electroluminscent driven spook-house for the XXI C.

Hong Kong Disneyland is finally going to get its own Haunted Mansion. Called "Mystic Manor," it opens in mid-May, and is a radical departure from the existing Mansions and Manor -- they've gone bananas with the old electroluminscent paint, in a very good way indeed. Here's a video of one of the preview ride-throughs.

The first area is Acquisitions and Cataloging Room, where Lord Mystic's collections are temporary placed and awaited to placed on shelves. The music box Lord Mystic mentioned is now in front of guests. Albert suddenly pops out and unlocks the box. The escaping magic dust floats in the air and brings life to all artifacts.
The first show case is the Music Room, in which weird and exotic music instruments are stored. A piano is placed in the centre of the room. The magic dust gives life to instrument and music plays. The music will follow the carriage and play the background music for the journey. Albert is excited and amazed. He follows the carriage, curious to visit all rooms.
The next stop is Mediterranean Antiquities. Paintings, ceramics, and Audio-Animatronic® statues start to move under the influence of the dust. An amphora with Hercules fighting with Nemean Lion to conquer Zeus’s quest spins and rocks when the carriage passes. The above description is taken from the Greek myths, the story of Hercules. As what the story told, Hercules only battled once with a lion, which is known as the Nemean Lion.
The carriages move into to a Solarium Room. Albert tries to toy around with the Venus fly traps as he is holding a piece of banana to them, then all of a sudden a large Venus fly trap open it's jaw as it tries to bite the guests, the room then becomes pitch black.
Soon afterward, the carriage enters the Slavic-Nordic Chamber. There is a painting of a Nordic God. He comes to life and blows freezing wind towards guests. Guests are able to feel cooling effect and see the special-effect smoke in this scene.

Mystic Manor

Documentary on hidden victims of Greek austerity that's crowdfunded, free & CC-licensed

Cory Doctorow at 2:50 am • •

Into the Fire writes, "Into The Fire is a film with a difference. Besides being a hard hitting documentary which shows the plight of refugees and migrants amidst a collapsing Greek economy, it's also an experiment in new film production and distribution techniques. A year ago, we made a first, crowd-funded trip to Athens. We filmed shocking levels of racism, police brutality, and right-wing extremism - as well as the courageous and inspiring people who are organising against it.

"Into the Fire will be released on 21st April on the internet. We crowd-funded the film and crowd-sourced the subtitles: it's been translated into eight languages using the open subtitler Amara. We are also using crowd-sourcing as the release and distribution strategy for the documentary: anyone who signs up to participate will receive embedding details ahead of time, and the film will be released on various websites simultaneously. The audience becomes the distribution network."

Issuing an apology on behalf of the New York Post

Cory Doctorow at 5:38 am • •

Andy writes, "As you guys know, the New York Post made some pretty terrible editorial decisions following the Boston Marathon attacks, including putting two innocent kids on the cover. Someone wrote a fake letter of apology from the paper's editor and inserted it into a bunch of papers around NYC, and ANIMAL made a video about it. Take a look!"

The Apology the New York Post Should Have Issued - ANIMAL (Thanks, Andy!)

Read the rest

Filter can separate water from Coke

Cory Doctorow at 3:21 pm • •

The sheer awesome filtration power of the OKO filter is on display here as a fellow from Japan's RocketNews24 uses it to separate the clear, relatively benign H2O out of the Black Waters of American Imperialism. If it can turn Coke into water, the entertainment industry should consider using it -- after all, they've spent the past 20 years trying to get the food coloring out of the swimming pool. In any event, I wonder how you dispose of the sludge that remains in the bottle?

I tried drinking by clear and colorless cola [filtration] 's great! Taste to be worried about? (via Kottke)

Harrison Ford doesn't answer Star Wars questions on Kimmel

Cory Doctorow at 7:40 pm • •

When Harrison Ford's appearance on Jimmy Kimmel switched to Q&A with the audience, Ford said that no Star Wars questions would be allowed. Whereupon Kimmel began (apparently) to troll Harrison rather hard. While it's clear that Harrison was in on the joke, it's got a pretty great finale.

Harrison Ford Meets an Old Friend and it Doesn’t Go Well on Kimmel

San Diego cop smashes phone & beats up suspect: "Phones can be converted to a weapon. Look it up online."

