I wish I knew more about these downright hostile signs. (via A Guide to all things tacky fabulous in Orlando, FL)

Dawn sez,

Strange Horizons's fund-raising drive started June 1st, and we'd hoped to end it by the end of the month, but it looks as though we will need to extend it, as we've only met our goal halfway. Our goal this year is $6,000 and we're doing things a little bit differently than we have in previous years. This year we are giving away prizes mid-drive. Prizes are being awarded to random bloggers--if someone posts a blog about our fund drive during a given week, they are entered into our drawing for that week's prize. This week, the winner of the blogger incentive prize will win a piece of fiction written by Tim Pratt exclusively for this prize. The winner will receive a hand written copy and also two of Tim's books. We are also giving away prize packages when we reach different amounts: $2,000, $4,000, and $6,000 dollars, respectively. The winners of those drawings will receive Escape Pod: Collections 1-5, a five-disc set containing the complete archives of the first thirty months of episodes from Escape Pod.

We're a nonprofit online speculative fiction magazine that pays professional rates for fiction; we're run by a staff of volunteers; we've published new material every week, freely available online, for nearly 8 years (and almost all of it is still available in our archives), including fiction, poetry, articles, reviews, art, and columns; we're funded entirely by donations, in a sort of public-radio-like model; in the US, donations to us are tax-deductible. Stuff we publish gets picked up regularly for Year's Best reprint volumes. Last year a story we published was on the Nebula ballot and another was on the Hugo ballot. Also, our Editor-in-chief, Susan Marie Groppi, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award.

Link (Thanks, Dawn!)

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 04 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

Harpo Marx -- my second-favorite Marx brother -- explains the origin of the Gookie, his magnificent, world-beating funny-face (there was a fantastic Animaniacs version of this -- post links to it in the comments below if you know where it lives online!)

Gookie was funny enough to look at when he wasn’t working, but when he got up to full speed rolling cigars he was something to see. It was a marvel how fast his stubby fingers could move. And when he got going good he was completely lost in his work, so absorbed that he had no idea what a comic face he was making. His tongue lolled out in a fat roll, his cheeks puffed out, and his eyes popped out and crossed themselves.

I used to stand there and practice imitating Gookie’s look for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, using the window glass as a mirror. He was too hypnotized by his own work to notice me. Then one day I decided I had him down perfect--tongue, cheeks, eyes, the whole bit.

Over the years, in every comedy act or movie I ever worked in, I’ve “thrown a Gookie” at least once. It wasn’t always planned, especially in our early vaudeville days. If we felt the audience slipping away, fidgeting and scraping their feet through our jokes, Groucho or Chico would whisper in panic, “Ssssssssssst! Throw me a Gookie!” The fact that it seldom failed to get a laugh is quite a tribute to the original possessor of the face.

Link (via Kottke)

The Guardian's Marina Hyde discusses the rampant abuse of CCTV spy-cameras placed by local governments -- the junior G-Men who use cameras to follow women with cute butts around town.

. A couple of months ago it was discovered that Poole borough council, in Dorset, had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - designed to track serious criminals and terrorists - to determine whether a school applicant and her parents lived where they said they did. They did, and were appalled to discover they had been spied on for three weeks, the subject of surveillance notes such as "female and three children enter target vehicle and drive off". Target vehicle, if you please! The thought of some deep-cover council drone jotting this stuff down as though it were an elite Delta Force operation is not as funny as it is horrifying.

Just who are these people, these swelling legions of unelected, ill-qualified monitors who wield such extraordinary power in our surveillance society? Clarification in one case came last year, when the civilian in charge of a Worcester police station's surveillance team was suspended after detectives found, among one day's footage, a 20-minute sequence of close-ups of a woman's cleavage and backside as she walked oblivious through the streets. Whether the woman ever discovered she was the star of a kind of pervert Truman Show is not recorded. But the offending monitor escaped with a warning and was - unbelievably - back in post within weeks.

Link (via Blogzilla!)

These cool mid-century arrow bookends just sold on eBay for $75. What a deal! They're brass and blackened steel. I love the design.
Arrow Bookends (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Reid sez, "I, unfortunately, have an AT&T cell phone. I check my bill every few weeks. Today, I went to log in, and was greeted by a terrific new advertisement for their online billing system. It's as if their marketing department thinks that warrantless wiretapping is funny or something. " Link, Link to screenshot (Thanks, Reid!)

