FeedReader » Boing Boing » May 2008

Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe says: "[I]s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull really an anticommunist movie? Does Ford's character oppose the theory of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production? Or is he instead merely an anti-Communist, i.e., opposed to a single-party regime devoted to the implementation of communist policies in, for example, the USSR? Or is Indy actually a pinko? Sounds crazy, but a couple of clues in the movie point at this possibility..."

Writing at the Globe's Movie Nation blog, recently, film critic Wesley Morris noted that when Jones is placed on leave, the head of his department asks him what he plans to do: "First, Indy says, he's going to London, then there's a job offer from the University of Leipzig he might well take. Leipzig is in what was then East Germany. Indy wants to defect!"

As if that weren't suspicious enough, Alex Golub, an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, points out at Savage Mind, an anthropological blog, that in one early scene, Jones tells a student to read V. Gordon Childe. (Childe was an eminent British prehistorian whose Marxism got him into hot water in his native Australia; during the early cold war, he maintained contact with archaeologists in the Soviet Union.) "Would a die-hard anticommunist really recommend a Marxist archaeologist to a student?" demands Golub.

Link

John Ptak says: "In the world of found book objects, few I think are as deeply removed and as deeply obscure as the work by Otto F. Fleiss called White Art in the Meat Food Business. A Practical Handbook for Butcher, Pork Stores, Restaurants, Hotels and Delicatessens on How to Make Lasting and Transferable White Art Decorations out of Bacon Fat Back for Window Displays, Ornaments on Meat Food Cold Buffets and for Exhibits and Advertising Purposes." Link

Tommy says:

I saw your post about the FlyCam and wanted to make sure you know about the brand new Pilot View FPV 2400.

It is basically Virtual Reality Goggles that allow you to fly your RC plane/car/whatever from the drivers seat! (a friend of mine actually fell down with the goggles on while doing a loop with his plane!).

I've been in the R/C hobby for years and I think this is really going to change things.

There's a video of Pilot View at the link. Link

The Nation's Christopher Hayes just turned in a fantastic long feature on Larry Lessig -- it does a great job of capturing what makes Larry so amazingly great.

In the past eight years the collusion between government and business has gotten worse, creating what economist Dean Baker terms the "conservative nanny state." Lessig sees unmaking this state of affairs as the challenge of the era. "There's a speech that Reagan gives in 1965," Lessig says, "where he talks about how democracy always fails because once the people recognize they can vote themselves largess, they just vote themselves largess and the fiscal policy is destroyed. Well, Reagan had it half-right. It's not as if it's the poor out there who have figured out how to suck the money out of the rich. It's exactly the other way around."

In fighting this corporate socialism, Lessig thinks there are allies to be found among the "intellectually honest" right. He points out that the need to raise money from industry provides an incentive to grow government and maintain regulation as a kind of leverage to extract donations from industry. He's made battling earmarks, a conservative cause célèbre, a Change Congress core mission; the first member of Congress to endorse Change Congress was Jim Cooper, a conservative blue-dog Democrat who is eyed suspiciously by the party's activist base. Lessig's touchstone in his conservative outreach is his father, who struggled every year to meet his company's pension obligations, only to learn years later that big companies like Bethlehem Steel had an exemption in the law so they didn't have to meet the same standards. "Now, from my modern political perspective, that's exactly the thing I think is most outrageous about how the government functions," says Lessig. "And from my dad's perspective, that's the most absurd thing about how government functions."

Link

Steampunk Maker Jake von Slatt sez, "Here's a delightful short from some SF Steampunks I met at Maker Faire. I'm not sure if they are LARPers, but from the appearance of a McIntosh MC240 tube amp and a _serious_ electronics workbench in one scene, I know that these are the sort of kids that Marcus Yallow would've hung out with! " Link (Thanks, Jake!)

The Placebo Store sells cherry-flavored chewable tablets called Obecalp (get it?) for parents to administer when they don't think their kid is really sick.

Hi. Welcome to the Placebo Store. I'm Jen. I am a mommy. It's what I love. It's my job to make owies go away. Whether it's a kiss or a big hug, the magic happens immediately. This is the power of placebo. I have a baby girl and two sons. One of them always needs my comfort and the knowledge that I will make them feel better. I invented Obecalp when I realized that children might need a little more than a kiss to make it go away. Obecalp fills the gap when medicine is not needed but my children need something more to make them feel better. You'll know when Obecalp is necessary.

Link | NY Times story about placebos made for kids

Woodcraft has an article about hidden drawers in furniture. The one shown here has a double-secret box! Link (via Make)

Slate posted a letter from John Conyers Jr., chairman of the House judiciary committee, to the DEA's acting administrator Michele Leonhart about the agency's "dramatically intensified … frequency of paramilitary-style enforcement raids" on legal cannabis users and dispensaries.

