Two weeks ago, Edge.org published Jaron Lanier's essay "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism," critiquing the importance people are now placing on Wikipedia and other examples of the "hive mind," as people called it in the cyberdelic early 1990s. It's an engaging essay to be sure, but much more thought-provoking to me are the responses from the likes of Clay Shirky, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold, our own Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, and, of course, Jimmy Wales.

From Douglas Rushkoff:

I have a hard time fearing that the participants of Wikipedia or even the call-in voters of American Idol will be in a position to remake the social order anytime, soon. And I'm concerned that any argument against collaborative activity look fairly at the real reasons why some efforts turn out the way they do. Our fledgling collective intelligences are not emerging in a vacuum, but on media platforms with very specific biases.

First off, we can't go on pretending that even our favorite disintermediation efforts are revolutions in any real sense of the word. Projects like Wikipedia do not overthrow any elite at all, but merely replace one elite — in this case an academic one — with another: the interactive media elite...

While it may be true that a large number of current websites and group projects contain more content aggregation (links) than original works (stuff), that may as well be a critique of the entirety of Western culture since post-modernism. I'm as tired as anyone of art and thought that exists entirely in the realm of context and reference — but you can't blame Wikipedia for architecture based on winks to earlier eras or a music culture obsessed with sampling old recordings instead of playing new compositions.

Honestly, the loudest outcry over our Internet culture's inclination towards re-framing and the "meta" tend to come from those with the most to lose in a society where "credit" is no longer a paramount concern. Most of us who work in or around science and technology understand that our greatest achievements are not personal accomplishments but lucky articulations of collective realizations. Something in the air... Claiming authorship is really just a matter of ego and royalties.

From Cory Doctorow:

Wikipedia isn't great because it's like the Britannica. The Britannica is great at being authoritative, edited, expensive, and monolithic. Wikipedia is great at being free, brawling, universal, and instantaneous.

From Jimmy Wales (italics indicate quotes from Jaron's original essay):

"A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds."

My response is quite simple: this alleged "core belief" is not one which is held by me, nor as far as I know, by any important or prominent Wikipedians. Nor do we have any particular faith in collectives or collectivism as a mode of writing. Authoring at Wikipedia, as everywhere, is done by individuals exercising the judgment of their own minds.

"The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first."

Indeed.

Link

UPDATE: Jaron Lanier writes us that he's received a lot of negative feedback from people who he thinks may not have actually read his original essay:

In the essay i criticized the desire (that has only recently become influential) to create an "oracle effect" out of anonymity on the internet - that's the thing i identified as being a new type of collectivism, but i did not make that accusation against the wikipedia - or against social cooperation on the net, which is something i was an early true believer in- if i remember those weird days well, i think i even made up some of the rhetoric and terminology that is still associated with net advocacy today- anyway, i specifically exempted many internet gatherings from my criticism, including the wikipedia, boingboing, google, cool tools... and also the substance of the essay was not accusatory but constructive- the three rules i proposed for creating effective feedback links to the "hive mind" being one example.

This has been going around for a couple of days, but I just found out about it. It's a neat optical effect -- you stare at a color negative of a photo for 30 seconds (or even just 15), then move the mouse over the photo, keeping your eyes on the black dot. The photo appears in color, until you move your eyes. Link

Danny sez, "Line Noise is the new EFF podcast (RSS or iTunes); this week's episode is a chat with EFF's IP attorney Fred von Lohmann on the background to the Section 115 Reform Act (previously on Boing Boing. He explains how a good bill was used to sneak in bad precedents - including the insane idea that all temporarily cached copies on the Net and in RAM should be copyrightable and subject to licensing.

"Good news on that, by the way -- thanks to your calls and comments, the committee have slowed the pace of this fast-track bill, and are now working to fix the bill's language. Everyone from the Copyright Office to Radio Shack and BellSouth have now commented on the problems, so there's an excellent chance of a clear resolution." Link

Nick of Square America invites you to solve a mystery.

I got this lot of slides about three years ago and I've never been able to figure out just what is going on. There are about 50 slides in all- all dating from between 1959 and 1969 and all of young women. Some, like the ones here have letters written on their foreheads, others have press type with their names on it affixed to either their temples or foreheads. Were the slides taken by a dermatologist or plastic surgeon or were these young women part of some now forgotten experiment.

Link

Apple has the trailer for the next Disney Pixar movie coming out in 2007. It's called Ratatouille and it appears to be about a Parisian rat (without a phony French accent) who, unlike other rats in his family, insists on eating only the finest food served in Paris' best restaurants.

