Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
Andrea James: Nasty! Public-access sensation Sondra Prill covers Miss Jackson's hit (thx Calpernia) Link
Jesse Thorn: The Onion offers pundits with instant feedback. HILARIOUS. Link
Some experimental evidence to suggest that swearing makes pain less traumatic, though the mechanism by which is does this shit is unclear:
The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.
Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. "Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it," says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: "I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear," he adds.
Edinburgh psych researcher Richard Wiseman and team left a load of wallets lying around with various contents, trying to see if there was a correlation between, say, baby pictures or cards indicating charitable giving and the rate at which wallets are returned. It turns out that people in Edinburgh (and maybe everyone) have a high likelihood of returning wallets with baby pictures, but are much less likely to return the wallets of charitable givers:
The baby photograph wallets had the highest return rate, with 88 per cent of the 40 being sent back. Next came the puppy, the family and the elderly couple, with 53 per cent, 48 and 28 respectively. At 20 per cent and 15, the charity card and control wallets had the lowest return rates.
Overall, 42 per cent of the wallets were posted back -- more than the team had anticipated. "We were amazed by the high percentage of wallets that came back," said Dr Wiseman.
Scientists have also found evidence for a baby instinct in brain scanning experiments. A recent study at the University of Oxford examined how people responded when they were shown photographs of baby or adult faces.
Ross sez, "A high-placed insider (ex VP of PR at Cigna) describes the machinations the insurance industry has used to keep us from getting a decent health care system."
This guy literally wrote the talking-points memo that the anti-universal-health-care crowd uses. He had a conversion experience and has now come clean. Remarkable.
BILL MOYERS: Was [Michael Moore's SICKO] true? Did you think it contained a great truth?
WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely did.
BILL MOYERS: What was it?
WENDELL POTTER: That we shouldn't fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it's been proven in the countries that were in that movie.
You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don't want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It's more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you're in now to one that you don't want. You might be in the plan you like now.
But chances are, pretty soon, you're going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you're going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined...
WENDELL POTTER: And [Wall Street thinks] that this company has not done a good job of managing medical expenses. It has not denied enough claims. It has not kicked enough people off the rolls. And that's what-- that is what happens, what these companies do, to make sure that they satisfy Wall Street's expectations with the medical loss ratio.
The French "Three Strikes" law is back on -- a law that can punish you for being accused of copyright infringement by cutting off your internet connection, fining you, and putting you in prison. It also criminalizes offering free internet access because pirates might use it.
Ed Felten nailed it: this is like a law that lets publishers take away all reading material from you and everyone who lives in your house if you're accused (without evidence) of infringing on three books.
Not content to let the idea die, President Nicolas Sarkozy's administration reworked the law in hopes of making it amenable to the Council--instead of HADOPI deciding on its own to cut off users on the third strike, it will now report offenders to the courts. A judge can then choose to ban the user from the Internet, fine him or her €300,000 (according to the AFP), or hand over a two-year prison sentence.
Those who are merely providing an Internet connection to dirty pirates can be fined €1,500 and/or receive a month-long temp ban from the online world. (A group of French hackers has already begun to work on software that cracks the passwords on locked WiFi networks so that there's an element of plausible deniability when law enforcement tries to go after home network owners.)
We've just released our 2009 "Attention Philanthropy" grants, our effort to shine a light on awesome work that's undeservedly obscure. 100 nominators from around the world helped us find amazing projects in fields as diverse as human rights, urban planning, citizen media and renewable energy. There's a day's worth of interesting reading just going down the whole list, but even a quick visit will probably turn you on to some cool things you didn't know existed.
Attention philanthropy is a gift of notice. In a noisy world, deluged in advertising, overrun with PR flacks and crowded with the superficial, one of the biggest barriers to success for a small, good idea or noble enterprise can simply be getting noticed in the first place.
Here's your chance to do a simple, good thing. If the work you find on these pages inspires you, learn more. Visit their websites, contribute to their projects and, above all, help us spread the word far and wide.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
UFC fighter Frank Mir exhibits the unfortunate consequences of what happens when you step into the ring with six-foot-three, 265-pound human monster Brock Lesnar after last night's UFC 100 heavyweight bout.
If UFC 100 represents mainstream, the world has changed.
Brock Lesnar, the former World Wrestling Entertainment fighter and current UFC heavyweight champion, battered Frank Mir in a second-round knockout to set aside a festering year of bitterness.
With a likely million more watching on pay-per-view, Lesnar gave the 11,000-plus a doubly obscene hand gesture and stood firm as the disdain continued.
Seth Godin eloquently describes the fitness factor that makes a restaurant suited to getting placement in an airport: they have to be run by corporations whose primary skill is dealing with bureaucracies. I wonder why this competency appears to exclude a comparable competency in preparing edible food?
Have you noticed that most airports feature the same restaurants? It's not an accident. The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations.
The codebreakers of Britain's Bletchley Park have finally been officially recognized by the UK government for their critical contributions winning WWII. Now, if we can only get the British government to put some money into preserving the shockingly decayed site itself...
"These people made an enormous contribution to the outcome of World War Two, the 20th century and freedom in the West," said Simon Greenish, director of the Bletchley Park Trust.
"After many years of having to keep their critical wartime work top secret, it is tremendous that this contribution has finally achieved recognition."
Heroes of Bletchley included Tommy Flowers, who built one of the world's first programmable computers, Colossus, largely using his own funds, and Dr Alan Turing, who designed the bombe cryptanalysis machines.
Flowers received an MBE and an award of £1,000 for his work while Turing was arrested for homosexuality in 1952 and committed suicide shortly afterwards, having received no official recognition for his work in his lifetime.
UCSB brain researcher Jonathan Schooler has an intriguing theory about why our minds wander:
The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks. One is known as the executive control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain's activity toward important goals. The other regions belong to another network called the default network. In 2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered that this network was more active when people were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future.
The fact that both of these important brain networks become active together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static. Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives. It may be no coincidence that most of the thoughts that people have during mind wandering have to do with the future.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
I'm in the front seat, riding with Soichiro in his car on his way to Shinjuku. "One cuts off one's finger to make a point", Soichiro explains while driving. "Usually to show the sincerity of an apology after doing something wrong."
"You cut off a single digit of your own finger in a ceremonial way, while facing your boss, and then you present the severed finger on a folded napkin to him. It reinforces the power of your apology. It shows that you're serious about what you're saying."
To do tomorrow in Los Angeles: visit the opening of a site-specific installation by The Date Farmers and Logan at the Constant Gallery's exhibition, Desert Sexy. Snip from the folks putting it together:
Desert Sexy is a group survey that explores the concept of the influence and context of the California low desert, which appears in art, music, film, etc. Besides the amazing photographs, paintings and sculptures from 12 incredible artists, we are also lucky enough to have low desert legends Yawning Man play a special live set at the opening reception! It's absolutely free and open to the public.
More info about the show here. Opening reception: Saturday, July 11, 2009, 6-8PM (but will go later), The Constant Gallery. Featured artists: Lisa K. Blatt, Scott Bowering, Joel Kyack, Mario Lalli, Anthony Lepore, Logan/The Date Farmers, Joey Morris, Keith Patrick, Robert Stone, Peter Sutherland, Tony Tornay, and Stephen Walters.
More exclusive photos from the installation, which apparently includes some neat old arcade game hulls, after the jump.
A quick roundup of news links related to the ongoing violent clashes in China's Xinjiang region between Han Chinese and ethnic Uighurs (who consider the region a sovereign nation - in many respects, the conflict is similar to that of Tibet.)
♦ Image above, from an extensive Boston Globe photo-essay which contains some graphic content: "An ethnic Uighur woman looks out the window of an apartment one day after Han Chinese mobs attacked the compound in Urumqi, China on Wednesday, July 8, 2009. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)"
♦ From China's state mouthpiece, People's Daily, calls to "punish Facebook" (I'm visualizing stern, uniformed Communist party officials publicly spanking Zuckerberg). Snip: "Over 90 percent of (...) netizens said that 'Xinjiang independence' activists, carrying out this type of 'online activity' severely violates China's national interests and agreed that Facebook should immediately shut down the 'Xinjiang independence" online group."
♦ Xinhua would like you to know that everything is "normal again" in the capital city of Urumqi, and that people are happily wandering the streets in search of watermelon, kebabs, and eggplant.
♦ Reuters: "Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said Friday genocide was being committed in China's northwest province of Xinjiang and called on Chinese authorities to intervene to prevent more deaths."
♦ CSM on China's savvier media strategy: "Taking a cue from Western PR tactics, Beijing moved away from trying to block coverage altogether - and was benefited by doing so."
♦ NYT reports the crackdown now extends to mosques: "Chinese authorities banned prayer gatherings at mosques here on Friday, the principal day of prayer for Muslims, as security officials tried to prevent further ethnic violence in the Xinjiang region."
During the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, an incident occured in which hundreds or thousands of Taliban POWs were killed by a warlord supported by the US.
Bush administration officials repeatedly thwarted efforts to investigate the mass killing, according to American officials and human rights groups. The warlord responsible, Abdul Rashid Dostum (shown above while campaigning for president in 2004), still retains a high position within the Afghan government. How (and if) the Obama administration will deal with ongoing calls for an investigation remains to be seen. Snip from NYT article today by James Risen:
American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation -- sought by officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, the Red Cross and other human rights groups -- because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported Karzai government, in which General Dostum has served as a defense official.
"At the White House, nobody said 'no' to an investigation, but nobody ever said 'yes,' either," said Pierre Prosper, the former war crimes ambassador for the United States. "The first reaction of everybody there was 'Oh, this is a sensitive issue. This is a touchy issue politically.' " It is not clear how -- or if -- the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum's reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration may not be hostile to an inquiry.
The Stanford University School of Medicine has a fascinating Flickr stream, including a collection of mystery medical history photos that I posted about several months ago. Most recently, they added a small set of interesting images from their 3D Radiology Lab. Above: "3D frontal view of teeth with braces overlaid on 2D human mandible. The wisdom teeth (upper right and left) have not yet penetrated the gums." Below left: "The lumbar region of the spine with surgically implanted hardware." From the 3D Radiology Set description:
The Stanford Radiology 3D Imaging Laboratory uses computed tomography and Magnetic Resonance imaging data to create three-dimensional images of the human body. Individual CT and MR scans of the body are taken around a single axis that are stacked and rendered using complex computer algorithms to create a three-dimensional volume of data. The images produced from this data can be manipulated on-screen to provide doctors with unique interior perspectives of the human body for diagnosing and treating patients. Each month the lab produces nearly 20,000 images.
The warrantless wiretapping program initiated under the Bush administration began within a few weeks of 9/11, according to a report recently released to Congress and compiled by intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and the DoJ:
The report, mandated by Congress, provides context to information that has been leaked in press accounts and buttressed by congressional testimony and in books authored by former officials involved in the surveillance effort.
The report notes that several members of Congress -- including then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nancy Pelosi -- were briefed on the program on October 25, 2001, and a total of 17 times before the program became public in 2005.
Among other things, the report also cites a Justice Department conclusion that "it was extraordinary and inappropriate that a single DOJ attorney, John Yoo, was relied upon to conduct the initial legal assessment of the (surveillance program)."
WHAT IS AWESOMECON??! Awesomecon is an outdoor extravaganza where awesome fans can celebrate with Tim & Eric!! Meet the creators of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and their special guests DJ Douggpound, David Liebe Hart, Richard Dunn, James Quall and many more! There will be karaoke, games, a costume contest, a trivia contest AANNDDD one lucky ultimate fan will win a wave runner ride with Tim & Eric! vrroooom vrooom.
So warm up your singing pipes, brush up on your Awesome Show trivia, pick out your best character costume and join us for our favorite outdoor summer tradition! See ya there!!!!
For the past 8 years at Institute for the Future, we have been creating "artifacts from the future." We see them as a means of converting abstract, high-level trends and future visions into tangible objects that help people internalize our forecasts. However, we do not view them as prototypes for building new products or services. Artifacts from the future are a good way to engage people in important conversations about the future and to elicit meaningful insights that hopefully lead to positive actions.
The above artifact, a "Reputation Statement of Account," was designed by our colleague Jason Tester, a researcher and a designer, as a part of our 2004 Ten Year Forecast. It remains one of my favorite artifacts and seems to perfectly encapsulate emergence of new types of social currencies as a part of a reorganization of our lives around social relationships. In this world, it would be easy to imagine that the statement of your wealth would include accounting of your social capital as measured by contributions to various types of open communities, such as Wikipedia or Flickr.
What does the brain do when you're not doing anything in particular? That's when the brain's "default mode network" really kicks into gear. This series of connected regions in the brain is apparently a hot topic for cognitive neuroscientists. This week's issue of Science News surveys research on the default mode network, which apparently is responsible for allowing your mind to "wander." But it also seems to have a much more important role. From Science News:
Default brain settings may lead to daydreaming and mind-wandering, but the network also conducts serious business. Neuroscientists still hotly debate the network's exact functions, however. Among its jobs may be running life simulations, providing a sense of self and maintaining crucial connections between brain cells. A few researchers doubt the network is anything special at all.
But evidence suggests that a malfunctioning default network is involved in diseases and disorders as diverse as Alzheimer's disease, autism, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, Tourette syndrome, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, schizophrenia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Despite its laid-back name, which neuroscientist Marcus Raichle coined in a 2001 paper, the default mode network is one of the hardest-working systems in the brain. It was discovered accidentally by researchers watching the activity of brains at work on various tasks.
Neuroscientists use PET (short for positron emission tomography) and functional MRI scanners to image and gauge brain activity. To tell which areas of the brain become more active during a mental task, scientists compare brain activity during the task with activity when the person is at rest, either with eyes closed or while staring at a dot or cross. Raichle, of Washington University in St. Louis, and others saw that every time a person engaged in a mental activity such as memorizing a list of words, a collection of brain regions consistently decreased activity compared with their resting levels. Only when people recall autobiographical memories or imagine alternative situations is the network more active than it is at rest, scientists have since found. (In this context, "rest" refers to a state in which the brain is not engaged in a mental task but is still monitoring the body and the world around it.) Raichle hypothesized that the network is more active when the brain is at rest and has to dial back its activity to let people concentrate on specific tasks.