Conyers asked for an accounting of the agency's costs for these measures against "individuals who suffer from severe or chronic illness" and for its rationale for threatening landlords of licensed dispensaries with "arrest and forfeiture of their property." Meanwhile, the California State Legislature is considering a measure that would allow state and local law enforcement agencies to refuse cooperation with the DEA.

Link

I like the look of this electronic noise maker built inside a pill bottle.

I found this pill capsule because someone in my house needs horse pills, evidently. I basically drilled the holes, used Epoxy to secure the battery holder to the speaker, and crammed everything in there. I love one night projects.

Link

Sharon Stone pulled a Pat Robertson / Jerry Falwell by suggesting that the earthquake in China was the result of "karma."

"And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma -- when you're not nice -- that the bad things happen to you?"

Now China is boycotting all things Sharon Stone.

Theaters are dropping her movies, department stores are taking down her image, and cosmetics brand Christian Dior has been scrambling to distance itself from the actress, who since 2005 has been the face of one of its skin products.

It makes me wonder what bad thing Phil Bronstein (formerly Mr. Sharon Stone) did to get his big toe nearly bitten off by a Komodo dragon in 2001? Link

Here's one photo of a series of about 20 photos showing a chicken developing in an egg. Before I saw these photos I had always thought that the yolk turned into a chicken, but it looks like the chicken forms outside of the yolk and absorbs the yolk as it develops. Link

Los Simpson is an incredibly creepy live action Simpsons spoof in Spanish. Link

For $20, John Deese of Decatur County, Georgia, will sell you a bottle with a ghost in it. It's not entirely clear if he is serious about what he's selling or not. He says that he doesn't collect the spirits personally but relies on professional, er, ghostbusters. From WKMG:

“Some people will open the bottle and say they don’t get results and it’s just a fun conversation piece. Others say, ‘There’s strange things happening in my house. Where're my car keys? Where's the remote to the TV?” Deese said. “The ghost in the bottle is more toward Casper the Friendly Ghost than the Exorcist. We're kind of in the middle.”

Link to WKMG story, Link to A Ghost In A Bottle (via Cabinet of Wonders)

Brendan I. Koerner's "Now the Hell Will Start" follows the true-life story of Herman Perry, a young black playboy from Washington, D.C., drafted into the Army and shipped to the Indo-Burmese jungles to build the Ledo Road, a Sisyphean attempt to connect Allied supply depots with China during World War II. Years of nigh-on-forced labor in the sweltering, tiger- and headhunter-infested slog caused many of the soldiers to clutch consolation in cheap drugs, getting high in dark, wet tents while their uniforms literally rotted off. Perry succumbed. Worse, his drug use provoked insubordinance against the white officers who commanded the predominantly black recruits, awarding him multiple visits to the brig. Horribly, after a year of hard work, incessant rain, flippant officers and cheap opium, Perry — provoked — killed a superior officer. He escaped into the jungle, certain he'd be captured within hours. Instead, he became the focus of one of the most notorious manhunts of the war, living with the mountain tribes of headhunters and becoming a folk hero some called "The Jungle King." Koerner's an amazing reporter — my first mentor, along with Choire Sicha, to drum into my head how effective informed, dense writing could be — and has a knack for transmuting reams of research into taut narrative. (He was one of Slate.com's excellent "Explainer" columnists for years.) It doesn't hurt that Perry's story cuts a path through subjects with which I am endlessly entranced: racism, drugs, survival, war, sorrow, and death — all wrapped in one man's outrageous, tragic adventure. It should be implicit since I'm writing this in the first place, but "Now the Hell Will Start" is recommended! If all goes to plan, we'll get Brendan online soon for a Q&A session on the #boingboing IRC channel. Link

Yesterday, I got two really awesome new graphics related to my young adult novel Little Brother (now in its third week on the bestseller lists!). The first, seen above, was a side-project by Tor Books's Pablo Defendini, a poster design that started out as concept art for the paperback of Little Brother. Pablo actually gave me one of the very small number of prints he made of this and now I can't wait to get it framed and hung up -- I love every little thing about it, from the RFID tag to the hidden message in the binary around the border. Oh, and Pablo does great hands.

Next up is this:

It's the artwork (not yet final) for the UK edition of Little Brother, which will be published in November by HarperCollins UK. It's a little less upbeat than the US cover, but I like the stencil-graffiti look, which hearkens to all the political movements (starting with early Christianity) that were bound together by illegal writing on walls. (If you'd like to get a notice when the UK edition is available, mail me).

Link to Pablo Defendini's print

Update: The initial print run for Little Brother is almost completely shipped, so my publisher has just ordered a new batch of hardcovers. Those books on the shelf now? They're the last of the first edition -- get 'em while they last!

In 1945, John Webber's grandfather, a scrap metal dealer, gave his son a random mug to play with that he had picked up along the way. John always thought it was brass and kept it with a bunch of other random stuff in a shoebox under his bed. Then when John, now 70, was moving out of his home, he decided to have the mug appraised. Turns out, the mug is gold and was made in the third or fourth century BC. It's expected to sell at auction for nearly a million bucks. Antiques Roadshow, eat your heart out! From AFP:

Webber... told The Guardian newspaper that his grandfather had a "good eye" for antiques and picked up "all sorts" as he plied his trade in the town of Taunton in south-west England.

