Here is OK Go's excellent video for "Needing/Getting." And yes, it was done "in partnership" with the maker of that particular car. According to the video description, the car "was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car… There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. — Read the rest

If you follow Boing Boing, you're probably passingly familiar with ACTA, the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty negotiated in secret, comprising a kind of wishlist from the entertainment industry, pared down rather a lot after a series of leaks. The sequel to ACTA is TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, yet another secret copyright treaty with many of the same participants. — Read the rest

Wagner James Au writes in with novel uses for a 3D printed Hilbert curve like the one I blogged last week: "Mathematician Henry Segerman creates copies of a 3D printed Hilbert curve he originally made in Second Life which, thanks to its twisty material, can also be worn as a geekily fashionable hair accessory!" — Read the rest

Thingiverse's Tony Buser has an amazing approach to approximating the Hilbert curve, as Make's Sean Ragan explains:

Veteran Thingiverse user Tony Buser has printed a model (intended to be an approximation of the fractal Hilbert curve) using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as a support material.

Michael Geist sez, "The U.S. government just concluded a consultation on whether it should support Canada's entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations. The TPP raises significant concerns about extension of copyright and overbroad protection for digital locks, so staying out might be a good thing. — Read the rest

Above: Gareth's original copies of The Illuminatus Trilogy.

"It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep." — Illuminatus!

I first discovered Robert Anton Wilson when I was 18 years old. I'd just moved to a commune in the tobacco fields of central Virginia and was working for the magazine that the community published. — Read the rest

Seth Roberts is the author of The Shangri-La Diet and posts at Seth's Blog about personal science, self-experimentation, and the scientific method.

In 2008, Rachael Hoffman-Dachelet's eight-year-old son started having frequent sore throats. He'd run a fever, feel stiff and tired, and miss a few days of school. — Read the rest

Clay Shirky's got another barn-burner of an essay, this one on the call to establish a functional news system with stable places for reporters by creating stable newspapers (Shirky: "like saying that if we had some ham, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had some bread."). — Read the rest

Beyond Infinity, an installation by french artist Serge Salat, is described as "interweaving mirrors, light, music, and fractal art" to "conflate visitors' perceptions of space". Sponsored by Buick, it was also apparently the world's most awesome vehicle showroom for the two days it was installed in Shanghai's Westgate Mall. — Read the rest

Of those who remember, some reveal our secret history through unusual media such as fashionable tumblogs and private filesharing forums. By sharing elements of an intricate and rigorous symbology drawn from the lost decade, this cabal works quietly to prepare us to learn the truth and its astonishing consequences.

REAMDE

Back in 2010, I found myself in Seattle (I was touring with my novel For the Win — a young adult science fiction novel about gold-farming), I stopped by Neal Stephenson's place for breakfast and asked him what he was working on. — Read the rest

Karl Schroeder, a fantastic science fiction author (see this review for a taste of his work) has spent the past two years in a Master's programme in Foresight at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In this guest essay on Charlie Stross's blog, he describes the way that structured study of the future interacts with science fiction. — Read the rest

Brooke Gladstone, co-host of the excellent NPR-syndicated "On the Media," has teamed up with illustrator Josh Neufeld to produce a fantastic nonfiction comic book called The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media. This is one of those books that feels like the author has been working up to it for her whole life, distilling all her varied experience and insight into one mind-opening, thought-provoking, and incredibly timely volume. — Read the rest

electron micrograph of vinyl groove by Chris Supranowitz

I've recently picked up several old vinyl LPs at thrift stores and garage sales. My musical taste is very eclectic, but these discs have one big thing in common: they're all filthy. Similarly, we have dozens of kids DVDs and CDs in our house coated in toddler goo that would almost certainly beat the adhesive that holds the tiles on the space shuttle. — Read the rest

"Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books" — Title of a peer-reviewed research paper published in the journal Acta Neurochirurgica, June 2011

A paper by scientists at China Agricultural University published in March 2011 in PLOS One details a study on transgenic cows that have been modified to express some compounds found in human breast-milk in their milk. The researchers claim the milk contains lysozyme (an antimicrobial protein), lactoferrin (a protein involved with the immune system) and alpha-lactalbumin. — Read the rest

bOING bOING was a zine that my wife Carla and I launched in 1988 to
cover comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, consciousness
technology, curious phenomena, and whatever else surprised and
delighted us. That zine, which ran for 15 issues until 1997, evolved
into the very website you're reading right now. — Read the rest

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams's Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World is a funny kind of chimera. It's a business book — a book to help enterprises reform themselves around collaborative principles made possible by the Internet (it also talks about how education, government and NGOs can use the same principles). — Read the rest

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds up his Sydney Peace Prize after receiving the award at the Frontline Club in London May 10, 2011. Assange, who infuriated Washington by publishing thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, was given a peace award in London on Tuesday for "exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights". — Read the rest

My latest Guardian column, "Why poor countries lead the world in piracy," discusses the groundbreaking independent research presented in "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies," a 400+ page report that took 35 researchers three years to compile. The project's lead, Joe Karganis, is giving a free talk tomorrow in London:

So why do it at all?