Rogier van Bakel says:

Watch the London community support officers (they're not real cops, but deputied volunteers who fancy themselves real ones) as they confront a videographer who has the temerity to take footage of a public street. It starts with a sudden gloved hand over the camera lens, then it's "give me a good reason why you're filming," then it's on to "papers please"; and when the guy behind the camera, sensibly enough, asks under which law he's not allowed to film there, the bully-boy hisses "shut up." Twice.

Pretend cops bully videographer, videographer wins

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets — a site which we suspect you'll enjoy reading even if you often find gadgets tire- and irksome (so do we!) — we spotted these top-notch crank-powered greeting cards from Hallmark, of all people; hacked sunglasses that block CCTV cameras; a book about making LEGO weapons; a human-powered party bike, complete with lights and sound system; and the Venture Bros. era-appropriate love of fancy chairs.

A team of Israeli art students made a wooden coffee grinder shaped like a cuddly tumor; a crappy newspaper made a crime spree by stupid kids the fault of Grand Theft Auto; ICANN unveiled a new plan for top level domains, putting me only $100k away from owning http://cluster.fuck.

Rob documented BBG's first word coinage; John exposed a traumatic misunderstanding of the nature of lumberjack hibernation; I got off my ass and started rounding up deals again.

One of Pixar's own made a cute Wall•E in LEGO. (And I'm going to see it tonight. I'm pumped!) AT&T may actually be adding MMS to iPhone, which for the first time allowed people on the internet to express their opinion about Apple. Nokia released some new phones, which for the second time allowed people on the internet to express their opinion about Apple.

Then there were the sexy stormtrooper boots, our enthusiasm over which only slighted muted by the acknowledgement that every stormtrooper was a clone, then brought back into vibrant excitement when reader Rob Cockerham invented the term "Fett footish."

There was a Steampunk sonic rifle. Despite indications to the contrary, use of the term did not cause the internet to implode. Yet.

Helio, a company that thought it could build a business by buying expensive phones and selling them to poor teens has — surprisingly — been sold for scrap. Perhaps they'd have been better selling buckets for making dogsicles.

Once again, someone made a dot-matrix toaster, but only in their mind. (Hey, MAKE:RS! You can do this!) World of Warcraft added a real-world security dongle to protect you from gold farmers stealing your account. Yahoo hiked domain prices in a fairly scummy manner.

And someone made a lamp from dishes which looks an awful like the stuff I used to make on the lathe when I was sequestered in wood shop for seventh-grade homeroom.

In Make, Vol. 14, Thomas Zimmerman wrote about how to make a lensless microscope. In this episode of Make's Weekend Projects, Kipkay provides a video step-by-step. Make a lensless microscope

Squint/Opera's photography exhibit "depicts imaginary scenes in London in 2090, when rising sea levels have inundated the city." They made it look like fun! Flooded London

A building fit for a king -- in this case, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz.

In competition with some of the world’s greatest architects, Snøhetta has won the competition about designing Saudi Arabia’s new Cultural Center. Saudi Aramco – the world’s largest oil company – is the client.

King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz set the cornerstone for the Cultural Center which will house a museum, library, theater, cinema and more. The building reflects the history of oil in Saudi Arabia and is different from the country’s architectonic traditions with its abstract and spectacular form.

Along with five other internationally know architect offices, Snøhetta participated in the competition and was chosen in preference to famous names as Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas.

Saudi Arabia’s new Cultural Center

From one of my favorite blogs about books, Bookride, a "tall tale from the trade":

A similar tale is set in 1965 in a provincial bookshop where trade is slow. The dealer has a sale of the books upstairs, lesser books but useful stock--even after severe reductions there are 10,000 books left. Rather than haul them down to the dump he decides to give the whole lot to the young girl who comes in on afternoons when he is out doing house calls, fishing, watching cricket etc., She graciously accepts them and says she will arrange to have them out as soon as possible. He sets off to a local auction and on his return is greatly surprised to find all the books have gone. The girl explains that a guy came in from a movie company needing 10000 books - for the book burning scenes in Fahrenheit 451 that they were filming nearby. She only charged £1 per book.

Tall Tales from the Trade

Earth is filled with incredibly strange creatures, from thermophiles like the one seen here that can survive in temperatures up to 121 degress Celsius to the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans that thrives in 2000 times more ionising radiation than would fry a human. New Scientist features a survey of ten "extremophiles." The headline is a bit off though, reading: "The most extreme-life forms in the universe." Of course, studying these unusual organisms could give scientists insight into what life might exist on other planets, but all of the creatures in this article are found right here at home. From New Scientist:

There's hardly a niche on Earth that hasn't been colonised. Life can be found in scalding, acidic hot pools, in the driest deserts, and in the dark, crushing depths of the ocean. It has even found a toehold in the frigid polar regions and in toxic dumps.

