The folks at Rocketboom released a lovely, dreamlike episode this week in which host Joanne Colan appears to move forward in time through a reverse-time New York City.

Gabriel Delahaye (whose work we've featured on Boing Boing tv not once, but twice!) says, "Um? This video? AMAZING." And holy plus-sized polyester dress slacks, do I ever concur.

I'm a little behind on blogging a number of things from around the web. One of them is this great little post by Annalee Newitz from last week, at science fiction blog io9 -- about everyday objects that inspired cool scifi machines. "Most excitingly, the T-1000 was inspired, according to James Cameron, by chocolate fudge," she explains. "Mmmm, fudge."

The heart box: world's goth-iest fountain? Video, and the sculpture is by artist Billy Chasen. According to the YouTube metadata, this work was displayed at a recent American Heart Association gala in NYC. (thanks, Siege!)

* Above, a short film by 16-year old Boing Boing pal Charis Tobias, and her cool mom, Marylew.

* Here is the Washington Post's second annual Peep Diorama contest. (Thanks, Jean)

* Jason Day says, "My wife made a Buffy-themed diorama ("Bunny the Vampire Slayer") for the Chicago Tribune's Peeps diorama contest (craftzine blogged about the contest here). She didn't finish by the deadline, but it turned out really well, and just in time for Easter."

* "Fear of Flight," a stop-motion short in which an Easter peep meets an untimely demise. (thanks, Billy)

* Candyblogger Cybele points us to some Peeps as Maori statues on Easter Island. "Bunny shaped Cocoa Peeps, to be exact," she explains, "hewn from pure sugar with a touch of gelatin."

* Reader Brian H. would like all peep-lovers in Boingdom to know about "two dioramas that were rejected from The Chicago Tribune's Peeps contest. One revolves around a black metal band playing a high school and the dire consequences therein, and the other is a simple tribute to an old Edward Gorey book."

* This week's edition of Web Zen, which is regularly re-blogged here on Boing Boing, is all about peeps, cadbury bunnies, and other anthropomorphic cavity inducers.

* And Sarah O'Sullivan says,

Last year BoingBoing featured my husband Dan Paddock's and my entry into our local newspaper's Easter marshmallow peeps diorama contest (York Daily Record, York, PA.) Our diorama, "We Come In Peeps," won second place. We thought you might like to see this year's entry, "Peepzilla, King of All Marshmallows." And no, I don't know which marshmallow bunny is Raymond Burr.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Rest in Peeps, Anna Nicole Smith.

Peeps peepshow

Down with my Peeps

Liberty Leading the Peeps

Office plastered in Marshmallow Peeps

Hunting with the vice-Peep

Los Angeles painter Korin Faught has her first solo show in the city opening tonight at the Corey Helford Gallery. I think her elegant paintings of twins and couples are incredibly glamorous, moody, and lovely. The exhibition, titled "Twenty Two," runs until April 19. Link to online gallery, Link to Corey Helford Gallery, Link to Style.com article (Thanks, Andrew Brandou!)

Tikistitch sez, "This one may not be *quite* as cool as the Hello Kitty Vader, but I can personally vouch for it as being 100% authentic, as I just took the picture of him downstairs in the lobby. I'm attending Jedi Con, the Star Wars con going on this weekend in Dusseldorf, Germany." Link (Thanks, Tikistitch!)

Wired News has a nice little gallery up from the Alien Abduction festival on Toronto's Queen Street West last week -- local merchants offered classes in tinfoil beanie manufacture, and "probing 101" (from the local sex-positive sex-shop). Link

Nadine Sterk's Sleeping Beauty lamp is on exhibition at a show of design school projects, on display at the Design Huis in Eindhoven, The Netherlands -- it's "a lamp that develops like a living organism: switch it on and it slowly starts growing by knitting its own lampshade at a speed of three rotations per hour." Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Marilyn sez, "In an experiment at the U. of Padua last year, female mosquito fish preferred to join shoals that were larger by just one fish, 'preferring shoals of four fish rather than three fish, and consistently preferring shoals of three fish over those containing just two.'"

This means that they have similar counting abilities to those observed in apes, monkeys and dolphins and humans with very limited mathematical ability.

Christian Agrillo, an experimental psychologist at the university of Padua in Italy said: "We have provided the first evidence that fish exhibit rudimentary mathematical abilities."

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

A Japanese okusan relieves her pet octopus' maddeningly itchy tentacles in this "Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" inspired TV commercial for and anti-itch remedy. Link

Jack LaLlane says the secret to happiness is to eat more fresh food, get more physical activity, and burst out in song in public from time to time. Link (Via grow-a-brain)

An artist in Wilmington, NC covered up another artist's public sculptures with black cloth and rope as a "prank," and the overseer of the Pedestrian Art program is hopping mad about it.

