Boing Boing » money

Infographic: how money corrupts Congress, and what to do about it

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 02 May 2013 03:10:13 +0000

Money wins Elections is an excellent, scrolling infographic that illustrates how money corrupts the American legislative process, showing that time and again, Congress has voted the way that the big money told it to, against the prevailing popular opinion. It's all in support of the American Anti-corruption Act, and it was created by Tony Chu for part of his MFA thesis project.

Money wins Elections

New Canadian $5 celebrates the space programme

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:00:04 +0000

I'm pretty fond of the design of the new Canadian plastic $5 note, which is much improved if you draw Spock ears, eyebrows and hairline on old Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

The new Canadian $5 bill has just destroyed every single other piece of currency in the world (IMO) (farm9.staticflickr.com)

New US$100 bill in circulation 10/8

David Pescovitz — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:12:17 +0000

The new US$100 bill will go into circulation on October 8, 2013. New security features include a "3-D Security Ribbon" woven into the paper. The image changes from bells to 100s with the viewing angle, and "color-shifting" bell graphic that changes from copper to green, "an effect which makes the bell seem to appear and disappear within the (copper-colored) inkwell." "The Redesigned $100 Note"

Big pictures of small change

David Pescovitz — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:49:40 +0000

Artist Martin John Callanan and the Advanced Engineered Materials Group at the UK's National Physical Laboratory used an infinite 3D optical microscope to capture 400 million pixel images of the lowest denomination coin from many currencies. "The Fundamental Units"

Lessig's TED talk on fighting corruption in politics with campaign finance reform

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:46:28 +0000

Larry Lessig presented at TED his new project, an effort to curb the corrupting influence of money in American politics with a reform to campaign finance, so that the government depends on the people alone. It's a wonderful talk:

There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. With rapid-fire visuals, he shows how the funding process weakens the Republic in the most fundamental way, and issues a rallying bipartisan cry that will resonate with many in the U.S. and beyond.

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim

Why can't we prevent asteroid strikes?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:38:24 +0000

Asteroids: Yet more evidence that (as a society) we aren't very good at prioritizing preventative measures against long-term risks.

When US money was nice to look at

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:12:47 +0000

US currency was beautiful, once upon a time, when it sported images of animals and symbolic statuary, rather than deifying its citizen-rulers by putting presidents on the money as though they were kings. This 1901 $10 note (available on Wikimedia Commons in a 33.34MB, 6,454 × 5,784 JPEG!) is a case in point.

United States $10 Banknote, Legal Tender, Series of 1901 (Fr. Ref#114), depicting Meriwether Lewis and William Clark of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. The central portrait is a depiction of an American bison. Part of the National Numismatic Collection, NMAH, Smithsonian Institution. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Game theory and bad behavior on Wall Street

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:13:36 +0000

An opinion piece by Chris Arnade on the asymmetry in pay (money for profits, flat for losses), which he describes "the engine behind many of Wall Street’s mistakes" That asymmetry "rewards short-term gains without regard to long-term consequences," Chris writes in a new guest blog at Scientific American. "The results? The over-reliance on excessive leverage, banks that are loaded with opaque financial products, and trading models that are flawed." [Scientific American Blog Network]

Database documenting payouts to UK slave-owners to be launched for public use

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:30:17 +0000

The British government paid out £20 million to compensate 3,000 slave-owning families for the loss of their "property" when slave ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. At the time, that sum amounted to 40% of the UK's annual spending budget; today, one could calculate the total value of the 19th-century payouts to be around £16.5 billion (=USD $25 billion; the actual sum can vary, depending on how you calculate).

In The Independent, an article digging in to the data, which will be released this week in the form of a publicly accessible database.

The previously unseen records show exactly who received what in payouts from the Government when slave ownership was abolished by Britain – much to the potential embarrassment of their descendants. Dr Nick Draper from University College London, who has studied the compensation papers, says as many as one-fifth of wealthy Victorian Britons derived all or part of their fortunes from the slave economy.As a result, there are now wealthy families all around the UK still indirectly enjoying the proceeds of slavery where it has been passed on to them.