"Life on Earth has radiated into every conceivable – and in some cases almost inconceivable – ecological niche," says Chris Impey of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US.

The very existence of these hardy organisms hints that life might be able to eke out an existence in the cold, dry climate of Mars, the icy, acidic conditions of Jupiter's moon Europa, or in countless other spots beyond our solar system.

Extremophiles

Tyler Boudreau, who served in the Marine Corps infantry for more than a decade, wrote a fascinating personal story for Industry Standard about digital technology on the battlefield. It's an interesting story about how IT can get in the way of human initiative and common sense. Boudreau's book, Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine, will be published in September by Feral House. From the article:

Unfortunately, high-speed communications and bold initiative do not always go hand in hand. With such an abundance of information available simultaneously at all levels, micromanagement can creep unnoticed into the chain of command and pull it apart. For example, if a general is able to follow an ongoing firefight through email and IM, and he is inclined to believe he knows what's best for the units in contact, then he very well might start directing those small units from afar, consequently eliminating the need for his colonels, captains, and sergeants to do any thinking of their own.

I witnessed this firsthand in al Anbar.

Article: I.T. vs. Initiative, Buy Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine

Near At the village of Avebury is a Neolithic stone circle and henge that's older than Stonehenge. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the roughly 5,000-year-old Avebury monument is approximately 421 meters in diameter. Filmmaker Ric Kemp shot a lovely psychedelic 8mm film at the site with a spaced-out soundtrack by Neil Mortimer, produced by Mark Pilkington. Avebury Monument

Klaus Pierre, a French/German actor-waiter-whatever, aspires against all odds to become America's next great action hero. In today's episode, he takes his skills to the beach, and encounters a true Hollywood action hero, Matthias Hues.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions for subscribing to the BBtv video podcast feed.

Previous Klaus Pierre episodes on BBtv:

Klaus Pierre: Super Pretty Action Hero Star

Klaus Pierre: Red Carpet Botox Dreams

Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero in Training in America: Pirate Musical of Epic Fail

Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero in Training in America, studies Savate

Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero in Training in America at Coffee Shop.

Klaus Pierre, French-German Action Hero in Training in America, studies Swordfighting

Point Break and heartbreak

Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive says:

Funny animal comics don't get enough respect.

Many incredibly talented artists worked in funny animal comics... some, like Kurtzman and Frazetta, went on to fame in other genres. Yet the only artist working in this field that most people are familiar with is Carl Barks. Uncle Scrooge comics are fine, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. In the 1940s and 50s, there was a wealth of funny animal comics all drawn in completely unique styles. I have to admit that comics aren't my strong suit, but when I see a comic like this one, I want to know more about the people responsible for them.

Here is Supermouse Comics number 4, drawn by Milt Stein. Little is known about Stein's career. Tom Sito points out that he was an animator at Famous for a time, and he worked on Tubby the Tuba for Dr. Alexander Shure's Westbury Long Island Company, the tradtional forerunner of NY Tech's Computer Animation Program. He committed suicide in 1977. Milton Knight adds, that Stein "animated some very expressive scenes at Terry in the early 40s (the girl mouse puppet in Down With Cats). And in the 60s, he animated the humorous characters on an independent TV pilot that Jerry Beck likes to include in his "Worst" ASIFA shows, titled Cosmic Raymond. I think Stein was one of the most neglected artists of all time; and he drew far better than Barks!"

Supermouse Comics number 4

PingMag interviewed Kristin Feireiss and Lukas Feireiss, editors of Architecture of Change: Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment. The houses and buildings featured in this book are stunning.

Designed with the utmost sustainability in mind, the New Monte Rosa-Hut by Studio Monte Rosa/ETH Zuerich is located in the middle of a nature reservation next to a glacier in the Swiss Alps. Energy-wise it's 90% self-contained and self-sufficient, featuring a metallic surface consisting of photovoltaic panels and a spiral-shaped glass band that follows the sun, conducting passive energy inside. From the Architecture of Change book by Gestalten publishers.

PingMag interviews Kristin Feireiss and Lukas Feireiss

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Those of you following the saga of the sell-off of the federal legislative histories by the General Accountability Office might be interested in some good news and some bad news.

The good news is they have released 619,000 pages of histories, which were the pilot project scans they conducted. Looking at this data shows just how incredibly valuable these legislative histories are and how wonderfully talented the government employees are who compiled the information.

