Bolus presents YouTube videos of eight songs that elicit a specific kind of bummed-out feeling in the listener. It's like they were all cut from the same bolt of rash-inducing cloth. The songs are:

White Plains -- My Baby Loves Lovin'

Terry Jacks -- Seasons in the Sun

Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods -- Billy Don't Be a Hero

Captain & Tenille -- Muskrat Love

Tony DiFranco & the DiFranco Family -- Heartbeat (It's a Love Beat)

Bobby Goldsboro -- Honey

Sammy Johns -- Chevy Van

Debbie Boone -- You Light Up My Life

In Bolus' comments section, someone said Tony Orlando's "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" belongs on the list, and I agree. Link

Here are some photos of giant sculptures being set up for Maker Faire, taking place this weekend in San Mateo. (Click on thumbnails for enlargement) Link

The Department of Defense is freaked out that the commercially-manufactured microchips in their tech might contain "kill switches" that bad people could use to remotely knock the devices out of operation. So at the end of last year, DARPA launched its Trust In Integrated Circuits program to develop methods for sussing out chips with "malicious" circuitry hidden inside. IEEE Spectrum writer Sally Adee looked at the technicalities of the controversy. She told me, "I think interviewed every electrical engineer in the country so I could wrap my head around 1) why that's a big deal and 2) how it would affect me (I'm selfish that way.) From IEEE Spectrum:

Feeding those (fever) dreams is the Pentagon's realization that it no longer controls who manufactures the components that go into its increasingly complex systems. A single plane like the DOD's next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, can contain an “insane number” of chips, says one semiconductor expert familiar with that aircraft's design. Estimates from other sources put the total at several hundred to more than a thousand. And tracing a part back to its source is not always straightforward. The dwindling of domestic chip and electronics manufacturing in the United States, combined with the phenomenal growth of suppliers in countries like China, has only deepened the U.S. military's concern.

Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's R&D wing, released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military—and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F‑35—a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised. In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can.

Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can't be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can't afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone's various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn't interfere with the chip's normal functions won't show up in these tests.

“You don't check for the infinite possible things that are not specified,” says electrical engineering professor Ruby Lee, a cryptography expert at Princeton. “You could check the obvious possibilities, but can you test for every unspecified function?”

Link

Fred sez,

I've just completed building the 2.0 version of Committee Caller for my master's thesis. It's called Cause Caller and it is a virtual phone bank web app powered by a Semantic Media Wiki.

I came up with the idea of automating call queues for phone banks while trying to organize one for myself, it was a total hassle to find everyone’s phone number on a particular committee, so I built CommitteeCaller last semester.  Over the last couple of months I’ve worked with several local causes to develop the idea into a generalized activist tool that is my thesis — Cause Caller. The result is a fully extendable, platform that drives a “live” VoIP application that hopefully takes a lot of the hassle out of phone banking.

Right now Cause Caller is a bit of a blank slate — while I have almost all of America’s federal politicians (Congressional representatives, Senators, etc.) in the database,  I am really interested in building state level politicians into it. Causes also need to be added as right now there are only two: the demo cause and SolarOne’s I Heart PV Cause. This is where you can help — if you are or you know any activists looking to organize phone banks, please forward this to them! I’m going to be presenting this project for my thesis at ITP on Friday, May 9th at 12:20pm, so I’ll be incorporating feedback I receive over the next week into the “results” section of my presentation.

Have fun getting in touch with democracy!

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Boing Boing readers may remember some static from the State of Oregon about whether their statutes are public or private.

Tim Stanley, the CEO of Justia and myself have had three phone calls with the staff of the Office of the Legislative Counsel, examined their proposed so-called "public" license, and believe we've established that we're going to have to agree to disagree. As such, we've retained counsel and referred the matter to him for the next steps.

Readers may be interested in a recent post by William Patry, author of the 7-volume treatise on copyright, on the subject Oregon goes wacka wacka huna kuna. Despite the technical legal words used in the title, he does a great job explaining the basic concepts.

Link See also: Oregon: our laws are copyrighted and you can't publish them

Paul sez, "A couple of days ago, an "educational" documentary aimed at discouraging music piracy was announced in the Australian press. Today it appears that at least one of the artists was lied to about the intent of the piece. Allegedly, he was told the film was to be about trying to survive as a musician and his statements were spun to present the view that the life of an artist is made more difficult by the downloading of his work. The closing quote is great:

I'm from a punk rock band, it's all about getting your music out any way you can - you don't make money from the record, the record companies make the money from the record. If they can't make money these days because they haven't come onside with the way the world is going, it's their own problem.

Link (Thanks, Paul and Sandy!)

