-ray fluorescence fingerprint detection

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have devised a new method to detect the chemical residue left behind by your fingertips. They used micro-X-ray fluorescence (MXRF) to reveal the sodium, potassium, chlorine, and other elements excreted in sweat and deposited in a fingerprint pattern. From Los Alamos News:

The technique has several advantages over traditional fingerprint detection methods that involve treating the suspect area with powders, liquids, or vapors in order to add color to the fingerprint so that it can be easily seen and photographed. Using this technique, known as contrast enhancement, it is sometimes difficult to detect fingerprints present on certain substances, such as multicolored backgrounds, fibrous papers and textiles, wood, leather, plastic, adhesives and human skin.

Since MXRF is noninvasive, a fingerprint analyzed by the method is left pristine for examination by other methods like DNA extraction.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:34:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Toy lab: kids rebuild used toys, endow them with powers

Tiffany Vincent says,

I read Xeni's "Toy Zen" post, and it reminded me of Cincinnati's Toy Lab, a wonderful (non-profit) place where children (and adults) make toys out of old toys. They run all their donated toys through a gigantic washing machine several times before unleashing them on the masses. Kids assemble their toy, name it, and assign it powers before having it photographed and placed on the Web for all to see. I've spent hours of productivity giggling at the toys these kids have invented.

Shown here: Name: Tassie. Inventor: Sydney, age 7. Comments: "She can spit on people and she can fly."

Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:26:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

To do at M3 in Miami: Lessig keynote

If you're going to the Miami Music Festival, you may want to push aside the hookers and blow early on Friday morning to catch Lawrence Lessig's keynote at 11 am (Raleigh Hotel, poolside!) in South Beach. Remix culture seems to be a recurring thread throughout this year's edition of the annual event, and with the Grokster decision drawing near -- there will no doubt be heated debate along with the Florida heat. Link to details, and here's an interview conducted in advance of his keynote at last week's O'Reilly's ETECH: Link (Thanks, M.C. Lyte)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:13:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unfortunately-named gadget: "Hand Shredder"

The "Hand Shredder" is either an unfortunate Engrish incident or a clever little mauling device. Boing Boing reader Fungus Mungus says, "The only problem is once you've shredded one hand, you can't shred the other one! They need to come out with an automatic hand-shredder."
Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:05:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hogzilla is real. And now, he's real dead.

A team of National Geographic experts with nothing better to do confirmed the existence of Georgia's monster hog, "Hogzilla."

They also noted the super swine didn't quite live up to the 1,000-pound, 12-foot hype generated when Hogzilla was caught on a farm last summer and photographed hanging from a backhoe. Donning biohazard suits to exhume the behemoth's smelly remains, the experts estimated Hogzilla was probably only 7 1/2 to 8 feet long, and weighed about 800 pounds. The confirmation came in a documentary aired Sunday night on the National Geographic Channel; it will be rebroadcast Wednesday and Saturday.

Link (Thanks, Mo)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 06:58:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Technologies that will be criminal if we lose Grokster: email, blogs, Xerox machines

Next week is the Grokster Supreme Court hearing, where Hollywood will argue that technologies that are capable of being used to infringe copyright should be designed to prevent such infringement. In the week leading up to the hearing, EFF is publishing a daily list of technologies that couldn't survive such a standard, including Xerox machines, TCP/IP, blogs, VCRs, Email and more.

The Xerox machine

Vitals
This machine makes perfect replicas of printed pages. It can expand or contract the images on those pages, change their colors, and collate batches of pages into various configurations. It is ideal for copying pages from books, creating posters, and duplicating pictures.

Invented
"Xerography," or copying via electrostatic energy, was discovered in 1937 by law student Chester Carlson.

What this machine has made possible
The desktop publishing revolution, zines as an art form, cheaply reproduced classroom materials, quick reproductions of reports or other business materials, and an easy way for political or arts groups to create flyers that raise awareness about their work.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:18:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Openness/transparency/balance manifesto delivered to WIPO

Earlier this month, a group of copyfighters circulated a manifesto/petition for increased openness, transparency and balance at the meetings of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is currently chasing in the other direction by pulling stunts like excluding nearly every public interest group from its meetings. The petition has been delivered to WIPO now, with impressive stats:

1. More than 750 signatures

2. From 53 countries:

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Dominican Rep., Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saint Lucia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA, Venezuela.

3. From all 5 continents:

Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania.

4. Non exhaustive list of signatories' areas of interest:

advertising, agriculture, anthropology, arts (visual / musical / film / entertainment), banking, bioinfomatics, chemistry, computer security / privacy / engineer / science, culture, education, health, human rights, information studies, intellectual property, journalism, law, library, mathematics, medicine, patent owner, philosophy, physics, politics, sociology, song writing, technology, video game industry, web development.

The link has versions of the petition in Russian, English, Spanish and Portuguese, Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:15:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WiFi hotspots should have semantics and geotags

Brad Templeton's got a neat idea -- add geotagging and semantics to WiFi hotspots:

It would contain a mixed XML/HTML packet with a variety of useful fields and general text. These could range from simple descriptions ("This access point belongs to Joe Smith, I'm a programmer") to information ("On this site, Paul Revere stopped on his ride to consult with local minutemen") to street directions ("Turn right to get to highway 101, left for downtown") to, of course, advertising ("We sell fresh fruit and have a special on plums today.")

In other words, a replacement for signs and billboards and markers. And perhaps much more. Access points would also talk about themselves, declaring, for example, if the owner is offering open internet access for free or for fee, or has a local database of information, and what class of information is in the main text. The local lattitude and longitude for those without a GPS could be useful, along with local maps data in a compact form.

Link (Thanks, Brad!)

Update: Felix sez, "plazes is collaborative geo-tagging of networks, not just WiFi but any LAN. Unique identifier is the router´s MAC ID. In addition to structured data like address and type of network, people can upload pics and comments for that plaze/network. Every network gets a linkable URL and right now, we are working on a RDF representation of the geodata."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:01:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, March 21, 2005

Buck the Animatronic Stag

Buck the Stag puts Big Mouth Billy Bass to shame. Buck is a remote-controlled faux taxidermy mount with a motion sensor that triggers his animated renditions of such classics as Sweet Home Alabama and Suspicious Minds. The big value-add though is that you can also speak into a wireless mike and your words will come from Buck's mouth. Yours for the low price of £199.00 from Boys Stuff:

With fur and even a few stray hairs in the right places, Buck the Stag feels realistic as well as looking it. If you're after a bit of cruelty-free stately home style, he can provide it – and let's face it, a talking deer is much more entertaining than a dead one...

Link (Thanks, Bonnie Burton!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:35:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Myst island birthday cake

Boing Boing reader Ned Batchelder says,

My 13-year-old son is obsessed with the whole Myst series of games: Myst, Riven, Exile, Revelation, and Uru. We have a tradition in our family of making themed birthday cakes of the child's choosing, and this year our Myst-ophile wanted a cake in the form of the Myst island from the original game. We made it and it came out great. Take a look! As our son puts it, "tis the roxor!"