The bad news is the government *gave* millions of dollars worth of help to Thomson West which is raking in the bucks with the big database. In response to the data release by GAO, we have countered by offering to have scanned, at no direct cost to GAO, the same docs they gave to Thomson West. All we want is their hand-me-downs to give to a deserving public.

Link (Thanks, Carl!)

See also: Did the US gov't sell exclusive access to its legislative history to Thomson West?
GAO has sold exclusive access to legislative history down the river to Thomson West

Here are the top 10 most-viewed TED Talk videos from June 2006 to May 2008)

Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight

Jeff Han's touchscreen foreshadows the iPhone and more

David Gallo shows underwater astonishments

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth

Arthur Benjamin does "mathemagic"

Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen

Tony Robbins asks why we do what we do

Al Gore on averting a climate crisis

Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks

You can also watch the Top 10 TED talks highlights video.

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we played with a cheap retro console clone; imagined riding the NOAH concept monocycle; listened as a Roboclarinet played "Flight of the Bumblebee"; and gaped at Dell's sudden interest in good industrial design.

John explored a server room built into ladies' room's handicapped stall by cassette-tape lamp-light; Rob tallied Sir James Dyson's awesomeness index; and Joel found a tiny universal remote.

A pistol camera shoots while you shoot; a new Vertu phone design looks like an ugly shoe; HP Touchsmart IQ506 is not an iMaclone; and Akai's latest MIDI machines look cool—and expensive! If you're boring, try Archimedes' Drill. If you're wanting turn-by-turn directions, Apple would like a word with you. John's destiny is found in the Boom Arm Starbase Workstation; Joel, however, is doomed to slay Nerf werewolves and vampires forever; Rob shall obliterate the need for universal remotes. Only Intel did anything sensible: it's saying no way to Vista.

When I visited Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen of Homegrown Evolution last week they showed me the rocket stove they made in their backyard. Theirs is quite fancy because it is made of bricks. They sometimes use their rocket stove to fry a meal in a skillet.

The rocket stove was invented about 10 years ago by Dr. Larry Winiarski at the Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon. It consists of an elbow-shaped combustion chamber (usually made from metal cans) surrounded by insulating material (often a large can filled with sand). It uses twigs for fuel, so it's ideal for areas where the trees have been depleted.

Here's a video from the Aprovecho Research Center that shows how to make a rocket stove.

Here are the first 3 of 10 rocket stove principles, by Larry Winiarski.

1.) Insulate, particularly the combustion chamber, with low mass, heatresistant materials in order to keep the fire as hot as possible and not toheat the higher mass of the stove body.

2.) Within the stove body, above the combustion chamber, use an insulated,upright chimney of a height that is about two or three times the diameterbefore extracting heat to any surface (griddle, pots, etc.).

3.) Heat only the fuel that is burning (and not too much). Burn the tips ofsticks as they enter the combustion chamber, for example. The object is NOTto produce more gasses or charcoal than can be cleanly burned at the powerlevel desired.

Illustration from In the Wake, a cool website on various simple off-the-grid tools.

Last year, Joel Johnson and BBtv visited the International Cryptozoology Museum in Maine, a multi-room cabinet of curiosities filled with artifacts, ephemera, and oddities related to "hidden animals," mythical beasts, and creatures unknown to science. The curator of the museum is Loren Coleman, known to BB readers for his terrific contributions to our site, his many books, and his blogging at Cryptomundo. Sadly, the International Cryptozoology Museum is in dire straits. According to Loren, he's caught up in a complicated IRS audit that, he says, initially began with a challenge of "the reality of 'cryptozoology' as an occupation." Then the museum itself apparently was called into question. Now, Loren is seeking $15,000 in donations to keep the International Cryptozoology Museum alive and move it to a new location. From his post:

To the IRS, the museum verges on being a hobby (as per Code 183), and it needs more income (even if donations) to support itself, on its own. To me, the merging between my interviews, the book sales that come out of the museum appearances, and the visibility of the museum on the net are all interwoven. I've never had a great income since I was laid off from adjunct teaching, but combined together, I live at the cryptozoology poverty level with no complaints. But to the IRS, the museum is a separate entity. I understand now, and must comply with that view. I've lost my appeal on my "merge" view.

No fighting this any longer, for I stand fully enlightened about how the IRS is viewing Code 183, as it applies to my life's career. The museum has to make money, or it ceases to exist.