Media reports from within China say a factory in Guangdong has been completing orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

Link to BBC News article (too jay shay, Hutch!)

A friend at Fleshbot writes...

Prague's Big Sister internet-enabled brothel has long been high on our list of travel destinations ever since our globetrotting siblings at Gridskipper first bought it to our attention a couple of years ago. (But only from a sociological perspective, you understand, not because we want to boink our way to international notoriety via the dozens of video cameras set up throughout the establishment which broadcast the goings-on to tens of thousands of the site's subscribers.) Short of going to Prague or coughing up a $40 monthly membership to join the website, the best way to see what Big Sister is all about is photographer Hana Jakrlova's Big Sister photodocumentary project...

Link to Fleshbot post (nsfw). Shown here, the, ah, polar bear theme room inside the Big Sister brothel.

... apologies to xkcd.com/149/ (thanks, Wayneco!).

UPDATE, 630pm PT: He beat the world record! Still playing. - XJ

UPDATE, 9:00pm PT: Wow, okay, they finally stopped. Much screaming and champagne. - XJ

Following up on the post I made yesterday about a marathon attempt to set a world record for Grand Theft Auto gameplay (it's all happening right next door to Boing Boing tv, at DECA studios) -- bleary-eyed and sleep-depped Bush League GM/Executive Producer Allison Kingsley says, between caffeine slurps...

We're getting close! Jim, our dedicated Bushleaguer, is in his 23rd hour of playing GTA IV for the world record. It was a long, long night but he's nearing the 24th hour. The good news is he's doing surprisingly well, the bad news (in his words) after all this time he's only slept with one hooker.

Other favorite stats:

25.27% of the game completed

34 missions passed

started 23 fires

killed 10 people with bare hands

shot to death 31 times

265.46 is the longest jump distance

1 kill with a molotov cocktail

$50.00 most spent on a date (and although not a big spender he did score 5 times)

38,188 spent on health care

...and the stat he's particularly proud of? 0 times cheated.

Link to ongoing live video and chat; tweets here, G4 just did an interview here. Some quick iphone snaps I took of the ongoing madness are above, below, and here.

Previously on Boing Boing:
* GTA IV world record attempt tonight, next door to BBtv
* Grand Theft Are You Fcking Kidding Me

On Monday, I referenced this famous Diane Arbus photograph of Eddie Carmel, "The Jewish Giant." BB reader Christopher Washer pointed me to a terrific Sound Portraits profile of Carmel, who died in 1972. The documentary was produced by Jenny Carchman, who first saw the Arbus photo as a little girl and couldn't get it out of her mind. From the description of the program, titled "The Jewish Giant":

The Jewish Giant began with Jenny's search to uncover a story that has remained a secret for 25 years. Eddie was normal sized until he became a teenager, when he began to grow uncontrollably (he suffered from acromegaly, a then-incurable condition resulting from a tumor that had developed on his pituitary gland). According to The Guiness Book of World Records, Eddie grew to be 8'9". As an adult, the only work he could find involved exploiting his freakishness. He starred in B-grade monster movies (The Brain that Wouldn't Die), made two 45 records ("The Happy Giant" and "The Good Monster") and was billed in the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden as "The Tallest Man on Earth." Eddie died in 1972 at the age of 36 in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. His coffin was custom made.

The Jewish Giant is a story of suffering, of not fitting in, of the body betraying itself, and of the bizarre life-twists that can subsume a family. It's a story about what it's like to be a regular person looking at the world from inside a not-so-regular body.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Hubert's Freaks: the lost photos of Diane Arbus Link

Susannah Breslin has a post up today about the overwrought reactions of shock 'n' horror over the sex 'n' violence in just-released Grand Theft Auto IV.

After a video of the Ladies of Liberty City began circulating around, in which men drive around, pick up sex workers and/or drive over them, shoot prostitutes standing on street corners, and get some freaky-ass, legs-in-the-air, booty-shaking lap dances, everyone got all up in arms over it.

The girls at Feministing weren't having it: "It is no question that GTA is merely reflective of the bigger misogyny embedded in capitalist patriarchy, but the question is why is a game that depicts such violence towards women so popular?" (Jesus Christ, if this is what degrees in gender studies hath wrought, polysyllabic bloggers still carping about the patriarchy, please fucking stop handing them out.)

Jack Thompson nearly had a heart attack over it. (To wit: "Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio. We now have vaccines for that virus... The 'vaccine' that must be administered by the United States government to deal with this virtual virus of violence and sexual depravity is criminal prosecutions of those who have conspired to do this.")

And Rockstar got a helluva lot richer. (See: "Record Sales Expected For Grand Theft Auto IV.")

