[an error occurred while processing this directive]

View a recent day: May 25 | May 24 | May 23 | previous days | by month and year

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Michael Leddy on the strategy of granularity

Orange Crate Art blogger Michael Leddy, a college English professor, wrote a short and insightful essay for Lifehack.org titled "Granularity For Students." Michael presents a simple idea: break tasks down into manageable chunks and they won't be as daunting. But as he says, "the typical spiral-bound student-planner doesn’t seem to encourage (granularity); that tool is often little more than a place to store due dates: “research paper due.” I like how Michael explains the way granularity might be applied to the task of writing:

Instead of writing a draft and “looking it over,” it’s much smarter to break down the work of writing and editing by thinking about one thing at a time. Developing a strong thesis statement: that’s one task. Working out a sequence of paragraphs to develop that thesis: another task. Figuring out how to make a transition from one paragraph to another: another task. If you tend to have patterns of errors in your writing, look for each kind of error, one at a time. Noun-pronoun agreement? Read a draft once through looking only for that. Comma splices? Read once through with your eyes on the commas. It might seem that approaching the work of writing and editing in terms of smaller, separate tasks is unnecessarily cumbersome, but breaking things down will likely make it far easier to work more effectively and come out with a stronger piece of writing. No writer can think about everything at once.

Link

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

Library of America to publish Philip K. Dick

The excellent Library of America--publisher of hardcover editions of such literary greats as Fitzgerald, Melville, Thoreau, Twain, and Stein--will release a collection of four novels from surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Neo-noir author Jonathan Lethem is slated to edit the volume. (Link to my post on Monday about PKD's influence on Lethem.) From the Associated Press:

"(Dick) is someone, like Raymond Chandler, who took the conventions of a pulp genre and made very adventurous literary use of them," Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, told The Associated Press on Tuesday...

Beyond literary merit, Rudin cited a couple of factors in choosing Dick — the 25th anniversary next summer of Blade Runner, which will be marked by director Ridley Scott's remastered "final cut," and the positive response to the Library of America's volume of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, published in 2005.

"There were a lot of people who felt their reading tastes were validated by including Lovecraft in the library," Rudin said.

Link (Thanks, Professor Gill!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:46:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Volkswagen's sneaky trick to make money

Volkswagen Credit recently sent a letter to its customers, inviting them to skip a payment this month. But the fine print reveals that they will charge you $25 to take them up on their seemingly kind holiday offer.

"The holidays...time to give thanks, spread joy and shop for the best sales. Now, here's the perfect "gift" to help you stretch your holiday dollar. Volkswagen Credit is offering you the opportunity to 'skip' your December 2006 payment on your current account listed above. [...] Upon receipt of your extension agreement, we will assess your account a $25.00 extension fee, payable on your next due invoice. There is no need to send money at this time. [...] Happy Holidays!"

I like the way Volkswagen put the word "gift" in quotes.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:14:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hummer wheel ad on Craigslist featuring a crack smoker

This unusual ad for a set of Hummer tires was spotted on the Phoenix Craigslist. I wonder if the photo on the bottom right implies that the seller would be willing to trade the tires for a rock. Click image for a better look. (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)


UPDATE: And the ad is back up with a new photo in the bottom right and the additional comment, "I changed my last pic maybe this one won't get flagged"
Link (Thanks, Josh Weiss!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:05:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Confiscated bats at Louisville airport

Aww... look at those cute pink bats in the confiscation bin. From Todd Lappin:

"In Louisville, Kentucky -- home to Louisville Slugger, America's most famous baseball bat manufacturer -- TSA has a special warning display near the security screening area at the airport.

"Sadly, this is the closest thing to 'local flavor' that I've seen at any of the otherwise uniformly-grim TSA outposts around the country."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:04:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sterling skull cufflinks

These handsome sterling silver skull cufflinks by designer Christofle are $225 from Vivre, the same fine catalog that brought us the "Baby Devil Art" and "Baby Cross Bone" multi-thousand-dollar pendants.
Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:49:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Carved animal trophy heads

Roost has designed a line of stately and elegant animal trophy heads hand-carved from blocks of laminated basswood. The range includes a Cataline Goat, Bighorn Sheep, Blesbock, Reedbuck, and others. Seen here is the Noble Stag (H 42" x W 29"), priced at $595 from Velocity Art and Design in Seattle.
Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:37:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Whale attacks trainer at SeaWorld

A "killer whale" named Kasatka attacked a trainer during a show at San Diego's SeaWorld last night. Apparently, the orca grabbed trainer Ken Peters and pulled him twice to the bottom of the tank, breaking his foot. From Reuters:

SeaWorld's vice president of zoology, Mike Scarpuzzi, said the incident happened when female orca Kasatka was supposed to shoot out of the water upright so that the trainer could dive off her nose.

Instead, Kasatka grabbed the trainer's foot and dived to the bottom of the 36-foot-(11-metre-)deep tank, Scarpuzzi said. They surfaced less than a minute later, but she ignored other trainers' signals to draw her to the side.

The orca dived a second time with the trainer for about a minute. The trainer "stayed calm and calmed the whale down. He gently rubbed the whale, stroked her back," and she let go, Scarpuzzi said.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:14:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Belt-drive watch

Tag Heuer have released a concept belt-drive watch called the V4 -- you have to see the video to believe it.

Powered by a oscillating linear weight that falls back and forth within the central shaft - transmitting the energy to the four ball bearing barrels. All part of the mechanical revolution in watchmaking where everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel - but this time with belts.

Link

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

Juicing the Brain in Scientific American

Scientific American reports on military research to "juice up" soldiers' brains using amphetamine-alternatives like Provigil and Ampakine CX717. The aim, of course, is to find the next generation "go pill" that fighters can pop to stay awake longer without impairing their cognitive abilities. The article also discusses transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a method to stimulate specific regions of neurons to possibly alleviate depression or, of interest to the military, improve reaction time. (More on TMS in this Popular Science article I wrote several years ago.) For me though, the most interesting bit in the SciAm article is the brief discussion of the "fear gene." From the article:

A distinguished team of U.S. researchers reported in 2005 that a gene called stathmin, which is expressed in the amygdala (the seat of emotion), is associated with both innate and learned fear. The researchers bred mice without the gene and put them in aversive situations, such as giving them a mild shock at a certain point in their cage. Normal mice exhibited traditional fear behavior by freezing in place, but the altered mice froze less often. And when both types of mice were put in an open field environment--an innately threatening situation--the mice without stathmin spent more time in the center of the field and explored more than the control mice.

Do individuals who have lesser stathmin expression exhibit less fear? It is unlikely that there is a one-to-one correspondence, because humans are far more psychologically complex than mice, capable of modifying their genetically programmed behavior. Yet it is not difficult to imagine that a military official who overestimates the significance of genetic information will someday propose screening Special Forces candidates, or even raw recruits, for the "fear gene." Indeed, a few years ago the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company had to pay $2.2 million to employees who had been secretly tested for a gene associated with carpal tunnel syndrome, even though the scientists who developed the testing technique said it could not work for that purpose. The company was trying to see if the workers' medical claims were attributable to their jobs or their genes.

If DNA testing for a fear gene is both scientifically and ethically dicey, what about setting out to create people who lack that characteristic? Would breeding humans without stathmin or other genes associated with fear reactions engender more courageous fighters? Would parents sign on for such meddling if they harbored ambitions for a child capable of a glorious military career or just didn't want to give birth to a "sissy"?

Link

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

Mechanical pump powered by heart cells

Japanese researchers have built a miniature pump that's driven by living cells cultured from a rat's heart muscles. Instead of batteries, the pump is powered by a nutrient bath. Someday, this kind of bio-mechanical pump could be integrated into medical implants or labs-on-a-chip. According to the scientists from the University of Tokyo and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, the next step is to integrate chambers and valves to better control the liquid being pumped. From New Scientist:

The main part of the pump is made from a flexible polymer sphere 5 millimetres in diameter. Teflon capillary tubes measuring 400 microns in diameter are inserted into opposite sides of this sphere.

A cell-friendly protein coating is then added to the sphere followed by a sheet of pulsing cultured heart cells. After just an hour the cells are firmly attached and begin driving the pump.

To test the pump, the researchers placed it in a nutrient medium at human body temperature (37°C). They watched through a microscope as small polystyrene balls contained with a fluid moved through the pump's tubes. The pump operated continuously for six days in testing.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:44:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Workings of an ancient computer

Scientists have uncovered the workings of an ancient computer called the Antikythera Mechanism. Built at the end of the second century B.C.E, the device was used to calculate and display moon phases and a luni-solar calendar. Its exact workings have been something of a mystery since it was first found in 1901 at the site of a Roman shipwreck. Now, researchers from the UK, Greece, and US report that high-resolution imaging have revealed the function of the gears and the partial inscriptions on the body of the machine. They report their findings in this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature.

From the New York Times:

They said their findings showed that the inscriptions related to lunar-solar motions and the gears were a mechanical representation of the irregularities of the Moon’s orbital course across the sky, as theorized by the astronomer Hipparchos. They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C...

Historians of technology think the instrument is technically more complex than any known device for at least a millennium afterward.

The mechanism, presumably used in preparing calendars for seasons of planting and harvesting and fixing religious festivals, had at least 30, possibly 37, hand-cut bronze gear-wheels, the researchers reported. An ingenious pin-and-slot device connecting two gear-wheels induced variations in the representation of lunar motions according to the Hipparchos model of the Moon’s elliptical orbit around Earth.

Link to NYT article, Link to abstract at Nature (Thanks, Mike Liebhold!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:34:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cactus building

Rotterdam's Urban Cactus housing project (UCX Architects) uses ingenious staggered terraces to make huge, sunny spaces, and a building profile that seems to have been parachuted in from 1945's future.

They placed the 98 residential units on 19 floors, using the pattern of outdoor spaces to determine the overall appearance of the project.

The slightly irregular pattern alternates these outdoor spaces to create what are in effect double-height spaces. Each unit then receives more sunlight than a typical stacked composition.

Link (via Futurismic)

Update: Fabio FZero sez, "The cactus building reminded me of this other architecture experiment in Montreal, created for Expo '67. It looks like a bunch of matchboxes stacked on top of each other, but provides a garden with open and unblocked view for all apartments. Impressive!"

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:13:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buttonless elevtors for efficient routing

Buttonless elevators are programmed in the lobby -- you enter your floor and are directed to a given lift. The idea is to make elevators efficient at routing -- say, by putting everyone going to floor 8 in the same box. However, the loss of control freaks people out:

You can't change your mind about where you're going after the doors shut. "Once you get on, you've got claustrophobia," says Mr. Glassberg, who is a senior vice president at Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc.'s TV Guide. He calls the new elevators "Wonkavators," after the flying glass elevator in the movie "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory..."

Most people catch on pretty quickly. Just a month after the Hearst Tower opened, some Hearst executives said they were forgetting to push buttons in old-fashioned elevators. "My problem has become that I keep forgetting to press buttons in the elevator in my apartment building, so as I tap tap tap on my BlackBerry, I realize minutes later that the elevator hasn't moved," says Atoosa Rubenstein, the departing editor in chief of Hearst's Seventeen magazine.

Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:54:32 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

LP turntable powered by built-in gasoline engine

This beautiful turntable is powered by a 2.5 cc engine. It wasn't made as a real product, but it sure looks cool. Link (Via Ektopia)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:48:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Arm-trapping fire-alarm immolates Samaritans

In 1938, Modern Mechanix magazine ran an article on a new design for a fire-alarm box. It had an arm-hold trap built in that held the alarm-puller in place until the fire department arrived -- the idea was to lock prank-alarm-pullers in place (of course, if you were dumb enough to pull an alarm during a fire, you were horribly trapped alive in the flames until you succumbed to immolation or asphyxiation).

THE sending of false fire alarms by mischievous persons may be eliminated through use of a newly developed call box. To use the device, the sender of an alarm must pass a hand through a special compartment to reach the signal dial. Once the dial has been turned, the sender’s hand is locked in the compartment until released by a fireman or policeman with a key.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Funny Internet meme gum

BlueQ sells a line of gum in funny, Internet-meme-y boxes, including one bearing the classic legend, "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten." Link (via AccordionGuy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:33:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New eBoy poster: FooBar

Those uncontested kings of pixel-based eye-candy, eBoy, have created an astoundingly beautiful new poster called FooBar, and it's an homage to all things webalicious. It's fun looking for your favorite Web brands (Boing Boing and Make are both in it!), and imagine the memories it will evoke when you look at it 20 years from now. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:53:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni.net/trek: dispatches from Guatemala

A quick roundup of posts published to xeni.net/trek, while the electricity holds out. Howdy from what's probably the only internet connection in this part of the Petén jungle. I'm traveling in Guatemala for a month, working on a series of stories in various places here, and maintaining an online journal with quick notes (and video and photos) from the road.

* Chicken Bus of the Sky

* Volcán De Fuego

* Thousands of women protest wave of "femicides"

* Video: haciendo tortillas

* Guatemala and bandwidth policy reform

* 15 die in marketplace fire

* Murders of transgender/transvestite people on the rise

* Video: Marimba players

* Piñatas Encarceladas

* Mercado snapshot - 2 kids share an apple.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:33:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

1960s TV commercial for V-RROOM! tricycle noise-maker

Andrew says: "Until that Sixfinger TV commercial surfaces... thought you might be amused by this old spot for V-rroom, the motorcycle-noise simulator for bikes & trikes.

"I THINK I had one of these... I'm going to tell myself I did. (Giant Yoko shades sold separately.)" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:17:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mimoco's designer USB drives

Mimoco has a series of flash USB drives designed by artists. The one shown here is called "Monster" and was designed by Devilrobots in Tokyo. The 1 GB version is $79.95. For an extra $5, you can by a hoodie for it. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:09:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barbie doll set comes with plastic dog crap

Here's a Barbie doll toy set that comes with a dog that eats biscuits and then defecates. The photo seems to show that there is no difference between the biscuits and the dog crap. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:43:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Victoria and Albert drops reproduction charges

London's Victoria and Albert museum will allow scholarly magazines and books to reproduce the images in its collection free of charge, and is taking a wide view of what is "scholarly."

Much of the work in the V&A is in the public domain but many museums practice a weird perversion of copyright: they make you agree not to take (or sometimes publish) photos you take while in their halls as a condition of entry. Then they assert the bizarre claim that photos of their public domain collections are themselves new copyrighted works (even though the purpose of such a photo is to apply as little interpretation, art and creativity to the shot as possible) and charge the public a monopoly rent to reproduce the photos they've produced.

It's basically a giant racket to sell penny postcards and license fees for books. But this undermines the museum's core mission: to preserve and promote access to our shared cultural heritage. It's a form of curatorial treason -- betraying the museum's purpose to enrich its coffers.

The V&A has been a very progressive institution on this subject, generally speaking. The last time I visited, I was able to take photos with impunity -- except, bizarrely, in the gift shop (though I was allowed to stand outside of the gift shop, taking pictures of the interior).

In a move which could transform art publishing, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&A) is to drop charges for the reproduction of images in scholarly books and magazines. Reproduction costs now often make it difficult to publish specialist art historical material. The new scheme will come into effect early next year.

The V&A is believed to be the first museum anywhere in the world which is to offer images free of copyright and administrative charges. It also intends to take a “liberal” view on what should be deemed scholarly or educational. The new arrangements will normally apply to all books published by university presses. Free images will also be available for exhibition catalogues and journals such as Apollo and The Burlington.

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:22:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

T-shirt says "I am a terrorist" in binary

This CafePress store sells t-shirts with offensive messages spelled out in "binary" (binary representations of ASCII characters, I'm guessing), including "Fuck Karl Rove," "Bomb, and "I am a Terrorist." Link

Update: Erik sez, "I'd get one with a truly random string of Characters on it. When asked what it says, I'd say "nothing, it's random ones and zeros." Which will mean, of course, I'll be thrown off the plane for having a shirt that says nothing meaningful whatsoever. What a lovely and useful precedent!"

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Brits: sign the petition, save UK copyright

Attention Britons! Although the preliminary indications are good that UK copyright on records won't be extended to 95 years, the fight isn't over yet.

A leaked report from the Gowers Review -- an expert body that is making recommendations on new UK copyright -- suggests that Gowers will reject the idea that records produced in the past should get a fresh 45 years tacked onto their monopolies, a massive picking of the public pocket. Britain offered record labels a bargain: press a record, get 50 years of copyright. Now the labels are coming back and asking for nearly double that, and not just for the records they make tomorrow, but for the records they made yesterday, too.

There's no way the labels will take this lying down. We must be sure that our MPs are aware that the public is watching this issue and will call its representatives to account if they cave into a few giant corporations' greed.

The Open Rights Group has led the charge on this and maintains a public petition to Tessa Jowell, the minister who controls copyright issues in Parliament. If you're a Briton who wants to keep the UK from repeating America's mistakes, sign on now -- and tell your friends to sign on, too.

The music industry says that they are simply looking after musicians, yet the copyright in many of these recordings is not held by the musician, but by the label. Record labels aren’t a charity; they aren’t giving anything to musicians that isn’t already in their contract. Instead, they are driven by a desire to retain control over a small number of profitable recordings in order to maximise profits.

Term extension is not just about the ulterior motives of a powerful industry group. When artists produced works 50 years ago, they did so knowing exactly how many years of exclusive rights they would gain. And they signed those rights away to record labels knowing that they would expire in 50 years.

Copyright has always been a bargain between the interests of the rights holder and the interests of the public. A retroactive extension of the term would do nothing more than provide a windfall to the rightsholders - not necessarily the musicians, remember - and would deny the public the benefit of their side of that bargain.

If you decide to extend copyright on existing recordings, you will destroy our musical and sound recording heritage. If you extend copyright on new recordings, you will deny our children access to that heritage, but without having any significant positive impact on artists who are recording today.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:51:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Make's open source gift guide on Rocketboom

Make senior editor Phil Torrone is on Rocketboom today, showing off gear from the Make Open Source Gift Guide. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:51:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Free This Film is Not Yet Rated screening in LA TONIGHT!

Reminder: tonight I'll introduce Kirby Dick and a screening of his movie, "This Film is Not Yet Rated" at the University of Southern California. The show is sponsored by the USC Free Culture club, and I can't wait.

"This Film..." was the best documentary I saw this year. It delves into the shadowy world of the MPAA's rating system and the way that it forms a nearly invisible but all-encompassing censorship regime that punishes indie filmmakers far more than the major studios, who run it. The censor board is set up like a star chamber, the members, criteria, and appeals process shrouded in secrecy (Dick punctures the veil by hiring a charming private eye to uncover and reveal the hidden identities of the censors). The MPAA ratings process has been called "Jack Valenti's other mistake" -- apart from seeking wildly expanded copyright, that is.

It's an honor to be introducing Mr Dick and his movie -- he's a brilliant film-maker with something to say and real courage of his convictions. I hope to see you there tonight.

Where: University of Southern California, Los Angeles: University Park Campus, George Lucas Instructional Building, 108

When: Thursday, November 30, 2006, 7:00pm to 9:00pm

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

William Wray art show December 9

Former Ren and Stimpy artist William Wray has an art show at the Just Looking Gallery in San Luis Obispo opening December 9. His urban plein air paintings are incredible. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:46:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Naked man smokes crack and gets attacked by an 11-foot aligator.

This morning in Florida, a large alligator tried to eat a naked gentleman who was smoking crack.

The alligator had the man in his jaws when deputies arrived at Lake Parker in Lakeland about 4 a.m. today. They were called by nearby residents who reported hearing a man yelling for help.

[Adrian J.] Apgar, 45, of Polk City, suffered a broken arm, partially amputated left arm and trauma to his left leg.

Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:25:49 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pillows that look like giant anti-depressant pills

Sandra says:

Sci-artist Laura Splan created these nifty pillowy pills.

"Prozac, Thorazine, Zoloft is a group of large pillows crafted out of hand latch-hooked rugs, which have been sewn together and stuffed. These soft, oversized anti-psychotics and anti-depressants provide a different kind of comfort than their prescription counterparts. The time consuming nature of the latch-hook process provides a sufficiently mind-numbing effect. Latch hooking is a simple but tedious craft that has traditionally been used to depict idealized and romanticized images from domesticity and nature."

Go see the many other fantastic works displayed on her site, including neuroart. I also like Blood Scarf, a scarf knitted from vinyl tubing that fills with blood from an IV in the wearer, warming the body as it depletes it.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:47:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO make a D20 out of pecan pies

Instructables has a great recipe (!) for crafting a gigantic and delicious 20-sided gaming die out of pecan pies. They call it a pie-cosahedron. Why pecan pies? Because they are the most inherently 20-sided of all pies. Link (Thanks, BW Jones!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:08:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Audio from Seth Schoen's USC talk last night

Here's the audio from last night's USC talk by Seth Schoen, the final talk of 2006 in my USC Public Diplomacy Center Fulbright Chair lecture series. Seth is staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he gave a wide-ranging lecture on trusted computing, the economics of freedom, and the ideology of engineering. Due to a technical screw-up (mine), we only got the first half of Seth's talk on tape (argh), but it's a great hour! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:52:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ghost hunting van on eBay

This 1986 GMC G30 was apparently used on Miami Vice and Nash Bridges and later tricked out by the American Institute of Parapsychology to investigate hauntings. The current owner is auctioning it on eBay with a starting bid of $3,000.
From the auction listing:

Comes with working pan/tilt mounted on roof (camera removed), deep cycle battery bank-(all hold full charge), a 250gig 4 channel DVR which also records 4 channel audio and acts as a quad.You could record audio and video remotely for a month. Huge power inverter to run everything you need on 120v AC. Like new Samsung 17" Flat Screen monitor. 2 smaller swivel LCD Monitors. Pan Tilt Controller, dash mount flip out LCD monitor and rear mount infrared camera for backing up easily. I also have the 20 watt low frequency tx/rx set which is like new,used with the van and already mounted antenna. You can recieve and record clear audio and video for many miles with this setup. Integrated sound system in the back along with a video effects board. All equipment works very well. Four swing out chairs and a practical work area in the back. Even has a huge xray flourescent light table viewer mounted to wall. Windows are mirror tinted. Has a very solid tow bar section for towing another vehicle(see pic). Van has been in everything from childrens books on ghosts to above mentioned tv shows...

Not a show vehicle but absolutly awesome potential with a huge number of uses: Surveillance/Spy, Parapsychology,Police, Military,Camping, Ghost Hunting, etc.

Link (via Fortean Times)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:09:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blip Festival -- art and music made with low-bit video consoles

Jeremiah says: "I thought this might be something the BoingBoing readership would be interested in: a HUGE 4-day chiptune / lo-bit music festival taking place in NYC that kicks off tomorrow (Thursday) and runs through Sunday.

"This looks like its going to be quite the gathering with nearly 40 international musicians and visualists from all over the globe.

"For anyone that has been curious about people repurposing old NES consoles, Game Boys, Ataris and C64s to create completely original music -- this looks like the event to check out."

THE TANK and 8BITPEOPLES are pleased to present the Blip Festival, a four-day celebration of over 30 international artists exploring the untapped potential of low-bit videogame consoles and home computers used as creative tools. Familiar devices are pushed in new directions with startling results — Nintendo Entertainment Systems and Game Boys roaring with futuristic floor-stomping rhythms and fist-waving melody, art-damaged Sega hardware generating fluctuating and abstracted video patterns — and that's only the beginning. An exploration of the chiptune idiom and its close relatives, the Blip Festival is the biggest and most comprehensive event in the history of the form, and will include daily workshops, art installations, and nightly music performances boasting an international roster larger and more far-reaching than any previous event of its kind. Small sounds at large scales pushed to the limit at high volumes — the Blip Festival is an unprecedented event that is not to be missed.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:40:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Paper/Deitch Art Store at Art Basel Miami

If I were fortunate enough to be attending Art Basel Miami Beach next week, I bet the best value for my limited art dollars would be found at the Art Store presented by the Deitch Projects gallery and my friends at Paper Magazine. (Seen here is a Jeff Koons skateboard and Tobias Wong's 24 karat coke spoon inspired by the McDonald's coffee stirrers that stirred up controversy in the 1970s.) The list of represented artists is incredible. Hopefully the shop will move online after the event. From a blog post about the store by Kim Hastreiter who is curating the collection of goods for sale:

I have always been an art shopping maniac, collecting toys, sneakers, skateboards, refrigerator magnets and closets full of artist products since Keith Haring made his first transistor radio. (I even have some Salvador Dali perfume bottles that are amazing.) The recent art and commerce feeding frenzy has led many artists to collaborate with numerous brands over the past ten years. On my office shelves I have Damien Hirst Becks beer bottles, Futura CK One fragrance bottles, Jeff Koons skateboards, Tom Otterness bookends, Stephen Sprouse fabric covered pillows. In my closets I have Phil Frost sneakers, Murakami Vuitton bags, Kenny Scharf magnets, Jeff Koons vase, Barry McGee and Margaret Killgallen dolls, Os gemeos sneakers, and LOTS more. I think of this stuff as my 401 K.

And so I thought it would be SO fun to survey what's out there, pull it all together and open an ART STORE for four days in Miami. My inspiration is the 99 cent store so we're going to sell stuff priced from 99 cents to 9,999,999 dollars!! The interior of the store is being customized by the wonderful artist Jim Drain (of Forcefield fame) and the sign for the front of the store is being made by the amazing artist Tauba Auerbach.

Artists represented in the store include Futura (clothes, skateboards), Kaws (toys), Ryan McGinnis (toys) , Thomas Campbell (wallets, T Shirts surfboards), Jeff Koons (skateboards), Tracey Emin (Longchamp Bags), Jean Michel Basquait (sneakers, Valentino purses), Tom Otterness (toys), Jo Jackson (DC sneakers), Shephard Fairey (watches, clothing), Lisa Yuskavage (shower curtains), Kiki Smith (rugs, toys), Keith Haring ( Jeremy Scott sneakers sweatsuits, bathroom tiles), Alex Katz and Marilyn Minter (the most amazing TARGET produced beach towels for The Art Production Fund!!! See photo of glittery eye.), Assume Astro Vivid focus ( Le Sportsac bags) , Kenny Scharf (mini mannequins, watches, Bic lighters, magnets), Artist Network Program (RVCA Tshirts), Neckface (jackets and skateboards), Ed Templeton (skateboards), John Baldessari and Sol Lewitt silk scarves, Karen Kilimnik, Jack Pierson (see photo of dish) and John Waters dishes, Skullphone (T shirts and bags), Sol Lewitt (china), Andy Warhol (watches, soap, mousepads), Tobias Wong (bongs, 18kt cokespoons, necklaces), Dalek (cameras, dolls), Barbara Kruger (pillows mousepads), Hugo Guiness (Kate Spade bags), Leanne Shapton (Jack Spade bags), Andrew Andrew (cookies, magnets, jewelry), Skullphone (bags, T shirts), Donald Sultan (playing cards), Claw Money (pillows, jackets), Threeasfour (bicycles, scarves)! PLUS we will have little pockets of representation from a couple of our most favorite likeminded shops like ALife, aNYthing, and Colette.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:26:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crap of the Future

PeaceLove sez, "'Surly media nerd' Annalee Newitz has posted some hilarious predictions about the lame holiday crap of the future. Her DRM prediction rawks!"

