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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: HP Lovecraft, much improved in graphic form.

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:50:49 +0000

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a recent graphic novel adaptation of the classic 1928 HP Lovecraft story of the same name, masterfully executed by INJ Culbard.

The dirty secret of the Cthulhu mythos is that their originator, HP Lovecraft, wasn't a very good writer. In addition to his unfortunate tendency to embrace his era's backwards ideas about race and gender, Lovecraft was also fond of elaborate, tedious description that obscured the action and dialog. Which is a pity, because Lovecraft did have one of the great dark imaginations of literature, a positive gift for conjuring up the most unspeakable, unnameable (and often unpronounceable) horrors of the genre, so much so that they persist to this day.

Enter INJ Culbard, whose work adapting various Sherlock Holmes stories into graphic novels for Self-Made Hero press I've reviewed here in the past. Culbard is a fine storyteller and artist, and makes truly excellent use of the medium to deliver a streamlined Lovecraft, one where the protracted, over-elaborated descriptions are converted to dark, angular drawings that manage to capture all the spookiness, without the dreariness.

This is really the best way to enjoy Lovecraft.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Tune: Derek Kirk Kim's alien abduction romcom

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:07:13 +0000

Derek Kirk Kim is the insanely productive comics creator whose chronicles the lives of pop-culture obsessed Korean-American slacker Happy Mutant semi-losers in various kinds of peril, from love gone bad to alien abduction.

Today, his online science fictional rom-com comic Tune has been collected in the first of (I hope) many volumes, with Tune: Vanishing Point.

Tune's hero is Andy Go, a lovesick art-school dropout who is obsessed with his former classmate Yumi, finding a job before his terminally disappointed parents kick him out of the house, and keeping his life as orderly and neat as possible. Andy starts the story with an epic hangover in a strange bed, fully clothed and utterly disoriented. It's only once he stumbles into the bathroom for a truly world-beating piss that he realizes the "house" he's in is a cage, with no fourth wall, and there's an audience out there, watching him.

Tune then flashes back to tell the story of how Andy got there, and here Kim does what he does so well: makes us fall in love with a group of genteel, clever, messed up losers who are their own worst enemies. By the time we get back to how Andy ended up in the box, we're totally invested in his story, and wishing that the second volume was in print already.

Tune is Scott Pilgrim played through an alien abduction chord-progression, a delight from start to cliff-hanging finish. If you liked Kim's Good As Lily, Healing Hands and Same Difference, you'll love Tune.

Tune: Vanishing Point

Philip Pullman's Grimm's Fairytales

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:00:40 +0000

Philip Pullman -- best know for his Dark Materials series -- has written a new edition of the Brothers Grimm stories, called Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version. It's the 200th anniversary of the Grimm collection, and Pullman's edition includes author's notes and Aarne–Thompson classifications. Pullman has revisited the stories with a light touch, not attempting to modernize them, but rather pulling from lots of different sources and versions to assemble coherent tales that have all of the teeth and blood of the original pieces. Pullman's Grimms are stories stripped to the bone, where every sentence just moves the thing forward, where almost no characters have names, motivations are explicit and stated, and stuff happens fast. It was a fantastic read.

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version

Pinkwater's Bushman Lives: absurdist misfit story is an insightful treatise on art

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:27:42 +0000

Daniel Pinkwater's Bushman Lives is another of Pinkwater's marvellous novels for young adults (and adults!) in which a misfit narrator embraces his inner weirdo and finds odd joy. Harold Knishke is a young man in late 1950s Chicago who finds himself with a lot of spare time thanks to weird political patronage at his high-school, which results in him serving as a corrupt hall monitor who can excuse himself from school grounds on his own recognizance. One day, he quits flute lessons, sells his flute to his relieved instructor, and uses the money to take up life-drawing classes at a beatnik art school across the street from a mysterious whitewashed house whose paint is constantly being replenished by mysterious, hissing humanoids all dressed in white wrapping.

Woven into this narrative is the story of Geets Hildebrand, Harold's best friend, who runs away to join the Navy. Geets and Harold share an obsession with Bushman, the Lincoln Park Zoo's storied gorilla, a tragic and dignified figure. Geets is discharged from the Navy and discovers a secret society of rural misfits in a state park who tell him about a hidden castle on a hidden island in the middle of a lake.

Harold's life is one odd thing after another. He meets a young woman training to be a wise-woman who hips him to Willem de Kooning and then gets him a mentor who is obsessed with mural-painting and baking potatoes. He is inducted into an artist's workshop in a mysterious transdimensional building. He learns that there is a folk song about him, but can't make out the lyrics.

But most of all, Harold learns about art -- about the techniques of visual art, about the weird phonies that haunt the art world, but most importantly (and movingly) about the drive to make art and the thing that art does for its audiences.

Daniel Pinkwater and his wife Jill are both visual artists, and Bushman Lives is, more than anything, a book about art, and a very good one. I'd read Pinkwater all day long even if his absurdist fairy tales were nothing more than odd little stories, but as Bushman Lives (and his other works) proves, Pinkwater's absurdism is a delivery system for profound and important insight that stay with you for years and decades.

Bushman Lives was serialized online prior to publication, and really rewards your attention.

Bushman Lives

Sailor Twain: don't fall in love with the mermaid of the Hudson valley

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 13:20:56 +0000

I wrote about Sailor Twain, Mark Siegel's beautiful, haunting serialized graphic novel when it began. Since then, the story of a New York steamship captain who is haunted by his love for a mermaid has run its course, and today it has been published in a single, handsome hardcover volume from FirstSecond.

Sailor Twain tells the story of Captain Twain of the Lorelei, which plies its trade up and down the Hudson valley, while the ship's owner, a dissolute Frenchman, seduces the wives of the gentry in the owner's cabin. Captain Twain's own beloved wife is wasting with some unspecified disease on land, and he works to raise money to send her to specialists. He's a good man, beset with tragedy, and he has forgotten how to write the poetry he once loved.

And then comes the day when he spies a mermaid clinging to the deck of the Lorelei, gravely wounded. He pulls her from the sea and into his cabin, and everything changes for Sailor Twain. The poetry comes back, and at his request, she never sings for him, never puts him under her siren spell. But still, he is hers.

Out spills a mystery, a story about seduction and duty, mythology and gender, dreams lost and dreams forgotten, and the lure of magic and wonder. Siegel's illustrations are charcoal drawings that fearlessly mix highly detailed, realistic depictions with cartoons, impressionistic smears, and caricature, and they are moody and grey and dreamlike, the perfect match for the story.

This is a stupendous work, a beautiful and sad and lovely thing. If you don't believe me, go read it online for free and see for yourself.

Sailor Twain

A Wrinkle in Time, worthy graphic novel adaptation

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:00:17 +0000

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle's justly loved young adult novel about children who must rescue a dimension-hopping physicist who has been trapped by a malignant intelligence bent on bringing conformity to the universe.

Hill and Wang's A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel is Hope Larson's really wonderful and worthy adaptation of the original. Larson is very faithful to the original text, and the graphic form really suits the story, as it allows for direct illustration of some of the more abstract concepts (such as the notion of folding space in higher dimensions to attain faster-than-light transpositions of matter).

But Larson does more than capture the abstract with her graphics. L'Engle's charm and gift was in her ability to marry the abstract with the numinous -- to infuse stories about math and physics with so much heart, heartbreak, bravery, sorrow and joy that they changed everyone who read them. Larson does a brilliant job of capturing this crucial element of L'Engle's style.

I read this book aloud to my four year old daughter over a couple weeks' worth of bedtimes. There were plenty of times when I was sure that the nuances of the story were going over her head (she didn't come out of the experience with any sense of what a tesseract is!) but her interest never, ever wavered. That's because Larson's illustrations do such a fine job of showing the emotional arc of L'Engle's characters that even a small child could not help but be drawn into the drama. In fact, reading this book turned out to be both a treat and a chore, because every night's session ended with her demanding that I read more. And when we finished the book and closed the cover, she took it from my hands, turned it over, handed it back to me and said, "Again."

Hard to argue with that.

Hill and Wang were kind enough to give us exclusive access to chapter two, which you'll find below, past the jump!

A Wrinkle in Time

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:33:27 +0000

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There is the long-awaited sequel to Cat Valente's debut novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and it delivers on all the promise of that book, which is one of the strongest fantasy novels for young readers I've had the pleasure of getting lost in.

September, the young heroine of Circumnavigated, is back in the mundane world when she chases a green wind across the Nebraska prairie and returns to her beloved Fairyland. But it's not Fairyland as she remembered it: her shadow -- lost on a previous adventure -- has become the Hollow Queen of the Underworld, and is using her minion, the terrible Alleyman, to steal all of Fairyland's shadows and with them, Fairyland's magic. Equipped with a magic ration-book and a few scant adventurer's supplies, September runs to the Underworld for a series of Adventures, in an attempt to foil her shadow's evil and restore the natural order to Fairyland above.

But this is a Valente novel, so nothing is at seems. There's as much Phantom Tollbooth here as there is Narnia, a disorienting but familiar sense of story-ness as September travels slantwise through the underworld, shot through with menace and heroism. You never know what's coming next in Fell Beneath, and the most roundabout and whimsical turns always come back around to the main story and its payoff.

As masterful as the first novel, and with a reprise of Ana Juan's illustrations, this is a most worthy sequel. I'm also excited to note that there's an unabridged, DRM-free MP3CD audiobook edition, because this is one of those fairytales, like Gaiman's Stardust, that you want to have read aloud to you.

If your fancy is tickled by this, don't miss Deathless, Valente's fantasy for adults about the Siege of Leningrad.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

David Byrne's How Music Works

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:15:52 +0000

Former Talking Heads frontman and all-round happy mutant David Byrne has written several good books, but his latest, How Music Works, is unquestionably the best of the very good bunch, possibly the book he was born to write. I could made good case for calling this How Art Works or even How Everything Works.

Though there is plenty of autobiographical material How Music Works that will delight avid fans (like me) -- inside dope on the creative, commercial and personal pressures that led to each of Byrne's projects -- this isn't merely the story of how Byrne made it, or what he does to turn out such great and varied art. Rather, this is an insightful, thorough, and convincing account of the way that creativity, culture, biology and economics interact to prefigure, constrain and uplift art. It's a compelling story about the way that art comes out of technology, and as such, it's widely applicable beyond music.

Byrne lived through an important transition in the music industry: having gotten his start in the analog recording world, he skilfully managed a transition to an artist in the digital era (though not always a digital artist). As such, he has real gut-feel for the things that technology gives to artists and the things that technology takes away. He's like the kids who got their Apple ][+s in 1979, and keenly remember the time before computers were available to kids at all, the time when they were the exclusive domain of obsessive geeks, and the point at which they became widely exciting, and finally, ubiquitous -- a breadth of experience that offers visceral perspective.

There were so many times in this book when I felt like Byrne's observations extended beyond music and dance and into other forms of digital creativity. For example, when Byrne recounted his first experiments with cellular automata exercise for dance choreography, from his collaboration with Noemie Lafrance:

1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase (in dance, a phrase is a short series of moves that can be repeated).
2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.
3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.
4. When everyone is doing the same phrase, the exercise is over.
It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent lifeform coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immediately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase. The copying had already begun, albeit in just one area. This pocket of copying began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison. Unbelievable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick in, and for the "strongest" (unfortunate word, maybe) to dominate.

I remembered the first time I programmed an evolutionary algorithm and watched its complexity emerging from simple rules, and the catch in my throat as I realized that I was watching something like life being built up from simple, inert rules.

The book is shot through with historical examples and arguments about the nature of music, from Plato up to contemporary neuroscience, and here, too, many of the discussions are microcosms for contemporary technical/philosophical debates. There's a passage about how music is felt and experienced that contains the phrase, "music isn't merely absorbed above the neck," which is spookily similar to the debates about replicating human consciousness in computers, and the idea that our identity doesn't reside exclusively above the brainstem.

The same is true of Byrne's account of how music has not "progressed" from a "primitive" state -- rather, it adapted itself to different technological realities. Big cathedrals demand music that accommodates a lot of reverb; village campfire music has completely different needs. Reading this, I was excited by the parallels to discussions of whether we live in an era of technological "progress" or merely technological "change" -- is there a pinnacle we're climbing, or simply a bunch of stuff followed by a bunch of other stuff? Our overwhelming narrative of progress feels like hubris to me, at least a lot of the time. Some things are "better" (more energy efficient, more space-efficient, faster, more effective), but there are plenty of things that are held up as "better" that, to me, are simply different. Often very good, but in no way a higher rung on some notional ladder toward perfection.

When Byrne's history comes to the rise of popular recorded music, he describes a familiar dilemma: recording artists were asked to produce music that could work when performed live and when listened to in the listener's private playback environment -- not so different from the problems faced by games developers today who struggle to make games that will work on a wide variety of screens. In a later section, he describes the solution that was arrived at in the 1970s, a solution that reminds me a lot of the current world of content management systems like WordPress and Blogger, which attempt to separate "meaning" from "form" for text, storing them separately and combining them with little code-libraries called "decorators":

[Deconstruct and isolate] sums up the philosophy of a lot of music recording back in the late seventies. The goal was to get as pristine a sound as possible... Studios were often padded with sound-absorbent materials so that there was almost no reverberation. The sonic character of the space was sucked out, because it wasn't considered to be part of the music. Without this ambiance, it was explained, the sound would be more malleable after the recording had been made. Dead, characterless sound was held up as the ideal, and often still is. In this philosophy, the naturally occurring echo and reverb that normally added a little warmth to performances would be removed and then added back in when the recording was being mixed...
Recording a performance with a band and singer all playing together at the same time in the same room was by this time becoming a rarity. An incredible array of options opened up as a result, but some organic interplay between the musicians disappeared, and the sound of music changed. Some musicians who played well in live situations couldn't adapt to the fashion for each player to be isolated. They couldn't hear their bandmates and, as a result, often didn't play very well.