According to a researcher quoted in the piece, rich and socially prominent families benefitted, but so did "very ordinary men and women." The benefits of slavery affected "the entire spectrum" of the UK's economy. The newly accessible data is sure to spark renewed debate over reparations to former British slave colonies.

Read the full report: Britain's colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition (via Ned Sublette)

Great moments in pedantry: Canada puts the wrong maple leaf on its $20 bill

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:51:16 +0000

Hey, that's not a Canadian sugar maple leaf! That is very clearly the leaf of the invasive Norway maple.

Guitar picks made from coins

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:43:04 +0000

Etsy seller GuitarPickCollection sells handmade guitar (mandolin, banjo, etc) picks made from coins and slugs that have been formed to suit. I was never much of a guitar player and so I can't guess whether this would be good news for your favorite axe, but if you do fancy a coin-pick, this maker's stuff is rather beautiful.

Guitar Pick Collection Handmade Artisan by GuitarPickCollection (via OhGizmo)

Commemorative coins are sneaky pork

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 01:41:55 +0000

You know those cool commemorative coins that the US Mint keeps issuing? Turns out that they're a handy way for Congress to get around the ban on porky earmarks for their home district. As reported last April in The Foundry:

Here’s how it works: In June of last year, Rep. Peter Roksam (R-IL) introduced legislation authorizing a commemorative coin honoring the Lions Club, a service organization based in Oak Brook, IL – part of Roksam’s district.
The legislation dictates that proceeds from the coin sales be used to pay for the cost of producing the coins, but adds: “all surcharges received by the Secretary from the sale of coins issued under this Act shall be promptly paid by the Secretary to the Lions Clubs International Foundation for the purposes.”
In other words, assuming the costs of production are covered, the legislation will steer federal funds to an organization in Roksam’s home district. No earmarks required.

There's a long list of other commemorative coins, mostly issued at Republican instigation (the coins all seem to emanate from the House), but sometimes with a Democratic push in the Senate.

Congress Uses Commemorative Coins to Circumvent Earmark Ban

A visit inside a vault holding $315,000,000,000 in gold bricks

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:56:59 +0000

A fascinating visit to the Bank of England bullion vault, which stores $315 billion in gold. The narrator is kind of sad because he says gold is useful for many things and it's just sitting here.

Gold Christmas Tree

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:42:25 +0000

Reuters:

The tree-like ornament is made of 88 pounds of pure gold, standing about 7.9 ft high ... It is decorated with pure gold plate silhouette cutouts of 50 popular Disney characters and draped with ribbons made of gold leaf. The price tag? A mere $4.2 million.

Bogus Lincoln $100 bill fails to impress checkout clerk

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:44:38 +0000

A man in Rhode Island was either too dumb or too cheeky for his own good: the counterfeit bills he tried to pass at a local Target had Abraham Lincoln on the $100, popularly known as a Benjamin. [Sun Chronicle]

Russian beard tax token from the reign of Peter the Great

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 04:12:04 +0000

This is a Russian beard tax token from the reign of Peter the Great, who set out to modernize Russia by getting everyone to shave. Anyone who wanted to keep a beard had to buy one of these tokens (which bore the legend "the beard is a superfluous burden"). Costs varied by profession -- nobles and officers paid 60 rubles, top merchants paid 100, and so on. Additionally, everyone passing into a city while wearing a beard had to pay a kopek's worth of face-fur-toll.

Update: You can buy replica beard tokens, too.

Beard Tax Token, 1705 (via Neatorama)

Panama aims to adopt Euro

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:29:07 +0000

The Panamanian president announced that the country would like to introduce the Euro as legal tender, alongside the U.S. dollar. [Reuters]

Commodity market prediction takes the Internet by storm

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:59:06 +0000

Good news! There is not an unavoidable bacon shortage looming in our future. Bad news! What was actually being predicted was really an increase in meat prices across the board. Droughts have completely decimated this year's corn crop, and as corn is the stuff we usually feed our meat, it's going to cost more to raise a pig (or a cow, or a chicken) next year. Key takeaways: There will still be meat, it's just going to be more spendy next year, and also don't trust the British when they offer you "bacon" because they actually mean Canadian bacon, which is different (and inferior).