Fifty years ago, textile mogul Allen Gant Sr. introduced the world to the first pair of pantyhose. To mark this momentous anniversary, Smithsonian tells the story of their invention and place in fashion history. The heyday of panthose were the 1970s and 1980s but apparently sales have declined since the 1990s "casualization" of the workplace. From Smithsonian:
The year was 1953 and if you were a woman, a night on the town meant either squeezing into a girdle or slipping on a garter belt. Formal dress dictated that females wear such intimate, and often uncomfortable, articles of clothing. How else could you hold up your nylons?
Allen Gant Sr., then running textile company Glen Raven Mills, was inspired by his wife's lament. "How would it be if we made a pair of panties and fastened the stockings to it?" he asked Ethel. She stitched some crude garments together, tried them on, and handed the products to her husband. "You got to figure out how to do this," she said. Allen brought his wife's experiment into the office, and with the help of his colleagues Arthur Rogers, J. O. Austin, and Irvin Combs, developed what they later called "Panti-Legs." Their product—the world's first commercial pantyhose—began lining department store shelves in 1959.
"It was wonderful," a 74-year-old Ethel Gant told the Associated Press 30 years later. "Most people my age loved them from the very beginning and couldn't wait to get a hold of them. I don't think we've ever changed our minds," she said.
Allen Gant Sr. had at least one satisfied customer, but the panty-stocking combo did not grab most women's attentions at first. Though the convenience of not having to wear a girdle or garter belt was a plus, what helped pantyhose take hold was the rise of the miniskirt in the mid-1960s.
For the fashion-conscious woman looking to wear a skirt shorter than stockings are long, pantyhose were the perfect fit. When iconic models such as Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy donned their mini skirts, demand for pantyhose exploded and women flocked to the stores for pairs of their own.
The Rev. Joey Talley, aka "the Good Witch of West Marin," has been booted from farmers market in Marin, California. Apparently, Talley has been hawking her "personal witchcraft services" at the market for years but never applied for a vendor permit. From the Marin Independent Journal:
"I've been here year after year," Talley said. "There are teens who tell me things they could never take to their parents, and they could never afford to schedule a $100 session with me..."
A clinical psychologist by training - she previously worked with veterans services and at a drug rehabilitation clinic in San Francisco - she uses her skills as a counselor, herbalist and Wiccan healer to solve her clients' problems, which often have to do with money or sex, she said.
"There have been a lot of requests for money charms in the last year," Talley said. "A lot of people have asked me to put a glamour on a loan application or other paperwork, so when other people read it, it will look good to them."
Occasionally, she'll receive requests to perform black magic - but Talley always tells those clients she's not that kind of witch.
While they appreciate Talley's unique talents, Marin Farmers Market representatives insist she take part in the same application process as every other vendor at the Fairfax market. It's that process, Spilger said, that lets customers know what they see at the market is what they'll get.
Related: These folks are trying to preserve "Nikola Tesla's last and only existing laboratory, in Shoreham, NY (USA) [as] a science and technology center and museum." Apparently, AGFA wants to buy the space and turn it into a corporate center. The Tesla Science Center project solicits your support and donations to protect the site as a historic landmark. (thanks, Evelyn)
Over at Wired's Danger Room blog, David Hambling has an extensive post up about a new series of "less-lethal" weapons from "controversial electroshock weaponeer" Taser International. , is shown above. As Hambling notes, results from safety and field tests of Taser's new gear, which includes the eXtended Range Electronic Projectile (XREP) above, is coming along far more slowly. But hey, at least those new weapons are tweeting!
The Taser X3 has its own Facebook page and, worst of all, it Twitters. Presumably the agency were briefed to come up with something cute and non-threatening. Evidently they decided that the X3's image should come across less as Arnold Schwarzenegger and more as Paris Hilton, judging from these tweets:
"Check out my color screen. Like a Tele-Tubby ... only a little more intense!"
"Just out of the solar radiation box. Tanning bed for TASER's... 3 months of Arizona summer sun radiation. Check that one off!"
"Never thought I'd get so excited about the feel of a safety switch. But wait until you feel it - smooooooth."
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
Jesse Thorn: Count Arthur Strong discusses creationism and creation. Amazing insights. Link
Richard Metzger: Wonderful selection of Pina Bausch videos on Coilhouse.net Link
Sean Bonner: I'm kinda tired today, I think I need some Powerthirst!!! Link
Jesse Thorn: Another clip from Armando Iannucci's hilarious new film "In the Loop": ("Warning: contains exotic swearing"): Link
Sean Bonner: Live action Spanish language Simpsons. It's every bit as creepy as it sounds. Link
Sean Bonner: This is Pickle Surprise. What Pickle Surprise is, I have no idea. Link
Jesse Thorn: "In the Loop" comes out in the US in about two weeks. It is one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. Link
R. Stevens: I saw a friendly kitty chased by skunks today. Link
Jesse Thorn: The full run of Dave Hill's series "The King of Miami" is now available on Hulu: Link
Andrea James: Bill Bailey analyzes leitmotifs in 'Starsky & Hutch' incidental music: Link
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should -- according to our hypothesis -- acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay!
Each writer, Rob explained, would choose from a variety of "junk" objects bought by the curators at garage sales and thrift stores. A smiling mug. A Sanka ashtray. A JFK bust. Then, we would write a short story about the object. Whatever we liked. A fiction. Thereby, at least as I saw it, imbuing this seeming "worthless" object with a greater value, sentimental or otherwise. The story and a photo of the object would be posted on the website and put up for auction on eBay. Readers would be invited to bid on the item. If they won the auction, they would win the object and a printout of the story. No one would be "deceived" into believing the stories about the objects were true, as their fictional relationship would be made clear, and the proceeds of the auction would go to the author, who would retain the rights to the story. Or, as Rob puts it: "Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a 'significant' object!"
I chose the All-American Official Necking Team button that you see here. The story I wrote about it has bits of truth and fiction mixed together. My paternal grandfather did die on the IRT and my father was a tall man, but I am not a boy and, so far as I know, my father was never on a "necking team."
After he had passed away, my mother and I had stood over the dining room table upon which sat a large box that contained what was left of him. Cremains, the man had called them. My father, I had longed to correct him. Thankfully, my mother had been willing to share what remained of him with me, his only son. My father was a skyscraper of a man -- six-foot-five, Ozymandias hands, a brooding forehead -- a great man, really -- and so, he had left a great deal of himself behind.
Other writers with story objects include Luc Sante, Ben Greenman, Stewart O'Nan, Kurt Anderson, and there's one coming from Boing Boing's own Mark Frauenfelder.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
A lawyer in Florida filed a motion to force his rival to upgrade to newer shoes, on the grounds that his homely old hush puppies gave him an unfair advantage by projecting an air of unsophisticated honesty to the jury.
3. It is well known in the legal community that Michael Robb, Esquire, wears shoes with holes in the soles when he is in trial.
4. Upon reasonable belief, Plaintiff believes that Mr. Robb wears these shoes as a ruse to impress the jury and make them believe that Mr. Robb is humble and simple without sophistication. . . .
6. Part of this strategy is to present Mr. Robb and his client as modest individuals who are so frugal that Mr. Robb has to wear shoes with holes in the soles. Mr. Robb is known to stand at sidebar with one foot crossed casually beside the other so that the holes in his shoes are readily apparent to the jury . . . .
7. Then, during argument and throughout the case Mr. Robb throws out statements like "I'm just a simple lawyer" with the obvious suggestion that Plaintiff's counsel and the Plaintiff are not as sincere and down to earth as Mr. Robb.
8. Mr. Robb should be required to wear shoes without holes in the soles at trial to avoid the unfair prejudice suggested by this conduct.
Toronto's Pages bookstore, one of my favorites in the world, is set to close after a rent-hike left it unable to remain in its 30 year Queen Street location. I worked at Bakka, the science fiction bookstore, when it was just a few doors down from Pages (which has a phenomenal periodicals and underground, design, art, and culture book sections, as well as some of the friendliest, most knowledgeable staff you could hope to meet), and I remember when we lost our lease after a rent hike. The store eventually landed back on Queen Street after being acquired by a new owner, but it was touch and go for years. Apparently Pages can't find anywhere else to go and will be shuttering. I'm gutted -- Pages was always one of the highlights of my trips back home to Toronto.
"Landlords seem to be recession-proof at this point," he says. "They're just keeping their prices up."
Currently, Glassman figures he's getting a good deal at $235,000 a year. But landlord Yoram Birenzweig, VP of Pinedale Properties, says the true market value at 256 Queen West is $100 a square foot - which my calculator tells me is $400,000 a year.
That's not what he's demanding Glassman pay, but even if they split the difference, it's all too much for Pages.
Glassman keeps stressing his relationship with Birenzweig is genial and that he's not getting screwed over.
"It's life," he says. "He appreciates what we're doing, [but] for him, if you can, you should make more money," he says.
The article goes on to mention that another great Toronto bookstore, This Ain't the Rosedale Library, rescued itself by moving to Kensington Market from Church Street. I've been to the new location and it's fantastic -- a great store for a great neighborhood. Visitors to Toronto, take note.
French hackers claim to have sabotaged Internet forensics by creating a firmware for routers that cracks nearby WiFi networks and routes your traffic through them at random, creating false trails leading to your neighbors instead of you. They're calling it the HADOPI Router, in honor of Nicolas Sarkozy's crazy Internet law of the same name.
HADOPI originally required ISPs to disconnect users after three unsubstantiated claims of copyright infringement (Princeton's Ed Felten compared this to giving publishers the power to take away all the printed matter in your household if you were accused of committing three acts of illegal photocopying or cut-and-paste). The law was initially defeated in the French parliament, then it passed on reintroduction, only to be struck down by France's high court on the grounds that it violated human rights.
Undaunted, Sarkozy has reintroduced the bill, on a fast track, with a provision that creates a five-minute judicial review prior to account termination, fines and imprisonment for those accused of illegal file-sharing. The French HADOPI Router hackers created their technology to highlight the unreliability of network forensics under the best of circumstances, and to create a veneer of plausible deniability for any accused: "Your honor, I must have been the victim of a neighbor with a HADOPI router."
A hacker known only as 'N' says he has developed some software known as 'Hadopi Router', a term first penned by bloggers who devised the concept. 'N', who is said to have previously worked manufacturing routers, says he and a few friends wrote 'Hadopi Router' in order to prove that the evidence gathered by the Hadopi agency is unreliable.
"It locates Wi-Fi networks in the neighborhood, then begins to crack all their passwords," says 'N'. "Once we have the keys, we can create a virtual access point," which in basic terms means using the Internet connection without the account holder's knowledge.
'N' says that if an 'owned' router has its password changed, the system automatically switches to another Wi-Fi signal in the neighborhood and starts to attack the new password.
Additionally, 'N' claims that with Hadopi Router it is possible to monitor activity on the cracked networks but one of his accomplices called 'V' says they have no bad intentions.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-group watchdog organization based in Alabama, will present documentation to Congress on Friday about the presence of active duty military personnel on the white supremacist social networking site newsaxon.org. On that website, SLPC spotted 40 users who claim to be serving in the military, an apparent violation of Pentagon regulations prohibiting racist extremism in the ranks.
Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a magazine produced at the law center, [said] "The Pentagon really has shrugged this off and refused to look at this in any serious way."
On the newsaxon.org website, which Potok termed "a racist version of Facebook run by the National Socialist Movement," many participants list their branch of service, base location and hometown on colorful pages festooned with Nazi art and Confederate battle flags. Some say they have served or will soon be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Several include pictures of themselves in camouflage combat uniforms.
One participant under the username "WhitePride85," who said he is a 24-year-old staff sergeant from Madison, Wis., wrote: "I have been in the Army for over 5 years now ... I am a SSGT ... I have been in Iraq and Kuwait ... I love and will do anything to keep our master race marching. I have been a skinhead forever."
Screengrab: In his "about me" section, newsaxon.org user "SoldatAMG" describes himself as a "Sergeant in USMC stationed at Camp Lejeune (...) recently returned from my 3rd trip to Iraq. I fight every day to stem the tide of multicultturalism and to ensure that my children have a better world. SIEG HEIL!"
(Image: "Karakorum Highway, Xinjiang" by flickr user pmorgan.) For folks struggling to understand the current explosion of ethnic unrest in what the government of China officially refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, this Far East Economic Review essay by Calla Weimer may be helpful reading. Snip:
What makes Xinjiang so volatile is a simmering resentment by the native Uighur people against repression by the Han majority. Uighurs in many respects are denied the opportunity to live the life they desire. They are inhibited in the practice of their Islamic faith. They are limited in their access to economic opportunity. And, not unlike their Han Chinese counterparts, they are denied basic freedoms of expression and assembly.
China's ethnic-minority problems are deeply rooted, and resolving them will require change of a systemic nature. China is not a society that embraces pluralism. Difference is seen as a threat and little quarter is given to alternative points of view or ways of life. The government controls many aspects of people's lives and livelihoods, and local officials have a great deal of power within that context, power that is subject to abuse whether toward Han or toward minorities. But minorities suffer more under a system where prejudices can weigh on official behavior. This in turn brews resentment among those systematically victimized. An acrimonious dynamic builds and festers. This can happen with minority groups anywhere, but in China there is more scope for those who have power to abuse it. And there is no voice for those who have grievances.
Urlesque has posted a collection of videos that document a sport I wish did not exist: "Mutton Busting."
And while 'mutton busting' sounds categorically filthy, it is, in fact, merely the act of a child riding a hyper sheep bareback.
I'm of the mind that it's, ah, not a good thing for the child or the sheep. But here I am, suggesting in muted horror from the safety of my desk that you watch the videos.
From a photo-essay "narrated" by chef Eric Ripert with delicious little details about what goes on behind the scenes at the world-famous, Michelin 3-star NYC restaurant Le Bernadin:
When serving crab, it is very important to get out each tiny piece of shell that might have been left behind and that is a difficult job. To make the task easier, we inspect the crabmeat under a black light. The shells glow under this light and they are easy to pick out.