DNA DRM: The latest solution to the problem of media copying is a digital rights management (DRM) scheme that relies on identifying the DNA of the consumer. When you purchase a piece of media, your licensed copy is encoded with 13 unique sequences of nucleotides from your genome. Each time you hit the power button on your new DNA DRM Zune media player, a hair-thin needle painlessly pierces your flesh and feeds a drop of blood into an embedded genome sequencer. If you are the registered owner of the media, you are permitted to play it. If you aren't, the media is deleted from your device and a record of your transgression is reported to the central media certification authority. You will be forced to pay an extra "unlicensed play penalty tax" to license it next time. The only thing good about this system is that biohackers can take the DNA DRM Zune apart, remove the embedded sequencer, and use it to figure out if they have cancer.

Link (Thanks, PeaceLove!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Open classical music repository

David sez, "This is a new online repository of public domain classical music. What's really cool is that Aaron tells me it's okay to sample/remix the music into new compositions as long as you provide attribution."

This site takes music that is in the public domain, meaning a work that belongs to the community, and has it recorded by individuals and college/community orchestras throughout the United States and stored online so it can be accessed for free through this website. This would do the following:

1. Provide free unlimited access to music in the public domain to anyone with internet access.

2. Allow obscure works, for example some Baroque music, to be recorded for the first time that would otherwise not be recorded because of its small profit potential.

3. Community - being a community driven project, this can create an online music community, perhaps leading to future cooperative projects.

4. Add usefulness to all the untapped talent in our nation\u2019s orchestras. Think of about how many college orchestras perform to diminishing numbers of audiences. Now, every performance adds to the online repertoire, adding another reason to perform and perform well.

5. Create the first organization devoted to giving the public access to musical works which belong to them.

Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:14:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jones Soda ditches high-fructose corn syrup

Jones Soda is ditching high fructose corn syrup (toxic waste in liquid form) in favor of cane sugar -- not that I eat either, but if you're into poisoning yourself with soft drinks, this is a lot less bad for you.

The change at Jones Soda comes at a time when high fructose corn syrup, which became a common sweetener for sodas in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has received negative publicity as being linked to obesity and diabetes.

Link (via Megnut)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:09:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Leicester Square gets free WiFi

Hurrah! London's Leicester Square is getting free WiFi, 24/7. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:04:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

IHOP's "no ID, no pancakes" policy

An IHOP restaurant has been forced to abandon its practice of requiring diners to surrender their drivers licenses before ordering. They'd instituted the no-anonymous-pancakes policy to prevent dine-and-dash, but as with all security measures, what made one party more secure made another less secure. In requiring all diners at the pancake house to produce ID, IHOP opened their customers up to identity theft.

Russo said a security guard at the restaurant had "at least 40" licenses in hand when he arrived to eat.

"Identity theft is rampant. I wouldn't want to give my license, with my address or Social Security number to anyone that I'm not familiar with," Russo said. "I'm going just for breakfast."

Link (via Schneier)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:03:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Street Tech holiday gift guide

bOING bOING senior editor Gareth Branwyn and the crew at Street Tech just issued part one of their annual holiday gift guide. THe contents range from Herbie the Mousebot to Operation Damocles AT-43 to my grooming weapon-of-choice, the HeadBlade. From Gareth's introduction to the holiday gift guide:

While we make a lot of noise here at Street Tech about consumer responsibility, environmental awareness, living lower on the hog (or forgoing the hog altogether), truth be told, we love buying shit just as much as the next conspicuous consumer. And we won't even try to deny our unwavering interest in new gadgets and cool tools. That said, we're also obsessed with high quality, intelligent design (of the non-theocratic kind), and products that perform as they're advertised. On top of all this, we love the act of gift-giving, showing our love and appreciation for people, in ritual gestures of exchanged beads and baubles. Combine all this: Great goods that are well- and responsibly made, that you get to buy and then give away to make fellow, beloved meatbots happy? Well that just sounds like a whole lot o' good times to us.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:58:24 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Urban light pillars above cities

is of Ath, Belgium, snapped this photograph during last week's Leonid meteor shower. According to physicist Les Cowley, the strange lights that Bavais captured so beautifully are urban light pillars. From SpaceWeather.com: (Cowley) explains:

(Joel Bava) explains: "That night above Ath there was an icy fog full of flat plate crystals. The tiny crystals mirrored the lights of the city beneath into sets of light pillars. The higher the crystals, the closer the reflection glints approached the zenith making the pillars appear to converge overhead: illustration. Why the breaks in the lines of light? There were several layers of ice crystals with gaps between them."

Link (no permalink, view archive of November 28) (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:43:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dept. of Defense investigating sadistic "water bottle" soldiers

Yesterday I posted a video of a sicko jackass soldier in the back of a truck, taunting an Iraqi boy with a bottle of water. It made me sick to see this US soldier laughing derisively at a little kid running as fast as he could for some water. Apparently, the U.S. Department of Defense is just as disgusted, and it is investigating the incident, along with another incident caught in video that shows a soldier complaining that he can't shoot children who throw rocks at his vehicle. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:38:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Waltz of the Polypeptides sculpture

Seen here is Waltz of the Polypeptides, an eighty-foot long, ten-foot high sculpture by Mara G. Haseltine that was recently installed at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York. From a CSHL press release:

The sculpture depicts a subcellular protein factory called a ribosome caught in the act of producing the BLyS protein, which stimulates the production of infection-fighting antibodies in the body...

The sculpture is comprised of seven structures, each of which is derived from that of the actual biological forms, observed using scanning electron microscopy, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and X-ray crystallography.

Link to press release, Link to more about the Waltz of the Polypeptides

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:32:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Geisha Asobi makes long false eyelashes from her hair

When my favorite Japan-based blogger, Geisha Asobi, cut her hair, she made hair gloves and extra long false eyelashes from the cut hair. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:35:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wilhelm Scream - Hollywood's favorite scream

A single scream, recorded for the 1951 film "Distant Drums," has made its way into dozens of films, games and TV shows. Afficianados call it the "Wilhelm Scream" and have cataloged many of the films in which it appeared, from Hercules to Pirates of the Caribbean, The X-Files to the short "Golden Dreams" film at Disney California Adventure.

One person who noticed the same distinctive scream reoccurring in so many movies was sound effects fan Ben Burtt. Ben and his friends in the cinema department at USC, Rick Mitchell and Richard Anderson, noticed that a scream was popping up in a lot of movies. One of the films they made together, a swashbuckler parody "The Scarlet Blade" (1974) included the scream - which they borrowed off another film's audio track.

A few years later, when Ben Burtt was hired to create sound effects for Star Wars (1977), he had an opportunity to do research at the sound departments of several movie studios. While at Warner Bros. looking for sound elements to use in the space adventure, he found the original "Distant Drums" scream - which he called "Wilhelm" after the character that let out the scream in "Charge at Feather River."

Link, Link to video (Thanks, Matthew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dr Seuss's anti-malaria GI comic

Dr Seuss made this malaria comic (starring Ann, an Anopheles mosquito) for the United States Army Orientation Course, overseas edition in 1943, which was published for GIs in the tropics. It's very funny and charming and a little ruder than your average Seuss story. Link (Thanks, Phunkysai!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:33:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Geek wreath

The Geek Wreath is a simple and powerful idea: take a strand of lights and weave it around a wreath of all the goddamned power cables, spare USB cables, obsolete SCSI cables and whatever else you've got cluttering up your home. Link (via Make)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:26:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Zombies sue Minneapolis for bogus WMD bust

Minneapoliteans who dressed up as zombies and were busted for "simulating weapons of mass destruction" because their costumes had wires sticking out them are suing the city for being freaking idiots:

A group of zombies have risen up to claim the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County violated their free rights and discriminated against them.

The six adults and one juvenile who were arrested while impersonating the undead in July filed their lawsuit Thursday.

The ragged group were arrested for "simulating weapons of mass destruction" during a dance party near the Minneapolis entertainment district.

Link (via Neatorama)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:15:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boing Boing in Toothpaste for Dinner

Hurrah! Toothpaste for Dinner, one of my favorite web-funnies, gave Boing Boing a namecheck in a new toon! Link (Thanks, Coleman!)

See also:
Toothpaste for Dinner -- high-larious new book from Drew
Funny toons
Mad Drew: new Toothpaste for Dinner book

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Make Magazine Issue #8 Launch Party in LA this Saturday

If you live in LA, I hope I see you at the Make Magazine Issue #8 Launch Party on Saturday at 5:30pm.

Please join us Saturday Dec 2nd at 5:30pm for a very special meeting of Dorkbot SoCal to launch the new issue of MAKE magazine.

Simon Penny (Director of UCI's Arts Computation Engineering program) will speak on integrating interaction design, space design, structure design, mechanical design, electronic design and software engineering using his 3D machine-vision driven interactive digital-video project Fugitive 2 as a case study. Attention will then turn to the pragmatic design and fabrication issues involved in building a custom motion control rig for the video projector in the project. Simon is bringing in a prototype of the motion control rig as tangible example.

Mr Jalopy (Contributing Editor to MAKE and automotive mad scientist) will be giving an epic (yet fast paced) talk on "Deep Sea Suburbs: Custom Vans, Internal Combustion Engines, Backyard Anthropology and the California Dream".

Make magazine issue #8 will be available for perusal and purchase

There is a high probability of free beer and pretzels

Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026
213-483-8761

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:23:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OLPC laptop runs DOOM

Wayan sez, "The $100 laptop is now shipping to Brazil and Argentina, and the OLPC developers are taking a fun break. They installed DOOM and have a video of themselves playing it on the OLPC XO!" Link (Thanks, Wayan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:08:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA sues elderly Rita survivor

The RIAA lawsuits have reached a new low:

An elderly survivor of Hurricane Rita, Ms. Rhonda Crain, has been sued by the RIAA in Beaumont, Texas, in SONY v. Crain.

She is fighting back and has asserted a counterclaim against the plaintiffs, saying that the RIAA's actions "amount to extortion, reciting a litany of other similar cases brought by the RIAA.

Link

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

US Trade Representative bends Russia over on copyright

The US Trade Representative has declared victory over Russia. Russia will be required to license CD/DVD pressing plants and inspect them day and night -- the US, spreading democracy by requiring licensing of the presses! Russia will also have to shut down AllofMP3.com and stop its collecting societies from representing artists without permission (of course, this doesn't mean that US quasi-governmental collecting societies like SoundScanExchange will stop doing the same thing).

You might ask why collecting societies are in there at all. That's because AllOfMP3.com claimed that they were paying licenses to a collecting society that made their business legal. Putting this last clause in the agreement sounds like the US Trade Rep is admitting that AllOfMP3.com is a legitimate, licensed business that pays for what it sells.

Russia has to take on board the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which is the treaty that created the US DMCA, a law that has resulted in the jailing of a Russian researcher who visited the USA for talking about math.

* The United States and Russia agreed on the objective of shutting down websites that permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works. The agreement names the Russia-based website allofmp3.com as an example of such a website.

* Russia will:
- take enforcement actions against the operation of Russia-based websites; and
- investigate and prosecute companies that illegally distribute copyright works on the Internet.

* Russia will work to enact legislation by June 1, 2007, to stop collecting societies from acting without right holder consent,

* Russia will also work to enact legislation implementing the 1996 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Internet treaties.

PDF Link (via Digg)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:27:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO Knit retro computing socks

Check out these retro-computing knitting patterns for socks. I love the Breakout socks! Link (via Make)

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

Gingrich wants first amendment abolished

Newt Gingrich has called for America to tear up the Constitution and throw out the first amendment, because free speech helps terrorism. Didn't this guy take an oath to uphold the Constitution? This is a new low, even for Gingrich.

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:13:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Iraqi children run desperately for water bottle held by soldier

Video of a US soldier amusing himself by holding a bottle of water from the back of a truck while young Iraqi children run desperately for it. Link (Via WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

Reader comment:

GarrettThank sent a link to this video of US soldiers using their tank to crush a car owned by some impoverished Iraqi citizens who allegedly stole some wood in a greedy attempt to feed their families. I'm sure the vast majority of US soldiers are excellent people, but these assholes ruin all the good will. He says:

Compared to the GIs in WWII who carried extra chocolate rations to make friends with the locals these soldiers look like punks. Link

(Here's a video of a nice soldier playing soccer with some Iraqi kids. I hope to see more like this one to get rid of the sick feeling in my gut from watching the first two. Link -- Mark)

Reader comment:

David Cassel says:

Speaking of Iraq footage, here's a really cool link. Footage from Iraq shows how YouTube is giving a much better view of the reality in Iraq than the traditional news media.

Combat attacks are seen - from both sides - and towards the bottom there's some surprising hot Iraqi "action" of another sort.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:06:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK artists instinctively choose Creative Commons

Matt sez, "Some interesting titbits in a UK report by Openbusiness.cc and the Arts Council of England on artists utilising Creative Commons licensing in the UK, and their thoughts on copyright. I think it's interesting artists seem to be using CC licenses on instinct, even if many haven't thought through how that can really apply or feed through into their work, other than through network effects related to distribution."

Often the artists that are using CC have chosen to do so almost on instinct. They believe strongly that traditional copyright has not succeeded in providing the promised financial incentives and protection for artists themselves and see CC as a way of limiting negative effects without completely losing control over their work.

Link (Thanks, Matt)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:52:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harvey comic book covers from the 60s

"A Sampler of Things" presents a small gallery of Harvey comic book covers from the 1960s. The composition and colors are wonderful. I especially like this one, which takes place in a windstorm. The dots are blowing off Little Dot's dress and hitting Little Lotta, covering her eyes and mouth. Nightmarish. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:51:58 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Homeland security buffoons blow up data logging device

Over at "Notes from the Technology Underground," Bill Gurstelle writes about a university geoscience researcher who accidentally left a temperature logging device in the trunk of her rental car when she dropped it off at the rental agency. When she and her husband arrived at the airport gate, "five uniformed airport police with flak jackets and guns" were waiting to interrogate her. But they employed a "blow up first, ask questions later approach," because the equipment had been destroyed by Bloomington Police Department bomb squad before giving her a chance to explain.

And for good measure, authorities closed portions of the Twin Cities Lindbergh terminal parking ramp for two hours.

Why in the world would the police destroy the equipment so quickly? Here's a picture I found of the "suspicious looking equipment."

Remember, this thing was in the trunk of an Avis rental car, about a half mile from the nearest runway, not on the tarmac or in the terminal.

Yes airline security is important, but all this paranoia, and rote following of draconian procedures means no flexibility, no common sense, and second chances. Looks like another win for the real terrorists.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:27:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gallery of monster toys

The Gallery of Monster Toys is a stupendous collection of kids' monster stuff from the 60s to the 90s. I actually had one of these glow-in-the-dark Mummy models -- though mine never looked half so good as this. Link (via Neatorama)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:37:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Using tape to repair plane wing -- video

Moustache writes about the time he saw some men repair a plane he was sitting in with some kind of tape.

I dug up this video I shot back in December ‘04 when I was aboard an Air Deccan flight from Bangalore to Mumbai. Looked out my window and what did I see, A group of guys repairing the wing with some sort of muthafcukin’ duct tape. There’s some more repairs to the left of the one they are working on with what seems to be the same technique. Crossed my fingers, tossed back a shot of Black Label, and stayed on the flight.

Link (Thanks, Phil!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:28:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF accepts Barney's surrender

EFF has won a settlement out of the corporate owners of Barney the Purple Dinosaur -- a pack of legal bullies who use copyright law to threaten people who make fun of their character on the Internet:

The agreement settles a suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in August on behalf of Dr. Stuart Frankel against Lyons Partnership, owners of the Barney character. Frankel received repeated, meritless cease-and-desist letters from Lyons, claiming his online parody violated copyright and trademark law. EFF's suit asked the court to declare that Frankel's parody was a noninfringing fair use protected by the First Amendment.

"We wish we hadn't had to file a lawsuit to finally get Barney's lawyers to stop harassing a man who was just expressing his opinion about a cultural phenomenon," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "Hopefully Lyons Partnership has learned its lesson and will have more respect for fair use in the future."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:39:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Plank + cheap mic = touch sensitive tablet

Matthew sez, "Some software and cheap microphones is all that is needed to turn a wooden board into a touch sensitive input device. The video is pretty impressive."

Two or more sensors are attached around the edges of the surface. These pinpoint the position of a finger, or another touching object, by tracking minute vibrations. This allows them to create a virtual touchpad, or keyboard, on any table or wall.

The system, called Tai-Chi (Tangible Acoustic Interfaces for Computer-Human Interaction), was developed by researchers from Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France and the UK. "We have made a system that can give any object, even a 3D one, a sense of touch," says Ming Yang, an engineer at Cardiff University, UK, who is coordinating the project.

Link (Thanks, Matthew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:52:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bruce Lee themepark coming to China

A Bruce Lee themepark is under construction in Shanghai Shunde, which is close to Hong Kong:

...they are also planning a roller coaster that emits Bruce Lee’s signature squawks and grunts! The park will be patrolled by robot-mannequin Bruce Lees! And the whole shebang is controlled by a special secret control room housed in a giant statue! Yes!

The park is slated to be finished in three years and we can pretty much guarantee, without doing any research or talking to anyone, that there’s going to be a hall of mirrors of some kind in this thing.

Link (Thanks, Wei Qin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:59:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cheap air travel via bulk cheese purchasing

Buy a wheel of Swiss Knights Fondue and Cheese and you get 500 AAdvantage air-miles -- that's like a trip to Australia for $1,100 -- a serious bargoon (if you can book far enough in advance to use your miles, of course).

This weekend I was handed an opened wheel of processed cheeses by a friend. He said that his brother-in-law had caught wind of a frequent flyer promotion whereby you get 500 miles for each purchase of this cheese wheel and had purchased 75,000 miles for ~$300, which also means he's got more opened cheese wheels than he knows what to do with.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:05:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Underpaid cosmonauts

Russian cosmonauts earn less than $800/month, and the program is having a hard time attracting would-be space-farers:

According to Space News, cosmonauts now earn $767 (20,448 Russian rubles) per month plus bonuses for spaceflights. That's far less than what they could attract in the private sector.

So the rocket company Energia has allowed university students to apply to be cosmonauts before they graduate. That didn't pan out so well. Only five of 20 students who volunteered for the programme in 2006 underwent medical tests. None of them passed.

Link (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:01:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Judge Richard Posner coming to Second Life

Wagner James Au sez, "He's upheld the First Amendment protections of video games and contemplated the future of law in online worlds, and early December, in an apt progression, monumentally influential Judge Richard A. Posner will take on avatar form, to discuss the US Constitution in the era of apocalyptic terrorism. (Event sponsored by Creative Commons.)"

“I am very excited to have been asked to give a talk, via an avatar, in Second Life," Judge Posner tells me, via e-mail. "Virtual communities are an important social phenomenon with transformative potential, and I know that Second Life is in the forefront of this latest stage of the digital revolution." And I'm very excited to welcome such an august figure in-world, joining Lawrence Lessig, Thomas Barnett, and other great public intellectuals who're among the first to transmit their crucial ideas into the metaverse.

Link (Thanks, James!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:59:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WorldChanging book launch in LA this Sat

This Saturday, December 2 will be the Los Angeles launch of the WorldChanging book, at Equator Books. WorldChanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century is a huge, encylopedic tome on the novel ways that the technology and social movements are being used to make the world a better place, from the grass roots up. WorldChanging is based on the excellent blog of the same name, and is thematically organized with sections on "Stuff," "Shelter," "Cities," "Community," "Business," "Politics" and "Planet," each broken into a series of quickly digestable essays on subjects like "Healing polluted land," "Green marketing," "Movement building" and "Citizen science." (I contributed an article on the global copyfight and what expanding copyrights mean to the developing world).

Where: Equator Books, 1103 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291

When: Sat, Dec 2, 7:30PM

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:43:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 27, 2006

Human sugar bowl -- 1960s street prank

In the 1960s two underemployed young men named Mal Sharpe and Jim Coyle from the San Francisco Bay Area decided to have some fun by walking the streets with a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase to conduct surreal prank interviews with people.

On a recent episode of the terrific podcast, The Sound of Young America, Mal Sharpe was invited as a guest to talk about the movie Borat. The podcast's host, Jesse Thorn, said Coyle and Sharpe were spiritual grandfathers to Sacha Baron Cohen. Thorn also played a segment of an early Coyle and Sharpe bit, called the human sugar bowl, in which the pranksters entered a San Francisco restaurant and asked the owner if he would "be opposed to the idea of using an area of your head, which is currently not used for such purposes, to use this as a storage place for sugar?" I loved the fact that the restaurant owner actually had a conversation with the two pranksters, telling them they were crazy for thinking the idea would be a viable business, and explaining to them why he thought it was a bad business idea. Today, most restaurant owners who were approached by a pair of deadly earnest men spouting such insanity would reach for a gun, a can of pepper spray, or a phone to call the cops.

Here's a sample of the bit. You can buy a four-disc set of Coyle and Sharpe's work at CDBaby.com.

Reader comment:

Sound of Young America host Jesse Thorn says:

I must reflect credit elsewhere... that was actually an episode of Public Radio International's Open Source on which Mal Sharpe and I were guests. The host is Christopher Lydon. They're CC licensed, so I put it down my podcast chute since I was out of town this past weekend.

That said, here's an hour show I did a few weeks ago with Mal.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:47:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CBC prez: High-def TV has no business model

CBC president Robert Rabinovich has decried high-def TV as having no business model. This wouldn't be newsworthy except that the promise of HDTV is the excuse given for the Broadcast Flag, which says that paranoid studio executives should be in charge of what features TVs are allowed to have.

The idea is that if you don't give them their design-veto, they won't put movies on high-def, and then the money won't come in. But when the head of Canada's national broadcaster announces that there's just no way any broadcaster is going to make its money back on high-def, it makes you wonder if the Brits don't have the right idea.

In the UK, a digital TV system called "Freeview" gives the public 30 free standard-definition TV channels, for life, over the air, for one setup payment. Instead of trying to lure people into throwing away their old sets and buying all new, Hollywood-crippled ones, the Brits just created free cable for life. Amazingly, lots of people voluntarily switched -- and soon they'll be able to shut off the old analog towers and use that spectrum for better, more internetty things.

“There's no evidence either in Canada or the United States that we have found for advertisers willing to pay a premium for a program that's in HD,” Mr. Rabinovich said. “So basically they're saying if you want to shoot in HD, that's your business, we're not going to pay you more.”

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:04:51 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Democracy player, faster and more stable

There's a new, faster, more efficient version of Democracy Player out today. Democracy is the free and open Internet video player that can subscribe to easily-published video feeds. It automatically fetches new videos using BitTorrent (so the video-maker's server is never overwhelmed by sudden popularity) and it plays it no matter what video format it's in.

Version 0.92, released today, fixes a ton of performance issues, mostly in the Windows version (Democracy is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux). If you've tried Democracy before and had problems with it, this is the version to get. Link

(Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Board of Directors of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the charity that oversees Democracy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:37:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO suggest links for Boing Boing

A reminder: please don't ever email any of us suggestions for things to post to Boing Boing. The only way to suggest a link for Boing Boing is using the suggest-a-link form. We never blog things sent by email -- even from friends and loved ones and (especially) PR people. The form's the way to go. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:25:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of the Bantams (kid musicians) from the 1966

Skinny Robbie has a video a trio of boys called The Bantams who are pretending to play Twist and Shout on a TV show called Shivaree. Link

In 2005, Robbie wrote about this group of entertaining tots. And here is Fritz Bantam's homepage (on Geocities!). From his site:

The youngest of 3 brothers, that were a music phenomenon in the late 60's and early 70's, Fritz Bantam has continued his music career to the present day. Graduating from playing maracas, to playing bass guitar, Fritz continues to wow audiences with his musical talent.Fritz currently resides in the Inland Empire of California with his wife and two children. A recent surge in the interest of 60's and 70's music culture,and a notable demand for Bantam memorabilia,prompted the development of this site.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:43:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thomas Jefferson's art collection copyrighted?

My pal and Institute for the Future colleagues Mike Love writes:

After Thanksgiving my family visited Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Virginia. Before entering, the tour guide told us that we couldn't take any photos inside because they "don't own the copyright for some of the works of art." This peeved me in light of the copyright-restricted space post I had read recently about misusing the language of copyright to intimidate people.

In protest I tried to take a no-flash picture of Jefferson's engraved copy of the Declaration of Independence, but was politely told to stop - and reminded that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation doesn't own the copyright to some of his works of art. If they don't own the copyright to his nearly 200 year-old art then who does!?

UPDATE: Jennifer Michaels, a former Motincello tour guide, writes:

I was a tour guide at Monticello from 2002 to 2004, and I can answer Mike Love´s question of, "If they [Monticello] don't own the copyright to his nearly 200 year-old art then who does!?" It´s a great question, and I was always happy to answer it for my own tour groups.

The reason that photographs are not allowed inside Monticello itself is because the home itself is owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, a non-profit organization that upkeeps the home, but more than half of the furniture inside the building does not belong to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. When the non-profit organization bought the house in the 1930´s, there was no furniture in it at all. Thomas Jefferson died over $100,000 in debt and the vast majority of his private property was sold at dispersal auction in the 1830´s to recover his debt, which was a huge burden on his surviving family. The TJF curators spend an enormous amount of time just trying to find the furniture, which is literally scattered to the four winds.

When they do manage to find a furniture or piece, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation would obviously prefer to buy it when possible for their own collection. But the TJF can´t afford to buy it all outright, and understandably, some pieces aren´t even for sale, either because the private owners don´t wish to part with it or because it´s part of another museum´s collection. Consequently, the majority of furnishings in Monticello are on permanent contractual loan to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, with the private (or other museum) owners retaining all rights--including reproduction copyright--to the items themselves. So prohibiting photography in the house is actually done to protect private property that belongs to a slew of other people. That´s a very different situation than what´s going on at Victoria and Albert, where the artwork truly is in the public domain.

Furthermore, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is understandably concerned that if they did allow non-flash photography in the home, visitors would inevitably forget to turn off their flashes and misunderstand the rules and take flash photography anyway. Most of the items in the home are extremely light-sensitive due to their age, to the point that all of the home´s windows are covered with a protective UV film. Imagine if just one out of every 1,000 visitors forgot the rules and took a flash picture in the house; with about half a million visitors to the home each year, that would expose the house to approximately 500 photography flashes a year, which is plenty enough to do damage.

If the Jefferson Foundation were so anti-film, they wouldn´t allow photographs everywhere else on the grounds except inside the house. Because they own the entire outdoor property and have only allowed replica furniture to ornament the outside of the house, there is no copyright conflict with people taking pictures outside the home itself. I always reminded my tour groups as soon as we got back outside that they should turn their cameras on and start snapping away.

Finally, if it makes Mike feel any better, I am almost certain that the engraved, framed copy of the Declaration of Independence that he was attempting to photograph didn´t actually belong to Thomas Jefferson. There are two engravings of the Declaration in the home, and while both are contemporary to Jefferson´s time period, Jefferson´s own engravings of the Declaration no longer exist. So Mike was actually looking at a very similar engraving by the same engraver, but not the one that Jefferson actually owned.