"Heaven knows where he got this, he never said," he added, revealing that as a child, he used the cup for target practice with his air gun.

Link (via Fortean Times)

The Unusual Suspect writes, "blogTO writes of a Canadian PhD student studying Social Political Thought who was intercepted by Kelowna Airport screeners when they spotted her necklace, which has a charm in the shape of a gun. (Article includes a photo of the actual necklace.) The charm is less than 2" in size, and has no moving parts."

"How do you know it wasn't a real gun?" asked Guy, a security agent with the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, who also declined to provide his last name.

"Who knows if there is a gun that small that can shoot bullets? You don't know that. They followed the rules."

Hey, Guy? If I could make a miniature gun that was 1.7" long and contained no moving parts and could still fire bullets, I could also make it in shapes other than gun. If your security seriously contemplates defending against that level of technology (firing bullets out of a solid object less than 2" long), then you'd better confiscate all metal objects, period. Also, what are you doing about other conceivable -- but technically impossible -- threats, like telekinesis, voodoo, and directed sunspot radiation? Link

MediaDefender, the thugs paid by the entertainment industry to spy on file-sharers and attempt to cripple file-sharing networks, attacked a legitimate Internet TV company called Revision3 over the weekend, launch as massive denial-of-service attack in retaliation for having their spy-bots locked out of R3's BitTorrent trackers:

Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. It’s a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how to tune into its network on DirecTV, Dish, Comcast and Time Warner, or a mall might publish a map of its stores...

A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender.

Who pays MediaDefender to disrupt peer to peer networks? I don’t know who’s ponying up today, but in the past their clients have included Sony, Universal Music, and the central industry groups for both music and movies – the RIAA and MPAA. According to an article by Ars Technica, the company uses “its array of 2,000 servers and a 9GBps dedicated connection to propagate fake files and launch denial of service attacks against distributors.” Another Ars Technica story claims that MediaDefender used a similar denial of service attack to bring down a group critical of its actions...

“Media Defender did not do anything specific, targeted at Revision3″, claims Grodsky. “We didn’t do anything to increase the traffic” – beyond what they’d normally be sending us due to the fact that Revision3 was hosting thousands of MediaDefender torrents improperly injected into our corporate server. His claim: that once we turned off MediaDefender’s back-door access to the server, “traffic piled up (to Revision3 from MediaDefender servers because) it didn’t get any acknowledgment back.”

Putting aside the company’s outrageous use of our servers for their own profit, and the large difference between one connection every three hours and 8,000 packets a second, I’m still left to wonder why they didn’t just tell us our basement window was unlocked. A quick call or email and we’d have locked it up tighter than a drum. ..

If it can happen to Revision3, it could happen to your business too. We’re simply in the business of delivering entertainment and information – that’s not life or death stuff. But what if MediaDefender discovers a tracker inside a hospital, fire department or 911 center? If it happened to us, it could happen to them too. In my opinion, Media Defender practices risky business, and needs to overhaul how it operates. Because in this country, as far as I know, we’re still innocent until proven guilty – not drawn, quartered and executed simply because someone thinks you’re an outlaw.

Link (Thanks, Burris!)

The Canadian Space Agency has, er, launched a recruitment campaign for astronauts. Two lucky applicants will be chosen to join the Canadian Space Agency Astronaut corps and a "pool of qualified candidates will also be created for future needs." From the job description:

The Canadian Space Agency is seeking outstanding scientists, engineers and/or medical doctors with a wide variety of backgrounds. Creativity, diversity, teamwork, and a probing mind are qualities required to join the Canadian Space Agency's Astronaut Corps. To withstand the physical demands of training and space flight, candidates must also demonstrate a high level of fitness and a clean bill of health.

Astronaut trainees will train for tours of duty on the International Space Station (ISS), the largest human spacecraft ever built...

Long-duration missions aboard the ISS generally last from three to six months. Training for long-duration missions is very arduous and takes two to three years. This follows basic training of about one year. This training requires extensive travelling, and includes assimilation of the ISS assembly sequence and its on-orbit operations.

Link (Thanks, Douglas Rushkoff!)

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has just posted a gallery of terrific illustrations from the 1950s by illustrator Boris Artzybasheff.

In his introduction to the section titled "Machinalia" in his book As I See, Boris Artzybasheff says, "I am thrilled by machinery's force, precision and willingness to work at any task, no matter how arduous or monotonous it may be. I would rather watch a thousand ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by a thousand spent slaves lashed into submission. I like machines."