As my son gets ready to move out of the house to go to college, I've been thinking about another Russian writer who captures universal human themes that resonate over a hundred years later: Anton Checkhov. His story "Dushechka" or, in English translation, "The Darling," has many layers of meaning. Indeed, the Russian word Dushechka originates from the Russian word "dusha" or soul, and thus the title alone has multiple meanings -- soul mate, someone who is all soul, or has a great soul. I'm not going to do Dushechka justice in this post so please forgive me, dear Russian literature fanatics.
The heroine of "The Darling" is a young woman, Olenka, who becomes passionate about whatever her loved ones are involved in. First she marries a theater owner and all she talks about is theater. She speaks with contempt of the public, of its indifference to the arts, of its boorishness and insensitivity. She weeps at unfavorable revues and argues with editors. When her husband dies, she marries a timber merchant. Suddenly, lumber is the most fascinating subject on earth as far as Olenka is concerned. She manages her husband's business affairs and dreams of boards, planks, beams, and joists. When the second husband dies, Olenka takes up with a veterinary surgeon. Her acquaintances find out about this simply because she suddenly becomes overwhelmingly concerned with the sanitary conditions of animals: "The health of domestic animals ought to be as well attended to as the health of human beings." And so it goes.
It is hard to be a parent and completely avoid turning into a Dushechka just a bit, particularly in this day and age of high parental involvement. Whether we like it or not, we become engaged in our kids' passions and pursuits, and often absorb them as our own. That brings me to baseball and bluegrass.
For years after coming to the US, I had absolutely no interest in baseball. In fact, I didn't get it at all -- there just wasn't enough action on the field as far as I was concerned. Once, someone invited me to a party in the box at San Francisco's Candlestick Park where many people watched the game on a TV screen. My reaction? "This would be great if you could only switch to a different channel." I was convinced that you had to be born in America to understand and appreciate baseball. This all changed when Greg, my son, joined his first T--ball team. I grew to love baseball as he moved from T-ball to Little League. We are now proud San Francisco Giants season ticket holders. My husband told me he knew I was fully on board when he heard me say after a pitch, "That was a mean slider!"
Similarly, I found myself falling in love with the most American of music genre -- bluegrass. This happened when the building housing the music room in my son's school had to close for repairs, and the kids could not use their favorite electric instruments to play rock music. Instead, John Fuller, music teacher and bluegrass musician, brought out acoustic instruments outside--mandolin, guitars, upright base--and Greg, a 5th grader at the time, suddenly discovered bluegrass. Within a few months, he and his buddies had a bluegrass band and were playing at festivals and farmers' markets. And I, who was raised on Bach and The Beatles, suddenly found myself camping out at various bluegrass festivals, hanging out with bluegrass musicians, and learning to love Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, among others.
As Greg gets ready to leave for college, the cautionary image of "Dushechka" looms big on my mind. I am going to a lot of ballgames and listening to a lot of bluegrass musicians, probably more than ever before. Am I trying to ensure that my adopted passions continue as Greg moves out, and that I don't turn into a Dushechka? If that is the case, thank you Chekhov for a cautionary tale.
Fred sez, "Image search on Google has just become a bit easier and a little less scary: Google officially launched the ability to filter search results using Creative Commons licenses inside their Image Search tool. Searches are also capable of returning content under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or images that are in the public domain."
Mike sez, "In his closing talk from last month's Reboot conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling guesses at what it will be like to live through the next ten years: 'It is neither progress nor conservatism because there's nothing left to conserve and no direction in which to progress. So what you get is transition. Transition to nowhere.'"
Courtesy of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Celia sends us "an annotated copy of the Kindle contract. Based on my decidedly non-lawyerish interpretation of this contract and the annotations, I think it says that Amazon now owns everything it wants to own, and you're out of luck if you don't like that."
Publishing contracts are generally kind of bogus to begin with, but this is a real pinnacle of bogosity.
Neither party may assign any of its rights or obligations under this Agreement, whether by operation of law or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the other, except that (i) Amazon may assign any of its rights and obligations under this Agreement without consent and (ii) you may assign all of you [sic: your] rights and obligations under this Agreement to any corporation or other entity domiciled in the United States without consent in connection with the sale of all or substantially all of the assets of a Title; provided that you shall give Amazon written notice of any such assignment no later than ten (10) business days following such assignment. Subject to the foregoing limitation, this Agreement will be binding upon, inure to the benefit of and be enforceable by the parties and their respective successors and assigns.
Amazon can sell this contract - indeed, the whole Digital Books business - to anybody it wants, and your contract rides along with the sale. We revert to the essential necessity for you to be able to terminate this Agreement any time you want under the blue highlighted language in Section 9.
Andrew Sullivan has rounded up all the documented major, easily verified lies of Sarah Palin. It's an impressive list, a kind of "portrait of the candidate as a frootbat."
Palin lied when she said the dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire state trooper Mike Wooten; in fact, the Branchflower Report concluded that she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.
Palin lied when she repeatedly claimed to have said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere; in fact, she openly campaigned for the federal project when running for governor.
Palin lied when she denied that Wasilla's police chief and librarian had been fired; in fact, both were given letters of termination the previous day.
Palin lied when she wrote in the NYT that a comprehensive review by Alaska wildlife officials showed that polar bears were not endangered; in fact, email correspondence between those scientists showed the opposite.
Are you a young maker or know one? There is still a month to submit projects to The Digital Open, an online expo for open technology projects created by people aged 17 and under from around the world. The Digital Open is a project of the Institute for the Future in partnership with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing. The deadline for submissions is August 15 but if you enter your project (even if it's not finalized) by July 24, you may win one of five Flip Ultra Camcorders. Grand prizes in the Digital Open include laptops running OpenSolaris and other fun gear. Entries will be judged by Eric Wilhelm of Instructables, Dale Dougherty of MAKE, Kati London of Area/Code, Graham Hill of Treehugger, Linda Rogers of Sun, Nick Bilton of the New York Times, Lawrence Lessig, our own Xeni Jardin, and many other interesting folks. The Digital Open
One of my favorite painters, Brooklyn artist Stella Im Hultberg, has a solo show of new work opening Friday, July 10, at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles. Along with work on paper, canvas, and wood panel, she's also showing a series of small painted wood figures. Seen here, "Penumbra" (oil on canvas, 12" x 14"). The works in the exhibition, titled Memento Mori, are also viewable online. Memento Mori
Love-him-or-hate-him comix artist Johnny Ryan just issued four new hand-screened prints in editions of 100. My favorite is Johnny's take on The Exorcist. The print is 11.5" x 16", six color, and just $30. Johnny Ryan prints
Researchers made progress enabling a computer to teach itself British Sign Language by analyzing video footage. The scientists from the University of Oxford and University of Leeds first programmed a machine vision algorithm so the computer could identify the shapes of hands in the video. From New Scientist:
Once the team were confident the computer could identify different signs in this way, they exposed it to around 10 hours of TV footage that was both signed and subtitled. They tasked the software with learning the signs for a mixture of 210 nouns and adjectives that appeared multiple times during the footage.
The program did so by analysing the signs that accompanied each of those words whenever it appeared in the subtitles. Where it was not obvious which part of a signing sequence relates to the given keyword, the system compared multiple occurrences of a word to pinpoint the correct sign.
Starting without any knowledge of the signs for those 210 words, the software correctly learnt 136 of them, or 65 per cent, says Everingham. "Some words have different signs depending on the context – for example, cutting a tree has a different sign to cutting a rose." he says, so this is a high success rate given the complexity of the task.
Our pals at Adafruit Industries have launched a new series of kits that include a full color comic book/zine. The first volume of Citizen Engineer is all about SIM card hacking and has the parts to build your own SIM card reader/writer. Citizen Engineer(via MAKE:)
I received the following press release on June 3 (forwarded to me by Douglas Rushkoff). I honored the embargo date of July 9.
In the spirit of famous scientific wagers by notable scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, two leading biologists, Professor Lewis Wolpert and Dr Rupert Sheldrake, have set up a wager on the predictive value of the genome.
The wager will be decided on May 1, 2029, and if the outcome is not obvious, the Royal Society, the world's most venerable scientific organization, will be asked to adjudicate. The winner will receive a case of fine port, Quinta do Vesuvio, 2005, which should have reached perfect maturity by 2029 and is being stored in the cellars of The Wine Society.
Prof Wolpert bets that the following will happen. Dr Sheldrake bets it will not: By May 1, 2029, given the genome of a fertilized egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities.
Prof Wolpert and Dr Sheldrake agree that at present, given the genome of an egg, no one can predict the way an embryo will develop. The wager arose from a debate on the nature of life between Wolpert and Sheldrake at the 2009 Cambridge University Science Festival.
Prof Wolpert believes that all biological phenomena can in principle be explained in terms of DNA, proteins and other molecules, together with their interactions. He is convinced that it is only a matter of time before all the details of an organism can be predicted on the basis of the genome.
Dr Sheldrake believes that the predictive value of genes is grossly over-rated. Genes enable organisms make proteins, but they do not contain programs or blueprints. Instead, he thinks that the development of organisms depends on organizing fields called morphogenetic fields, which are not inherited through the genes.
Famous scientific wagers in the past include Richard Feynman's bet of$1000 that no-one could construct a motor no bigger than 1/64 of an inch on a side. He lost. Stephen Hawking bet fellow cosmologist Kip Thorne that Cygnus X-1 would turn out not to be a black hole (Hawking lost). And in 1980 biologist Paul Erlich bet economist Julian Simon that the price of five mineral commodities would rise over the next ten years. In fact they fell.
The wager will be reported in full in The New Scientist on 9 July where there will also be articles stating their cases by both Prof Wolpert and Dr Sheldrake. Lewis Wolpert's book How We Live and Why We Die: The Secret Lives of Cells is published by Faber and Faber and the new edition of Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life is published by Icon Books.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
(Self-portrait by Sarah May Scott)
At Mayday Productions, blogger Sarah Scott writes about life with a spinal cord injury. Her writing is searingly honest, brutally revealing, and wickedly self-aware.
The after is where it really gets grand, gets epic, gets to where one memoir could never be enough. Truly epic shit doesn't start to go down until the very moment you decide to start living again, to start crawling your way back into the light and out of the darkness. I know enough to know now I'll never fully leave the darkness completely, but the reprieves at this point seem to be enough to keep me going for now. sometimes. But no one wants to hear about the after, because it doesn't arc as much as it shakes and shudders in fits and spurts until eventually you recognize an ersatz normalcy has filled the void you left somewhere in all the fallout.
I interviewed her for Boing Boing about life in a wheelchair, if she considers herself a cyborg, and her plans on becoming a female Hardiman.
SB: Tell me your story.
SS: The story that everyone wants to know from the start is why I use a wheelchair. I was 29, one minute racing my road bike, and the next "tits up in a ditch" and a paraplegic. That was nearly four years ago. Prior to that, I was your basic hot mess, but that's a longer story than there is room for here. I will say that PTSD has figured in for a longer time than I ever realized until I was injured. For once in my life, and this always sounds crazy, but after everything I've been through I actually like who I am for the first time in my life, chair and all.
I am a small-town girl from State College, PA, though I spent some time in NYC and Philadelphia before returning after my accident. These days I live in a very rural area with my crazy mutts.
SB: Are you a cyborg?
SS: I am not a cyborg, but I am getting closer and closer to being a terminator. My back is already full of titanium, and I've got a radio-controlled device in my abdomen that feeds medication into my spinal canal. If the trials go well, I hope to get my chance at being the female Hardiman with the ReWalk system. You can start calling me Ripley when that happens.
In a sense, being in a chair is like being a cyborg/object to a lot of people, somehow not quite human. I think all women know what it is to feel like an object to a certain degree, but I found it to be much different when you're viewed as a asexual woman and a person of very vague use if any. It made me very early on understand that to survive I was going to have to change how my self-worth was measured.
SB: Why do you blog?
SS: I started blogging for a few reasons. I was desperately lonely and going through all these sort of insane experiences that no one could understand, and I was desperate to be able to explain them in such a way that people would be able to understand without reverting to all the chair stereotypes that I was just a bitter, mean, crazy person now. There were a lot of people in my life that didn't make the transition to be able to see me first and the chair second, and it was heartbreaking. I thought online I could control things in such a way that people would see me again. In the beginning, it was very much about control.
As things have evolved, I started to ease up on that obsessive level of control and start showing the darkness too. It turned out to be hugely therapeutic for me, and I hope that it humanized me for a lot of people as well. More than anything, I want people to see me as a person and not as an object of pity or otherwise. My story is really about grief and catastrophic change, and I think most people at one time or another in their lives can relate to that.
Something that wasn't diagnosed early on was that I had a Traumatic Brain Injury during the accident, and my brain works a lot differently now. I can't remember shit, repeat myself constantly, fuck up words, and these creative floodgates opened up and haven't closed since. I see the world so differently, which I think is a big reason why I became so insanely drawn to photography and writing. I write and take pictures because I have to, it gives meaning to my life even if I forget from time to time that I have any.
SB: What do people not understand?
SS: Most people forget that I'm a very ordinary person living under extraordinary circumstances, and that I'm also incredibly shy to the point of near social phobia in some cases. The things that make healing the most difficult is all the shit I carried with me before the accident, things that become unavoidable after being catastrophically injured. I don't think I'll ever stop grieving, but I do know that everyday it gets a little less painful.
SB: If we could open you up and look inside, what would we find?
SS: Under all the armor, I'm someone who's been trying to survive one way or another my whole life, but never had a map or a guide to know how. My hope is that you'd find a lot of resilience and hopefully some beauty along with it. I like to think that I'm finally becoming on the outside the person who was hiding in there all along, but for many reasons wasn't able to be. I'm really, really hoping there's a photographer in there, but only time will tell.
Charlie Stross has just wrapped up a 12-part, 25,000-word autobiography explaining how he came to find himself writing some of the weirdest, freshest, wildest post-cyberpunk fiction in the field.