Link

Previously on BB:
* GTA IV world record attempt tonight, next door to BBtv

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets we started off the morning by looking at some zombie robots who like to eat brains. From there, it was straight to serious gadgetry: AT&Ts plans to subsidize the 3G iPhones, a look at a WiFi detecting watch, a tiny wireless camera perfect for covert perversion, a video game controller that claims to work on psychic reverberations and the workstations of the rich and tasteless.

We also rounded-up our 1k Competition Entrants... those works of genius from our readers in 1024 bytes or less. A bottle of Marilyn Manson's new absinthe was broken open, with much reminiscing about similar beverages quaffed in bars of yore. And then Rob broke out Photoshop and created this incredible image of cyborg Steve Jobs with his face ripped off, to celebrate a vintage Japanese automaton's refurbishment.

Also: the cutest Alien vinyl figurine ever.

Link

A Ghost Bike is a white-painted bike that is placed at a location where a cyclist has been hit. According to an old post on bello velo, this photo depicts the first Ghost Bike, memorializing an accident on Holly Hills Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri. It was created by Patrick Van Der Tuin who saw a cyclist hit by a car. A few days later, he and his friends locked several bikes at locations where he knew cars had collided with cyclists. Since then, the meme has spread nationwide. GhostBike.org is a clearinghouse of Ghost Bike installations and photos of the sites. Link to GhostBike.org, Link to bello velo (via CT2)

My friend John Alderman snapped this photo of an umbrella burial ground just outside of Tokyo's Ikebukero train station. After a huge storm, the wind deposited the mangled mass of cheap umbrellas into a pile. Link

In this great, short video, Michael Geist systematically rebuts the oft-repeated claims of the Canadian lobby for US-style copyrights -- claims about Canada's supposedly backwards copyright regime, lack of creativity, and so on. It's nice to have all the rebuttals in one neat, tidy bundle. Link

Jake von Slatt sez, "On Saturday May 3, on the main stage at Maker:Faire Heather Gold will leading a discussions about sub-culture through the lens of Steampunk. Participating in the discussion will be Cap'n Robert of Abney Park, artist, photographer and editor from SteamPunk Magazine Libby Bulloff and myself, Jake von Slatt. Please join us via the live stream and chat and lob us some of those tough and insightful comments!" Link (Thanks, Jake!)

Sam Brown's "Sheep" stools look like great kids' room additions -- nothing says "innocent childhood" like sitting on a headless sheep. Link (via Babygadget)

British schoolchildren in the west of England are terrorizing their chums by impersonating pedophile stalkers.

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall police told the Manchester Grauniad:

"Information from the public has highlighted a possibility that the offenders could be children aged 10 and over, masquerading as a paedophile. The investigations are continuing and at this moment we are looking into every line of inquiry and are not ruling out any possibility. However, the language used on the social networking sites such as Bebo and MSN is at times childish. [No change there, then - Ed]

"It could be youngsters playing a sick game to try and intimidate friends they have fallen out with. This will be treated seriously and we will be contacting the families of the children involved and we will try and help them by involving social services."

Link

Google just launched a bunch of custom artist themes for iGoogle, and they were kind enough to invite me to design a theme for it. I called it "Adventure in Lollypop Land." The scene changes throughout the day.

I donated my fee to the wonderful SOVA Community Food & Resource Program, run by Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles.

Link

O'Reilly's Make: Books launched a new series of books called DIY Science, and the first one is The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiements, by Robert Bruce Thompson. Here's the preface to the book, which I found very inspiring.

Christmas morning, 1964. I was 11 years old. My younger brother and I arose at the crack of dawn and noisily rushed downstairs to find out what was under the tree. Our parents followed us, bleary-eyed.

Santa had been good to us that year. Colorfully-wrapped presents were scattered, not just under the tree, but across most of the living room floor. Being boys, we started tearing open the presents with no thought at all for the care that had gone into wrapping them. We were after the loot.

There were the inevitable disappointments. Sweaters from grandma, school clothes from Aunt Betty, and hand-knitted stocking caps for both of us from Pete and Sarah, our elderly next-door neighbors. But there was plenty of good stuff, too. Sports equipment and a cap pistol for my younger brother. A battery-powered Polaris nuclear submarine that actually fired small plastic missiles. A bicycle for my brother and a BB gun for me! Lots of books, the kind we both liked to read. A casting set, with a lead furnace and molds to make toy soldiers.

As we opened the packages, my brother and I mentally checked off items against our wish lists. We’d both gotten everything we asked for. Almost. One item had been at the top of every iteration of my wish list since the Sears Christmas Wish Book had arrived, and that item was nowhere to be found. I searched frantically through the piles of discarded wrapping paper, hoping I’d overlooked a box. It wasn’t there.