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

Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick

Novelist and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Jonathan Lethem has frequently written and spoken about the influence surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick had on Lethem's noir SF works like Amnesia Moon and Gun, With Occasional Music. Indeed, the DVD release of A Scanner Darkly, based on Dick's novel, will feature Lethem's commentary as a bonus feature. The new issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review includes Lethem's imaginations of Phil's strange life shortly after the publication of his first novel. From Lethem's piece, titled "Phil In The Marketplace":

The Lucky Dog Pet Shop is where the writer of Ubik goes to buy ground horsemeat, ostensibly for his dog, actually for himself and his wife to eat. It’s not so bad, horsemeat. In the Pyrenees they smoke it into jerky and serve it with hard cheese and casks of good red wine. What’s bad is the shame. The writer of Ubik has come to suspect that the woman who runs the cash register at the Lucky Dog Pet Shop knows he’s buying the horsemeat for himself, that there is no dog. In a world where the FBI has already visited the writer’s house—they were dapper and polite, fine figures of men, a little older than he’d expected; they reminded him of Hollis, they took him for a drive, he sort of liked them—the woman is one of his foremost looming authority figures. She might turn him in. She might tell his mother.

Yet when the writer of Ubik gets to the cash register he finds not the dreaded woman but instead a substitute clerk, a young man with a small beard like a Beat. When the writer approaches, the substitute clerk greets him in a voice conditioned by cigarettes and bearing traces of an accent. The writer understands without knowing how he understands that the substitute clerk is from France. More than just from France. The substitute clerk is a Marxist literary critic. The writer feels relief. Here is someone who certainly must grasp the eating of horsemeat. The writer’s going to get away with it, at least today.

“You are Philip?”

“Yes.”

“You will write Ubik?”

“I don’t know, I guess so.”

Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:05:21 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blobsquatches!

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman takes an interesting look at "blobsquatches," blurry indistinct objects in photos that could either be a real, live Bigfoot or, well, a branch, a shadow, a rock, a tree stump, a smudge on the lens, etc.

...(The) first known public lecture appearance of the word ("blobsquarch" was) on September 14, 2003. On that date, Alton Higgins, at the Willow Creek Symposium, flashed the term up on a screen and spent several minutes analyzing various blobsquatch images.

Higgins expanded what he presented at Willow Creek, and published his March 21, 2004 revised paper, which can be found online here: "Evaluating Purported Sasquatch Photographic Evidence".

Higgins wrote within that paper: "Any photo requiring equal parts interpretation and imagination (photos sometimes characterized as ‘blobsquatches’) should be discounted."

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:40:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

WATCH list of the year's ten most dangerous toys

WATCH (World Against Toys Causing Harm, Inc.) has issued its 2006 list of "10 Worst Toys," playthings "with the potential to cause childhood injuries, or even death." Included on this year's danger roster are the likes of Heelys, the skate shoes that Cory is fond of, Sky Blaster all-in-one rocket and launcher, and the Fisher-Price Lil Snoopy. From the WATCH description of the dangers of Fear Factor Candy Challenge products:

W.A.T.C.H. OUT! ! These "Fear Factor" pouches containing "spine-chilling spiders", "mystery meat", and a "buzzard buffet", pose a "candy challenge" to children, asking: "[I]s fear a factor for you?" The grotesque buffet, available in the toy aisle, is based upon the television series which sometimes features contestants competing to eat as much as possible in the shortest time. Toy aisles should not be used to encourage food-eating competitions, which invite potential choking and ingestion injuries, particularly for young children.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:24:38 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Exxon kills free classroom copies of "Inconvenient Truth"

Odiyya sez, "Laurie David, a producer of An Inconvenient Truth, reports that the National Science Teachers Association has rejected 50,000 free classroom copies of the movie, citing 'unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.' One of those supporters turns out to be Exonn-Mobil." Link (Thanks, Odiyya!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:57:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Custom portrait of you as a zombie

Canadian illustrator Rob Sacchetto has opened a business selling zombified portraits of his customers. Email him a picture of yourself and he'll mail you back a hand-drawn cartoon of you as a horrible zombie. He got the idea after doing a couple friends' zombie portraits for Hallowe'en -- now he's charging US$85, including shipping. Link (via Neatorama)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:00:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of cocaine making in Colombian jungle

Filmmaker Matthew Bristow went to the Colombian jungle to document a cocaine manufacturing process. They use gasoline, sulfuric acid, ammonia, quicklime, and caustic soda to turn coca leaves into the white powder. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:20:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF Staff Technologist free talk in LA tomorrow!

A reminder: I'm hosting Seth Schoen, EFF's Staff Technologist, at a free talk at USC in Los Angeles tomorrow night.

Seth is a polymath geek, who created the job of Staff Technologist at EFF. He makes it possible for EFF's lawyers to understand the technological implications of the law and the legal implications of technology. He's an engineer who fights for freedom, and has taken part in such exciting adventures as ferreting out the secret codes hidden in color laser printouts. He maintains a Linux distribution, wrote the DeCSS Haiku, and testifies in court. Most importantly (from my perspective), he is the world's leading expert on the threats and promises of trusted computing -- and the creator of Owner Override, a proposal that will leave trusted computing's privacy benefits intact, but defang its threats to liberty.

As always, we'll podcast the audio within a day or two of the event, but I hope to see you there! This is the last speaker of the year, so it's your last chance in 2006!

Where: University of Southern California main campus (LA), Annenberg School for Communications, room 207

When: Tuesday, November 28, 7PM-9PM

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:09:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Johnson's Ghost Map: Earth's largest organism and its smallest

I just finished Steven Johnson's excellent new book "The Ghost Map," a popular science book about the London cholera epidemic of 1854, and the extraordinary new science that emerged from its punishing violence.

In 1854, London was a city with millions of residents and no sewage system. It was the first time a city had grown so big, and while it had a rudimentary idea of a public health system, this system was based on the "miasma" theory of disease: that illness was the result of smelling bad smells. So it was that London was drowning in its own shit, and so it was that thousands of Londoners were in the business of harvesting, cleaning, moving, exploring and scavenging in shit. Johnson quotes journals and accounts of the day describing unimaginable filth, residents dipping buckets into open, running sewers, then letting the "water" separate out of the excrement, skimming it off and drinking it.

Cholera epidemics are the inevitable outcome of such a situation. One such outbreak took Soho -- a poor, overcrowded neighborhood -- by storm, killing one in ten in the space of a week. In that week, two very different men (a cleric and a scientist) who were both local to Soho pounded the streets, working to extinguish the disease's flames. They struggled against the miasma-obsessed public health administration (whose idea of sanitation was to order all the basement cesspools emptied into the Thames, London's main source of drinking water).

The cleric, Reverend Henry Whitehead, had intimate knowledge of Soho's streets and families, and the scientist, Dr John Snow, had a history of challenging establishment superstitions with empirical research. Together they worked on a map that showed the disease's course through London, and ran the cholera back to the well where it originated. The combination of data-visualization and local knowledge revealed the microbial nature of cholera, years before anyone managed to connect the actual bug with the disease.

Johnson's got a gift for telling human stories in science -- and a healthy respect for cities, humanity's most complicated and magnificent inventions. He's characterized this as the story of the world's largest organism -- the city -- locked in struggle with one of the world's smallest -- a bacterium. That's as good a strapline as any -- it's a dramatic story of a key evolutionary moment in our history, a moment when we could have destroyed ourselves or brought ourselves to the future. Link

See also:
Steven Johnson's new book The Ghost Map
Steven Johnson's fave books about plagues
Steven Johnson launches outside.in
BoingBoingBoing podcast 006: Steven Johnson

Update: Jeff sez, "John Snow published a book on his investigation into the cholera epidemic. His account is a pretty interesting read."

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

Bollywood-star mudflaps

Flickr user Meanest Indian has a lovely gallery of Indian mudflaps depicting stars of Bollywood movies. So much cooler than the US zaftig silhouette. Link (Thanks, Avi!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:42:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kirby Dick and This Film is Not Yet Rated, Thu in LA

This Thursday, I'll introduce director Kirby Dick and his movie "This Film is Not Yet Rated" at a free screening at USC. The screening is sponsored by the USC Free Culture club, a campus organization dedicated to promoting liberty, openness, and access to information.

Kirby Dick has graciously agreed to present the screening of his movie, which I reviewed in September. This Film is Not Yet Rated is the best documentary I've seen all year, the kind of thing that inspired outrage and sympathy. It tells the hidden story of the MPAA's rating board, and its systematic discrimination against sympathetic portrayals of gay sexuality and sex in general, and its tacit support for ultra-violence.

The ratings board is shrouded in secrecy, and exists, supposedly, to forestall Congressional censorship of the film industry (an eventuality as unlikely as it is unconstitutional). The board's membership is secret, as are the names of the appeals committee that is meant to watchdog the organizing. The whole, secretive mess was established by Jack Valenti in his capacity as head of the MPAA, and so it bends over backwards to help filmmakers from the major studios (while shafting indies).

Dick's documentary revolves around his efforts to unmask the identity of the secret censor board. He hires a private eye and sets her to work (the CSI elements of the film are really juicy -- it's fun to see how private eyes really work). Threaded around this are interviews with filmmakers who've had run-ins with the board, and, as a climax, Dick's own Orwellian adventures in submitting his documentary to the censor board whose identities he has uncovered.

I can't wait to meet him -- one viewing of This Film is Not Yet Rated turned me into an instant, lifelong fan. I hope to see you there!

Where: University of Southern California, Los Angeles: University Park Campus, George Lucas Instructional Building, 108

When: Thursday, November 30, 2006 : 7:00pm to 9:00pm

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:33:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Altair 8800 replica kit

Check out these amazing replica Altair 8800 kit, composed all new (or new-old stock) parts, with the original instructions for assembly. The Altair 8800 was the microcomputer ancestor of the PC -- the computer that inspired the PC revolution. It was -- to some approximation -- the first useful computer that you could build and run in your home workshop. Regrettably, these kits are only sold on eBay, making them a pain to acquire, but the idea is just fantastic, and it sounds like the build-quality is terrific. Link (via Make)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:19:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, November 26, 2006

VICTORY! UK recording copyrights won't go to 95 years! (?)

Glyn sez,

The BBC are reporting that there will be no copyright extension for songs in the UK. The official review commissioned by the Treasury on all IP law in the UK has not yet been published but it is highly likely the BBC have managed to get a sneak peak.

Sir Cliff Richard and Jethro Tull had been among artists lobbying for copyright to last 95 years, rather than the present 50.

The Open Rights Group had been amongst the groups lobbying against this possibility with their release the music campaign and their submitions to the review. When the report actualy comes out we will see if they have had similar success with their request to create a new exception to UK copyright law that would give individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format. Sign the petition if you're in the UK.

Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:27:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

How to make your urine blue

How to ingest methylene blue to make your pee blue. Link (Thanks, Phil!)

Reader comment:

Russell says:

I've been an avid reader of the Boing Boing blog for some time, it's good stuff.

I saw the 'turn urine blue' post and remembered seeing something about methylene blue on an MSDS that would probably be worth mentioning with this - it may have had a hand in some birth defects when injected amniotically. Fairly harmless stuff unless you're pregnant though, and probably not to dangerous when ingested even then, but for more info there's a report here.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:56:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Boing Boing Boing podcast 008: Merlin Mann

Episode #8 of the Boing Boing Boing podcast is ready for downloading. Our guest for this edition is Merlin Mann of the personal productivity blog 43folders.com

Xeni, Pesco and I talk with our guest about a slew of recent Boing Boing topics, and about things going on in Merlin's busy life, including his fabulously funny "Phone Guy" videos.

LISTEN: Podcast Feed, Subscribe via iTunes, Direct MP3 Link (64K), other MP3 file download options from archive.org: Link, enhanced podcast with images, or listen at Odeo (with archives of previous shows): Link.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:40:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Future Salon: alternate reality games

Tomorrow's Future Salon in Second Life is, appropriately, on the topic of alternate reality games and pervasive gaming. Participants include 42 Entertainment's Elan Lee (BB pal Jane McGonigal's collaborator on projects like ilovebees), Tony "Clickable Culture" Walsh, and Adrian and/or Dan Hon of Mind Candy , creators of Perplex City. The in-game salon takes place tomorrow, Monday 11/27, at 4pm PST. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 06:14:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Glass handgun model

This handsome glass model of a revolver is currently up for auction on eBay. Starting bid is GBP 9.99 (approx US$19.30). From the auction listing:

COLT 45 TYPE GUN SHAPED GLASS BOTTLE HAND MADE
THIS IS A RARE CONDITION WITH A NICE WELL DETAILED EMBOSSING GLASS SURFACE..

A LOVELY BOTTLE TO HAVE IN YOUR COLLECTION BOTTLE APPROX 10'' LONG.. .

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:48:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

McDonald's tries to patent sandwich-making

McDonald's has filed a patent application in Europe and the US for making sandwiches:

The burger company says owning the 'intellectual property rights' would help its hot deli sandwiches look and taste the same at all of its restaurants.

It also wants to cut down on the time needed to put together a sandwich, thought to have been dreamt up by the Earl of Sandwich in 1762.

The 55-page patent, which has been filed in the US and Europe, covers the 'simultaneous toasting of a bread component'.

Garnishes of lettuce, onions and tomatoes, as well as salt, pepper and ketchup, are inserted into a cavity in a 'sandwich delivery tool'.

The 'bread component' is placed over the cavity and the assembly tool is inverted to tip out the contents. Finally, the filling is placed in the 'bread component'.

It explains: 'Often the sandwich filling is the source of the name of the sandwich; for example, ham sandwich.'

Link (via Digg)

Update: Gareth sez, "Here's a link to the actual patent application. McDonald's isn't attempting to patent sandwich-making per se, just a tool for putting together a sandwich."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:37:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Open Source holiday gift guide

Make Magazine has published an "Open Source Holiday Gift Guide," filled with things to give this Christmas that you're allowed to take apart, tinker with, understand and improve upon:

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don't own it, you can't improve upon it, you can't share it or make it better, you certainly can't post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we've put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source. Some are kits, some are open software projects that you'll need to build hardware for before gifting, and some are just support for the projects/groups that do open source. Included in this guide are things you can get from the MAKE store too (we try and have as many open source goods as possible).

Link (via O'Reilly Radar)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:42:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Make's "Warranty Voider" tool

Make Magazine has a special Make-branded "warranty-voider" Leatherman tool, along with a copy of the Maker's Bill of Rights:

* Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included.
* Cases shall be easy to open.
* Batteries should be replaceable.
* Special tools are allowed only for darn good reasons.
* Profiting by selling expensive special tools is wrong and not making special tools available is even worse.
* Torx is OK; tamperproof is rarely OK.
* Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable.
* Consumables, like fuses and filters, shall be easy to access.
* Circuit boards shall be commented.
* Power from USB is good; power from proprietary power adapters is bad.
* Standard connecters shall have pinouts defined.
* If it snaps shut, it shall snap open.
* Screws better than glues.
* Docs and drivers shall have permalinks and shall reside for all perpetuity at archive.org.
* Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.
* Metric or standard, not both.
* Schematics shall be included.

Link

Update: Fred sez, "there's a couple of things that struck me about the device after I read the manifesto and looked at the Flickr set:"

Warranty Voider violations of The Maker's Bill Of Rights

1. No parts list.
2. Case is sealed by rivets -- cannot be opened for repair.
3. Need a drill to remove rivets and a riveter to replace them (i.e. 'special tools required').
4. Can't get at components to replace them, thus entire assembly must be replaced, and proprietary parts are not available individually to the end user.
5. Ease of repair not a consideration.
6. No schematics included.

"Now, while I carry a Leatherman to perform occasional light repairs on my unreliable 1976 Triumph Bonneville, the Leatherman has missing tips and chipped tools from misuse over the years. I've always been annoyed that I can't perform maintenance on my maintenance tool."

Update 2: Phil sez, "the Make Warranty Voider has a 25 year warranty from Leatherman - they'll pretty much repair them no matter what."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fine art ads photoshopping contest - kick ass!

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest -- fine art reimagined as contemporary advertising. This is hands-down the best W1K contest I've seen this year -- some favorites (besides McDavid, pictured here): Hey Eve!, Advil, Spain Is Different, Reach, Last Supper, Escher Raid, I Wish I Had..., Shout, Coffee, Picasso Crayola, Anbesol.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:27:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Australia's copyright law breaks search engines

Australia's new copyright law may result search engines blocking access to the country. PM John Howard sold Australia's copyright law out as part of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, through which Australia agreed to change its copyright laws to surpass America's own disastrous system.

The new law will create punishing potential liability for search engines who do not secure permission for indexing, cacheing and and searching every website in their database. In order to protect themselves from liability, search engine operators would have to contact every single web-author who ever lived.

Critics say Australian copyright laws do not take into account how information is gathered and presented on the Internet.

Dr Rimmer says Internet search engines could be crippled by the proposed copyright changes, which protect libraries, archives and research institutions but leave commercial entities like Google out in the cold.

He says this will affect the ability of search engines to engage in digitisation projects like book search, provide images, index news stories and archive web content.

"Given the amount of litigation that Google has been involved in the last year, I think they've got very genuine fears that they could be subject to copyright actions in Australia," he said.

He says rather than adopting the narrow "fair use" definitions contained in the legislation, Australia should adopt a US-style open-ended fair-use defence to ensure a flow of and access to information.

Link, Link (Thanks, Dan!)

Update: Mark Pesce has a great op-ed about this in today's Melbourne Age.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:16:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bahrainis use Google Earth to spy on royals' palaces

Marilyn sez, "Ordinary Bahrainis are using Google Earth to spy on the many gargantuan palaces, yachts,former national parks and waterfront properties (90% of the country) owned by the royal family and their cronies, while the rest of the country lives in squalor."

Mahmood al-Yousif, a businessman whose political chat and blog site Mahmood’s Den is among Bahrain’s most popular, says that in the tense run-up to the polls, few Bahrainis have not surfed over the contours of their kingdom, comparing vast royal palaces, marinas and golf courses with crowded Shia villages nearby, where unemployment is rife and services meagre.

For those with insufficient bandwidth to access Google Earth, a PDF file with dozens of downloaded images of royal estates has been circulated anonymously by e-mail. Mr Yousif, among others, initially encouraged web users to post images on photo-sharing websites.

“Some of the palaces take up more space than three or four villages nearby and block access to the sea for fishermen. People knew this already. But they never saw it. All they saw were the surrounding walls,” said Mr Yousif, who is seen in Bahrain as the grandfather of its blogging community.

Link, Link to PDF closeups of Bahrain's palaces, Mahmoud's Den coverage (Thanks, Marilyn)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ukrainian steampunk plane

Ukraine's Aeroprakt is manufacturing this neo-Victorian wooden airplane. I don't know any other details -- is it veneer? Solid? One of a kind? Mass-manufactured? Link (Thanks, Avi!)

Update: Rich sez, "The 'wood' on that Aeroprakt A22 you talk about at is just a custom paint job. See the gallery of this Aussie Foxbat distributor. You can see that the lines are identical to the standard Foxbats, and you can see that steampunk plane labeled 'Wooden paint job'."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:27:16 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Chicago Sun-Times: Zune is a failure

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Andy Ihnatko unloads on the Zune with both barrels, calling it a "complete, humiliating failure" and a "colossal blunder," because Microsoft has taken the user out of its design considerations and put the music industry (in the person of Universal's Doug Morris, "a big, clueless idiot") in their place.

Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

"Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity...

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba's Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune's limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.

Throw in the Zune's tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one.

Link (via Joho the Blog)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:29:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

CableCard PCs will only stream to Xboxes

Fred sez,

More evidence that the digital video future may look like a big downgrade compared to the analog present, thanks to viral DRM carried by the CableCard.

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows MCE computers equipped with a CableCard will only be allowed to stream live video to Media Extender devices (like Xbox 360). No streaming to other PCs. Also, recorded CableCard content cannot be converted for playback on portable devices (Zune, iPod).

By contrast, analog, non-CableCard-infected TiVos support both these functions, as do PCs that use analog TV tuner-cards.

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:33:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO break Zune's WiFi DRM

Gizmodo has a quick and easy hack for breaking the DRM on the Zune's WiFi. The Zune locks the music you wirelessly share with other Zunekers so that it only plays three times before evaporating. This is applied totally indiscriminately, even to Creative Commons music with a machine-readable license granting permission to distribute it. It would also apply this restriction to students who shared MP3s of their class-lectures.

First, you need to enable hard drive mode using the instructions we posted before. Then, rename whatever files—MP3s, movies, programs—to have the extension ".jpg" in order to fool the Zune into thinking its an image. This hack works because Zune doesn't apply DRM to images!

Then what?

Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the "containing folder" where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension.

Link (via Wonderland)

See also: Microsoft Zune will violate Creative Commons licenses

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:13:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 24, 2006

Does the TSA consider holiday pie a dangerous liquid?

Snip from Consumerist:

Inside, a man asks whether the no liquid rules apply to his pie... Not much fuss at the security pageant. We packed our liquids in our checked luggage, seeing no need to perform toilet mid-flight. A man waiting in line asked if it was okay to bring his pie on board. "That aint't a liquid," said the TSA employee. "Oh, good," said the man. We refrained from asking aloud whether cherry pie filling was considered a gel. "Unless it's sweet potato," she said. "It is," he said. "Then I'm gonna have to confiscate it!" said the TSA employee, to general laughter.

Link (Thanks, Ben Popken)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:23:40 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni in New York Press newspaper

Filmmaker and writer Adario Strange interviewed me for New York Press, and called me an "anthropomorphic avatar," which is pretty darn funny. Link to article, cover scan (photo shot by Jacob Appelbaum).

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:40:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Copyright Office creates 6 DMCA exemptions

The Copyright Office has created six new exemptions to the hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to break any digital lock, even if you're doing so for a legitimate purpose.

Every three years, the Copyright Office hears petitions for exemptions to this sweeping rule. This year, it created six exemptions, including one for film profs, another for gamers whose consoles have gone obsolete, blind people, and cell-phone recyclers.

However, the office refused to grant exemptions that would benefit the general public -- space- and format-shifting, backing up your DVDs -- and they took back an earlier exemption that let people reverse-engineer the blacklists maintained by censorware companies to bring some transparency to their process.

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.

6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.

Link (Thanks, Andy, Andreas, and everyone else who suggested this story!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sophe Lux: PJ Harvey meets Freddy Mercury

I've been listening to Sophe Lux's CD Waking the Mystics nonstop for a week or so, and just loving it. The Portland, OR eclectic glam band is fronted by Wendy Haynes, who sounds a little like PJ Harvey by way of Freddy Mercury. The songwriting is often hilarious, sometimes profound, and the songs veer from faux-psychedelic 1960s clavier rock ("God Doesn't Take American Express") to luscious sci-fi rock opera ("Marie Antoinette Robot 2073") to bouncy numbers like "Little Soldiers of Time." It's singable, it's danceable and the concert DVD I've been perusing suggests that this is the kind of thing you want to see live, too. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:16:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sticker Graphics: mixed-media books of sticker art

Sticker Graphics is a series of gorgeous box-set mixed-media books devoted to sticker art (something I have a lot of passion for). I picked up issue two ("Do You Love Stickers?") at Reading Frenzy last week, taken by the gorgeous, Space-Odysseyesque curved white box, which has a transparent compartment on the top filled with handsome stickers and patches. There's a drawer set into the box that slides open to reveal a book of lush sticker-art photos, a "locker poster" of stickers, and a DVD of little sticker animations (these are the least interesting part of the package).

The stickers and book, though, are really terrific -- it makes me wish I had a new laptop to cover. There's a lot of Japanese-looking die-cuts, a lot of little stickers perfect for filling in the blank spaces on your canvas (or decorating smaller phones and cameras) and some nice retro and Euro-stickers. The book provides a fascinating tour of global sticker design and placement. Sticker Graphics: All you need is..., Sticker Graphics 2: Do you love stickers?

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:35:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cushions that look like rocks

Livingstones, a French company, sells these cushions that look like rocks -- the idea is to pile them up in your living room to make soft, comfy cairns of cognitively dissonant rock-pillows. Link (via Cribcandy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:14:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

PSP homebrewers develop DRM

Xart, a hobbyist PSP game-maker, has created a DRM system for his games. Creators of unauthorized homebrew games for the PSP worry that others will strip their names off of their creations and appropriate credit for their work, so Xart has proposed that the splash-screens that appear before the game starts should be encrypted so that they can't be altered.

Of course, the homebrew PSP scene exists because this sort of thing just doesn't work. It's impossible to deliver a game to a user with an encrypted section and the keys to decrypt it and expect that the user won't be able to decrypt it.

On the one hand, it's pretty unlikely that a homebrew hobbyist will use the DMCA to attack people who break their crypto, and it's reasonable to want to keep the credit intact on your works. On the other hand, this stuff really doesn't work, and no one should know that better than a PSP hobbyist.

With some people trying to rip off the homebrew scene, pretending to be Dark_Alex or some of our other respected devs, Xart from our forums has come up with a great new idea to prevent people ripping off others work. Xart has developed a powerful, fast Data Array Scrambling (DAS) system to protect your homebrew games and applications from hex editing and others stealing credit from your hard work.

This is an example of an encryption technique and it not a yet full release. For this Xart has used his xLoader application. It's a proof of concept to show just how quick encryption can be done to protect your work.

Link (Thanks, Hamish!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:09:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NESPaul: guitar made out of a Nintendo

The NESPaul guitar was made by grafting the neck of a dead electric guitar onto the hollowed-out body of an old Nintendo console. I have no idea if the resulting contraption sounds any good, but it looks so! damned! metal! Link (Thanks, CB)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:59:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Blobfish: a creepy sea-critter

Mr Blobby (a fathead, blobfish or Psychrolutidae), pictured here, was "trawled during the NORFANZ expedition at a depth between 1013 m and 1340 m, on the Norfolk Ridge, north-west of New Zealand, June 2003." I had no idea that things like this existed outside of the cartoons. He gives me the crawlies. Link (via JWZ)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:56:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Turkey-shaped Jell-O Mold 2006 Competition

BoingBoing pal Danielle Spencer says, "Well, after last year's frighteningly realistic Jell-O® turkey (previous BB post), I conducted a Turkey Mold contest for this year's Thanksgiving party at the office. And here, now, the highly unheimlich results."

Snip from a description of one of the winning fowl:

Chopped Liver Turkey
Lianne and Karis's stark and startling chopped liver turkey executes an interrogation reminiscent of Greenbergian formalism — what qualitites are intrinsic and indispensible to turkey qua turkey, to the quiddity of the bird? — they ask us. Simultaneously, the sculptural form references the geometry of minimalism and the somatic impulse of gender and identity-based work. A dazzling recapituation of late twentiety century artistic movements.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:51:48 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EMI will allow cricket songbook to be published

Tim sez, "EMI have rescinded their copyright warning about the parody cricket songbook, according to its distributor."