I was stressed out for most of two years. I'm an alpha-type personality to begin with, but this wasn't funny. I was writing fiction (and articles for Computer Shopper) as a therapeutic distraction. Around the middle of 1998, I figured that the novel I'd written in 1995-96 Singularity Sky was about ready, and mailed it off in the direction of Tor in New York, where it sat on a certain editorial director's desk for the next eighteen months. I wrote and sold a couple of short stories, and began work on a project which I was workshopping with some other local writers; a strange humorous horror novel/spy thriller about a hapless geek who's fallen into a government department for dealing with ... look, you probably know where this is going, right?. This was strictly a weekend activity, to distract me from the weekday stress cycle: compartmentalising my life helped me deal with Datacash. But it probably didn't help enough.
For most of the end of 1998 and the first half of 1999, the uttermost bane of my life was an ecommerce subsidiary of Bank Paribas called KLELine. They were offering a credit card solution over SSL, which had certain attractions for some of our customers, being (a) French, and (b) able to do some funky and useful things, or so they said. The trouble from my point of view was ... well, they weren't terribly clear on open source, for starters, or on public APIs, which was somewhat more serious. And when I got in deeper, I discovered some horrifying shortcuts in their API. Like, oh, once a credit card transaction hit their servers they'd process it, but the acknowledgement might well disappear into the bit bucket if the poor-quality leased line between London and Paris chose that particular moment to crap out. And the exchange rate for the transaction in question would be pulled out of a hat in accordance with the phase of the moon or something, and a subsequent refund or cancellation request wouldn't go through at the same exchange rate if there was a currency fluctuation.
Mark from the BBC sez, "Hello, we've got a fabulous short comic strip about Victorian genius and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was drawn by ace animator Sydney Padua. It's so good I thought it deserved a much bigger audience."
Rick Kleffel sez, "I've recently posted an interview with China Miéville about his new book, The City & The City -- certainly one of the most unusual books you could read this year. He talks about the challenges of working in two genres -- the fantastic and the hard-boiled mystery genre -- in one novel."
Kyle Brady, a computer science student, sends us, "a critique of a major IEEE article by Lawrence G. Roberts where he automatically assumes P2P traffic is illegal, unwanted, and should be filtered - then develops the technology to do so."
Consider, for a moment, the issue most often cited for "traffic shaping", the practice of filtering a users traffic based on the type and source: legality of content. While there is an abundance of content with questionable copyright origins based on the current interpretations of the DMCA (in America), there is also a sea of legal content being acquired by the same means: Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and a number of other musical artists have experimented with a freely available online distribution method, in addition to countless young movie producers that are only interested in their content being available and seen.
How can network monitoring practices differentiate between "legal" and "illegal" P2P traffic? Filtering by content source, such as a band's official website vs. IsoHunt, is impractical - the content available via the official source is likely licensed for free distribution and sharing by other means. Filtering by traffic size, as in number of bytes transferred, is a gray area at best - setting an arbitrary size for acceptable P2P traffic, or any type of traffic, creates artificial pricing levels, not to mention potentially endorsing the acquisition of questionably sourced content. There is really only one option left, and it is what most ISPs choose in such cases: filter by traffic type.
I've never understood the ISP/admin approach to P2P that says, "We've provided you with a pipe so you can access the Internet, but stop accessing the Internet so much!" If users want P2P, then P2P is what makes paying for an ISP valuable, so why would ISPs want to reduce its availability? That's like a phone company that discovers that teenagers use phones to send a lot of texts to one another, overwhelming their capacity (based on assumptions about how much text users will want to send) who then throttles text-sending rather than changing their assumptions about use-patterns.
British journalists working for Murdoch papers have been on a crime spree, hiring private eyes to illegally hack into the voicemail and data of thousands of people, including " tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills"; Murdoch has paid out over £1M so far to hush it up. The head of the Conservative party's communications is a former Murdoch exec who from the time that much of this crime was committed by his staffers.
Senior editors are among those implicated. This activity occurred before the mobile phone hacking, at a time when Coulson was deputy and the editor was Rebekah Wade, now due to become chief executive of News International. The extent of their personal knowledge, if any, is not clear: the News of the World has always insisted that it would not break the law and would use subterfuge only if essential in the public interest.
Faced with this evidence, News International changed their position, started offering huge cash payments to settle the case out of court, and finally paid out £700,000 in legal costs and damages on the condition that Taylor signed a gagging clause to prevent him speaking about the case. The payment is believed to have included more than £400,000 in damages. News Group then persuaded the court to seal the file on Taylor's case to prevent all public access, even though it contained prima facie evidence of criminal activity.
There are two particularly troubling aspects to this story. The Metropolitan Police, Crown Prosecution Service and Information Commissioner's Office all had prima facie evidence of these crimes, but have declined to take action against News Group. And, mobile phone companies continue to allow access to messages using voicemail PINs set to defaults that are apparently known throughout the media. Perhaps in future:
1. Law enforcement agencies will take action against those discovered to be breaking the law, whether or not they work for powerful newspaper groups?
2. Mobile phone companies will not leave their customers' communications wide open to abuse?
3. Government agencies and companies will think a little more carefully before building up large collections of sensitive personal data that will inevitably be sold to the highest bidder?
Itsumishi sez, "Remember that absurd Internet Filtering Scheme Stephen Conroy and the Australian Government has been continuing to push onto the Australian population? Well GetUp the amazing organisation that has been involved in a lot of great campaigns in Australia has created a very hilarious advertisement they're hoping to get onto every Qantas flight in the country while for next sitting in Parliament. The idea is that most politicians will be flying at some time during this time and they'll be a captive audience. Anyway, the ad is brilliant and they need donations to get it on air, please help!"
I wish the video was embeddable, as this has to be seen to be believed: the alarm-clock is attached to a pneumatic gas-lift under a bed that picks it up and bounces it up and down like a lowrider car:
Built by reader "Kevin" for a contest, this computer-controlled alarm clock is touted as the world's largest. To be more specific, he "mounted a large air cylinder to the head of [his] bed and a valve, controlled by a computer, which [he programmed] to wake [him] up in the morning." Continue reading to see it in action."
AD sez, "Girls Guild is an ancient secret society complete with a mythological back-story set in Atlantis, secret code and handshake, nemesis, and (perhaps) soon-to-be-ubiquitous symbol -- but with a twist: all of the secrets, iconography and legends are available for retooling, embellishment and propagation under a Creative Commons license."
This looks like fun, notwithstanding that Girls Guild appears to be so ancient as to have predated the apostrophe.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
I'm not sure what this video about, but I'm pretty sure it has to do with astrophysics. "Docking," by Mato Atom, who describes himself as a "hobby astronomer without a telescope." (Thanks, Matt!)
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
A little "Blade Runner," a little "Metropolis," a little "Coneheads," things got science-fiction-inspired on the Jean Paul Gaultier runway yesterday during the Fall 2009 Paris couture shows. (Image credit: Left and right: Monica Feudi; center: Simone Manzo)
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
Richard Metzger: Caught in the Act: The Full Story (most genius thing I've seen in... days) Link
Richard Metzger: Michael Jackson's video nasty Unseen footage shows Jacko squirming in horror as he's quizzed over sex Link
Richard Metzger: Anderson Cooper vs Sarah Palin's Insane Spokeswoman Meg Stapleton Link
Jesse Thorn: Stay with this music video by the Salteens and you will be rewarded. Link
A 29-year old worker died today when he fell into a giant vat of hot chocolate at a New Jersey factory. Hope someone at the scene had the presence of mind to question the oompah-loompahs.
A spokesman for the local prosecutor's office said the man appeared to have died instantly from a blow to his head by a paddle mixing the chocolate. His colleagues at the factory tried to shut down the mixer, but were too late. Local journalists met some of the workers in the car park, covered in chocolate and seemingly in dismay.
Oh, this is righteous and terrific news. Remember Jean Anleu, the mild-mannered, book-loving, code-writing geek who was jailed in May by the Guatemalan government over a single tweet he posted during that country's political crisis?
He's a free guy now. The case against him was thrown out today by a Guatemalan appeals court. He has been absolved of all charges.
Prensa Libre has a comprehensive article in Spanish here, and this link takes you to Spanish-language audio of the proceedings today. Friends are still collecting funds to cover @jeanfer's sizeable legal bills. If you care to donate, you can do so to his friend Manolo's PayPal account (manolo@manoloweb.net, yes I have vetted it, and yes it's real).
Only lawyers, EULA collectors and legal obsessives will find this funny, but it cracked me up: care to access the 140-character pearls of wisdom streaming forth from Wal-Mart's Twitter account? Well, first you have to agree to the 3,379-word Terms of Use agreement that comes with it. I know, I know, a lot of big corporate entities on social networking sites likely put forth equally verbose TOUs, but -- a "Twitter Discussion Policy"? Awesome overkill. It all starts here. (via @zephoria)
On the Watchismo blog, Mitch celebrates the launch of the Urwerk King Cobra CC1, a remake of the original "jumping hour" watch, explaining why he's so fascinated with these remarkable, largely extinct timepieces.
Time is usually - nearly always - displayed by a circular indication: one dial and two (or three) with the time displayed around a perpetual circle. However, this 360° representation of time goes against everything we learnt as we grew up drawing a straight line on a blank page and marking it Past, Present and Future. Why do we think of time as travelling in a straight line yet display it rotating around a circle? The answer is straightforward: mechanisms that continually rotate are much simpler to produce than those that trace a straight line then return to zero. In fact, the latter is so difficult that, until now, nobody has ever managed to develop a production wristwatch with true retrograde linear displays.
The Pope's latest encyclical (a kind of churchy APA) decries "excessive zeal for ... intellectual property, especially in the field of health care."
Section 22 of the letter, entitled "Human Development in Our Time," laid out the Pope's vision of human development goals. It also highlighted the failings of the current system, citing rigid ideology, consumerist "superdevelopment", corruption, and "cultural models and social norms of behavior .... which hinder the process of development." Casting a strikingly pragmatic tone, the encyclical underscores the complexity of development issues, which "should prompt us to liberate ourselves from ideologies, which oversimplify reality in artifical ways, and ... lead us to examine objectively the full human dimension of the problems."
Even conceding these points, a woman could not stay young and attractive for ever, and later on could well become a problem.
(vii) A spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years. A man usually mellows.
Nat continues, "Bearing in mind this sage advice, I've already begun to regretfully decline my daughter's requests for education and social opportunities, explaining to her that "she could not be regarded as a long-term investment in the same sense as we regard" her brother."
Craig sez, "Looks like Vancouver is getting free speech areas just like the RNC! Yipee! It's so nice of them to set up these areas. I'm sure that even though they're optional, all us polite Canadian folks will be encouraged to full advantage of the designated areas."
Good to see the Olympics upholding its tradition of fostering international brotherhood through brutal authoritarian crackdowns, venal rent-seeking, and remorseless forced relocation of unsightly poor people.
The head of security for the 2010 Games, RCMP assistant commissioner Bud Mercer, told Vancouver city council on Tuesday, however, that protesters will not be required to limit their activities to the areas.
You're free to use them, if you like, but anywhere you participate in lawful protest is legal and lawful in Canada. It doesn't have to be in a free speech area," said Mercer.
Mitch writes in with news of his latest Copper Robot podcast, "Robert Charles Wilson discusses his latest novel, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, which is the most fun novel you'll ever read about the collapse of Western civilization and the end of religious freedom and democracy in America. It's an adventure story about the son of pious snake-handling parents in a small town, who leaves home in the company of the nephew of the President of the United States, and goes off to war and New York. The novel has adventure and romance and comedy and sea voyages and rooftop foot-chases and leaping from building to building. It's great fun. I also talked to Wilson about his 24-year career, past books including Darwinia and Spin, his writing process and favorite tools, and how working for a Canadian civil rights education was great education for a writer."
Travis Louie, whose art we've featured many times on BB, is curating a large group show opening this Saturday, July 11, at CoproGalley in Santa Monica, CA. The theme and title of the show: "Monster?" Seen above, clockwise from top left, Mark Garro's "Allure," Bob Eggleton's "Eye Monster," Audrey Kawasaki's ""While You're Sleeping," and Jessica Joslin's "Phineas." The entire show is viewable online as well. Monster? show preview(Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
If you liked "RoboGeisha," you'll love "Hausu"! I don't know anything about this movie, except that it was made in 1977, it involves a murderous lampshade, and you should probably not watch it if you don't like blood fountains, disembodied body parts, light fixtures, screaming cats, screaming cat paintings, or screaming cat paintings spewing blood. Maybe in the comments somebody would like to tell us what they're hollering about? Probably NSFW due to some disembodied boobs. (Via Buzzfeed)
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
The Big Picture takes a big pixel look back at President Obama's first 167 days in office. He looks cool in pretty much every picture. Well played, Barry, well played. (Image credit: Samantha Appleton)
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
Sure, it's a tad Bat for Lashes, but who's keeping track? This delightful promo spot for the Bicycle Film Festival, a "celebration of bicycles through film, art, and music" underway in Minneapolis as of today through July 12, was brought to you by this isn't happiness, one of my favorite blogs.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
From the lovely collection of self-portraiture by Kimiko Yoshida. This one has something to do with minotaurs and Picasso. (Via NOTCOT)
Music can have an overwhelmingly strong hold on the human mind, dramatically swaying our emotions and evoking memories. How come? The new issue of Scientific American Mind surveys recent research on music and the mind. For example, the power of music may come from its influence on regions of the brain responsible for language, feelings, movement, and other unrelated systems. It could also be an important vehicle for emotional communication and connection from which societies emerge. The article looks at studies supporting such theories. From SciAm Mind:
The musical tongue may also transcend more fundamental communication barriers. In studies conducted over the past decade, cognitive psychologist Pam Heaton of Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research team played music for both autistic and nonautistic children, comparing those with similar language skills, and asked the kids to match the music to emotions. In the initial studies, the kids simply chose between happy and sad. In later studies, Heaton and her colleagues introduced a range of complex emotions, such as triumph, contentment and anger, and found that the kids' ability to recognize these feelings in music did not depend on their diagnosis. Autistic and typical children with similar verbal skills performed equally well, indicating that music can reliably convey feelings even in people whose ability to pick up emotion-laden social cues, such as facial expressions or tone of voice, is severely compromised.