Cory Doctorow at 6:07 pm • •

A San Diego cop beat up a man whom he was ticketing for illegal smoking, after the man refused to stop video-recording the experience. The cop told the man that he feared the phone might actually be a gun disguised as a phone, before smashing the phone and tackling the man and smashing his face into the boardwalk. He was taken away in an ambulance.

It all seemed pretty civil until the cop writing the citation told him to stop recording, which Pringle refused to do.
“Phones can be converted into weapons …. look it up online,” the cop told him.
Last month, a South Florida cop confiscated a man’s phone citing the same reason, so maybe this is a new trend.
When Pringle tried to talk sense into the cop, the cop slapped the phone out of his hand where it fell onto the boardwalk and broke apart.
The other cop then pounced on him, slamming him down on the boardwalk where he ended up with a laceration on his chin.
“Blood was everywhere,” Pringle said. “I was laying on my stomach and he had one knee on my back and the other knee on the side of my face.
“They kept telling me ‘to calm down,’ that ‘you’re making this worse for yourself,’ that ‘you have no right to record us.’”

He didn't get the cop's name, and the SDPD won't give it to him.

San Diego Police Attack and Arrest Man Video Recording Them, Claiming Phone Could be a Weapon (Updated) 294 (via Techdirt)

Viacom gets its ass handed to it again by a court in its YouTube lawsuit

Cory Doctorow at 6:36 am • •

For years, Viacom has been embroiled in a bizarre lawsuit against Google, asserting that Google had a duty to figure out exactly which videos uploaded by it users infringed on Viacom's copyrights and stop them from showing (Viacom's internal memos showed that they themselves had paid dozens of companies to secretly upload Viacom videos disguised to look as leaked internal footage to YouTube, and that the company's executives had viewed the suit as a way to seize control of YouTube from Google and run it themselves).

Now, yet another court has told Viacom that its legal theory about the duty of online service providers to proactively police its users' uploads is totally, unequivocally WRONG. Viacom has pledged to appeal.

In a ruling released today, the court gave a total victory to Google/YouTube, granting it summary judgment, saying that YouTube was protected from claims of infringement via the DMCA's safe harbors, and mocking Viacom's legal theories at the same time. Might as well jump right in with some quotes, including the money quote that Viacom's legal theory is "extravagant." Elsewhere the judge calls it "ingenious."
Viacom's argument that the volume of material and "the absence of record evidence that would allow a jury to decide which clips-in-suit were specifically known to senior YouTube executives" (Viacom Opp. pp. 9-10) combine to deprive YouTube of the statutory safe harbor, is extravagant. If, as plaintiffs assert, neither side can determine the presence or absence of specific infringements because of the volume of material, that merely demonstrates the wisdom of the legislative requirement that it be the owner of the copyright, or his agent, who identifies the infringement by giving the service provider notice. 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A). The system is entirely workable: in 2007 Viacom itself gave such notice to YouTube of infringements by some 100,000 videos, which were taken down by YouTube by the next business day. See 718 F. Supp. 2d 514 at 524.
Thus, the burden of showing that YouTube knew or was aware of the specific infringements of the works in suit cannot be shifted to YouTube to disprove. Congress has determined that the burden of identifying what must be taken down is to be on the copyright owner, a determination which has proven practicable in practice.
This was the crux of Viacom's argument. That because they could show a lot of infringement, and here and there point to some evidence that some people at YouTube might have known of general infringement, then the burden should be on YouTube. But the court clearly calls them on this, noting that's not what the law says, nor does it make sense. Instead, under the law, the burden is on Viacom and that makes sense.

YouTube Wins Yet Another Complete Victory Over Viacom; Court Mocks Viacom's Ridiculous Legal Theories [Mike Masnick/TechDirt]

Controlling a robot arm with an Android phone

Cory Doctorow at 1:33 pm • •

Paul sez, "This past semester, three engineering grad students at the University of Toronto (myself and two others) created an Android app for a course project that allows for wireless and intuitive control of a robotic arm from an Android-powered smartphone. We're pretty proud of the results (the link is to a demo we put together) and have released the code open source."

Android Robotic Manipulator Demo (Thanks, Paul!)

Homebrew Duck Hunt pinball table

Cory Doctorow at 8:25 pm • •

Skit-B Pinball built this custom Duck Hunt pinball machine by modding a 1962 'Williams Valiant' table and hybridizing it with a PC to provide sound effects and other nifties. The project was a little break from Skit-B's main undertaking, a gonzo-awesome pinball adaptation of Predator.