Unless you've been living on another planet you would have surely been hearing about the Fanatics songbook over the last couple of weeks.

Just 5 days prior to the commencement of play at the Gabba it looked like we were going to have to shred the recently printed 100,000 copies.

After a slight misunderstanding with our good friends at EMI, we've been reliably informed that the songbook isn't in breach of any copyright laws and in turn the songbook is once ahead downloadable and fully legal.

Fantastic news for Aussie cricket fans the nation wide!!"

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:05:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Portland's zine-maker co-op

I was lucky enough to recently tour Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center -- a zine-maker's co-op that provides a lab for self-publishing zinesters who can come in and use the center's computers, printers, copiers, and fantastic letter-press workshop. They offer courses in zine-making (especially in the use of the letter-press, which produces really handsome materials). Membership is a sliding scale of $45-$100 year, and the Center also sports a multi-thousand-volume library of zines that you can use for inspiration. It's just upstairs from Reading Frenzy, the stunning zine store. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:59:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sudden Gravity: Twin-Peaksesque horror comic

I read Greg Ruth's graphic novel Sudden Gravity this week on a plane and I'm still reeling from it. It's a deeply surreal story about the apocalypse coming to a giant, grim hospital modelled on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. The storyline is un-summarizable in the way that, say, Twin Peaks was. And as with Twin Peaks, the thing that makes this book work is the spooky, overarching feel, something that comes from the writing and especially from the stupendous, stark, haunting black-and-white artwork. I was given this book by Shawna Gore, an editor at Dark Horse, who declared Greg Ruth to be her favorite artist working in the field, and I'm inclined to agree. There is so much to set your skin a-crawl and keep you turning the pages in Ruth's illustration. It's a fast read -- I put it away in less than an hour -- but it's a slow burn. I keep returning to those illustrations in my mind. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:53:05 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Record industry association declares DRM dead

An executive at IFPI -- the international recording industry association -- has declared DRM to be "dead" -- though he warns of "Son of DRM," whatever that means. He promises that the major labels will always be at the center of the music industry, too (he runs an indie label). New Music Strategies speculates that the labels will shift to even more online surveillance, more lawsuits against fans, and worse End User License Agreements (I don't see how you accomplish this last one without DRM, though).

DRM as we know it is over. There may be Son of DRM but that’s another matter. Right now its dead, the majors are moving towards the new model. The one thing you can be sure of is they will still be at the centre of the world music industry whatever happens. The independents are another matter. As our sector’s share has fallen by almost half in just over twelve months, the new model for us is partnership. It always was, I’m just not sure we got it.

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:39:50 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Design your own Penguin cover

Jeremy sez, "Penguin has released six classic titles with pure white, art-quality covers for people to design their own book jackets. Titles include The Picture of Dorian Gray,Magic Tales from the Brothers Grimm and Emma."

In essence, we've started a new series because if the first six work we'll publish more. The series was named My Penguin by our rather marvellous Creative Director, who came up with the name after about two minutes. The tag line is 'Books by the Greats, Covers by You', and throughout the rush to design the (back) covers, get the right paper, and tell people about them, we've had a really great time. The covers are art-quality paper, and from internal Penguin efforts we know that they hold ink, paint, pencil and glue (see the first efforts here). Each one comes shrink-wrapped so the paper doesn't get dirty, and I hope people might give them as gifts. They're went round Penguin earlier in the week and we've starting an online gallery that will launch with staff efforts at the end of November (no doubt we'll talk about this here). All of the books talk about the gallery on the back cover, because we want anyone and everyone to send in pictures of their own covers so we can put them up too.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:34:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Last days of decrepit underwear perverts

Gilles Barbier's genius photo "L'Hospice" depicts the final days of funnybook underwear-perverts -- a saggy Wonder Woman wheels Captain America along on his gurney, Superman leans on his walker... Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Update: Andy sez, "Mr. Barbier's works are actually life-size sculptures, not photos. They were shown at the Whitney Museum in NYC in 2003 as part of an exhibition on how American culture influenced artists worldwide."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:09:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Interview with Lonely Planet Micronations author

BLDGBLOG has posted a fascinating interview with Simon Sellars, co-author of The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations. Micronations are those "countries" founded by lovable crackpots who declare some chunk of dirt to be sovereign territory and create a flag, currency, royal line of succession, and all the pompous trappings of nationhood. The book is a traveller's guide to these kingdoms, with all the best things to do and see as you visit them.

BLDGBLOG: Have you ever declared your own micronation?

Sellars: Yes. I grew up in the suburb of Bentleigh, in Melbourne, Australia. It was an exceedingly boring place, like a retirement village – it seemed like I was the only teenager around at times. So I founded the Independent Republic of Bentleigh, declared myself President, and claimed the whole of Bentleigh as territory. Our national anthem was "We Can't Be Beaten," a song by the toughest band in the land, Rose Tattoo.

BLDGBLOG: What happened to it?

Sellars: We were beaten – the IRB was invaded by Poland. The Polish kid next door already hated me, but when he saw me poncing up and down the back yard draped in my IRB flag, he was enraged even more than usual. He jumped over the fence, punched me in the mouth and stole my lunch money – and that was all the IRB's assets gone, just like that. He also stepped on my toy tanks and melted my plastic soldiers with a cigarette lighter, which meant the IRB had no defence force, and that was the end of it, really. My mother banned me from starting up a micronation ever again, unless I could back it up with sufficient armoury and investment capital, which of course I never could, being a very lazy kid.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:06:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smart, simple fried-egg toy

Love this fried-egg toy -- a metal egg-shell that opens up to reveal a felt fried egg. Link (via Cribcandy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:56:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Spielberg promises no iPod video

Steven Spielberg decried the iPod's 3-inch screen and promised that he would not shoot for the medium. I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that a 3-inch screen wants different kinds of material than a 300' one -- and that old timers like Spielberg may not have what it takes to shoot for 3".

He also says that people are social and will always go to the cinema -- another statement I largely agree with. But there are two factors working against this:

1. The arms-race for feature-film budgets means that no one takes big chances with wide-release movies. No one is going to take a flier on a $300 million movie, trying something totally unproven and radical.

2. Because the movies cost so much to make, the studios are obsessed with them as crown jewels, and they've taken to treating cinemagoers like suspected criminals, bombarding them with "anti-piracy" warnings (um, I just paid $13 to get into this turkey, I'm not a pirate), searching them and taking away their phones (that thing has my calendar, personal photos, and private rolodex in it -- plus you can use it as digital cash!), and spying on them during the show (now *that's* a way to make a customer feel welcome).

In a free-ranging hour of interview with former NBC News correspondent Garrick Utley and questions from the audience, Spielberg said iPod video may be all the rage but count his films out from tailoring his films to fit the small screen.

"That's one medium where I have to draw the line," he said. "We'll shoot for television and the movies and let there be a wide gap" between that and the small 3-inch screen. He also said that he felt that people are social animals who will choose to go out to a movie rather than watch a show on widescreen.

"I don't think movie theaters will ever go away," Spielberg said.

Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:51:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Baseball cuffs

I like these baseball cuffs -- velvet lined, brass-reinforced, and ready to be autographed by your buddies. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:42:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thanksgiving gross-out photoshopping contest

Today on a very topical Worth 1000 photoshopping contest: gross-out banquets for Thanksgiving. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:38:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Old engravings of animals are charmingly strange

Bibliodyssey has an excellent gallery of 18th century engravings from 'Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen' at Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon (named as 'Histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes'.

The absurd rendering of many of the animals comes about because the engravers/artists working on the project did not actually see the animals. They had to rely on descriptions and their imagination and, as was the fashion of the time, the animals were placed in contrived settings and often given human facial qualities, which only serves to heighten the sense of bizarre. And thankful we are too.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:53:18 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Unusual photo of large squid in parking lot

What is this squid doing with a bottle of tea in a parking space? Brought to you by Squid, a blog of all things squidish. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:41:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Coop's La Carrera Panamericana photojournal

Coop is back from his Mexico adventure as a co-racer in the La Carrera Panamericana. He's just posted the photos and stories from day 5.

If you ever need to buy something in a locale where your grasp of the native tongue leaves something to be desired, it helps to be able to draw a picture. We found some valve springs that we hoped would work, and we were on our way again.

I wonder if the Mexican mechanic realizes he in possession of a piece of Coop original artwork. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:30:29 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Preview of new issue of Hi-Fructose

The 4th issue of my favorite art magazine, Hi-Fructose, is hitting stands in December.

The fourth volume of Hi Fructose Magazine returns this winter with more under the counter culture and toysploitation to sink your rotten teeth into

This issue features an extensive interview with Ray Ceasar, the tiled street abduction of Space Invader, the doe-eyed-sweet art of Fawn Gehweiler, Ragnar’s hobos and vixens, and an interview with Gary Taxali! Plus multipage exposes on Kozik’s Mickey Maos, The Gorillaz as shot by Brian McCarty, Leslie Repetaux (aka Black Olive), Sauer Kids, Sam Buxton,Wilfred Wood, a journey into Longo Land, Designer toys and much, much more.

Edited and published by Annie Owens and Attaboy.

Laughing Squid has links to preview pages. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:34:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The REAL Brian Atene responds

Last month, I posted a video of Brian Atene, the young arrogant kid who made an audition tape for Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket casting call in 1984. I followed up the posting with a link to a YouTube video from 2006 of a guy claiming to be Brian Atene. It turns out this was a fake. Here's the REAL Brian Atene.

Well, Brian Atene himself has posted a video response to his 1984 tape, and he more or less admits that the video wasn't a joke. This isn't one of the lame fake Atene videos that popped up on YouTube in the wake of the original video—it really is Atene this time. If you skip the first two (very weird) minutes, this new video is pretty entertaining. Atene seems off his rocker, but he's also weirdly charismatic. Among other things, he says he didn't actually send the famous tape to Kubrick; he made two tapes and ended up submitting the other one.

I actually like the first two minutes. He's funny! Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:50:25 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Images of animals in the womb

The Daily Mail features a gallery of images of animals in the womb from the National Geographic documentary In The Womb: Animals that airs December 10. I'm not sure how much these images have been enhanced and altered with CG but they're still quite stunning.

From the Daily Mail:

Using a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans, computer graphics and tiny cameras, the team were able to show the entire process from conception to birth.

"These kind of images from inside animals have never been seen before," said Jeremy Dear of Pioneer Productions, who made the film.

"We worked with dozens of zoos and animal sanctuaries across the world. There were a lot of different challenges - recording a dolphin (image right) is very different from an elephant (image left), for instance.

"Animals were trained to sit still near the scanners and we also inserted cameras into the womb via the elephant's rectum-But it has been worth it. It one sequence we follow an elephant developing. When it is finally born, there is not a dry eye in the house.

Link to Daily Mail article, Link to National Geographic's In the Womb: Animals (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:37:27 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Car stereos nicked due to rumored cable TV hack

This weekend nearly 200 Fords in Cardiff, UK were robbed of their stereos, more than four times the norm. According to police, the boosts in boosts was probably due to the spread of an urban legend that chips inside the stereos can be used to decode scrambled digital TV signals. Yesterday, police recovered 37 of the stereos, 21 radio face plates, and a laptop from a single car. From the BBC News:

Police confirmed the rumour but officers have spoken to Ford and the digibox manufacturers who said there was no link.

Ford told BBC News that components cannot be used in this way.

A spokesman said it was "pure myth" sparked by an off-the-cuff comment from someone within the motor industry.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:11:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO make a papercraft turkey

In the latest MAKE: Weekend Project video, Bre Pettis and special guest Allison Kudla teach you how to make the ultimate vegetarian turkey... out of paper. From the project page:

(We'll explain) how to use Blender to decimate a turkey and output it to Pepakura which will flatten it and add tabs and get it ready for papercrafting... Watch the video to learn how to build one from scratch, print out the instructions if you want to learn how to make your own model out of paper, or you can just print out the plans and fold them on up! This could make a great activity for the family while the meat-based bird is cooking!

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:34:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mark's paintings at Roq La Rue

My art show at Roq La Rue gallery earlier this month was a blast. I showed nine of my paintings and have sold five six so far. My worked was shown with four other artists: Chris Reccardi, Lynne Naylor, Johnny Yanok, and Wednesday Kirwan. Wednesday was at the show, too, and it was really fun meeting her. You can see everyone's art here.

If you're interested in buying one of the remaining paintings, please contact the gallery owner, Kirsten Anderson at (206) 374-8977, or by email.

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

"Candy Thief"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
$650
"Fallen Leaf"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"Gumdrop Princess"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Pet Walk"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"Star Hitcher"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
$950
"Stump Dance"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"The Poke"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Torn Leaf"
20 x 24
Acrylic on Canvas
$750
"Zero"
20 x 24
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:09:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robert Pirsig interview

Robert Pirsig, author of the best selling philosophical autobiography, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, gave what he claims is his last interview with the Guardian, to promote the republication of his second book, Lila, originally published in 1992.

When [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] came out, in 1974, edited down from 800,000 words, and having been turned down by 121 publishers, it seemed immediately to catch the need of the time. George Steiner in the New Yorker likened it to Moby Dick. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights (Pirsig refused). It has since taken on a life of its own, and though parts feel dated, its quest for meaning still seems urgent. For Pirsig, however, it has become a tragic book in some ways. At the heart of it was his relationship with his son, Chris, then 12, who himself, unsettled by his father's mania, seemed close to a breakdown. In 1979, aged 22, Chris was stabbed and killed by a mugger as he came out of the Zen Centre in San Francisco. Subsequent copies of the book have carried a moving afterword by Pirsig. "I think about him, have dreams about him, miss him still," he says now. "He wasn't a perfect kid, he did a lot of things wrong, but he was my son ..."

I ask what Chris thought of the book, and Pirsig's face strains a little.

"He didn't like it. He said, 'Dad, I had a good time on that trip. It was all false.'"

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:25:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EFF Staff Technologist free talk in LA next Tuesday

EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen will give a free talk next Tuesday at USC in Los Angeles. Seth is the final speaker in my Fulbright Chair lecture series this year, and he's a fascinating technologist who does an admirable job of explaining the subtle ways in which technology design can affect liberty for better or for worse.

Seth's the creator of the conceptual Trusted Computing mod, Owner Override, an implementation of Trusted Computing that preserves all the privacy benefits and eliminates the danger to users.

He's also the maintainer of the Bootable Business Card Linux distribution, the author of the DeCSS Haiku, and one of the investigators who cracked the secret behind the hidden codes in color laser printer outputs.

Where: University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication, Room 207 (Los Angeles)

When: Tuesday, November 28, 7PM-9PM

Hope to see you there! Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:23:47 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Audio from Xbox hacker's USC talk last night

The audio from Andrew "bunnie" Huang's free talk at USC last night is online, thanks to students Mike Jones and Andy Sternberg. Bunnie came to fame for breaking the crypto on the Xbox, enabling the creation of Xbox Linux, and is now working with the startup he founded, Chumby, which makes an open media-player/device.

Bunnie's talk was a fantastic exegesis on the mind of a reverse-engineer, the perils and promise of hardware hacking, and the pursuit of business models that encourage smart customers to get the most out of their devices.

Next week's speaker is EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen, whose many claims to fame include authoring the DeCSS Haiku, his sharp critiques of trusted computing, his role in uncovering the color printer secret codes, and many other seminal technical achievements. He also maintains the Bootable Business Card distribution of Linux. Seth speaks at 7PM on Tuesday, Nov 28, at the USC Annenberg School, room 207. Link, MP3 Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:12:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Crap Hound No. 6 - clip art magnificence

Chloe from Reading Frenzy (Portland's astounding zine store) just handed me a copy of Crap Hound No. 6, the latest installment in her press's steady reissuance of the seminal clip-art zine. Created by Sean Tejaratchi, Crap Hound issues each featured a grand, disjointed theme -- issue six's is Death, Telephone and Scissors. Each page is a kind of collage of stark, black-and-white imagery of these things, laid out with a lot of wit and yet with a solemn appreciation for the subject.

I'm very excited to hear that a new issue of Crap Hound is coming shortly -- this one to feature "Church and State."

Crap Hound inspired me and countless others in its initial printing (the name of the zine was part of my impetus for titling my first major story-sale "Craphound" and subsequently registering the domain -- I was also inspired in this by the insults fielded in the great film Local Hero). Holding an issue again after all these years takes me whirling back. I could look at this thing for hours. Link

See also Crap Hound -- seminal clipart zine -- is back!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:46:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Angry little comics: "I'm Gonna Rip Your Face Off!"

I just finished reading Joe Sayers's mini-comic, "I'm Gonna Rip Your Face Off" (discovered on the shelves of Portland's amazing, one-of-a-kind zine emporium Reading Frenzy) and man, that's some kind of bitter, angry funny! Three bucks is cheap for the kind of sardonic barks of laughter this little book wrung from my chest. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:41:39 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Net Neutrality and online gaming

In this article, entitled "Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf," a sharp analyst tackles what the loss of Net Neutrality could mean for online gamers. Net Neutrality is the idea that your ISP sends you the packets you ask for as well as it can. A non-neutral net is one where ISPs take bribes to make some services better and degrade the rest.

With the permanent barriers that the removal of net neutrality will erect for these uses, the worst-case scenario includes three waves of change:

* One or more mainstream ISPs will introduce excessive lag that will effectively prohibit their users from participating in online games. The move will not be aimed at restricting usage per se, but rather to extract a fee from the game operator. However, as the Cablevision and YES dispute of 2002 showed us4, a fee disagreement between a cable company and content provider can effectively lock out the use of a popular service for over a year;

* As online gaming guilds, clans, and partners disappear into the rifts created in the Internet fabric, players that derive value from the community of the game rather than the playing experience per se will drop off. This vicious cycle of scarcity of users will lead to diminished enjoyment for existing users which will lead to still fewer users, until more games follow Asheron’s Call to oblivion5;

* Hardcore users will write strongly worded messages to their ISPs, who will classify them as unreasonable malcontents using more than their share of bandwidth.

Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:35:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Warhol soup cans on sale

Barney's New York department store is selling limited edition "Andy Warhol" cans of Campbell's condensed tomato soup. The cans are available in four colorways based on Warhol's famous screenprints and cost $12/each. According to the Barney's catalog, the imagery is "Printed on special quality paper and with Andy's signature (reproduced)." (In 2004, Campbell sold a similar limited edition four pack of soup cans wrapped in Warhol labels.)
Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:39:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

EMI threatens cricket fans over parody songs

Pirate sez, "Australian recording label EMI has threatened to sue Australian cricket fans for publishing parody songs based on popular pop songs at cricket matches."

EMI says The Fanatics' Ashes songbook breached copyright because it included altered lyrics to songs such as Go West by the Village People and Daydream Believer by The Monkees.

The Daydream Believer parody included the lines: "Cheer up Michael Vaughan, How bad must it be, To a be a poor pommie whinger, And you're watching on TV?"

Link (Thanks, Pirate!)

Update: Tim sez, "EMI have rescinded their copyright warning about the parody cricket songbook, according to its distributor."

Unless you've been living on another planet you would have surely been hearing about the Fanatics songbook over the last couple of weeks.

Just 5 days prior to the commencement of play at the Gabba it looked like we were going to have to shred the recently printed 100,000 copies.

After a slight misunderstanding with our good friends at EMI, we've been reliably informed that the songbook isn't in breach of any copyright laws and in turn the songbook is once ahead downloadable and fully legal.

Fantastic news for Aussie cricket fans the nation wide!!"

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:15:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Italian post-code database liberated from paywall

David sez, "The Italian Post Office was privatized recently, and they pulled the freely downloadable database of Italian postcodes, right before introducing a new series of postcodes, extensive changes to existing ones, and a new rule by which they would refuse the delivery of any letter with an imprecise postcode on it. Simultaneously they started selling a CD version of the database for several thousand Euros. The Italian public was understandably upset, and it took only about a month for a project from Free Software Foundation Europe to recreate, and liberate the database which is now accessible again to users, and software developers, independently from Poste Italiane's." Link (Thanks, David)

See also Help build a public UK postcode database

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:00:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Atrocious apostrophe's and "quotation" "mark" "abuse" photo galleries

Here are a couple of Flickr pools with photos of signs that have words in quotations for no reason, and non-possessive plurals with apostrophes (also known as the "grocer's apostrophe.")
Apostrophe link | Quote marks link (Via Give, Get, Take and Have)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:55:47 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Flickr camera guide

Flickr is publishing an amazing concordance of stats about the cameras used by its members: which cameras are popular, which are gaining, and so on. You can also browse photos by camera to see which ones please you most: this is the world's best consumer-guide for cameras. Link (via Waxy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:59:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fallout Shelter Handbook from 1962

Ward Jenkins scanned a few pages from his copy of the Fallout Shelter Handbook from 1962

From 1962, deep in the midst of the Cold War. I found this amongst piles of musty smelling magazines and articles at a booth at the Inman Park Arts Festival several years back. The cover is classic: your average white American family enjoying life as best as they can after an atomic attack. What I love the most about it is that Mom is in her day dress, apron and all, preparing dinner, and Dad is relaxing in his jacket, smoking a pipe, having just finished reading the liner notes to something by the Ray Coniff Singers, probably.

The rest of the handbook is some interesting stuff if you dig construction how-to's -- this could've been sold at a Home Depot if they had them at the time. There are some very interesting ads in the handbook, too. Check out the rest of the images I've scanned to see more.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:16:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Title sequences to the James Bond movies

My favorite part of any James Bond film is the title sequence. You can watch them all here. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:09:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Electromechanical bulldog mystery

Swapatorium bought this cool-looking old metal bulldog statuette and discovered that it contains some kind of electromechanical component. What is it?!

This metal bulldog was in a box of objects from an estate sale. It no longer works. I have no idea what its function was when it did operate. It's 3 inches tall and made in Japan.

The bottom has a piece of cardboard and felt. I pulled it up to see what was inside and found the metal coil and string. Was this thing a noisemaker? The dog is solid metal except for the tiny hole on the side which probably once held the pull string. Anyone ever seen one of these? I'm just curious as to its purpose.

If you think you know what it is, post a comment. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:01:04 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Harper's Weekly email newsletter

The always-surprising Harper's Weekly email starts off with bad news about Iraq:

In Hillah, Iraq, a man promising work lured day-laborers into a minivan, then blew it up, killing 22 people. "The ground was covered with the remains of people and blood," said a laborer, "and survivors ran in all directions." Thirty people were killed in attacks in Mosul, Baquba, and Baghdad, four American security contractors and an Austrian were kidnapped in Basra, and a deputy health minister was kidnapped in Baghdad. "Where is the government?" yelled a woman in Mashtal, after multiple bombs killed 11 civilians. "Women and children were killed. God is great, God is great." Senator John McCain said that American troops in Iraq were "fighting and dying for a failed policy"; Henry Kissinger said that he didn't believe a military victory in Iraq is possible; and Army Specialist James Barker admitted that he had raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and helped murder her family in March 2006. Tony Blair told Al Jazeera that western intervention in Iraq had been "pretty much of a disaster."

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:07:36 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Device to constrain your toddler while you use the toilet

There are many times I could have used this harness, meant to keep your kid out of trouble while you use a public toilet.

It reminds me of a story a friend told me. His wife is a social worker who goes into crack houses to rescue kids. One time, she walked into a decrepit crack house and found a baby duct taped to the wall.
Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Reader comment:

Scott says:

This link is to a photoshopped image I created of the infant bathroom restraint device with an included gas mask.

I think that the manufacturers of the bathroom infant restraint device should throw in a blindfold or at least a gas mask for the poor kid. Strapping a helpless person to a wall and forcing them to watch someone go the bathroom is considered torture in some countries.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:48:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Little car kits from Japan

Mitsuoka Motors in Japan sells neat car kits.

To support your dream to make up your original car by yourself. Not only people who love cars but also like mechanical things must have dreamed at least once. This model makes your dream come true.

[The K4] is composed of more than 500 parts and takes approximately 40 hours to assemble. The Kit-Car measures just under 2.5 meters (eight feet) long and can run at up to 50 kilometers (31 miles) an hour. The expected cost of each of this vehicle is US $6,460. (Spluch)

Link

Reader comment:

citizenj says:

I'm not sure if you've noticed or not, but Google's translation from Japanese to English of the Little Car Kits site comes up with some serious Engrish going on:

"Electlic? It delivers the feeling of being stoked to you as the Santa Claus does?"

Wow.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:43:08 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Takeshi Yamada's curious taxidermy creations

New York artist Takeshi Yamada creates spectacular taxidermy gaffs--frauds and fakes that are right at home in a Victorian cabinet of curiosity or PT Barnum's American Museum of the 19th century. (Seen here, Yamada's Human-faced fly with penny.) Culture chronicler Silke Tudor wrote a wonderful profile of Yamada in last week's Village Voice after meeting him at a recent bizarre taxidermy confab orchestrated by BB pal Robert Marbury of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy.

From the Village Voice profile:

Born out of the mythos of Coney Island, Yamada's present-day cosmos includes several six-foot-long Mongolian death worms; a pair of Fiji mermaids; a two-headed baby; a hairy trout; a seven-fingered hand; fossilized fairies; jackalope stew; a five-foot-long bloodsucking chupacabra; a 16th-century homunculus; a legion of samurai warriors trapped in the bodies of horseshoe crabs; a tiny marsh dragon; a coven of freakishly large, nuclear-radiated stag beetles from Bikini Atoll; and a furry mer-bunny, all of which are brought to life using old bones, shells, resin, origami, and bits and pieces of refuse, both inorganic and fleshy.

"In the East, abnormalities are not seen as shocking," explains Yamada as he slogs through a deep, soggy thicket behind a baseball field. "The freakish is not a bad thing. It can represent the mystery of the universe. An expression of divinity. A blessing."

He felt a bit differently when a tiny, horn-like tumor began to grow out of his finger after he moved to Coney Island.

"Shazam!" exclaims Yamada, as he often does. "I was like jackalope!"

Link to Village Voice article, Link to Yamada's page at Sideshow World

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:09:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Shapeshifting memory plastic

Researchers have invented a new plastic material that can change into three different shapes based on heat. The chemical engineers from MIT and the Helmhotz Association of German Research Centers demonstrated a plastic tube with three "programmed" diameters (4.5 mm, 6.9 mm, 5.8 mm) that are selected by altering the temperature. From the MIT News Office:

An "intelligent stent" made of the new class of plastics could assume three different shapes to facilitate medical procedures: It would assume a handy oval shape for insertion, then a fully inflated round shape for temporary use inside a blood vessel, duct or other cylindrical organ, and lastly, a compressed cylindrical shape for easy removal.

The triple-shape-shift from shape A to B to C could also have applications in industry. In factories, changeable plastic fasteners could be implanted in, or attached to, one part, then heated to extend an arm to another part. With further heating, the fastener would change shape yet again to lock itself in place. In effect, it would be an automated form of self-assembly.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:48:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Molly Bloom talks copyright

In this YouTube video, "The Disney Trap: How Copyright Steals our Stories," James Joyce's Molly Bloom and an Italian net-user have a video-chat about copyright and how the protracted term of copyright makes it hard for characters to defend themselves. It's a nice way of putting it -- by prohibiting new writers from retelling others' characters stories, the characters are limited to the perspective their writers imbued them with. Link (Thanks, Mr Bijou!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:48:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ULCA taser-cop has a history of sadistic violence

One of the UCLA cops who was caught on video torturing a student in shackles with a tazer has a record of sadistic, violent attacks on the job.