Recently, in a clever experiment, acoustics scientist Roberto Bresin and his co-workers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm garnered quantitative support for the idea that music is a universal language. Instead of asking volunteers to make subjective judgments about a piece of music, scientists asked them to manipulate the song—in particular, its tempo, volume and phrasing—to maximize a given emotion. For a happy song, for instance, a participant was supposed to manipulate these variables by adjusting sliders so that the song sounded as cheerful as possible; then as sad as possible; then scary, peaceful and neutral.
The researchers found that the participants—expert musicians and, in another study, seven-year-old children—all landed on the same tempo for each song to bring out its intended emotion, be it happiness, sadness, fear or tranquility. These findings, which Bresin reported at the 2008 Neuromusic III conference in Montreal, bolster the idea that music contains information that elicits a specific emotional response in the brain regardless of personality, taste or training. As such, music may constitute a unique form of communication.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
A textile company and coffin manufacturer are jointly introducing a new line of coffins made from wool or organic cotton. From a press release:
This is an innovative coffin and something completely new for the alternative coffin market, but the use of wool in burials is nothing new. The Burial in Wool Act of 1667 made it a legal requirement for the dead to be buried in woollen shrouds in an attempt to boost the struggling woollen industry of the time. With the current social eco agenda, rising concerns on the environmental impact of burials and this innovative product, the industry has come full circle."
And from the description of the casket seen here, the Swaledale model:
The Swaledale coffin is made in Yorkshire using pure new wool, supported on a strong recycled cardboard frame. Wool is a fibre with a true "green" lineage that is both sustainable and biodegradable. The interior is generously lined with cotton and attractively edged in jute.
Independently tested and accredited for strength and weight bearing, the Swaledale's unique design combines the highest environmental standards with an attractive and soft feel. Designed to differ from the traditional wooden coffin, it offers a contemporary style with comfortable handling. The concept is completed with a personalised embroidered woollen name plate. All the materials used in the Swaledale coffin are readily biodegradable and suitable for cremation and all types of burial.
It's the season of rice paddy art in Japan and Pink Tentacle has collected some exquisite examples! The massive artworks are grown through the strategic arrangement of rice plants of varying hues. From Pink Tentacle:
The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori prefecture village of Inakadate, which has earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry. This year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall there.
In a sense, Google is just bringing computing back to the way it was supposed to be. When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.
What Jobs didn't happen to notice was that the computer operating system he witnessed and copied wasn't meant as a way to organize the software and data on a single machine--it was actually a way for computers on a network to share resources. Not only files, but the software to work with them. The computers themselves were to be just dummies--terminals from which to run software and access files that were stored on someone else's expensive computer.
Instead, our operating systems have moved away from sharing and towards ownership. We buy a big powerful machine and do everything on it ourselves. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: they create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on. (It's as if the car companies and asphalt industry worked together, building roads that required new kinds of cars, and then cars that required new kinds of roads.)
Yesterday I posted an essay on Socialstructing--creating organizations around social connections rather than against them. I believe these types of organizational forms are growing and diffusing rapidly throughout the economy. However, I do not see them as panaceas from all our ills since they have a potential to bring with them new kinds of inequalities, exclusions, and Ponzi schemes. So this post looks at potential unintended consequences of socialstructing.
One of the best things about speaking Russian (possibly the only thing), is that it gives you an ability to access Russian literature in the original. Over the years I've tried many different translations of Russian writers and was disappointed every time. Nothing compares to the original. Maybe it is impossible to do justice to these texts because many Russian words are so deeply rooted in a uniquely Russian context and life circumstances. What I love about writers such as Gogol and Chekhov is that in portraying life in 19th century Russia they managed to capture universal themes of human inner struggles, desires, and life ironies. They created prototypes of characters and circumstances that are as real today as they were 150 years ago. People just work through those circumstances with a whole new suite of tools and technologies.
That leads me to one of my favorite pieces of Russian literature -- Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, a novel first published in 1842. The story revolves around the exploits of Chichikov, a personality populating the lower rungs of the Russian society. Driven by a desire to enhance his social standing, Chichikov develops an ingenious scheme. He goes around Russian villages buying up records of dead serfs. It's a brilliant idea that capitalized on a unique and grotesque feature of the feudal Russian society -- ownership by landlords of the people who lived and worked on their land.
The number of "souls" one owned was a measure of one's economic and social status. Landowners in fact paid taxes based on how many serfs or "souls" they owned. The government kept count of owned "souls" and this count was based on government census numbers. Unfortunately, the census took place only infrequently and many landowners ended up paying taxes on their dead serfs. Grasping an opportune moment between the two censuses, Chichikov bought records of these dead souls from landowners eager to lighten their own tax burdens. Papers certifying Chichikov's ownership of 400 "souls" rapidly elevated Chichikov's status: landed gentry opened their homes to him, tried to give away their daughters in marriage, and celebrated him at town functions. And all it took was a record of ownership of hundreds of "souls." So every time I see another article or an ad about how to acquire more followers on twitter, friends on Facebook, or otherwise collect more "souls" for money, fame, or reputation, I start thinking about Chichikov. He did come to an ignominous end, finally fleeing town. Makes me wonder.
We've featured the incredible stop-motion animation of PES before. Here are two I hadn't seen before, "Human Skateboard" and "Fireworks," that are my new favorites. eatPES
Instead of a complaint letter, the band "Sons of Maxwell" have posted a music video aimed at United Airlines over the destruction of one of their guitars on a trip last year:
[We] were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didnt deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say no to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world.
SF writer Ken MacLeod and his pals at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh have just launched "The Human Genre Project:"
The Human Genre Project is a collection of new writing in very short forms -- short stories, flash fictions, reflections, poems -- inspired by genes and genomics.
Starting with just a few pieces at its launch in July 2009, the collection will grow and develop over time. Please check back regularly to see what has been added.
The project was conceived by Ken MacLeod, writer in residence at the Genomics Forum, who also edits the collection, and was inspired by Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction.
The Human Genre Project is an initiative of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, part of the ESRC Genomics Network, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and based at The University of Edinburgh.
Maya sez, "Pratham Books is a non-profit trust that publishes high quality books for children at affordable prices and in multiple Indian languages. We have already uploaded some of our books under a CC-license on our Scribd account. We have also started uploading illustrations from our books for people to remix and reuse on our Flickr account. Over the weeks, we will upload more illustrations and add to our existing archive."
Nine months after having launched the Chrome web browser, Google just now announced the Google Chrome Operating System, "an attempt to re-think what operating systems should be." Google plans to offer the OS for use on a wide array of devices in about a year. Snip from the official Google Blog:
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
My boyhood chum Paul Simcoe emailed me last week to sing the praises of the new Gordon Gano and the Ryans album Under the Sun. Paul and I grew up together, raised on the Violent Femmes (Gano's earlier band), and now that Paul's running Toronto's most excellent Criminal Records, he's a real treasure-house of kick-ass music suggestions.
Though the album isn't due out until Sept 1, Yep Roc, Gano's label, was kind enough to send me the album in MP3 form, and I've been seriously rocking to it ever since. It reminds me most of the Violent Femmes' underrated third album, The Blind Leading the Naked, with its mix of jangly, upbeat pop songs, semi-serious religious themes, and a few slow numbers that are more reminiscent of the track Good Feelings from the Femmes' eponymous debut album.
My standouts from this disc are Man in the Sand, Oholah Oholibah, Red, and Wave and Water, whose video was just released on YouTube (see above).
I don't usually review stuff far in advance of release date, but Under the Sun was worth jumping the gun for; I've scheduled this post to run again at the beginning of September to remind you that the disc is out.
Hackers on a Plane is one of those unique hacker events that defy all of the odds that the mainstream throws our way. What if a bunch of hackers got together and chartered space on a commercial airline, then journeyed throughout Europe to take part in various hacker conferences and see the emerging hacker spaces in several different countries? Not only is this very possible, but it's all completely organized. It's the perfect way to experience this summer's hacker activities on a global scale and at an affordable price.
But we have a serious dilemma. Not all of the tickets have been sold, no doubt due to the lousy economy and other such mundane issues. As those people who refuse to let reality get in the way, the hacker community needs to come together and keep this project from falling short, a fate that would probably doom future such endeavors. So if you have any dream of being a part of Hackers on a Plane, or know others who might be interested, now is the time to step forward. We only have to sell around ten tickets for the expenses to be covered and this needs to be done by the 10th of this month to fulfill terms with the airline and all that fun stuff.
This is what you get. For a total cost of $1618.03, you get round trip airfare from New York City, accomodations while you're away, admission to both PlumberCon and HAR, and a full tour of hacker spaces in Austria, Germany, and Holland. You leave New York the morning of August 4th and return the afternoon of August 18th.
Apollo sez, "This is a YouTube video of some West Virginia pro-coal thugs (dressed in Massey issued uniforms) crashing the peaceful 23rd annual Mountain Keepers Festival. The festival is a gathering of West Virginians who live in the hollows that are being destroyed by Mountaintop Removal mining, and their fellow advocates from all over the country. At one point the most vile of the thugs threatens a man and his child verbally and with a throat slitting gesture. Simply appalling."
Katherine sez, "A group called Macro/Sea is taking used construction dumpsters and lining them to create swimming pools. It's throwing pool parties at undisclosed locations in Brooklyn (I think what they're doing may technically be illegal). One of the people involved is skateboarding legend Jocko Weyland. The current dumpster pools are phase one in a more ambitious plan to reclaim disused strip malls."
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
Squash the $treet is a game for your iPhone that enables you to express your violent dislike of all those smarmy bankers that Americans like to blame for the economic collapse.
Financial Crisis? Let your rage rain down on the crooks and swindlers who caused it.
Watch the shady bankers, creepy fraudsters and corrupt CEOs flee their gilded offices, sprinting for the nearest escape vehicle. Squash and flick the snarky scoundrels up and down the streets and sidewalks in the festering heart of the city where all the thievery and greed began.
Recoup your losses with the monetary awards you receive from successfully squashing the white-collared criminals who stole your retirement savings. Fund your unending vengeful rampage with precious metal bonuses hoarded from certain embezzlers who just couldn't grab enough.
Be a responsible steward: avoid bankruptcy or your bubble will burst.
Special features include: "Special powerups that boost your squash rate and resentment streak," "Bloody spatter effects," and "Panicked voice-acting and screams by actual bankers." Sounds like fun!
Brian Message, best known as one of the managers for the best band in the world, is said to be launching a new record label that will allow artists to retain greater ownership of their intellectual property. This article in NME says the new label, Polyphonic, plans to offer artists a 50% base share of profits, with that percentage increasing as an act grows more successful. Reports also indicate that Polyphonic's primary method of distribution will be online.
Although specifics details have not been released, the new company's policies look set to place emphasis on the digital distribution of music and may see release plans similar to Radiohead's 2007 album 'In Rainbows', which fans could choose how much to pay for when downloading it. Polyphonic is a joint venture between Message's company ATC and management firms MAMA Group and Nettwerk Music Group, reports the Telegraph.
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
Andrea James: The Tupperware Container of Ironic/Coincidental Hollywood Deaths, hosted by physicist Dr. Franklin Ruehl Link
Sean Bonner: I have to admit that this Journey cover that @mackreed just tweeted is pretty awesome. Link
Andrea James: Pinky the Cat asks: What are crimes against humanity? Link
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
One of my favorite fashion blogs is Jak & Jill, which showcases the work of photographer Tommy Ton. The image you see here comes fresh off the Givenchy runway in Paris, where Fashion Week is getting underway. Is this a burqa? What do you call this kind of face jewelry? I don't know, but I love it. (Image credit: Tommy Ton)
Recovering music industry exec John Niven wrote a hilarious/disturbing piece for the Independent (UK) today on the surreal, ongoing spectacle surrounding Michael Jackson's death, and the willful omission of any mention of those child abuse allegations from most of the coverage.
The barrage of utterly inane celebrity tributes ("inspirational", "a true hero", "a genius", "a gentle soul" "a treasure") was to be expected. The howling fans across the world, broken and gibbering nonsense for the rolling TV news crews ("he ... he died for all of us" etc), the inevitable autopsy results in a few weeks, with their Swiss laboratory inventory of prescription tranquilisers, all this too is standard operating procedure.
What has stunned me and truly floored me in the past week or so has been the complete sidelining by the entire media of Jackson's later life. Across the board, from every news channel to all the quality papers, there has been wholesale collusion in the notion that "he was a great artist and, yes, there was some, umm, troubling stuff later on, but let's forget all that right now and just celebrate the music".
Hang on a minute. I'm not the kind of person to start Paedogeddon-style witch-hunts gratuitously, but ... I thought I'd find some real analysis of the "troubling stuff" somewhere. But here's what we're getting: "Another beautiful boy is gone, wiped out in an instant." This was Germaine Greer in The Guardian. She made no mention at all of the multiple accusations of child abuse levelled at Jackson (although she was unintentionally hilarious when she wrote of his art no longer being fuelled by his ability to "run with the kids on the block". Uh, Germaine, love, they'd be more likely to be running away from him).
Now here's some cool news: Holly Black and Ellen Kushner have sold another volume of stories in the venerable and beloved Bordertown series. This was a series of linked stories and novels about a world in which the Kingdom of the Fairy returns to Earth, connected by a mystical gateway, and about the goings-on in the Bordertown that sits in between the world of humans and the world of magic, a town where technology and sorcery only work intermittently and runaways, rejects, nutcases and heroes gather. It had an incredibly powerful impact on me as a young reader, sparking a lifelong love-affair with contemporary fantasy.
I've been invited to write a story, and I leapt at the chance. Other writers committed or "expressing interest" include Charles De Lint, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly, Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link. I don't have the faintest idea what I'm going to write, except that it will probably revolve around a group house or squat.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
The Independent did one of those things where they ask someone famous a bunch of questions, and this time they asked Ron Jeremy. The Hedgehog. The San Fernando Valley's Hirsute Thespian of Our Times.