The quality of the video is really nice. Don't you wish YouTube looked half as nice as this? Link

Why are so many drawings from earlier centuries so deliciously weird? Here are a couple I came across on one of my favorite blogs, BibliOdyssey. Link

Funny photo of a urinal with a small ball and goal in it. Link

A while back, law firm Baker & McKenzie sent Boing Boing a snippy letter warning us not to do something we wouldn't do even if they begged us -- broadcast live streams of the FIFA World Cup.

I wonder if Baker & McKenzie will send Wired News a letter complaining that Wired News is facilitating piracy for explaining a variety of ways in which FIFA World Cup fans can enjoy live video streams of the tournament on their computers without paying the rightsholder, Infront Sports & Media? Link

(Image courtesy groovehouse of The Grooveblog.)

Craig Yoe's second Arf publication (first one here), Arf Museum just came out, and it's an immensely giddy, scholary, funny, shocking, and enjoyable history of comics and art seen through the eccentric and eclectic filter of Yoe's fevered, comics-crazed mind.

Yoe was the creative director of Jim Henson's Muppets and a creative director at Nickeodeon and I doubt there's anyone who knows more about cool old comics and who has a better collection of comic book art.

Some of the artists and characters in this issue include Art Spiegelman, Picasso, Patrick McDonnell, Bettie Page, Charles Addams, Coop, Dan DeCarlo, Hugh Hefner, Rube Goldberg, King Kong, Ernie Bushmiller, and Chester Gould.

Like those early, giant-sized issues of RAW, Arf Museum is something I'm going to keep, treasure, and pull off the shelf to pore over for the rest of my life. Link

This month's "Found" section in Wired -- which features photoshopped images of futuristic artefacts -- is a great one: a bookcase full of titles from the future. On the list: "Our Hive Mind, Ourself"; "The Way to Program Poker"; "2- and 3-Brane Quantum Geometry for Dummies" and my favorite: Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History: This Time For Sure." Link

I just finished "JPod," Douglas Coupland's latest novel. Coupland has long been a favorite writer of mine, someone who was able to tell stories about people who could use irony to distance themselves from the worst parts of their lives, but transcend irony to come to the best parts of their lives. JPod is something different.

JPod is a novel about how the novelty-seeking, irony-soaked, instant-nostalgia, gross-out culture of the Internet can corrode your soul, so that when you crack wise, there's nothing underneath it but more wisecracks. The book made me uncomfortable and sometimes even angry, but I never wanted to put it down, and it made me think hard about my own life and values.

Coupland's earlier books, like 1995's Microserfs, tell the stories of smart, committed young people working their guts out because they believe in the transformative power of technology, because their pure passion for technology unites them. These young people are exploited and have personal problems, but they overcome them by supporting one another -- finding ways outside of "enterprise IT" to use technology to make their lives better. They become entrepreneurs, activists, or artists, finding ways to create change where none had existed before.

But JPod has none of that. In JPod, the little brothers and sisters of Generation X slave away at a thinly-disguised EA Games in Vancouver, where marketdroids reward their slavish labor by heaping menial tasks on them, and perverting the games they make so that they're not even cool. None of these people will be a software millionaire. They are people who work sweatshop hours for lousy wages, burn out young, and go nowhere. They use Google and eBay to scour the globe for anything to make their lives meaningful. They don't find it.

The storyline is all over the place. Much of it is cartoony -- sub-plots about Chinese gangsters, militant lesbians and dope-growers and so on -- and clearly not meant to be taken seriously. But there's a core story that trundles along as Coupland sings his doomsong, a story about characters as likable as Coupland characters always are, people struggling in ways that makes you want them to succeed.

JPod is the anti-Microserfs. Coupland has written himself as a character into the book, someone reviled by his other characters, presumably for having duped them into thinking that irony and a career in tech will make them happy and fulfilled. He's a villain, and he's pretty unflinching in criticizing his own work.

The prose is peppered with long pastebombs of Internet prose, from the banal to the sublime. eBay UI chrome. Penis enlargement spams. Acronym expansions, humorous and serious. All the valid three-letter Scrabble words. Where this kind of pastebomb appeared in earlier Coupland works, it was ironic, or cool, or funny. In JPod, it's a cross between reverent prose-poetry and a lament at how our brave revolution has become another bureaucracy.