(Wilmington Star-News photo by Amy Hotz)

"It was basically a good-hearted prank," said [Dixon] Stetler, a local artist who has had work on display at the Cameron Art Museum and is known for, among other things, paddling a raft made out of flip-flops across the Cape Fear River.

"We didn't damage anything. It's not an angry thing, it's a funny thing."

"I find it incredibly disrespectful, not only to the artist, but to the Pedestrian Art program and the city," said [Matt] Dols, who has been helping to install sculpture downtown under the Pedestrian Art banner for about two years.

Link

Our Boing Boing Gadgets editor, Joel Johnson, wrote an article for the magic-themed issue of MAKE on how to build a fireball shooter. Today, MAKE's video producer, Kip Kay has a video on the awesome shooter. Link

COOP points us to the marvelous Netsuke & Intro photo pool at Flickr. Netsuke are tiny Japanese sculptures, first appearing in the 17th century, that were attached to traditional robes. They acted as fasteners for Inro, cases that held small objects because the clothing had no pockets. Seen here, a "frustrated rat catcher" netsuke from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Link

There's a good discussion revving up in the comment thread of Mark Frauenfelder's entry, Documentary examines possibility of US dollar collapse. The first major salvo came from Cowicide, twenty comments in, responding to arguments that the problem isn't that serious:

Not sure Operation Three Trillion Dollar War is helping too much, either...
* Link to video, transcripts of video, audio, etc.

BTW, this isn't some wackos... it's Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist, Joseph Stiglitz, and Linda Bilmes (Professor of public finance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government).

While we are at it:

Robert Kuttner on the “Most Serious Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression"
* Link to video, transcripts of video, audio, etc.

How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill)”
* Link to video, transcripts of video, audio, etc.

Subprime Mortgage Crisis Causing African Americans to Experience Greatest Loss of Wealth in Modern U.S. History.
* Link to video, transcripts of video, audio, etc.

Yah, yep... I smell trouble... yep, I smell it.

Been smellin' it for quite a while, but it's getting stinkier and stinkier. Haven't even passed the dead skunk on the highway yet...

ConsideredOpinion came in with a balanced and knowledgeable analysis:

... Secondly - the impact of realignments will be felt unevenly across the economy. The super-rich will, by in large, remain insulated from these changes. The highly-educated (with marketable skills) will remain the most globally competitive, and barring labor movement restrictions should compete evenly against the best anywhere in the world for any currency. If the realignments can be 'dialed in' slowly enough, skilled industrial laborers should do better in the US ... but I don't care to think what this will mean for unions and the ILO. ...

Then Zuzu weighed in, and became the most prominent commenter in that thread. He's something of a monetarist, which is okay; monetarists are good on the consequences of grossly inflating the currency.

it's like nobody has ever been through a recession before... All this fear mongering is getting a little out of control.

I know people love their anecdotal evidence, especially in an economic discussion. But the concern here is pretty straightforward. From about 2001 - current the United States has funded a comprehensive restructuring of domestic government agencies (i.e. Homeland Security) with new and far-reaching "anti-terrorism" programs (e.g. Federal subsidy of enlarged state and local police, USVISIT, etc.), funded an invasion and ongoing active occupation of Iraq (at a cost of about $1 billion per month), while at the same time cutting taxes, and in September 2007 Congress raised the debt ceiling $9.815 trillion. The U.S. Government went from an ostensibly balanced budget in 1999, to a mind-boggling increase in spending, while at the same time collecting less revenue (i.e. taxes). How do they afford it? They increase the supply of money and credit through the Federal Reserve. This is a stealth tax. By debasing the fiat currency of the dollar, they spend the new dollars on the military-industrial complex to "keep us safe"*, which dilutes the value of the dollars we save in our bank accounts (or that we negotiated with our employers to earn in our paychecks), but all of the other goods and services are still just as scarce, so more dollars are needed for the same value to exchange for them, which is inflation.

(*Recently "keep us safe" has been extended to including bailing out financiers such as Bear Stearns and soon Lehman Brothers.)

The "Three Trillion Dollar War" or whatever you want to call it was all paid with inflation, which explains why the price of gold went over $1000/oz, why oil and food prices are up, but people are still generally acting as if dollars are worth what they used to be worth before the new money was created. (Arguably his is also why the Federal Reserve ceased publishing M3 data in March of 2006, and why the Department of Labor and Statistics has redefined the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to exclude energy (i.e. oil) and agriculture from its "basket of goods" estimation of dollar purchasing power.)

The economic crisis the United States can no longer ignore is the unwinding of this inflation. However, economists who speak on television or for politicians will tie themselves in knots and circular logic to avoid ever saying the word "inflation" -- it's like a taboo. So first they pitched this problem as a "sub-prime mortgage crisis", until now the problem is obviously not contained to just that market sector. Recently I've heard people start saying "contagion" like when the Asian Tigers melted down from their inflationary bubble in the 1990s.