There's a lot of pressure to perform when you're the best-known [porn] actor in the world; my biggest fear is that I'll be in a scene and I'll suck, and people will say, "Just look at that flaccid noodle." I'm getting older and it feels more of a strain, but I'm still enjoying doing the scenes.
I'm Jonathan and one of the bloggers for the Israeli Blogger Coalition against the biometric database. Our government is currently pushing, with heavy pressure from certain corporations, to establish a national mandatory biometric database. Today, I went with Eran Vered, a fellow blogger and video producer to video the hearing about the biometric database in the Israeli Parliament (Knesset).
After around half an hour of filming, the staff from the Immigration Authority (coming to lobby the database) noted that Eran can film them as well and passed a note (shown on video). A few minutes afterwards, Eran was "Excused" out of the hearing, where former minister of Interior, Meir Sheetrit, who is the champion for the database, suddenly screamed for no apparent reason.
While Eran did have a special permission to film in the Knesset (as you cannot enter it with any camera without that permission) it seems quite strange.
Sheetrit's anger towards Eran was unexplainable, as he is eager to pass this bill into law without any public debate. The bill itself allows confidential regulation and confidential procedures for use of the database and that are not subjected to any public review.
I'd be more than glad if you can help us promote our struggle against this bill.
Filmmaker Dianna Dilworth emailed me last week with a link to her documentary about hardcore Michael Jackson fans like the fellow above: We are the Children.
"It's a look at the lives of the fans during the trail a few years back," she says -- specifically, trufans out showing support for their idol during the pop star's 2004-05 trial on child molestation charges.
As folks who follow me on Twitter already know, I find the cable news MJ-death-marathon spectacle to be a sad reminder of the state of -- well, the pathetic state of American cable news. I mean, what was that? Nine days of wall to wall "Michael Jackson: STILL DEAD"?
But thoughtful works like Dilworth's film, works that examine the lives of the "happy mutants" who are utterly devoted to this pop culture figure, I find fascinating. Do yourself a favor today: turn off the TV, stream this instead.
Ignite is coming to LA! As always speakers will get 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. We're going to be holding the geek event at Cinespace in Hollywood on 7/21. Submit a talk now.
This will be the first Ignite in Los Angeles; it is co-hosted by LA Geek Dinner. Doors are open at 6:30 for Geek Dinner. The Ignite talks will run from 8:00-9:30. Please RSVP to the Geek Dinner list on Upcoming.
If you're working on an interesting project, have an unusual skill, or just some interest that would be fun to share with everyone, please submit a proposal to: http://bit.ly/IgniteLA
Ignite LA is being organized by Brady Forrest, Matt Forrest, Dan Gould, and Heathervescent. It is a free event. If you're not familiar with Ignite check out some videos on the Ignite Show.
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
Yes, you would. Of course you would!
Just because you didn't make it to today's moving tribute to everyone's favoritest King of Pop, it doesn't mean you can't comfort yourself by living as close as, well, you can to his star on the Walk of Fame. Sure, it's a sad consolation prize, but it's something ... Isn't it?
Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.
London-based photographer Sophie Gerrard has created a photo series called "E-wasteland," a graphic look at the toxic effects of electronic waste on India's land and its people.
Every year, Gerrard writes, 20 to 50 million tons of electronic waste are generated worldwide.
India has become one of the world's largest dumping grounds for e-waste. E-waste is highly toxic. It contains lead, cadmium, mercury, tin, gold, copper, PVC and brominated, chlorinated and phosphorus based flame retardants. Many of these heavy metals and contaminants are extremely harmful to humans as well as to animals and plants.
The Basel Convention, of which the UK and India are signatories, bans the transportation of hazardous or toxic waste from the developed world to developing countries.
This illegal toxic trade is, therefore, in direct violation.
Pop star Michael Jackson will be laid to rest today in a Los Angeles cemetary without his brain. Doctors investigating the cause of his death are retaining it for an undetermined period of time so they can perform further tests.
[The] LA coroner's office has still not completed its tests on Jackson's brain, and the singer's family have been advised that unless they wish to wait, he must be buried without it.
Jackson died from an apparent cardiac arrest on 25 June. Though his body was released the next day to relatives, his brain was not. The pop star's inert brain must "harden" for at least two weeks before doctors can conduct their neuropathology tests.
Doctors will examine Jackson's brain to help determine the cause of death, suspected of being linked to painkillers. Such examinations can also reveal unknown diseases, evidence of alcohol abuse or whether Jackson has suffered overdoses in the past.
Removing the brain is the "only way to carry out the tests" according to a source for the Mirror. "The tissue has to be examined. I can't tell you how long that is going to take."
The news release from Sandia National Laboratories says the SunCatcher power system (above) unveiled at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility today is the result of a design partnership with Stirling Energy Systems and Tessera Solar. But I think they really designed 'em with Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. Yes, I know he died in 1967, but the gubmint's secret art-zombie time travel machines address that matter. Duh.
My mother knew well the value of social capital, although she probably never heard the term. In the Soviet Union where she lived and where I grew up one couldn't survive without it. She traded social capital on a daily basis. It meant that despite being a widow with very little money, despite not having a high position or a membership in the "privileged" class (the Communist Party), she was able to provide a relatively good life for her family. We never worried about having enough food, my sister and I always wore fashionable (by Soviet standards, at least) clothes, took music and dance classes, went to good schools, spent summers by the seashore, went to the symphony, and otherwise took advantage of a lifestyle that seemed much beyond our means. How was my mother able to provide all these things? She certainly couldn't afford them on her pitiful wages as a physician in a government-run clinic in Odessa, Ukraine. Social capital--networks of relationships with friends and acquaintances -- is what accounted for her ability to provide for a relatively comfortable, albeit not luxurious, lifestyle.
While there was no meat to be found in any store in the city, my mother got it regularly (along with other provisions) through the director of a supermarket, who was also a husband of a close colleague. I got into music school in exchange for my mother treating the director of the school. We could get Western medicines because my mother was friendly with the head of a large local pharmacy. Our apartment was always filled with people who my mother was counseling, diagnosing, treating, and prescribing medicines for. No money was ever exchanged. Ever mindful of Stalin's purges and his fabricated case against Jewish doctors' alleged conspiracy to poison Soviet leadership, she was too afraid to have an underground private medical practice or take money for her services. "With my luck, I would be the first to be caught," she always said. The people who could be regularly found in our home or whose homes she visited dispensing medical services were her substitutes for money. They and many other "connections" she built over a lifetime were her doors to resources -- from tangible commodities such as food, medicines, and clothes, to information, services, and emotional support.
Our story was not unique. All around us, amid empty stores, low salaries, dismal productivity numbers, and fraying infrastructure, people seemed to live normal "middle class" lives. An economist would have a hard time explaining how this was possible by looking at economic statistics or by walking around the stores and markets in Russia in the 1960's and 70's. Visitors to the Soviet Union, in fact, were always amazed at the gap between what they saw in state stores--shelves empty or filled with things no one wanted--and what they saw in people's homes--nice furnishings and tables filled with food.
What bridged the gap was the informal economy, an economy driven by social rather than financial capital. This economy was deeply rooted in the myriad relationships people like my mother used to acquire goods, services, information, education, and many other things. They did not do this consciously--no one was teaching them how to grow their network or increase their following the way many social marketers are eager to teach us today, they just did this to survive. The web of social relationships was an invisible fabric that permeated the economic life and made that particular society work.
Social capital has served a critical role in the economic life of the Soviet Union and continues to do so in many poorer countries today. Teodor Shanin, an eminent sociologist, has invented a field of study called "peasantology," which looks at how people survive in informal economies. Shanin argues that peasants inhabit an economic structure entirely different from either capitalism or socialism. The key element of the peasant economic structure is the existence of dense and vibrant social and family networks that provide members access to necessary resources. Researchers observed the phenomenon first in Africa years ago where they could not find any economic explanation for how the majority of the population survived. They didn't own land. They didn't seem to have any assets.
Marxist and market economists had always dismissed such activity as marginal. However, as Shanin argues, one is hard pressed to see something as marginal when half of mankind lives like this. In fact, social capital also plays an important role in developed economies, as many researchers such as Manuel Castells and Robert Putnam, among others, have shown. However, far too often we have pushed social capital and notions of non-monetary currencies out of our economic thinking and economic interactions. One can in fact view the whole history of economic development as a long path of taking local, familiar, personal, and social out of economic relationships and replacing them with professional, impersonal, and highly institutionalized economic interactions centered on exchanging one form of capital--money. It is hard to argue that this has brought great efficiency to our economic life and has resulted in spectacular growth rates in societies that have followed the path. In the process, we have built organizations and regulatory frameworks that allowed us to scale what previously were familiar, often familial, economic relationships to include anonymous strangers, thus allowing for aggregation of resources across geographies and social boundaries. Organizations we created and that dominate our economic landscape today, with a limited liability corporation as its crowning glory, have been great innovations in their time and enablers of much of our prosperity. They massively increased the scale of economic interactions and at the same time became institutional proxies for the kind of trust we previously reserved for our neighbors and family.
We have become successful at the art of operating at scales massively beyond the local village and beyond the boundaries of social relations. We know how to organize people and resources for the ultimate goal of maximizing monetary returns. Along the way, we developed a host of management theories and practices that have become bibles to generations of working men and women. And the corporate culture we created spread well beyond the business realm. As Doug Rushkoff points out in "Life Inc.," corporatism or corporate way of thinking has permeated our culture, language, philanthropic organizations, schools, and media. It is how we've come to think about getting things done. We almost cannot conceive of a world without hierarchical organizational charts, mission statements, departments, and clear sets of corporate rules and incentives.
All of this is about to change. Computing and communications technologies are not only linking us into a one global village, one global brain, they are also adding a new layer of sociality to our interactions and are making it possible for us to engage in new kinds of transactions with each other outside of existing organizational boundaries. They are making it possible for us to gain access and build trust that we previously outsourced to organizations. They are also taking anonymity out of many economic transactions. We can gain new levels of knowledge about strangers by following their Twitter streams, looking up their friends on Facebook, checking their reputations as buyers and sellers on E-Bay, measuring their contributions to Wikipedia, watching their Youtube videos. We can lend our money directly to people and projects we find appealing on Kiva.org rather than entrust the money to banks to invest anonymously and without any say from us. Even public relations is changing from relying on official public releases to increasingly whispering to the right people in one's social network (as an example see this recent article in the NYT). We are bringing a whole new level of sociality, familiarity, and connectedness to our economic interactions. In a word, we are socialstructing our organizations, i.e. reorganizing them around social connections rather than against them.
But social connections we organize around are different from face-to-face relationships our ancestors grew up with. We are witnessing a rise in what I call information-driven sociality -- sociality that derives from our ability to get direct access to strangers and remove their anonymity by giving us access to information trails they leave behind, thus providing us with knowledge about many aspects of their selves--interests, reputations, online contributions, musical tastes, even buying preferences. In the process, the raison d'etre for many types of organizations we created over the past few centuries -- organizations needed for aggregating resources and enabling transactions between anonymous strangers -- is disappearing. Amplified with the collective intelligence, access, and resources embedded in social connections with multitudes of others, we are now increasingly able to achieve the kind of scale and reach previously achievable only by large organizations.
Driven by information-driven sociality, the next decade will usher in a whole new array of organizational models, new forms of currencies, and new sets of work practices. At the same time we will need to create new regulatory frameworks suited for organizational forms based on principles of social connectivity and familiarity. Remember the old adage of "Keep social out, don't bring it into the workplace?" The new adage is "Social is business, bring it in."
I am delighted to welcome back a returning Boing Boing guestblogger: author, photographer, and blogger Susannah Breslin.
She has written for Details, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, The Daily Beast, Radar Online, Variety, Salon, Wired News, The New York Post, The LA Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Vancouver Sun, The San Francisco Examiner Playboy.com, Nerve, Arena (UK), and Max (France). She has appeared on CNN, FOX, Playboy TV, "Politically Incorrect," UK Channel 4, and NPR. She is writing a novel that's set in the adult movie industry.
She is beautiful, as you can see from the above photo; she is talented, as you will see from the posts to follow; and she is rather tall: 6'1".
MIT researchers developed light-detecting fibers that could eventually be woven into a "fabric camera." Instead of counting on a single lens, the new system would use a web of the fibers as a distributed imaging surface. Imagine a shirt where the entire back is a "camera." From MIT News:
The researchers, led by Associate Professor Yoel Fink of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), emphasize that while such an application and others like it are still only dreams, work is rapidly progressing on developing fabrics capable of capturing images. In a recent issue of the journal Nanoletters, the team reported what it called a "significant" advance: using such a fiber web to take a rudimentary picture of a smiley face.
"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but without a lens," said Fink, corresponding author of the Nanoletters paper. "This work constitutes a new approach to vision and imaging."
Here is Destino, the collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí. Production began in 1945 and the film didn't premier until 2003. Apparently, it will finally see an official home DVD release in 2010 along with a documentary about the two artists' history together. Destino(Wikipedia) (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)
Over at Offworld, we've just dug up what'll probably be the most mind-bending video of the week: the first look at Joe Larson's 'demake' of Valve's PC/Xbox 360 hit Portal, rendered entirely in ASCII. Its best trick that puts it a leg up on the 2D Flash version: a 'through the portal' view that recaptures everything that made the original game so awe inspiring to experience for the first time (also: its simple 1-character companion cube, and the Donkey Kong tribute toward the end of the video). Watch the video on Offworld.
The first TV commercial in North Korean history is now on the air. It's an ad for a Taedonggang beer described as the "Pride of Pyongyang" and the ad promises that beer will reduce your stress.
Ravin sez, "Hello, I'm Ravin Pierre, I'm not an actor but I portray one on the television. I'm co-founder of Cardboard Tube Fighting League out of Seattle. One weekend only, I'm traveling to the east coast (again, Tube Fight - Washington DC 2008) to seed new groups in Philly and NYC. I'm big into DIY and creative costume enthusiasm, as most Boing Boing readers are, I'm hoping they will show up in their best cardboard costume and battle."