Link

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

DecoTel desk phone and other assorted retro-tech

Oak Tree Enterprises sells all kinds of unusual retro-tech, from 1970s handheld videogames to vintage electric fans to this stately Western Electric "DecoTel" executive desk phone. This broken, yet classy, conversation piece will set you back $55. Oak Tree Enterprises' site design and text is a real treat too. Link (Thanks, Imaginary Foundation)

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:09:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Infographic of blogosphere traffic spikes

My blog-mate David Pescovitz and I were interviewed for a Sydney Morning Herald story about the Bloggies (Boing Boing was among this year's winners). A nifty infographic ran along with the story. It's based on Technorati data, and points to some of the events/memes which led to the greatest spikes in blog traffic from 2004-2005. You know something's wrong with the online world when "Kryptonite Lock Controversy" inspires roughly the same amount of posts per day as "Indian Ocean Tsunami," though there may be more to the data than meets the eye.
Link to story (subscription required, user name "boingboingdotnet" password "boingboing")

Update: On his blog, Boing Boing reader Tim Jarrett offers one possible explanation for the Kryptonite-versus-Tsunami data oddity:

I say: it’s not the absolute size of the spike, it’s how it relates to its surroundings. (Uh, bow chicka chicka bow bow.) Based on my experience interpreting online traffic, the metric of merit when comparing two events isn’t absolute amount of traffic (posts, page views, unique users) but the delta they cause from the normal volume of activity. Look at the time period around “Kryptonite lock controversy”—the spike, while high, is part of a consistently high series of spikes that appears to run from July through shortly after the election. In other words, not dramatic, considering the overall blogosphere activity at that time.

The tsunami, on the other hand, reached the same peak of activity in the middle of a seasonal down period in blog posts—in fact, as I recall, a seasonal down period for Internet activity as a whole. In other words, it’s a hell of a lot more impressive that a bunch of bloggers got off their haunches after the holidays to post about the tsunami—when they weren’t inclined to blog—than that they posted in a period of otherwise high post activity.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:37:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

My Dinner With Flickr

Boing Boing reader Ranjit Bhatnagar loves the internet photo-sharing service Flickr so much, he cooked up an homage in polenta. "I'd love to say it's in honor of Flickr's acquisition (or consumption?) by Yahoo, but unfortunately I was a day early," the chef says.
Link

Previously: Yahoo! bought Flickr!, Polenta Twinkie, Scan, then blog each week's pick from the farmer's market

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:23:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Apple blocks DVDJon's PyMusique app

ZDNet reports that Apple has closed the iTunes Music Store security hole exploited by Jon Lech Johansen's DRM-free interface PyMusique. Says Apple, "The security hole in the iTunes Music Store which was recently exploited has been closed, and as a consequence the iTunes Music Store will now sell music only to customers using iTunes version 4.7." Users can still preview songs with PyMusique, but won't be able to buy them through the app. No word on whether or not Apple will take legal action against PyMusique's three co-creators. Link (thanks, Rik).

Previously: DVD Jon creates DRM-free iTunes interface "PyMusique"

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:06:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Global darkness shortage poses health and sanity risk

There's a global shortage of darkness, and it's not good for us.

"A number of health and environmental problems are due to a loss of darkness," says Dr David Crawford, executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association, a group that campaigns against light pollution. "And it will get worse as we creep -- or rush -- to a 24/7 world. All of life, all of it, has evolved with a day/night cycle -- the circadian rhythm. It's essential to good health. Many studies are now showing that those who go without a true day/night cycle are adversely impacting their immune systems, and that's not good..."

Once at work, overriding the craving for dark and sleep comes at a price. "They activate the `fight or flight' stress mechanism," says Foster, "and we know that stress in turn can suppress the immune system." Bright lights, caffeine and nicotine artificially maintain stimulation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, studies show that nightshift workers are at increased risk of a range of health problems, from stress, constipation and stomach ulcers to depression, heart disease and cancer. For example, a 2001 study in Seattle, based on interviews with 800 women, found that females who worked the graveyard shift could face a 60 percent increase in the risk of breast cancer.

Link (via Circadiana)

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

Lego Nintendo DS cradle

This charging Nintendo DS cradle is built from legos and comes complete with game-storage, a stylus well, and a Battle Droid. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:57:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Disney busts amateur Disneyland tour guide

Jim Hill is one of the great Disnephiles and Disney bloggers of the planet. Among other things, he gives a regular tour of Disneyland to people who pay him to show them around and tell them the inside story of the park (there are tons of tour operators who show people around Disney parks -- often escorting large groups from other countries). This weekend, Disney security stopped and threatened to arrest Jim for giving his tour.

I'm serious, folks. 20 minutes into my 2 o'clock tour, I was suddenly interrupted by two officials from the park's security staff. They quietly pulled me aside and said that they'd had complaints about my tour. That they'd heard that I was saying negative things about their theme park. More importantly, that my JHM tour was somehow undercutting Disneyland Guest Relations' ability to sell its own tours of the theme park.

Needless to say, I was somewhat surprised by this reaction. As were the 10 or so people who were taking my 2 o'clock tour and watching all of this unfold from 5 feet away. I mean, yes, the JHM Disneyland tour does contain a few juicy stories. Which is why Chuck Oberleitner once called it "The 'E' True Hollywood version of Disneyland's history." But is that really reason enough to shut the tour down?

Link (Thanks, Tavie!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:52:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New eBoy poster: London

The new eBoy poster of London is an infinite source of eye candy. I just ordered it.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:58:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bloggers = Journalists? Visa restrictions may be a downside.

Ernest Miller says,

A couple of days ago BoingBoing posted a story about the harrassment Jeremy Wright, who is Canadian, faced when he told US Immigration officials that he was a blogger. Although it is unclear why he was treated so poorly by US government officials, one possible explanation is that, as a blogger, he is also a journalists. Journalists, even from friendly countries, are required to have special "I Visas" that normal tourists are not required to have. Journalists without these visas have beeen similarly harrassed. Maybe we ought to change that law.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:15:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

SNL gets "penis nose" past censors

Where is the outrage?

"Keen observers of a sketch about a celebrity roast of Clint Eastwood might have noticed something peculiar about how the show's host, David Spade, was made up to look like Owen Wilson.

His nose looked like a penis. Not 'kind of like a penis'; it looked like a urologically-correct appendage, right down to what we believe is called the dorsal vein."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:13:04 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Good news for Miyazaki fans

Scott says: "Howl's Moving Castle will be released in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York on June 10. An expanded release will follow domestically in 700 to 800 theatres. In comparison, the general release of Spirited Away was extremely limited and only expanded to 700+ theaters after it won the Oscar for Best Animated Theatrical Feature. The Shinkong Mitsukoshi department store in Taipei recently hosted an exhibit of artwork from the film, including beautiful sculpted sets. Here's a link to 33 photos from the show."
Link (via Bing and nausicaa.net)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:05:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Open Source Yoga advocates fight "Atom Bomb Balls" Bikram

We've blogged about Bikram the yogi blowhard before -- Mr. Choudhury has been making headlines over efforts to enforce copyright on a popular style of yoga he claims to have invented. He's been threatening to sue folks who teach them without permission (or licensing fees).

Now there are reports that a group called "Open Source Yoga Unity" has filed a suit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, asking the judge to declare that Bikram cannot use his copyrights to stop others from practicing or teaching the Bikram sequence of poses.

Apart from the Bikram pose sequence, Mr. Chodhury is also famous for having uttered these words:

"Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me."