(via Geekologie)

Rendered stack of rubbery penile noodloids, falling

Cory Doctorow at 8:32 am • •

Logitech4873 spent 62 hours rendering an interlocking, Jenga-like stack of tumbling, penile, rubbery thinngums falling in slow motion: "The reason for the excessively long rendertime was the use of high quality indirect lighting, SSS materials (Sub-Surface Scattering) and the high quality of the motion blur."

I'm so sorry (via JWZ)

HOWTO spin a toothbrush on your finger

Cory Doctorow at 8:08 pm • •

This enterprising fellow is very good at spinning a toothbrush on his finger, and he wants to share his talent with all of us! It looks remarkably simple to learn, and you'll surely find endless hours of enjoyment in this skill, should you choose to acquire it.

Como girar uma escova de dentes no dedo - Tutorial de malabares com objetos não-convencionais (Thanks, Lucas!)

28-geared, 3D-printed cube

Cory Doctorow at 2:56 pm • •

Shapeways user Maundy created the Steampunk Geared Cube, a magnificent geared confection that came out of the 3D printed fully assembled!

The cube contains a total of 28 gears, all of which turn from manually rotating only one (though the designer notes that rotating two gears results in a smoother motion). The outermost gear on each side has handles for easy rotation, and each is linked to its adjacent gear in an interlocking pattern. Once one gear is spun, the others correspondingly spin along.
In addition to the fascinating pattern and mechanics, the cube has a tray in the middle for holding various small objects. The product also comes with a stand and a lockable lid, which is placed on top of the cube and can be locked and unlocked by rotating the gears.

3D Printed 28-Geared Cube

Solving classic NES games computationally

Cory Doctorow at 11:52 am • •

Dr. Tom Murphy VII gave a research paper called "The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel . . . after that it gets a little tricky," (PDF) (source code) at SIGBOVIK 2013, in which he sets out a computational method for solving classic NES games. He devised two libraries for this: learnfun (learning fuction) and playfun (playing function). In this accompanying video, he chronicles the steps and missteps he took getting to a pretty clever destination.

learnfun & playfun: A general technique for automating NES games (via O'Reilly Radar)

Reddit co-founder calls Larry Page to get Google to join the anti-CISPA fight -- your help needed too!

Cory Doctorow at 6:29 am • •

Evan from Fight for the Future sez, "In the hours before the House Intelligence Committee's secretive, closed-door markup on privacy killing bill, CISPA, we had to unleash our secret weapon. CISPA threatens to invalidate every privacy law on the books and give companies full legal immunity when they share our private data with the government. That's why the tech giants that stood with us during SOPA (Google, Facebook, and Twitter) haven't said much about CISPA. Our chief Internet Defender, Reddit-Cofounder Alexis Ohanian, helped us make this video of him calling Google and asking to speak to CEO Larry Page about that fact that if CISPA passes, every privacy policy on the web will be a total joke."

Sign the petition, kill CISPA, save the Internet (again!).

Google, Twitter, & Facebook: What's your privacy policy? (Thanks, Evan)

Rare footage of a "normal person" given LSD in 1950s clinical research

Cory Doctorow at 6:12 pm • •

In this video, Sidney Cohen (author of The Beyond Within: The L.S.D. Story, administers LSD under clinical conditions to an unnamed "normal person" (her description), some time in the 1950s. Her description of her experience is really wonderful -- you can tell she's going through something profound and amazing. As Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote in 2011,

The experience she describes includes familiar themes such as gorgeous colors, geometric patterns, microscopic particles suddenly visible, and a sense of transcendence, oneness, and ineffability:
"I can see everything in color. You have to see the air. You can't believe it....I've never seen such infinite beauty in my life....Everything is so beautiful and lovely and alive....This is reality...I wish I could talk in Technicolor....I can't tell you about it. If you can't see it, then you'll just never know it. I feel sorry for you."
Today all this may sound hackneyed, but what's striking about this woman's account is that her expectations were not shaped by the huge surge of publicity that LSD attracted in the next two decades. Although she had not heard what an LSD trip was supposed to be like, her experience included several of the features that later came to be seen as typical—a reminder that, as important as "set and setting" are, "drug" matters too.
Despite the similarity between this woman's description of her experience and testimonials from acid aficionados of the '60s and '70s, her presentation is so calm and nonthreatening that it is hard to imagine how anyone could perceive this drug as an intolerable danger to society.

'I Wish I Could Talk in Technicolor' (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)