Save the Cryptozoology Museum, Buy Loren Coleman's books

Previously on BB:
• Boing Boing tv: Cryptozoology with Loren Coleman
• Inside Loren Coleman's Cryptozoology Museum

Pili trianguli et canaliculi is a rare genetic disease also known as "uncombable hair syndrome" and "spun glass hair." From an abstract in the medical journal Ultrastructural Pathology (photo from The World's Fair blog):

Both inherited (autosomal dominant and recessive with variable levels of penetrance) and sporadic forms of uncombable hair syndrome have been described, both being characterized by scalp hair that is impossible to comb due to the haphazard arrangement of the hair bundles. A characteristic morphologic feature of hair in this syndrome is a triangular to reniform to heart shape on cross-sections, and a groove, canal or flattening along the entire length of the hair in at least 50% of hairs examined by scanning electron microscopy. Most individuals are affected early in childhood and the hair takes on a spun-glass appearance with the hair becoming dry, curly, glossy, lighter in color, and progressively uncombable. Only the scalp hair is affected.

Uncombable Hair Sydrome on Wikipedia, Uncombable Hair Syndrome on The World's Fair blog

The Pistol Cam creates lasting memories of life's most precious moments. Rob has more at Boing Boing Gadgets.
Pistol Cam

Gallery of photos of a giant plucked chicken sculpture.

Attention Chicken! is a three dimensional version of the collage that goes by the same title.

Nicolas Lampert and Micaela O’Herlihy created a ten-foot rotisserie chicken out of polystyrene foam, hard coated, and then painted with latex paint and final coat of high gloss varnish.

In October, 2006 Attention Chicken! made a number of unannounced public interventions throughout Milwaukee at Bradford Beach, the woods, Walmart, National Ave, and other locations throughout the city. Reactions ranged from laughter to attacks directed at the chicken (three in one day!)

Attention Chicken (via wtbw)

Last night I listened to a New Yorker podcast interviewing Atul Gawande, author of an article in the latest issue about itching. It's fascinating.

“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

Read "The Itch" | Listen to interview with "The Itch" author Atul Gawande

Remains of a rare giant squid turned up off the coast of Santa Cruz, California yesterday. According to researchers from the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, this specimen was probably 25 feet long and weighed hundreds of pounds when alive. Only one giant squid has ever been caught on video alive. From the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

A flock of gulls feeding on the carcass alerted the crew to the remains. Their first thought, said crew members, was that the animal was a seal but after motoring closer to it they recognized the chewed-up squid...

(Giant squid expert and Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History curator Eric) Hochberg said there's likely several squid along the California coast, but because the animal swims at depths of thousands of feet, it's almost never seen and difficult to study...

"The animal is just so big and so rare ... it's very easy for people to get a little nervous about what it is, and the stories go from there," Hochberg said.

Giant squid (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Previously on BB:
• Giant squid caught on film for first time
• Giant plastinated squid
• Giant squid bag by Gama-Go

Julian Sanchez of The American Prospect writes that the House Democrats who say the FISA bill they voted for is a "compromise" are liars, unless you define "'compromise" as a "shameful or disreputable concession,' which fits the deal brokered by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) to a tee."

The award for the most bald-faced lie on the House floor Friday, however, goes to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who insisted that the bill "does not allow warrantless surveillance of Americans." She is wrong. It does.

The broader spying powers given to the executive branch by the compromise bill require intelligence agencies to "target" foreigners. But if those foreign "targets" happen to call or e-mail Americans, those communications are fair game. And since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is only permitted to review the broad targeting procedures government eavesdroppers use to determine that a target is abroad, and not the substantive basis for authorizing surveillance of any target, anyone is a potential target.

The bill, in other words, allows the government to conduct "vacuum cleaner" surveillance -- sweeping up international traffic willy-nilly -- then filter it for anything that looks interesting. Indeed, many believe that licensing such surveillance is precisely the point of this legislation. If so, "warrantless surveillance of Americans" could well become routine, whether or not they are the formal "targets" of eavesdropping.

Democrats Capitulate on FISA (via Reason)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Obama's support for the FISA "compromise"

Last month, the open source 3D printer RepRap made the first successful copy of itself. And it's not the only 3D printer technology emerging from the workshops of ingenious makers. Over at SciAm.com, JR Minkel posts a slideshow of five machines to "print" 3D objects, including the RepRap, Fab@Home, and, seen here, the amazing Candy Fab from Evil Mad Scientist Labs. The Candy Fab prints objects by fusing layers of sugar. 3D Printers

Previously on BB:
• RepRap universal constructor achieves self-replication
• Build a fabricator at home
• 3D printing comes to Sears

Natalie Zee Drieu of Craft found this tutorial on knitting Spock ears with leftover sock yarn.