"Bikram goes to the mat" -- Link. (Thanks, Chris Maag, and eric)
Previously: Bikram yoga copyright clash, and New twist in Bikram Yoga copyright feuds

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:05:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO build a cellular into a rotary dial phone

This HOWTO has step-by-step instructions for gutting a classic rotary dial phone and inserting the guts of a modern cellphone, so that the rotary dial actually dials the cellphone. Link (Thanks, Murgatroit!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:45:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot Commando toy TV commercial

Spike over at Bedazzled! has posted another TV commercial for another wonderful Marvin Glass toy: the Robot Commando.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:02:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Russo-Teutonic 1979 Eurovision winner video

Daniel point us to a "Flash version of the live taping of 4th place winners of the 1979 Eurovision competition. The band is Dschingis Khan, the Germanization of Genghis Khan apparently, and the song is Moskau. Everyone is wearing shiny shimmering bright colors. There's a grinning, lanky, Santa-esque figure in red tights dancing like a madman at almost all times. I believe he is supposed to be the mighty Genghis. The two supporting female band members are of negligible interest, but the guys, oh man - when watching, pay attention to the bald blue one on the right and the bearded green one, they are chock full of hilarity." MPEG Link (Thanks, Daniel!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:00:43 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OurMedia: unlimited hosting/serving of your open-licensed works

JD Lasica, Marc Canter and co have launched OurMedia, a service that will host your open-licensed materials forever, for free, with unlimited bandwidth. They're under high load right now, but I'm sure they'll be running more smoothly as they throw more servers at the problem. Link (via Dan Gillmor)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:57:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Imaginary Foundation t-shirts

I love The Imaginary Foundation's t-shirts. The cut-up/collage designs seem to be rooted firmly in the surrealist and dada traditions. They're also really comfy. I inquired about the Foundation's operating principals and this is what I was told:

"The Imaginary Foundation was established in Geneva in 1973 as an experimental think-tank for new ideas. Created by an eclectic group of free thinkers, the Foundation’s research spans all creative endeavors and assigns as its goal: the wish to eliminate set conventions in favor of the humorous, the abstract, and the visionary."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:57:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Godwin's Law analog for porn and file-sharing

Ed Felten pithily observes a corollary to Godwin's Law (which says that all online arguments end when someone gets compared to Hitler) for the copyfight: "As a copyright policy discussion grows longer, the probability of pornography being invoked approaches one. When the topic of a copyright policy discussion switches to pornography, each side suddenly adopts the other side's arguments."

Hollywood argues that filesharing will lead to a shortage of movies, because nobody will make movies they can't sell. But when the topic switches to pornographic movies, suddenly they start arguing that filesharing increases the creation and availability of content.

Similarly, some P2P vendors who say they can't possibly filter or block copyrighted content, suddenly decide, when the topic switches to porn, that they can provide effective blocking.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:51:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flora, Blair, Ward Kimball posts

It's an art trifecta at Cartoon Brew this morning. Amid Amidi says: "I've done three successive posts that sort of work together as a whole - one has a rare Jim Flora illustration that wasn't included in the recent Flora book, the other is a link to Mary Blair murals, and the third entry has a never-before-seen painting by one of Disney's "Nine Old Men," Ward Kimball (MARS & BEYOND)."
Link

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

Aline Kominsky-Crumb interview

Newsweek recently ran an article about Robert Crumb (news hook: A 400 page book and CD is coming out in April called The R. Crumb Handbook). MSNB also has an interview with Crumb's wife, cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

In a recent interview he described himself as an “ineffectual individual,” which is surprising for someone with such a prodigious output. Do you think he could survive without a woman like yourself in his life?
No, he wouldn’t. He’d be dead without me. [Laughs.] When I met him his life was such a wreck. He’s really a soft guy. He just wants to be liked too much. When he says ineffectual, he just can’t say no to people. There are always parasites ready to jump on somebody like that. So I’m the bad cop.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:25:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Computer key stool

GreatBigStuff.com sells these nerdy and fun computer key seats. "The contoured shape holds your backspace just like your finger rests in a key." They're $84 each but for $16 extra they can be customized with any (?) ten characters you want! Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:24:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DIY comic strip community

Our Parisian friends at Fluctuat.net and AEIOU are the creators of Gnomz, "a community that enables web users to create customized online comic strips quickly and free-of-charge." You can design your own characters or use Gnomz inspired by public figures and pop culture celebrities. BB pal Alex Boucherot says that more than 20,000 comics were created in less than a year on the French Gnomz. Now they've launched an English language version! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:13:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, a psychedelic tale

A new BBC documentary posits that Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was inspired by the writer's own drug-induced hallucinations. At the time he wrote the book, Stevenson's tuberculosis was being treated with a derivative of ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus. Evidence comes from a letter uncovered in Yale University's Stevenson archive:

In the letter, dated “end of August, early September 1885”, Stevenson’s wife wrote to William Henley, her husband’s friend and literary agent: “Louis’s mad behaviour . . . I think it must be the ergotine that affects his brain at such time.

“He is quite rational now, I am thankful to say, but he has just giving up insisting that he should be lifted into bed in a kneeling position, his face to the pillow.”

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:53:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, March 20, 2005

In memoriam: Car designer John DeLorean

Automobile developer John Z. DeLorean has died at age 80.

Hallmarks [of the DeLorean DMC-12], such as an unpainted stainless steel skin and the gull-wing doors, have been ignored by mainstream automakers. The angular design, however, earned it a cult following, and the car was a time-traveling vehicle for Michael J. Fox in the popular "Back to the Future" films of the late 1980s.

But the factory produced only about 8,900 cars in three years, estimated John Truscott, membership director of the DeLorean Owners Association. That figure is dwarfed by the major automakers, who sell more than a million vehicles a month. DeLorean's company collapsed in 1983, a year after he was arrested in Los Angeles and accused of conspiring to sell $24 million of cocaine to salvage his venture.

Link (Thanks, Mo)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:10:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO transform an iBook into a furBook

Graphic designer Cynthia Malaran offers simple directions to make a stark, cold iBook a bit more cuddly through the magic of fun fur. Link (Thanks, Imaginary Foundation!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:02:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mexican govt guide for emigrants to the US

Philip sez, "a pratical help guide (nicely illustrated in comic book style) for Mexican emigrants (particularly of the illegal variety) issued by the Mexican foreign ministry. apparently there was a great fuss about this in January, after about a million copies had already been distributed. curiously, it's still on-line (in Spanish, of course)." Link (Thanks, Philip!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:40:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Yahoo! bought Flickr!

Yahoo! Flickr has been acquired by Yahoo! I'm an advisor to the company and I've been rooting for them through a long negotiation, and I'm so happy for them now that it's a done deal. Congrats, guys -- couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.

What is going to happen to Flickr?
Flickr will be continuing on the path it's on -- to Flickr 1.0 and beyond. We'll be working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here. We're going to grow and change, but we're in it for the long haul, with the same management and same team.

You're not going to become a bunch of suits?
No, no, no! The precious DNA we've got -- that of the Ludicrew -- is on side and revving up for building Flickr. Having the team building out the team's vision for Flickr has been stressed as our number one priority, and keeping us around -- in spite of our wiseassery, tomfoolery and tendency to hoot spontaneously -- is crucial for preserving the Flickrness that is Flickr. They're not going to replace any of us with suits, nor induce us to wear them. Lapel? I don't know what you mean.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:35:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shanghai Ning, crosscultural Asian/American hip-hop

BB reader Diana Huang says,

This bizarre sibling of American rap made up of English, Mandarin, and Shanghainese (Shanghai dialect of Mandarin, a.k.a. my hometown dialect) just blew me away. The sound is typically rap but the lyrics and topics have a very distinctive Chinese/Shanghainese spin. The lyrics are jammed with "trash" words in different languages. Topics are typically social commentaries such as the track named "Made in Shanghai" that takes a shot at the Chinese youth's blind infatuation with foreign pop cultures (Japanese, Korean) but also has a good amount of softer topics about unrequited or lost love. BBC has a good story about of the rapper named "Little Lion" -- Link.

Link to Shanghai Ning website. Update Boing Boing reader Tian adds news of another Shanghainese hiphop hybrid:

I posted a song by an unknown flight attendant for Eastern Air (Chinese airline) last Decemeber. She used Enimem's "Slim Shady" as the baseline.