But the crisis is simply that the Bush-Cheney administration has spent more money than God by borrowing and printing it (i.e. creating inflation), which in the central banking system of fractional reserve multiplies several times over into even more inflation. This creates an enormous market bubble -- that so-called "economic recovery" Bush has claimed in his speeches of yore. So this bubble didn't even feel like a bubble so much because the "improvement" was marginal over the pre-existing recession from the previous dot-com bubble and housing "foam" created by Alan Greenspan. But soon all of that inflation is about to collapse.

Think of inflation like those Warner Bros. cartoons where Wile E. Coyte runs off the edge of a cliff, and he can keep running and running on the air as long as he doesn't look down and realize that there's no more dirt beneath him. But eventually he looks down and plummets until he hits real dirt. That's what a correction for inflation is like.

And we've had this inflation/recession building up for approximately a decade now. It could take at least that long to get back out of it. So I would not chalk this up to "fear mongering". Fear mongering of the phantom menace called "terrorism" is what got us into this hole.

I'm reminded of an episode of Duckman (1994):

Once again, the U.S. is spending millions to oust a puppet they spent millions to get into office. They'll spend more millions on the coverup to hide having spent those millions and even more millions to discredit members of the media who report otherwise. It's a good thing they print their own money.

Other major comments by Zuzu:

* Inflation vs. deflation.

* Inflation, deflation, and the government's manipulation of the currency.

* A long, interesting quote on People & Power, rigged markets, the Plunge Protection Team, central planning, and the command monetary system (as opposed to planned economy).

Partway through that sequence, Fran Six popped in with a link to a set of charts she's constructed:

* A long-term chart depicting a deflationary boom since the Nasdaq crash in 2000 with its incipient manias in prices.

* The $US gold price divided by the $C with an overlay of a junior precious metal stock.

* The inverse of the gold/silver ratio.

* A very large chart depicting the silver/gold ratio with the added Wilder's ADX. Note the extreme position of the ADX indicator.

* A picture of insider buying for GBN.V in the last year.

* Oil price projection using fibonacci overlay.

* Dow Jones Industrial Crash, Oct. 1987.

* Nasdaq Crash, Apr. 2000.

There's one brief additional comment from Fran Six. She should feel encouraged to come back and explain more about those charts.

Near the end of the discussion's current endpoint, Spinobobot entered the conversation with a couple of comments (first, second) I'd quote at greater length, if this entry weren't already too long. He's in favor of welcoming our new robot overlords. Mostly, he talks about things monetarism doesn't:

In seriousness, I simply don't understand why some people trust "the market" to solve all of our problems. This quote particularly got me:

"You can't expect bureaucrats to know better than the market itself."

This market fundamentalism in which any economic woes are blamed on attempts to regulate and interfere with the economy is as unfalsifiable a position as the that of Marxists who maintained that the Soviet Union and other Communist nations weren't really Communist, because a true Communist nation would be successful. As though we didn't already see the fallout of total laissez-faire in the 19th Century.

I take your point about the problems of bureaucracy and I definitely think that market processes which are response to things like supply and demand have their benefits. I don't want to see the elimination of markets by any means.

But we need to put constraints on markets, establish certain kinds of incentives that exercise a general direction for how things will go. What I really don't like about unchecked markets is the way that they destroy common goods. Self-interest is not the only viable human motive.

The conversation's not over.

Link

In 1990, comic artist and editor Mark Chiarello painted portraits of baseball greats from the Negro Leagues. The watercolors were packaged as a set of trading cards celebrating these players, many of whom never appeared on baseball cards before. Those watercolors, plus several dozen new ones, have now been collected in a hardcover book titled Heroes Of The Negro Leagues. The original works are currently being shown at ArtInsights gallery in Reston, Virginia, and the new issue of Juxtapoz includes an interview with Chiarello. I think these portraits are absolutely stunning, whether you care about the great American pastime or not. Link to ArtInsights online gallery and interview, Link to buy Heroes Of The Negro Leagues

A gamma ray burst that occurred 7.5 billion years ago was visible on Earth by the naked eye this week. It was "2.5 million times brighter than the most powerful supernova ever seen."

Here's a History Channel video about Gamma ray bursts. "Scientists at the University of Kansas believe gamma ray bursts were responsible for a great mass extinction on Earth 450 million years ago. The gamma rays strip away the ozone layer and generates a chemical smog, producing a widespread chill that grips the globe. Every few seconds, a supernova emits jets of deadly gamma rays somewhere in the galaxy. If one of these gamma ray bursts should happen sufficiently close to the solar system, all life would perish."