Meet "Big Trash"

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:04:36 +0000

Over the long run, keeping stuff like tree limbs and compostable waste out of landfills is good for cities. There's only so much space in a landfill and getting more land is extremely expensive. So why haven't more cities hopped on the curbside composting bandwagon, or at least banned yard waste from landfills? There's probably a lot of factors that go into those decisions, but one, apparently, is the influence of large, private companies that handle waste collection and see the diversion of re-usable waste as a detriment to their income. (Via Chris Tackett)

HOWTO send vulture debt collectors packing

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:56:07 +0000

"Defending Junk-Debt-Buyer Lawsuits" is a paper written by Peter A. Holland of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and published in the May 1 issue of Clearinghouse Review. It's a clear, short, absolutely readable (and indispensable) guide to fending off speculative lawsuits from vulture debt-collectors. These are the debt collectors who buy up bad debts that banks and other creditors have written off (because there's insufficient evidence that the debt exists in the first place, or because it's past the statute of limitations, or because the debtor has been through a bankruptcy). Then they bulk-file lawsuits against the debtors, hoping that they won't show up in court to defend themselves, so that the vultures can win judgments and use them to go after houses, cars, salaries and so on. As Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith puts it, these vultures are buying up a lot of scrap paper, hoping to find a lottery ticket.

It's surprisingly easy to fend off these bottom-dwellers, though. They have to prove that you owe them money. A brief moment spent scrutinizing the documents filed against you is usually enough to find evidence that will get the case dismissed. Holland's paper explains in detail just what to do to get these vampires to flee from your door:

Read the complaint and accompanying documents multiple times, highlighter in hand, while looking for intentional deceptions, errors, and omissions that could help your client prevail. First, look for defects on the face of the complaint. For example, the named plaintiff might be a different corporation from the entity named in the supporting documents. This occurs with surprising frequency. Second, if your state requires debt buyers to be licensed as debt collectors, check whether the debt buyer is licensed. Suing without a license creates standing issues, and, according to an increasing number of courts, it constitutes a violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.16 The junk-debt buyer is subject to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act because the junk-debt buyer allegedly acquires the debt after default.
Third, look for the failure to prove the existence of (or the terms and conditions of) the alleged underlying contract. Failure to prove the contract is the rule rather than the exception. Often a contract is not even attached to the complaint. More often, some well-worn photocopy sample of a terms-and-conditions mailer is attached. This sample is often illegible, and almost never signed by the consumer. On close inspection, the printing date on this document often reveals that it was generated years after the account was allegedly opened. Also, the terms and con- ditions submitted may not be from the original creditor identified by the junk-debt buyer but are presented to make the claim appear supported.
Fourth, the debt buyer is usually unable to prove a complete and unbroken chain of title. Without a valid chain of title, the debt buyer does not have standing to sue.

Defending Junk-Debt-Buyer Lawsuits (via Naked Capitalism)

(Image: Vulture, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from 7704782@N07's photostream)

Butter-knife money-clip

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:20:00 +0000

Last night at dinner in San Francisco (I'm in town to give a Long Now talk tonight), our waiter noticed that I was wearing a ring made from an ornate spoon handle and produced his home-made money-clip, which he'd fashioned from an antique butter-knife he found at a pawn shop. He said he'd used a hand clamp to hold the handle, wrapped the blade in a cloth dishtowel, and used careful hammer-taps to bend it around. He also said that he flew with it routinely without any problems from the TSA. It was a really nice piece -- he wrapped his bills around his credit-cards and ID to create the necessary thickness.