The New York Times' David Pogue answers a letter from an anonymous writer who says he or she is "about to enter a somewhat public life." Here's an excerpt:

A) How many wackos do you hear from in a day?
B) How do you handle said wackos?

(A) I don’t hear from that many wackos. Maybe about one a month. (That’s if you define “wacko” as “someone who rants incoherently.” If you mean “someone who disagrees with you,” then the answer is, “daily.”)

(B) If the person is obviously deranged or pretending to be, I don’t reply. Otherwise, I try to send at least a brief response.

Not everyone is happy with that degree of engagement. After reading one reader’s six-page account of his customer-service nightmare, I wrote back, “What a horror story. So sorry to hear it!” But the reader, evidently having expected me to take up his cause personally, wrote back simply, “**** you, too.” (Swear word omitted.)

E-Mail Etiquette for Public Figures

This singer is so infatuated with his own performance that he neglects to notice that a woman is stuck to him. (via Arbroath)

Today on Boing Boing tv, Cory performs a reading from his new novel Little Brother. This reading (from chapter 3, part 1) is the second in an ongoing BBtv series.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions for subscribing to the BBtv video podcast feed.

Josh Harris, founder of Jupiter Communications and, later, Pseudo.com, forwarded a letter to Boing Boing today in which he proclaims to the New York Times that "Pseudo was a fake company," and that the entire enterprise was "an elaborate piece of performance art."

Why did he address this to the NYT? Mr. Harris claims many of the news articles which established a perception of legitimacy for the once high-flying internet video startup -- the sort of legitimacy that helped encourage investors to part with tens of millions of dollars -- were written by now-disgraced NYT writer Jayson Blair, who was forced to resign in 2003 after having been caught plagiarizing and faking content in his stories for the paper.

"I suggest you do a NYT archive search and find the four articles written by Jayson; search terms: josh harris jayson blair," says Harris.

If you're not familiar with Pseudo (and Harris') significance during the late '90s internet bubble, here are a few profile links: NY Mag, Wired, Radar, Wikipedia, BusinessWeek. His online experiment "We Live in Public" predated the era of now ubiquitous always-on lifecasting video sites.

Journalists used words like "wild, Warholian," "oddball," "dot-com playboy extraordinaire" and "golden boy" to describe Harris during the Pseudo era; also "crazy."

The man who replaced Harris as CEO at Pseudo was David Bohrman, now an executive at CNN overseeing the network's election coverage in Washington.

Harris sends this to Boing Boing from Sidamo, Ethiopia (see snapshot above, with his almost-ripe coffee plants), where he moved shortly after selling his most recent creation, Operator 11. If he looks a little under the weather, that's because, as he explains, he's been fighting a fever there for the past few weeks; he says he's there "working on a documentary about the 'Great Ethiopian Nation.'"

Here is Harris' letter, which continues after the jump:

I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company.

I believe that the then New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was actively following my work and onto my game (taking one to know one). The last article Mr. Blair wrote about me was entitled Dot-Com Executive, Once a Conjurer of Silicon Alley Razzmatazz, Logs Off (Jayson Blair, March 4, 2001). For that interview Mr. Blair requested that we meet in the empty back room of Sardi’s (the first time I recall meeting him face-to-face) and then basically winked at Andy Morris (my publicity agent) and I for over an hour. Previously Mr. Blair mentioned or quoted me in three other articles.

Does the New York Times have an ethical responsibility to its readers to contact ad infinitum, ad nauseam every single source that touched Mr. Blair’s writing when the integrity of its reporting is at stake? Did someone at the New York Times Corporation contact each and every person that Mr. Blair wrote about?

The British government has scrapped a(n insane) plan to bring "airport style" security measures to the nation's train stations -- a plan that would have required the millions who board the overland rail system every day to have their bags X-rayed, go through metal detectors (and, presumably, remove their shoes and get rid of their liquids).

A trial found that introducing airport-style checks would be impractical and antagonise the public.

The transport minister, Tom Harris, said the public would not accept the resulting delays and there would be objections about personal privacy if an extensive screening regime was introduced.

"Screening equipment and dogs can be effective in the railway environment," said Harris in a written statement to parliament. "However, given the very large passenger flows and thousands of entry points on the UK rail and underground networks, 100% airport-style screening is currently not feasible."

Link

For the 150th anniversary issue of The Bookseller (the world's oldest publishing trade magazine), the editors commissioned me to write a short-short story about the next 150 years of book sales. The result is called The Right Book, and it's out in the current edition and online as well.