From Wikipedia:

Research has been conducted to investigate the consequences of Earth being hit by a beam of gamma rays from a nearby (about 500 light years) gamma ray burst. This is motivated by the efforts to explain mass extinctions on Earth and estimate the probability of extraterrestrial life. A gamma ray burst at 6000 light years would result in mass extinction; a 1000 light year distant burst would be equivalent to a 100,000 megaton nuclear explosion. A burst 100 light years away would blow away the atmosphere, create tidal waves, and start to melt the surface of the earth. There is a one in a million chance that there could be a gamma ray burst as near as the earth's closest star, Alpha Centauri, in the lifetime of the earth. Such a burst, at 4.3 lightyears distant, would effectively incinerate the earth.

Link

I find Pixelo''s "Super Real Mario World" and "Homer Simpson Untooned" to be delightfully unsettling. Link

People of all religious denominations will be overjoyed to learn that a statue of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was installed on the Cumberland County Courthouse Lawn in Crossville, Tennessee today.

All Pastafarians, Rejoice!

Statement at Installation Ceremony
March 21, 2008

We are lucky enough to live in a country that allows us, its citizens, the freedom of speech. I have chosen to put up a statue of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to represent the discourse between people of all different beliefs. The many faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds of Cumberland County’s residents make our community a stronger richer place. I respect and am proud that on the people’s lawn, the county courthouse, all of these diverse beliefs can come together in a positive dialogue. Here, we are all able to share the issues close to our hearts whether it is through a memorial to the soldiers killed fighting for our country, the Statue of Liberty honoring our nations welcoming promise to all, a group’s fight to stop homelessness, or powerful symbols of faith. I greatly treasure this open forum between everyone in the community.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a pile of noodles and meatballs, but it is meant to open up discussion and provoke thought. Being able to put up a statue is a celebration of our freedom as Americans; a freedom to be different, to express those differences, and to do it amongst neighbors -— even if it is in a noodley way.

Link

The New Yorker has several clips from “Standard Operating Procedure,” a new Errol Morris documentary about Abu Ghraib.

ERROL MORRIS: Are these kids [locked up in Abu Ghraib] suspected of being terrorists or just…?

SABRINA HARMAN [a U.S. Army specialist who took photographs at Abu Ghraib and was convicted by court-martial for her conduct there, shown here]: No.

ERROL MORRIS: If you could talk about that?

SABRINA HARMAN: I don’t know what all of them were in for. We had so many from age 10 all the way up. I think the youngest one was because his father was passing notes or doing something illegal, but they held him also. I don’t know if the kid was involved, but he, he’s, he’s a little kid. I mean, he could have fit through the bars he was so little.

ERROL MORRIS: So how does this make you feel? I mean, you’re seeing all these kids...

SABRINA HARMAN: Well, you go numb. I mean there’s…You really don’t have any feelings. You can’t feel because you’ll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off. You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the MREs [“meals ready to eat”] to make their time go by better, I guess, but there’s only so much you can do or so much you can feel.

ERROL MORRIS: And do you think that there were reasons that these kids were being held, other than their mother or their father?

SABRINA HARMAN: I’m sure the older ones, like the 16, 17 year olds, they probably assisted in something, or the IPs [Iraqi police] probably picked them up for some reason. But it’s kind of corrupt there with the system because five different people can be in there charged for the same murder, and you could just wait there, forever. I mean, if your neighbor doesn’t like you, he can be like, “Hey, this guy’s a terrorist. This guy just killed a soldier,” and the soldiers of course would think it’s true and they would go over there and they would arrest him. I mean, a lot of that happened, but it’s just a matter of time before you can prove it, that it happened, that these guys were actually innocent. Because there are so many people flooding in, we just didn’t have the resources to get to each one of them in a normal fashion.

Link

A 78-year-old woman in a German hospital for leg surgery underwent an unnecessary operation on her anus instead. The surgical team at Münchberg's Hochfranken-Klinik apparently made a mistake, installing a prosthetic anal sphincter on the wrong patient. From USA Today:

(German newspaper Frankenpost) says some members of the surgical team have been punished in connection with the series of mistakes that led them to operate on the wrong patient.

Prosecutors are said to be looking into the incident. As for the unidentified patient, she still needs knee surgery and plans to file a lawsuit.

Link to USA Today, Link to Frankenpost (German language)

Ian Clarke, the hacker who created the secure publishing tool FreeNet, is looking for someone to take over his BitTorrent competitor, Dijjer. He writes,

Dijjer is a really cool little piece of software that I initially developed as a skunk works project within Revver back in 2005. It was born of a few key frustrations with BitTorrent.

Due to other commitments, I'm now looking for a talented Java developer to take on the challenge of maintaining and progressing the Dijjer project, and I'm hoping that BoingBoing can help me find such a person :-)

Dijjer is a free (as in speech) P2P app that allows the distribution of large files to lots of people with little or no bandwidth overhead, in many regards it solves the same problem as BitTorrent, but with some key differences, which include:

* Dijjer doesn't need trackers, to publish a file on Dijjer it just needs to be available on an ordinary web server.

* Dijjer streams downloaded files directly to your web browser, or your audio or video player, as they are downloaded.