Butter Knife Money Clip

Oatmeal Spells F U in Money Shots

Glenn Fleishman — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 01:21:06 +0000

I am kneeling on a sun-dappled hardwood floor with stacks of $20 bills in $2,000 bundles in each hand helping to spell out the word "douchebaggery," and thinking: $220,000 just doesn't seem like that much money. I found myself in this position after asking Matthew Inman, the artist behind the cartoon and business The Oatmeal, if I could take pictures when he withdrew the cash he will ultimately hand over to the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation in order to use it to make fun of a Web site that threatened him with legal action.

This is the latest episode in a saga that BoingBoing has documented in quite some detail, and which began June 11, when Inman posted an annotated version of a letter he had received from Charles Carreon, a well-known attorney representing FunnyJunk, a user-submitted content site, complaining about a post Inman had made a year ago. Inman complained in 2011 about FunnyJunk's business model, noting, "Most of the comics they've stolen [have] no credit or link back to me. Even with proper attribution, no one clicks through and FunnyJunk still earns a huge pile of cash from all the ad revenue." It's a common problem with sites that rely on submitted items, and each site has different policies on how to manage such unauthorized postings. Inman didn't issue DMCA takedown notices, though he would have been within his rights. He says he's just not interested in engaging in that sort of behavior. (By the way, did you know you have to register an agent with the copyright office to qualify for the safe-harbor provision of the DMCA? Me, neither! FunnyJunk's registration was received May 29, 2012, shortly before its lawyer sent the letter to Inman.)

In Inman's response to the letter, he said instead of avoiding potential litigation by, among other things, paying FunnyJunk $20,000, he would instead raise that much money and give it to the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation. If he achieved that goal, he would take a picture of the money in cash and send that photo along with a "drawing of your mom seducing a Kodiak bear" to FunnyJunk. In the actual event, Inman raised $220,024 via an Indiegogo campaign. Hence the cash in his office.

(Between posting his annotated letter and the collection of cash, as we wrote here, Carreon expressed bewilderment to MSNBC about Inman's response, threatened to sue Inman and other parties, and then actually filed suit against Inman, Indiegogo, the National Wildlife Federation, and the American Cancer Society, among other unnamed parties. I also highly recommend Popehat's legal discussion of the filings. Inman is represented by Venkat Balasubramani, who wrote this marvelous response to Carreon's initial legal letter. After Carreon filed a suit on his own behalf, the EFF joined Balasubramani to provide aid to Inman. As Popehat notes, Carreon might run afoul of anti-SLAPP [strategic lawsuit against public participation] laws, too. BoingBoing knows something about anti-SLAPP suits. On June 30, Carreon updated his suit with even more allegations, and proposed a settlement. On July 3, Carreon withdrew his suit. I'm not even getting into Carreon and his wife's fascinating political Web sites with photoshopped images nor their poetry.)

Anyway.

This all leads to the money I (sadly, temporarily) have in my hands (see full photo set). I'm in an office in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, near where I had my own office space for several years, with Inman's mother (who handles merchandise fulfillment), his girlfriend, his sole employee, and an old friend with whom he used to work. The office is nearly empty. They've just moved in. A few digitally printed "oil paintings" adorn the walls. A stack of prints of a Wookiee holding a light saber with a crucifix emerging is on one table.

Inman had arranged with his bank a few days before to receive the money at a branch, where they took him into a vault to receive his cash. The bank typically has less than half that amount in cash on hand, a fact that perhaps it shouldn't have shared. He was told to bring four backpacks to hold the cash, but did his own estimations and brought a modest duffel instead.

I am apparently implicitly trustworthy enough to handle the cash, and we all assisted Matthew in arranging bills first to spell "FUCK YOU" and then "F.U." and then, in two passes, "PHILANTHROPY > DOUCHEBAGGERY" in a sort of dot-matrix/bitmap style. At one point, Inman's mom suggests he pose inside the U, which he does, and then holds out a middle finger. "Oh, don't do that," his mother says. He puts his hand down for a moment, and then holds up both hands with middle fingers extended. (Matthew is a mild-mannered, pleasant chap.)

The more you handle large sums of money, the more ridiculous the concept becomes. A $20 bill, on its own, feels like it has some worth; 1,100 of them are absurd, like confetti or Monopoly bills. There are too many to take seriously. I have this same feeling every time I try to explain to my young children how money and the economy works: "Kids, this piece of paper is different than all others. It's been imbued with magical ink properties and a sort of religious faith in the United States government."