My parents had been watching my brother and me ripping through gifts like Tasmanian Devils. Just as I’d decided that I hadn’t gotten the one gift that I really, really wanted, mom and dad called me into the kitchen. There it sat, on the kitchen table, exactly what I’d been hoping for. It was already unboxed and spread wide open to show the contents. My father said, “This is from your mother and me. It is not a toy.”

It was a Lionel/Porter/Chemcraft chemistry set, and the exact model I’d asked for. The biggest one, with dozens of chemicals and hundreds of experiments. Glassware, an alcohol lamp, a balance, even a centrifuge. Everything I needed to do real chemistry. I instantly forgot about the rest of my presents, even the BB gun. I started reading the manual, jumping from one experiment to another. I carefully examined each of the chemical bottles. The names of the chemicals were magical. Copper sulfate, sodium carbonate, sulfur, cobalt chloride, logwood, potassium ferricyanide, ferrous ammonium sulfate, and dozens more.

A redemption tale by the prolific religious comic book artist Jack Chick is born again through animation, in a classic short film by Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Chick, born in 1924, is the most published comic book author in the world. Over decades, his publishing company has released some 500 million fundamentalist evangelical "Chick tracts" warning of the eternal consequences of a life lived without salvation.

One of these cautionary cartoon gospels, "Somebody Goofed," attracted the attention of animator-directors Syd and Rodney a decade ago -- and they transformed it into the mixed media pastiche Boing Boing tv presents to you, dear viewer, today.

This 8 minute film debuted at the DFILM Digital Film Festival in San Francisco on November 7, 1997. DFILM founder Bart Cheever tells Boing Boing tv:

We showed it all over the world. No other film came close to provoking the kind of intense, gut-level reaction that we saw with Goofed -- people really loved it or really, really hated it. Religious people called it blasphemous and threatened to organize boycotts of our shows. Anti-religious people called it religious propaganda and wrote angry letters to theater owners where we screened the festival.

To me, Goofed was the Birth of a Nation of After Effects films, and was really the aesthetic blueprint for much of what you see on TV today. So many people have copied their cool 2D photo-animations, and their style is used so heavily today on VH1, E, MTV, and so on -- it's easy to forget how groundbreaking the film was. No one had ever really done anything like it before.

I loved the way Goofed is this rich moving collage of newsprint religious tracts, album covers (can you spot Paul's Boutique?), clips from 70's gangster films, cigarette ads from old magazines etc. To me, Goofed represented a whole new way of collaging various forms of media.

UPDATE: We reached out to the filmmakers for some thoughts on this amazing piece of work, 10 years after its creation -- Rodney Ascher tells us...

Making Somebody Goofed was 50% art experiment and 50% self-designed AfterEffects tutorial. It was the first digitally animated project for both of us (I think...). It took at least 6 months to make the thing, maybe close to a year. I was running a Powermac 7500 (Syd's always had a model 1 or 2 levels faster than mine so he was probably behind the wheel of an 8500) and we got a gasp during a Q and A when we explained that rendering some of the QuickTimes took more than a day or two and transporting the uncompressed files demanded about 12 Jaz cartridges!

It was designed to be something of a Rorschach test: we followed the original comic as rigorously as we could, resisted any temptation to change things around (for pacing, content, whatever) and allowed the audience to interpret however they liked. During its premiere at DFilm, the audience was mostly quiet and thoughtful but at a screening at the SFMoMA it played pretty much as a spoof with a lot of appreciative laughter. On the other hand, when it was shown at a screening for the Television Commercial Industry, the awkward, confused, slightly hostile silence was deafening. Happily enough, we've gotten very nice responses from both Chick Publications and The Suicide Girls.

Related posts on Boing Boing:

Photo Fictions: bizarre narrative photo show in L.A.

Rodney Ascher's short film about a freefalling parachutist

Syd and Rodney's "Jack Chick's Titanic" video

Galactus meets Jack Chick

Jack Chick's own Passion

Jack Chick profile

Parody of Jack Chick tract warns against tiki worship.

Hallowe'en, Jack Chick style

(Special thanks to Pesco, and to Syd Garon)

Flickr user Lockwasher collected a bunch of junk to make rayguns out of, and then decided to use the leftover junk to make a stunning collection of junk robots. Link (via Neatorama)

Khoi Vinh, the Design Director of NYTimes.com, explains that the Times's much-vaunted cross-platform consistency is down to hand-coding their HTML with a text-editor, not using GUI tools like Dreamweaver:

It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.

Link (via /.)