Changing the technology used in art changes the art, for good and ill. Blog-writing has a lot going for it -- spontaneity, velocity, vernacular informality, but often lacks the reflective distance that longer-form works bring. Byrne has similar observations about music and software:

What you hear [in contemporary music] is the shift in music structure that computer-aided composition has encouraged. Though software is promoted as being an unbiased toold that helps us do anything we want, all software has inherent biases that make working one way easier than another. With the Microsoft presentation software PowerPoint, for example, you have to simplify your presentations so much that the subtle nuances in the subject being discussed often get edited out. These nuances are not forbidden, they're not blocked, but including them tends to make for a less successful presentation. Likewise, that which is easy to bullet-point and simply visualize works better. That doesn't mean it actually is better; it means working is certain ways is simply easier than working in others...
An obvious example is quantizing. Since the mid-nineties, most popular music recorded on computers has had tempos and rhythms that have been quantized. That means that the tempo never varies, not even a little bit, the the rhythmic parts tend toward metronomic perfection. In the past, the tempo of recordings would always vary slightly, imperceptibly speeding up or maybe slowing down a little, or a drum fill might hesitate in order to signal the beginning of a new section. You'd feel a slight push and pull, a tug and then a release, as ensembles of whatever type responded to one another and lurched, ever so slightly, ahead of and behind an imaginary metronomic beat. No more. Now almost all pop recordings are played to a strict tempo, which makes these compositions fit more easily into the confines of editing and recording software. An eight-bar section recorded on a "grid" of this type is exactly twice as long as a four-bar section, and every eight-bar section is always exactly the same length. This makes for a nice visual array on the computer screen, and facilitates easy editing, arranging, and repairing as well. Music has come to accommodate software, and I have to admit a lot has been gained as a result.

Byrne is well aware of the parallels between music technology and other kinds of technology. No history of the recording business would be complete without a note about the format wars fought between Edison and his competitors like RCA, who made incompatible, anti-competitive playback formats. Byrne explicitly links this to modern format-wars, citing MS Office, Kindles, iPads and Pro Tools. (His final word on the format wars rings true for other media as well: "Throughout the history of recorded music, we have tended to value convenience over quality every time. Edison cylinders didn't really sound as good as live performers, but you could carry them around and play them whenever you wanted.")

Likewise, debates over technological change (pooh-poohing the "triviality" of social media or the ephemeral character of blogs) are played out in Byrne's history of music panics, which start in ancient Greece, and play out in situations like the disco wars, which prefigured the modern fight over sampling:

The most threatening thing to rockers in the era of disco was that the music was gay, black and "manufactured" on machines, made out of bits of other peoples' recordings.
Like mixtapes. I'd argue that other than race and sex, [the fact that disco was "manufactured" on machines, made out of bits of other peoples' recordings] was the most threatening aspect. To rock purists, this new music messed with the idea of authorship. If music was now accepted as a kind of property, then this hodgepodge version that disregarded ownership and seemed to belong to and originate with so many people (and machines) called into question a whole social and economic framework.

But as Byrne reminds us, new technology can liberate new art forms. Digital formats and distribution have given us music that is only a few bars long, and compositions that are intended to play for 1,000 years. The MP3 shows us that 3.5 minutes isn't an "ideal" length for a song (merely the ideal length for a song that's meant to be sold on a 45RPM single), just as YouTube showed us that there are plenty of video stories that want to be two minutes long, rather than shoehorned into 22 minute sitcoms, 48 minute dramas, or 90 minute feature films.

And Byrne's own journey has led him to be skeptical of the all-rights-reserved model, from rules over photography and video in his shows:

The thing we were supposed to be fighting against was actually something we should be encouraging. They were getting the word out, and it wasn't costing me anything. I began to announce at the beginning of the shows that photography was welcome, but I suggested to please only post shots and videos where we look good.

To a very good account of the power relationships reflected in ascribing authorship (and ownership, and copyright) to melody, but not to rhythms and grooves and textures, though these are just as important to the music's aesthetic effect.

Byrne doesn't focus exclusively on recording, distribution and playback technology. He is also a keen theorist of the musical implications of architecture, and presents a case-study of the legendary CBGB's and its layout, showing how these led to its center in the 1970s New York music scene that gave us the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, and many other varied acts. Here, Byrne channels Jane Jacobs in a section that is nothing short of brilliant in its analysis of how small changes (sometimes on the scale of inches) make all the difference to the kind of art that takes place in a building.

There's a long section on the mechanics of the recording business as it stands today, with some speculation about where its headed, and included in this is a fabulous and weird section on some of Byrne's own creative process. Here he describes how he collaborated with Brian Eno on Everything That Happens Will Happen Today:

The unwritten rule in remote collaborations is, for me, "Leave the other person's stuff alone as much as you possibly can." You work with what you're given, and don't try to imagine it as something other than what it is. Accepting that half the creative decision-making has already been done has the effect of bypassing a lot of endless branching -- not to mention waffling and worrying.

And here's a mind-bending look into his lyrics-writing method:

...I begin by improvising a melody over the music. I do this by singing nonsense syllables, but with weirdly inappropriate passion, given that I'm not saying anything. Once I have a wordless melody and a vocal arrangement my my collaborators (if there are any) and I like, I'll begin to transcribe that gibberish as if it were real words.
I'll listen carefully to the meaningless vowels and consonants on the recording, and I'll try to understand what that guy (me), emoting so forcefully by inscrutably, is actually saying. It's like a forensic exercise. I'll follow the sound of the nonsense syllables as closely as possible. If a melodic phrase of gibberish ends on a high ooh sound, then I'll transcribe that, and in selecting the actual words, I'll try to try to choose one that ends in that syllable, or as close to it as I can get. So the transcription process often ends up with a page of real words, still fairly random, that sounds just like the gibberish.
I do that because the difference between an ooh and an aah, and a "b" and a "th" sound is, I assume, integral to the emotion that the story wants to express. I want to stay true to that unconscious, inarticulate intention. Admittedly, that content has no narrative, or might make no literal sense yet, but it's in there -- I can hear it. I can feel it. My job at this stage is to find words that acknowledge and adhere to the sonic and emotional qualities rather than to ignore and possibly destroy them.
Part of what makes words work in a song is how they sound to the ear and feel on the tongue. If they feel right physiologically, if the tongue of the singer and the mirror neurons of the listener resonate with the delicious appropriateness of the words coming out, then that will inevitably trump literal sense, although literal sense doesn't hurt.

Naturally, this leads into a great discussion of the neuroscience of music itself -- why our brains like certain sounds and rhythms.

How Music Works gave me insight into parts of my life as diverse as my email style to how I write fiction to how I parent my daughter (it was a relief to read Byrne's discussion of how parenting changed him as an artist). I've been a David Byrne fan since I was 13 and I got a copy of Stop Making Sense. He's never disappointed me, but with How Music Works, Byrne has blown through my expectations, producing a book that I'll be thinking of and referring to for years to come.

Byrne's touring the book now, and as his tour intersects with my own book tours, I'll be interviewing him live on stage in Toronto on September 19th, at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors.

How Music Works

Fear and Trembling: Prion diseases on Twitter

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 15:37:38 +0000

Even if you don't immediately recognize the words "prion" or "Kuru", the history has seeped into popular culture, like a horrifying fairy tale that just happens to be true. Once, there was a tribe in New Guinea that ate the dead. It wasn't the kind of fakey cannibalism you see in the movies, with hunters rushing out to spear people for sustenance. Instead, it was about respecting your elders. When a member of your family died, you ate them—you took a part of them into yourself. And that included the brain.

But over time, these people found themselves plagued with a terrible illness. Children and perfectly healthy adults, usually women, would suddenly begin to lose control of their limbs. They would jerk and shudder. Within weeks, they wouldn't be able to stand up at all. And then they died. Everybody who had those symptoms died.

Eventually, Western scientists would learn the awful truth. When the people from New Guinea ate their ancestors they were also eating a disease. It attacked their brains—riddling the tissue with holes. The New Guineans, the Fore people, called the disease kuru. In their language it meant "trembling" or "fear".

Today, we know a little bit more about the disease, kuru. We know it's not caused by a virus or a bacterium or a fungus. We know it's related to other brain-damaging diseases, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which turns healthy adults senile and kills them within a year of the onset of symptoms; scrapie, which affects sheep; and the dreaded bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- mad cow disease.

Tying all these diseases together is a scary little something called a prion. On August 16th, I attended a lecture by Jay Ingram, a Canadian journalist who has written a book about prion diseases, called Fatal Flaws. The lecture taught me a lot about prions, but it also taught me about some of the flaws inherent in trying to live-tweet a lecture as I'm listening to it. When the subject is so scary—and so confusing—even well-intentioned live tweets can go awry.

How to build a better speed limit

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:06:14 +0000

Sometime in November, Texas will open a stretch of toll road south of Austin where the speed limit will be 85 miles per hour.It will be the highest speed limit in America. (Montana used to have no speed limit at all during the day, but that changed in 1999.)

Naturally, one of the big arguments against this is that higher speeds lead to more accidents. And there is some data to back this up. For instance, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety makes a pretty good case for lower speed limits in a Q&A posted on their site:

In 2010, a total of 10,395 deaths, or nearly a third of all motor vehicle fatalities, occurred in speed-related crashes. Based on a nationally representative sample of police-reported crashes, speeding – defined as exceeding the speed limit, driving too fast for conditions or racing – was involved in 16 percent of property-damage-only crashes and 20 percent of crashes with injuries or fatalities. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that the economic cost of speed-related crashes is more than $40 billion each year.

...The National Research Council attributed 4,000 fewer fatalities to the decreased speeds in 1974 compared with 1973...

A 2009 study examining the long-term effects of the 1995 repeal of the national speed limit found a 3 percent increase in road fatalities attributable to higher speed limits on all road types, with the highest increase of 9 percent on rural interstates. The authors estimated that 12,545 deaths were attributed to increases in speed limits across the U.S. between 1995 and 2005.

There is definitely a relationship between speed and safety. It's there consistently in individual studies and you see it when you start looking at lots of studies all at once, too. But the meta-analyses—research that compares and analyzes the results of many studies—also show that the speed/safety connection is probably more complicated than it first appears. Speed limits matter. But maybe we need more options to pick from than a simple, static "faster" or "slower".

People and the environment both have a big impact on the relationship between speed and safety. There are a couple of meta-analyses available to read for free online. Check them out, and you'll see how psychology and road conditions play a big role.

For instance, a 1998 publication from the Federal Highway Administration found that the type of road matters. If you raise the speed limit on a road where people are already driving slowly, it won't affect safety at all.

In general, changing speed limits on low and moderate speed roads appears to have little or no effect on speed and thus little or no effect on crashes. This suggests that drivers travel at speeds they feel are reasonable and safe for the road and traffic regardless of the posted limit. However, on freeways and other high–speed roads, speed limit increases generally lead to higher speeds and crashes.

Here's another weird fact that turns up in both the 1998 report and a paper published by the Transportation Research Board in 2001: You're actually safest when you're traveling with the speed of the traffic around you. Speed-related accidents tend to happen when people are traveling faster or slower than the other cars on the road.

In fact, the 1998 report says that most speed-related accidents happen because an individual is driving too fast for the conditions of the road—that's the current weather, the width of the specific road, and how fast other people are driving.

The conclusion that both reports come to: We don't necessarily need lower speed limits. What we need are speed limits that adjust to the current conditions and the specific needs of a specific road. A variable speed limit would reflect the reality that a lot of drivers already see and respond to, and it might be more easily accepted by the drivers who ignore one-size-fits-all speed limits today. Plus, the variable speed limit would allow the law to match up with what's actually safe. If traffic is flowing at an average of 60 mph, it doesn't make sense to have 70 mph posted—somebody is going to try to keep up with the speed limit and create an unsafe condition.

It's an interesting idea. So far, there's not a lot of good data available to show whether or not it actually reduces accidents and fatalities. Variable speed limits have been tested out around the world, but they remain rare and, in North America, are mostly relegated to stretches of rural highway in places with a history of extreme weather—for instance, a road in Tennessee that gets a lot of heavy fog.

But the basic story is that we need more data. To know whether or not variable speed limits actually make sense, we need them to be implemented in more places with more traffic.

READ MORE
• Synthesis of Studies on Speed and Safety - 2001 meta-analysis
• Synthesis of Safety Research Related to Speed and Speed Management - 1998 meta-analysis
• Driving Speed and the Risk of Road Crashes, A Review - 2006 meta-analysis that is behind a paywall
• Wikipedia on variable speed limits
• US Federal Highway Administration research on variable speed limits in construction zones

Image: Driving Cars in a Traffic Jam, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from epsos's photostream
Image: Speed Limit 35, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 71966930@N00's photostream

Copyfraud: making the case for actual copyright enforcement

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 12:49:01 +0000

Jason Mazzone's Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law isn't just another book about how the expansion of copyright and trademark law has harmed innovation, free speech and creativity. Instead, Mazzone -- the youngest faculty member in Brooklyn law school's history to hold an endowed chair -- argues that the real problem is that copyright law isn't enforced enough. Mazzone persuasively argues that the room that copyright makes for public expression and innovation -- through fair use and other defenses -- offer exactly the kind of safety valve that copyright's monopoly on expression demands.

However, as Mazzone points out, there is virtually no penalty for unjustly claiming that these public freedoms don't exist. The entertainment industry can slather its products in dire warnings that ignore fair use and make misleading threats for users who lend, re-use or sample the media they buy. They can demand licenses for minimal uses, for works in the public domain, and for fair uses. They can assert absurd trademark claims. They can threaten baseless lawsuits by the bushel-load -- and all without any risk to them.

Mazzone's point is that without a robust set of regulations and punishments for companies that claim to own what rightfully belongs to the public, this will only expand. After all, falsely claiming that your public domain sheet music can't be copied by a choir means that you get to sell a lot of copies of your sheet music -- absent a penalty for such a fraudulent claim, who would abstain from it?

Mazzone writes with the clarity of Lessig, Samuelson and Boyle -- the gold standards for public, lay-friendly copyright writing -- and uses infamous cases to make his point, from the scam that cost George Clinton his copyrights to the fraudulent claims made by Mattel against artists who make fun of Barbie. He unpicks the intricate tangle of state and federal law, precedent and norms, and sets out a series of problems and then proposes a set of sane, implementable solutions that could be turned into law today.