Brendon sez, "LAist has a great rundown of the history of Terrence Duren, an 18-year veteran of the UCPD and the 'taser-happy' officer in last week's incident. Among his greatest hits, it seems that he's been fired from a 'real' police force, recommended by the University for dismissal after choking a frat boy with a night stick (UCPD just suspended him), and tried after *shooting a homeless man* (who survived)."

Duren hasn't had the smoothest career in law enforcement. He came to Westwood after being fired from the infamous Long Beach PD. A few years after being hired by UCLA he was accused of using his nightstick to choke a fratboy and the university asked the UCPD to fire Duren, but he was only given a three month suspension.

In late 2003 Duren shot a homeless man, Willie Davis Frazier, Jr., in a Kerckhoff Hall bathroom. Frazier, who attempted at first to shun lawyers and represent himself, was imbalanced enough to spend time in mental institution as the court tried to figure out if he was fit to stand trial.

During a 2004 preliminary hearing in which Duren testified against Frazier, the officer carried a Machiavelli book into court, "The Prince", which argues that the ends justifies the means. "Did you know that this was Tupac's favorite book?" he asked.

Link (Thanks, Brendon!)

Update: Blogging.la investigated the story further and the LA Times got it wrong -- Terrence Duren never worked with the Long Beach PD.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:38:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni.net/trek: dispatches from Guatemala

I'm on assignment in Guatemala for a while, working on stories here. During the trip, I'll be filing short video clips, photos, and notes from the road at xeni.net/trek. Here are a some posts from the last few days:

* Snapshots from Antigua: the image above is from a 16th century monk's crypt beneath Hotel Casa Santo Domingo, a surreal, gotholicious, luxury hotel in Antigua. A room for one night costs more than some indigenous Guatemalans earn in an entire year.

At this hotel in Antigua and elsewhere in the more developed parts of Guatemala, I met some of the many North Americans who come here to adopt indigenous children. Guatemala's adoption system is private, and brokers typically collect a fee to arrange the transaction, and pay something to the birth mother. More than 75% of the population here lives under the poverty line, and Guatemala is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, so there's plenty of room in the adoption system for corruption.

Americans who come to adopt with good intentions may see the act as one of mercy for babies (some orphaned, others born to poor mothers) who face a harsh future here. But a number of the Mayan people I spoke to here feel differently about the increasing number of children leaving their country -- many describe it as theft, or something like a human cash crop. "We already lost so many of our parents during the civil war, now the white people are coming to rob us of our children," one man told me last night.

* Aquí no hay RIAA: spotted in a cafe next to signs for volcano day trips and international VOIP calling rates, "BURN CDS."

* Video clip: Caffe Opera.

* Recycled Life: Documentary film about people who live in the Guatemala City Dump, the largest and most toxic landfill in Central America.

* Heartbreak device spotted in mercado: BoingBoing's recent podcast guest John Hodgman calls these games "heartbreak devices" because "they are not particularly responsive to the poor reflexes and ill coordinated movements of a 5 year old, so very little comes of it except for tears -- and the enjoyment of watching a claw."

* Video clip: Cafe Condesa. A neat old fountain where water comes out of a mermaid's breasts.

* Space alien volcano umbrella plants: In nearby Costa Rica.

* Visit with Don Victoriano, a K'iche Mayan linguist.

* Infrastructure tech for Guatemala's rural poor: A group called AIDG develops green, sustainable infrastructure technologies for poor communities in Guatemala and elsewhere. I'm heading out there shortly to file radio and video reports.

* Two interesting places to stay in Antigua.

* Special request snapshot for Violet Blue.

* Video Clip: vendiendo nisperos en el mercado.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 07:04:15 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Newsweek on the anti-DRM movement

Newsweek takes notice of the burgeoning global anti-DRM movement:

Now, an increasingly vocal grassroots resistance to DRM is cropping up. An anti-DRM campaign called “Defective by Design,” which is organized by the Free Software Foundation, has 15,000 registered members; the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that DRM places limits on “your ability to make lawful use of the music you purchase.” Web sites like stopdrmnow.org and digitalfreedom.org have been launched “to protect individuals’ right to use new digital technologies” and urge boycotts on DRM-tagged content. David Berlind, executive editor of tech trade journal ZDNet, coined his own term for DRM: “Content Restriction, Annulment and Protection.” (Figure out the acronym).

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:00:38 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fox affiliate's ridiculous blogging "agreement"

Andy sez, "Our local Fox affiliate in DC has been plugging their new blogging tool on air lately, inviting the public to use it. It's one of the first cases I've heard of in which a TV news station is doing this, but of course, there had to be a catch in the fine print."

You agree that any content you post becomes the property of FIM [Fox Interactive Media]. You understand and agree that FIM and its parent and affiliated companies may use, publish, copy, sublicense, adapt, edit, distribute, publicly perform, display and delete the content you post as they see fit. This right will terminate at the time you remove such content from the Site. Notwithstanding the foregoing, a back-up or residual copy of the content posted by you to the Site may remain on the FIM servers after you have removed such content from the Site, and FIM retains the rights to those copies.

If at any time you are not happy with the Forums or object to any material within the Forums, your sole remedy is to stop using them.

Now, it's clear to me that Fox -- or anyone who hosts others' words -- needs to know that the people who post the material on its site won't turn around and sue because the site is hosting their words. But as with all non-negotiated, crammed-down-your-throats "agreements," Fox goes so far beyond this as to make it clear that the lawsuits they want to guard against aren't the frivolous ones, but rather the ones that might arise from them actually ripping you off. Link (Thanks, Andy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:57:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Berlusconi used Hollywood studios for money laundering

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is on trial for laundering money by purchasing copyright licenses from MPAA members. Accused of co-conspiring with him is David Mills, the "estranged husband" of Tessa Jowell, the British copyright minister who has taken many extremist stances in support of the handful of US-led Fortune 100 companies that dominate global entertainment.

Next time you hear an entertainment exec spouting evidence-free garbage about P2P being used to fund terrorism, ask him about Berlusconi and his company's complicity with high official corruption and money-laundering.

Prosecutors say offshore companies set up in the early 1990s were used to buy American film rights which were sold at hugely inflated prices to Mr Berlusconi's television company, Mediaset.

It was an intricate system designed, they allege, to ensure the former prime minister avoided paying tax.

Link (Thanks, Becky!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Galactus meets Jack Chick

Galactus is Coming! is a freakin' high-larious mash-up of the classic Jack Chick religious comic tract and the Marvel Comics Galactus Devourer of Worlds mythos. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:47:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

High-def and science fiction don't mix

My latest Locus Magazine column is up: "The March of the Polygons: How High-Definition Is Bad News for SF Flicks" is about the way that the move to high-def screens in the home shortens the commercial life of blockbuster sf movies.

Every year, the effects are more impressive, the impossible more daring. That's because today's special effects are almost universally generated on computers, and computers get better every year. Moore's Law describes the trend in processor performance, doubling every two years and getting faster every year. Other laws describe even steeper curves for storage, bandwidth, and bus-speeds. If Moore's Law applied to cars, you could replace your $12,500, 10-year-old, 39 miles/gallon Toyota with a $50 car that weighs 200 pounds and gets 500 miles to the gallon today.

It's a good reason to go to the box-office, but it's also the source of an awful paradox: yesterday's jaw-dropping movies are today's kitschy crap. By next year, the custom tools that filmmakers develop for this year's blockbuster will be available to every hack commercial director making a Coke ad. What's more, the Coke ads and crummy sitcoms will run on faster, cheaper hardware and be available to a huge pool of creators, who will actually push the technology further, producing work that is in many cases visually superior to the big studio product from last summer.

It's one thing for a black-and-white movie at a Hitchcock revival to look a little dated, but it's galling — and financially perilous — for last year's movie to date in a period of months. You can see what I mean by going to a Lord of the Rings festival at your local rep-house and comparing the generation-one creatures in Fellowship of the Ring to the gen-three beasts in Return of the King.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:39:58 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ten-legged "rocking" chair

This 10-legged rocking chair stutters from leg to leg as you rock it. Hard on the floors, easy on the eyes. Link (via Make)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:38:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Katamari Damacy earmuffs

Check out these amazing, Katamari Damacy-inspired earmuffs that you can buy or knit yourself from a pattern in Shojo Beat magazine. Link (via Craft)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:36:00 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 20, 2006

Homebrew submarine packed with cocaine

Four individuals were busted off Costa Rica's Pacific coast smuggling 3 tons of cocaine in a DIY submarine. According to the Associated Press, the vessel floated along at 7 miles per hour at a depth of six feet. The giveaway were three pipes, apparently used to provide oxygen to the passengers, moving along the surface of the water. (Link) Earlier this year, the Colombian navy captured a 60-foot sub they suspected was used to smuggle blow. (Link) And in 2000, a 100-foot drug smuggling sub was found under construction in Colombia. (Link) (Thanks to all who sent this in!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:53:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Zipper People vintage sign

These vintage wooden signs depicting the Zipper People are up for auction on eBay with a starting bid of $99. The rendering's resemblance to the real Zipper People is uncanny. From the auction listing:

The "Zipper People" are believed to be the folk art signs that marked the entrance to the Zipper Ride, a famous roller coaster, one of which was on the Daytona Beach Boardwalk for many years. They are believed to be from the 40's, though the 1950's is possible. Both are painted on wood board and have a hard shell finish. There are a few nicks here and there, but the condition is remarkable for the age. Both have mounting brackets which are visible in the pictures. Great americana for your collection. Each is over 6 feet tall.

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:19:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Book pick: "Full Revelations of a Professional Rat Catcher" (1898)

Manybooks is offering a free book from 1898 called Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher After 25 Years' Experience, by Ike Matthews. This short tome is sure to make wonderful fireplace reading for the whole family.

The damage Rats can do to property, commodities, etc., is almost incredible. I have had so many examples of this that I scarcely know which to submit as illustration. I think the worst case I have seen was where they gnawed a hole half way through a 2−1/4 inch lead pipe, and often I have known them to bite through a one−inch lead pipe. The worst damage is done when they get under the flag floors of cottage houses out of the drains. They scratch the soil from beneath the flags, which then sink, and the consequent stench from the drains is abominable, jeopardising the health of the tenants. I have seen a great many of these cases in the poorer parts of Manchester. The damage the Rats will do in the silk and similar trades, to the goods of merchants, or in the grocery business, is enormous, and not so much by reason of what they actually eat as by what they carry away, which is often ten times as much as they eat. I have often proved this when ferreting at a wholesale grocery warehouse. When we have taken up the boards between the laths and plaster we have found the ceiling almost full of lump sugar, nuts, candles, etc., which have been there for years, hoarded by the Rats. Now, this all means heavy loss, and that is why I say that any business man so suffering ought to engage the services of a professional Rat−catcher once a year in order to keep the Rats down, and catch as many as possible before they begin breeding.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:00:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Buzzards take over cell phone tower

Science fiction writer Bradley Denton says a large cell tower near his home has been taken over by hundreds of buzzards.

You see, our cell-phone tower is now the permanent nighttime home of over a hundred black-headed buzzards. Big, ugly buzzards. The kind you see playing tug-of-war with whole deer carcasses.

Every morning when Barb and I begin our walk, there they are . . . just waking up, clacking their talons on the reverberant steel and stretching their great dark wings as they prepare to leap away and soar in search of the dead.

Once, I counted a hundred and twenty of them before I decided I didn’t want to know how many there were. Sometimes the tower is black-feathered from top to bottom. Other days, there aren’t so many. But I can’t recall a morning when there were none. And those who are there always watch us as we walk by.

Link

Reader comment:

Joel says:

The fellow who writes about the buzzards near his house should take a second to appreciate such a beautiful and interesting creature. Why, the vulture holds a distinction afforded few beings on this green earth. By consuming carrion, vultures step neatly out of the predator prey relationship. I think that's admirable, not spooky or unsettling.

Nature is a beautiful thing. A post like the buzzard one you hosted on boing boing I feel sad about. I wish more people felt differently about our fellow tenants.

Tony "Buzzard" Bussert says:

I'm a bit perplexed by why you included the comments from reader "Joel". He obviously didn't read the entire post from Bradley Denton, and by your posting the reader comment I'm inclined to think that you didn't either. In no way does it seem to me that Mr. Denton is taking offense to the buzzards. He says the following, "Yet it serves a purpose, and I know it has to be somewhere. We postmodern humans, we gots to have us our cell phones." This implies that he doesn't like the cell phone tower more than anything. He also says about the buzzards, "They're beautiful when they fly.". Your post of the comments of "Joel" detract from your usual thoughtful posts. Just thought I should point it out in the defense of Mr. Denton.

Kirsten Sanford (host and producer of TWIS - This Week in Science)says:

My thesis advisor at one point had a turkey vulture named Balzac. It was amazing to be able to get close to such a magnificent bird. They really are beautiful. Yes, some would probably find his red, wrinkled head slightly disturbing, but I thought he was quite regal looking. He had a thing for the chicks, too. Any man coming too close to his cage would get a screeching, but the ladies... he would sidle up to the wire mesh, tilt his head at us, and wink ever so suavely. All the while, he would make little whispering noises as if he were trying to tell us sweet nothings that would tempt us closer to him. I wonder if the cell phone tower in the post by Mr. Denton is being used as a rookery of sorts, or if it just happens to be in the right place to give the birds good lift when they take to flight.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:42:55 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Freakonomics quiz: Who is Celebrity X?

Stephen Dubner took his family to Benihana in NYC and spotted a celebrity, but he's not telling. He's making readers guess.

One table over was a large party including someone that all of us recognized, whom we’ll call Celebrity X. A year ago, I don’t think many of us, if any, would have recognized Celebrity X -- even though he/she was pretty well known some 20 years ago. You could even say notorious. But that celebrity dimmed quite drastically. If in recent years you thought of this person at all, you probably would of thought of her/him as somewhere between a has-been and a clown.

Thanks to a couple of recent television shows, however, Celebrity X is back on top. This would seem to be due in considerable measure to an impeccable sense of timing.

There are some good guesses so far: Mr. T, Flavor Flav, Hulk Hogan, David Hasselhoff. I'll bet it is Flavor Flav. The first person to guess correctly wins an autographed copy of Freakonomics.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:35:10 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Chris Ware does the New Yorker

Chris Ware drew four different covers for the Thanksgiving issue of the New Yorker, and they all look terrific.

At the New Yorker site you an read his comic strip (a nice 1650x2250 scan -- thanks New Yorker!) and a five-minute interview with Ware (In MP3 format, not RealAudio -- thanks again, New Yorker!)

Link (Via Drawn!)

Reader comment:

Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review says:

Chris Ware also did the cover for the "Writers on Writers" special issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. We gave him the whole shebang -- front, back, spine -- and told him to go crazy. (And, lo, he did. And it was good.) We've got a 2000x1442 GIF of it for our fellow Ware fanboys.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:15:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steve Allen interviews Jack Kerouac

Steve Allen noodles on the piano while begging Kerouac to pardon him for asking some "square questions" in this video of a 1959 interview.

The brief interview is followed by Kerouac reading an excerpt of On The Road. ("I wrote the book because we're all gonna die.")

The end of the video shows Allen, many years later, reminiscing about the interview. Link

Reader comment:

Phil says:

The film What Happened to Kerouac? also features the interview footage you posted, along with a ton of other great archival footage and interviews with fellow beats - Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs, etc. Well worth checking out if you liked the clip linked in that post.

Kyle says:

Jack's actually reading from the introduction to Visions of Cody. Gotta dig Jack, cat. :-)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:58:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Template for paper nano case

The beloved Ape Lad has created a template for making your own Nano protector out of paper. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:27:43 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bank of America gets in trouble over U2 cover song

Last week I posted the story about Bank of America's callous disregard for a fraud victim who was arrested after the branch manager reported him to the police. As a bonus in that post, I added a video clip of a Bank of America employee singing a cover of a U2 song at a business meeting.

It turns out Universal Music thinks Bank of America violated Universal’s copyright of the song, because a lawyer for Universal posted a cease-and-desist letter on a site hosting the video. (NYT story here)

WFMU's Blog has a good entry about the story, along with information about the singer, whose name is Ethan Chandler. The best part is the way WFMU runs the lyrics to the U2 song side-by-side with the the Bank of America version.

For a darker reading of the BoA song, I recommend reading the lyrics side-by-side with U2's, which helps bring out some of the subtext.

It is even better ... Is it getting better?
Now that we’re the same ... Or do you feel the same?
Two great companies come together ... Will it make it easier on you now?
Now, MBNA is B of A ... You got someone to blame

Link

Update:

PhoneCam video of Johhny Marr and David Cross covering Ethan Chandlers rendition of "One." The video is interrupted after a few minutes by security goons, because... well, because that's what security goons do. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:20:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

RIAA toilet paper

Jinx is sellng $6 rolls of RIAA bumwad -- though it seems redundant. Those four letters are already inextricably associated with dirty assholes. Link (Thanks, Olivia!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:31:37 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Macrofocus photos of bees

My friend Rick Lieder is a science fiction illustrator with a sideline in macrofocus insect photography. He's just launched Bee Dreams, a new site of photos of bees from around his neighborhood in Michigan. Link

See also Macrofocus bug photos for sale

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:16:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bunnie the Xbox hacker: free talk in LA tomorrow night!

A reminder that I'll be hosting a free public talk by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, the legendary reverse engineer who broke the Xbox. Bunnie will speak at my Canada-US Fulbright Chair speaker series at the University of Southern California in LA. In addition to his talents as a reverse engineer (documented in his excellent book Hacking the Xbox), Bunnie is an evangelist for hardware hacking, working to help software people understand how to get their hands dirty with hardware. He is presently working at Chumby, a company he co-founded -- Chumby makes an open bean-bag WiFi computer that has small touchscreen.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang is a nocturnal hacker and the hardware lead; his responsibilities include the architecture, design and production of chumby's electronics, as well as writing drivers for and maintaining the Linux kernel on the chumby. With a PhD in EE garnered from MIT in 2002, he has completed several major projects, ranging from hacking the Xbox (and writing the eponymous book), to designing the world's first fully-integrated photonic-silicon chips running at 10 Gbps with Luxtera, Inc., to building some of the first prototype hardware for silicon nanowire device research with Caltech. bunnie has also participated in the design of 802.11b/Bluetooth transceivers (with Mobilian), graphics chips (with SGI), digital cinema CODECs (with Qualcomm), and autonomous robotic submarines (with MIT ORCA/AUVSI). He is also responsible for the un-design of many security systems, with an appetite for the challenge of digesting silicon-based hardware security. bunnie is also a contributing writer for MAKE magazine and a member of their technical advisory board.

When: Tuesday, November 21, 7PM

Where: University of Southern California Main Campus, Annenberg School for Communication, Room 207

As always, we'll have audio from the talk up a day or two later.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:16:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Smithsonian lobbies to preserve its Showtime sellout

Carl sez, "Hordes of Smithsonian lobbyists have descended on Capitol Hill to reverse recent congressional actions meant to mitigate at least a little bit of the damage from the Smithsonian's exclusive 30-year selloutcontract to Showtime. Lobbyists are moving moving on several fronts, including trying to keep a GAO analysis of the contract secret and rescinding House language that would cut the Secretary's salary in half so he would only earn what the President earns. This situation is begging for some sunshine in the attic. If you're interested, there is a letter open for signature that asks Congress to stand firm. More info in this post on Interesting-People. Link

See also Smithsonian's Showtime deal: critical attorneys shred it

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:08:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

GeekCorps builds cantenna WiFi TV network in Mali

Geekcorps sez, "In the village of Bourem Inaly, Mali there are over 120 television sets powered by 12-volt car batteries, but there is almost nothing to watch. With its CanTV project, Geekcorps has helped the local radio station stream video content to the local community over WiFi. The radio station, which rents these units out, benefits from a new monthly revenue stream while the villagers benefit with an improved source of news and entertainment. One goal of the CanTV project is to make it possible to build the CanTV receivers or TV cantennas (antennas built with cans) using locally using locally available parts, with the exception of the $25 audio/video receiver currently imported from Canada. Also, the TV cantennas have been designed so that a local technician can quickly learn how to install them without special tools. The radio station already has access to television broadcasts via satellite, and a TV over WiFi transmitter installed in August 2005 by Moussa Keita of Geekcorps." Link (Thanks, GeekCorps!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:05:27 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Foggy Toronto photos from CN tower

Ryan sez, "I work at the CN Tower and have seen all kinds of days, when its all fogged up and you can't see anything - to when you can see all the way down to Niagara. But... I had never quite seen a day like this, the clouds were hanging pretty low so one you got to the observation deck, you were actually sitting above the clouds. I think this picture turned out the most incredible of all of them." Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

Update: Brad sez, "I used to work at the CN Tower too (in 1976!) but much later I took this unusual picture from it. that's unusual is that the 360 degree view doesn't exist from any one spot, it is taken from around the edges of the observation deck unsing techniques I have worked out to avoid the paralax problems that will occur in such situations. (I've done Boston, Tokyo and Ottawa the same way)"

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:00:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Creative restores FM recording to MP3 players

Creative has restored the ability to record FM radio on some of its MP3 players. Last month, Creative shipped an "update" to its FM-recording players that disabled the record-from-radio feature (they hid this information in the fine-print on the update, focusing instead on the fact that they'd added new languages to the interface). Now, about a month later, they've restored the feature, after great outcry from their customers.

The newest firmware for the Vision:M is now up and we have FM recording again. This is a great move by Creative as many people here were really losing faith in them, and the MP3 player industry as a whole because of this removal. Creative weren't even adding the FM recording feature to their newest players (Zen Vision W, Zen V Plus, etc..) so hopefully that will also change. I congratulate Creative in making their wrong a right.

Link (Thanks, Futwick!)

See also Creative Labs shafts MP3 player owners with feature revocation

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:56:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Knitted wooly cupcakes

Ms Darcy knits delicious-looking wooly cupcakes and photo-documents them on Flickr. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:49:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Portland FreeGeek ripped off

FreeGeek, a Portland, OR nonprofit that fixes up old PCs, turns them into Linux boxen, and gives them away, was robbed this weekend. The thieves took the machines that the FreeGeeks use to organize, test and upgrade the donated PCs, cutting the org off at the knees. They're calling on people to report suspicious sales of used Ubuntu laptops.

Hello, fine people. I'm writing with sad news. Last night, Free Geek, Portland's groovy technology non-profit, sustained its most major break in to date. The majority of the items stolen were laptops, a few hard drives, and LCD screens. Many doors were smashed in forcibly in the process. While our laptop program is becoming a major source of income for us, it also is a great source of needed hardware for local non-profits. This income is now gone, and local do-gooders will have to go without our free source of laptops for a few months.

So we're making a call out to the community to help us stop these thieves and prevent this from happening again. If you're offered a laptop with Ubuntu Linux installed on it in the next couple of months, give us a call at 503-232-9350. Used LCD screens, while harder to pin down as originating at Free Geek, might raise an eyebrow as well.

Thanks for your help!

Link

Update: Steve sez, "We (the Golden Greats) arrived with our gear to be greeted with the bad news, and more bad news: the IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) was hit the previous night! The IPRC supports Portland's zine community, and I fear that they will have a tough time replacing those Macs. I haven't seen any postings or news about the break-in, but given the openness of both organizations, I would suspect the crimes are related."

I toured the IRPC just after the break-in. Spirits were high, but the sight of those empty work-tables was really depressing.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:54:42 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Richard Nixon dollar coin coming for 2016

The US Mint is issuing a new one-dollar coin that will feature a new president every year. 2016's president will be Richard "Lying Scumbag" Nixon. I predict the "Nixie" will be hoarded and used to pelt George W Bush at his kid's birthday party appearances, as he attempts to eke out a living by supplementing the meager nest-egg left to him by his handlers after they are through looting the US public coffers. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:40:45 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Toy tattoo gun for kids

The GR8 TaT2 Maker is a toy tattoo gun for your little budding skin-artist: "Open up your very own pretend play tattoo parlor. This easy-to-use tattoo maker kit includes an electronic tattoo pen and funky stencils. Using soft, safe pulsating action, the tattoo pen creates realistic, washable designs with dramatic effects." Link (via Neatorama)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:51:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Beer Goggles: handmade glasses from old beer-bottles

Check out these gorgeous "beer goggles" -- working glasses-frames made from old beer bottles. They're from Urban Spectacles, the mad glasses-frame makers responsible for the previously-seen hand-carved frames and frames from old vinyl records, and they come with a ring made from the top of the bottle and a necktie made from the label. Link

See also:
Handmade wooden specs-frames
Hand-made glasses from vinyl records

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:42:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Help build a public UK postcode database

New Public Popular Edition maps are trying to create a freely usable UK postcode database. The British Post Office owns the database of postcodes and their corresponding coordinates (in Europe, there are more expansive copyrights over factual material like postcodes than in the US, where collections of non-original facts receive a very thin protection). That means that your website can only use post-codes if you buy a license from the Post Office.

New Public Popular Edition (along with a similar project, Free the Postcode) is trying to solve this. They have 1950s-era public-domain maps and they ask you to locate your house (or childhood home) on it and key in your post-code. They do the rest, eventually building out a complete database of every postcode in Britain.

The resulting data will be released as purely public domain -- no restrictions whatsoever on re-use. Link (via Plasticbag)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:35:01 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Meet a 92-year-old blogger

Is 92-year-old Donald Crowdis (former host of the Candadian TV program The Nature of Things) the world's oldest blogger? EVen if he isn't his blog is terrific. He's funny and astute. Here's an excerpt from a recent entry he wrote on cannibalism.

[T]he best food, or at least the best protein, is that which is most like our own. Of course, eating others of our kind gives rise to social problems, and is rare as a result, but it happens. In times past, among some of the Pacific Islands peoples, since a butchered human very much resembled a butchered pig, it was referred to as "long pig". I presume these cannibals ate only their enemies, not their family members, no matter how tasty they may have looked. Most of us have accepted that humans are precious in the sight of God, while ordinary pig, or "short pig", is OK nutrition.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:18:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Amnesty condemns Pentagon's plans for Gitmo legal compound

Amnesty International today criticized Pentagon plans to construct a massive legal complex at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. US taxpayers will foot the bill for this $75 - $125 million compound, due for completion by July of next year. From a Miami Herald article:

''Once again, the Defense Department seems to be operating in -- even constructing -- its own universe,'' said Larry Cox, executive director of the human rights project's U.S. division.

``The new rules for the proposed military commissions . . . have not been made public, and not a single charge has been filed under the new system. And yet the Pentagon wants to build a permanent homage to its failed experiment in second-class justice.''

The Defense Department has notified would-be contractors that it seeks a design and construction plan for a military commissions compound at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

It would have two courtrooms; housing for up to 1,200 U.S. forces, lawyers, members of the news media and other visitors; a 100-car motor pool; an 800-person dining facility; conference and closed-circuit television facilities and a secure work space for classified material.