Link

These "Ghost Goblets" ($75 for 4 at Cocktail Vibe) achieve a nice effect with a double-chambered tumbler in which the inner chamber is shaped like a traditional goblet. You could really go to town with this idea, making the inner chamber resemble pretty much anything -- I'm thinking of a giraffe... Link (via OhGizmo)

Legendary horn player Louis Armstrong was also a collage artist! He collaged the fronts and backs of his personal collection of reel-to-reel recordings, more than 500 total. The Paris Review posted several examples and the story behind Armstrong's other medium for improvisation:

Only occasionally do the collages indicate the musical content within; usually there is no correlation. Armstrong made generous use of various kinds of adhesive tape not only to attach images to each box but also to laminate, frame, or highlight them. The works are untitled and undated, but he was making them as early as the 1950s; in a letter from 1953 he wrote, “Well, you know, my hobbie (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape . . . My hobbie is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and [make] a little story of my own.”

Link (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)

Jeff sez, "Researchers often use Photoshop to clean up the images they produce in the laboratory. If the experiment didn't go quite right, a bit of tampering can make a gel look like things did work. Editors at Science, Nature, and other journals are turning into detectives, using new tools to hunt for fraudulent images."

And the level of tampering they find is alarming. "The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal," says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help them detect image manipulation. Doctored images are troubling because they can mislead scientists and even derail a search for the causes and cures of disease.

Ten to 20 of the articles accepted by The Journal of Clinical Investigation each year show some evidence of tampering, and about five to 10 of those papers warrant a thorough investigation, says Ms. Neill. (The journal publishes about 300 to 350 articles per year.)

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Xeni goes backstage at a wearable technology fashion show held at the San Francisco Exploratorium, and tries digital and analog clothing on for size.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has spotted a delicious "Refined Cereal Light Fixture":

The Refined Cereal Light Fixture turns a row of fluorescent-colored, sugary cereal boxes into a wall mountable light fixture. The omission of Apple Jacks from the design seems like a weakness in the design: everyone is familiar with the eerie sight of a box of Apple Jacks radioactively pulsating in the dark by dint of super-charged sweetness alone.

Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Canadian Member of Parliament Charlie Angus (late of one of my favorite punk acts, L'Etranger) has introduced a private member's bill on Net Neutrality in Canada:

Charlie Angus, who represents Timmins and James Bay, launched his bill one day after 300 people showed up in Ottawa to protest the issue. "You are citizens of a digital realm and you have rights," Angus told the crowd, according to the CBC. The crowd then chanted, "Whose net? Our net!" As a slogan, this leaves something to be desired, but it does get the point across.

Angus wants Parliament to debate the topic, and his brief bill amends Canada's Telecommunications Act to prohibit various forms of discrimination. P2Pnet hosts a copy of the text, which outlaws "network management practices that favour, degrade or prioritise any content, application or service is transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership or destination." Reasonable network management is still allowed, and ISPs are explicitly allowed to charge different prices for different levels of bandwidth.

Link

Jamie sez, "The League of Noble Peers have been hard at work transcribing STEAL THIS FILM II [a great, remixable documentary about file-sharing and copyright] footage over the last six months, and we're now proud to announce this fully searchable index of the base material from which we made the film. As well as streaming previews, the material is available in HD format under CC-by-SA and we're encouraging people to use it in their own projects. One other thing to note is the cool underlying search technology, which is based on 0xdb.org and pad.ma."

Steal This Film 2 involved extensive research and numerous interviews. Due to time constraints, every documentary uses of only a small portion of the materials collected. Some interviewees, having been so generous in giving us their time, didn't appear at all in the final cut. In most cases this was simply a problem of being forced to focus in on the points we thought most crucial, and the need to arrange many voices into one argument.

This archive is intended to fulfill three objectives. We want to allow those interviewed the time to elaborate their perspectives in more detail, and to return the segments we selected to the context from which they emanated. We hope that these materials can be useful to those in search of greater detail.

Finally, in the spirit of cooperation and sharing, and by agreement with our interviewees, we are making this footage available to others who want to make films on this subject, and who may not have the resources to travel to and meet these exceptional individuals. We hope the HDV Torrents we have provided are of sufficient quality. If you have any issues, please contact us.

Steal This Film is a work in progress, incomplete, open to contradiction and response. The task of talking back to our point of view is one we leave at the feet of you, the viewers, users and produsers of the film.

Link (Thanks, Jamie!)

See also: Steal This Film, Part II: the Internet makes us into copiers

BouncingBall's been building himself a fanciful fake handgun, and has documented the process on Instructables with a good HOWTO:

This is a project I've been working on for a few weeks now. I basically wanted a cool hand gun. I didn't fancy any replica movie props, and the law makes it hard to buy normal replica guns. so i made my own.

Link

Brevity is the soul of Flip. I've been enjoying the proliferation of short, sweet video clips taken with the ultracompact and low-cost digital camcorder. NYC-based PR terrorist Peter Shankman sneakily turned his Flip on while passing it through the TSA flight screening machine, and the resulting footage is above. Link. It's simple, but I like the sparkly parts where the poor little camera gets nuked. Pre-emptive note to actual nuclear scientists who will correct my semantics in the comments: shut up.