The brain consumes 20 percent of your body's energy, but what for? Turns out a third of the energy is spent on "housekeeping":

A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA indicates that two thirds of the brain's energy budget is used to help neurons or nerve cells "fire'' or send signals. The remaining third, however, is used for what study co-author Wei Chen, a radiologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, refers to as "housekeeping," or cell-health maintenance...

"Housekeeping power is important for keeping the brain tissue alive," Chen says, "and for the many biological processes in the brain," in addition to neuronal chats. Charged sodium, calcium and potassium atoms (or ions) are continuously passed through the membranes of cells, so that neurons can recharge to fire. ATP supplies the energy required for these ions to traverse cell membranes. Chen says there must be enough energy to maintain a proper ionic balance inside and outside cells; if too many get stuck inside, it can cause swelling, which can damage cells and lead to strokes and other conditions.

Link (via Monochrom)

Dave sez,

I'm the editor of PoopReport.com. I've been living in India for the last six months. While here, I've come across a great cause related to the subject of my site: raising money to build toilets for lowest-caste girls studying at the Pardada Pardadi school in rural Uttar Pradesh.

Today these students are forced to suffer the dangers and humiliation of waking up before sunrise to relieve themselves in nearby fields. This is incredibly unsanitary and quite demeaning -- imagine if you had to wait until the sun was down before you could use the bathroom, no matter how bad you had to go?

But a toilet really can change their lives. It will directly impact the health and the dignity of these students, their families, and their villages as a whole.

A single dual-pit toilet based on the Sulabh model (which converts waste into fertilizer and needs to be serviced only once every five years) costs $250. Every little bit helps -- $1 is enough to cover lunch for four laborers building the toilets. But if you give a full $250, Pardada Pardadi will give you naming rights and send you picture of your toilet and of the girl and the family to whom you've given such a great gift.

I'm in for $250 -- I've dug pit latrines in a squatter village in Central America and it's pretty thankless labor, but I've seen first hand what a difference it makes. Link (Thanks, Dave!)

Matt Mason, author of The Pirate's Dilemma, sez, "I thought you'd be into this 3-D printed scale model of Cinderella’s Castle I received in the mail today. A few weeks back I was speaking at the Disney Imagineering HQ in California, where 3-D printing is used to develop new designs. They made one of these for Bob Iger, one for Steve jobs, and had this one at HQ, which they very kindly sent me as a thank you, after finding out about my obsession with all things 3-D printed. It’s the most detailed thing I’ve seen come out of a prototyping machine yet, this picture doesn’t do justice to the perfect brickwork, spires and columns, nor can you see the corridors that run through the model. It’s pretty nuts. Apparently it took 11 hours to print." Link (Thanks, Matt!)

See also:
Pirate's Dilemma author's speech: "To get rich off pirates, copy them"
Pirate's Dilemma slideshow video -- pirates will save the world

Bob Harris, author of an amazing book about his experiences on Jeopardy! called Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!, returned from Chile and emailed a bunch on interesting photos to his friends. He kindly gave me permission to post a few of them on Boing Boing. (Click on thumbnails for enlargement).

There are two species of pudu, Northern Pudu (pudu mephistopheles) and Southern Pudu (pudu pudu). These are pics of pudu pudu, perhaps the most fun to say of all species names.

Pudu are the smallest deer species on earth. (There are smaller critters that look deeroid, but they're not.)

It's the mascot of my own site, Bobharris.com, which has a Friday pudublogging section where most weeks I post a new pudu pic that I've either taken myself or received from readers.

A student at Purdue once tried to start a movement to change the school mascot from the boilermaker to the pudu, so they would be the Purdue Pudus. This did not succeed.

These pudus have been hit by cars or wrongly adopted as pets, so without Fernando, they probably wouldn't have survived. When people in these parts hear of such things, they bring the pudus to Fernando's hideaway, where they live out their days with space, safety, food, and comfort. Sometimes they even make babies.

Dibs -- your new way to eat ice cream.

You mean, all over that woman's face and neck, while she passively mimes pleasure as the ice cream pelts her at high velocity?

Yes, this would be new. Usually I just use a spoon.

And our Final Jeopardy clue today is:

These Mediterranean girls had the custom of going up nude on the roof so the influence of the moon would increase the size of their breasts.

Clearly, I have been playing Jeopardy! in the wrong country entirely. Unfortunately, none of the contestants gives the correct response.

I'm 95% sure on my translation, but I can't swear to it. My Spanish is not yet fluent.