By offering simple solutions to these problems, Mazzone shows that the theft of the public domain isn't due to the impossibility of getting the law right. Rather, it is a combination of depraved indifference by lawmakers and unchecked greed by corporations. Reading Mazzone gives you the idea that the technical question of solving copyright is actually rather simple -- though finding the political will may prove much harder.

Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law

4chan gets real about software

Dean Putney — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 15:25:57 +0000

Illustration: 凌[Pixiv]

9/7/2012: Updated with feedback from moot

4chan, the Internet's long-time dumping ground and butt of many a joke, is getting serious about software by making their biggest public-facing code change in nearly a decade, introducing an API and a bunch of new functionality.

Given its reputation, many commentators have already written this off with a shrug and a laugh. But 4chan is also one of the web's most popular and influential communities. It's the source of so many Internet-age cultural trends that even your grandma may be dimly aware that the clever picture she posted on her Facebook was trawled a thousand copies ago from the dark depths of /mlp/. Given that there's big money in all this, the API offers businesses a direct line to the heart of the machine.

As a professional software developer and long time 4chan user, I think this is a pretty interesting development. I talked yesterday afternoon to some of those who worked on 4chan's code over the years and know a little about why this is such an important development.

4chan, whose codebase is a heavily modified version of the Futallaby image board system, has suffered all kinds of software problems over the years. Note: moot says that Futallaby's code is almost entirely gone, and their software is named "Yotsuba" now. Volunteers running the site struggled with massive growth, hacks, denial-of-service attacks, regular crashes and much else besides. They were generally paid little, if at all, for their efforts, simply because there just wasn't any money to go around. Founder Chris Poole, aka moot, famously held $20,000 in credit card debt just trying to keep the site afloat. It was amazing that the site held on at all.

For nearly its entire history, 4chan was completely hands-off on software from the client side--i.e. you or anyone else interested in the data. Excepting messing with users by auto-playing obnoxious music or putting party hats on every post, the public-facing code changed little over the years and was aimed esclusively at web browsers. New features appear extremely rarely, and the developers I talked to could only identify of a handful in the last six years.

In May, however, 4chan announced a refactoring of the site's HTML output, the underlying structure of the page served to browsers. Yesterday, they announced three more big software-related changes:

• They're rolling the functionality of the most popular 4chan browser extensions into the site itself.
• They're adding a read-only JSON API, a way for outsiders to slurp up raw data on what's appearing at the site.
• Both of these changes are released and documented publicly on GitHub, a popular code repository.

May's HTML refactoring cleaned up years of cruft in 4chan's garbled source. This itself was significant, at the time, because it allowed users who had either written or thought about writing browser extensions to make much better versions with improved functionality. "mootykins" also asked that extension authors limit the number of requests they made to 4chan, in order to reduce load on the servers. As the default user experience is so sparse, extensions quickly grew to become a big part of 4chan users' experience. Their first official extension (for FireFox) was written in 2005, but user-written extensions appeared much earlier.

The API opens up new possibilities for third party developers. Where previously getting site content meant grabbing the HTML source (a horrible mess, even with the refactor) and attempting to parse it, developers can now grab content easily and parse it quickly in more versatile languages. This could lead to mobile phone apps (moot says this is unlikely, since Apple and Google both just kicked third party apps off their app stores), general site analytics, or simply detecting hot threads and trends throughout the site. With 4chan's tendency to generate new creative content, this is a pretty desirable feature.

Unfortunately, right now the API only works for individual threads and doesn't report info for a full board or for the site as a whole. Boards can be viewed as RSS in post-date order, but this doesn't include the most popular board, /b/. Also, 4chan's data is rendered as HTML before it's saved in the database, so the API doesn't do a fantastic job of separating out valuable info. Note: moot says that the API will soon be updated with endpoints for full boards. The 1.0 version was released to support the new inline extension

4chan is using version control and releasing information publicly. Although they've been using some form of version control since about 2006, this hasn't been well-known publicly; because of their chaotic nature I'd assumed they were still making changes live, on the public site. As recently as 2008, I was told, 4chan didn't have a real development environment set up for testing, though that may have changed since then— growth was so quick, and changes needed to be made so rapidly, that version control or development environment usage wasn't practical. 4chan's sharing of its code publicly (and letting people watch repositories where changes are being made) is a big step towards their code's transparency. They might even accept a pull request to the extensions script if a user made updates to it. For the most part, 4chan is deeply secretive. Most of the site's inner operations are rarely discussed, and people currently involved in the site didn't want to discuss its current workings even in broad terms.

So, if users and developers want this functionality, and these are positive changes for the site, why is this coming about only now after years of near-silence? First, browsers extensions became a popular early solution because not all their features were wanted by the whole community. Change on any site is hard, especially with a long-term user base. I know from experienc, in changing Boing Boing's design throughout the years, that even a slight change (or no change) can elicit some angry emails. And ourusers are pretty polite! I can't imagine what we'd do if we got DDoS'd by angry users every time we moved the nav bar.

These new updates on 4chan suggest two things: 4chan's userbase is slowly rolling over to where older, angrier users aren't around to complain, but also that 4chan is becoming more active in—and less afraid of—making site-wide changes. They're getting users used to it.

4chan's stability has also improved recently, so administrators are probably spending less time putting out fires. This may be partly due to them getting static cache flushing—a method of reducing how much load servers are placed under when users request pages—working properly for threads. Previously, each time someone posted, a new copy of the HTML thread had to be generated from scratch. Instead, now, the output is cached and a process periodically writes a new version on a schedule. Note: moot says this is the case, but that only three boards are rebuilt using a timer. 4chan never loaded content dynamically.

4chan's official browser extensions—not to mention encouraging other extension writers to throttle their countless users' manic request rate—probably improved server stability quite a bit as well.

Additionally, while 4chan mostly takes a laissez-faire approach to offensive content, it has strict rules. Most of 4chan's codebase is concerned with moderation and administrator functionality. Trolls and other obnoxious users may be effectively synonymous with 4chan—it's part of why there's very little money to be made there--but dealing with the worst remains a monstrous task.

Lastly, these changes were largely made by new, incoming volunteers. Traditionally, the volunteers working on the code don't have too much experience as software developers. In the early days, the developers were just cutting their chops on a large site; the "hackers", likewise, were script kiddies wreaking havoc with automated tools. 4chan must be attracting better developers now.

4chan's movements suggest that it's planning more active and organized development. They've made large changes to the site ~~and are closing down extensions~~. Note: moot says they're not "closing down" extensions. Its established user base is turning over more rapidly—or, perhaps, it's simply maturing. It's bringing in new developers, it's using version control, and its publicly releasing its source on Github. It's opened up with a JSON API so third party apps and projects can be made, even if the the available data are limited in scope. With a user base as large as has—22 million unique visitors making 1.3 billion pageviews in June this year—these changes should lead the site in interesting new directions.

Immortal Lycanthropes: Required reading for budding happy mutants and their grownups

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:52:43 +0000

Hal Johnson's Immortal Lycanthropes is a YA novel unlike any other. It's the story of Myron Horowitz, a horribly disfigured amnesiac orphan whose nice adoptive parents can't protect him from the savage beatings administered by the school bully every day. But then the bully is found bruised and battered and hurled through shatterproof glass, and Myron is found on the floor of the cafeteria, naked, with no sign of his clothes anywhere. And the adventure starts.

You see, Myron is an immortal lycanthrope, part of an ancient mythic race of human/animal hybrids -- one for every species of mammal -- who date back to the dawn of humanity. Nothing can kill him save another immortal in animal form, and there are plenty of those around, as it turns out. They have all come out of the woodwork to attempt to kidnap/kill/rescue/brainwash/claim/manipulate him, because he appears to be the first newborn immortal lycanthrope since the dawn of history.

Myron is off on a madcap trip across America, variously beaten and nearly killed and tricked and conned and even worshipped as he discovers the true nature of his race, and speculates about what animal might lurk within him.

Johnson has taken a slight idea -- his editor says that the book's genesis was a sarcastic remark about writing YA fiction, as in, "What, you want me to write about immortal lycanthropes or something?" -- and made something perfectly wonderful and wonderfully perfect out of it. A few chapters in, I flipped to the beginning of the book looking for an "about the author," only to notice that he'd dedicated the book to Daniel Pinkwater, who is the all-time world champion of weird amazing mind melting brilliant YA fiction. I knew then that I had found a writer who was going to pierce me like a very funny, very weird arrow.

And pierce me he did. Take one part Lemony Snicket, one part Boy's Life adventure, three measures of Daniel Pinkwater, a dash of Tex Avery mixed with Carlos Castenada, and you'd get something like Immortal Lycanthropes.

When I was twelve years old, my brain was blown clear out of my skull and into an erratic orbit by a Daniel Pinkwater novel called Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy From Mars. If I wanted to have the same effect on a bright 12 year old proto-mutant today, I might just hand her or him a copy of Immortal Lyncathropes. For the win.

Immortal Lycanthropes

Introducing Elfquest at Boing Boing!

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 21:01:11 +0000

UDPATE: It's live! Read the first page.

It's my great pleasure to welcome Wendy and Richard Pini to Boing Boing, where they'll be publishing the next chapter of their long-running fantasy epic Elfquest—online-first for the first time!

You may also know Wendy from her anime-style retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of The Red Death — which even got her in trouble with Facebook over cartoon boobs.

The first page of Elfquest: The Final Quest's prologue will appear here at Boing Boing on Monday. In the meantime, catch up with the story so far (all 6000 pages of it!), free of charge, at the series' official homepage.

After the jump, I've pasted in part of an item I once wrote (for the late, lamented Ectoplasmosis (Update: reborn on tumblr!)) about why this comic series is so awesome. Then follows our press release.

• With Dave Sim’s Cerebus The Aardvark, it was among the first self-published comics to make it big, booting down the door for new talent the nation over. Its success as a graphic novel in mainstream bookstores helped infect the American mainstream with a European-esque appreciation for comics. Women read this! Women!
• Wendy Pini’s art is a melting pot of comics, manga and classical illustration. And she’s been at it since before most people had even heard of manga.
• The feral, omnisexual, hallucinogen-guzzling protagonists aren’t Tolkien-derived clichés, but a freakish medley of european lore, native american myth and hippy free love. And yet it isn't at all "edgy".
• No superheroes, magic wands or other arbitrary magics. It’s consistently plotted to tight rules of engagement and expertly crafted by the same wife-and-husband team thats been doing little else since 1977.
• It’s a neat blend of high fantasy and science fiction: the “elves” are aliens who wanted to impress us by appearing as angels, but got stuck in a genetic disguise by their slaves’ violent rebellion.
• All the fashions in it are either from the 1970s or the 1930s: everyone is either a pimp in furs and leather or something sculpted by Erté.
• Winnowill is the best arch-villainess since Cthulhu.
• 6,000 pages of full-color classic indy brilliance free of charge. Precedent set.
• Issue #17’s Elf Orgy. Great name for a punk band.

New Elfquest story to make online debut at Boing Boing!

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (September 5, 2012) — After decades of epic adventure, the heroes of Wendy and Richard Pini's indie hit Elfquest still haven't settled down. But for now, they'll be found at top blog Boing Boing, taking their place in its first ongoing narrative comic presentation.

"We're stoked to be able to take the next chapter in the series 'online-first'," said Boing Boing's Rob Beschizza. "For anyone who grew up reading indie comics or who loves a fantastic yarn, this is a dream come true."

Elfquest, a fantasy epic first published in 1978, replaced the era's Tolkien-esque tropes with a more modern—and less foofy—vision of point-eared peril. The story of Cutter's barbaric tribe of elves, and their quest to discover their cosmic origins, was one of the first independently-published comics to achieve mainstream success.

"Wendy and I never set out, thirty-five years ago, to take the indie comics world by storm," said Richard Pini. "But there the history is, in the sales and—more importantly—in the fandom that's stayed with us. Now we get to relive those scary, heady days once again as Elfquest makes its online debut to fans old and new."

Among other graphic novel firsts counted by Wendy and Richard: a massive female audience, publishing deals with both Marvel and DC Comics, and translation into dozens of languages.

Boing Boing is one of the top blogs in the U.S., with more than 4 million visitors a month and a long tradition of showcasing the unusual, the spectacular and the wildly talented.

The prologue to the new tale, to be published weekly over several months, gears up the decades-long story for its long-awaited next major chapter.

"Elfquest's World of Two Moons—its landscapes, inhabitants, dangers—is familiar yet always unpredictable territory," said Wendy Pini. "After five years' hiatus, I've come home to the Holt and to my main characters, Cutter and the Wolfriders, only to wreak storytelling havoc on them as never before. In 'Elfquest - the Final Quest' sturdy, stable characters will react in totally unexpected ways as they face devastating, unavoidable change. I'm scared and exhilarated by what's going to happen!"

Each page of the story will be published at boingboing.net on Mondays, beginning next week on September 10. New readers can read the story so far, free of charge, at http://www.elfquest.com/gallery/OnlineComics3.html

At sea for science

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:14:23 +0000

The Joides Resolution is a large boat—more than 450 feet long and almost 70 feet wide. That's small compared to a lot of cruise ships, but big enough to house and feed and provide work space for 126 people. It's a floating city, with a movie theater, helipad, hospital, cafeteria, laboratories, and a giant drilling rig. But even a big boat can start to feel small when you have nowhere else to go, and no land in sight, for two whole months.

Some science can't be done on shore, and the Joides Resolution is one of the tools researchers use to learn more about the world beneath the waves. The ship travels the globe, serving as a mobile research station for scientists who want to study the bottom of the sea.

Between June 2 and August 1, 2012, a team of researchers, technicians, and support staff took the Joides Resolution north, to the cold waters off Newfoundland. Their goal: Collect samples of mud, clay, and muck from the ocean floor. Using a deep-sea drilling system, they lowered thousands of feet of pipe through the water, and forced it into the sea floor below. When the pipes were pulled back up on deck, they contained core samples—cylindrical logs that allowed the scientists to see layer after layer of sediment. By looking at what those cores are made of, the chemistry they contain, and the physical fossils buried deep inside them, researchers can begin to reconstruct what Earth's climate must have been like tens of millions of years ago.