Remember the Ford dealership that ran a radio ad telling non-Christians to "sit down and shut up?"

"JW Horne," who claims he works for the dealership writing the ads posted to his blog, defending his decision, telling "non-believers" and "plain doubters" that we are "in the minority and as loud as you yell and protest, you will always be in the minority."

But today, Rick Kieffe, owner of Kieffe and Sons Ford in Mojave and Rosamond, publicly apologized for the ad, saying that a) he doesn't actually attend church, and b) he didn't approve the ad.

“It’s just something that went by us,” said Kieffe, who does not attend church but considers himself “a Christian spirit.” “We’re obviously sorry that it offends a given segment who identifies themselves as atheist.”

Link to "You Will Always Be in the Minority" post, Link to apology (via Consumerist)

See also: Ford dealership uses bigoted radio ads to sell cars

In this 11-minute video, a series of cunningly engineered custom Mario levels are used as a rhythm section to accompany a spliced-together medley of chirpy anime soundtracks. The maker (IsoTkhs on YouTube) has set up the levels so that various bumpers and objects keep Mario moving, jumping, flying and bouncing over in-game objects at very precise timing, so that each object's bounce-noise forms part of the percussion for the tracks. The clip goes on and on, which is like the Mario percussion version of Chico Marx looking casually away from his piano, cracking jokes, moving around, while one or both of his hands effortlessly continue to plunk out some insanely complex and witty bit of ivory-tickling. Clearly the maker is saying, "I can do this all day long. You thought that was cool? Check this out. And this. And this. And this. Oh, pick your jaw up, there's still more to come. Yeah, this too. Ha, yeah, that one was pretty good. Now, watch this."

If you only watch one 11-minute YouTube of anime music accompanied by custom Mario levels today, make it this one. Link (via Waxy!)

Here's a papercraft steak dinner to download, print out and make. Link

Recently on Boing Boing Gadgets we saw suits made from recycled bottles; heard that Apple is toying with solar power; and felt the MacBook Air cut to the bone. Rob wondered who would like a text-based portable gaming console; Joel tinkled on Yamaha's Disklavier IV WiFi Piano; and John, when he wasn't microwaving cellphones, pondered the creation of a floating libertarian utopia. As for reviews, there wasn't much to hear from Koss' new Sparkplug headphones. Last week, we invited Mrs. Buttermer to take her teacher's red pen to the worst "top 10 worst things" Diggbait list of all time. Today, however, all we want to know is this: what the hell is this strange knob that we found in Rob's back yard?

Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, John posts about this sharp cassette-face watch. Link

The uncanny valley even creeps dogs out. (via Arbroath)

For the first time, monkeys have successfully fed themselves with a robotic arm jacked directly into their brains. Neuro-control of robots isn't new, but apparently performing tasks as complicated as eating is a huge challenge. Conducted at the University of Pittsburgh, the demo was captured on video that's now on YouTube. Of course, the research itself may not sit well with people who are against all animal testing. From New Scientist:

Most people who become paralysed or lose limbs retain the mental dexterity to perform physical actions. And by tapping into a region of the brain responsible for movement – the motor cortex – researchers can decode a person's intentions and translate them into action with a prosthetic.

This had been done mostly with monkeys and in virtual worlds or with simple movements, such as reaching out a hand. But two years ago, an American team hacked into the brain of a patient with no control over his arms to direct a computer cursor and a simple robotic arm.

Schwarz's team extracted even more complicated information from the brains of two rhesus macaques by reading the electrical pulses of about 100 brain cells. Normally, millions of neurons fire when we lift an arm or grab a snack, but the signals from a handful of cells are enough to capture the basics, (neurological engineer Andrew) Schwarz says.

Link to New Scientist article, Link to video

Adrian McCarthy says:

While at the cinema yesterday, I read a notice posted by the box office that Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ in order to deter and track piracy. The notice acknowledged that the momentary silences were annoying but that it was out of their control. Basically it said, please don't bug the manager if the sound drops out, unless it lasts more than a minute.

I searched this morning, but I can't find any mention of this on the web. I was going to snap a picture of the notice to post on my blog, but my cell phone battery had died--and I probably would have been chased off by a security guard.

Blanking out chunks of audio seems a rather crude way of watermarking the film. Once again, it's the paying customers who suffer.

For reference, it was the Regal Cinema at Hacienda Crossing in Dublin, California. I was there to see Speed Racer in IMAX, so I didn't directly witness tampering with Indiana Jones.

Rolling Stone has a story about televangelist John Hagee's church, written by Matt Taibbi.

The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.

...

"In the name of Jesus," continued Fortenberry, "I cast out the demon of astrology!"