The thing that Arthur liked best about owning his own shop was that he could stock whatever he pleased, and if you didn't like it, you could just shop somewhere else. So there in the window were four ancient Cluedo sets rescued from a car-boot sale in Sussex; a pair of trousers sewn from a salvaged WWII bivouac tent; a small card advertising the availability of artisanal truffles hand made by an autistically gifted chocolatier in Islington; a brick of Pu'er tea that had been made in Guyana by a Chinese family who'd emigrated a full century previous; and, just as of now, six small, handsomely made books.

The books were a first for Arthur. He'd always loved reading the things, but he'd worked at bookshops before opening his own little place in Bow, and he knew the book-trade well enough to stay well away. They were bulky, these books, and low-margin (Low margin? Two-for-three titles actually *lost* money!), and honestly, practically no one read books anymore and what they did read was mostly rubbish. Selling books depressed Arthur.

These little buggers were different, though. He reached into the window -- the shop was so small he could reach it without leaving his stool behind the till -- and plucked one out and handed it to the kid who'd just asked for it. She was about 15, with awkward hair and skin and posture and so on, but the gleam in her eye that said, "Where have you been all my life?" as he handed her the book.

Link to page 1/2, Link to page 3

Update: You asked, they listened! Here's the story in text form!

Deeplinking has collected the paper sketches that gave birth to Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Abiword, mySociety, and others. Shown here, an early Twitter (stat.us) sketch, from Jack Dorsey's Flickr stream. My own contribution to the archiving of this stuff are my pics of Raph Koster's original, hand-drawn Ultima Online map. Link (via Waxy)

In order to raise awareness about the various malicious bots looking to colonize your computer via the net, Symantec/Norton have whomped up a couple of downloadable cute malware papercraft bots for you to cut, fold and glue. Available are the Identity Theft Bot and the Extortion Bot. Link (Thanks, Kenn!)

Jason, "I just blogged about a wonderfully lurid and pulpish book cover for Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1954 by Signet, that I happened to randomly find on Amazon. Significant is the artwork and over-the-top copy on the back, which is quite different from almost every other edition of this novel that I've seen." Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Bruce Schneier's new Wired column discusses the growing trend to designing devices so that other people can shut them down against your will -- the movie theater can mute your phone, OnStar can shut down your engine, new technology deployed to stop the movie-plot threat of bus-hijackers ramming them into buildings can be used to shut down bus-engines.

Bottom line: a device designed to be controlled and shut down against its owner's wishes is inherently less secure than a device that is designed to only do the stuff its owner asks of it. This is like the hoary cliche of the accidentally pressed self-destruct button on the spaceship in bad sf movies: wouldn't the spaceship be inherently safer if none of its intentional design outcomes included sudden, catastrophic explosion?

It's comparatively easy to make this work in closed specialized systems -- OnStar, airplane avionics, military hardware -- but much more difficult in open-ended systems. If you think Microsoft's vision could possibly be securely designed, all you have to do is look at the dismal effectiveness of the various copy-protection and digital-rights-management systems we've seen over the years. That's a similar capabilities-enforcement mechanism, albeit simpler than these more general systems.

And that's the key to understanding this system. Don't be fooled by the scare stories of wireless devices on airplanes and in hospitals, or visions of a world where no one is yammering loudly on their cellphones in posh restaurants. This is really about media companies wanting to exert their control further over your electronics. They not only want to prevent you from surreptitiously recording movies and concerts, they want your new television to enforce good "manners" on your computer, and not allow it to record any programs. They want your iPod to politely refuse to copy music a computer other than your own. They want to enforce their legislated definition of manners: to control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.

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Yesterday at Boing Boing Gadgets, everyone forgot to do "Today at Boing Boing Gadgets" because they were too busy playing with Syd Mead's Blade Runner LEGO car. Ebullience, however, was deflated by Kanye West threatening to cap our asses with his MacBook Air. So we reported on serious news for a spell: we looked at the possibility of third-party Xbox 360s, the planned obsolescence of JVCs newest HDTVs with built-in iPod docks and discovered that expensive lithium batteries are more cost-effective than cheap alkalines.

Also in the news: Ubuntu is released for mobile internet devices. iTunes must not, repeat, must not be used as a weapon of mass destruction. A pair of vacuum cleaner house shoes. Ring tones only dogs can hear. A $100,000, sensory-depriving egg for your solipsistic gaming pleasure. Electric vehicles coming to the UK en masse. GLaDOS releases a wacky Falcon controller. Operation: key-chain edition!

Also, always remember: YOUR REPORT MATTER to Yahoo!