Coupland's message is more than a counsel of despair there. First and foremost, he is indeed saying that working at EA in 2006 is no less miserable and soul-crushing than working for IBM in 1975 was, sure. But he's also reveling in how fast the revolution happened, how many peoples' lives it's touched, how fast it's become the new normal.

Which is right: there's no such thing as a permanent state of turmoil. Eventually, turmoil becomes normal.

But next year's turmoil is always lurking around the corner -- and every generation will get a chance to experience some kind of wrack and roll.

Link

The Danish free culture activists who created a free beer with an open-source recipe have released a new version of their free beer: Free Beer 3.0 with guarana.

Free Beer 3.0 has a new recipe, a new label, and a new Flickr Pool

Master brewer Birthe Skands describes 3.0 as a "traditional, top fermented beer with a very high drinkability factor - defined as the desire to drink another glass or bottle. With heavier beer from Belgium, for example, you'll drink only one glass which you'll indulge in. With FREE BEER you'll want to drink another one - so it's actually thirst quenching. We also wanted a nice color, and ended up with a beautiful, light amber"

Link (Thanks, Henrik!)

Tomorrow, activists in seven cities across the US will picket Apple Stores, handing out information about the dangers of the DRM hidden in Apple's iTunes. iTunes DRM may seem pretty innocuous at first, but every time you invest in an iTunes Store song, you make it more expensive to switch to an Apple competitor's product at any time in the future. You didn't have to abandon your CDs to switch to MP3s (in fact, the more CDs you owned, the better your MP3 experience was, since you could rip those CDs to seed your MP3 collection), but if you want to go from Apple's iTunes to a competing device, ever, you have to be prepared to abandon your whole investment.

Add to that Apple's willingness to remove features from iTunes Store songs in the name of "updating," the absence of any way to give away, sell or loan your iTunes Store songs, and Apple's use of blacklists and legal threats to prevent people from adding functionality to the iPod and iTunes and buying an iTunes song starts to seem like a worse and worse deal (especially since many artists report that they're seeing $0.07 or less from the sale of their music on the iTunes Store, so all your money is doing is lining the pockets of the same recording companies that are busily suing grannies, little kids and everyone else they can get their hands on).

The demonstrations are being organized by the Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design" group, the same cats who crashed Bill Gates's keynote at WinHEC dressed in toxic waste suits. I can't wait to get to one of their actions -- they sound like a hoot!

Let the fun begin! We will be on-site tomorrow from 10am (local time) getting suited-up and you can expect the action to start at 10:30am - remember to bring those cameras!

Apple Store - 1 Stockton St, San Francisco, CA 94108
Apple Store - 679 N Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60611
Apple Store - 4702 NE University Village Pl, Seattle, WA 98105
Apple Store - 100 Cambridge Side Place, Cambridge, MA 02141
Apple Store - 767 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10153
Apple Store - 160 Walt Whitman Rd. Huntington Station, NY 11746h
Apple Store - 6121 West Park Blvd. Plano, TX 75093

Link (Thanks, Peter!)

Update: Micah sez, "Please add the Apple Store at University Village in Seattle to the list!"

Update 2: Will of MaximumPC mag sez, " I'll be at the San Francisco Apple store tomorrow morning with some one-sheet printouts explaining why DRM sucks, and as many copies of our April issue as I can carry. The April issue tells people how they can strip DRM from all their media--CDs, DVDs, downloaded music, and more."

My pal John Perry Barlow -- Grateful Dead lyricist, copyfighter, and co-founder of EFF -- conducted an electronic debate with ex-congressman Dan Glickman, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America on the BBC's website. The results are a hoot.

These are aging industries run by aging men, and they're up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices. And I don't have a question about who's going to win that one eventually.

There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends but because they want to stick it to the movie business.

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

At the Institute for the Future, my colleague Jason Tester creates "Artifacts from the Future," physical mock-ups of imaginary products, objects, and services that embody how new technology may someday impact our lives. In the new issue of Business 2.0, Chris Null looks at this forecasting methodology and showcases a handful of Jason's artifacts, including these RFID locators and blockers, and pharma fruit. From the article:

You might go to an IFTF presentation and see baskets of finessed fruit that promise cognitive enhancement. Or you might wake up in the hotel where the IFTF seminar was being held to find your newspaper dated 10 years hence.

Artifacts were intended to start conversations. They worked. Mark Schar, senior vice president of financial software company Intuit, an IFTF client, says, "When you present forecasts to a group of executives, you're standing there and waving your arms a lot. When you put an artifact in front of them, they go, 'Oh, I get it.'"