Link

And Scott Deerwester says:

Just a quick comment on the Shanghai Ning posting - Shanghainese is no way, no how a "dialect of Mandarin". The formal name of the language is Wu, and it's spoken by about 7.5% of the people in China, according to the Ethnologue, and it's one of the thirteen or so major families of languages that people call "Chinese" (in addition to the 200 or so languages spoken in China that aren't called Chinese!). Even the term "dialect" is tricky, especially in China. There, as in many places, it's more a political term than a linguistic term.

Linguistically, the distinction between language and dialect is the degree of overlap - "mutual comprehensibility". The various Chinese languages are at least as different from each other as, say, French and Italian, or Dutch and German. But there's only one written Chinese language (which is basically Mandarin). When people who speak other Chinese languages read (or write) Chinese, many of the words that they write are completely different from the ones that they speak! Even more bizarre, this means that, while two literate speakers of different Chinese languages may not be able to understand each other at all, they can write to each other, each in his or her "own" language!

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:27:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, March 19, 2005

Board-game combines Go and Tetris

I've just spent the evenng playing Blokus, a board-game that combines the best of Tetris and Go. It was ferociously addictive and fiercely competitive. Play with three others for maximal heart-wrenching tension between the need to attack and to defend. Of course, you can play online, too. Link (Thanks, Raph!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:30:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cory's IT Conversations debate on Google Autolinks

Last week, I did a phone interview with Denise Howell about the Google Autolinks "controversy," along with Robert Scoble and Marty Schwimmer from the Trademark Blog, for Denise Howell's new IT Conversations Internet radio show, "Sound Policy." The one-hour debate was quite lively -- you can download or stream it and see for yourself.

But those who have been watching the Web long enough to remember see a resemblance between AutoLink and Microsoft's Smart Tags feature, an unpopular link-adding "enhancement" to Internet Explorer that never made it out of the starting gate. Many wonder too whether AutoLink demonstrates a shift in Google's "don't be evil" approach toward making search profitable. Does AutoLink do enough to make it clear to users which links were put there by the Web page author and which were added? Could AutoLink or something like it alter the meaning and intent of the original page? Don't Web authors have the right to have their work distributed as written? Don't Web users have the right to view material in their browser however they'd like, and can't developers make tools that help this process?

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:21:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Aubrey de Grey profile in Slate

Paul Boutin wrote a profile of controversial longevity scientist Aubrey de Grey for Slate. Paul sez:

[De Grey's] "M Prize" competition for longevity research topped $1M in jackpot last week. Will we really conquer aging and death by 2025? I don't believe so, but unlike those spoilsports at Technology Review I'd be happy to be wrong.

Link to "Methuselah Mouse Man".

Note: as my blog-mate Mark has reported previously, Mr. De Grey is also an honorary member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. See also this earlier BB post by David Pescovitz: Why Die?

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:53:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Web Zen: Toy Zen

fireball island
deadly toys
corgi toys
optical toys
vladmaster
my little borg pony
world domination toys
the cubes
art army
the real toy story
hazard cards
Shown here: My Borg Pony. web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:14:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Don't say 'blogger' to US Immigration

Via Declan McCullagh's politech list: William Knowles writes about a Canadian blogger who claims he was harassed and strip-searched by US immigration officials when he told them his profession was "blogger." Snip:

This sounds like an unbelievable story, but it happened to Canadian blogger Jeremy Wright last week. As already reported on quite a few blogs, Jeremy was detained and interrogated by US Immigration when he arrived in New York last week for a meeting with McGraw-Hill (Ed. note: an unnamed media company -- see update) to discuss a great business opportunity for Jeremy in the area of blogging.

It appears that the immigration people simply did not believe that Jeremy could make a living as a blogger. And they gave him the third degree - including an humiliating strip search - as a result for some hours. And banned him from entering the US. Incredible. Jeremy wrote detailed commentary on his blog about his experience, but he's now pulled those posts (this post explains why). While the details aren't yet clear on exactly why Jeremy had such an awful experience at the hands of the guardians of freedom and liberty (hard to get true irony here), this appears to be disgraceful behaviour on their part.

I met Jeremy in the US in January. Shel and I interviewed him for a podcast. You couldn't meet a nicer and more honourable bloke!

Link to William's post, and link to an update posted by Jeremy Wright on The End of The Story.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:04:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-shirt: Chairman Mao sez RTFM

This t-shirt makes punny nerd fun of Mao's red book and RTFM ("read the fucking manual" in geek parlance). The Chinese characters say, more or less, "closely following Chairman Mao through strong wind big waves and advance forward".
Link to more info on tian's blog, buy the shirt here.

Previously on Boing Boing: Chinese commie death purses: lost in translation

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

Beer Can House restoration

Houston's famed Beer Can House will undergo a much-needed rennovation thanks to a $125,000 grant from the city to the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, owners of the property. John Milkovisch, a retired employee of Southern Pacific Railroad, began decorating in 1968. From Roadside America:

Beer cans quickly became John's exclusive medium -- a convenient one, since John drank a lot of beer. He worked on the house for the next 18 years, incorporating a six-pack a day into its adornment -- roughly 39,000 cans. He linked pull-tabs into long streamers to make curtains that chimed when the wind blew. "This curtain idea is just one of those dreams in the back of my noodle," he explained at the time.

"John thought beer cured everything," explained Mary, his wife, after John had died (in 1988).

Link to Houston Chronicle article about the restoration

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:44:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Young Frankenstein's Memoir

That's /FRAHHHN-ken-steen/, of course. Newsweek's Brian Braiker did a really neat interview with film legend Gene Wilder, whose memoirs were just published. I can't wait to get my paws on the book. Newsweek's online feature includes links to video clips of five classic Wilder scenes (including a moment from Willy Wonka, shown below), and background on each. Snip from interview:

Q: I didn’t realize that you had had a stem-cell transplant. Have you done any advocacy for more stem-cell research or are you staying out of that debate?
A: I wasn’t a friend, but I was an acquaintance, of Chris Reeve, and we talked about it the last time I saw him, which was at the U.S. Open. The Bush administration has this—I don’t know what to call it—I’d like to say Neanderthal outlook about it. Generally, I don’t like it when actors get up and start preaching, but it’s something that should be obvious and it’s hard to speak with vehemence when you think that the people you’re addressing it to aren’t going to understand what you’re saying. I think it’s something Congress should take up.

Q: You write about this compulsion to pray you had when you were younger. What’s so fascinating about it is that you called the compulsion your “Demon” when ostensibly you were praying to God.
A: Actually, I never thought of it as God. I didn’t know what to call it. I don’t believe in devils, but demons I do because everyone at one time or another has some kind of a demon, even if you call it by another name, that drives them. It came in March of my freshman year at the university in Iowa and it lasted a long time. I never knew when it was going to come or go. Every time I was happy it seemed to rear—well, I say his ugly head, but I don’t know if it was a he or a she.

Link to interview and video clips, and Link to amazon listing for Wilder's Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art.

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

Christian creationists bully IMAX theaters over evolution

Boing Boing reader Dave sez, "IMAX theaters in the southern USA are refusing to air documentaries that merely mention evolution. One of the sad parts is that the theaters in question are in museums and science centers -- institutions of science, not faith." Link to NY Times story "A New Screen Test for Imax: It's the Bible vs. the Volcano."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:29:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amul Indian Butter Ad Archive

Boing Boing reader Avi Solomon sez:

Amul is a brand butter of butter made in India. As kids we used to dip Amul buttered bread in hot milk chai. But the Amul Utterly Butterly Girl is an icon of middle class India from the 60s to now. The eagerly awaited Amul ads combine scathing social commentary on the scandal du jour and shine light on little known middle class aspirations that make India a very special place. For example see these Ads made during the 1976-7 emergency: Link.