Check out the astounding, elaborate Russian cosplay scene for the game Fallout II (mangled Google Translate text below Thanks to Denisvi in the comments for a much-improved translation; you do indeed pass the Turing Test!)!
On June 21st, 2009, at one of the abandoned air-defense bases in St. Petersburg region, a game based on "Fallout 2" universe took place, organized by "Albion" workshop. Some 300 people participated in the game, working with workshop group, tech support group and emergency/medical services. And, of course, the players themselves, who prepared for the game over the course of many months. Much was accomplished by the workshop crew: sealed military bases, including the memorable Sierra from Fallout II, were built; plot and game coordination accomplished, including rapid response by the creators to changes in game environment. Players were hard at work as well. They made authentic costumes, modified airsoft guns to the point of being unrecognizable, outfitted a special car, operated establishments such as cinema, working radio station, few bars, hospital, casino and much more. Combined efforts of workshop people and players made the world come to life for two short days.
I'll be in Chicago on July 9 to see a production of the highly praised theatrical adaptation of my novel Little Brother. The July 9 show is sold out (performances run until July 18), but Bill Massolia, who wrote the play and runs the company, has organized a get-together beforehand. If you're in Chicago, I'd love to see you and say hi!
Meet Cory Doctorow before the show. July 9, 5:45pm to 7:00pm.
Jack's Bar & Grill/404 Wine Bar 2856 North Southport Ave. Chicago 773-404-8400
I love the name of the Wine Bar -- though I worry about it being not found.
Robbo sez, "With the CRTC [ed: Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Canada, analogous to Ofcom or FCC] holding hearings on network management, the arrival of the Pirate Party movement in Canada can only be welcome news to those of us participating in the copyfight. While it's not likely they will have much clout within the halls of parliament, the conventional rules of *mis*representation don't apply when a party, political or cultural movement is driven by such a focused issue. It is enough to acheive the means by which it can be raised in debate - not just in parliament but also the media and the streets - so as to ensure public awareness of the actions of elected representatives and to subsequently steer them to the public's will and not be merely (and silently) beholden to the influence of corporate lobbies. Arrrrr, eh?"
Watchismo's got a freakish and wonderful new pocket watch, the Eris:
Either way, this watch, designed by students from l'Ecole d'Arts Appliqués Genèva is a 100 % Swiss made product by Pierre Junod Switzerland and can be worn as a pocket watch, pendant or used as a small desk clock. The Materials are white hour hand & orange minute hand, anthracite anodized aluminum case, laser engraved figures, mineral glass, Swiss quartz movement, each watch is sold with a natural rubber strap to hang from your neck, a wall, anything you wish to have time fly by.
The time is displayed with two pointers (extended from hidden hands) floating around the "equator" of the globe. The minutes indicated on the upper hemisphere and the hours highlighted down below.
"Shot in the Back of the Head," the top-selling iTunes track off Moby's new, self-released album "Wait for Me," is also the song he released as a free download, which has been available for months and remains available as a free download.
In related news, Henrik sez, "Imagiro explains why they released their debut album What to Do and How to Do It (yes, the title is inspired by an old BoingBoing post) on a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license and made it freely available at the same time as they market it through the ordinary channels of music distribution. They did this with the blessing of KODA, the Danish rights-holders society. It is available in mp3, ogg and flac formats, the latter of which via bittorrent."
First of all, releasing What to Do and How to Do It on a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license is a very clear way of communicating to the users of the album what uses we think are fair. We love when people make remixes and mash-ups and thus combine old works to create new ones. By allowing non-commercial uses and derivatives everyone can use our music, e.g. as background for a Youtube-video or post remixes on a blog. However, if you want to use the music for a commercial or release the remix commercially, you'll have to ask us first and agree to a contract.
Greg sez, "Albert Borris' debut novel, a YA book called Crash Into Me, comes out today... but back in December, Albert suffered a massive stroke that left him unable to get words out on paper or verbally in the proper order. He's a writer unable to write... and currently unable to help promote his own book. Fellow young adult and middle grade debut authors in the Class of 2K9 of which Albert had been co-president, are working together along with others to help spread the word so that Albert's novel gets the attention it deserves... and which he is unable to help generate."
When Owen, Frank, Audrey, and Jin-Ae meet online after each attempts suicide and fails, the four teens mak e a deadly pact: they will escape together on a summer road trip to visit the sites of celebrity suicides...and at their final destination, they will all end their lives. As they drive cross-country, bonding over their dark impulses, sharing their deepest secrets and desires, living it up, hooking up, and becoming true friends, each must decide whether life is worth living--or if there's no turning back.
The sequel to the venerable Don't Copy That Floppy video (an embarrassing 1992 rap video about the evils of software piracy, produced by the Business Software Alliance) is apparently ready to ship, and it's a doozy. Taking a page out of The IT Crowd's playbook, suggesting that copying your friends' music, movies and code will lead to you being imprisoned and then forced into brutal slavery by other cons (seriously).
The BSA are, of course, big proponents of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which would require signatories to send noncommercial copiers to prison, so I suppose that there's something to this threat.
I wonder if anyone at the BSA ever sits down and says, "You know, if we keep making stuff like this, eventually people are going to start thinking that giving us money for software only funds more efforts to imprison their loved ones, and thus they should really pirate stuff, if only to starve us of cash for these batshit excursions into private law."
The Fancy Fast Food blog is dedicated to remixing horrible fast food so that it looks and tastes great, even it still has all the nutritive value of a sack of greasy, heavily salted fiberglass. Here's tortellini made from a pair of Taco Bell Fancy Burrito Supremes:
Think outside the tortilla. Carefully unwrap the Burrito Supremes and soft taco, and extract their stuffings in a bowl. Carefully rinse off each of the tortillas, and then briefly steam them in a steamer to soften and moisten them. Then lay each tortilla on a cutting board and cut circles in it using a small circular cookie cutter, or simply an empty tin can measuring around 2 1/2" in diameter. Take the filling and put a small amount in each small tortilla circle, then fold it in half and pinch it into a tortellini shape. The moisture should keep it sticky enough to stay put. Pile the tortellinis on a plate. Next, cut open and pour the contents of the sauce packets in a measuring cup, then generously drizzle the sauce over the tortellini. Garnish with parsley and serve with Sierra Mist in a wine glass.
I first encountered the video embedded above last week, but shrugged it off as (a) someone's colonoscopy home movie repurposed for internet lulz, (b) stealth marketing campaign for a Cloverfield sequel, or (c) a portrait of Sarah Palin's soul. As usual, I was wrong.
[The] city of Raleigh, North Carolina, is responding as the viral video of a seething blob in the city sewers made its way across the internet yesterday. Marti Gibson is the Environmental/EMS Coordinator for Public Utilities in the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, and she has been as confused as the rest of us. When she first looked at the video, she emailed our anonymous source to say it was a slime mold that was in the phase of its lifecycle where it looks like a throbbing, breathing animal (see io9's report on slime molds from a few weeks ago where we talked about this exact thing).
She assured our tipster that any water passing by this slime would pass through a treatment plant and be thoroughly cleansed. But then, a few hours later, Gibson retracted her statement in an email...
Spoiler alert: IT'S A SEETHING MASS OF DISGUSTING GRODY WORMS, WRITHING IN BUSBY BERKELEY-STYLE SYNCHRONIZED SQUIRMEOGRAPHY, BATHED IN WARM, DELICIOUS RAW SEWAGE. You're welcome!
Photojournalist James Rodriguez, whose work in Guatemala I've blogged here before, is in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, covering the popular response to the coup d'etat that occurred on June 28th.
I share with you a special photo-essay about yesterday's tragic events at Toncontin Airport, in Tegucigalpa, where the Army opened fire against civilians killing at least 4 and injuring dozens. (...)
BBC News has published the best video so far of the Army's repression against the protesters. The army's shooting can be clearly seen: Video link.
All work here in Honduras has been self-financed. If you would like to contribute to MiMundo.org, you can do so via Rights Action here - it is tax deductible in the U.S. and Canada.
Dare I say it, “green hat” hacker extraordinaire Austin Heap (See SF Chron a few weeks ago) and a group of domestic and foreign techie folks wanting to help Iran have announced the upcoming release of Haystack. Heap writes on his blog that it’s a “new program to provide unfiltered internet access to the people of Iran. A software package for Windows, Mac and Unix systems, called Haystack, will specifically target the Iranian government's web filtering mechanisms.
The suit, filed last week, claims that the museum deceives the public into believing they are operating under the authority of Pez and asks that the museum’s 7 foot tall replica of Pez dispenser be destroyed. The lawsuit also takes issue with the museum’s sales of toy truck Pez dispensers which had been modified with Obama and McCain logos during last years elections. The museum has been opened since 1995 and is said to be the only place in the world were you can see every Pez dispenser ever made.
Update: The love that dare not Pez its name. At left, Scott Beale snapped this scandalous pic proving what Star Wars slashfic scribes have long known: The 'droid hearts Chewie, as evidenced in two giant Pez dispensers. Lawsuits be damned. C-3PO & Chewbacca, Together At Last.
Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out how to predict Social Security numbers from publicly accessible birth data with frightening accuracy. The researchers analyzed a public information source known as the "Death Master File," which includes birth data and SSNs for people who have died. The scientists found that in many instances, if you know the date and state in which a person was born, you can deduce their SSN.
With just two attempts, the researchers correctly guessed the first five digits of SSNs for 60 percent of deceased Americans born between 1989 and 2003. With fewer than 1,000 attempts, they could identify the entire nine digits for 8.5 percent of the group.
There's only a few short steps between making a statistical prediction about a person's SSN and verifying their actual number, Acquisti said. Through a process called "tumbling," hackers can exploit instant online credit approval services -- or even the Social Security Administration's own verification database -- to test multiple numbers until they find the right one. Although these services usually block users after several failed attempts, criminals can use networks of compromised computers called botnets to scan thousands of numbers at a time.
"A botnet can be programmed to try variations of a Social Security number to apply for an instant credit card," Acquisti said. "In 60 seconds, these services tell you whether you are approved or not, so they can be abused to tell whether you've hit the right social security number."
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
Jesse Thorn: Bill Withers performing "Hope She'll Be Happier" at Zaire '74, from the new documentary "Soul Power": Link
Sean Bonner: Bad Dog Bad Hog. I dare you to sit through 30 seconds without clawing your eyes out. Link
Richard Metzger: I can't explain it, you really just have to see it for yourself Link
Reyna Perez has embraced the concept of digital collaboration with her self-titled EP. She recorded each song in Brooklyn on acoustic guitar at a home studio and emailed the tracks to producer Michael Maurice (Curio Sound) in Denver. Over the course of 2 months, Maurice mastered her songs into full fledged productions using Logic software and his own instruments. "I've given them a warm analogue sound, without using any actual analogue equipment; it's a testament to the times, and I'm very happy with the results," says Maruice.
The final mixes arrived via ftp on Friday, June 17th, the same day the iphone 3GS hit the streets. Video producer Ari Kuschnir, Reyna's fiancee, purchased the iPhone after a two hour wait, made shorter by listening to the tracks. Hearing the new music and playing with 3GS, he had an idea. Why not debut Reyna with the first iPhone music video? "It became clear that the phone's camera quality was good enough to shoot a music video. It seemed fitting for the project."
Over the next few days, the plan and the team came together. Within a week, through a series of collaborations much like the mastering of Reyna's EP, the video was complete.
The DOJ is reviewing large American telecoms including ATT and Verizon over concerns the companies have abused the increasingly centralized market power they've gained in recent years, according to an item in the Wall Street Journal today:
The review of potential anti-competitive practices is in its very early stages, and it isn't a formal investigation of any specific company at this point, the people said. It isn't clear whether the agency intends to launch an official inquiry.
Among the areas the Justice Department could explore is whether wireless carriers are hurting smaller competitors by locking up popular phones through exclusive agreements with handset makers, according to the people. In recent weeks lawmakers and regulators have raised questions about deals such as AT&T's exclusive right to provide service for Apple Inc.'s popular iPhone in the U.S.
The Justice Department may also review whether telecom carriers are unduly restricting the types of services other companies can offer on their networks, one person familiar with the situation said.
At the end of workshops at the Institute for the Future we often ask participants to sum up their experience in one word or one sentence. Applying the technique to myself, I would sum up my whole life in one phrase: From Odessa to the Future.
Right around my 50th birthday I found myself in a position of Executive Director of IFTF, a venerable 40-year old think tank in Palo Alto, California. An honor, for sure, but an honor that for me meant many hours of reflecting on an amazing arc one's life can take, an arc that in my case started in a three room (not three bedroom, three room) apartment I shared with my mother, sister, and grandparents on a street named after a radical and obscure left-wing German politician and historian Franz Mehring in a city most famous for its steps forever immortalized in Sergey Eisenstein's movie Battleship Potemkin. This arc has brought me to the heart of Silicon Valley and to the most unlikely of occupations--a futurist. Although in a funny way, my past may have given me the best training for a futurist, at least the kind of futurism we practice at IFTF. It taught me on a visceral level a lesson that we always try to impart on others: no one can predict the future. If you asked me or anyone around me 35 years ago what would I be, the most likely answer would've been an "engineer." A good bet since most educated Russian Jews are engineers, many of them here in Silicon Valley. I did spend one unhappy year studying naval engineering (this may explain my decision to emigrate at the age of 18). No one around me knew any futurists other than the gypsy fortunetellers regularly trolling the streets of Odessa. You can think of me becoming a futurist as one of those black swan events Nassim Taleb writes about.
My personal experience has also led me to wonder about the unintended consequences of most things we do or that happen to us. I have come to believe that Steven Johnson's apt book title Everything Bad is Good for You applies to many realms much beyond video games and popular culture. I am finding that many things we strive for or think are desirable are actually bad for us and vice versa, things that we thought were bad turn out to be good (unless they kill you, of course). Or to be precise, I don't think they are good or bad per se but that when we make judgments about something being good or bad, we simply cannot foresee the totality of consequences and that among this totality of consequences there are necessarily some good things and some bad.