Link

Roq la Rue Gallery is presented a show of up-and-coming Pop Surrealists. It opens tonight!

Roq la Rue is pleased to present a giant group show for its June exhibit, entitled "Fresh Meat" and featuring artists who have not exhibited at the gallery before (Ok, with the exception of a couple!). Some artists are newly emerging onto the gallery scene, others are more established and exhibit regularly all over the country. The show has no overarching theme, just lots of fresh talent ranging from contemporary figurative to retro illustration, true down and dirty rock n roll Lowbrow to sublime exquisitely rendered Surrealism. (Shown here: David Bowers).

Link

Salon has a short item explaining why Bush decided to let Zarqawi kill thousands of innocent people instead of taking him out when he had the chance to years ago:

As NBC News reported back in 2004, U.S. military planners drew up plans to take out Zarqawi three times in 2002 and 2003, but the Bush administration killed the plans each time. Why? Because, military officials told NBC, the Bush administration feared that destroying Zarqawi's terrorist camp in Iraq "could undercut its case for war against Saddam."

Link

Ricky sez, "Jeff Lange at Jim Hill Media was recently invited to Mouse Surplus, the Orlando-based surplus vendor for Walt Disney World, to explore their new, huge warehouse facility. One of Jeff's finds while there was a box of old Horizons film strips and acetates used in the classic Epcot attraction. He also offers up pictures of the vast warehouse space, including a photo of Mouse Surplus' array of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and Snow White's Scary Adventure ride vehicles. If only I had the space..."

Looking at this next series of acetates (Which were used in "Horizons" pre-show area. So that WDW guests could then get a sense of the sorts of things that they'd soon be seeing as they made their way through the queue of this Future World attraction), I'm reminded of how hopeful "Horizons" used to be. The bright new future that was supposedly waiting for all of us. Whether we chose to continue to live on Earth ...

Link (Thanks, Ricky!)

My friend Mako got married recently; he's a hacker and so's his new wife, Mika, and they exchanged vows of mathematical significance: "the numbers of letters in each word in each vow matches consecutive digit in the decimal expansion of a famous mathematical constant." Mika chose Pi, Mako chose Phi. Here's the Pi vow:

Now, I give a total offertory to joyful union.

I'll honor - joyously, endlessly, loyally, devotedly - you.

In the marriage that unites us, paired Yang and Yin, Benjamin and me, forever soulmates, shall complement as partners steadily.

With a doubtless promise, I pledge integrity and stability sincerely. Our rounded rings, a completely noble treasure; it represents continual respect, love, perpetual link with trust, limitless.

My vow: absolutely lasting devotion.

Link (via Vitanova)

The new Canadian Heritage Minister had her election campaign funded by big entertainment companies, the very companies she's supposed to be overseeing in office.

In the last Canadian elections, we kicked out Sam Bulte, a Liberal Party candidate favored for the spot of Heritage Minister. Bulte had been funding her campaigns by raising huge sums from the entertainment and pharma companies, whom she was meant to be guarding. Naturally, her policies when in office stole from the public interest to deliver windfall profits to those companies.

Now it seems that her successor, Conservative Party Heritage Minister Bev Oda, became the focus of the entertainment industry's funding efforts as it became clear that Bulte would not be re-elected (Bulte went crazy when her election prospects weakened, screaming in all-candidates meetings about not being "intimidated by user-rights zealots and EFF members").

Unlike the US, Canada does not have a tradition of corporate funding of Parliamentary campaigns. Indeed, Michael Geist got many of the candidates in the last election to sign onto a pledge not to take campaign funding from industries that they are likely to end up overseeing once in office. This only makes sense -- if you're taking a government paycheck to represent the public interest by overseeing an industry, that industry shouldn't be lining your pockets.

Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda did not take the pledge. According to data just released by Elections Canada, if she had, she would not hold her current position. During the campaign, Oda received contributions from many in the copyright lobby including Universal Music (tied for her third largest external contributor), the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association, the Entertainment Software Alliance, the Canadian Music Publishers Association, and CRIA's own Graham Henderson. In addition, the broadcast lobby were also active supporters with Melinda Rogers (Ted's daughter), Gary Slaight, Phil Lind, Jay Switzer, and the Canadian Association of Broadcasters.