Link

posted by Xeni Jardin at 02:22:17 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

New Scientist's 50 year forecast

As part of their 50th anniversary celebration, New Scientist published brief comments by more than 70 scientists about what the next fifty years may hold. Some of the writers include Paul Davies, Francis Collins, Peter Norvig, Susan Greenfield, Dan Dennett, Steven Weinberg, and dozens of others. From the intro:

In coming decades will we: discover that we are not alone in the universe? Unravel the physiological basis for consciousness? Routinely have false memories implanted in our minds? Begin to evolve in new directions? And will physicists finally hit upon a universal theory of everything? In fact, if the revelations of the last 50 years are anything to go on - the internet and the human genome for example - we probably have not even thought up the exciting advances that lay ahead of us.

Delve into those visions of the future by author in the story list of this special report, or navigate forecasts by topic...:

Life: Ageing, alien life, consciousness, ecology, embryology, environment, evolution, genetics, health, humans, language, neuroscience, oceans, psychology, sex and social science.

Space and technology: Artificial intelligence, communications, computing, cosmology, space and technology.

Physical sciences: Chemistry, energy, materials, maths and physics.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:31:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Playstation 3 boots Linux

The PS3 will not only boot Linux, but it contains an open bootloader that gives you pretty free rein in what you install on your box.

Installing an “Other OS" on PLAYSTATION3 requires two files. One is the “Other OS Installer” distributed by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (which is called installer hereafter), and the other is the “Other OS boot loader” (called boot loader hereafter) provided by the third party.

The installer installs the boot loader of an "Other OS" on a boot‐loader‐dedicated storage area of PLAYSTATION3. Once the boot loader of an "Other OS" has been successfully installed, it automatically starts up instead of the PLAYSTATION3’s system software at every power on by selecting it as”Default System”in the menu of the PLAYSTATION3’s system software.

The installer installs only the boot loader of an "Other OS". It is assumed that any further installations, such as the installation of "Other OS" files on the built-in hard disk of PLAYSTATION3, are performed when the installed boot loader starts up. For more details, please contact the provider of the boot loader you are using.

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:55 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK regulator: Dragon Sausages MUST contain dragon!

Liz sez, "A bit of over-literalism from the UK Trading Standards people. Welsh Dragon Sausages have had to be renamed Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages, in case anyone buys them expecting them to be full of juicy dragon meat."

Jon Carthew, 45, who makes the sausages, said yesterday that he had not received any complaints about the absence of real dragon meat. He said: “I don’t think any of our customers believe that we use dragon meat in our sausages. We use the word because the dragon is synonymous with Wales.”

Link (Thanks, Liz!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:43:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cancer cells evolve in tumors

Cancer cells in a tumor evolve due to natural selection. They compete fiercely for reproductive space inside the tumor, changing strategies to beat out other cancer cells and to triumph over chemotherapy.

"A tumor cell population is constantly evolving through natural selection," says Carlo C. Maley, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program at Wistar whose own research focuses on this area. He is senior author on the new review. "The mutations that benefit the survival and reproduction of cells in a tumor are the things that drive it towards malignancy.

"Evolution is also driving therapeutic resistance," Maley adds. "When you apply chemotherapy to a population of tumor cells, you're quite likely to have a resistant mutant somewhere in that population of billions or even trillions of cells. This is the central problem in oncology. The reason we haven't been able to cure cancer is that we're selecting for resistant tumor cells. When we spray a field with pesticide, we select for resistant pests. It's the same idea."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:40:54 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Are RIAA lawsuit damages Constitutional?

If you get sued for file-sharing by the record industry, you can find yourself paying $750 per file in damages (the law allows a whopping $150,000 per file!). This Texas Law Review paper by J. Cam Barker examines this practice -- the wholesale price of downloadable music being in the $0.70/song range -- in light of the Constitution

In this paper, I argue that there is a constitutional right to not have a highly punitive statutory damage award stacked hundreds or thousands of times over for similar, low-reprehensibility misconduct. I point to the rationale behind criminal law's single-larceny doctrine, identify the concept of wholly proportionate reprehensibility, and use this to explain why the massive aggregation of statutory damage awards can violate substantive due process.

Link (via Recording Industry Vs the People)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:27:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Friday, November 17, 2006

Wesabe: community money-saving service

Today marked the launch of Wesabe, a startup from O'Reilly Entrepreneur in Residence Marc Hedlund. I'm proud to have joined Wesabe's advisory board -- Marc's way sharp, and Wesabe's a damned cool idea. The service anonymizes your financial data and then compares it to others' and figures out ways that you can save money right away, and worked into it is a bunch of community stuff for people who are figuring out how to spend smarter. It's a little like Flickr for your money, or social Consumerist.

What does Wesabe do?
Wesabe is a community of people who share our experiences with our money so we can help each other make better financial decisions. We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members' personal financial data, and showing tips — recommendations to get the most from our money. These tips and recommendations come from the collective wisdom of our entire community. When one of us figures out how to make a great decision, we all learn.

What makes your product unique?
As soon as you sign up with Wesabe, we show you ways to start saving money based on your actual spending. Existing software products do a good job of helping you figure out where your money went — as long as you keep them carefully maintained and updated every few days. They don't, however, help you figure out how to get more from your money, and they certainly don't help you get from a place of stress with your money to a place of control and better value.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:01:52 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Zadie Smith on the practice of reading

From an interview with novelist Zadie Smith on KCRW's Bookworm program:

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

Link (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:57:23 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Gallery of photos of the "One Laptop Per Child" laptop

Nice gallery of photos of the $100 B1 laptop built by the One Laptop Per Child project. It's so cute I can't hardly stand it.

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:12:35 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Goth terrarium

The Gothic Garden Terrarium Kit -- a tabletop garden for the spooky in you:

No matter your stylistic preferences, it's difficult to keep it 100% black all the time. The folks at Dunecraft have created the Graveyard Gothic Garden Terrarium Kit, which lets you maintain your gothic sensibilities, but adds plants you can grow that bleed. (Yes, bleed.) Just add water and some sunlight, but don't worry-- despite their affinity for the light, you won't have to go out in the sun to enjoy this nifty indoor terrarium!

Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:21:00 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sample troll shaking down all of hip-hop

Sample Trolls -- companies that steal copyrights from musicians and then threaten to sue everyone who ever sampled those musicians' work. The progenitor is a crook named Armen Boladian who forged George Clinton's signature on an assignment of copyright and has now become a one-man lawsuit factory who threatens legal action against the entire hip-hop world (avid Clinton samplers) unless they pay him tribute.

Bridgeport is an unwelcome addition to the music world: the "sample troll." Similar to its cousins the patent trolls, Bridgeport and companies like it hold portfolios of old rights (sometimes accumulated in dubious fashion) and use lawsuits to extort money from successful music artists for routine sampling, no matter how minimal or unnoticeable. The sample trolls have already leveraged their position into millions in settlements and court damages, but that's not the real problem. The trolls are turning copyright into the foe rather than the friend of musical innovation. They are bad for everyone in the industry—including the major labels. The sample trolls need to be stopped, either by Congress or by court rulings that establish sampling as a boon, not a burden, to creativity...

George Clinton is otherwise known as the King of Interplanetary Funk and, along with the late Rick James, the world's most famous funk musician. In the 1970s, Boladian and Bridgeport managed to seize most of the copyrights to Clinton's songs. How exactly they did so is highly disputed. However, in at least a few cases, Boladian assigned the copyrights to Bridgeport by writing a contract and then faking Clinton's signature (as described here). As Clinton put it in this interview, "he just stole 'em."

Link (via Deep Links)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:12:22 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Universal sues MySpace

Universal Music Group is suing NewsCorp's MySpace for copyright infringement. BB band manager John Battelle has the details at the Searchblog. He calls this breaking news the beginning of a "big poo-flinging goat rodeo." Link to Searchblog, Link to CBC News article

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:02:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Phallic toy alert: Dora Aquapet

To quote Sigmund Freud: Sometimes a Dora Aquapet is just a Dora Aquapet. Link (Thanks, Vadinne!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:54:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Imaginary Foundation mobile wallpapers for free

The Imaginary Foundation, creators of surreal streetwear including the double-label BoingBoing/IF t-shirt, have made ten mobile phone wallpaper designs available for free download. Stunning.
Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:56:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Findings fractals in the stock market

Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals, spoke last week to an audience at MIT gathered by the Molecular Frontiers Club. Mandelbrot focused his remarks on his recent efforts to seek out patterns in the NASDAQ. (Video of a 2001 lecture at MIT, where Mandelbrot touched on this subject, is available here.) The fractal nature of the market is the subject of Mandelbrot's latest popular book co-written with journalist Richard L. Hudson, titled "The (Mis) Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin And Reward." From the MIT News Office:

An unusual type of fractal that comes from a simple equation, the Mandelbrot Set (image at right) is popular outside of mathematics because of its aesthetic appeal and its complicated structure. No one has been able to prove the Mandelbrot Set is true, according to Mandelbrot. "But no one has been able to prove it's not true, either," he said, as large pictures of fractals filled the screen behind him.

Mandelbrot recently began to apply his knowledge of fractals to explain stock markets. "Markets, like oceans, have turbulence," he said. "Some days the change in markets is very small, and some days it moves in a huge leap. Only fractals can explain this kind of random change."

Link to MIT News Office article, Link to buy The (Mis)Behavior of Markets

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:47:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of mannequins on skateboards

Please enjoy this video of unclothed department store mannequins riding skateboards. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:13:28 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Patriot act makes it harder to get real Sudafed

After Paul Boutin cured his blocked sinuses with one does of old-school Sudafed, he looked into the reason why it was taken from the shelves, and learned that Senator Diane Feinstein decided to make it harder to get as part of the PATRIOT act.

To buy original formula Sudafed, Wal-fed, or other pseudophedrine sinus medicine that actually works (not the new Sudafed PE), go to your supermarket or drugstore and look in the cold remedies sections where it used to be. They now have little fake boxes or cards you take to the pharmacist to say "I want one of these." The pharmacist checks your ID and you sign for it.

Why can't you buy Sudafed over the counter anymore?

The renewed USA PATRIOT Act signed into law in March includes a "Meth Act" aimed at reducing production of methamphetamines, which can be manufactured from pseudophedrine, aka Sudafed. That's why Sudafed changed their over-the-counter formula to Sudafed PE. You can still buy Sudafed original if you go to the pharmacist at Safeway or Walgreens. But you can only buy one box a day and three a month, and you need to present a photo ID and sign a log for the pharmacist. The idea is to keep meth dealers from buying Sudafed in quantity to cook it into methamphetamine. The bill was attached to the Patriot Act after co-authors Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Jim Talent (R-MO) were unable to get it passed by other means.

Maybe this will encourage people to harvest their own ephedra (aka ma huang / Mormon tea) and make their own decongestant medicine. Link

Update:

Several people have emailed to let me know they think that people who suffer from debilitating sinus headaches should stop whining and let the government do its job ridding the planet of drug abuse. (Because the government has a really good track record in the War or Drugs.) I disagree with these people.

For one thing, I'm one of those crazy (small l) libertarians who thinks drug laws, on the whole, hurt society more than they help society, so I don't like this law. It's a shame that some people ruin their lives and their families' lives by using meth and other drugs, but the innocent people killed by muggers who need money to buy expensive drugs, the enrichment of street gangs and organized crime rings that sell illegal drugs, the corruption of government officials who take bribes from smugglers, the people who are falsely arrested on trumped up drug charges, the people who are killed by crazed bounty hunters and police raiding the wrong houses, the seizure of property belonging to people who didn't know there were drugs on their property, and the imprisonment of non-violent drug users amount to a bigger problem, I think. I am in favor of abolishing all drug laws.

For another thing, the meth epidemic has been hyped out of proportion. Jack Shafer, editor of Slate, did a nice job debunking the meth epidemic myth last year.

Tons of comments in link below.
More...

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:43:03 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Video of a crowded day in the Moscow subway

I thought the subway in Tokyo was crowded, but this video of a throng of unhappy people jammed in a Moscow subway is claustrophobic. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:34:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Attorney seeks improper copyright stories

Patrick sez, "I am an attorney looking to write an article about copyright abuse. Having previously written an article debunking the idea that the Chicago Cubs can sue neighbors for looking into the game, I'd like to follow up with a more diverse group of improper copyright threats to explain what is and is not the law.

"As a constant reader of Boing Boing I know that you have quite a few stories about this kind of abuse come through your hands. If you would be willing to put my email up on Boing Boing for readers to submit their real world problems, I'd be in your debt." kulervo@yahoo.com

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:21:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

China re-blocks Wikipedia

Ian sez, "Both English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia have been blocked once more. That didn't take long. It's times like this you wonder, is China's net nanny a manic-depressive?" Link (Thanks, Ian)

See also Jimmy Wales to Beijing: Wikipedia won't censor

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:18:19 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Little kids don't believe everything they hear

Research published in Child Development suggests that little kids are pretty good at figuring out whether something they're told is true or just a fantasy:

In three studies, about 400 children ages 3 to 6 heard about something new and had to say whether they thought it was real or not. Some children heard the information defined in scientific terms ("Doctors use surnits to make medicine"), while others heard it defined in fantastical terms ("Fairies use hercs to make fairy dust"). The researchers found that children's ability to use contextual cues to determine whether the information is true develops significantly between the ages of 3 and 5.

Moreover, when new information is presented to children in a way that relates the information in a meaningful way to a familiar entity, they are more likely to use the contextual cues to make a decision about whether the new information is true than if the new information is simply associated with the entity.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:16:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Cemetery 2.0: networked tombstones

Elliott Malkin has memorialized his great-grandfather with something he calls Cemetery 2.0: a networked tombstone connected to a variety of serialized information resources about his life.

Cemetery 2.0 is a concept for a set of networked devices that connect burial sites to online memorials for the deceased. The prototype, at left, links Hyman Victor's gravestone in Chicago, to his surviving Internet presence, including his:

* Flickr Genealogical Repository
* Facebook Memorial Profile
* Pedigree Resource File (GEDCOM)
* Family Tree of the Jewish People entry (GEDCOM)

The Cemetery 2.0 device maintains a live satellite Internet connection. Visitors to the physical memorial can view related memorials on the device display, while visitors paying their respects at any of the online memorials will recognize that their browsing is associated directly with the actual burial site.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:14:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

ACLU sues over SmartFilter in libraries

The Washington ACLU is suing a library system over its use of SmartFilter's defective censorware. SmartFilter are the shakedown artists who blocked Boing Boing but offered to cut us a deal if we'd redesign our site to their specifications. Their overbroad, wildly inaccurate censorware is used by libraries in Eastern Washington to keep patrons from seeing naughty things -- including vast quantities of lawful material.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, three library users and a nonprofit organization today brought suit to ensure that patrons of a library system in Eastern Washington have access to useful and lawful information on the Internet. The lawsuit challenges the library system's policy of using a restrictive Internet filter to bar access to information on its computers and of refusing to honor requests by adult patrons to temporarily disable the filter for sessions of uncensored reading and research. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Spokane. ...

The North Central Regional Library District (NCRL) operates 28 community libraries in Chelan, Douglas, Ferry, Grant, and Okanogan Counties. The NCRL has used a blocking software product called SmartFilter, Bess edition, manufactured by the California-based company Secure Computing Corporation, to filter Internet content on all public computers at its branch libraries. Bess blocks a very broad array of lawful information, and the NCRL has refused to unblock sites for patrons. ...

Libraries that receive funds for Internet access under two specific federal programs are required to have the ability to block minors from seeing "visual depictions" of sexual activity. But the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that libraries should disable those filters upon the request of an adult. The ACLU believes that the NCRL filtering policy goes far beyond what is allowed under federal law.

Link (Thanks, Seth!)

See also BoingBoing banned in UAE, Qatar, elsewhere. Our response to net-censors: Get bent!

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

UCLA chancellor Abrams blames student for tasering

Yesterday, I blogged a story and video about a UCLA student who refused to show ID to campus cops at Powell Library. The cops responded by grabbing him and repeatedly tasering him as he writhed on the floor in handcuffs, screaming alternatively in outrage and for mercy. The cops threatened to taser other students who asked for their badge numbers.

Now the UCLA Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams has issued a mealy-mouthed statement defending his policy of requiring ID after 11PM (because anonymity becomes less constitutionally protected and more deadly after 2300h), essentially blaming the student for going to the library without his student card in his pocket. He says that compliance is critical for everyone's safety and well-being, presumably because failing to comply means that you'll be shackled and tortured by the campus police. It's like carrying garlic to protect you from vampires.

UCLA students should corner the Abrams every time he shows his face on campus and demand to see his papers. What a jerk.

University police are investigating an incident late last night in which police took a student into custody at Powell Library. Investigators are reviewing the incident and the officers' actions. The investigation and review will be thorough, vigorous and fair.

The safety of our campus community is of paramount importance to me. Routinely checking student identification after 11 p.m. at the campus library, which is open 24 hours, is a policy posted in the library that was enacted for the protection of our students. Compliance is critical for the safety and well-being of everyone.

Link, Link to Andy Sternberg's detailed post on the attack (Thanks, Glyn!)

Update: Jordan sez, "This is a link to the personal/job description of the acting chancellor, or should I say 'high chancellor.' This is a blurb from the last part of the page that explains quite well where this man is coming from. Prof. Abrams' most recent book, Anti-Terrorism and Criminal Enforcement, (2nd ed., 2005), also published in an abridged version, is the first casebook to deal comprehensively with the rapidly evolving field of anti-terrorism law and the criminal enforcement process. This book analyzes how that process is affected by the government's invocation of the concept of a 'war on terrorism.'"

Update 2: Brian sez, Tasered UCLA student gets high profile lawyer.

Attorney Stephen Yagman said he plans to file a federal civil rights lawsuit accusing the UCLA police of "brutal excessive force," as well as false arrest. The lawyer also provided the first public account of the Tuesday night incident at UCLA's Powell Library from the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a 23-year-old senior.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:02:10 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Ballmer: Linux users are patent-crooks

The other shoe has dropped on a weird little deal between Microsoft and Novell over SUSE Linux last week. Microsoft gave Novell $440 million for SUSE support, and then Novell gave back $40 million to license Microsoft's bogus patent claims against Linux.

Now Microsoft's Chief Rageaholic Steve Ballmer has explained the deal: Novell's $40 million "payment" is an admission of guilt. Every Linux user who doesn't use SUSE (the only "licensed" Linux) is a patent infringer. All Linuxes except the ones that Microsoft blesses are illegal.

A key element of the agreement now appears to be Novell's US$40 million payment to Microsoft in exchange for the latter company's pledge not to sue SUSE Linux users over possible patent violations. Also protected are individuals and noncommercial open-source developers who create code and contribute to the SUSE Linux distribution, as well as developers who are paid to create code that goes into the distribution...

At the time, Microsoft officials, including Ballmer, were mum on whether the Linux kernel, which is governed by the General Public License and takes contributions from programmers all around the world, violated Microsoft's patents.

Ballmer was more open Thursday.

"Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered," Ballmer said. This "is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability."

Link (Thanks, Carsten!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:44:52 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Comics made from Wikipedia

John sez, "Greg Williams takes Wikipedia text and then makes funny, sharing-enabled comics out of them. The skunk one's my favorite." Link (Thanks, John!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:39:28 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Airplane security briefing in dance - comic

DJ sez, "The artist Jen Wang has posted a series of super-cute illustrations showing the pre-flight safety demo by stewards as a kind of dance performance." Link (Thanks, DJ Fadereu!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:34:22 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Haunted painting photoshopping contest

Today in the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: fine art paintings in which one or more figures has been turned into a "ghost." Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:26:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Racecar game in a suitcase

This German suitcase racecar game contains 2 meters of track that you can race two cars on (as well as a stopwatch for figuring out who won). Runs for 5 hours on a 9V battery and costs an ungodly €598.00. Link (via Red Ferret)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:21:13 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UK RFID passports cracked

UK security experts have cracked the sooper sekure new UK biometric passports. It took 48 hours. With £174 worth of sniffer hardware, attackers can read all the personal information off of any of the three million new UK passports in circulation -- and if combined with demonstrated hacks for reading RFIDs at a distance, this could happen from across the room, or even farther. You can then clone the RFID and stick it in another passport (surprise! your identity is now owned by a terrorist!).

"If you can read the chip, then you can clone it," he says. "You could use this to clone a passport that would exploit the system to illegally enter another country." (We did not clone any of our passport chips on the assumption that to do so would be illegal.)

Grunwald adds: "The problems could get worse when they put fingerprint biometrics on to the passports. There are established ways of making forged fingerprints. In the future, the authorities would like to have automated border controls, and such forged fingerprints [stuck on to fingers] would probably fool them."

But what about facial recognition systems (your biometric passport contains precise measurements of key points on your face and head)? "Yes," says Grunwald, "but they are not yet in operation at airports and the technology throws up between 20 and 25% false negatives or false positives. It isn't reliable."

Link, Link to Bruce Sterling's blistering commentary (Thanks, Matt!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:24 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Audio from Gilmore/Barlow talk at USC

The audio from Tuesday's night's standing-room-only lecture by EFF co-founders John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow at my USC lecture series is online (thanks to Mike Jones and Andy Sternberg for their yeoman duty!). Gilmore and Barlow are pioneering giants of cyberspace, having created many of the institutions and safeguarded many of the liberties we take for granted today. They gave a fantastic presentation on the founding of EFF and the early days of the fight for freedom online, and then answered more than an hour's worth of intense questions about the present-day fights.

A reminder that my next speaker is Xbox hacker Bunnie Huang, next Tuesday night at 7PM.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:06:53 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Zune ad spoofs

Two readers have sent in great spoofs of the Zune ad campaign:

Deepsignal's Welcome to the Orgy ("Share music=get laid/but then the next morning the music you share is gone, just like a one night stand/DRM, it's like that empty feeling/it's ok. you weren't compatible anyway")

Appleeqlove's Welcome to the Social (bong hits and Zunes)

(Thanks, Ingo and Ivan!)

See also Weird screenshot of failed Zune install

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:00:57 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Classic video-game scarves

Bits to Die For sells a line of stunning video-game inspired scarves with pixel-art from Lode Runner, Pong, Space Invaders, Defender and others. Link (via Wonderland)

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

Paramount/MPAA: it's illegal to put DVDs on iPods

Paramount and the MPAA are suing a company that pre-loads iPods with video from DVDs and then sells you both the original discs and the iPods. They claim that it is illegal to put DVDs on your iPod -- whether it's done in a store or your living room.

According to the suit, Load 'N Go sells both DVDs and iPods and loads the former onto the latter for customers who purchase both. The company then sends the iPod and the original DVDs to the customer. So the customer has purchased every DVD, and Load 'N Go just saves them the trouble of ripping the DVD. The movie studios' suit claims that this is illegal, because ripping a DVD (i.e., decrypting it and making a copy) is illegal under the DMCA. The suit also claims that this constitutes copyright infringement.

Although this lawsuit happens to be aimed at Load 'N Go, the DMCA theory in the complaint makes it crystal clear that the MPAA believes it is just as illegal for you to do the same thing for yourself at home. Apparently, Hollywood believes that you should have to re-purchase all your DVD movies a second time if you want to watch them on your iPod.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:46:06 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Mark Mothersbaugh on Weird America

This week's Weird America features DEVO founder Mark Mothersbaugh. It's a great video with Mothersbaugh reflecting on much of his career, from the birth of DEVO following the Kent State University shootings in 1970, to the meaning of Devolution, to his early mail art and recent Beautiful Mutant series of manipulated photos.
Link (via Laughing Squid)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:33:53 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xeni's in Guatemala for a while

I'm in Guatemala, researching some stories here. I'll be posting photos, video, and other notes from the road on a "reporter's notebook" blog at xeni.net/trek, and linking to clusters of that material from BoingBoing. Hello to you from Antigua, Guatemala -- where I can hear 400-year-old church bells ringing right now in the dark, along with night birds. The air smells like cooking fire smoke. Twin volcanoes of ash and water are sleeping soundly tonight (this is a good thing), and I will be in a few moments, too.

Image: The weeping virgin, at a 400+ year old church here in Antigua (2004, Xeni Jardin, under this CC license)

posted by Xeni Jardin at 09:10:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Federated Media's holiday gift guide

Our partners at Federated Media have a nifty holiday gift guide that has the best product reviews from the blogs it represents. If you're looking for shopping ideas, this is the place. For instance, check out Gareth Branwyn's review of Logitech's Freepulse wireless headphones. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:08:41 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wii - first impressions

Nintendo sent me a Wii last week. I'm not a big gamer, but I like playing the Gamecube and DS with my nine-year-old daughter, even though she always beats me. (I don't own a Playstation or XBox, and haven't really used either).

Nintendo games are marvelous — Super Mario Sunshine is my favorite. I love the world of Mario and his friends. My only problem with the games is the controller — I just can't make my fingers and thumbs move the right way, or fast enough, to be very good at most of the games, especially the competitive ones. My daughter beats the pants off me in Monkeyball. One time, after a particularly humiliating loss to her in MonkeyBall, she said, "I feel bad winning; it's like playing against a baby."

When the Wii arrived in its very Mac-like box, I didn't know what to make of the controller, other than to think that it looked like a big iPod Shuffle. I hooked the system up to the TV (which took all of 30 seconds) and realized that there was no cable to plug into the controller. It was wireless. If that wasn't cool enough, I soon learned that the way you moved the cursor on the TV screen was by waving the controller around. It was like using a laser pointer. What's more, the controller uses haptics (touch technology) to help you navigate. When the cursor goes over a button or icon, the controller produces a physical "bump" to help you navigate. It feels like magic. I love it.

The Wii cames with a sports game, and it makes great use of the controller. To play baseball, you hold the controller like a bat and swing it. A tiny speaker on the controller makes the sound of a ball hitting the bat, and the haptics let you feel the crack of the impact.

My favorite part of Wii Sports, though, is the boxing game. My daughter and I had created avatars that looked like us and we used these avatars to box with each other. We each held a controller in out fists and punched at the air, making our little avatars punch at the same time. When the bell rang, I started pummeling my daughter. Yes, it felt a little funny hitting a cute cartoon avatar of my daughter wearing glasses and pigtails, but after losing to her so many times in MonkeyBall, I wasn't going to let the fact that I was her father get in the way of my chance to get revenge. I pounded away furiously, sending a jab to her head that knocked her to the ground. The referee started counting, but she was out cold. I finally won a game against her! The simplicity and intuitiveness of the controller had leveled the playing field between my daughter and me. Her days of treating me like one of those TV commercial idiot dads were over.

"Hey, no fair!" she said. "You're bigger than me."

"Payback is a mother, honey," I said. "Wanna try again?" Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:24:08 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Genetics of muscle performance?

A new understanding of the genetics of muscle metabolism and performance could eventually lead to new chemical methods for boosting your muscle power. The researchers at Dartmouth Medical School and Dartmouth College bred a mouse genetically engineered to express a particular enzyme related to muscle activity and were surprised by the rodent's superpowers. The research was published in the American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism. From a Dartmouth Medical School news release:

Like a trained athlete, this mouse enjoyed increased capacity to exercise, manifested by its ability to run three times longer than a normal mouse before exhaustion. One particularly striking feature of the finding was the accumulation of muscle glycogen, the stored form of carbohydrates—what many athletes seek by "carbo-loading" before an event or game...