* Dijjer uses "UDP hole-punching" to communicate through firewalls without any need to manually reconfigure them.

* Dijjer forms one unified P2P network, rather than a separate network for each file, which allows it to scale up much more quickly.

Link (Thanks, Ian!)

Here's the latest episode of You Suck at Photoshop, a screencast in which the self-loathing tutor teeters on the verge of a nervous breakdown while hurling abuse at viewers. Link

John Macneill is a kickass 3D illustrator whose work frequently appears Popular Science and other national magazines. He also contributes to the Turbo Squid 3D model site. Recently In 2002 he uploaded his model of a WWII B-24 Bomber to Turbo Squid. Lockeed Martin came across it and yesterday it wrongfully (illegally?) used the DMCA to force Turbo Squid to remove the file.

A photographer can take a photo of any type of car and sell the photo; look at any car magazine. A painter can create a painting of anything and sell that, remember Andy Warhol's famous 1968 painting of a can of Campbell's tomato soup? But a CG artist cannot create a sculpture of a Ford Mustang and sell that, at least not on Turbo Squid. There is obviously a double standard here. So where does this leave CG artists? Until a stock company becomes willing to fight back against these takedowns, there seems little any individual artist can do.

UPDATE: Cory has the following to add:

Turbo Squid, a large 3D stock image site, has been systematically removing models of contemporary and vintage vehicles, after their manufacturers sent in improper DMCA takedown notices alleging that publishing 3D models of old cars and airplanes infringed on their trademarks (this isn't true, but even if it was, the DMCA deals with copyright, not trademark). Yesterday, 3D artist John MacNeill had his model of a WWII bomber removed after Lockheed sent a letter to Turbo Squid, alleging that this 60-year-old plane infringed on its trademark.

A Turbo Squid spokesperson is quoted as saying, "The thing you need to keep in mind is that you cannot make money off someone else's registered Trademark." This is simply untrue. Trademark does not protect owners from others profiting on their marks -- trademark's purpose is to prevent vendors from misleading the public about the origin of goods and services. If you use someone else's trademark ("Charger works with Nokia phones!") you're totally in the clear, provided that the purchaser doesn't get confused about whose product he's buying.

Trademark law is clear: Turbo Squid can sell unauthorized models of cars, planes and other trademarked objects, provided that they make it very clear that these models weren't authorized, made or marketed by the manufacturers of the cars, planes and objects.

The unfortunate precedent was allowed to stand, and since 2003 many other corporations have followed suit. The "banned" list at Turbo Squid now includes dozens of different makes of cars and aircraft. When recently challenged on the basis for these continuing takedowns, Nancy-Ellen Martin at Turbo Squid said "The thing you need to keep in mind is that you cannot make money off someone else's registered Trademark." The DMCA, of course is an amendment to US copyright law and has nothing to do with trademark. The US Patent and Trademark Office defines trademark as "a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination of words, phrases, symbols or designs, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others." In short, trademark is all about avoiding confusion in the marketplace, and is intended to prevent a manufacturer from selling a product that is falsely branded to appear to be another similar product. This seems to be even less of a justification for a takedown than DMCA. 3D models are not real-world cars, trucks or airplanes, there can be no confusion in the marketplace.

Link

The Shellac Sisters are a London DJ troupe that spins exclusively 78rpm records. No Technics 1200s for this crew. They use 1920s wind-up gramophones and wear period clothing. From their Web site:

We have a vast collection of 78s covering all styles of music from the twenties through to the fifties… Big band swing by Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and The Andrews Sisters, classics like Tea for Two and The Lambeth Walk, novelties by Noel Coward and cheeky music hall acts, 1920s flapper favourites, Hollywood movie classics from Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire and Marlene Dietrich, jumping jive by Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan, 1950s rock'n'roll from Elvis and bombshell hits from Marilyn Monroe, romantic serenades by Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole, latin exotics by Carmen Miranda and Perez Prado… tea dancing foxtrots, quicksteps, blackbottoms and cockney knees ups!

Link to The Shellac Sisters page, Link to The Shellac Sisters on MySpace

The amazing artisans at Pressure Printing are holding a spring print sale where every exquisite piece in their catalog is 20% off, from Jim Woodring and Camille Rose Garcia to Tim Biskup and COOP. I have several Pressure Printing editions and each one is a work-of-art in its own right. Seen above, James Jean's "Taciturn," featuring intaglio prints mounted in a hand-crafted Japanese screen that folds out to 17 inches. Link

In his Salon Machinist blog, Farhad Manjoo shows how to read any article in the Wall Street Journal online (one of the few online papers that charges money for a subscription) for free. As a bonus, he includes an explanation about why this is ethical (though he admits it's "slightly deceptive").

Remember that the Journal is set up to disarm its pay gate if it thinks you're coming from Google News or Digg. In order to get free access, then, you've got to convince the Journal that you've clicked on a link on one of those sites. How to do that?