On July 11th, while the Joides Resolution was still at sea, I got to interview several of the scientists on board. Paleontologist Richard Norris, geochemist Jessica Whiteside, and sedimentologist Chris Junium (along with communications officer Caitlin Scully) talked to me about their research, what they hoped to learn, and what it was like to live in a laboratory far from home.

These are the tubes that are driven vertically into the sea floor by the Joides Resolution's drilling rig. They'll come back up full of sediment from the bottom of the ocean.

You can listen to my full interview with the scientists via Soundcloud—or download it as a podcast. It's almost an hour long, but you'll learn a lot about how the scientists (and the rest of the crew) work, how they live, and what they study. I think it's interesting to hear this story straight from the people who are experiencing it, especially when you're talking about an experience that simultaneously brings together with an incredibly diverse group of people, while also thoroughly cutting them off from the rest of humanity.

In a lot of ways, the Joides Resolution is like the research stations in Antarctica. Truly an international effort—"more international than the International Space Station," as Richard Norris put it—it's also interdisciplinary. Scientists literally cannot do this kind of work on their own. In order for a science team of 30-some people to function, they have to work alongside 20 technicians and more than 70 crew members, including cooks, electricians, and welders. It creates a different sort of community and a different sort of environment than what you'd find in a lab on land. At the same time, as Chris Junium describes, everyone on that boat is very far away from their friends and their family for a very long time.

This is the Moon Pool, which the researchers talk about in the interview. It's a hole that goes all the way through the ship, creating a pool of sea water on the deck of the Joides Resolution. Besides serving as a launching port for underwater research vessels, the Moon Pool is also necessary for the drilling operations. The drilling pipes are so heavy that they can't be lowered over the side of the ship. If you did that, the whole thing would list. Instead, the drill goes down through the Moon Pool, down through the center of the ship, itself, keeping the weight balanced and the boat afloat.

We've also got a series of videos that will allow you to see some of the stuff the scientists talk about in the interview (and give you a way to hit the highlights without listening to an hour-long podcast).

In the first film, you'll meet some of the people who spent two months on board the Joides Resolution this summer, and get an inside look at what their lives were like.

The second film shows you how the crew of the Joides Resolution went about collecting those all-important samples of sea-floor sediment. It's not as simple as you might think. The Joides Resolution does its drilling in deep water. It can't anchor. Instead, the boat has to be carefully positioned so it doesn't twist and torque the drilling pipes as it moves on the surface of the water.

Finally, what do the scientists do with those sea-floor samples once they've got them? This last video follows the core samples from the ocean to the lab. You'll see how researchers keep track of hundreds and hundreds of tubes of muck, and find out how they make sense of what they're seeing. You'll also get to meet the Green Monster—a thick and frustratingly persistent layer of mud much younger than the sediments the researchers were hoping to find.

Learn more about Joides Resolution Expedition 342

See more photos from the trip

Watch more videos made on board the Joides Resolution

Special thanks to Caitlin Scully!

Be My Enemy: triumphant sequel to Planesrunner

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Today marks the publication of Be My Enemy, the absolutely triumphant sequel to Ian McDonald's pulse-pounding young-adult science fiction novel Planesrunner.

Planesrunner -- a rollicking, multidimensional tale of a young boy who holds the key to infinite universes, seeking to rescue his physicist father from sinister powers -- finished on a brutal cliffhanger, leaving its readers gasping and cursing for more. Now we have it.

In Enemy, there's a lot more of what made Planesrunner great -- tremendous action scenes, cunning escapes, genius attacks on the ways that multidimensional travel might be weaponized, horrific glimpses of shadowy powers and sinister technologies.

But Enemy also has more of what makes McDonald's adult fiction some of the best work I've ever read: a gifted ear for poesie that makes the English language sing, the unapologetic presumption of the reader's ability to understand what's going on without a lot of hand-holding, and a technological mysticism that never explicitly says when the literal stops and the fantasy starts.

In Enemy, Everett, the young hero of Planesrunner, is confronted with multiple versions of himself from different worlds, all facing different versions of his crisis, and some not on his side. McDonald's handling of this is deft, going beyond the good Spock/evil Spock cliches and showing us how two "good" kids could start as multidimensional twins and end as mortal enemies.

If you held off on reading Planesrunner because you didn't want to commit to a series without knowing if the author could keep up the quality, have no fear. McDonald has proven himself handily. And if you read Planesrunner like me and have been slavering for the sequel ever since, rejoice -- the time is at hand!

Here are the first five chapters, courtesy of the kind folks at Pyr!

Be My Enemy

Strange superhero Flaming Carrot goes digital

Glenn Fleishman — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 16:08:29 +0000

The 1980s had many surreal and outré comic-book stars. I recall particularly following The Tick, Concrete, and Nexus. They were respectively a nigh-invulnerable, possibly mentally ill superhero with a chubby accountant sidekick in a moth-themed flying suit; a writer whose brain was transplanted by aliens (themselves possibly escaped slaves) into a nearly invulnerable rock-like body often performing missions of mercy; and a man (later others, including men, women, and children) picked by a nearly omnipotent being residing in the center of a planet to atone the genocide of his father by being forced to be an almost indestructible and thoroughly powerful superhero, lest he face disabling pain.

You catch the theme here, right? Omnipotence, invulnerability, superhero—all but the Tick reluctant. Into that mix, Flaming Carrot was something altogether different.

The man wore a giant carrot mask (which I sometimes thought might be part of him) with a continuously burning flame on the top, and fought crime. He carried guns and killed people! He had sex (off screen)! He got flooby! Flaming Carrot was an endless source of nourishing nonsense that flooded forth from creator Bob Burden, who is still at it. Plotlines would meander about, involve strange supervillains (the Blipio!), strange allies, and strangeness in general. Burden drew the strip with a pulp feel, including buxom ladies in cutoffs and tight shirts.

Burden himself wrote, in issue 24, "While Flaming Carrot is an interesting character, the basic concept is not as easily grasped as with most super-heroes. Why does Flaming Carrot dress up in such a bizarre costume and go around shooting people? What are his powers? What's the point of it all? And that is the point. There is no point."

The comic books, which appeared largely in the 1980s through 1990s (with a reappearance from 2004 to 2006) followed the best rules of nonsense: those involved consider their lives absolutely serious, a la the original Airplane! movie. You can get a sense of these at his difficult-to-navigate Web site: click Special Features at the top and then Thrilling Visions for Flash-driven access to a 140-page collections of writings and sketches.

Burden also created the Mysterymen, a sort of third- or fourth-tier set of blue-collar-style superheroes like Flaming Carrot, who received Hollywood treatment in a terrible, terrible film full of great moments and actors. (It didn't pay for itself, but it actually made real money.) I particularly like The Sleek, the world's 17th-fastest superhero.

I'm recollecting Flaming Carrot, because he's...being re-collected! Burden and his team launched a Kickstarter campaign, already past its goal with new items being added, to produce digital editions of a previously published collection, Man of Mystery and The Wild Shall Wild Remain. The price is modest: $10 gets you the 250-page digital version of The Wild Shall Wild Remain; $15 adds the 130-page Man of Mystery.

Burden is also producing a new limited-edition hardcover of The Wild at $50, which includes a new eight-page adventure. The project offers packages at all sorts of price ranges that include original-run comics from his personal collection, and hand-drawn illustrations. I've opted for the $100 "champagne" level which gets you the new hardcover, a Burden-drawn Flaming Carrot, and both digital editions.

Flaming Carrot, like the best fever visions, can't be described so much as experienced. Ut!

Legends of Zita the Space Girl: a worthy followup to the most excellent kids' science fiction graphic novel

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 13:14:26 +0000

Back in June, I reviewed the delightful science fiction kids' comic Zita the Spacegirl and mentioned that the sequel would be out in September. That sequel, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, comes out today, and is a most worthy follow-on to a most excellent kids' comic.

The first volume of Zita introduced us to Zita, a regular girl from Earth, throws herself through a transdimensional portal to rescue a friend, and comes to ally herself with a motley band of robots, aliens, a giant mouse, and a rogueish showman named Piper, fighting off a death-cult that is determined to perform a human sacrifice to avert a deadly asteroid impact.

In Legend, Zita is now a celebrity, travelling from world to world with Piper and her friends, being exhibited to gawkers who want a glimpse of the hero who saved Scriptorium. On one nameless space-station -- a worldlet every bit as weird and hilarious as the setting in book one -- Zita meets a very special admirer amidst the throng. Her new friend is a discontinued doppelganger robot with the power to assume the likeness of anyone it meets. The poor robot has been literally doomed to the scrapheap, the last of its kind, and when it meets Zita, they swap identities, and Zita gets a moment of much-needed respite from the crowds.

This seems like a great deal to Zita (and her giant mouse friend, Pizzicato) until the robot decides to make the switch permanent, and takes off with Piper and Zita's friends to attempt the rescue of yet another world from an invasion of bloodthirsty Star Hearts. Zita is taken in by another band of travelling performers, who, like Piper, are more than they seem.

What follows is another action-packed, high tension adventure story that is marvellously inventive, beautifully drawn, and filled with both comedy and real pathos that had both me and my four year old very worried for both the heroes and the villains in this story.

As I said, this is a most worthy follow-on to a fabulous first volume, and it ends in a way that makes it clear that creator Ben Hatke has more volumes to come.

Legends of Zita the Spacegirl

Economix: terrific cartoon history of economics

Mark Frauenfelder — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 16:11:12 +0000

One of my favorite books is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. With simple comic art, McCloud presents the history of sequential comics, and how they work. It's as much about psychology as it is about the way comics use standard structural elements that work on a subconscious level to tell a story. A cartoon version of McCloud serves as the narrator of the book, speaking directly to the reader, which is very effective.

I'm also a big fan of Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe, a series of comic books that, as the title suggests, presents the history of the universe from the big bang up to the present era. It combines factual history with a bit of humor (which is always appropriately in context).

Both McCloud and Gonick came to mind when I read Economix: How Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work), by Michael Goodwin and by illustrated Dan E. Burr. Told as a history, it ties important world events (wars, revolutions, technological progress, resource depletion, pollution, etc.) to their economic consequences, and it explains the far-reaching (and often unintended effects) of economic policy decisions on people and the planet. Dan E. Burr's appealing illustrations add punch, humor, and clarity to Goodwin's already-excellent storytelling skills.

The first 20 pages or so are about the early history of economic policy (Jean-Baptiste's mercantilism and Francois Quesnay's laissez-faire ideas). It then spends some time examining Adam Smith's revolutionary book, Wealth of Nations. I've often heard people cite Smith's Invisible Hand as the reason why a laissez-faire free market is the best economic policy, but Smith actually warned that free markets were vulnerable. He believed that monopolies and cartels will always try to escape the market and undermine public interest by tricking and corrupting the government into doing favors for them. From the book:

Adam Smith was never dogmatic; he knew markets weren't perfect. Markets won't enforce laws, protect borders, or provide public goods, such as street cleaning, that everyone wants but nobody has much incentive to provide

For that matter, Smith thought government should favor war–related industries so they would be around if war came, protect wage workers (because they had less bargaining power than employers), keep banks honest, issue patents, protect new industries until they were on their feet, cap the interest rate, control disease, establish education standards (so brain–dead jobs like the one in the pin workshop didn't turn workers into brain–dead people), and even provide public amusements.

It becomes clear early on that Goodwin thinks laissez-faire capitalism leads to problems (like private affluence and public squalor) and that he favors a mixed economy (free enterprise combined with socialism). Since I'm basically a democrat (with a civil libertarian streak), I agreed with Goodwin's interpretations of historical events of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries -- the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the robber barons, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, World War II, the permanent war economy, Reagan's disastrous reign, Alan Greenspan's creepy machinations, and George Bush Junior's wholesale looting of the economy by giving tax cuts to the rich (which doesn't work). Most presidents receive a failing grade from Goodwin. The exceptions are Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Bill Clinton. Most of the other presidents were in cahoots with the ultra rich, who will never be satisfied until they own every crumb of the economic pie.

Economics books usually bore me, but in the hands of Goodwin and Burr, the subject was engrossing (and like Gonick, often funny). Light switches flicked on in my mind every few pages or so, and after reading Economix I felt like I understood many fundamental aspects about the way the world works that I had been too lazy to learn about before.

On his website, Goodwin has a list of books he used as sources when writing Economix. He puts the books in order of how highly he recommends them. (Highly Recommended: "James Carroll, House of War. A stunning history of the Pentagon, the postwar military, and the economic institutions that feed it." Read but Not Recommended: "Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. Porn for rich people. In Rand’s world, rich people are rich because they’re better than everyone else, and they’d be even richer except that nasty inferior people keep convincing them to give away their money.")

Economix is a book I'm going to buy and give to people.

Buy Economix: How Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work) on Amazon

The Trestle, Kirtland Air Force Base

Mark Pilkington — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 19:22:09 +0000

Unknown Fields (UF) is a design studio, originating in London’s Architectural Association, that "ventures out on annual expeditions to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies." Right now, Mark Pilkington, author of Mirage Men and publisher of Strange Attractor, is leading this busload of architects, writers, filmmakers and artists in an exploration of the mythic landscape of the American Southwest, and the stories that it has inspired. Their trajectory takes them from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque New Mexico to Black Rock City, Nevada, via sites of military, architectural and folkloric significance. Mark is sending us occasional postcards from the edge. - David Pescovitz

The Trestle, Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Constructed over four years in the late 1950s at a then-astronomical cost of $58 million, the Trestle is still the largest all-wooden structure in the world, comprising over 6 million feet of timber. Part of the Air Force’s research into the after effects of a nuclear blast, a range of aircraft, including huge B-52 bombers and Air Force One were hauled up onto the Trestle, where they would be bombarded with electromagnetic pulse waves (EMP) fired from an emitter on either side.

EMP waves travel long distances in a very short amount of time and can seriously disrupt electronic systems, as we also know from powerful solar emissions. Understanding how EMP might affect the functioning of retaliatory nukes, bombers or command and control aircraft was therefore an essential part of post-apocalyptic preparations.

Every element of the Trestle, right down to its oversized nuts and bolts, had to be wooden so that none of its own components would interfere with the effects of the EMP wave on the aircraft being tested (though apparently there are some small metal o-ring components deep in the mix). Inspecting all the joints took a dedicated team a whole year; as soon as they had finished it was time to start again.