In all, a significant portion of Oda's external funding during the campaign came from the very groups that now seek support from Minister Oda on key policy issues. Further, it is striking that all the corporate and association donations came late in the campaign as the polls showed the Conservatives in the lead and after the Bulte story was generating public interest.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Last week, Cory posted about how Mike Kuniavsky hacked a cheap 3D mouse into a gestural interface for his Mac. Mike likened it to a "magic wand." In his continuing inquiry into "magic" as a user interface, Mike compiled a partial bibliography of publications discussing magic or enchantment in the context of human-computer interaction. As someone who loves magic and, er, interfacing with computers, I'm thrilled by Mike's research thread! Link

Princeton University has posted the 56 works they've selected for their 2006 Art of Science exhibition. These are pieces "produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science." Electrical Engineering grad student Qiangfei Xia's "Easter Bonnet" won third prize in the competition and I think it's stunning.

From his description of the artwork:

A laser pulse melted a tiny piece of metal on a silicon chip, resulting in an unexpected shape that looks like a very, very small Easter bonnet. An unintended dust particle serves as a decorative flower on its top. The size of the bonnet in this photo, measured from left to right, is about 45 micrometers, half the diameter of a human hair.

Link (via easternblot.net)

The Sheraton Chicago Hotel now offers a free service where they'll lock up your BlackBerry or other mobile device to help you fight your addiction. It's a cute idea, but apparently the general manager will surrender the device to you upon request. It would be more fun if upon check in you gave him the right to refuse your request at his own discretion. Link

My latest issue of Lab Notes from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering is online. I hope you enjoy it! In this issue:

* Computing Material Truths: How computers are used to simulate the mechanics of new nanomaterials

* Nuclear Detective: An ultra-high resolution radiation detector

* A Logical Approach to Computer Security: Computational logic to identify malware

Link

Fort Lauderdale, FL high school students in a criminology class took a field trip on Monday to seek out fake evidence at a mock crime scene set up by their teacher at a local park. No word whether the teacher gave extra credit to the kids who stumbled upon a real corpse at the scene. From Reuters:

There was no sign of foul play and the 45-year-old homeless man appeared to have died of natural causes, (Fort Lauderdale Police detective Kathy Collins) said...

"I don't really think I could take finding any more dead bodies, especially if it was rotting," Juan Cantor, 15, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper.

Link

The University at Buffalo Addiction Research Unit hosts a fun gallery of psychoactive drugs that were legal during the late-19th through mid-20th century. For example benzedrine inhalers (racemic amphetamine) could be bought OTC until the 1950s. The Web site even shows a Pan Am airline menu offering a Benzedrine inhaler as a "service item" for your flying comfort, along with a toothbrush, sewing kit, and kleenex. From the site:

The prohibition of psychoactive substances has evolved gradually in the United States and in Europe. The opium-containing preparation laudanum had been widely available since the 18th century. Morphine, cocaine, and even heroin were seen as miracle cures when they were first discovered. During the mid to late 19th century, many manufacturers proudly proclaimed that their products contained cocaine or opium. A few, like Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup for infants which contained morphine, were more guarded in divulging their principal ingredients. By the beginning of the 20th century, problems with habitual use of cocaine and opiates was becoming increasingly apparent. This led to the removal of these substances from some products (e.g., Coca Cola) and to the introduction of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) in the United States which required the listing of ingredients on product labels. Nonetheless, standard narcotic remedies like paregoric remained readily available into the early 20th century, and Benzedrine inhalers were marketed without prescription until the early 1950s. Codeine wasn't removed from most over-the-counter cough suppressants until the early 1980s.

Link (via Mind Hacks)

eBay Guides has a collection of tips to boost your chances of grabbing a prize in a claw machine game. From the Guide:

Three Pronged Claws:
This type of claw usually handles small stuffed animals and small collectable basketballs. This type of claw is somewhat similar to the four pronged claw, but instead of having two of the prongs positioned above the arms, you have a choice of the prongs going around the left or right arm. Have the claw at an angle so that it covers the whole chest area of a stuffed animal; this is the best way to get things out of three pronged machines. To get a small collectible basketball, try and make sure a ball is not being surrounded by any other basketballs. For this might rotate the claw on its way down and might miss your basketball target. If this is inevitable, try and make it straight down as much as possible. For best results, aim the center of the prongs in the radius center of the basketball. This technique draws a 60 to 70 percent chance of grabbing a basketball, but it is very difficult to center the claw in the middle of the basketball.

Link (via Parent Hacks)

Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom interviewed George Soros and it's excellent.

Amanda asked Soros about George Bush's rock-bottom approval ratings --

Amanda: What helped Americans get the picture?

Soros: Reality. Link

Jodin Morey says:

Impeach Bush yourself! This is much more than just a petition.