Coughing and spitting noises. Behind me, a bald white man started to wheeze and gurgle, like he was about to puke. Fortenberry, still reading from his list, pointed at the man. On cue, a pair of life coaches raced over to him and began to minister. One dabbed his forehead with oil and fiercely clutched his cranium; the other held a paper bag in front of his mouth.

"In the name of Jesus Christ," said Fortenberry, more loudly now, "I cast out the demon of lust!"

And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I couldn't see if any actual vomitus came out, but he made real hurling and retching noises.

Now the women began to pipe in. On the women's side of the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to explain what these noises sounded like. If you've ever watched The Houston 560 or any other gangbang porn movie, that's what it sounded like, only the sounds were far more intense.

It was not difficult to figure out where the energy was coming from on that side of the room. Some of the husbands glanced nervously over in the direction of their wives.

"In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!" said Fortenberry.

"Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!" wailed a woman in the front row.

"Bleeech!" puked the bald man behind me.

Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.

"Need . . . a . . . bag," I said as he came over.

He handed me a bag.

Link

James Gilmore and Joe Pine, authors of the famous business book Experience Economy, are visiting with us at Institute for the Future today. Their new book, Authenticity, is about the quest for truly "real" things and what that means for biz strategy. Basically, it explores why companies should keep it real even if they're selling something fake. (Think Las Vegas, for example.) Joe and Jim just told me about Bourbon Chicken Grill'N Dip, a BBQ sauce that has this amazing tagline on the label: "Authentic Food Court Flavor." I love it almost as much as if they promoted the use of "real artificial flavoring!" Link to Bourbon Chicken Sauce, Link to buy the book Authenticity, Link to Authenticity site

Mary Robinette Kowal says:

On the ACLU's blog, they have a PDF of a CIA redacted document about the use of torture. The page is entirely blacked out except for the phrase, "These enhanced techniques include:" and then farther down the page, "waterboard."

Link

David says

The federal government is secretly negotiating an agreement to revamp international copyright laws which could make the information on Canadian iPods, laptop computers or other personal electronic devices illegal and greatly increase the difficulty of travelling with such devices. The deal would create a international regulator that could turn border guards and other public security personnel into copyright police. The security officials would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellular phones for content that "infringes" on copyright laws, such as ripped CDs and movies.

The guards would also be responsible for determining what is infringing content and what is not.

Canadians, time to write your MP! This was on the front page of the daily tabloid in Vancouver, so hopefully Jim Prentice will be forced to actually consult the public before he sells us all up the river.

Link

Dug North says:

Here's a beautifully crafted hand-cranked automaton of a human hand, impatiently tapping its index finger.

It was created by sculptor Chris Eckert. Link

Robert Woodhead says:

Last weekend I unleashed the Casio Exilim EX-F1 camera (which can do 300, 600 and 1200 fps video) at the Carolina Combat Robotics event. This was a warmup for doing similar videography at RoboGames next month, but you might enjoy this little video, set to "The Blue Danube"

The website link< has links to other high-speed videos I've done while testing out the camera.

Link

Earlier this year, I posted that the third severed foot in six months had turned up on a beach in British Columbia. A fourth was found last week. All of them have been right feet inside size 12 sneakers. From the Canadian Press:

Police say DNA testing is being done on the latest foot, and DNA profiles have been conducted on the others.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer based in Seattle, Wash., said when a human body submerged in the ocean, the main parts like arms, legs, hands, feet and the head are usually what come off the body.

But he's still baffled by how the exact same part -- a right foot -- could wash up repeatedly.

"It's not unusual for body parts to wash up along the United States or Canada," he said. "There's so many accidents, like boating. That's not unusual. It is unusual to find four bodies over the course of the year and just right feet."

Link (via Fortean Times)

Previously on BB:
• Severed feet washed up in Canada Link

Book Decor sells authentically fake libraries. You can pick the antique leather-bound books based on the color of the covers. For example, the "Zen Collection" consists of sun-bleached volumes. There are also limited quantities of "Harry Potter Look" books. Depending on the style, each book sells for around $6 to $28. The books aren't in English though, so unless you happen to know the language a particular book is written in, you couldn't read it if you wanted to. From the Book Decor site:

Decorating a home library is a tough task, especially if you are short on books! Then again, not everyone is fortunate enough to have a few hundred hardbacks on hand. Considering that even the smallest of home studies requires a substantial number of volumes, the cost of filling a few bookshelves can really add up!

That is, of course, unless you consult with a decorative book dealer. As merchants who deal specifically with ornamental books, decorative dealers know exactly how to fill bookcase space with the greatest of ease. As ornamental book merchants, we at Book Décor are well-versed in the art of decorating with books. Our Danish printed, European imported books are sold specifically with interior design in mind.

Many people feel that it's silly to purchase books for pure decorative value. While we certainly understand this, we also savor the opportunity to change the mind of such individuals! Our books are so beautiful on the outside that their interior ceases to be important. What's more, they are available for purchase by the foot as well as the yard. In other words, no more spending hours in used bookstores looking for space fillers. At Book Décor, this process takes a matter of seconds!