A unique monument to Cold War rigor and ingenuity, reminiscent of a huge fairground ride, perhaps the Cyclone, Coney Island’s wooden roller coaster, or a wooden labyrinth, the Trestle is now a condemned structure, too unstable to use, too expensive to dismantle. Today it provides a home to local wildlife, including a colony of great horned owls who can be heard screeching from within its depths. Our guide tells us that she likes to collect the skulls of their prey, which they leave scattered around the base of the structure.

Devil Said Bang: Sandman Slim finds it's lonely at the top

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:17:53 +0000

Devil Said Bang is the latest Sandman Slim novel, and Richard Kadrey continues to knock them way the hell out of the park. As with previous volume (the first three were Sandman Slim, Kill the Dead, and Aloha From Hell), Devil is the harder-than-hard-boiled story of James Stark, a distant descendant of Wild Bill Hickok and a wild magic talent whose LA coven conspired against him, sending him to Hell. There he was turned into a gladiator and assassin, killing hellions in the pit and murdering Lucifer's generals in their beds until he escaped to earth, bent on revenge.

Devil is the latest installment in what is, at core, a superhero story (albeit one with a lot of gore and Satanism) and after three books, Kadrey has arrived at that point where the superhero's successful adventures have left him with so many powerful artefacts and so much authority and so many dead enemies that he's essentially become a God. Devil is a story about the ways in which it can be pretty terrible at the top, as Stark tries to come to grips with his own power -- power he's always reviled in others -- while continuing to slaughter, bad-mouth, and humiliate his enemies, be they demons, angels, monsters, ghosts or humans.

Filled with perverted sex, awesome one-liners, gore, murder, and a necronomiconical sense of the daemonic, Devil shows that these are the books that Kadrey was born to write. One of the original cyberpunks, Kadrey has always been the grittiest of the gritty lot, the chipped switchblade in a box full of fractal-edged nanofabricated scalpels. Compared to Kadrey, other supernatural horror writers feel like they've been drinking the thrice-brewed tea of HP Lovecraft, while Kadrey has been performing blood sacrifices in abandoned LA parking garages. Read these books, and be delighted.

Devil Said Bang

The Mark Inside: the best book I've read on the long con

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:03:11 +0000

Amy Reading's The Mark Inside is perhaps the best book I've ever read on con artists and con artistry, a retelling of one of the classic stories of the bunco boom that marked the start of the 20th century in America. Reading builds her book around the life story of J Frank Norfleet, a soft-spoken, thrifty Texas rancher who built his fortune up from nothing, only to lose it all to a gang of swindlers. Norfleet became obsessed with the men who'd victimized him, and became a nationally famous vigilante, crisscrossing America bent on capturing and jailing the whole gang -- and any other con-men he met along the way.

Norfleet himself was transformed by his quest, which awoke in him a kind of inner showman and bunco artist. He delighted in showing off for the press and for audiences, spinning yarns as adeptly as the con artists he hunted. In order to get cooperation from government prosecutors and lawmen, he had to flimflam them, too, convincing them with carefully scripted cons of his own. Reading places Norfleet's con within the wider context of the con-artists who ruled America and the shifting American attitude towards wagering and speculating, showing how the whole nation was moving itself from a republican thriftiness to a nation that mythologized plungers and get-rich-quickmen who made a fortune by dicing with dollars in markets and at the faro tables.

I've read dozens of books about and by con artists (the bunco boom had its own publishing wing, and every fast talker who lived long enough seems to have penned a memoir after the fashion of The Yellow Kid Weil). Not a one of them captures the pathos and bathos, the absurdity and temerity, the virtuosity and the venality of the con man quite like Reading. She writes with the lyricism of a magic realist, but with the rigor of a historian, and so much of her best analysis springs from her explorations of the differences between different accounts of the same events.

Books like Where Wizards Stay Up Late and The Right Stuff and The Information perfectly captured their own individual moments in time -- turning points in the modern history of the Earth. The Mark Inside stands with these as an engrossing and illuminating account of the moment at which speculation -- not thrift -- became the order of the day in America, and it's thrilling and hilarious by turns and when you're done, you understand the past and the present better.

The Mark Inside

Switching to a straight razor

Sean Bonner — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 13:00:52 +0000

I stared, face lathered up, sweat dripping, hand shaking, into the fogging mirror in my bathroom almost every day for over 2 weeks before I built up the courage to actually put the 4" razor to my face and take a swipe.

The fact that I hadn't shaved on any regular basis for any period in my life because of the bloody mess that inevitably ensued didn't help matters, but mostly I was just afraid of slicing my jugular wide open and being mocked after my death for as the idiot who even attempted this in the first place. I took a deep breath and went for it.

How did I get to this point? It all started in early 2012 when the previously beardy version of myself was engaged in an exciting and thought provoking discussion with seven or eight other beardy gentlemen. I noticed that every single one of these guys was fiddling with their facial hair. I thought that odd for a moment until I realized I was as well.

I went home that night and shaved.

I'd had facial hair - to one extent or another - since I hit puberty, so it was a change. Because I can't do anything the easy way, and because I've become obsessed with what physical items I add to my life (but mostly because I can't do anything the easy way) I knew right away that if this was going to be a regular thing I needed an option other than the plasticy disposable razor I was currently holding.

My reluctance to acquire new objects was enflamed every time I needed new razors, and so was my disappointment in myself for buying something that I knew from the start was disposable. And quickly doing the math, the 3-pack of Schick Xtreme razors I'd taken a shine to ran about $14 and would last me a little shy of 2 weeks, so that's nearing on $350 a year on crap I'd be buying and then throwing out.

I just couldn't keep doing it. I started researching different shaving methods. I watched a lot of YouTube videos of dudes in towels videoing themselves in the bathroom and visited some popular shaving message boards.

Yes, there are message boards where people spend countless hours every day blowing off work to talk about shaving. You might laugh at that - as I did when I found them - but damn if there wasn't a wealth of knowledge there to be uncovered. Trust me when I tell you this, the most important thing for me was not what was there, but what wasn't: a memorial collection of now deceased members who accidentally slit their own throats and died.

I reminded myself of that every single day as I tried to work up the confidence put this giant blade on my face. I decided on using a straight razor for a number of reasons. I didn't want something electrical because then I'm still stuck buying batteries or having to struggle with a cord getting in the way, or whatever else comes up with cleaning stuff like that.

The so called "safety razors" still required new blades and seem to be anything but safe - almost every single post I read about someone who cut their finger or their face, certainly anyone who was discussing what they considered to be a serious cut - those were all the results of safety razors.

It almost seems like a joke how nasty those things are to have such a friendly name. Which might be the problem, when you have something called "safety" you relax and assume it's safe. And that's when it cuts off your lip.

A straight razor doesn't suffer from that as it reminds you every time you see it how scary it is. But it's also tried and tested and was used by millions of people for a hell of a long time on the regular so it had to have some redeeming qualities.

I could expand on what those might be but I really made the decision because they just look cool. What actually sold me was the realization that once you buy the set up, assuming you take care of it, you really never have to buy anything again. There were people online claiming to own and still be able to shave with straight razors that had been passed down to them by grandparents. That kind of quality and lasting usage was exactly what I wanted.

I smiled, thinking of my own son Ripley, and the fear and panic I'd be gifting to him many years from now when I passed my razor on to him. So I started hunting for what my set up would be.

First and foremost I needed to find a quality razor made by a reputable company. There are a handful of old and well respected companies still making straight razors - and most of them make both high end and low end models. Which is cool, but it also seems sketchy.

When you are talking electronics then there are countless parts and features that can be tweaked to create a high and low end variation of a similar product. But when the product is a single piece of metal attached to a handle… yeah.

Weird right? Also, turns out there are like a hundred different kinds of grinds and edge types and corner styles that a straight razor can have. There are no shortage of people willing to write epic message board posts about why one is better than the other but it all seems to boil down to personal opinion.

I didn't want to buy an entry level razor and then have it suck and scare me away, or have to buy a new one months down the line, so I decided if I was already spending $300+ on disposable razors a year that's the ballpark I should consider for a straight razor.

I'd originally been drawn in by the the "Flowing" razor by Dovo. The guy at The Superior Shave even said it's the nicest razor they make.

Then a friend sent me a link to a smaller US based razor making upstart called Hart. I was immediately impressed with their minimal designs, focus on quality and lack logos all over the blades. When I emailed them a few questions and they immediately offered to overnight me a razor to examine in person I was kinda blown away. This is 2012, there are still companies that doing things like that? By this point I'd been window shopping for a while, and had the opportunity to hold a number of razors, but nothing was like the Hart razor when I picked it up.

The quality was instantly noticeable - combined with their obviously excellent customer service, this was a good sign. The gentleman I spoke with pointed out that in addition to the regular line offered on their site they make a special edition razor that has been blackened with gun-bluing exclusively for a barber shop right here in Los Angeles called Baxter. The bluing provides an extra layer of corrosion resistance.

I was sold.

Razor chalked off the list, now came what I assumed would be the difficult task of finding vegan friendly accessories in a genre of object that seems to fetishize leather and animal hair. Turns out, not so difficult.

You know that dark strap of leather that is always hanging from old timey barber chairs? Apparently it has a function. It's called a strop, and you need to drag a straight razor back and forth on one every day to maintain a sharp edge.

Legendary razor strop maker Tony Miller sells a totally synthetic vegan strop right on his site. He was sold out when I initially contacted him, but within a month I had one in my hands. And while badger hair brushes appear to be the ultimate shaving status symbol, one of the best reviewed brushes on Amazon is the Parker synthetic shaving brush so I grabbed that too. That was about 5 months ago and I'm happy to report that I'm not dead yet.

In fact, I haven't even suffered a cut worse than I might have using the disposables. It took me at least 3 weeks to take the first stroke with the blade on my face. The thing you learn really quick with a straight razor is that decisive movements are where it's at.

Hesitate, and you cut yourself.

Of course, there is all kinds of technique to work on, how to hold the thing and what angle to strive for, and keeping your stroke straight up and down and never side to side. And all the is important, but getting over the fear of using the thing in the first place is really the hardest part. You should never stop respecting how deadly it potentially is, but at the same time you don't want to be timid when using it. Shaky hands lead to shaky cuts and there will be blood.

What about the results? Since I wasn't a big shaver before this it's hard for me to compare against anything, but I think this method delivers an insanely close shave. The best part for me is that there is almost no irritation at all. No razor burn of any kind and my face doesn't feel on fire for the next 2 hours like it did when I used a disposable razor.

In 5 months, I haven't had to spend another cent after my initial set up. And going through this routine 2-3 times a week – and it definitely is a routine – has gotten much easier. I'm much more comfortable holding and using the razor and actually enjoy the process.

Would I recommend it? Hell yes. I feel like I've accomplished something by just mastering how to hold the damn thing, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it gave me a weird confidence boost.

Every other challenge you face in the day gets some perspective when you've already had a razor against your throat.

The coming civil war over general purpose computing

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 15:38:53 +0000

The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing

By Cory Doctorow

Even if we win the right to own and control our computers, a dilemma remains: what rights do owners owe users?

This talk was delivered at Google in August, and for The Long Now Foundation in July 2012. A transcript of the notes follows.

I gave a talk in late 2011 at 28C3 in Berlin called "The Coming War on General Purpose Computing"

In a nutshell, its hypothesis was this:

• Computers and the Internet are everywhere and the world is increasingly made of them.

• We used to have separate categories of device: washing machines, VCRs, phones, cars, but now we just have computers in different cases. For example, modern cars are computers we put our bodies in and Boeing 747s are flying Solaris boxes, whereas hearing aids and pacemakers are computers we put in our body.

• This means that all of our sociopolitical problems in the future will have a computer inside them, too—and a would-be regulator saying stuff like this:

"Make it so that self-driving cars can't be programmed to drag race"

"Make it so that bioscale 3D printers can't make harmful organisms or restricted compounds"

Which is to say: "Make me a general-purpose computer that runs all programs except for one program that freaks me out."

But there's a problem. We don't know how to make a computer that can run all the programs we can compile except for whichever one pisses off a regulator, or disrupts a business model, or abets a criminal.

The closest approximation we have for such a device is a computer with spyware on it— a computer that, if you do the wrong thing, can intercede and say, "I can't let you do that, Dave."

Such a a computer runs programs designed to be hidden from the owner of the device, and which the owner can't override or kill. In other words: DRM. Digital Rights Managment.

These computers are a bad idea for two significant reasons. First, they won't solve problems. Breaking DRM isn't hard for bad guys. The copyright wars' lesson is that DRM is always broken with near-immediacy.

DRM only works if the "I can't let you do that, Dave" program stays a secret. Once the most sophisticated attackers in the world liberate that secret, it will be available to everyone else, too.

Second, DRM has inherently weak security, which thereby makes overall security weaker.

Certainty about what software is on your computer is fundamental to good computer security, and you can't know if your computer's software is secure unless you know what software it is running.

Designing "I can't let you do that, Dave" into computers creates an enormous security vulnerability: anyone who hijacks that facility can do things to your computer that you can't find out about.

Moreover, once a government thinks it has "solved" a problem with DRM—with all its inherent weaknesses—that creates a perverse incentive to make it illegal to tell people things that might undermine the DRM.

You know, things like how the DRM works. Or "here's a flaw in the DRM which lets an attacker secretly watch through your webcam or listen through your mic."

I've had a lot of feedback from various distinguished computer scientists, technologists, civil libertarians and security researchers after 28C3. Within those fields, there is a widespread consensus that, all other things being equal, computers are more secure and society is better served when owners of computers can control what software runs on them.

Let's examine for a moment what that would mean.

Most computers today are fitted with Trusted Platform Module. This is a secure co-processor mounted on the motherboard. The specification of TPMs are published, and an industry body certifies compliance with those specifications. To the extent that the spec is good (and the industry body is diligent), it's possible to be reasonably certain that you've got a real, functional, TPM in your computer that faithfully implements the spec.

How is the TPM secure? It contains secrets: cryptographic keys. But it's also secure in that it's designed to be tamper-evident. If you try to extract the keys from a TPM, or remove the TPM from a computer and replace it with a gimmicked one, it will be very obvious to the computer's owner.