The technical name for this is "referer spoofing" (with the misspelling). Spoofing is an easy thing to pull off in Firefox -- all you've got to do is download this add-on, refspoof.

When you've installed that app, you'll see a new toolbar [shown above]

Now follow these steps:

* Go to WSJ.com.

* In the refspoof toolbar's "spoof:" field, type "digg.com."

* Also in the refspoof toolbar, click the R icon, and select "static referrer."

* That's it. Click around the site; the WSJ thinks each click is coming from Digg. The WSJ is now yours for free!

Link

Matt sez, "Tom Waits, well-known for his litigation against advertisers who imitate his sound for commercials, apparently recorded one commercial of his own. And it's for dog food." Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Sebastian Horley, a British author whose book, Dandy in the Underworld recounts his life of "sex, drugs and finely tailored clothes" has been barred from entering the US for a book tour, on the grounds of "moral turpitude."

On the one hand, this is a PR win for Horley, who'll probably sell a crapload of books on the back of this, but on the other hand, does US customs really think that Americans aren't capable of hearing some fashionista recount his drug stories without falling into a pit of dissolute decadence?

British writer and self-styled dandy Sebastian Horsley was denied entry to the United States after arriving to promote his memoir of sex, drugs and flamboyant fashion.

Sebastian Horsley was deemed "not admissible" by U.S. customs agents.

Horsley said he was questioned for eight hours Tuesday by border officials at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey before being denied entry on grounds of "moral turpitude."

The 45-year-old author was traveling to New York for the U.S. launch of "Dandy in the Underworld," his account of a life dedicated to sex, drugs and finely tailored clothes.

"I was dressed flamboyantly -- top hat, long velvet coat, gloves," Horsley said. "My one concession to American sensibilities was to remove my nail polish. I thought that would get me through."

Link (Thanks, DbZeroOne!)

According to a press-release from SlySoft, makers of the DVD-copying software AnyDVD HD, the BD+ anti-copying system used by BluRay disks has been cracked. BD+ has been held out as some kind of uncrackable answer to the DRM wars, and was cited by many pundits for BluRay's victory over HD-DVD in the recent format wars.

Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group will have to revise his statement from July, 2007 regarding BD+: "BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years". It is worth mentioning that since he made that statement only eight months have gone by.

Peer van Heuen, head of High-Definition technologies at SlySoft adds: "Admittedly, we are not really so fast with this because actually we had intended to publish this release already in December as promised. However, it was decided for strategic reasons to wait a bit for the outcome of the "format war" between HD DVD and Blu-ray. On top of that, we first wanted to see our assumptions confirmed about the in the meantime released BD+ titles regarding the BD+ Virtual Machine. We are rather proud to have brought back to earth the highly-praised and previously "unbreakable" BD+. However, we must also admit that the Blu-ray titles released up to now have not fully exploited the possibilities of BD+. Future releases will undoubtedly have a modified and more polished BD+ protection, but we are well prepared for this and await the coming developments rather relaxed". Van Heuen adds jokingly: "The worst-case scenario then is our boss locks us up with only bread and water in the company dungeon for three months until we are successful again".

Link (via /.)

Science blogger PZ Myers, a sharp critic of creationism, was blocked from attending the premiere of Expelled, a creationist propaganda film. The ban apparently came from the producer, who personally instructed the police to keep Myers out; however, Myers's family and guest were allowed to attend.

The irony? Myers's guest was Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion. Link

The Hugo nominees for 2008 have been announced, and wotta list!

Best Novel
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)
Brasyl by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor; Analog Oct. 2006-Jan/Feb. 2007)
The Last Colony by John Scalzi (Tor)
Halting State by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)

Link

The awesomely, Sovietly square Nexcopy USB200PC key duplicator will flash 20 USB sticks at once from a master key. Sounds like a useful tool for samizdata (see, for example, Cuba, where keys were used to spread videos of a suppressed congressional crisis), and it's going to look great on the scrapheap of history in a decade or so! Link (via OhGizmo)

Tibetans and their supporters around the world held vigils this week in support of the ongoing uprising in Tibet, as Chinese military and police jailed protesters inside Tibet, and reports of injuries and deaths continue.

Today on Boing Boing tv: Xeni visited one such vigil in front of the LA Federal building, organized by Southern California Tibetans, including Namgyal Kyulo of the Tibetan Association of Southern California, and Tseten Phanucharas, of the Los Angeles Friends of Tibet.

LINK TO BBTV BLOG POST, with discussion and downloadable video.

- - - - - - - - - -

Some of the vigil participants reported they were unable to connect with family and friends at home in Tibet, to check on their well-being, because of blocked telecommunications. Others (an exiled grandmother and her 11-year-old son, alike) spoke of being "glued to YouTube," straining to watch blurry phonecam videos of the demonstrations and violence.

China's government is not allowing reporters or human rights observers inside Tibet, and human rights advocates are concerned that grave violations are taking place.