Jess Stover says:

I'm a filmmaker in Los Angeles at the helm of project ARTEMIS ('Artemis Eternal') a short, scifi-fantasy film currently in preproduction that is professionally-led, community-funded, cross-platform and supported by an audience of Wingmen who accept the challenge to create a better professional model for film production, distribution and exhibition. Here's a 2-minute clip.

You may have seen us on YouTube Film, MySpace.com main, CurrentTV.com' top 8, io9, and the Globe & Mail... The project is noted for its advanced presentation and packaging and the involvement of many high-profile crewmembers such as celebrated computer artist Greg Martin, who I collaborate with frequently from development to delivery.

We've had tremendous community support already, ranging from Fortune 500 companies like JetBlue (who altruistically has contributed free airfare) to independent craftsman like a renown master bowyer in Hungary to Wingmen who have been working directly with me on various parts of the project.

And, thanks to the Wingmen, everyone can access what we accomplish without a login or payment and we continue to deepen the content each week and add new ideas to the project map on the official site.

This is the best time to come into the project. We are completely prepared to shoot: Everything is booked and packaged and will happen quickly from this point forward. Budget-wise we're halfway there and are looking for the rest of our Wingmen to help us cross the finish line.

The story of the actual film is about questioning what society expects of you and what we accept as normal. Everything we're doing with the overall project fits and explores that theme. As BoingBoing readers ourselves, we're looking forward to sharing the project with other like-mindeds. We won't succeed without you.

Twitter the project & use it to coordinate: Link

bushleague.tv is a yet-to-be-launched internet video show produced right next door to where we make Boing Boing tv, at the studios of internet video firm DECA. The Bush League people are pretty crazy, and they're fun neighbors to have.

Anyway, tonight at at 5pm LA time, they -- specifically, this one guy on the show named Jim -- will attempt to break a gaming world record by playing the new edition of Grand Theft Auto (GTA IV) for over 25 consecutive hours. That's a lot of whores and cars! I understand they've even hired a real-life nurse to stand by in case the guy like, dies or whatever.

A live-cast video feed (and twitter updates) will be at bushleague.tv. I hear a bunch of friends from G4 TV will be in the house. Allison Kingsley from Bush League bought a ton of flowers to counteract the anticipated olfactory menace of eau de wargamer (I am so not kidding).

There's a teaser about their show on the site now, and the live feed will start promptly at 5pm. Bush League is an entertainment site aimed mostly at dudes that launches next week, on May 8th.

Wall Street Journal reports that Mazda decided to destroy "approximately $100 million worth of factory-new automobiles" that had been shipped on a tanker that tilted on route to the US.

The freighter, the Cougar Ace, spent weeks bobbing on the high seas, listing at a severe 60-degree angle, before finally being righted. The mishap created a dilemma: What to do with the cars? They had remained safely strapped down throughout the ordeal -- but no one knew for sure what damage, if any, might be caused by dangling cars at such a steep angle for so long. Might corrosive fluids seep into chambers where they don't belong? Was the Cougar Ace now full of lemons?

Link

In my latest Guardian column, I disclose my five email power-tips -- the system I use to manage hundreds of emails every single day:

Sort your inbox by subject
This is my favorite one by far. If something big is going on in the world, chances are lots of people are going to be emailing you about it, and they'll generally use pretty similar subject lines.

When my daughter was born, the majority of congratulatory emails began with the word "Congratulations." When I'd asked my friends to help me find an office, most of the tips I got began with "office."

Best of all, if some spammer manages to get a few hundred copies of a message through my filter and into my inbox, they'll all have the same subject line, making them easy to bulk-select and delete.

Foreign-alphabet spam is also a doddle, since non-Roman characters will all alphabetise at the bottom or top of your inbox; if you don't read Cyrillic, Korean, Hebrew or Simplified Kanji, you can just delete them all with a couple of key presses.

Link

This Czech industrial film from 1957 about the Kitchen of 2000 is a lovely bit of paleofuturism. Infra-red chicken, ingredient spouts, TV shopping (actually, we have most of those!). Link

Update: Treehugger's Chris Tackett sez, "one of our writers knew of a lot more clips of that kitchen, so he made a follow-up."

Mary sez, "While looking for something else entirely, I stumbled upon this eBay auction for an Antique Steam Pulley Driven Workshop with Lights. Good heavens. It’s got a lathe, jig saw, drill… It’s like a steampunk Shopsmith, but it’s real." Link (Thanks, Mary!)