There's a little known and rarely used clause of the in the rules for the House of Representatives which sets forth the various ways in which a president can be impeached. Only the House Judiciary Committee puts together the Articles of Impeachment, but before that happens, someone has to initiate the process.

That's where we come in. In addition to the State-by-State method, one of the ways to get impeachment going is for individual citizens like you and me to submit a memorial. ImpeachforPeace.org has created a new memorial based on one which was successful in impeaching a federal official in the past. You can find it on their website as a PDF.

You can initiate the impeachment process yourself by downloading the memorial, filling in the relevant information in the blanks (your name, state, etc.), and sending it in.

More information on the precedent for submitting an impeachment memorial, and the House Rules on this procedure, can also be found at the above address.

If you have any doubts that Bush has committed crimes warranting impeachment, read this page.

If you're concerned that impeachment might not be the best strategy at this point, read the bottom of this page.

Link

Cloudscout sez, "I used to order from a place called Galactic Pizza when I lived in downtown Minneapolis. They're a quirky little pizza joint that delivers their pizzas in electric cars. They also dress as superheroes. Yes, the underwear-pervert, caped-crusader kind. Apparently, it's not just a costume. One of these spandex-clad deliverators foiled a robbery attempt in Minneapolis last night."

A strange man grabbed for Teresa's purse...they struggled. The man eventually got the purse and took off.

What followed had Teresa doing a double-take--In a flash, someone was giving chase to the robber.

"He had on a white tunic, a beige leotard, and tights and boots," Teresa explained. The man was also wearing a cape.

Link (Thanks, Cloudscout!)

Update: David sends in this mirror of the video

Y: The Last Man is one of my three top favorite comic book series, and the latest bound collection has just hit the shelves. Y is the story of Yorick Brown, the last male survivor of a mystery plague that has wiped out all the men on Earth. The seven (and counting) volumes in the saga chronicle his encounters with mysterious espionage rings, homespun farm communities, radical Amazon warriors, government thugs and civic heroes, and there's never a moment to stop and catch your breath on the way.

Volume 7, Paper Dolls, picks up the story with Yorick on a sub docked in a heroin-wracked Australia. Yorick convinces his minders to let him slip into Sydney to try to track down his long-lost fiancee. About half the book is told in flashbook, filling in the fascinating life's stories of characters we've come to know and love. The artwork is expressive -- sometimes moody and sometimes comic, but always sharp. The dialogue is likewise sharp: the wisecracks in Y are some of the best reasons to pick this series up.

Y makes me wish I had a time machine so I could jump forward six or eight months and pick up the next collection. Every one of the Y books has left me wanting more. Lots more.

Book 7 Link, Book 6 Link Book 5 Link, Book 4 Link, Book 3 Link, Book 2 Link, Book 1 Link

See also:
The first Y collection
The fifth Y collection

These beach-sandals have a built-in bottle opener hidden on the undersole. Great idea, provided you haven't been walking in dog crap or anything else you wouldn't want smeared on the lip of the bottle you're about to drink from. Link (via Popgadget)

The Inquirer reports that licenses for the video DRM system HDMI/HDCP cost $15,000. HDCP licenses are required for electronics (monitors, players, recorders) that want to use high-definition video from the Hollywood studios. On top of the 15 grand, companies have to meet a punishing and arbitrary "compliance" regime that requires them to shut out open source developers who want to build apps for their hardware and implement a host of anti-user features that treat their customers like crooks.

Of course you have to pay the licensing fee of $15.000 and this will sure keep a lot of the Taiwanese companies out of this promising marchitecture.

Some of them want to use and have paid the licensing fees as the people in Japan really wants the graphic cards and the motherboards with HDMI on it. It is an easy way to drive audio and video via single cable, nothing more than that.

Link

The Aula 2006 Movement is a Finnish conference on technology and mobility that's happening next week. I'm speaking at it, as is Alice Taylor of the Wonderland blog, Clay Shirky, Justin Hall, Joi Ito, danah boyd, FON-founder Martin Varsavsky and many others. These are great, conversational, intense events (I spoke at one in 2003) and they're free and open to the public. If you find yourself in Helsinki next Wednesday, June 14, come on down to the Bio Rex theatre at Mannerheimintie 22-24. The conference has actually relocated to a larger venue to make sure the largest number of people can attend. Link (Thanks, Marko!)

In this youtube, a band identified as the "Indian Beatles" performs a totally rockin' version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" in Hindi. I'm pretty sure I have this song as an MP3 somewhere, but with the video added in, it's a hundred times more awesome.