(Image: some of the hundreds of ethnic Tibetans identified as protest participants and turned in to Chinese police in Tibet. The detainees were presented before state-run television cameras before being transported to prison / XZTV, Tibet).

"The Chinese government must immediately allow independent media access to all areas of Tibet," said the Tibetan Association's Kyulo. "We continue to hear eyewitness reports of house to house searches and arbitrary arrests in Lhasa and growing numbers of killings in Amdo, Kham, and other areas."

China blocked YouTube and Google News, and Boing Boing tv viewers inside China tell us that Boing Boing is also blocked (perhaps due to keyword filtering for words like "Dalai Lama," or "Tibet.") Google appears to be complying with China's net-censors by censoring the version of Google News that is available inside China.

"Without the internet, we would have no information at all about what's going on inside of Tibet," said Tseten Phanucharas. "nor would this global movement in solidarity with the Tibetan people exist."

Also present at the rally was Gyalthan Gyatso, part of a team of cyclists doing a "Peace Ride for Human Rights in Tibet" beginning March 29th in San Francisco.

(Image: some iphone snapshots during the BBtv shoot / Xeni Jardin)

Previously on Boing Boing:

Tibet: nearly 1,000 jailed in Lhasa, Dalai Lama offers to resign

Xeni on G4's AOTS re: Tibet and China's 'net blackout

Tibet: China blocks YouTube, protests spread, bloggers react

Tibet: more deaths, injuries in Lhasa as crackdown grows

Tibetan protests in Lhasa turn violent as Chinese forces crack down

China sends in troops to quell monks' peaceful protests

Police attack peacefully protesting monks in Tibet

Protest inside Tibet captured on tourists' cameras

Hacking the Himalayas: Xeni's stories and trek-blog from Tibet and India

Boing Boing tv: Miss Tibet/Eames Elephants

Google, China, and genocide: web censorship and Tibet

Alt-music interrogator Russell Porter has quite a following in the UK; his Porter Report videos chronicle culture with aggressive wit and offbeat charm. Today, the "professional chancer and well known layabout" joins us on Boing Boing TV for an interview with Rosa Rex and Katy Klaw, better known as the Blues / Rockabilly duo Peggy Sue and the Pirates. Mr. Porter ends with a wet offshore homage to "swimmin' with bowlegged wimmin."

Link to BBtv post with discussion and downloadable video. Here are previous BBtv episodes featuring Russell Porter. (special thanks to Jolon Bankey).

The Onion's latest video segment -- a newscast from a future where humans are subservient to robots -- is not only uproariously funny, it's also a damned fine, top-notch piece of science fiction. More like this, please. Link (via Danger Room)

Jacob sez,

> The Tor project was accepted into the Google Summer of Code program for 2008!

The Tor project is looking for a few good happy mutants. Are you a hacker interested in contributing to a successful open source project? Do you qualify for the GSOC? Are you interested in helping solve some of the practical issues a large and successful anonymity network faces?

It appears that many of the BB happy mutants enjoy Tor - Perhaps this is a good chance for a few good students to be paid to hack on the project!

Tor, of course, is The Onion Router, an anonymizing system for beating censoring firewalls like those in China, Syria and the Denver International Airport. Link (Thanks, Jacob!)

Phil sez,

After hearing stories of trouble at airport security checkpoints related to Apple's newest laptop, TSA acquired one and x-rayed it. The TSA's "Blogger Bob" summarized that because the MacBook Air uses a solid state drive instead of a traditional hard drive, its internals look entirely different than any other laptop.

He also says that he cannot show the image of the x-ray of this laptop because that is sensitive information.

I'd love to see some rebellious x-ray technician pick up the slack and show us all what's so special.

In the followup comments, "Bob" says that he isn't sure if an X-ray of a MacBook Air would breach national security, but that someone would come along shortly to determine whether it is or isn't. Link (Thanks, Phil!)

Miro, the free/open Internet TV client, has just released a major update, going to 1.2. Miro combines BitTorrent (fast downloads), VLC (play any video format) and RSS (subscribe to video in "channels" and have new episodes downloaded directly to your desktop as they're published).

The idea is to create an open platform for enjoying video online, one that isn't owned by any company, one that anyone can produce video for -- to make video open like the web, not owned by any company. Basically, to make a Firefox for Internet video.

# On Windows and Linux, we updated to XULRunner 1.9, which brings memory and performance improvements.
# We’ve added a much-requested preference to set new channels to not auto-download.
# New preferences for tweaking number of simultaneous auto-downloads and torrent seeding.
# Important re-architecting of the frontend and backend code.
# Lots of bug fixes and tweaks.
# On OSX, we updated to Perian 1.1.
# On Windows, the Miro installer is now much simpler and prettier.
# Improved support for Flash in Channel Guide pages.
# Improved translations for dozens of languages.