Inman says confronted with the cash in his hands, he's uncomfortable with what he's doing. "It seems boastful," he says, worrying that it is childish spelling out obscenities and insults with hundreds of thousands of dollars on his floor. His buddy says, "When did you stop being willing to be ridiculous, Matt?" "When I turned 29." He is nearly 30 now.

Photos were taken from many angles. Inman finished up with a rough "drawing" of one of his typical Oatmeal faces with some crazy hair to make it look more like the "mom" in his drawing. And then we packed up the money so he could take it back and re-deposit it in the bank.

The final sum was roughly $205,000 after payment processing costs and Indiegogo's fee, some paid via PayPal and some direct to Indiegogo. Indiegogo has disbursed, on June 29, $96,000 to the two charities, and Inman has checks written for the remainder in the hands of his lawyer to send off as soon as the legal coast is clear.

Artist who made near-perfect US$100 bills

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 19:48:45 +0000

From Wired comes David Wolman's indispensable piece on master counterfeiter Hans-Jürgen Kuhl, a printmaker, artist and rounder who forged millions in flawless US $100 bills, only to have the boodle nabbed in a sting before even one of his Franklins could circulate. Kuhl combined mechanical printmaking talent with an artist's eye and an obsessive commitment to detail, and came up with many ingenious workarounds for beating the Treasury's anti-forgery technology.

However, he sucked at tradecraft. He got rumbled when he took bags and bags of paper waste to a commercial incinerator. A worker noticed what seemed to be bags of US currency (at first) but turned out to be obvious cast-offs from his forging op, and the cops were called in. One sting later, and Kuhl was in jail.

He's out now, and painting again (for the first time in 20 years). He still dreams of making a forgery so perfect you could hand it to the US Secret Service.

Kuhl’s intricate production process combined offset printing with silk-screening (see “How to Make $100″). The hardest features to forge with any level of sophistication are on the front of the note: the US Treasury seal, the large “100″ denomination in the bottom-right corner, and the united states of america at the top. Real US currency is printed on massive intaglio presses (intaglio is Italian for engrave). The force with which the presses strike the paper lying over the engraved steel plates creates indentations that fill with ink, giving the bills a delicate 3-D relief and a textured feel. Its absence is a telltale sign of a counterfeit. For Kuhl this was the most critical puzzle piece: how to create that texture convincingly without the benefit of actual engraving. “I had an idea,” he says, “and I was itching to try it.”
His idea was to apply a second layer of ink, creating sufficient relief to mimic intaglio-pressed paper. But looking under a microscope, Kuhl saw that this second coat slumped as it dried, giving the image a blurred appearance. This problem stymied his progress until he read about UV-sensitive clear lacquer, which dries instantly when exposed to ultraviolet light. That, he says, was when everything clicked. “The ink wouldn’t have time to slump,” he says.
He ran a sheet of paper through the silk-screen press again, this time applying the lacquer and then drying it under UV light. “You don’t see the UV varnish—that is the key. You only feel it,” Kuhl says. This invisible coating atop the raised US Treasury seal and large “100″ in the lower-right corner of the bill was his masterstroke. One official told the German news magazine Der Spiegel that Kuhl’s dollars were “shockingly perfect.”

The piece includes a pretty good technical HOWTO on making your own forged notes. You know, for kids!

The Ultimate Counterfeiter Isn’t a Crook—He’s an Artist

(Image: James Yamasaki)

Sarah Robles: The strongest woman in America lives on $400 a month

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 18:28:14 +0000

Meet Sarah Robles. She can lift as much as 570 pounds. In last year's weightlifting world championships, she bested every other American—both female and male. Sarah Robles is going to the Olympics in London this summer. But at home, in the United States, she lives on $400 a month.