Link to Amul Butter home page.

In related creamy buttery news, Boing Boing reader MontrealBob sez:

This story describes a recent ruling by Canada's Supreme Court that the Quebec law banning yellow margarine should be upheld. This law is ostensibly to protect unsuspecting consumers who might otherwise be fooled into eating margarine in place of butter. And so, Quebeckers continue to eat white margarine.

Link

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

Beatallica.org now back online! New tunes on the way.

Beatallica's "webmaster of puppets" David Dixon tells Boing Boing:

"A temporary version of Beatallica.org is now back online -- we're going to relaunch the site in its entirety once the new song (and its 13 international versions) is all mixed down. I can't give you a precise date on that yet; it all depends on how quickly our producer/engineer can finish it."

Previously: Xeni on NPR: Beatallica back, thanks to Lars Ulrich, Beatallica.org shut down, more Sony nastygrams fly; Beatallica fans respond to Sony nastygram; Lars Ulrich of Metallica steps in.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:53:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gallery of Port Authority "photo prohibited" signs

Karl sez,

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has quietly banned the taking of photographs in at least the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, on the George Washington Bridge, and in the PATH system. (I've seen people being hassled for taking pictures inside the P.A. Bus Terminal, but I couldn't find that prohibited in the posted rules; they wised up at the World Trade Center site and I can't find any prohibitions there any more; I don't know what the status is at the airports, but I can't imagine it being good.)

When I first saw the slick signage at the Holland Tunnel, I was very sad. They have since added these "No Photo" signs on the GW and the Lincoln tunnel, and every time I see them, I feel a mixture of anger and helplessness and sadness. Soon enough, you just get used to it, and begin to forget that it ever was any different. "Why would you ever have wanted to take pictures inside a tunnel anyway, Grampa?"

It's sad and depressing, and I don't want it to become merely taken for granted and unremarked. So I went out and took pictures of the "No Pictures" signs, and I've put them up on my website. They're not professional pictures, and a good zoom lense would have helped my effort enormously, but at least they're up, and maybe will cause people to stop and think about it for just a little bit.

Link (Thanks, Karl!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:38:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NYT publishes anonymous remarks slamming anonymity

My cow-orker Wendy Seltzer reports on a NYT story that credulously quotes a parade of coppers complaining that open WiFi is a tool for criminals to make anonymous mischief, while totally missing the irony that the cops they spoke to would only communicate on condition of anonymity. Yo, NYT: if you don't like anonymous speech, relocate to some country without a First Amendment!

Two federal law enforcement officials said on condition of anonymity that while they were not aware of specific cases, they believed that sophisticated terrorists might also be starting to exploit unsecured Wi-Fi connections.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:35:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gigantic video-game level-maps

VGMaps is a gigantic repository of gigantic maps of every game imaginable, from old consoles to modern PC games. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:26:20 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LCD dongle shows you meatspace info while you're fullscreened in a game

This little USB-based LCD dongle is intended for use by gamers whose fullscreen play keeps them from monitoring email, IM, weather, etc. It will scroll a little ticker of useful information without requiring you to exit your game. Link (via Make Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:23:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Stephen King to publish classic hard-boiled crime novel

I've blogged before about Hard Case Crime, the small press that is reissuing many classic hard-boiled crime novels and commissioning new crime novels in the style of the old, with new cover paintings by the surviving artists of that era.

Now it appears that Hard Case has pulled off an extraordinary coup: Stephen King has written a book for the series, called The Colorado Kid. Link (Thanks, Mike!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:19:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, March 18, 2005

HOWTO make a duct-tape wallet

3M Canada has published a detailed HOWTO for turning duct-tape into a wallet. Great idea -- these folks should create a comprehensive directory of duct-tape projects (tuxedos, prom-dresses, etc) for using up their stuff. Link (via Make Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:59:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Orrin Hatch is head of new IP subcommitee

Loony old Orrin Hatch has been named the head of the new Senate subcommittee on Intellectual Property -- I guess that Genghis Kahn wasn't available to fill the position.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), once nicknamed "Terminator" for his 2003 comment that the recording industry should be allowed to remotely destroy the computers of file-sharers, was named today to head a new Senate subcommittee on intellectual property. While Hatch backed down slightly from that comment the next day, saying, "I do not favor extreme remedies -- unless no moderate remedies can be found," he has remained a staunch ally of the entertainment industry.

Link (Thanks, Nick!)

Update: Irony alert: Joi Ito loaded our RSS for this story and got an ad for some IP law firm underneath it. Guess the whole relevance-matching algorithm is a little scr0d.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:55:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Judith Miller at UC Berkeley

Last night at UC Berkeley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Judith Miller discussed journalism and democracy with investigative reporter Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino in The Insider). In a few weeks, Miller may be behind bars for refusing to reveal confidential sources relating to another reporter's disclosure of a CIA operative's name. Before becoming a possible martyr for the First Amendment though, Miller was known for penning articles in the New York Times supporting claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Whether Miller was tricked by her sources (including members of the Bush administration) or, worse, in cahoots with them is still not clear to her many critics. From Bonnie Powell's coverage of the Berkeley event:

Miller argues that if she was duped by her unnamed sources, so was the Bush administration — and she's not apologizing for believing there were WMDs in Iraq until the president does. "I think I was given information by people who believed the information they were giving the president," she told Bergman. "When the president asked, you know, 'What about this WMD case? Are we sure about this?' [then-CIA director] George Tenet said to him, 'Mr. President, this is a slam dunk.' The people I talked to certainly thought that." Other WMD believers, she said, included the entire U.S. intelligence community as well as French, English, and Israeli agencies. The debate, she claimed, was not over whether Saddam had WMDs, but whether it was worth going to war over them...

Ultimately, Miller said, she "wrote the best assessment that I could based on the information that I had." She attempted to tie the controversy over her WMD reporting to her current struggle by saying that she had heard after the fact — after she returned from being embedded with an infantry division in Iraq — that there had been people who had reservations about the WMD intelligence she was receiving.

"I wish they had come forward at the time to express those reservations," she said. "To me, this case that I am now involved in emphasizes the importance of getting as many people as possible to come forward with a dissenting view, or allegations of wrongdoing."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:46:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hollywood stars look like crap in high-def

A list of movie stars who look like crap in high-definition. There's a huge push to get Americans to switch over to digital television and the FCC is convinced that getting the broadcasters to air shows in high-def is the answer -- I think they're wrong and this list is exactly why. The first TV shows were radio shows like Burns and Allen done on stage instead of in a radio studio, and it wasn't until multi-camera setups (like the one on I Love Lucy) evolved that TV started to come into its own, as more than radio with pictures.

It's clear to me that high-dev isn't just low-def with bigger pores, but when you hear studio execs talk about their high-def plans, they always revolve around showing us the same people doing the same things with more pixels (the exception, of course, is Marc Cuban's HDNet).

If governments want to get their citizens to switch to digital TV, they're better off shoving more of the standard-def programming out on the free-to-air stations in digital form (as they have in the UK) than hoping that the opportunity to see Jennifer Anniston's hairspray residue on a 36" set will convince every to throw away their TVs and start over.

3. Britney Spears
The pop tart is still in her early 20s, but she looks about 10 years older in high-def. Her face is puffy and she's starting to show wrinkle marks around her lips, reportedly from a two pack-a-day cigarette habit.