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Earlier this week, Ruben Bolling's TOM THE DANCING BUG toon let fly with some trenchant commentary on Disney and copyright. Link (Thanks, Cori!)

This one-of-a-kind prototype Margaret Thatcher teapot (modelled on the Spitting Image version of the Iron Lady) sold recently on eBay for a mere £82.06. I would have paid more than that for the privilege of drinking from Thatcher the Snatcher's distended nose every morning. Link (via Making Light)

Flickr's Andi808 shot this striking pic of a CCTV in London's Trafalgar Square that's seemingly staring Lord Admiral Nelson straight in the puss. Link (via Blackbelt Jones)

The WikiProfessional project (like Wikipedia, but for narrow and deep exploration of highly specialized domains) just launched with its first beta wiki: WikiProteins is a place where biologists can collectively annotate an enormous database of proteins, a database culled from the best open science journals in the field.

The new paper describes a major advantage to this approach. Traditionally, biological information has been divided between two approaches: data mining, which involves parsing existing information to identify semantic content and connections within it, and curating, which involves expert, manual analysis of data. By importing information from both types of sources, WikiProteins should theoretically contain the best properties of both types of data: reliable information supplied by experts and potential connections among data that haven't previously been explored.

The paper provides a number of measures of the success of this approach. For one, the import process has identified over a million individual authors, and a similar number of concepts that connect them and the other items stored in the database. The different data sources also seem to have paid off, as the authors determined that well over half of the protein-protein interactions brought in from curated databases could not have been identified by data-mining PubMed abstracts.

In calling for biologists to get involved in the beta process, the people who generated WikiProteins have a number of roles in mind. For starters, they expect that the data mining process has generated a significant number of spurious connections, and hope that the community will help in pruning those. For example, they noted that the gene abbreviation "CLB2" mapped to at least five different genes (depending on the organism), as well as a material used in dentistry, Clearfil Liner Bond 2; manual intervention may be needed to sort these out. They're also hoping that contributors will simply dump sentences from the literature into WikiProteins in order for them to be indexed and further connections mined.

Link

This Star Trek bridge cake was made by Duff Goldman, owner of a bakery in Baltimore that was featured on The Food Network's reality show "The Ace of Cakes." Fire carbohydrate torpedoes! Link (via Neatorama!)

No one does kooky magazine ads like the fine folks at your local Rosicrucian temple. For example, see this fine MENTAL POISONING ad that ran in the July, 1939 ish of Mechanix Illustrated -- pure illuminatus! Link

These miniatures depicting the futuristic world of NYC in 1980 appeared in the January, 1931 ish of Modern Mechanix, as part of a feature on the burgeoning art of special effects miniatures for motion pictures:

This model took five months to complete and cost approximately $200,000. It was built in an old blimp hangar once used by the U. S. Army balloon corps and covers a ground area 75×225 feet, representing the most extravagant effort yet conceived by the American cinema industry.

Lofty office buildings 250 stories high, canals carried overhead on suspension cables, airplanes that land on a few square feet of flat space on the side of tall structures, streets with nine lanes and nine levels of traffic, are among the interesting features. Although the model city is futuristic, its construction violates no engineering practices. It is really engineering skill carried a bit farther than today.

Link

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv, Cory Doctorow checks in from his ongoing book tour for "Little Brother," and reads a passage from this latest novel. We also learn all about the contents of his hotel minibar, and a cool steampunk watch he received which shoots cockroaches accross the room.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

Previously on Boing Boing tv:
* Cory Doctorow: Show us your "Little Brother" HOWTO videos, and "Dumpster-Diving Philosopher."

Kieffe and Sons, a Ford dealership in Mojave, California, has a new radio ad in which they try to court Christian car buyers by announcing that they believe that non-Christians in America should "sit down and shut up."

["Did you know that there are people in this country who want prayer out of schools, "Under God" out of the Pledge, and "In God We Trust" to be taken off our money?"]

"But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Kieffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don't tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that's tough, this is America folks, it's called free speech. None of us at Kieffe & Sons Ford is afraid to speak out. Kieffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don't see you today, by the grace of God, we'll be here tomorrow."

Link (via Pharyngula)

Health officials in New York are cautioning people to avoid a "street aphrodisiac" made from the excretions of a poisonous toad, after a man consumed the illegal concoction and died.

The city's poison control center issued the warning Friday after receiving a hospital report that a 35-year-old man who ingested the hard, brown substance died earlier this month. The product is sold under names including Piedra, Love Stone, Jamaican Stone, Black Stone and Chinese Rock at sex shops and neighborhood stores. It is banned by the Food and Drug Administration.

City health officials said the victim, whose identity was not released, was admitted to the hospital complaining of chest and abdominal pain. He died two days later. Health officials said the hardened resin, made with venom from toads of the Bufo genus, contains chemicals that can disrupt heart rhythms.

Link to AP item, more on a NYT blog here.