Track star Lolo Jones, 29, soccer player Alex Morgan, 22, and swimmer Natalie Coughlin, 29, are natural television stars with camera-friendly good looks and slim, muscular figures. But women weightlifters aren't go-tos when Sports Illustrated is looking for athletes to model body paint in the swimsuit issue. They don’t collaborate with Cole Haan on accessories lines and sit next to Anna Wintour at Fashion Week, like tennis beauty Maria Sharapova. And male weightlifters often get their sponsorships from supplements or diet pills, because their buff, ripped bodies align with male beauty ideals. Men on diet pills want to look like weightlifters — most women would rather not.

Meanwhile, Robles — whose rigorous training schedule leaves her little time for outside work — struggles to pay for food. It would be hard enough for the average person to live off the $400 a month she receives from U.S.A. Weightlifting, but it’s especially difficult for someone who consumes 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day, a goal she meets through several daily servings of grains, meats and vegetables, along with weekly pizza nights. She also gets discounted groceries from food banks and donations from her coach, family and friends — or, as Robles says, “prayers and pity.”

She's not alone. Holley Mangold, the other American woman who'll be doing Olympic weightlifting in the same division, works part-time for a BBQ restaurant and lives in a friend's converted laundry room.

In fact, while the biggest stars in the most-watched events can pick up million-dollar endorsement deals, the truth is that most Olympic athletes live on extremely modest incomes. That's especially true in countries like Canada, which lacks the kind of government support system you find in places like China and Russia, but also lacks the plethora of large and small private endorsement deals that are available to some (but not all) American Olympians.

I think this is interesting. Every time the Olympics come up, I hear friends and talking heads alike arguing that the amateur athlete no longer exists. Everybody in the Olympics is really a professional and that makes it all less exciting—or so goes the conventional wisdom. The reality is that, for the most part, we're talking about people who make big sacrifices to be able to compete at a high level in a sport they're obsessed with for its own sake, not because they're getting rich. Sponsorships, rather than tainting the sport, do also help some athletes know where their next meal is coming from. After reading some of these articles, I think the vast majority of Olympic athletes probably fall squarely into Happy Mutant territory.

Read the rest of Buzzfeed's profile of Sarah Robles

• Read the New York Times' profile of weightlifter Holley Mangold
• Ivestopedia: Olympic Athletes—Back to Reality
• Wired: Olympic Runner Fights to Change Sponsorship Rules
• ABC News: How Can Olympic Athletes Find a Real Job?
• Time Magazine: Keeping Afloat (which contrasts the profits of the U.S. Olympic Committee with the small incomes that support many Olympic athletes)

Hacker School sets out to bring in more women programmers, succeeds

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 22:00:36 +0000

Hacker School is an intensive, three-month residential programming bootcamp in NYC. Some students receive tuition grants funded jointly by Etsy, 37 Signals, and Yammer. This year, they decided to focus on increasing the number of awesome women programmers participating in Hacker School, and did an amazing job. Etsy VP of Engineering Marc Hedlund is justifiably proud:

When we announced the program, we were aiming to find 20 women to join the summer class. The previous class, in the spring, had only around 7 female applicants and wound up with 1 female student, so we knew it would take a big effort to get to our goal. Since Hacker School runs admissions and structures the classes, Etsy’s primary role was to get the word out about the grants — and we asked for help from our community in reaching as many great candidates as we could.
To say that worked would be a serious understatement. With help from all of you, Hacker School received applications from 661 women, nearly a 100-times increase from the previous session. (As they put it, they received more applications this time from women named Sarah, than all applications from women for all previous sessions combined.) Hacker School has admitted 23 of those women for the summer program — exceeding our original goal by 3. It’s been incredibly exciting to see.
The response to the Hacker Grants program was much larger than we expected. 597 (90%) of the 661 female applicants requested financial assistance. We believe that the existence of the grants did play a major role in causing the increase in applications from women. Of the 23 female students admitted, 18 of them requested grants — 8 more than we’d planned to provide.