One threat to TPM is that a crook (or a government, police force or other adversary) might try to compromise your computer — tamper-evidence is what lets you know when your TPM has been fiddled with.

Another TPM threat-model is that a piece of malicious software will infect your computer

Now, once your computer is compromised this way, you could be in great trouble. All of the sensors attached to the computer—mic, camera, accelerometer, fingerprint reader, GPS—might be switched on without your knowledge. Off goes the data to the bad guys.

All the data on your computer (sensitive files, stored passwords and web history)? Off it goes to the bad guys—or erased.

All the keystrokes into your computer—your passwords!—might be logged. All the peripherals attached to your computer—printers, scanners, SCADA controllers, MRI machines, 3D printers— might be covertly operated or subtly altered.

Imagine if those "other peripherals" included cars or avionics. Or your optic nerve, your cochlea, the stumps of your legs.

When your computer boots up, the TPM can ask the bootloader for a signed hash of itself and verify that the signature on the hash comes from a trusted party. Once you trust the bootloader to faithfully perform its duties, you can ask it to check the signatures on the operating system, which, once verified, can check the signatures on the programs that run on it.

Ths ensures that you know which programs are running on your computer—and that any programs running in secret have managed the trick by leveraging a defect in the bootloader, operating system or other components, and not because a new defect has been inserted into your system to create a facility for hiding things from you.

This always reminds me of Descartes: he starts off by saying that he can't tell what's true and what's not true, because he's not sure if he really exists.

He finds a way of proving that he exists, and that he can trust his senses and his faculty for reason.

Having found a tiny nub of stable certainty on which to stand, he builds a scaffold of logic that he affixes to it, until he builds up an entire edifice.

Likewise, a TPM is a nub of stable certainty: if it's there, it can reliably inform you about the code on your computer.

Now, you may find it weird to hear someone like me talking warmly about TPMs. After all, these are the technologies that make it possible to lock down phones, tablets, consoles and even some PCs so that they can't run software of the owner's choosing.

Jailbreaking" usually means finding some way to defeat a TPM or TPM-like technology. So why on earth would I want a TPM in my computer?

As with everything important, the devil is in the details.

Imagine for a moment two different ways of implementing a TPM:

1. Lockdown

Your TPM comes with a set of signing keys it trusts, and unless your bootloader is signed by a TPM-trusted party, you can't run it. Moreover, since the bootloader determines which OS launches, you don't get to control the software in your machine.

2. Certainty

You tell your TPM which signing keys you trust—say, Ubuntu, EFF, ACLU and Wikileaks—and it tells you whether the bootloaders it can find on your disk have been signed by any of those parties. It can faithfully report the signature on any other bootloaders it finds, and it lets you make up your own damn mind about whether you want to trust any or all of the above.

Approximately speaking, these two scenarios correspond to the way that iOS and Android work: iOS only lets you run Apple-approved code; Android lets you tick a box to run any code you want. Critically, however, Android lacks the facility to do some crypto work on the software before boot-time and tell you whether the code you think you're about to run is actually what you're about to run.

It's freedom, but not certainty.

In a world where the computers we're discussing can see and hear you, where we insert our bodies into them, where they are surgically implanted into us, and where they fly our planes and drive our cars, certainty is a big deal.

This is why I like the idea of a TPM, assuming it is implemented in the "certainty" mode and not the "lockdown" mode.

If that's not clear, think of it this way: a "war on general-purpose computing" is what happens when the control freaks in government and industry demand the ability to remotely control your computers

The defenders against that attack are also control freaks—like me—but they happen to believe that device-owners should have control over their computers

Both sides want control, but differ on which side should have control.

Control requires knowledge. If you want to be sure that songs can only moved onto an iPod, but not off of an iPod, the iPod needs to know that the instructions being given to it by the PC (to which it is tethered) are emanating from an Apple-approved iTunes. It needs to know they're not from something that impersonates iTunes in order to get the iPod to give it access to those files.

If you want to be sure that my PVR won't record the watch-once video-on-demand movie that I've just paid for, you need to be able to ensure that the tuner receiving the video will only talk to approved devices whose manufacturers have promised to honor "do-not-record" flags in the programmes.

If I want to be sure that you aren't watching me through my webcam, I need to know what the drivers are and whether they honor the convention that the little green activity light is always switched on when my camera is running.

If I want to be sure that you aren't capturing my passwords through my keyboard, I need to know that the OS isn't lying when it says there aren't any keyloggers on my system.

Whether you want to be free—or want to enslave—you need control. And for that, you need this knowledge.

That's the coming war on general purpose computing. But now I want to investigate what happens if we win it.

We could face a interesting prospect. This I call the coming civil war over general purpose computing.

Let's stipulate that a victory for the "freedom side" in the war on general purpose computing would result in computers that let their owners know what was running on them. Computers would faithfully report the hash and associated signatures for any bootloaders they found, control what was running on computers, and allow their owners to specify who was allowed to sign their bootloaders, operating systems, and so on.

There are two arguments that we can make for this:

1. Human rights

If your world is made of computers, then designing computers to override their owners' decisions has significant human rights implications. Today we worry that the Iranian government might demand import controls on computers, so that only those capable of undetectable surveillance are operable within its borders. Tomorrow we might worry about whether the British government would demand that NHS-funded cochlear implants be designed to block reception of "extremist" language, to log and report it, or both.

2. Property rights

The doctrine of first sale is an important piece of consumer law. It says that once you buy something, it belongs to you, and you should have the freedom to do anything you want with it, even if that hurts the vendor's income. Opponents of DRM like the slogan, "You bought it, you own it."

Property rights are an incredibly powerful argument. This goes double in America, where strong property rights enforcement is seen as the foundation of all social remedies.

This goes triple for Silicon Valley, where you can't swing a cat without hitting a libertarian who believes that the major — or only — legitimate function of a state is to enforce property rights and contracts around them.

Which is to say that if you want to win a nerd fight, property rights are a powerful weapon to have in your arsenal. And not just nerd fights!

That's why copyfighters are so touchy about the term "Intellectual Property". This synthetic, ideologically-loaded term was popularized in the 1970s as a replacement for "regulatory monopolies" or "creators' monopolies" — because it's a lot easier to get Congress to help you police your property than it is to get them to help enforce your monopoly.

Here is where the civil war part comes in.

Human rights and property rights both demand that computers not be designed for remote control by governments, corporations, or other outside institutions. Both ensure that owners be allowed to specify what software they're going to run. To freely choose the nub of certainty from which they will suspend the scaffold of their computer's security.

Remember that security is relative: you are secured from attacks on your ability to freely use your music if you can control your computing environment. This, however, erodes the music industry's own security to charge you some kind of rent, on a use-by-use basis, for your purchased music.

If you get to choose the nub from which the scaffold will dangle, you get control and the power to secure yourself against attackers. If the the government, the RIAA or Monsanto chooses the nub, they get control and the power to secure themselves against you.

In this dilemma, we know what side we fall on. We agree that at the very least, owners should be allowed to know and control their computers.

But what about users?

Users of computers don't always have the same interests as the owners of computers— and, increasingly, we will be users of computers that we don't own.

Where you come down on conflicts between owners and users is going to be one of the most meaningful ideological questions in technology's history. There's no easy answer that I know about for guiding these decisions.

Let's start with a total pro-owner position: "property maximalism".

• If it's my computer, I should have the absolute right to dictate the terms of use to anyone who wants to use it. If you don't like it, find someone else's computer to use.

How would that work in practice? Through some combination of an initialization routine, tamper evidence, law, and physical control. For example, when you turn on your computer for the first time, you initialize a good secret password, possibly signed by your private key.

Without that key, no-one is allowed to change the list of trusted parties from which your computer's TPM will accept bootloaders. We could make it illegal to subvert this system for the purpose of booting an operating system that the device's owner has not approved. Such as law would make spyware really illegal, even moreso than now, and would also ban the secret installation of DRM.

We could design the TPM so that if you remove it, or tamper with it, it's really obvious — give it a fragile housing, for example, which is hard to replace after the time of manufacture, so it's really obvious to a computer's owner that someone has modified the device, possibly putting it in an unknown and untrustworthy state. We could even put a lock on the case.

I can see a lot of benefits to this, but there downsides, too.

Consider self-driving cars. There's a lot of these around already, of course, designed by Google and others. It's easy to understand, how, on the one hand, self-driving cars are an incredibly great development. We are terrible drivers, and cars kill the shit out of us. It's the number 1 cause of death in America for people aged 5-34.

I've been hit by a car. I've cracked up a car. I'm willing to stipulate that humans have no business driving at all.

It's also easy to understand how we might be nervous about people being able to homebrew their own car firmware. On one hand, we'd want the source to cars to be open because we'd want to subject it to wide scrutiny. On the other hand, it will be plausible to say, "Cars are safer if they use a locked bootloader that only trusts government-certified firmware".

And now we're back to whether you get to decide what your computer is doing.

But there are two problems with this solution:

First, it won't work. As the copyright wars have shown up, firmware locks aren't very effective against dedicated attackers. People who want to spread mayhem with custom firmware will be able to just that.

What's more, it's not a good security approach: if vehicular security models depend on all the other vehicles being well-behaved and the unexpected never arising, we are dead meat.

Self-driving cars must be conservative in their approach to their own conduct, and liberal in their expectations of others' conduct.

This is the same advice you get in your first day of driver's ed, and it remains good advice even if the car is driving itself.

Second, it invites some pretty sticky parallels. Remember the "information superhighway"?

Say we try to secure our physical roads by demanding that the state (or a state-like entity) gets to certify the firmware of the devices that cruise its lanes. How would we articulate a policy addressing the devices on our (equally vital) metaphorical roads—with comparable firmware locks for PCs, phones, tablets, and other devices?

After all, the general-purpose network means that MRIs, space-ships, and air-traffic control systems share the "information superhighway" with game consoles, Arduino-linked fart machines, and dodgy voyeur cams sold by spammers from the Pearl River Delta.

And consider avionics and power-station automation.

This is a much trickier one. If the FAA mandates a certain firmware for 747s, it's probably going to want those 747s designed so that it and it alone controls the signing keys for their bootloaders. Likewise, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will want the final say on the firmware for the reactor piles.

This may be a problem for the same reason that a ban on modifying car firmware is: it establishes the idea that a good way to solve problems is to let "the authorities" control your software.

But it may be that airplanes and nukes are already so regulated that an additional layer of regulation wouldn't leak out into other areas of daily life — nukes and planes are subject to an extraordinary amount of no-notice inspection and reporting requirements that are unique to their industries.

Second, there's a bigger problem with "owner controls": what about people who use computers, but don't own them?

This is not a group of people that the IT industry has a lot of sympathy for, on the whole.

An enormous amount of energy has been devoted to stopping non-owning users from inadvertently breaking the computers they are using, downloading menu-bars, typing random crap they find on the Internet into the terminal, inserting malware-infected USB sticks, installing plugins or untrustworthy certificates, or punching holes in the network perimeter.

Energy is also spent stopping users from doing deliberately bad things, too. They install keyloggers and spyware to ensnare future users, misappropriate secrets, snoop on network traffic, break their machines and disable the firewalls.

There's a symmetry here. DRM and its cousins are deployed by people who believe you can't and shouldn't be trusted to set policy on the computer you own. Likewise, IT systems are deployed by computer owners who believe that computer users can't be trusted to set policy on the computers they use.

As a former sysadmin and CIO, I'm not going to pretend that users aren't a challenge. But there are good reasons to treat users as having rights to set policy on computers they don't own.

Let's start with the business case.

When we demand freedom for owners, we do so for lots of reasons, but an important one is that computer programmers can't anticipate all the contingencies that their code might run up against — that when the computer says yes, you might need to still say no.

This is the idea that owners possess local situational awareness that can't be perfectly captured by a series of nested if/then statements.

It's also where communist and libertarianis principles converge:

• Friedrich Hayek thought that expertise was a diffuse thing, and that you were more likely to find the situational awareness necessary for good decisionmaking very close to the decision itself — devolution gives better results that centralization.

• Karl Marx believed in the legitimacy of workers' claims over their working environment, saying that the contribution of labor was just as important as the contibution of capital, and demanded that workers be treated as the rightful "owners" of their workplace, with the power to set policy.

For totally opposite reasons, they both believed that the people at the coalface should be given as much power as possible.

The death of mainframes was attended by an awful lot of concern over users and what they might do to the enterprise. In those days, users were even more constrained than they are today. They could only see the screens the mainframe let them see, and only undertake the operations the mainframe let them undertake.

When the PC and Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 appeared, employees risked termination by bringing those machines into the office— or by taking home office data to use with those machines.

Workers developed computing needs that couldn't be met within the constraints set by the firm and its IT department, and didn't think that the legitimacy of their needs would be recognized.

The standard responses would involve some combination of the following:

• Our regulatory compliance prohibits the thing that will help you do your job better.

• If you do your job that way, we won't know if your results are correct.

• You only think you want to do that.

• It is impossible to make a computer do what you want it to do.

• Corporate policy prohibits this.

These may be true. But often they aren't, and even when they are, they're the kind of "truths" that we give bright young geeks millions of dollars in venture capital to falsify—even as middle-aged admin assistants get written up by HR for trying to do the same thing.

The personal computer arrived in the enterprise by the back door, over the objections of IT, without the knowledge of management, at the risk of censure and termination. Then it made the companies that fought it billions. Trillions.

Giving workers powerful, flexible tools was good for firms because people are generally smart and want to do their jobs well. They know stuff their bosses don't know.

So, as an owner, you don't want the devices you buy to be locked, because you might want to do something the designer didn't anticipate.

And employees don't want the devices they use all day locked, because they might want to do something useful that the IT dept didn't anticipate.

This is the soul of Hayekism — we're smarter at the edge than we are in the middle.

The business world pays a lot of lip service to Hayek's 1940s ideas about free markets. But when it comes to freedom within the companies they run, they're stuck a good 50 years earlier, mired in the ideology of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his "scientific management". In this way of seeing things, workers are just an unreliable type of machine whose movements and actions should be scripted by an all-knowing management consultant, who would work with the equally-wise company bosses to determine the one true way to do your job. It's about as "scientific" as trepanation or Myers-Briggs personality tests; it's the ideology that let Toyota cream Detroit's big three.