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This wonderful photo from the mid-1970s depicts a young man named John Shepherd who "established this UFO-detecting station in his grandparent’s home… His equipment includes radar, sonar, scanners, and homing devices which attempt to track the 'Aliens' he believes are studying the earth." The photo appears in a new, lightly-revised edition of my friend Jacques Vallée's classic 1979 book Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults. The rare book has just been republished by Daily Grail Publishing. From Fortean researcher Mark Pilkington's post on the Further blog about the book:

MOD is a fascinating examination of the UFO subculture’s sinister underbelly. Vallee considers the ways that the UFO mystery can be manipulated by those seeking to exert psychological and psychosocial control over marginal elements of society, and falls prey himself to the kind of controlled paranoia experienced by Robert Anton Wilson in his own Cosmic Trigger. Thirty years down the line we can see that Vallee was absolutely spot on with some of the concerns he expressed in MOD: amongst the groups he investigated were Bo and Peep, the ‘Mysterious Two’ who went on to lead the Heaven’s Gate suicides two decades later.

Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception on Amazon, Messengers of Deception at Further

BB pal Meri Brin spotted these beautiful trays made by French design house ibride. They're 23.5 " x 15.5" and the lace edges are laser cut. Available from Art Effect for $175 each. iBride bird trays

Grandmaster Internet Funnyhunter and videogum Senior Editor Gabriel Delahaye says:

You guys, The internet is so weird. Let's just turn it off. We'll just go to to California and turn it off. Basically, some kids made music videos for their favorite hip hop songs by animating them with the Sims. I know I did not discover this trend, but I think I found some real treats that you're going to enjoy. I love sharing!

The 10 Best Fan Made Hip Hop Videos With Sims Of All Time [videogum]

Glyn sez, "The Open Rights Group has done a summary of the official explanation of how it was possible for a junior official for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs to lose discs containing records for 25 million individuals and 7.25 million families in the post. From this report its clear that Information security was not seen as a priority at HMRC.

The data loss incident arose following a sequence of communications failures between junior HMRC officials and between them and the National Audit Office ("NAO"). The loss was entirely avoidable and the fact that it could happen points to serious institutional deficiencies at HMRC.

The two major institutional deficiencies from which many of the more detailed issues flow were:

• Information security simply wasn’t a management priority as it should have been, and
• HMRC had an organisational design which was unnecessarily complex and crucially, did not clearly focus on management accountability

HMRC has significantly reduced the risk of further data loss since the incident. However, when there are so many islands of information and so many data transfers going on, and while simple guidance is not available to staff, further data loss nonetheless remains a distinct possibility and more needs to be done. Investment will be required to continue the reduction of risk to an acceptably low level, although the review process is identifying data transfer practices which can simply be stopped at no significant cost.

Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

Bell Canada has been forced by the CRTC (Canadian telco regulator) to reveal exactly how congested its network is. This follows revelations that Bell has been slowing down P2P traffic -- even traffic on its wholesale customers' networks, so no matter who you buy your DSL from, Bel gets to ruin your P2P experience.

The confidential documents show that, basically, Bell just doesn't have a substantial congestion problem -- in fact, backbone congestion has been going down.

The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is currently investigating Bell's system, which cap throttles P2P downloads at around 30KB/s between 4:30pm and 2:00am every day. Bell's own congestion numbers, which the CRTC said must be made public and Bell has now provided to Ars Technica, show that as the DPI gear was more widely deployed across Bell's network and eventually applied to Bell's wholesale customers (who promptly filed a complaint with the CRTC), rates of congestion at the DSLAM level increased. Between March 2007 and September 2007, the number of congested DSLAM links on Bell's network averaged 4.8 percent; during the period from November 2007 to May 2008, that average increased to 6.7 percent.

Meanwhile, upstream in Bell's network, congestion has been dropping. Over the same time periods, the average number of congested backbone links fell from 2.9 percent to 1.1 percent.

Link

Kathryn sez, "American Eagle returns a plane to the gate to kick off a toddler and his mom. Apparently, the flight attendant kept yanking on the autistic toddler's seatbealt to make sure it as tight, touching off a temper tantrum. Doesn't this make you feel safer?"

"She kept coming over and tugging his seatbelt to make it tighter, 'This has to stay tight'. And then he was wiggling around and trying to get out of his seatbelt. And she kept coming over and reprimanding him and yelling at him," Farrell said...

"The pilot made an announcement that there was a woman and her child on the plane and the child is uncontrollable. And at that point I just broke down," Farrell said.

Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)

When I was in New York City a while ago, I noticed that someone in the West Village had put a bunch of potted plants below the sidewalk grates outside their building. I really was taken by the subtle sidewalk garden. Click on the photos for bigger images.