4. Brad Pitt
Like Ms. Diaz, Pitt had a terrible skin problem in his younger years. The impact is clear in high-def. He's still a good-looking guy, but he doesn't look like one of People Magazine's "Most Beautiful."

5. Jewel
The singer looks great in still photos and music videos, but she looks terrible in high-def. And someone should help her with make-up; it looks like it was done by Ringling Bros.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:55:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Self-replicating 3D printers

A researcher in Bath, England is working on a 3D printer that can be used to print out all the parts necessary to make 3D printers.

Bowyer has already produced an electronic circuit by squirting the alloy inside a plastic autonomous robot, which itself was created using a commercial 3D printer. Because the heated syringe he used is very similar to the nozzle that deposits plastic layers in the printer, he envisions squirting both plastic and metal from the same nozzle in future self-replicating machines.

The machine need not be capable of assembling itself, he says, only producing all the necessary parts, with the exception of the microprocessors and the lubricating grease. These could later be added and the various parts clipped together, Bowyer says. "People are quite capable of assembling things if they want to," he adds. "I am not interested in self-assembly, just self-copying."

Link (Thanks, Robert and Dave!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Garbage man damage update

(Click thumbnail image for enlargement) Here's an update from yesterday's garbage man damage report. The cable guy spliced the TV cable yesterday afternoon. He did a nice job. I gave him an orange from the orange tree.

The phone company won't come until Saturday. I was getting tired of having no internet or landline phone, so late yesterday afternoon I grabbed the phone cable that was lying across the road and ran with it quickly to the ladder and got up on the roof with it. (I had to run fast because there were a lot of cars on the street and I didn't want one to drive into the cable when it was only a couple of feet off the ground.) Then I took a bunch of wire nuts and some wire strippers and spliced the severed wires. Doesn't it look pretty? This ought to do until the phone repairman comes and yells at me for fixing it myself.
Also, here are a couple of emails I've gotten about yesterday's incident:

Jay says: I feel your pain about having the lines cut--I work from home and the loss of my cable line would be a disaster. And your garbage man sounds like a jerk. But don't castigate them all. There are deadlines--the crap has to be picked up in one day whether every house leaves one bag or a small mountain. I think there is plenty of stress too. Garbage stinks--and plenty of it is heavy and awkward to lift. I have left hot water tanks, washers, dryers, mounds of wet drywall, paneling, chunks of concrete--and plenty of good ol' household waste. It gets cleared away without fanfare, and I am very grateful. I live in a pretty affluent community and the garbage men make about 13 bucks an hour. Maybe trying to make ends meet on that paltry sum engenders some anger; for sure, it is hard to derive much joy and fun from life on such a cruddy wage. Or maybe it is the people who get impatient and roar around a stopped truck and nearly run them down all the time. Whatever. I don't call that well-paid, and I am ashamed it isn't higher. You had a bad day for sure, but I thought I'd point out how you came across and offer the other side. Boingboing is one the few things that lives up to its billing "a directory of wonderful things." Just this once, not so wonderful. -- Jay

Levi says: If you're looking for an answer [to the question "Why are garbage men so angry?], re-read what you said. When times get tough, you can fall back on your social status, education, or whatever else you inherently feel the world owes you. He, on the other hand, gets the shit end of that world payment structure. He implicitly takes the shit from people like you for being lesser than you. Feed that cycle back for years and years, and you get your incident today.

Greg says: Here are some answers:
1) He was as high as he thought he could be and still do his job.  It's a boring job.  
2) Realistically, it's not all that well-paid, and there's no room for advancement, especially without a bit of education.  
3) They can be fired, but they have to work at it.  Maybe this is his chance?  One of our guys rolled his oversize truck on a residential street in front of a visiting dignitary.  That works, but you need to be on a hill.  
4) It's a boring job, and you only get to listen to junk radio. 

Joshua says: Our garbagemen knocked over our mailbox and just kept going. Which meant the post office wouldn't deliver our mail until the mailbox was fixed (because they post office won't deliver to our door, only to our streetside mailbox--I don't know why). My wife called our landlady, who called the city about the mailbox. The mailbox was fixed (by our handyman), but as far as we know, nothing ever happened to the garbagemen who knocked over the mailbox.  

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:32:51 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

TeleBlaster TV set explodes television

Moscow artist Aristarkh Chernyshev's TeleBlaster "is born to explode television." From the description at Electroboutique where you can buy a TeleBlaster set for $1499:

Its design repeats a blast, but it also stresses the fuctionality, which is the main thing here. TeleBlaster allows watching TV programs in different ways: as is, but also in a special mode of the signal processing. Users can load different effects algorithms from a flash-card or from the manufacturer website.

TeleBlaster allows mixing users' videofeed with a TV broadcast, and therefore gives unlimited possibilities for creativity: television becomes, literally, a Lego set from which users/watcher creates his/her own worlds.

Besides that, with TeleBlaster you can generate video effects synchronous to sound. This optio turns it into a specialized multimedia entertainment center.

Principal novelty of TeleBlaster is that it prvides its users with unique possibilities of control over information streams and gives an additional freedom of choices of TV watching modes. TeleBlaster rethinks the value of television and turns it into a great source of visual information and positive emotions.

Link to Electroboutique, Link to Chernyshev's "New Age Of Television" series (via AEIOU Excuse my French!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:27:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Police lie about drug dogs to rob drivers' rights

Florida's Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of restrictions on the use of drug sniffing dogs. Rex Curry, the defense attorney in the case, has written an interesting piece on the way cops use drug dogs to illegally "fish for drugs."

Drug dogs are covers for lies. Here's how -

1. Cops tell drivers that they should consent to a search of their car because radio dispatch "has a drug dog on the way over." It is often a lie told to induce drivers to consent to search. There is no dog on the way.

2. If a dog is or is not "on the way," cops add additional lies to make drivers think that there will be a long wait and that the driver must stay until a dog arrives. Cops rely on driver ignorance of the fact that evidence will be suppressed if drivers are detained longer than it takes to complete the traffic stop (e.g. write the ticket). Drivers are induced to consent to search to avoid a long wait based on lies.

3. If a dog is enroute, cops let drivers think that they are obliged to stay even when the cop has no reason to detain drivers any longer. The cop's rationalization is that drivers loiter roadside with cops for no apparent reason or because drivers enjoy waiting for dog sniffs. Cops take advantage of drivers who are too stupid (or too meek) to ask if they are free to go, so that drivers "consent" to unwarranted detention by not leaving.

Link (via Farber)

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

Andre Norton, RIP

Andre Norton, a talented, ground-breaking science fiction writer, has died.

Norton requested before her death that she not have a funeral service, but instead asked to be cremated along with a copy of her first and last novels.

Born Alice Mary Norton on February 17, 1912, in Cleveland, she wrote more than 130 books in many genres during her career of nearly 70 years. She used a pen name -- which she made her legal name in 1934 -- because she expected to be writing mostly for young boys and thought a male name would help sales.

Xur writes, "Her books span generations and genres, and Witch world is possibly her most famous creation. The High Hallack Genre Writers' Research Library - a project of Ms. Norton's lifetime has officially opened on 28th February 1999."

Link (Thanks, Xur and the codan armada!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:16:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Animation Show poster

Scott says: "The Animation Show is opening up in Atlanta today. Check out this cool Tim Biskup poster."