Prosperity and abundance that we all strive for and that many people have come to America for bring with them huge environmental and oftentimes social costs; lower living standards are simply more sustainable. Abundance of opportunities leads to stress and tyranny of choice, which we experience on a daily basis, from our shopping experiences to the kinds of stressful choices our young people are facing when deciding on colleges or careers. Compulsory education turns many kids off learning. In contrast, kids deprived of educational opportunities, treasure schooling. Just read stories of Afghan girls who were banned from schools under the Taliban and how exalted they were at being able to go to one-room crammed schools. Compare it with kids in many American schools who think of going to school as a punishment. I often think of Solzhenitsyn who once remarked that the freest he ever felt was in the gulag. Who could've thought that in the most oppressive of places one can attain great spiritual freedom? By no means do I advocate depriving people of incomes or kids of schools. I also would not recommend taking spiritual vacations to the gulag. I just like to think about complexity of outcomes and possibilities that often go against the grain of conventional wisdom or clear-cut solutions. I guess this would make me a bad politician. But this is what I like to think about, write about, and debate about, and this is what I hope to engage the awesome Boing Boing community in conversations about.
I'm pleased to introduce our next guestblogger, Marina Gorbis. Marina is executive director of Institute for the Future, a 40-year-old non-profit thinktank in Palo Alto where I'm a research director. IFTF helps companies, governments, foundations, and other organizations think about longterm future trends to make better decisions in the present. Marina a terrific thinker, an effective administrator, a generous person, and a humble soul. She's also very funny, a tad cynical, and a hardcore bluegrass fan -- all traits I appreciate in a friend and mentor. I'm delighted that Marina's agreed to spend some time with us. From Marina's bio:
A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Marina is particularly suited to see things from a global perspective. She has directed international programs and led international development projects for SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in China, Japan, Vietnam, India, and Eastern Europe. Marina has also authored publications on international business and economics, with an emphasis on regional innovation and competitiveness.
In addition to serving as IFTF's Executive Director, Marina led the Technology Horizons Program for several years, focusing on the innovation at the intersection of new technologies and social organization. She has initiated a Global Ethnographic Network (GEN), a multi-year ethnographic research program which tries to develop an understanding of daily lives of people in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Silicon Valley, in an attempt to integrate their voices into IFTF's forecasts. She has also led several major private client engagements at IFTF, the most recent being a global Science & Technology Forecast for the UK Government's Department of Science & Technology. She holds an M.P.P. from the University of California, Berkeley, a certificate in international business from the University of London, and a B.A. in industrial psychology, also from the University of California, Berkeley. California, Berkeley.
Wouldya lookit that! I've won the Libertarian Futurist's Society's Prometheus Award for my novel Little Brother! As with all the other awards LB has been up for this year, I'm even more honored by the company I'm in than the award itself; this year's Prometheus nominees included Charlie Stross's Saturn's Children, Matter by Iain Banks, The January Dancer by Michael Flyn, Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove, and Half a Crown, the wrenching conclusion to Jo Walton brilliant Farthing/Ha'penny alternate history trilogy. And this year's Prometheus Hall of Fame winner was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. These books and these writers are all incredibly humbling company to find oneself among.
The Prometheus will be given out at the WorldCon, and the award includes an actual, no-fooling gold coin. So yes, I'll be walking around the Montreal Worldcon with a pocket full of gold, don't tell anyone.
Bestselling novelist Michael Stackpole says he's making great money selling fiction directly off his site; he doesn't worry about pirates, "People downloading my stories from the big torrent sites were never going to buy them anyway. It's no money out of my pocket." and "He even admitted to downloading some of his own books from bittorrent sites if he didn't already have a digital copy, saying it was far easier than scanning it in himself."
Rather than simply changing the method of delivering stories to readers, Stackpole believes digital formats will change the nature of the stories themselves. At the very least, authors should tailor their work to these new mediums. He cited what he referred to as "the commuter market," people who read two chapters per day on their half hour train ride to work. It's an ideal market for fiction broken into 2,500 word chapters, and could presage a resurgence of serial fiction. "It's kind of like a return to the Penny Dreadfuls," he said. "But the readers today are more sophisticated, so we as writers need to put more work into it."
It was interesting to hear the formulaic way Stackpole approaches writing. He described how the method of writing old pulp stories could easily be adapted for modern audiences by eliminating certain ubiquitous but unecessary subplots and adding a bit of character development. A serial detective story should be, "70 percent case, 30 percent soap opera," with a little more soap in a later story to satisfy readers interested in a character's developing personal life.
Even amidst all this embracing of change, Stackpole reassured his audience that digital formats were not sounding the death knell for paper books. "Cars did not kill off horses. Digital publishing will not kill off books. It _will_ change the way they are written and retailed."
I've always found DIY prison culture to be absolutely fascinating. Inmates are makers by necessity. In 1999, photographer Marc Steinmetz created this fascinating series of photographs depicting DIY tech found in prisons. The series is titled "Escape Tools." From the artist's site:
(Above left), Rope Ladder with wooden rungs disguised as chess pieces; found and confiscated in an inmate's cell in Wolfenbüttel prison, Germany, around 1993.
(Above right), Immersion Heater made from razor blades; found in a cell in 'Santa Fu' jail in Hamburg, Germany. Jailbirds use these tools to distil alcoholic beverages forbidden in prisons. Your typical inmate's moonshine still includes a plastic can containing fermented fruit mash or juice, an immersion coil of some sort, a rubber hose, and a plastic receptacle for the booze.
Joel Johnson, who led the launch of Boing Boing Gadgets and Offworld, is moving on to work on other projects. We're grateful for all of Joel's hard work and passion and we're eager to see what he does next. He is truly a unique signal worth paying attention to in a very noisy space.
These two amazing hot rods will be up for bid in September's Icons Of Speed & Style auction at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Many of the vehicles look like rad Revell plastic model kits or Hot Wheels. That's because those scale models and Hot Wheels were based on some of these actual cars. From the auction listings:
1850 'Boothill Express' Custom Show Rod: Built by Ray Fahrner, Boothill Express is based on the 1850s funeral coach that reportedly carried James Gang member Bob Younger to his grave. Powered by a 426 cu. in. Chrysler Hemi with extra-tall Hilborn fuel injection stacks, it has been the subject of numerous scale models and is certainly one of the wildest and most iconic custom creations to come from the show rod era of the 1960s.
1965 Dodge "Deora" Concept Car: A radical design interpretation of the Dodge A100 forward-control pickup truck, the Deora's striking lines were penned by California-based designer Harry Bradley and constructed in stunning detail by the Alexander Brothers of Detroit. Their unique creation was honored with the coveted Ridler Award in 1967, and it was pulled out of storage in 1998 before being fully restored back to show quality with the assistance of Harry Bradley himself. Immortalized by various Hot Wheels cars and AMT scale models, the Deora is one of the most recognizable and desirable 1960s Concept Cars.
Pablo from Tor has the details on a cool new promo they're doing to promote my next book, Makers, which'll be published in the fall (HarperCollins UK will publish it in the UK, Australia, NZ, and other parts of the commonwealth). Makers tells the story of a group of hardware hackers who fall in with microfinancing venture capitalists and reinvent the American economy after a total economic collapse, and who find themselves swimming with sharks, fighting with gangsters, and leading a band of global techno-revolutionaries. The first 50,000 words of Makers were serialized on Salon some years ago under the title Themepunks.
Starting today around noon (Eastern Standard Tribe, of course), and throughout the rest of the year, Tor.com will be serializing Makers, Cory Doctorow's upcoming novel, which goes on sale from Tor Books in November.. We'll be serializing the entirety of the novel, with a new installment every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, until the whole thing is finished, sometime in January 2010. Each installment of Makers will be accompanied by a new illustration by Idiots'Books (idiotsbooks.com), which will interconnect with the other illustrations in the series, and offer limitless possibilities for mixing and matching the illustrations in the series. In a week or so, after we've posted a number of tiles, we'll release a Flash game in which users will be able to re-arrange the illustration tiles on a grid and create their own combination of layouts.
I'm planning on repeating the tribute to booksellers I made with the free release of Little Brother, introducing every section of the serial with a little hymn to some bookstore or other; booksellers are clearly on the side of the angels (I speak as a former bookseller!).
However, I'm doing this one a little differently; rather than write up my favorite booksellers, I'm asking for your favorite bookstores -- in the comments for each section of the serial, I'd like you to write up testimonials for your favorite stores. I'll pick three every week to add to that week's installments, by way of spreading the love around.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hosts long-awaited network management hearings this week, pitting Canada's telecom and cable companies against a broad range of consumer, creator, and technology groups in a fight that may help clarify whether Canada has - or should have - net neutrality laws.
My weekly column notes that as the Commission weighs the various claims, it would do well to consider the testimony it heard just a few months ago during the February new media hearings.
For example, Shaw Communications's network management submission states "traffic management is necessary to ensure that Shaw's customers continue to have access to fast, reliable and affordable service." It adds the "traffic shaping process uses deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to identify packets that are associated with P2P file-sharing applications and to slow those packets down, limiting the amount of available capacity P2P traffic consumes."
Yet when CEO Jim Shaw was asked about the prospect of identifying traffic during the new media hearings, he told the Commission, "we can only tell you how many bits are coming in or out. We don't know what kind of bit it is. It could be anything from an e-mail to a porno. We don't know that. We spend no time trying to figure out what bits are going to your house. We just don't know."
Perhaps foreshadowing the outcome of the net neutrality hearing, MTS Allstream acknowledged "when a commercial interest attempts to violate the principle of openness, as it is defined by the open culture movement, there tends to be a very dramatic and forceful rebuking."
Sony has filed a patent for a system that allows any object, from a coffee mugs to a book, to be mapped and used as a controller in a video game. Rob has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets. "Sony files patent on any-object motion control"
Legendary Fortean author John Keel has died. A personal influence on my own interest in anomalies and fringe theories, Keel is best known for his 1976 book The Mothman Prophecies, an investigation into strange phenomena that reportedly occurred around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966-1967. Of course, that book was made into a Hollywood film in 2002. However, The Mothman Prophecies just scratched the surface of Keel's experiences in the realm of high weirdness. Keel's friend and fellow Fortean author Loren Coleman has written an obituary over at Cryptomundo. "John A. Keel has died"
Martin John Callanan, artist-in-residence at University College London's Environment Institute, used satellite data to create a small 300mm terrestrial globe depicting cloud coverage from a single second in time. He first showed the work, titled A Planetary Order, last week at an event also celebrating the publication of Extraordinary Clouds, a new book by the UCL Environment Institute's writer-in-residence, Richard Hamblyn. The cloud-themed projects are profiled in a short video from the university. "UCL writer and artist-in-residence look to the skies"
The baby photograph wallets had the highest return rate, with 88 per cent of the 40 being sent back. Next came the puppy, the family and the elderly couple, with 53 per cent, 48 and 28 respectively. At 20 per cent and 15, the charity card and control wallets had the lowest return rates. 
BILL MOYERS: Was [Michael Moore's SICKO] true? Did you think it contained a great truth? 
Default brain settings may lead to daydreaming and mind-wandering, but the network also conducts serious business. Neuroscientists still hotly debate the network's exact functions, however. Among its jobs may be running life simulations, providing a sense of self and maintaining crucial connections between brain cells. A few researchers doubt the network is anything special at all. 
The year was 1953 and if you were a woman, a night on the town meant either squeezing into a girdle or slipping on a garter belt. Formal dress dictated that females wear such intimate, and often uncomfortable, articles of clothing. How else could you hold up your nylons? 
3. It is well known in the legal community that Michael Robb, Esquire, wears shoes with holes in the soles when he is in trial. 
Love-him-or-hate-him comix artist Johnny Ryan just issued four new hand-screened prints in editions of 100. My favorite is Johnny's take on The Exorcist. The print is 11.5" x 16", six color, and just $30.
I was stressed out for most of two years. I'm an alpha-type personality to begin with, but this wasn't funny. I was writing fiction (and articles for Computer Shopper) as a therapeutic distraction. Around the middle of 1998, I figured that the novel I'd written in 1995-96 Singularity Sky was about ready, and mailed it off in the direction of Tor in New York, where it sat on a certain editorial director's desk for the next eighteen months. I wrote and sold a couple of short stories, and began work on a project which I was workshopping with some other local writers; a strange humorous horror novel/spy thriller about a hapless geek who's fallen into a government department for dealing with ... look, you probably know where this is going, right?. This was strictly a weekend activity, to distract me from the weekday stress cycle: compartmentalising my life helped me deal with Datacash. But it probably didn't help enough. 
Rick Kleffel sez, "I've recently posted an interview with China Miéville about his new book, 
AD sez, "Girls Guild is an ancient secret society complete with a mythological back-story set in Atlantis, secret code and handshake, nemesis, and (perhaps) soon-to-be-ubiquitous symbol -- but with a twist: all of the secrets, iconography and legends are available for retooling, embellishment and propagation under a Creative Commons license." 
The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori prefecture village of Inakadate, which has earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry. This year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall there.
Guestblogger 
Maya sez, "Pratham Books is a non-profit trust that publishes high quality books for children at affordable prices and in multiple Indian languages. We have already uploaded some of our books under a CC-license on our Scribd account. We have also started uploading illustrations from our books for people to remix and reuse on our Flickr account. Over the weeks, we will upload more illustrations and add to our existing archive." 
Either way, this watch, designed by students from l'Ecole d'Arts Appliqués Genèva is a 100 % Swiss made product by Pierre Junod Switzerland and can be worn as a pocket watch, pendant or used as a small desk clock. The Materials are white hour hand & orange minute hand, anthracite anodized aluminum case, laser engraved figures, mineral glass, Swiss quartz movement, each watch is sold with a natural rubber strap to hang from your neck, a wall, anything you wish to have time fly by. 
A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Marina is particularly suited to see things from a global perspective. She has directed international programs and led international development projects for SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute) in China, Japan, Vietnam, India, and Eastern Europe. Marina has also authored publications on international business and economics, with an emphasis on regional innovation and competitiveness. 