Tor Books and Expanded Books produced a funny interview/trailer thing for John Scalzi and me in honor of our latest books -- he's bringing out a young adult novel in the Old Man's Warverse in August called Zoe's Tale that I've read a little from and it's dynamite! Link

EFF has published an open letter to Steve Ballmer upbraiding him for switching off the MSN Music DRM server and nuking the music collections of every customer trusting enough to buy music, laying out a suite of things that Microsoft needs to do to make amends:

In an open letter sent to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer today, EFF outlines five steps Microsoft must take to make things right for MSN Music customers -- including a issuing a public apology, providing refunds or replacement music files, and launching a substantial publicity campaign to make sure all customers know their options.

"MSN Music customers trusted Microsoft when it said that this was a safe way to buy music, and that trust has been betrayed," said EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry. "If Microsoft is prepared to treat MSN Music customers like this, is there any reason to suppose that future customers won't get the same treatment?"

Link (Thanks, Rebecca!)

Christopher Ratte took his 7-year-old son to a baseball game at Comerica Park. He ordered a lemonade from a vendor and gave it to his boy. Unbeknownst to Ratte (a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan) it was "hard" lemonade, meaning it contained alcohol. When a guard spotted the boy sipping from the bottle, the police were called in, the boy was taken from his father, driven by ambulance to the hospital, and put into foster care.

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

"I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."

But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand.

"You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.

"You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

... it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

Link

Today on BoingBoing Gadgets, we tickled the dragon's tail, destroyed the evidence, then wrote it up on the world's smallest Mac. We learned that wherever Cory goes, the iPhone follows; that you can't kick a robot when it's down; and that magnetic shelves are the perfect place to store crap gadgets. Baffled by a 60-drive USB duplicator, we pondered how to measure its power consumption.

From the Malabar front came news of a robot spider droid army, just in time to take care of re-awaked elder god, AirJelly. John played with a pinhole panorama and min-maxed his weight loss, while Rob fawned over a neodymium magnet puzzle and a pet porthole.

Finally, it dawned on us: Apple Store Geniuses are douches.

This is Gil Duff of Cincinnati, Ohio. On Monday, he got drunk in a public park and took a nap in a portable toilet. Again. Apparently, that particular toilet is his own capsule hotel. His pants were up, suggesting that he went in specifically to catch some z's. From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Police arrested Duff, 45, at 3:45 a.m. Monday inside a portable toilet in Sycamore Township’s Bechtold Park – the same place they found him on April 22, snoring so loudly he caught the attention of a bike cop. When that officer swung open the toilet door, he found Duff on the john with his pants up, an open beer by his side.

Link (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)

Engineers have demonstrated how to make microscale origami-like containers that could be used as drug delivery devices in the body. The hinged structures were created in polysilicon and are only 30 micrometers on a side. (One inch is 25,400 micrometers.) The team from the USC Information Sciences Institute published their "recipe" in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. Link

Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), has passed away. He was 102 years-old.

"I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild." -- Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)

Link to Wikipedia article, Link to Hoffman.org (Thanks, Wayne de Geere III!)

UPDATE: News of Hofmann's death may have been greatly exaggerated. But boy, that's sure a great quote and we're happy Dr. Hofmann still seems to be riding his mental bike around Switzerland.

UPDATE: Over at The Stranger's blog, Dominic Holden says that the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies has confirmed Hofmann's death. Link (Thanks, NaFun!)

UPDATE: The fine folks at Erowid have also confirmed. Apparently, Hofmann died this morning of a heart attack. Link

UPDATE: And an obituary from The Telegraph. Link

Citizens observed a masked individual wielding a running chainsaw walking around Bicester, Oxfordshire, England. Turns out he was on his way to a costume party. From the Lancashire Evening Post:

Terrified residents in Bicester, Oxford, called police with a description and an armed response unit and the force helicopter were scrambled in minutes.

Link (via Fortean Times)

Vivid Entertainment apparently acquired a 40-year-old sex tape starring Jimi Hendrix and two women. They plan to release it on DVD. Hit the link to IDontLikeYouInThatWay for NSFW? clips.
Link to IDontLikeYouInThatWay, Link to Hendrixsextape.com (Thanks, David Hyman!)

The gem sweater bedazzlements and lyrical besnazzlements of "internet ceWEBrity" Leslie Hall have graced Boing Boing tv before -- but in today's episode, Ms. Hall submits an exclusive tour diary for BBtv viewers, a veritable world exclusive. "With these shoulderpads I have the strength to destroy, villages, homes, and crops," she warns. Her ladyfire is mighty, as all ye who gaze upon this video shall witness.