"Our genetically altered mouse appears to have already been on an exercise program," says (Dartmouth professor) Lee Witters... "In other words, without a prior exercise regimen, the mouse developed many of the muscle features that would only be observed after a period of exercise training..."

"We now wonder if it's possible to achieve elements of muscular fitness without having to exercise, which in turn, raises many questions about possible modes of exercise performance enhancement, including the development of drugs that could do the same thing as we have done genetically," he says. "This also might raise to some the specter of 'gene doping,' something seriously being talked about in the future of high-performance athletes."

Link (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:51:30 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dinosaur's Teeth

My colleague Marina Gorbis at Institute for the Futurejust visited Hong Kong and posted a great set of photos on Flickr. She spotted these, er, tasty-looking Dinosaur's Teeth at a local market.
Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:13:34 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UN Interstellar Day of Tolerance

According to the 2001 UK census, Jedi is the fourth largest religious belief in the country. With the "religion" growing in followers, Jedis John Wilkinson and Charlotte Law of London are calling for the United Nations Association to change the name of tomorrow's International Day of Tolerance to the UN Interstellar Day of Tolerance. They're leading a protest tomorrow in Whitehall. From the Daily Mail:

‘Like the UN, the Jedi Knights are peacekeepers and we feel we have the basic right to express our religion through wearing our robes, and to be recognised by the national and international community...

‘Tolerance is about respecting difference where ever it lies, including other galaxies. Please don't exclude us from your important work. May the Force be with you.’

Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 12:42:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rubber band ball maker turns pro -- gets a sponsor

Oregonian Steve Milton, maker of giant rubber band balls, is being sponsored by OfficeMax. He'll unveil the world's largest rubber band ball on November 21. I wonder how much he is being paid?

OfficeMax is transporting the World’s Largest Rubber Band Ball in early-November from the Eugene, Oregon garage of creator Steve Milton to downtown Chicago for its official November 21, 11:00 a.m. weigh-in ceremony at State Street and Jackson with Guinness World Records official Sarah Wagner. Experts predict the OfficeMax-sponsored rubber band ball – created by Milton with help from his 6-year-old son, Bryce – will break the earlier world record of 3,120 pounds, set by John Bain of Wilmington, Del. The 26-year-old Milton, who started his ball in November 2005 with a number of small OfficeMax rubber bands, says the ball now contains 175,000 individual rubber bands. The rubber ball stands 5 ½ feet-high and has a circumference of 19 feet.

Videos here.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:14:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mind-bogglingly depressing women's magazine from 1966

John from A Hole in the Head blog has scanned some pages from a stack of old magazines called Woman's Household that he picked up at a garage sale. His commentary on this excruciatingly bleak and hopeless publication is wonderful.

At first glance they just looked like your run of the mill woman's recipe and crafts magazine, but with each one I picked up I was stunned; I had never seen such despair wrapped up in so much yarn. The woman running the sale, gave them all to me for a dollar, saying "Take them all, they are just going in the garbage."

"Woman's Household" was a monthly crafts publication which sold for 25 cents an issue. Their slogan was "Meet Other Friendly Woman Just Like You". The key phrase being 'just like you'; middle aged women isolated in small towns across America.

Link (Thanks, Graeme!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:00:49 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rube Goldberg style contraption video

I've seen a lot of videos where people set up Rube Goldberg systems, but this one is my favorite. I especially like the part where the stool seat spins down and tips a paper towel tube to make a ball roll out and go round a spiral track. Link (Thanks, Rob!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:48:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rocketboom visits Huong Ngo's Pop-Up Studio

Earlier this month, I wrote about artist Huong Ngo's Pop-Up Studio, an inflatable cube that she has been setting up in places around New York and sharing with other artists as a temporary workspace.

Today, Rocketboom has an interview with Huong that includes video of NYC park authorities making her remove the Pop-Up Studio from a park because it supposedly isn't safe for the children at the park. I'm not sure how a big inflatable cube could be dangerous to children, unless they tried to eat it. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:08:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

UCLA cops taser student who won't show ID

UCLA cops tasered a student who refused to show ID in Powell Library. They threatened nearby students with tasering if they interfered. A student captured video of the assault with a cameraphone. I hope the campus cops go to jail over this.

The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell "get off me," repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition...

Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

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

Transmetropolitan #1 as a free download

DC Comics have posted a free PDF download of the first issue of Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis's ground-breaking cyberpunk comic that eventually ran to ten collected volumes. This is the comic that made me fall in love with comics again -- made me start going to my local funnybook shop every week or two to buy up several new titles. Link (via Warren Ellis)

See also I come to praise Transmetropolitan

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:10:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless cup-and-string communicator

Artist Duncan Wilson created the "Cup Communicator" -- a wireless version of the dixie-cup-and-string walkie-talkie design. This is fantastic -- it should be a product!

Tug the cord to activate, squeeze to talk and hold to the mouth and ear...

The form and function of the Cup Communicator refer to the ‘two-cans and string' children's toy and the physical factors involved with that device. This typology and its associations remind us of the magic and playful intrigue of our first communication devices that has been lost by the desire for more efficient forms of telecommunication.

Link (via Red Ferret)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:03:44 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dead Sea Scrolls reveal ancient parasites

Archaeologists followed directions specified in the Dead Sea Scrolls and discovered the ancient latrines of the Essenes (one of the two groups believed to have authored the scrolls). There, they discovered that the Essenes' cleanliness rites (burying their waste, walking through a water pool en route to the shitter) actually caused them to have rampant parasite infections.

Two of the Dead Sea Scrolls note that the latrines should be situated northwest of the settlement, at a distance of 1,000 to 3,000 cubits — about 450 to 1,350 yards — and out of sight of the settlement.

Tabor and Joe Zias of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert on ancient latrines, went to the site and took samples.

Zias sent samples to anthropologist Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue of the CNRS Laboratory for Anthropology in Marseilles, France, who found preserved eggs and other remnants of roundworms, tapeworms and pinworms, all human intestinal parasites.

Samples from the surrounding areas contained no parasites. Had the waste been dumped on the surface, as is the practice of Bedouins in the area, the parasites quickly would have been killed by sunlight. Buried, they could persist for a year or longer, infecting anyone who walked through the soil.

Link (via William Gibson)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:59:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Microwave egg-boiler

On TokyoMango, a dead clever Japanese egg-boiling device that goes in the microwave and turns out perfect eggs instead of exploded messes.

Making the perfect boiled egg isn't easy--especially in a microwave, since eggs tend to explode under pressure. That's why someone invented this beautiful, egg-shaped, yellow-and-white microwave egg cooker. The device actually fits 3 mid-sized eggs, which are placed on an aluminum tray. Put 130cc of water in the yellow part, insert the tray, place the eggs on it, close the lid (the white part), and pop it in the microwave. 8 minutes in a 500W microwave gets you soft-boiled, 10 minutes gets you hard-boiled.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:53:46 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Fantastic hand carved sculptures based on Japanese toy monsters

Stunning hand carved Japanese monsters by Carlos Enriquez. Link (Thanks, Robyn!)

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

Vista DRM is bad for Microsoft

Computerworld has published a blistering indictment of the DRM in Vista, Microsoft's new OS. Microsoft has a bunch of competitive problems in the market -- security, ease of use, elegance, and so on. DRM fixes none of these -- and it makes security, much, much harder. It's far easier to secure a computer that is designed from the ground up to lock out remote attackers who want to use the machine in ways that the owner objects to, but that's precisely what DRM does. Microsoft's Vista strategy has been to design an OS from the ground up that lets remote parties override the computer's owner. This will not make Vista a better, more competitive product in the market.

Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at research firm Directions On Microsoft, asserts that this process does not bode well for new content formats such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD, neither of which are likely to survive their association with DRM technology. "I could not be more skeptical about the viability of the DRM included with Vista, from either a technical or a business standpoint," Rosoff stated. "It's so consumer-unfriendly that I think it's bound to fail -- and when it fails, it will sink whatever new formats content owners are trying to impose."

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:58:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

8 punk and post-punk female singer videos

I had so much fun time compiling that list of 70s punk band videos, I compiled another list. This one features some of my favorite female vocalists.

1. The Flying Lizards: Money (1979?)

Featuring scary minimalist singer Deborah Lizard.

2. Joan Jett: Cherry Bomb (1982?)

Joan Jett was a member of The Runaways, which did this song first.

3. Danielle Dax: Tomorrow Never Knows (1990)

Usually I don't like Beatles covers, but this is an exception.

4. The Runaways Schooldays (1979?)

Joan Jett was in this band before going solo.

5. Bow Wow Wow: I Want Candy (1982)

A post Sex Pistol's Malcom McLaren manufactured group.

6. X Ray Spex: The Day the World turned Day Glo (1976)

Singer Poly Styrene is one of my favorites. What an interesting voice!

7. BONUS: Debbie Harry sings in 1980 movie, Unmade Beds.

8. The Avengers: The American in Me (1978)

I was looking for a video of the Avengers but I couldn't find one. Luckily, Boing Boing reader Cliff did. Thanks!

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:32:14 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

IT Crowd DVD has subtitles in leet

The IT Crowd DVDs have just shipped -- with subtitles in leet! The IT Crowd is a convulsively funny British TV show about sysadmins, created by Graham Linehan, who is best known for writing the classic show Father Ted.

The IT Crowd's first six episodes ran last year on Channel 4, and was widely shared online, resulting in major commercial success, critical acclaim, and a renewed contract for another season of the show.

I was privileged to consult a little on the show, and I was able to connect Graham with uber-geek Yoz Grahame, who suggested that the disc carry subtitles in leet (or 1337), the letter/number substitution code used by gamers, hackers and other net-dwellers.

The disc is region-locked to Europe, but I hear that a US version is coming shortly. Link (Thanks, Damien!)

See also The IT Crowd -- the geek comedy I've been waiting for all my life

Update: Yoz sez, "The L33T subtitles aren't just a straight translation into leetspeak - they feature tons of geek references including Zork, Counter-Strike, B3TA, MC Frontalot and lots more. They were cooked up by five of us - Tim Browse, Sean Solle, Jim Lynn, Shimon Young and me. The superb retrographics on the DVD, however, were put together by the geniuses at Framestore CFC."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:06:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tom Waits's Orphans: moving, rocking 3-disc set

I got a preview copy of the new Tom Waits 3-disc set, "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards" about a month ago, and I've been listening to it nonstop ever since. The disc is set to be released in a week or so and it's time I told you just how totally amazingly awesome it is.

I am a stupendous Tom Waits fan. Whether he's being an experimental noise-rock loony, a bluesy raconteur, a folk-artist, a madcap orchestra director or a rock and roller, I love him. No musician makes me happier in more ways than Tom Waits, whose versatility, poetry, and self-reflexive humor make him the greatest American musician of his generation.

Orphans is a three disc set of rarities and never-released material, including some obscure personal favorites like his cover of Heigh-Ho from Snow White (originally released on the great Disney tribute album Stay Awake) and a grinding tribute to On the Road, recorded with Primus, and a track recorded with the Ramones.

Each disc is thematically separated -- Brawlers is rowdy and angry, Bawlers is full of ballads and sad longs, and Bastards is, well, Bastards -- unclassifiable, Tom Waitsian random goodness.

This is a songwriter's album -- the lyrics are so heartfelt and evocative, even the nakedly political tracks. I never thought I'd hear Tom Waits record a song about the Israel-Palestine conflict -- nor that I'd like it as much as I do. Tom Waits is like Bukowski set to music, but funnier and weirder.

This is a set that begs to be ripped and mixed into your own playlists. While the discs are thematic, I've found that I get better results by putting them together in my own order according to the mood of the songs, or the tempo, or how wordy they are. I've sliced and diced this set a hundred ways and it keeps on getting better.

If you've never heard Tom Waits, this is a great place to start -- he's one of those rare artists who actually translates great into eclectic "Best Of" albums. If you're a stone Waits fan, this set is a don't-miss-it, once-in-a-lifetime event. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:56:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Rushkoff's Testament issue #1, now free

Vertigo Comics has posted the first issues of select comics online for free, including BB pal Douglas Rushkoff's groundbreaking Testament. (Listen to our Get Illuminated podcast interview with Doug here.) Testament #1 is available as a free PDF along with a separate PDF of Doug's copious notes explaining the first five issues of the comic and drawing the Biblical and historical connections. From the comic description:

Grad student Jake Stern leads an underground band of renegades that uses any means necessary to combat the frightening threats to freedom that permeate the world. They employ technology, alchemy, media hacking and mysticism to fight a modern threat that has its roots in ancient stories destined to recur in the modern age.
Link to Testament #1 download page, Link to buy Testament: Akedah, the collected first five issues

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:42:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Portrait photos of gamers' hands

Jon Jordan has a great Flickr-set of photos of gamers' hands. It's quite gripping. Ar ar ar. Seriously -- there's a lot of expressivity in the way that these players clutch at their controllers. Link (Thanks, Glenn)

See also Portraits of video-game players

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:25:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Billy Bragg and manager: The Internet is for sharing files

Jordan sez, "Musical rabblerouser Billy Bragg and his manager (who also worked with The Clash) discuss file-sharing, DRM, and the impending demise of giant record stores."

He also fears the internet is misunderstood by labels.

Traditional stores are in jeopardy because of discounting, Jenner says "They weren't really able to come to grips with the essential truth of the internet, which is that it's all about sharing of files."

A protection system known as digital rights management (DRM) restricts the distribution and accessibility of music files can be tightly controlled.

However, this is "a complete turn-off to the consumers and doesn't work", Jenner claims - and is another area he says needs to be changed.

"Labels were trying to stop the internet doing what it does - exchange files - and try to chain it, put lead weights on it, so files wouldn't move around.

"All it does is penalise the honest."

Link (Thanks, Jordan!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:34:05 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Second Life struggles with copying

The virtual world Second Life is having to contend with a new piece of software that makes it easy to copy in-game artifacts. Most virtual worlds claim total ownership and control of anything created in the game, but Second Life allows players to claim a copyright in their creations. Players can sell (or refuse to sell) their in-game tchotchkes, or give them away under Creative Commons licenses. Second Life has a thriving economy based on the trading of user-created objects.

An open-source tool called CopyBot allows players to cruise around copying the objects sported by other players. Many SL players are upset by this, and demanding action. Second Life's proprietors, Linden Labs, are trying to figure out what to do. They've ruled out eliminating third-party programs from Second Life, and they are on record as refusing to become copyright enforcers for their community. They are offering to temporarily adjudicate questions of infringement to see if they violate the Second Life terms of service, but they're seeking better solutions, including reputation systems.

This is a hard problem. As a practical matter, it's just not feasible to control copying in an environment like Second Life, which means that SL entrepreneurs are going to need businesses that don't collapse when copying takes place. But there are much gnarlier problems here -- for example, in real life, questions of copyright infringement are adjudicated on the basis of law passed by elected lawmakers, while in Second Life, these questions are adjudicated by a company based on its non-negotiable terms of service. You can fire law-makers who make bad copyright, but you can't fire companies that make bad terms of service. You can take your business elsewhere, but if all your "assets" live in a proprietary virtual world, you have to go away empty handed, without any of your "copyrighted works."

Second Life's management is doing an exemplary job of coping with this, but benevolent dictatorships aren't the same thing as democracies. If a game is going to declare that its players are citizens who own property, can the company go on "owning" the game?

This isn't a criticism -- it's a question. Linden Labs walks a fine line between "government" and "owner" (or, if you prefer, "God"). They're pushing some hard boundaries.

These are important features because the implications of copying should not be about Linden Lab’s approach to copyright enforcement. We are not in the copyright enforcement business. The communities within Second Life should have the tools and the freedoms to decide how and when they deal with potentially infringing content. Many will decide on less restrictive regimes in order to maximize innovation and creativity. Others will choose more restrictive options and ban visitors who do not respect them. Consumers, creators, and all residents need to have the final say about which approaches work best for them.

Please recognize that using the Terms of Service is not a permanent solution. Nor is it shift in Linden Lab’s support of libsecondlife (who have removed CopyBot from their Subversion repository), machinima creators, or others who have explored Second Life beyond the features of the Second Life client. I continue to feel that libsecondlife is an incredibly important part of Second Life’s development and community.

Link

Update: Second Life journalist Wagner James Au has a good piece on the controversy in New World Notes.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:31:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Baen Books all free for blind, dyslexic, paralyzed, or disabled readers

Michelle sez, "Baen Books, a publisher of science fiction, will provide its books to fans who are blind, paralysed, or dyslexic, or are amputees, in electronic form free of charge, effective immediately. Baen Books is making this offer in recognition of Veterans Day, and all our disabled military veterans. Many Baen authors are veterans themselves, using a military setting as the setting of their tales. Right now convalescing vets might welcome an exciting, fast-action tale to pass the time." Link (Thanks, Michelle!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:17:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Webby Award winners to be "in" Museum of Moving Image

This year, the Webby Awards are holding a separate ceremony to honor outstanding film and video that's made for the Internet. The nominees and winners will become part of the Museum of Moving Image's collection of artifacts. (I know, I know, it's a digital file, etc. so what does it mean to be "in a collection," etc. Blame the conceptual artists, I guess.) From a Webby Awards press release:

According to (Webby Awards executive director David-Michel) Davies, from now until December 15th, original films and videos can be entered in 11 categories, including Animation, Comedy, Drama, Events, Experimental, Music, News/Documentaries, Reality, Student, and Viral. The awards will be judged by a jury of entertainment industry leaders including Harvey Weinstein, Showtime's Matt Blank, The Firm's Rich Frank, Sundance Channel's Larry Aidem, and Jim Gianopulos, Chairman and CEO, Fox Entertainment.

Link to press release, Link to enter the Webby Awards (deadline December 15)

UPDATE: Francis Hwang, former Director of Technology for Rhizome.org, writes:

Regarding the question of what it means for a digital file to be in a museum collection: If the good folks at the Museum of the Moving Image are doing it right--and they usually do--one important role will be of preservation. A lot of pioneering works of online design, art, etc, have been lost, since the medium is so ephemeral. But a museum is supposed to think of these artifact in terms of decades, not days and weeks, so if a website is put in a museum collection, then that drastically increases the chances that our grandkids will be able to see it. (This archival work is often complementary to that of the Wayback Machine, which, although wonderful, is massively unfocused and as such can often miss notable moments in a site's evolution.)

Those interested in these issues might consult the work of the Variable Media Network, which helps coordinate inquiry into these sorts of archival issues.

posted by David Pescovitz at 01:15:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

First Person Shooter spex turn the world into Counter-Strike

First Person Shooter glasses have a tiny hand holding a tiny gun superimposed over each eye-hole, so that the whole world looks like a game of Quake Counter-Strike. They're the creation of Aram Bartholl, who makes a printable PDF of the design available so that you can make your own set. Link (via Make)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:07:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Robot animal sculptures made from found electronics

Ann P Smith is an assemblage sculptor who makes extraordinary robot animals out of found electronics components and twisted wires. I could look at these all day. Link (Thanks, crashxx!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:03:26 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Charles Darwin apparition in a tree

Janice says: "I got up this morning, and looked out the window I look out for hours every day. I looked up at the birdfeeder to the spot where a limb was chopped off and saw Charles Darwin."

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:13:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Xbox hacker free talk at USC next Tuesday

Next Tuesday, November 21 at LA's University of Southern California, I'll host a free speech by Andrew "bunnie" Huang, the legendary reverse-engineer who broke the Xbox. Bunnie is an inspirational speaker on reverse engineering and hardware hacking, and his acclaimed book, Hacking the Xbox is a veritable technical manifesto on the subject.

Bunnie's latest act is founding a company called Chumby, which produces a free and wide-open "bean-bag computer" that comes with WiFi and a little color display, and the plans to reproduce any or all of it, from the flat-patterns for the bean-bag fabric skin to the source-code for the operating system. The device can subscribe to cool hacks, auto-updating itself to add great new features invented by other users.

Bunnie's talk is part of my Fulbright Chair lecture series at USC. It's on from 7PM-9PM on Tuesday, Nov 21, at the Annenberg School on the USC campus, room 207. Hope to see you there! As always, we'll be podcasting the talk afterward.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang is a nocturnal hacker and the hardware lead; his responsibilities include the architecture, design and production of chumby's electronics, as well as writing drivers for and maintaining the Linux kernel on the chumby. With a PhD in EE garnered from MIT in 2002, he has completed several major projects, ranging from hacking the Xbox (and writing the eponymous book), to designing the world's first fully-integrated photonic-silicon chips running at 10 Gbps with Luxtera, Inc., to building some of the first prototype hardware for silicon nanowire device research with Caltech. bunnie has also participated in the design of 802.11b/Bluetooth transceivers (with Mobilian), graphics chips (with SGI), digital cinema CODECs (with Qualcomm), and autonomous robotic submarines (with MIT ORCA/AUVSI). He is also responsible for the un-design of many security systems, with an appetite for the challenge of digesting silicon-based hardware security. bunnie is also a contributing writer for MAKE magazine and a member of their technical advisory board.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:31:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Kitschy souvenirs superimposed over tourist attractions

Michael Hughes buys kitschy souvenirs that depict tourist attractions; then he brings them to the attractions they depict and photographs them superimposed over the bit of the attraction they depict. It's hard to explain, but it is sheer photography comedy gold. Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:19:26 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Hot peppers and spider bites cause similar pain

New research suggests that tarantula venom and capsaicin, the stuff that makes hot peppers hot, both fire up the same pain receptor on nerve cells. The particular cell-surface receptor is triggered by chemicals and also temperature. The research, conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, and published in the scientific journal Nature, could someday inform the development of better pain killers. Meanwhile, I expect to see a new brand of Spider Venom Hot Sauce in a matter of moments. From Science News:

(Molecular biologist David) Julius notes that because triggering the receptor produces such strong pain sensations, it's not surprising that organisms as distantly related as pepper plants and tarantulas use the same defensive mechanism.

"Different organisms have figured out how to tap this site as a way of telling predators, 'You won't be comfortable if you mess with me,'" he says.

Link to Science News article, Link to buy Mark F's article "The Cult of Capsaicin" at the Boing Boing Digital Emporium (just 50 cents!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:19:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Open Knowledge Forum in London, Nov 28

The Open Knowledge Foundaiton is hosting its second-annual forum in London next week, with speakers from the Office of Public Sector Information, Your Right to Know, Public Whip and Love Music Hate Racism. I spoke at last year's event and it was fantastic -- a great evening of good, meaty discussion about the ways that information that is produced at public expense can be used by the public.

This forum will focus on open 'civic' information. Civic information is material produced by government or other groups which is relevant to political activity by citizens. In particular it includes:

1. The law, be it in the form of statutes or judicial decisions

2. Statements of elected representatives at the local and national level (for example the records of parliament in the form of Hansard).

3. Information about the activities of elected representatives and other governmental officials

As with the first forum on civic information our focus will be on both:

* projects and software that work to produce or make available open information

* the legal and social issues involved in obtaining and providing such information

Motivating all of these efforts is the goal promoting greater public involvement in the democratic system and increasing the accountability of a government to its citizens.

# When: Tuesday 28th November, 1845 for 1900 start

# Where: UCL (London), Sir David Davies Lecture Theatre, Roberts Building G08

Link (Thanks, Rufus!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:14:23 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Bank of America loses $50 million from customers upset by false arrest

UPDATE: So far, dozens of Boing Boing readers have emailed me to let me know they are closing Bank of America accounts totaling over $947,000 because of the way Bank of America treated a fraud victim like a criminal. Details below.

In August Matthew Shinnick sold a pair of bikes on Craig's list for $600. After shipping the bikes, he received a check for $2000, not $600. The buyer explained that the extra money was for shipping costs and for his "trouble."

Shinnick was suspicious, so when he went to a San Francisco branch of Bank of America to deposit cash the check (which was drawn on a Bank of America check), but expressed concern that the check might not be good. He asked the teller to find out before depositing cashing it.

"The teller contacted the business and was informed that no check had been written to Shinnick for $2,000 or any other amount. She immediately passed the check to the branch manager. "I saw him talking on the phone and staring at me," Shinnick said. "A few minutes later, four SFPD officers came into the bank. They didn't say a thing. They just kicked my legs apart and handcuffed me behind my back." The police report for Shinnick's arrest says he was taken into custody "for the safety of the bank employees as well as the bank customers." -- SFGate

Shinnick was hauled to jail, stripped of his clothing and put into an orange jumpsuit. His father posted $4,500 bond to spring him. Shinnick ended up spending $14,000 to get out of the mess Bank of America caused.

Bank of America refused to reimburse Shinnick, and so Shinnick took his story to a consumer advocate radio show host, Clark Howard. Lots of Bank of America customers were disgusted by BofA's callousness and have closed their accounts with the bank. Howard says they've pulled $50 million from B of A.

I almost wish I had an account with BofA so I could close it in protest, but I closed my account with them long ago because their service sucks. If you close your BofA account because of this, please email me and tell me how much you pulled from the account (I will not reveal your name, of course). I will keep a running tally.

This is Broken has the full story, with relevant links. Link

Update:

A Boing Boing reader emailed me to let me know he is closing two BofA accounts totaling $2,300.

A Boing Boing reader and BofA customer says:

I just opened an account with them about three months ago after moving to a new state. Between savings and checking, I have about $40k with them at the moment.

Living on precisely the opposite side of the US, this is the first I've heard of this; thanks for posting it. Despite the hassle of opening up another account so soon after opening this one, I'm leaving them this afternoon and I'm going to make sure they know exactly why.

A Boing Boing reader and BofA customer says:

Granted, I've been thinking of dumping Bank of America ever since they bought Fleet, but this seems like as good a "straw that broke the camels back" moment as any. Lets put another $6500 US onto that amount.

A Boing Boing reader and BofA customer says:

Add another $5,000 to that. I'm going to start looking for a new bank here in Tallahassee as soon as possible.

A Boing Boing reader and BofA customer says:

Closed $45K of accounts yesterday. Don’t know if you can count it in your tally, but they screwed up their online banking…again. This was sort of the straw that broke the proverbial back for me. I hate them!!!

A Boing Boing reader and BofA customer says:

I've pulled my $10,000 credit card account with BoA.

A Boing Boing reader and BofA customer says:

I closed a savings account. $2200

A Boing Boing reader and BofA customer says:

As of an hour ago you can add another $8200 to that figure. Though my experience of them has not been too bad up to this point, I can't tolerate this kind of behaviour. However I'm sure my new primary bank has probably done something equally stupid I haven't heard about it yet.

A Boing Boing reader and BofA customer says:

I've got an $80K mortgage with BoA, and while I've been thinking about refinancing for a while, your story has made me decide get that ball rolling and NOT use BoA. I'll also be closing out the $3K in my checking account.

I've gotten many emails from people who told me they're closing their accounts. The total is over $900,000!