Commenters on the YouTube page add more details. The song is "Tumse Hai Dil Ko" from the film "Jaanwar" -- and this: "The camera work is exceptional, the singing great, and the fact that this was just 1 year after the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show makes this work of adaptive plagiarism all the more impressive." Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Craftbits has a simple and fun project for mounting your iPod inside a vintage transistor radio. Link (Thanks, Vikram!)

A Japanese occupational therapy center has devised a canned bread product that stays fresh for three years without preservatives:

The group devised three flavorful recipes--chocolate chip; raisin and fruit; and a coffee, fruit and nut concoction. To ensure high quality, the bakers have the pH levels and level of moisture in cans checked monthly. Currently, the bakery produces only 500 cans a day, but it hopes soon to double that output.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Jon Stewart made mincemeat of out neanderthal pundit Bill Bennett in a debate on gay marriage; Crooks and Liars has the video:

Bennett: Well I think if gay..gay people are already members of families...

Stewart: What? (almost spitting out his drink)

Bennett: They're sons and they're daughters..

Stewart: So that's where the buck stops, that's the gay ceiling.

Bennett Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.

Stewart:I disagree, I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

Link (via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

Update: YouTube mirror, Comedy Central Mirror (Thanks, Matt and Jed!)

Kikuyumoja, a blogger, recounts an ingenious means by which he fixed his Dell laptop hinge with a bit of sheet metal from a cookie tin:

The next piece of (ma)bati I sighted in the kitchen was an old cookie box - for some ppl that's just rubbish but for me it equals a source of clean, thin sheet metal that I could use for the repair.

I cut out the desired size, double-layered it (to improve stability)....

...and used flat pliers to mold it around the remaining parts of the hinge.

After some small adjustments, the "new" hinge just fit in perfectly well:

Link (via Afrigadget)

Baen's Universe is a new science fiction PDF magazine that sells for $30/6 issues -- it's delivered with no DRM in pure electronic form. Lots of sf writers have already sold stories to the magazine (my own story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth will appear there) from Charlie Stross to Gene Wolfe, from Sarah Zettel to Catherine Asaro, plus David Brin, Greg Benford, and many, many others. Each issue is as long as a long novel -- 150,000 words, about twice as long as a typical sf magazine. The first issue launches this month. Link

Christo of Selectparks.net asks us to pass on news of his questionnaire, "The questionnaire is being used to garner experiences and opinions of game administrators (and other players) monitoring game play. With the growth of games as a social interaction tool (aka SecondLife) issues of avatar privacy and digital persona rights are gaining more attention." Link (Thanks, Christo!)

Doug sez, "The non-profit Conversations Network has just launched a new channel about businesses that want to make the world a better place. It's a collaboration with the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Pittsburgh Social Enterprise Accelerator, associated with Carnegie Mellon University. Free MP3s of conferences from Stanford and interviews with folks like Ethan Zuckerman and David Bornstein." Link (Thanks, Doug!)

Tiscali is a European ISP that had a deal with IFPI, the paramilitary international wing of the RIAA, to offer legal, paid for, licensed streaming music to its customers. IFPI made them remove the feature that allowed paying customers to search for the music they wanted to hear by artist (!) saying that this was too much "interactivity."

Meanwhile, if you want to download non-DRM music for free or cheap, there's always eDonkey, ThePirateBay.org and AllOfMP3.com.

Amazing that the only folks who've managed to offer a usable, decent music service are the ones who are ripping off the music industry. If I was a musician hoping to earn a royalty or two, I'd be plenty pissed at how my label (through IFPI) keeps chasing off the paying customers.

It took the move after it was told to remove the service's search by artist...

"Consumers were allowed a high degree of interactivity that breached these rules in many ways - for example, streaming individual tracks on demand," it said.

Link

The blogger at Panocamera works at a studio with a bunch of Haunted Mansion nuts who've made "Hitchhiking Ghosts" Hallowe'en costumes and changing-paintings like those in Disneyland's wonderful ride. Now he's made a singing bust like the ones in the graveyard: a sculpted blank head on which a face is projected. Unfortunately, there aren't many photos, but the build notes are intriguing:

The ingredients finally came together today. I started with a $29 PS2 joystick that had an embedded fold-out LCD. After some butchering, I removed the backlight and created the world's cheapest video projector. After rummaging through some old slide projector gear, I found a good lens to throw the image and (for testing) used my bike light as a projector bulb.