Link, Link to feature list

(Disclosure: I am proud to volunteer as a board member for the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501(c)3 charity that makes and publishes Miro)

Two State Department contract employees have been fired for spelunking in Barack Obama's US passport records:

The three people who had access to Obama's passport records were contract employees of the department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, NBC News has learned. The unauthorized activity concerning Obama's passport information occurred in January...

Explaining why the contractors had access to the files, the official said: "The State Department uses cleared contractors to design, build and maintain our systems and cleared contract employees provide support to government employees and several steps of passport processing including data entry, file searches, customer service and quality control.

Link (Thanks, Larry!)

Noel sez, "Jasper de Beijer creates amazing papercraft models then takes beautiful photographs of them. He is currently working on a Victorian themed series called 'The Riveted Kingdom', it's really stunning work. Link (Thanks, Noel!)

Threat Level reports that the head of California's DMV explained that just because his state filed for two-year extension to comply with the Department of Homeland Security's worse-than-useless yet mandatory Real ID program, that should not been seen as "a commitment to implement Real ID, rather it will allow us to fully evaluate the impact of the final regulations and precede with necessary policy deliberations prior to a final decision on compliance."

Even so, the filing of the application was enough to get Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff to pull out his special green crayon from a locked and booby-trapped desk drawer and use it to color California on his cute little map of states that won't have to suffer the special indignities he's designed for citizens of states that still believe in the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

States have until March 31 to request a two-year extension, and DHS had said before Thursday it won't grant Real ID extensions to states who don't commit to implementing the rules in the future.

Californians that would meant enduring the same fate facing citizens of South Carolina, Maine, Montana and New Hampshire.

They would have needed to dig out their passport, if they had one, every time they boarded a plane, or go through an extra level of TSA screening at airport metal detectors. Los Angeles and San Francisco airports could have had security lines stretching to the Sierras.

Californians without passports would also have been barred from buying certain medicine, entering federal court buildings or getting help at the Social Security Administration, unless they have a passport.

Link

Larry Lessig has offcially launched Change Congress, his followup to Creative Commons -- a movement to end the corrupting influence of, well, influence on Congress:

... once this wiki-army has tracked the positions of all Members of Congress, we will display a map of reform, circa 2008: Each Congressional district will be colored in either (1) dark red, or dark blue, reflecting Republicans or Democrats who have taken a pledge, (2) light red or light blue, tracking Republicans and Democrats who have not taken our pledge, but who have signaled support for planks in the Change-Congress platform, or (3) for those not taking the pledge and not signaling support for a platform of reform, varying shades of sludge, representing the percentage of the Member's campaign contributions that come from PACs or lobbyists.

...

What this map will reveal, we believe, is something that not many now actually realize: That the support for fundamental reform is broad and deep. That recognition in turn will encourage more to see both the need for reform and the opportunity that this election gives us to achieve it. Apathy is driven by the feeling that nothing can be done. This Change Congress map will demonstrate that in fact, something substantial can be done. Now.

Link to Wired article, Link to Change Congress

Lamperd, a "firearm training system" company, has patented a bracelet that delivers debilitating shocks when remotely triggered. Their killer app for this is aviation safety: they're proposing that the TSA could force everyone who flies to wear one of these and then flight-attendants could zap us into a stupor if we turn out to be Al Quaeda.

A method of providing air travel security for passengers traveling via an aircraft comprises situating a remotely activatable electric shock device on each of the passengers in position to deliver a disabling electrical shock when activated; and arming the electric shock devices for subsequent selective activation by a selectively operable remote control disposed within the aircraft. The remotely activatable electric shock devices each have activation circuitry responsive to the activating signal transmitted from the selectively operable remote control means. The activated electric shock device is operable to deliver the disabling electrical shock to that passenger.

Best part? They're Canadian! Oh, my countrymen, you have a wicked sense of humo(u)r.

Link to patent, Link to Lamperd FTS site (via Schneier)

The latest issue of the online magazine IdeaFixa has a multi-page feature of Boing Boing favorite Kris Kuksi's highly detailed 3D art. Link

In this Flickr pool, you are invited to look at movie stills and try to be the first one to figure out what movies they're from. Most of them stumped me, even though I'm intrigued by the images. Link (Via Eye of the Goof)

Here is rare video footage of Allen Finsberg reading Howl.
Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

My friend Anne Sanger was trained as a fashion designer, but these she days helps fashion companies integrate digital technology into the design process. (That occurs much less frequently than you might think.) Anne is also a talented illustrator, and as long as I've known her she's taken visual notes of things in the fashion world that she finds inspiring or interesting. I was thrilled when I found out she's started a blog, titled Le Parapluie, to share some of her sketches and fashion commentary with friends. I don't know much about fashion, but I do know that her illustrations are beautiful. (The drawing above on the right depicts my wife. Oddly enough, it looks just like her.) Link (Thanks, Kelly Sparks!)