Update on the Hacker Grants Program (via O'Reilly Radar)

Historical proto-Al Jaffee hides trenchant commentary in design of US Dollar Bill

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:38:50 +0000

The other day I noticed that on the back of the one dollar bill, there is a phrase: The Great Seal of the United States. It is split into two circles. When you fold the dollar so that the two half circles meet exactly, a new phrase is revealed.

The Great Seal of the United States (Thanks, Terry!)

Jar of American Gods

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:00:14 +0000

A Redditor posts photos of a jar of American gods, hole-punched out of the US dollar bills that an atheist friend receives as tips in his job as a valet.

My atheist friend has worked as a Valet for over a decade. He uses a hole-punch to take out the "god" on US dollars. Here is a picture of his collected "gods". (imgur.com)

HOWTO re-create the Scrooge McDuck "Gold Coin Swim"

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 07 May 2012 23:41:20 +0000

At the Billfold today, a wonderful and mathematically precise post that explains exactly “how much money do I need to create giant floes of gold in a private vault and dive into it like Scrooge McDuck?” (thanks, Dean Putney!)

Reddit's TestPAC is campaigning to defeat Lamar Smith, SOPA's daddy

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 06 May 2012 05:43:20 +0000

TestPAC, the PAC founded on Reddit to carry on the momentum from the SOPA fight earlier this year, is in the midst of its inaugural campaign: seeking to oust long-term Texas congressman Lamar Smith, who authored the bill and attempted to ram it through his committee without any substantive debate, after taking large campaign contributions from the entertainment industry through several election cycles. Now, TestPAC has "boots on the ground" in Smith's home district and the campaign is in full swing, and seeking your support:

As some of you are aware, for the last 3 months, TestPAC has been working tirelessly to put together a comprehensive campaign to increase awareness about Lamar Smith’s legislative irresponsibility with the ultimate goal of defeating him in the May 29th primary.
It’s amazing to see what we have accomplished in the last 3 months. We went from a handful of Redditors passionate in their opposition of SOPA to a membership base of over 1,200 subscribers, we have over 500 followers on Facebook, and almost 600 on Twitter. We have funded a billboard in Lamar’s backyard, produced a professionally done advertisement, and have been featured in some major media outlets like Mashable, Mother Jones, BoingBoing and TheNextWeb.
In addition to all of this, today we are proud to announce the launch of our field campaign.
Boots are on the ground, led by Andy Posterick, TestPAC’s Treasurer who drove 12 hours from Phoenix, AZ to Kerrville, TX to lead a group of 10 volunteers to assist with handing out fliers, putting up signs and interacting with the voters in Lamar’s district. We are stepping out from behind our keyboards and monitors and getting out into the streets. We are making it happen, and we are here in TX-21 every weekend for the next 3 weeks.
Lamar Smith knows TestPAC is knocking. Several reporters who wrote about us have contacted him and his staff for comment. They know we are out there working to send him home from Washington. Now it’s time that he sees us in his district, connecting with voters and working to send him packing.
We need Reddit's Help
We're holding a 5k moneybomb today, in order to double our TV exposure and help fund the ground campaign. Reddit, every day there are posts about SOPA, PCIP, or CISPA. TestPAC is turning those words into actions. Can you help us?
If you can donate, here is the link to do so. If not, please spread the word on Facebook & Twitter.

If Canadians were allowed to donate, I would donate. As it is, all I can do is ask you to kick in to support the campaign.

TestPAC has boots on the ground in Lamar Smith's district. Our field campaign has started. Our TV ad is ready to go. Reddit, let's do this thing. (self.politics)

Tennessee man jailed for using old $50 bill

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 02 May 2012 02:11:11 +0000

David Melson writes that police arrested and jailed a man Friday for using real money.

A clerk at Quik Mart, South Cannon Boulevard, notified police after the marker used to detect counterfeit bills didn't check as real. "The front side of the bill was off center and it didn't feel like a normal bill, it did look to be counterfeit," officer Brock Horner said in his report.

This is the state that just made it possible to sue teachers who tell children how human reproduction works. It's hardly surprising the authorities there don't know what a $50 bill looks like.

Old $50 bill found real, but not before bearer arrested [Shelbyville Times-Gazette]