Ms. Hall was among the internet personalities who participated in the recent ROFLcon gathering in Cambridge, Mass. Her presence there among fellow internet memesters is documented in this Wired gallery, and in a photo set from Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. See also his short video of the Tron Guy talking about geek women. Which brings us back to the 26-year-old Ms. Hall, straight outta Iowa, believed by her many followers to be the fiercest gold-lame-wrapped geek woman on the planet.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Related Boing Boing tv items:
* Leslie Hall: ceWEBrity, gem sweater diva, jammer of jams.
* Leslie Hall iPhone snaps, "Blame the Booty" remix - Boing Boing

My next novel, Little Brother, officially goes on sale today! In addition to the US print edition, there's a DRM-free audio edition (there're also forthcoming editions in the UK, Greece, Russia, France and Norway, with others pending) from Random House Audio. My deal with Random House is that they're absolutely not allowed to sell the book with DRM on it, which, sadly, means that Audible (the largest audiobook store in the world) won't carry it -- they insist on selling books with DRM, even when authors and publishers don't want it.

Instead, you can buy the audiobook from Zipidee, a retailer that Random House uses -- they have the spiffy embeddable Flash sales-object you see above (feel free to paste it into your own blog or whatnot), and there's also this static URL for those of you who can't use Flash.

The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it, you're free to take up to 30 minutes' worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it's clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you're allowed to do without my permission (of course!).

I'll also be releasing (as always!) a free, Creative Commons-licensed version of the text of Little Brother, just as soon as I get back to London (I'm presently in Toronto, visiting my family with my newborn daughter). It'll likely be Monday or so -- there's a bunch of little clean-uppy things I need to do with the Little Brother distribution site that I need to be in my office with uninterrupted time to accomplish. Link to audiobook, Link to buy Little Brother

The criminals who sell the Zeus malware have added an end-user license agreement to their "product," setting out a bunch of terms controlling how the criminals who buy their products may use it, and threatening dire technological reprisals for violations:

Symantec security researcher Liam OMurchu has details on this latest development. The help section of the latest version of the Zeus malware states that the client has no right to distribute Zeus in any business or commercial purpose not connected to the initial sale, cannot examine the source code of the product, has no right to use the product to control other botnets, and cannot send the product to anti-virus companies. The client does agree to "give the seller a fee for any update to the product that is not connected with errors in the work, as well as for adding additional functionality." Modern license agreements take a great deal of (deserved) fire for being absurdly draconian, but even the likes of Adobe and Microsoft don't claim that purchasing a version of their respective products locks the user into buying future editions.

It's obviously difficult for the manufacturers of an illegal product to threaten legal sanctions against an infringer, but the Zeus authors give it their best shot. According to the EULA, "In cases of violations of the agreement and being detected, the client loses any technical support. Moreover, the binary code of your bot will be immediately sent to antivirus companies." Frankly, "We'll blow your kneecaps off and feed them to you," might be a bit more effective as a threat, but I suppose it's a bit hard to carry out that threat over the Internet.

Link (via /.)

The Sheriff's Office in Shelby County, Tennessee, is warning locals to turn in anyone who takes too many pictures of bridges or shopping malls, because they might be scouting for Al Qaeda, who are clearly slavering at the opportunity to make a gigantic media splash by getting up to some serious naughtiness on the "iconic Hernando DeSoto Bridge."

The Sheriff also asked environmentalists to look out for anyone "a little bit radical" who might be a terrorist provocateur hoping to exploit the trusting, gentle hippies to turn them into deep green Unabombers.

"You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we'll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing," said Richard Pillsbury with the Tennessee Fusion Center, a collaboration between the Department of Safety and the Department of Homeland Security.

Shelby County sergeant Larry Allen warned attendees at the meeting to look for people who appear to be doing surveillance outside public buildings, such as shopping malls.

"One of the things discussed in the al-Qaeda manual is conducting surveillance of your target," added Eric Jackson with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. "That could mean looking at a building to see how security is established."

Link (via Schneier)

Artist Nina Katchadourian tried repairing spider webs with thread, but her efforts were rebuffed: "My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned."

The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on Pörtö. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.

Link (via Kottke)

Here's the latest Instructables HOWTO to tie in with my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of young geeks who use technology to restore liberty to post-9/11 America.

This week, it's HOWTO start a flashmob:

Timing is everything
This refers back to the whole participation thing. If your event is spontaneous in nature and just requires people to show up at the same time and do something goofy(say, gather at a subway stop and follow the first bearded person you see as if they were Jesus), they won't need much time to prepare. The ideal time for this sort of event is at the end of the workday (between 5 and 6PM) during the week as a) the streets are more crowded and b)participants are more available. For whatever reason, Thursdays seem to be most effective.

If you are planning something more elaborate, like a Costumed Rampage, you want to give people at least a week to prepare, and preferably two. These events are most effective in heavily populated shopping and tourist areas, so Saturday afternoons work best. Note: these often turn into drunkfests.

Link