Originally from California, Tim Biskup was raised on Disneyland, Rat Fink, badly dubbed Japanese Sci-Fi flicks, punk rock, skateboarding and underground comics. In the mid-eighties he left Otis/Parsons School of Design to seek his fortune in the world of illustration. His career included designing for skateboard companies and record labels. (a highlight being his work for Ralph Records and his heroes the Residents). His obsession with the art of Mary Blair led him to a career in animation. This career has involved him in countless cartoons, including his own short "Freddy Seymore's Amazing Life" for Nickelodeon and background supervisor for Cartoon Network's "Time Squad." In 1998, Biskup began hosting and curating the Burning Brush auctions, has been in a vast array of exhibitions and has currently launched a line of tee shirts and gift items under the GAMA-GO label.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:03:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jody Radzik's new blog critiques gurus of all spiritual stripes

For more than a decade, my friend Jody Radzik has dropped countless spiritual mindbombs on me. In fact, he's probably the only person that holds my interest in such matters. He has a wonderfully-open mind, but he's certainly no sucker. Jody's an intrepid explorer, always ready to dig into a belief system but never afraid to knock a guru off his or her throne with a brilliant and witty observation. In fact, his new blog--guruphiliac--is about just that. This week's posts include the likes of subway-gassing Aum Shinrikyo guru Shoko Asahara's prison proclivity to "wearing diapers and mumbling incomprehensibly" and news of Hindus pissed off at a Ford commercial where Shiva discusses how owning the car is good Karma. From the guruphiliac mission statement:

"While we understand that gurus are held sacred by many, they are also public figures deserving of scrutiny. Our primary aim is to inject a little humor into what can be an excessively self-righteous enterprise, and to illustrate the primary truth that no matter how divine their devotees believe them to be, gurus poop on the same pot we do."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:47:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

DVD Jon creates DRM-free iTunes interface "PyMusique"

Jeremy says,

DVD Jon has created a program which bypasses the DRM stage of the downloading process when purchasing songs from iTunes. One still pays for the tracks, and FairPlay is not included.

Link to download page, and Link to Jon Johansen's blog. Here's a snip from The Register's story:

PyMusique [is] a Python-based utility that offers a "fair interface to the iTunes Music Store", co-written with Travis Watkins and Cody Brocious. The app provides the usual ITMS features - access to song previews and the ability to set up a payment account and to use it to buy songs - but there are two crucial differences.

First, PyMusique allows you to re-download songs you've purchased. So if your hard drive goes up the Suwannee and you haven't backed it up for a while, you can re-acquire your ITMS-sourced song library. Second, none of the tracks you download will be encumbered with DRM.

Of course, it's of very questionable legality. Quite apart from potentially bypassing Apple's FairPlay copy protection system - a no-no according to Europe's European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) - running the software infringes the terms and conditions ITMS user agree to abide by when they set up an account.

Link to story.

And Donna Wentworth at Copyfight has posted some astute analysis here: Link.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:54:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO de-Xeni BoingBoing

Jason Gill says,

Someone has posted a script for GreaseMonkey (a Firefox extension that lets you add your own Javascript code to any website, to remove ads or add features: Link) that automatically removes any post by Xeni when viewing BoingBoing."

Link. Of course, if you're not reading my posts you're gonna miss this one. D'oh!

Update: Jesse Andrews, the fellow who wrote this de-Xeni script, would appear to be busted. :-) Chad Hurley, who identifies himself as Mr. Andrews' employer, says:

Hi Xeni,

Just a note about Mr. Andrews and his "de-Xeni" plugin - We’ve caught him looking at far worse things than your "over the top" posts. Why he has picked you to filter, one may never know, but I have an idea for a plugin. Maybe I will add it to the Grease Monkey requests. It’s really simple. When Jesse opens Firefox, it directs Jesse to a folder on my server called, "Things Jesse needs to do today before the big hand is on 12 and the little hand is on 5"! Just an idea.

Keep on keepin' on,

Chad

posted by Xeni Jardin at 04:48:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Clever zooming tricks improve mobile user interfaces

In my latest piece for TheFeature, I wrote about way researchers are using zooming tricks to make web sites easier to use on mobile phones.

[Patrick] Baudisch's solution to this problem is called "summary thumbnails," which he developed in collaboration with Heidi Lam at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. It is a mobile browser that renders pages as thumbnails, but keeps the text large enough to read. It achieves this by displaying readable text fragments. For example, a CNN.com headline that reads "Chimpanzee Attacks Supermodel at Circus" might be shortened to "Chimpanzee Attacks." All the other headlines and story summaries on the page get the same treatment. There's no artificial intelligence at work here -- it's simple truncation. But it's surprisingly effective. Baudisch and Lam conducted a user study and discovered that users found what they were looking for in web pages 41% faster and at a 71% lower error rate than they did when they looked for the same content on browsers that rendered pages as single columns, and that they zoomed 59% less than when they used ordinary thumbnail rendering browsers.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:56:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Man made ice tower collapses

The ice tower in Fairbanks we wrote about a while back collapsed last night.
Link (Thanks, Alan!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:16:33 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mystery Date game TV commercial

Hot on the heels of the Mr. Machine robot toy TV commercial comes this ad for another Marvin Glass amusement -- a game called Mystery Date.
Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:24:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Garbage man severs my phone, TV cable, internet, drives away

I don't understand why garbage men always seem angry? What's to be angry about? They are well paid, have no deadlines or stress, never have to get their butt out of their seat, get excellent health benefits, paid vacation, and so on.

Garbage men never have to worry about getting fired, no matter how badly they screw up. That's probably why the Los Angeles garbage man who snapped my phone, TV cable, and internet lines, damaging my roof in the process, drove away without so much as a note with a number we could call. A neighbor saw the whole thing happen this morning. The driver shrugged and kept on going. "Not my problem," he probably thought to himself, assuming he had enough empathy to realize he had inconvenienced another person.

Now there are cables stretched across the road. I called the city, and they told me they'll send me a paper form in the mail to fill out. That's the city's way of dealing with the problem quickly.

The cable guy is here now, but he said he couldn't fix it until the pole on the roof was fixed. I climbed up on the roof and unbent the pole enough for him to pull the cable through.

The phone company won't come until Saturday. Meanwhile, the garbage man is probably downloading internet porn, yelling at his ex-wife's child support lawyer on the phone, and watching Die Hard VIII on cable, because nobody snapped his wires. I don't like you, garbage man.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:06:42 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Japanese air conditioner photos

Over at Underbelly, John Alderman created a slideshow of photographs by Huschang Pourian, a designer living in Tokyo. Pourian is exhibiting his photographs of air conditioners at a gallery in the Gaienmae neighborhood.

I realised that even though there are a lot of earthquakes on this island (of Japan), traditional house-building seemed to avoid using diagonals which would strengthen the structures. Based on the inner unit of tatami mats, everything was following the right angle and parallel lines – Japanese order for body and soul. But I also found elements like tubes and wires destroying this order, going through walls, spreading chaos and confusion. Connected to these were white boxes with fans inside. I suddenly fell in love (visually) with these air conditioners and started chasing them....

But air conditioners are not just beautiful. Beside the fact that they make our lives much more comfortable, they also have a dark side. Their high energy consumption causes the well-known “Heat Island Effect". Tokyo is especially affected by this.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:41:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cambodia's King Sihanouk has a blog

Dan Gillmor says:

Citing information from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the Federation of American Scientists is reporting that Cambodia's King Sihanouk has a blog. The works to which this refers seem to stretch the definition of a blog, but it's fascinating to see a political leader talking this way.

Link to Dan's post.

Most of the entries are large images of scanned paper documents written in Cambodian or French. Among them, I found this newspaper clipping -- a horrible AP story about the castration of a Phnom Penh transvestite by two psychotic sex tourists from Japan. Someone (I'm presuming King Sihanouk) wrote two pages of extensive notes around it in French. Kind of like hard copy fisking. Link to the post: "Nouvelles du Cambodge présentées par N. Sihanouk."