Don't miss this video of a BofA employee singing at a business meeting. Link (Thanks, Mark!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:12:07 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

BestBuy: our prices are copyrighted

BestBuy sent a DMCA takedown notice to BlackFriday.info over a posting that contained leaked information about its Thanksgiving sale-prices. Takedown notices are intended to provide an expeditious means of censoring material that infringes your copyright, but there's no copyright in a price-list -- copyright only attracts to original creative works, not lists of prices.

BestBuy has been sued for abusing the DMCA this way in the past. If BlackFriday wants a mirror for its BestBuy prices, I'd be glad to host it here on Boing Boing. If we got a bogus takedown from BestBuy over this, we'd just post it here and make fun of it. Sue and be damned.

Best Buy and other retailers that churn out takedown notices are misusing the DMCA, but the larger problem is the law itself. The powers granted by the DMCA are broad enough that it is tempting for companies to wield the law as a bludgeon against whomever is displeasing them. Until the law is changed, companies will continue giving into the temptation to misapply it.

Link

Update: Here's a mirror of the pricing, via Google cache -- thanks, Mathew!

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

Rare swallow swallowed

Birdwatchers gathered at Lunan Bay in Scotland to see a rare red-rumped swallow, usually only seen in the southern Mediterranean. A sparrowhawk also spotted the swallow though and promptly ate it. From the BBC News:

Mike Sawyer, a member of a Dundee group comprising RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) members, said: "We were absolutely horrified. That's life I suppose."

An RSPB spokesman added: "It's very unfortunate that it was devoured after such a short space of time, and before more people had seen it.

Link (via Fortean Times, thanks for the headline)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:02:18 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Uncle Mark's 2007 Gift Guide and Almanac

Mark Hurst of Good Experience has just released his free annual PDF document called "Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide and Almanac."

If you're not familiar with Uncle Mark, here's the deal: I review all the major consumer technology products and give my ONE favorite pick in each category... not the "17 top digital cameras", but the ONE camera that you should buy. The guide concludes with an Almanac section where I say whatever comes to mind, mostly "tips and tricks" that I can't fit anywhere else.

If you *have* read Uncle Mark in the past (this is the fourth year), I'd encourage you to download the 2007 guide. In a strange alignment of the technology cosmos, everyone seems to be launching new stuff this year...

- new digital cameras
- new personal computers
- new cell phones
- new digital music players
- new video game systems (three of them)
- new online games

...and so almost the entire 2007 guide is newly updated. I've tried my best to untangle the thicket of consumer technology choices and show the way to smart purchases.

Please do share the guide: print it, e-mail it, forward it, and pass it along. If you have a coworker, friend, or loved one who needs a clue about today's technology choices, just hand them Uncle Mark 2007.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:47:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Wireless chargers?

Researchers are exploring a phenomenon called "evanescent coupling" as a way to juice up devices powered by rechargeable batteries without connecting them directly to a charger. Unlike electromagnetic induction--the technology that charges electric toothbrushes and early pacemakers--which requires the charger to be very close to the device, this new approach could potentially work at distances of several meters, claim the MIT physicists. From New Scientist:

Evanescent coupling...allows electromagnetic energy "trapped" in a charging device to be tapped by a "drain" mobile device if the two have the same resonant frequency.

"The energy is trapped at source, until I bring a device that has the same resonant frequency close to it. Only then can the energy 'tunnel through'," says (researchers Marin) Soljacic. Crucially, the "charger" only starts powering another device when a compatible gadget comes within range...

Placing one of these wireless chargers in each room of a home or office could provide coverage throughout the building.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 07:19:41 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Che Trooper bust

UrbanMedium has released a limited edition bust version of their clever "Che Trooper" graphic -- the perfect sculptural mashup. Link (Thanks, Derek!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:39:59 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Piers Johnson gallery opening in Toronto this Fri

My friend Piers Johnson is a talented painter whose show opens this Friday at Toronto's Elaine Fleck Gallery (1194 Queen St W - just E of the Gladstone). It's an exhibition of new works -- they're really striking. Link (Thanks, Neil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:22:09 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Room looks like it's in a toon

This hotel-room is decorated to look like a cartoon -- with "every corner and angle is outlined with a thin, hand-drawn, black line." Link (via Cribcandy)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:17:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Podcast tribute to Robert Anton Wilson

This week on The RU Sirius Show, they have a special tribute to Robert Anton Wilson, who, they report, is still very much alive.

Guests include Lance Bauscher, who made the great Wilson documentary, "Maybe Logic," and Eric Wagner, who wrote "An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson."

The show features performances from an upcoming audio release of Wilson's classic "The Illuminatus! Trilogy", which will soon be released by Bauscher's Deepleaf Productions company. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:42:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Realistic skull tattoo on face

This gentleman sports a tattoo that looks like a skull. Visit link for bigger photos. Link (Thanks, Kirsten!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:34:02 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Weird screenshot of failed Zune install

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) I'm not sure what is going on in this image that shows up when a Zune install fails, but I like it. Link

Reader comment:

Anthony says: "I just noticed the weird Zune screenshot posted to Boing Boing and wanted to share this screenshot I took of Fark last Friday - look at the Zune ad on the right-hand side of the screen! OK, what's SHE doing?" (Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:30:39 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sketchbook found in used book

Over at Fecal Face, Mel Kadel and Travis Millard show off an amazing book published in 1913 that they picked out of flea market trash. When they opened The Conspiracy, they found a big surprise inside. Oddly, the first twelve pages were printed with text and the rest is blank, except for several dozen excellent ink drawings by an unknown Chicago man who previously owned the book.
Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:03:45 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jenny Ryan's snake at Giant Robot art exhibit

Felt Club creator Jenny Ryan made this awesome snake for an upcoming art show at Giant Robot in SF.

This toy was inspired by a wacky, stiff little toy snake I won at a carnival as a little kid. Sssssally is made from new and vintage fabric (daisy bedsheets I had as a kid in the '70s!), various ribbon trims, googly eyes, felt, embroidery floss, and a jingly ball on the end of her tail. :)

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:40:11 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

9 great old punk videos

After Cory posted that clip of Jello Biafra talking about net neutrality, I got nostalgic and went on YouTube looking for videos from some of my favorite songs. Here they are:

1. Generation X: "Your Generation" (1977)

Billy Idol now was (and still is -- check out his unfairly forgotten most recent album, Devil's Playground) a top-notch songwriter and performer.
2. Buzzcocks: "What Do I Get?" (1977)

Their single and album art was way ahead of its time.
3. Stiff Little Fingers: "Suspect Device" (1979)

Don't you feel sorry for people who listen to Green Day instead of Stiff Little Fingers?
4. Dead Boys: "Sonic Reducer" (1979?)

Stiv Bators was one of the best live performers ever. He was also incredibly nice. When I was living in Colorado, I was in a band we had the pleasure of opening for his band, Lords of the New Church. He gave us the case of beer in his dressing room. I saw him many years later in Los Angeles and went up to him and said hello. I'm sure he didn't remember me but he asked me to have a soft drink with him at a cafe. It's very sad that he was run over by a vehicle in Paris (June 1990), he still had much to offer the world.
5. Ramones: "Blitzkrieg Bop" (1977)

They're all dead now, except for the multiple drummers.
6. Blondie: "Hanging On The Telephone" (1978)

One of my favorite Blondie tunes. Originally performed by The Nerves (Amazon sample here)
7. Devo: "Uncontrollable Urge" 1978

Bonus: Devo playing at Kent State University in 1973
8. The Clash: "White Riot" (1977?)

One of the best singles of all time.
9. Rich Kids: "Rich Kids" (1978?)

Glen Matlock was The Sex Pistol's bass player, and he wrote the Sex Pistols' best songs. When he was kicked out of the band and replaced by Sid Vicious, Matlock formed Rich Kids. They only made one album (Ghosts of Princes in Towers) but it is terrific power pop.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:36:36 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Steve Jobs loves the word "boom" -- video

When Steve Jobs gives a demo of a new Apple product, he says "boom" a lot. Here's video evidence. Link (Thanks, David!)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:24:14 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

OMFG manual not what it seems

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) Craig says: "Got this on my desk today. Didn't think an "Official Meeting and Facilities Guide" was that exciting. I think the suits that approved the cover were clueless."

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:24:48 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Communist Manifesto remixed from vintage toons

This genius YouTube remixes dozens of cartoons from several studios into a retelling of the Communist Manifesto. Link (Thanks, Dad!)

Update: Mike sez, "This is the website of the artist, Jesse Drew who made 'Manifestoon'. From his bio: 'A consistent advocate for public access to media arts production, Drew is a founding member of the San Francisco Community Television Corporation, and in 1994, he was awarded a 'Goldie' by the San Francisco Bay Guardian for his work in community media. His writings have appeared in numerous publications and journals as well as several anthologies, such as Resisting the Virtual Life (City Lights Press) and Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture (City Lights Press). A recent chapter in a new book published by MIT Press, At A Distance: Art and Activism Before the Internet (Eds. A. Chandler, N. Neumark) investigates the evolving notion of networks and alternative communication practices that occurred before the popularization of the internet.

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:19:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Jello Biafra on Net Neutrality

Alainsane sez, "Last night, I had the pleasure of seeing [former Dead Kennedys frontman] Jello Biafra on his spoken word tour. I captured and posted to YouTube part of his segment defending Net Neutrality--in which he likens the COPE Act to relegating indie media to dirt roads." Link (Thanks, Alainsane!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:12:40 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Dolphins taught to sing Batman theme

Scientists at the Living Seas in Walt Disney World's Epcot Center have taught dolphins to sing the theme from the original Batman show. No word on whether Warners will sue for copyright or trademark infringement:

"The dolphin was reinforced for producing a specific rhythm to a specific object," says Harley.

"For example, when we presented him with a Batman doll, he received a fish for producing a specific rhythm, in this case, a short sound and then a long one."

"If you recall the original Batman TV series musical intro you'll probably remember the way they sang 'Bat-maaaaaaaan'," she adds.

The dolphin spontaneously vocalised to the rhythms, so the researchers started to reward the male with fish whenever it matched its 'singing' to the rhythms.

Link (via /.)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:44:59 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Monday, November 13, 2006

Portraits of video-game players

Portrait photographer Phillip Toledano shot a small but vivid series of pix of people playing video-games. Link (via Wonderland)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:30:50 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Nancy cloth doll kit

I like the looks of this vintage kit for making a cloth doll of Nancy. It's up for auction on eBay with a current bid of US$6.99. Of course, the Sluggo kit is da one dat I really dig. From the auction listing:

1983 UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE KIT TO CREATE AN 18-INC CLOTH DOLL OF SLUGGO'S FRIEND NANCY FROM THE COMIC STRIP BY BUSHMILLER. COMES W/CLOTH & INSTRUCTIONS. FINE COND.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:39:07 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Manatee joke alert

The Hippocratic Oaf says this is "One of the best manatee-themed visual puns I've ever seen." I think so, too. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:11:13 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Air guitar t-shirt

Australian researchers embedded sensors in the arms of a t-shirt to create a wearable musical instrument. Unlike the percussive "drum suit" that Laurie Anderson played in Home Of The Brave, this "wearable instrument shirt" (WIS) maps gestures to trigger audio samples. The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) team's first demonstration of the technology is in the form of an air guitar. From the CSIRO Media Centre:

Textile motion sensors embedded in the shirt sleeves detect motion when the arm bends – in most cases the left arm chooses a note and the right arm plays it...

“The technology – which is adaptable to almost any kind of apparel – takes clothing beyond its traditional role of protection and fashion into the realms of entertainment and a wide range of other applications including the development of clothes which will be able to monitor physiological changes,” (says textile and fiber technology researcher Richard Helmer).

Link (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 03:22:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Absentee ballot mailed in using rare and valuable 1918 stamp

Dorkas says: "Someone aparently used the rare 'Inverted Jenny' stamp, which shows an upside-down biplane, to mail in their absentee ballot in Broward County, Florida. The ballot box was sealed before the stamp could be officially identified and now it can't be reopened for 22 months. The stamp might be worth up to $100,000!"

Broward County Commissioner John Rodstrom told reporters he spotted the red and blue Inverted Jenny on a large envelope with two stamps from the 1930s and another dating from World War II.

"I thought: 'Oh my God, I know that stamp, I've seen that stamp before,'" said Mr Rodstrom, 54, who collected stamps as a boy.

"I'd forgotten the name. I just remembered there was a stamp with an upside-down biplane on it, and that it was a very rare, rare stamp," he told Reuters news agency.

The official said the envelope had no return address, and the ballot was disqualified because it gave no clue as to the identity of the voter.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:01:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

John Hodgman on Boing Boing Boing podcast

In the latest Boing Boing Boing podcast, we interview humorist and journalist John Hodgman, a frequent contributor to The Daily Show, author of Areas of My Expertise, Apple TV commercial star, and coiner of 700 hobo names.
MP3 file | Subscribe via iTunes | Podcast feed

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 02:38:32 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Sub Rosa fringe PDF zine

The new issue of Sub Rosa, an interesting fringe belief PDF 'zine, features the confessions of an Aleister Crowley book collector, a profile of mysterious mystic/author Manly Palmer Hall, an interview with Robert Bauval, an Egyptologist who argues that the pyramids of Giza align with stars in the Orion constellation, book reviews, and lots more. And it's all free.
Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 02:04:54 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

NPR "Xeni Tech": Tech Solutions to Iraqi-U.S. Language Barrier

Snip from a report I filed for today's edition of the NPR News program Day to Day:

Part of the daily struggle for soldiers and Marines in Iraq is communicating with civilians and suspected insurgents. Few military personnel have enough fluency with Iraqi Arabic to be easily understood, and field translators are in short supply.

But technology may help close that communications gap. A hand-held voice translator device developed by Integrated Wave Technologies, already in use in other parts of the world, converts simple English commands into Iraqi Arabic or 15 other languages.

When the soldier says a simple phrase -- for example, "keep kids back" -- the Voice Response Translator (VRT) matches that command to a more complex phrase in Arabic. In this case: "Keep your children back from us or we will take action against you."

Integrated Wave Technologies President Tim McCune says simple communications like these can save lives, both among Iraqi civilians and military personnel. "This removes pulling the trigger as the first option in dealing with foreign nationals," he says.

Link to archived radio segment audio. Listen to sound files from translator devices currently being used by US troops in Iraq: Link. Learn useful Iraqi Arabic phrases, like, "there is no pork in this food" and "we have to detain you."

NPR "Xeni Tech" archives: Link, or subscribe to future episodes by RSS: Link.

Images: Integrated Wave Technologies © 2006. At top, An Army private shows how the Voice Response Translator (VRT) -- the small gray box with black speaker -- can be used with a megaphone to address large groups in the field. Below, a closer look at the VRT.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 01:59:20 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Life extension researcher Aubrey de Grey interviewed

Attila Csordas says: "Aubrey de Grey is the man, who first made serious, scientifically conceptualized life extension speech acceptable within scholarly circles. Here are his answers to 6 life extension questions concerning moderate and maximum life extension technologies and blogs."

What is the most probable technological draft of maximum life extension, which technology or discipline has the biggest chance to reach it earliest? When?

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, my own anti-aging plan) is a huge plan incorporating many different therapies to be applied simultaneously to people, thereby rejuvenating all organs at the cellular and molecular level. SENS is divided into seven main categories. It will need very good stem cell therapy and gene therapy technology, as well as probably big advances in tissue engineering. It will also need some very radical new technologies like finding bacterial enzymes that can degrade unusual compounds. Therefore, I think it will definitely not be available for humans for 20 years at least, and probably 25-30 years — and if we’re unlucky and discover new problems, it could be 100 years. But I think a good chance of doing it in 25-30 years is worth trying for! Moreover, we will be able to improve the SENS therapies thereafter, so that they give the same people (beneficiaries of the 30 extra years) another 30, and another, indefinitely - that’s what I call “longevity escape velocity”. I don’t think any other approach that has been suggested so far has any chance at all of doing that. CR mimetics, for example, rely absolutely on the genetic machinery that we already have - they just make the body try its hardest against aging - so they can’t be made better and better, there is an inherent best possible. But I’m all in favour of developing them, because they’ll be here much sooner than SENS and will help some people live long enough for SENS even if they only delay aging by a year.

Link

Reader comment:

Chris Spurgeon says:

You (and your readers) may be interested in his talk at a recent TED conference. The video is available online.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:14:15 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery grand opening, December 2. 2006

The world's greatest book publisher is having a grand opening store celebration on December 2.

Fantagraphics Books is pleased to announce the grand opening of the Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery on Saturday, December 2. Located at 1201 S. Vale Street in the heart of the Bohemian blue-collar arts community of Georgetown, this new retail enterprise carries a complete line of Fantagraphics comic books, graphic novels, classic cartoon reprints and foreign translations, as well as related volumes on comics history and criticism. The space will feature monthly exhibitions of compelling cartoon art and host events showcasing the most accomplished artists in comics and related media. This project marks the return to Fantagraphics of visual and performing arts producer Larry Reid in the role of Curator and Events Coordinator.

The inaugural exhibition, “30 years of Misfit Lit,” celebrates three decades of Fantagraphics Books’ innovative approach to the art form. This exhibition presents the broad range of contemporary cartoonists associated with Fantagraphics, including Peter Bagge, Jim Blanchard, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, R. Crumb, Ellen Forney, Roberta Gregory, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Ted Jouflas, Megan Kelso, Tony Millionaire, Joe Sacco, Carol Tyler, Chris Ware and Jim Woodring. The show opens with a festive reception on Saturday, December 2 from 5:00 to 8:00 PM. Many participating artists will be present.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:10:12 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Awards for best user-submitted cartoons

Fred Seibert of Channel Frederator is holding the first award ceremony for user submitted cartoons on the internet.

On January 24, Channel Frederator will present “The Freddies,” Channel Frederator’s first annual awards ceremony. Held at Cinespace in Hollywood, the awards will recognize a wide array of achievements seen on Channel Frederator’s weekly podcasts throughout the year. The awards, which range from “Cartoon of the Year” to “Cartoon Most Likely to be Censored by the FCC,” will be distributed in the form of an eight-inch replica of Joe Robot, the spokesrobot for Channel Frederator. Eleven awards will be voted on by the Channel Frederator viewers and five will be jury selected.

Channel Frederator was built on user-submitted video. With all the recent attention to user video on the internet, January’s event is the first to honor the films and filmmakers in this rapidly growing area. Quality, peer acknowledgement, and viewer recognition are the elements key to all the awards and parallel the criteria of the Television and Motion Picture Academies. The event expects to draw more than 500 animation and online professionals. All films featured between November 1, 2005 and October 31, 2006 are eligible for recognition in the ceremony. The occasion will be videotaped for a podcast presentation available through ChannelFrederator.com and iTunes.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:06:37 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Mysterio stock art from Charles Anderson

The Mysterio collection from Charles Anderson contains about 500 images done up in a Mexican horror-thriller pulp format. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:59:46 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

The art of Samantha Hahn

Samantha Hahn is a New York based artist whose latest paintings are about women's relationship with food. I espcially like this painting called "Lunch," showing a woman eating a live, tiny lion that is in turn eating a freshly-killed zebra. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:54:57 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Pedophile lived in girl's room for 3 months undetected

A 22-year-old pedophile abused a 12-year-old girl for three months by living in her room and hiding in a hole under the child's bed so her mother wouldn't find out.

He told the girl he needed somewhere to hide and was taken into her home unnoticed. The pair then cut a hole in the bottom section of her bed enabling him to hide in it whenever her mum came in.

Manchester Crown Court heard the girl then swore her ten-year-old sister to secrecy about Jennings.

His lair was found after the 12-year-old ran away with him leaving a note telling her mum not to worry.

Link (Via Random Good Stuff)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 12:45:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Oskar Fischinger on DVD

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) was an animation pioneer best known for his work on the "Toccata and Fugue" segment in Disney's Fantasia. In my opinion though, his other avant-garde "optical poems" were far more beautiful and captivating. Finally, Fischinger's films are being released on DVD. The first in a series of collections is Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films. Over at Daddy Types, Greg points out that this seems like just the thing to mesmerize young minds. I can't wait to watch it with my little boy! From The Fischinger Archive description of the DVD:

Contains ten of Fischinger's classic Visual Music films - Allegretto, Motion Painting No. 1, Radio Dynamics, Spiritual Constructions, Study nr. 6, Study nr. 7, Kreise, Spirals, Wax Experiments, Walking from Munich to Berlin, plus many Special Features: home movies from Fischinger's Berlin Studio c. 1931, never-released early animation tests and fragments, a selection of paintings by Fischinger, a selection of biographical photos, film notes by Fischinger and others, and a biography.

Link to buy Ten Films, Link to the Fischinger Archive

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:54:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Find It! puzzle is very difficult (at least for me)

Find It! is an online puzzle where you are presented with a photo that has some element in it that changes gradually. You have to click the changing element before the green timer bar runs out. I had a really hard time with most of the photos. Link

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

Girl hypnotizes and dresses up lizards

Lily Capehart is a 10-year-old girl from Florida who like to "hypnotize" wild South Florida anole lizards and dress them up. Her father, a professional photographer, takes beautiful photos of the lizards, and sells the prints.

Lily’s gift was realized at the young age of two when according to her mother, Dina, Lily chased down and captured the critters wherever they went. Unlike most girls her age, instead of playing with dolls, Lily dresses up and plays with lizards. With her uncanny ability to “relax” and “hypnotize” them, Lily began dressing the lizards in costumes and creating whimsical scenes. Lily’s photographer father, Lucien Capehart, immortalized the colorful creations.

Link (Via Endless Parade of Excellence)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:57:35 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Scientist's new book about Sasquatch

Jeff Meldrum is an anthropologist and anatomy professor at Idaho State University who also happens to be one of the world's leading Bigfoot researchers. His new book, titled Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, "brings a much needed level of scientific analysis to the Sasquatch-or-Bigfoot debate," according to none other than famed primatologist Jane Goodall. (In 2002, Goodall surprised many people when she said, "As far as I am concerned, the existence of hominids of this sort is a very real probability.") On Friday, Meldrum was a guest on NPR's Talk Of The Nation where he discussed his new book and the best evidence for this unknown animal.
Link to NPR story, Link to buy Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

posted by David Pescovitz at 10:15:29 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians

This image is from the 18th century book titled Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer, aus dem 16ten und 17ten Jahrhundert (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians from the 16th and 17th Centuries.) The University of Wisconsin Digital Library scanned and posted the entire tome, rich with stunning and cryptic illustrations, on their History of Science and Technology site.
Link to the book, Link to more info at BibliOdyssey

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:45:11 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

HOWTO make a protein sculpture

Artist Julian Voss-Andreae sculpts magnificent representations of protein molecules out of wood, metal, and other materials. He's also written a HOWTO on making your own protein sculptures from the datasets for three-dimensional structures of biological macromolecules freely available from the Protein Data Bank. Voss-Andreae, who did graduate research in quantum physics, wrote a software program, Mitre, that converts the protein data into cutting instructions. (Seen here, Green Fluorescent Protein, 2004, Steel with process marks, height 5'6")
Link to artist page, Link to "Make Your Own Protein Sculpture" PDF (via easternblot.net)

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:26:56 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Merlin Mann's "Phone Guy" 30-second videos

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has a half-dozen funny videos of himself playing the "Phone Guy." The "Phone Guy" is that guy -- the one on the phone in the park, at the airport, in the waiting room with you -- whose obnoxious conversation is simultaneously fascinating and revolting.

I love the way Merlin doesn't use a real phone as a prop; anything dark and rectangular does the trick. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 09:26:02 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Barlow and Gilmore giants of cyberliberty free talk in LA tomorrow

A reminder that tomorrow night, EFF co-founders John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow will speak for free at the University of Southern California, as part of my Fulbright Chair lecture series. We'll have online audio and video afterwards, but this is one you want to see in person if you can get there.

Between them, Gilmore and Barlow co-founded EFF, Greenpeace and Earth First; co-developed the compiler that runs almost all the code you've ever used; wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace; founded the first great dial-up ISP and invented the alt. hierarchy; wrote the Grateful Dead's best lyrics and much more -- Gilmore philanthropic work includes relief for victims of Guantanamo Bay, lawsuits against the Attorney General over the right to fly anonymously, and much more.

The two are dynamic, exciting speakers and I'm immensely proud to be presenting them tomorrow night. I hope to see you there.

Where: University of Southern California main campus, Annenberg School of Communications, Room 207 (Los Angeles)

When: Tuesday, November 14, 7PM-9PM.

Link

(John Gilmore photo by Carl Cheney; John Perry Barlow photo by Bart Nagel)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:37:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Win free impractical Japanese watches

TokyoFlash asked me if I would help them give three watches away to Boing Boing readers -- naturally, I said yes!

I love the amazing, impractical watches sold by Japanese boutique TokyoFlash. I have bought so many of these that I've lost count, and I just love the feeling I get that I'm rewiring my brain when I learn to tell time on one of them.

To win any watch on the TokyoFlash site, just answer the following question: "which watch was designed by Yasushi and Makoto and was inspired by architectural concepts around Tokyo?"

Send your answer, along with the make, model and color of watch you'd like to win to boingboing@tokyoflash.com. 3 winners will be selected from the correct entries on the 27th of November.

TokyoFlash is also offering a 1500 Yen ($13) discount if you can guess what time is being shown on the face of this watch. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:36:12 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Head scultpture made from facial reconstruction plates

Lewis Tardy's handsome metal head sculpture called "Reconstruction" is made from "Stryker titanium craniomaxillofacial reconstruction plates and screws as well as other steel and stainless steel found objects." Link (via Make)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:24:17 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Canadian copyright minister caught lining pockets

Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda continues to draw fire for taking cash from the entertainment companies she's supposed to be regulating. The Tory minister raised a fortune in campaign contributions from broadcasters and American-owned entertainment companies (Canadian record labels have split off from the American-run "Canadian" Record Industry Association). Then she proposed to have a fundraiser, while in office, at which she would pass the hat among the same companies for more money, even as she was dealing with complex new rules regulating the operation of the Canadian entertainment industry.

According to Elections Canada data, Oda held a similar fundraiser in May 2004 - before she was even elected to the House of Commons - that attracted enormous corporate support from the broadcast industry including Alliance Atlantis, Astral, CanWest, and CHUM, as well as from more than a dozen senior executives from major broadcast and cable companies.

Once elected, the support continued. With Oda installed as the Conservative Canadian Heritage critic, her riding association last year reported contributions from a veritable who's who of broadcast and copyright lobby groups and companies. These include broadcasters (Corus, Vision TV), cable companies (Rogers, Shaw, and Cogeco), record companies (Sony, Universal, Warner, EMI), and copyright lobby groups (Canadian Recording Industry Association, Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association, Entertainment Software Association).

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:13:30 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

Universal Music CEO: iPod owners are thieves

The CEO of Universal Music has called iPod owners thieves. In explaining that Universal required Microsoft to pay it vig on the sale of each Zune, Doug Morris said, "These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it."

Yesterday, Microsoft agreed to share revenue from Zune sales with record labels and artists. Forcing the issue was Universal Music Group, which at deadline is the only label named in the program. UMG refused to license its music to the Zune unless it could receive a percentage of each device sold,