So, letting enterprise users do the stuff they think will allow them to make more money for their companies will sometimes make their companies more money.

That's the business case for user rights. It's a good one, but really I just wanted to get it out of the way so that I could get down to the real meat: Human rights.

This may seem a little weird on its face, but bear with me.

Earlier this year, I saw a talk by Hugh Herr, Director of the Biomechatronics group at The MIT Media Lab. Herr's talks are electrifying. He starts out with a bunch of slides of cool prostheses: Legs and feet, hands and arms, and even a device that uses focused magnetism to suppress activity in the brains of people with severe, untreatable depression, to amazing effect.

Then he shows this slide of him climbing a mountain. He's buff, he's clinging to the rock like a gecko. And he doesn't have any legs: just these cool mountain climbing prostheses. Herr looks at the audience from where he's standing, and he says, "Oh yeah, didn't I mention it? I don't have any legs, I lost them to frostbite."

He rolls up his trouser legs to show off these amazing robotic gams, and proceeds to run up and down the stage like a mountain goat.

The first question anyone asked was, "How much did they cost?"

He named a sum that would buy you a nice brownstone in central Manhattan or a terraced Victorian in zone one in London.

The second question asked was, "Well, who will be able to afford these?

To which Herr answered "Everyone. If you have to choose between a 40-year mortgage on a house and a 40-year mortgage on legs, you're going to choose legs"

So it's easy to consider the possibility that there are going to be people — potentially a lot of people — who are "users" of computers that they don't own, and where those computers are part of their bodies.

Mmost of the tech world understands why you, as the owner of your cochlear implants, should be legally allowed to choose the firmware for them. After all, when you own a device that is surgically implanted in your skull, it makes a lot of sense that you have the freedom to change software vendors.

Maybe the company that made your implant has the very best signal processing algorithm right now, but if a competitor patents a superior algorithm next year, should you be doomed to inferior hearing for the rest of your life?

And what if the company that made your ears went bankrupt? What if sloppy or sneaky code let bad guys do bad things to your hearing?

These problems can only be overcome by the unambiguous right to change the software, even if the company that made your implants is still a going concern.

That will help owners. But what about users?

Consider some of the following scenarios:

• You are a minor child and your deeply religious parents pay for your cochlear implants, and ask for the software that makes it impossible for you to hear blasphemy.

• You are broke, and a commercial company wants to sell you ad-supported implants that listen in on your conversations and insert "discussions about the brands you love".

• Your government is willing to install cochlear implants, but they will archive everything you hear and review it without your knowledge or consent.

Far-fetched? The Canadian border agency was just forced to abandon a plan to fill the nation's airports with hidden high-sensitivity mics that were intended to record everyone's conversations.

Will the Iranian government, or Chinese government, take advantage of this if they get the chance?

Speaking of Iran and China, there are plenty of human rights activists who believe that boot-locking is the start of a human rights disaster. It's no secret that high-tech companies have been happy to build "lawful intercept" back-doors into their equipment to allow for warrantless, secret access to communications. As these backdoors are now standard, the capability is still there even if your country doesn't want it.

In Greece, there is no legal requirement for lawful intercept on telcoms equipment.

During the 2004/5 Olympic bidding process, an unknown person or agency switched on the dormant capability, harvested an unknown quantity of private communications from the highest level, and switched it off again

Surveillance in the middle of the network is nowhere near as interesting as surveillance at the edge. As the ghosts of Messrs Hayek and Marx will tell you, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening at the coal-face that never makes it back to the central office.

Even "democratic" governments know this. That's why the Bavarian government was illegally installing the "bundestrojan" — literally, state-trojan — on peoples' computers, gaining access to their files and keystrokes and much else besides. So it's a safe bet that the totalitarian governments will happily take advantage of boot-locking and move the surveillance right into the box.

You may not import a computer into Iran unless you limit its trust-model so that it only boots up operating systems with lawful intercept backdoors built into it.

Now, with an owner-controls model, the first person to use a machine gets to initialize the list of trusted keys and then lock it with a secret or other authorization token. What this means is that the state customs authority must initialize each machine before it passes into the country.

Maybe you'll be able to do something to override the trust model. But by design, such a system will be heavily tamper-evident, meaning that a secret policeman or informant can tell at a glance whether you've locked the state out of your computer. And it's not just repressive states, of course, who will be interested in this.

Remember that there are four major customers for the existing censorware/spyware/lockware industry: repressive governments, large corporations, schools, and paranoid parents.

The technical needs of helicopter mums, school systems and enterprises are convergent with those of the governments of Syria and China. They may not share ideological ends, but they have awfully similar technical means to those ends.

We are very forgiving of these institutions as they pursue their ends; you can do almost anything if you're protecting shareholders or children.

For example, remember the widespread indignation, from all sides, when it was revealed that some companies were requiring prospective employees to hand over their Facebook login credentials as a condition of employment?

These employers argued that they needed to review your lists of friends, and what you said to them in private, before determining whether you were suitable for employment.

Facebook checks are the workplace urine test of the 21st century. They're a means of ensuring that your private life doesn't have any unsavoury secrets lurking in it, secrets that might compromise your work.

The nation didn't buy this. From senate hearings to newspaper editorials, the country rose up against the practice.

But no one seems to mind that many employers routinely insert their own intermediate keys into their employees' devices — phones, tablets and computers. This allows them to spy on your Internet traffic, even when it is "secure", with a lock showing in the browser.

It gives your employer access to any sensitive site you access on the job, from your union's message board to your bank to Gmail to your HMO or doctor's private patient repository. And, of course, to everything on your Facebook page.

There's wide consensus that this is OK, because the laptop, phone and tablet your employer issues to you are not your property. They are company property.

And yet, the reason employers give us these mobile devices is because there is no longer any meaningful distinction between work and home.

Corporate sociologists who study the way that we use our devices find time and again that employees are not capable of maintaining strict divisions between "work" and "personal" accounts and devices.

America is the land of the 55-hour work-week, a country where few professionals take any meaningful vacation time, and when they do get away for a day or two, take their work-issued devices with them.

Even in traditional workplaces, we recognized human rights. We don't put cameras in the toilets to curtail employee theft. If your spouse came by the office on your lunch break and the two of you went into the parking lot so that she or he could tell you that the doctor says the cancer is terminal, you'd be aghast and furious to discover that your employer had been spying on you with a hidden mic.

But if you used your company laptop to access Facebook on your lunchbreak, wherein your spouse conveys to you that the cancer is terminal, you're supposed to be OK with the fact that your employer has been running a man-in-the-middle attack on your machine and now knows the most intimate details of your life.

There are plenty of instances in which rich and powerful people — not just workers and children and prisoners — will be users instead of owners.

Every car-rental agency would love to be able to lo-jack the cars they rent to you; remember, an automobile is just a computer you put your body into. They'd love to log all the places you drive to for "marketing" purposes and analytics.

There's money to be made in finagling the firmware on the rental-car's GPS to ensure that your routes always take you past certain billboards or fast-food restaurants.

But in general, the poorer and younger you are, the more likely you are to be a tenant farmer in some feudal lord's computational lands. The poorer and younger you are, the more likely it'll be that your legs will cease to walk if you get behind on payments.

What this means is that any thug who buys your debts from a payday lender could literally — and legally — threaten to take your legs (or eyes, or ears, or arms, or insulin, or pacemaker) away if you failed to come up with the next installment.

Earlier, I discussed how an owner override would work. It would involve some combination of physical access-control and tamper-evidence, designed to give owners of computers the power to know and control what bootloader and OS was running on their machine.

How would a user-override work? An effective user-override would have to leave the underlying computer intact, so that when the owner took it back, she could be sure that it was in the state she believed it to be in. In other words, we need to protect users from owners and owners from users.

Here's one model for that:

Imagine that there is a bootloader that can reliably and accurately report on the kernels and OSes it finds on the drive. This is the prerequisite for state/corporate-controlled systems, owner-controlled systems, and user-controlled systems.

Now, give the bootloader the power to suspend any running OS to disk, encrypting all its threads and parking them, and the power to select another OS from the network or an external drive.

Say I walk into an Internet cafe, and there's an OS running that I can verify. It has a lawful interception back-door for the police, storing all my keystrokes, files and screens in an encrypted blob which the state can decrypt.

I'm an attorney, doctor, corporate executive, or merely a human who doesn't like the idea of his private stuff being available to anyone who is friends with a dirty cop.

So, at this point, I give the three-finger salute with the F-keys. This drops the computer into a minimal bootloader shell, one that invites me to give the net-address of an alternative OS, or to insert my own thumb-drive and boot into an operating system there instead.

The cafe owner's OS is parked and I can't see inside it. But the bootloader can assure me that it is dormant and not spying on me as my OS fires up. When it's done, all my working files are trashed, and the minimal bootloader confirms it.

This keeps the computer's owner from spying on me, and keeps me from leaving malware on the computer to attack its owner.

There will be technological means of subverting this, but there is a world of difference between starting from a design spec that aims to protect users from owners (and vice-versa) than one that says that users must always be vulnerable to owners' dictates.

Fundamentally, this is the difference between freedom and openness — between free software and open source.

Now, human rights and property rights often come into conflict with one another. For example, landlords aren't allowed to enter your home without adequate notice. In many places, hotels can't throw you out if you overstay your reservation, provided that you pay the rack-rate for the rooms — that's why you often see these posted on the back of the room-door

Reposession of leased goods — cars, for example — are limited by procedures that require notice and the opportunity to rebut claims of delinquent payments.

When these laws are "streamlined" to make them easier for property holders, we often see human rights abuses. Consider robo-signing eviction mills, which used fraudulent declarations to evict homeowners who were up to date on their mortgages—and even some who didn't have mortgages.

The potential for abuse in a world made of computers is much greater: your car drives itself to the repo yard. Your high-rise apartment building switches off its elevators and climate systems, stranding thousands of people until a disputed license payment is settled.

Sounds fanciful? This has already happened with multi-level parking garages.

Back in 2006, a 314-car Robotic Parking model RPS1000 garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, took all the cars in its guts hostage, locking down the software until the garage's owners paid a licensing bill that they disputed.

They had to pay it, even as they maintained that they didn't owe anything. What the hell else were they going to do?

And what will

you

do when your dispute with a vendor means that you go blind, or deaf, or lose the ability to walk, or become suicidally depressed?

The negotiating leverage that accrues to owners over users is total and terrifying.

Users will be strongly incentivized to settle quickly, rather than face the dreadful penalties that could be visited on them in the event of dispute. And when the owner of the device is the state or a state-sized corporate actor, the potential for human rights abuses skyrockets.

This is not to say that owner override is an unmitigated evil. Think of smart meters that can override your thermostat at peak loads.

Such meters allow us to switch off coal and other dirty power sources that can be varied up at peak times.

But they work best if users — homeowners who have allowed the power-company to install a smart-meter — can't override the meters. What happens when griefers, crooks, or governments trying to quell popular rebellion use this to turn heat off during a hundred year storm? Or to crank heat to maximum during a heat-wave?

The HVAC in your house can hold the power of life and death over you — do we really want it designed to allow remote parties to do stuff with it even if you disagree?

The question is simple. Once we create a design norm of devices that users can't override, how far will that creep?

Especially risky would be the use of owner override to offer payday loan-style services to vulnerable people: Can't afford artificial eyes for your kids? We'll subsidize them if you let us redirect their focus to sponsored toys and sugar-snacks at the store.

Foreclosing on owner override, however, has its own downside. It probably means that there will be poor people who will not be offered some technology at all.

If I can lo-jack your legs, I can lease them to you with the confidence of my power to repo them if you default on payments. If I can't, I may not lease you legs unless you've got a lot of money to begin with.

But if your legs can decide to walk to the repo-depot without your consent, you will be totally screwed the day that muggers, rapists, griefers or the secret police figure out how to hijack that facility.

It gets even more complicated, too, because you are the "user" of many systems in the most transitory ways: subway turnstiles, elevators, the blood-pressure cuff at the doctor's office, public buses or airplanes. It's going to be hard to figure out how to create "user overrides" that aren't nonsensical. We can start, though, by saying a "user" is someone who is the

sole

user of a device for a certain amount of time.

This isn't a problem I know how to solve. Unlike the War on General Purpose Computers, the Civil War over them presents a series of conundra without (to me) any obvious solutions.

These problems are a way off, and they only arise if we win the war over general purpose computing first

But come victory day, when we start planning the constitutional congress for a world where regulating computers is acknowledged as the wrong way to solve problems, let's not paper over the division between property rights and human rights.

This is the sort of division that, while it festers, puts the most vulnerable people in our society in harm's way. Agreeing to disagree on this one isn't good enough. We need to start thinking now about the principles we'll apply when the day comes.

If we don't start now, it'll be too late.

Video: Google. Photos: Cory Doctorow. Layout: Rob Beschizza

Enthralling Books: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

Mark Frauenfelder — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 23:19:15 +0000

Here's my essay in a series of essays about enthralling books. See all the essays in the Enthralling Book series here. -- Mark

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

This twisted psychological suspense novel had me from the first page and I read it every spare moment I had until I finished it. It begins with a man named Nick's description of his morning on the day of his fifth wedding anniversary. Nick and Amy were once bon vivant magazine writers in New York, but the print media implosion put an end to their fun life, and for a variety of reasons ("Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet") they end up in Carthage, Missouri with Nick running a dive bar (using the remainder of Amy's recently obliterated trustfund) with his sister Margo. Later that day, Amy disappears from their house, leaving behind signs of a struggle. The police, and TV viewers around the country, suspect Nick did it.

The second chapter is from Amy's diary, seven years before her disappearance, in which she giddily describes meeting the handsome and funny Nick at a party in Brooklyn.

The chapters alternate between Nick's account of his life after Amy's disappearance, and Amy's diaries entries leading up to the event. We see a happy relationship deteriorate over time. We also see signs of psychopathy and deceit start creeping in as the story unfolds. Since this is a suspense novel, things aren't necessarily what they seem (or are they?) and there are major twists and surprises along the way.