To feed the projector, I'm using an old Lyra video jukebox. It's amazing how gadgets age so quickly, iPod is just so much easier to convert video that the Lyra has obsolesced. The hard part was getting the Thurl Ravenscroft video from the mansion. 'Turns out if you ride a few times, you will sooner or later find the doombuggies in the ride stop so that people who need extra help can board. If one is quick with a camcorder, the whole performance can be captured in under minute. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Some Photoshop transformations were needed to orient the video for projection.

Link (Thanks, Wil!)

Just a friendly reminder that the only way to suggest an item for Boing Boing is by following the directions here. We really appreciate your submissions, but we can't accept them via email sent to our personal addresses. Also, please don't add us to any email lists or PR blasts without our permission. Thanks so much! Link

Researchers in Germany have generated beautiful examples of ball lightning in vitro. Sometimes seen hovering over the ground during thunderstorms (and occasionally confused with a UFO), ball lightning is a mysterious spherical, glowing, ball of energy that scientists believe could be plasma. The plasma clouds that these scientists created were around 20 centimeters across and lasted for half a second. From New Scientist:

Earlier this year, Israeli scientists created plasma balls by using microwaves to vaporise various materials, but Gerd Fussmann and his colleagues (at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Humboldt University in Berlin) used a different approach that they believe comes closer to the natural phenomenon.

“It is likely that lightning flashes and water interact to produce ball lightning,” says Fussmann. “We therefore use a short, high-voltage discharge of 5000 volts to vaporise some of the water in a glass tank and create the plasma ball.”

The tank contains two electrodes, one of which is insulated from the surrounding water by a clay tube. The high voltage causes enormous currents of up to 60 amps – over 200 times those needed to cause death – to flow through the water for a fraction of a second. These enter the clay tube, causing the water there to evaporate and a luminous plasma ball - consisting of ionised water molecules - to rise from the surface.

Link to New Scientist article, Link to previous BB post about making "ball lightning" in your kitchen

The Daily Mail reports on a wearable rigid wing system developed by ESG Elektroniksystem designed so that military parachutists can glide up to 200 kilometers before pulling the ripcord. The next rev of the outfit will integrate turbo jets in the wings. It sounds a lot like the jet-powered BirdMan suit that Visa Parviainen flies around in over Finland. (I profiled Visa in the latest issue of MAKE:.) From the Daily Mail article describing the ESG gear:

Fitted with oxygen supply, stabilisation and navigation aides, troops wearing the wings will jump from a high-altitude transport aircraft which can stay far away from enemy territory - or on secret peacetime missions could avoid detection or suspicion by staying close to commercial airliner flight paths.

The manufacturers claim the ESG wing is '100 per cent silent' and 'extremely difficult' to track using radar.

Once close to their target landing zone, the troops pull their parachute rip cord to open their canopy and then land normally.

Link to Daily Mail article, Link to ESG press release (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

UPDATE: BB reader Thomas Beckett points out that flying suits appeared in the film Lara Croft Tom Raider: The Cradle of Life. From IMDB:

In the scene where Lara Croft and partner jump off a building with "flying suits" on, the stunt was performed by the two men who invented the suits. No CGI, wires, nets, or other SFX were involved. This suit was invented by Patrick de Gayardon who was killed in parachute accident in April 1998 during testing of a new parachute type in Hawaii. Link

From the maker of the free iSquint (an application I use all the time to convert videos to iPod format) comes VisualHub, a $23.32 application that does everything iSquint does and more, including fitting "up to 18 hours of video on one DVD" that you can play on "any standalone DVD player." Link

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman posts some random notes from his visit to the "Bigfoot In Texas?" exhibit in San Antonio. Running until July 30 at the University of Texas San Antonio's Institute of Texan Cultures, the exhibition and lecture series is a collaboration with the Texas Bigfoot Research Center. From Loren's post:

Going into the main hall of the Bigfoot exhibition, one is immediately struck by how, well, “museum-quality” it appears. There are display cases filled with replica skulls of Gigantopithecus and gorilla, the famed British Columbian carved stone head and foot bowl of Sasquatch, a Chehalis First Nations Sasquatch mask from British Columbia, and descriptive panels all around discussing hairy hominoids.

Link to Cryptomundo post, Link to Bigfoot In Texas?

Incredible and beautiful photos from an online Smithsonian magazine article: "In 1984, Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every last person in Oxford, Iowa. Two decades later, he's doing it again, creating a unique portrait of heartland America." Link

Check out Feldstein's gallery of more photos, too!