Also, I found this awesome entry:

STATEMENT FROM THE NORODOM SIHANOUK WEBSITE TEAM

The Website Team of Samdech Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia expresses its humble apologies to its distinguished audience for the unavailability of the site since March 4, 2005.

The web server has been subjected to a violent virus attack which required appropriate treatment.

The N. Sihanouk Website Team thanks its distinguished audience for its understanding and its faithfulness.

Phnom Penh, March 5, 2005

Link to the classiest message ever issued by a webmaster.

Update: Reader Ryun Patterson says:

From 1999 to 2003 I worked at The Cambodia Daily, the only English-language daily in Cambodia, and Sihanouk (who was king at the time but is no longer) would constantly fax us clippings from our newspaper with comments in French scribbled in the margins. At the end of the month, his staff would bundle up all his assorted media marginalia and distribute them to the media. His comments range from acutely insightful to witty to nit-picky, and these comments occasionally caused major government policy shifts. It's fascinating.

And about the "transvestite mutilation" newspaper clipping entry on the King's blog, Reader Nicolas Desprez sez:

Only the first hand-written paragraph refers to the printed article, the remaining paragraphs (after the three stars, with roman numerals bulleting) are about other stories like Cambodia current state of affairs.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 05:26:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help defend bloggers' rights to keep their sources secret

As part of the appeal on Apple's legal action to force websites that report on its new products to reveal their sources, Boing Boing will be signing onto a bloggers' "amicus brief." Our lawyer is Stanford's Lauren Gelman, and she needs your help for the brief. She writes:

"I need links to news stories broken by bloggers-- things a court can look at and say 'this looks like what we traditionally think of as journalism.' I am particularly interested in examples of stories based on sources, but any news will do. I will use these both as facts for the brief and I want to attach printouts from the blogs as attachments to it. I'm looking for as many as 50 examples, but I need at least 10."

Email your comments with links to gelman@stanford.edu. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:13:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Terrorize Me Elmo

Boing Boing reader Steve Doggie-Dogg says:

I saw your post on Boing Boing about the sex doll bomb scare. A friend of mine works at one of the major studios in Burbank. He works in the mail room x-raying packages as they come in, looking for bombs. A couple of months after 9-11, he got a package through that had a battery pack in the center, with sensors connected by coiled wires going out to all sides of the box. He called the Burbank police, and they called the bomb squad.

They evacuated the building and sent a guy in wearing one of those big bomb shield suits. He had a tiny video camera with him, and he poked a hole in the box away from the sensors and peeked inside with the camera. He came out of the building laughing, holding the box under his arm. He handed it to my friend who discovered it, and told him to open it.

My buddy opened it, and inside was a Tickle Me Elmo. The battery pack was in his belly, and the sensors were in his hands and feet to make him giggle. The bomb squad guy told everyone that the x-ray was a textbook example of what a bomb really looks like, and took a copy of it to use in training.

Previously on Boing Boing: Sex doll sparks bomb alert at post office, Tickle Me Elmo fur coats, This year's robot toys: Boogie Woogie Elmo.

Update: Apparently, Elmo has some history on the wrong side of the law. Widgett says, "Thought I'd throw out a quote from the toy's creator as to how this has apparently been a problem from the get-go."

"I was always sending batteries and headless dolls in the mail. I think that's what caught their attention."
-- Mark Johnson-Williams, 'Tickle-Me Elmo' doll designer, on why authorities had considered him a potential Unabomber suspect, 1997

posted by Xeni Jardin at 03:34:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fans beg Sony to sell them lost Fiona Apple album that's on P2P

A Fiona Apple album that Sony decided not to release has become a hit online in underground file-sharing circles, traded by fans who are begging Sony to release the disc so that they can buy it instead of downloading it.

"Extraordinary Machine" is an album that Apple finished over two years ago, but which was quickly shelved by the sad corporate drones over at Sony because they didn't "hear a single" and because it doesn't sound exactly like Norah Jones and because they're, well, corporate drones. They dictate cultural tastes based on relatively narrow and often deeply ignorant criteria related to marketing and money and fear of the new and the different. This is what they do...

And fans have been whipping the tracks into high-quality MP3s and splaying them all over the Net, and Rolling Stone and MTV and other media have picked up on the odd story, noting how fans are calling into the station like mad and most everyone loves the songs and protest Web sites like freefiona.com (alongside dedicated fan sites like fionaapple.org) have popped up to try and get some action and yet Sony refuses to actually release the album and the corporate drones remain mum and everyone's wondering just what the hell's going on.

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:29:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Neuromancer radio play preservation effort in the teeth of bureacracy

A fan of the BBC radio play adaptation of William Gibson's Neuromancer has launched a one-fan preservation and distribution effort. Jody Armstrong has the audio available for download on a web-page, along with some fan-art and a plaintive disclaimer begging someone from the Beeb to return the phone-calls and emails left asking for permission to do so.

I've been trying to locate somebody at the BBC or some information in relation to redistributing this recording to allow those who were not able to hear the play to enjoy it. I have sent a letter, four e-mails via the tortuously confusing BBC Website contacts page and made over a dozen phone calls to various departments. I have left numerous voicemails as a result of these phoen calls. Nobody has responded to the messages, those I spoke too seemed to respond like a dog that had been shown a card trick and no hint as to whether I can redistribute it has been forthcoming.

If, whether it be the BBC itself, those responsibel for the play or William Gibson himself, has a problem with this distribution of the play, please bear in mind 4 things before breaking out the lawyers.

1) The bandwidth, this site and even the pretty pictures you see on this page is mine, an impoverished Gibson fan who wants to do a favour for the other fans. It's out of my pocket, I'm spending my money, be kind...

2) I have made attempts to contact you and have been ignored. True I am probably breaking copyright laws, however I am promoting 'Play of the Week', William Gibson's work and the talented people behind the radioplay.

3) E-Mail me, I'll take it down straight away.

Link (Thanks, Boris!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:16:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

iTunes music ruins Apple slideshows

If you include Apple iTunes Music Store songs in your iMovie/iPhoto slideshows, you're boned if you try to send the slideshows to friends.

"When you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store and you use that song to create a slideshow in iPhoto or use it as an audio track in a movie you create in iMovie, you would expect that your movies & slideshows would work when you email them to other people.

"But no! Not only does Apple NOT let your recipients view your iMovie movies or your iPhoto slideshows, but the worst part about it is that YOU DO NOT receive a warning when creating these slideshows or movies in iPhoto or iMovie.

"Imagine burning your slideshow or movie onto a CD and distributing them to a bunch of people, only to be embarrassed later that none of your recipients can actually view the movie."

Users receive the message "This computer is not authorized to play the file nameofmovie.mov."

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:13:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Grokster scorecard: what theories of liability do the amici endorse?

Jonathan Band, a copyfightin' lawyer from Morrison & Foerster, has created a great roundup of the amicus briefs in Grokster, the Supreme Court case where EFF will argue the right of P2P developers to make tools without having to anticipate and prevent copyright infringement in their designs. The highlight of this is a chart in which the various positions of each of the amici is summed up on a grid. You can't tell the players without a scorecard. 460K PDF Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:56:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Technology pokes holes in NoKo isolation

Revolutionary Meatspace P2P! VCRs cast off by newly-minted Chinese DVD owners trickle into North Korea, along with tapes of South Korean TV shows.

The construction of cellular relay stations last fall along the Chinese side of the bo