Even as a straight-ahead thriller, Gillian Flynn's novel succeeds with a tight plot that's rich but easy to follow. What made it extra enjoyable for me is Flynn's dark sense of humor, insight into relationships, cultural observations, and developed characters. As messed up as Flynn's characters are, they are believable, unpredictable (even to themselves) and complex, and that's what keeps things interesting. I've read other reviews of Gone Girl in which readers have complained that Amy and Nick are too unlikable to care about. I disagree. I care about them the same way I care about Breaking Bad's Walter White, Mad Men's Don Draper, and Tony Soprano: pathologically manipulative jerks who reveal a shred of humanity often enough that you can relate to them, especially since we all have some element of a dark side in us.

I also liked Amy’s rant about “cool girls.” Here's an excerpt:

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men -- friends, coworkers, strangers -- giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.”

Flynn's previous novels, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects, are queued up on my reading list.

Buy Gone Girl on Amazon

In The Boy Kings, Zuck's personal ghostwriter reveals little

John Biggs — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 17:25:04 +0000

Katherine Losse was present at the creation. Employee 51 at Facebook, the English major became first a major player in the company's customer service team and then rose to prominence in i18n, Facebook's internationalization initiative. She ended her seven year career there as Mark Zuckerberg's blogger. She mimicked his voice in posts and emails, starting with "Hey Everybody" and ending in world domination.

Now, Losse offers a book about her experience there. Covering the period between 2005 and 2012, she sunk into the soft comfort of corporate life just as early Facebook's miasmic jelly hardened into serious business. Losse, because she's not a wonk, is the kind of person that you want writing about this kind of rise: she writes like she's working out a Lorrie Moore story set at Xerox/PARC and, as a result, she leaves out the nerdiness and attempts to replace it with humanity.

Sadly, editing or elision breaks the story far too often to give The Boy Kings a resounding Like. Take, for example, the central relationship with Thrax, an unnamed programmer with whom she spends an inordinate amount of time. Like a phimosis-suffering Louis XVI, Thrax prefers programming and running around with the geeks to creating a meaningful relationship with Losse. They dance around a kiss for years, and eventually you just don't care.

The rest of the story—the tales of untrammeled growth, the largesse, the haughty boy king Zuckerberg—is painted with the broadest brush. It was as if an editor said "We don't want any of that computer stuff in here" and cast it all out, leaving a husk. For a book about social networks, we don't meet many of the main characters. Names pop up randomly, as if we were reading Losse's News Feed. No one is described in any detail; but maybe we don't need to really "see" a group of man-children "ripsticking" around an empty office at 2am. Losse does the best she can with what amounts to a skein of electronic relationships.

But it also feels like Losse held a lot back. Some corners of the Internet expressed disbelief at the sexism at Facebook, although most of what she describes is nearly neuter: these boy kings can't be sexist, because they're not actually sexed. They're nerds given a little power, and when they have to handle soft skills like talking to girls and being friendly, they fail. The brogrammer, at least in Losse's world, is less bro and more boring.

I can recommend this book as a short slice of life, but if you're looking for a look inside Facebook, or even an understanding of its growth and expansion, you're going to have to wait. Losse isn't that writer, and that's fine. However, if you want to see what it's like to be a liberal arts major among the technologists, Losse has that down completely, almost to a fault. Like her chaste, weird relationship with Thrax, she held herself at a far remove from the goings-on in Facebook and the book highlights that remove starkly and with grace.

The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network [Amazon]

How to turn a PR nightmare into a dream

David Ng — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 05:10:49 +0000

Ever since the Keystone XL Pipeline (originally slated to transport Tar Sand bitumen from Alberta to Nebraska) was stalled, the attention on finding a new delivery route for this tar sand oil has focused around my own neck of the woods, British Columbia. And it seems like every time I open the paper, there's some new story about big oil PR shenanigans [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. All of this, of course, makes you wonder what a big oil PR session actually entails, and whether a memo like the fictitious one below (a.k.a. me having a little fun), is not so far from the truth...

Memo: Turning pipeline leaks into something positive!

PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL

ATTN: All executives, PR

Alright everyone, it’s time for some major spin control. We managed to plug that pipeline up, but now we seem to be losing the public relations fight what with the freaking amount of bitumen that spilled out. Seriously, the bad press is everywhere, and we are, quite frankly, getting crucified out there. So what can we do about this? How can we turn this PR nightmare into a PR fairytale?

Well, we think that we’ve got an idea that can’t lose. Let me explain. Basically, when we thought about the idea of a PR fairytale, we thought about castles. And when we thought about castles--stick with me here--as vanguards of the capitalist world, of course we didn’t think about real historic castles. No, we thought about pink stucco ones, like the kind you might associate with movie studios and animated versions of Cinderella. And then (like magic, we did this all at once, I swear) we said to ourselves, “THEME PARK!” And then we wondered, how much energy is in this leaked tar sand product anyway?

Well, it turns out (with some very speedy back of the envelope calculations) that the amount of energy we can get from it might be good enough to explore the running of our own magic kingdom! Well, at least if we can count on a few more leaks along the way. But how cool would that be? Anyway, here’s the gist. We just pull that energy from our happy accident(s), redirect it, and then run this baby! It’ll be like the leaks happened on purpose! Awesome!

But we digress. Let’s not bore you with talk of energy and leaks, let’s talk THEME PARK!

Now this is just preliminary brainstorming, but we’re thinking a great name would be “Slick City!” Nice, right? Maybe even add to that a catchy tagline - something like The Family Friendly Pipeline Spill! We can even have animal characters wandering around the park, with maybe some kind of funky gel-like oil in their fur and feathers so it looks all cool and shiny. And yes, there will be a Fossil Fuel Palace, made out of glistening anthracite! I can even envision a theatre area where an oiled-down animal mascot version of the musical Grease is performed.

Is it just me, or are people going to pay some serious coin to see that?

And the rides: how about one called “Shutting down the science!” You'd have these carts that go around a track, and the riders have these light guns that shoot at things for points. For instance, they can shoot at all the nasty scientists who want to report on their work, or shoot at research centers that might be making inconvenient discoveries. Ha ha, just kidding - I’m just throwing ideas out there, but you get the picture right?

We also need a giant slide of somesort. What if we design the slide so that it followed the same curve as the hockey stick graph? And what if we call it the Carbonator or something cool like that?

And the big ticket item? Obviously, this will be an epic rollercoaster. Perhaps one made to look like a big old pipeline. We could even make it from real pipeline parts! Don’t we get discounts for those kinds of things? As well, this ride is going to be amazing: it’s going to be the future of log rides. Instead of logs, the folks could sit in oil barrels, and instead of traveling through water, maybe those barrels would even go faster in a petroleum based fluid. Extra bonus if we get to light it on fire!

This is totally a goldmine of an opportunity. It’s like the ideas are just flowing and the theme park is creating itself! FRIED FOOD! Whoa. That one came out of nowhere! Seriously folks, we’ve hit oil here and it’s a gusher.

Batman Earth One: rebooting the bat

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:00:42 +0000

Batman: Earth One is a reboot of the Batman story written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by Gary Frank. It's a timely book, coinciding with the conclusion of the trilogy of Christopher Nolan Batman films, and it offers a very good entry to the series for people who haven't followed it closely until now.

We've seen a lot of remixes and retellings of the Batman origin story, and I think this is my favorite to date. Johns dispenses with some of the less plausible aspects of the Batman myth, and presents us with a Gotham that is out of control, corrupt, dark and glorious. There's a haunted house, there are serial killers, Hollywood phonies, and a mayor named Oswald Cobblepot.

The book moves swiftly, hits all the right emotional notes, and is beautifully made and illustrated. I picked my copy up at Secret Headquarters on a recent trip to LA, on staff recommendation (I've never gotten a bum steer from SHQ). It's got me excited about Batman comics for the first time in 20 years.

Batman: Earth One

Cow week: Welsh cattle hate dog walkers

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:01:11 +0000

Editorial note — Cow Week is a tongue-in-cheek look at risk analysis and why we fear the things we fear. It is inspired by the Discovery Channel's Shark Week, the popularity of which is largely driven by the public's fascination with and fear of sharks. Turns out, cows kill more people every year than sharks do. Each day, I will post about a cow-related death, and add to it some information about the bigger picture.

In 2009 and again in 2011, Welsh cattle joined forces to surround and kill women who were out walking their dogs on the outskirts of Cardiff. Apparently, cows really do not like it when you bring a dog around them. So, FYI on that. This story is from a survivor of the 2009 attack:

"I was slightly ahead when I saw the cows, they looked up and seemed curious and started to move towards us both," she said.

"They were coming in a semi-circular formation so I was heading towards the end so I could get away from them."

The next time she looked around Ms Hinchey appeared to be surrounded by the cows, she said.

One of things that made me post this particular story was the disconnect between the idealized image of a field full of docile cattle, happily grazing on grass ... and the truly creepy and threatening image presented in the quote above. I mean, it's like something from a Stephen King novel. Of course, I also don't have a lot of experience with cows in my personal, daily life. So my idealized image isn't based so much on what I think cows are actually like, but what I want them to be like. That's what really makes this image creepy for me. The cows are behaving ways that I don't imagine cows should behave.

People who spend their careers thinking critically about risk say disconnects like this can play a role in determining what we fear. Craig Cormick is the manager of public awareness and community engagement for the Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. Part of his job is understanding what technologies the public finds really risky and why. Last year, he spoke at the University of Michigan's Risk Science Center. The discussion touched on the way people in Western countries often assign more risk to food issues—and obsess about the possible risks of food more—than they do with other areas of their lives.

... we’ve never lived at a time and society when people are so far divorced from agricultural production, most people never get to see a farm, they have no idea how livestock is produced, no idea how food is produced and have a perception that it should all be natural, and it should be great and that would – ideally that would be marvelous but reality is that’s not how our food is produced. large agricultural production is the only way to feed the numbers of people we have and so there’s a romantic idealized view of what is good natural food as opposed to food that’s not and so when people perceive that you are tinkering with the food yes they have outrage and they have rage about this and when you have rage and fear together it’s a very-very dominant cocktail of emotions it’s very hard to turn around, very hard to turn around.

READ MORE
Read more about the two cow-related deaths near Cardiff.
Read a transcript of Craig Cormick's discussion
Watch the webcast of the discussion

READ ALL OF COW WEEK
• Cow Kills Irish Pensioner
• Bull Kills Man, Follows Him Until Certain He Is Dead
• Angry cows vs. angry mothers

Image: Hello u cutie Flickr Cows with - ATTITUDE, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from tir_na_nog's photostream

On quack cancer cures, and "alternative medicine" as religion

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:48:05 +0000

I loved Science Blogs contributor Orac before I was diagnosed with cancer. I love him a whole lot more now. I'll get to why in a moment, but I want to share something personal first (cracks knuckles).

Well-meaning friends have suggested I try coffee enemas and Burzynskian "antineoplastons" and oxygen therapy to cure my breast cancer; others have told me the reason some of my cells went mutinous is because I offended the Great Invisible Beardy Man in the Sky.

Dude, I've heard it all.

I am active on Twitter in talking about cancer, sharing the experience of my treatment (which fucking sucks), and connecting with fellow persons with cancer.

One of those fellow travelers yesterday tweeted this link, which praises the work of "ND" Judy Seeger. In alternative healing parlance, ND stands for naturopathic doctor. I like Orac's definition better: "not a doctor."

Let me be blunt: I think people who sell fake cancer cures are murderers.

I spoke about the content of that blog post with my radiation oncologist yesterday, after I lay down under the linear accelerator for another daily (yep, daily) blast of rays to kill any remaining lurking cells that might want to off me a few years down the road.

I hate radiation treatment, by the way. HATE IT. But I hate cancer more.

The tl;dr of the conversation I had in the exam room with my rad-onc: medicine isn't perfect, and people who work in the health care system, like my doc, know many aspects of it are broken. Many of them will tell you they are frustrated at how brutal the effects of radiation, chemo, and surgery are on those of us who must endure. But this is the best we have, for now.

Green smoothies are great, but they alone cannot cure cancer. Oncology isn't guaranteed to cure us, but quackery is guaranteed to kill us. What doctors like my rad-onc practice is constantly under scrutiny, and has endured the test of peer-reviewed science and empirical logic. It is the best we have. Rattlesnake powder, laetrile, and squirting espresso up your ass (real things that real people have told me I should do instead of sciencey-medicine) is not.

There are no dark Big Pharma cabals hiding a secret cure for cancer (aka "THE TRUTH," in all caps, as natural cure proponents are wont to type in blog comments). The FDA isn't "hiding" the cure for cancer, either. Believe me, the medical industry would find a way to popularize and profit from that cure, if it did exist. And I'd be first in line, if it worked.

Anyway, about Orac. He tears down naturopathic cancer cures in this post. And in this one, today, he explores the idea of "alternative medicine" as a faith-based religion.

"What we are doing (or trying to do)," writes Orac, is to rely on science rather than faith."

The longer I study alternative medicine and alternative medical systems, the more it becomes clear to me that they show far more similarity to religion than they do to science. It’s true that alt-med apologists dress up their beliefs in language that sounds scientific, but when you scratch the patina of scientific language off, it doesn’t take long to find the religious imagery, often facilitated by the more conventional religious beliefs (i.e, Christianity) of the believer. We see the same thing with respect to evolution denial. So why not with denial of scientific medicine? A nonscientific world view that is based on faith in things that can’t be seen is often not confined to church.

If you haven't spent a ton of time thinking about cancer like I have—and I didn't think about it much before I was diagnosed—you might not know that some idiots actually believe that people like me get cancer because they think bad thoughts. Or conversely, because they don't think enough good thoughts. I'm not kidding. Read the Orac posts. And pass them on to anyone who has cancer, and is frightened and desperate and thinking about ditching science for faith.

I believe cancer patients have every right to choose whatever course of treatment we want, including no treatment at all. But lies and false hope have no place in our lives, least of all when our lives are threatened by a disease that wants to kill us.

If I had fake cancer, I'd totally use fake cancer cures. But I have real cancer.

Friends don't let friends believe in bullshit science.
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) May 7, 2012