Stuff like tricloroethylene, formaldehyde, and benzene can be really toxic. Yet they're commonly found right in your house. Fortunately, adding some common houseplants to your surroundings can apparently help clean up the toxins. Our friends at GOOD Magazine posted a useful charticle showing where the compounds tend to rear their ugly heads and the common plants that can act as, er, toxic avengers.
Link

The great film director, producer, and actor Sydney Pollack died today at 73 years of age, at his home here in Southern California. Here is an obituary in the New York Times. I met him briefly in the course of producing tech conferences during the web 1.0 boom. He had some truly inspired ideas about narrative in the digital age, and the clash between old Hollywood vs. new. He seemed a generous and kind person. Image: NYCArthur.

Academics at the UK's Nottingham University were arrested as terrorists for downloading Al Qaeda documents from a US government server in the course of research into a Master's degree convering terrorist tactics. The two UK-born profs were released, but the student faces deportation to Algeria under the Terrorism Act, where he believes he will be tortured. The university -- which encouraged its staffers to rat out people they thought were involved in researching terrorism -- refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong with any of this.

Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.

The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a "prevent agenda" against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.

Sabir was arrested on May 14 after the document was found by a university staff member on an administrator's computer. The administrator, Hisham Yezza, an acquaintance of Sabir, had been asked by the student to print the 1,500-page document because Sabir could not afford the printing fees. The pair were arrested under the Terrorism Act, Sabir's family home was searched and their computer and mobile phones seized. They were released uncharged six days later but Yezza, who is Algerian, was immediately rearrested on unrelated immigration charges and now faces deportation.

Link (via /.)

Canadians! Come to Parliament Hill tomorrow for a protest in support of Net Neutrality!

Net Neutrality Rally (May 27th, 2008 - 11:30AM until 1:30PM)
What are we rallying for?

1 - Competition:
- To stop Vertical Market leveraging
- To stop/prevent a Duopoly Environment (where Cable/Telco incumbents control)

2 - Innovation:
- To allow new content and applications to develop and/or flourish (ie: facebook/google)

3 - Consumer Rights:
- Promote ISP transparency
- Promote Consumer Privacy
- Promote the need for Product delivery (get what you pay for)

Link (Thanks, Robbo!)

See that thing in this image that looks like a Martian vehicle descending by parachute to the surface of Mars? That's the Phoenix lander, captured in mid-drop, still glowing from entry into the atmosphere, by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. How badass awesome is it to be a human? Super badass awesome. Link (via Making Light)

Pete sez, "Customs officials at Narita airport have lost 124 grams of hashish they planted in an unknowing traveler’s luggage to train drug sniffing dogs." Link (Thanks, Pete!)

The Boing Boing tv crew is hard at play today, as you can see from the webcam snapshot above. We'll see you again tomorrow. Happy Memorial Day to our US audience. A quick peek at Wikipedia reveals that this is "National Sorry Day" in Australia, which sounded funny until we read the article; more here. (pic: cute old postcard scanned and Flickr'd by Dr. Haggis)

Link to photo set of deliciously-etched skate decks from a project called Refill Seven, "an exhibition allowing artists to explore the idea of lasering away at seven layers of ply that make a deck and add their own distinctive mark." Above, a design by Jeff Staple. I'm sorry, I'm not sure who designed the deck below (Aaron Horkey?) Snip from project description:

Only 50 limited edition decks will be produced per artist. The aim of the show is to have a series of unique decks that collectors may choose to ride or display. The exhibition [had] its first show at the MTV Gallery Space in Sydney, Australia scheduled on Thursday 5th April, to be followed later in the year by New York, LA, Japan and finally a scheduled tour of Europe.

Curated by Refill magazine, and etched by Precision 20 | 20 in Australia. There's a myspace page, if you can tolerate MySpace. (thanks, Jolon Bankey!)

Jacob Appelbaum was one of many folks who went to see the new Indiana Jones movie, and hated it. About this internet video, in which a giant Lego-covered styrofoam boulder hurls towards hapless victims, he says, "I was happy to see that someone else was as nostalgic as me." UPDATE: oh nooooooes, we have been duped by a sneaky viral marketing campaign. I HATE YOU INTERNET MARKETERS. Take this conversation and shove it.

BB commenter MGABRYSSF explains,

It's viral from the Sausalito marketing group "Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners". The YouTube account holder google's to an "office food blog" which shows him in the background of BSSP. They have the LucasArts games account. They're located on Liberty Way which I've worked in the same building and recognized it from the photos. As soon as I revealed this on the YouTube comments section I got blocked and the posts were deleted. The initial "behind the scenes" photo on flickr was also taken down. It was CC so I mirrored it on Flickr and attributed the owner (as per CC guidelines). Of course - he had kittens over that. He claimed that Gizmodo violated Creative Commons and some such bullshit. Gizmodo also linked to the source so that's a stretch of an excuse. Fuck the phonies.

Commenter Agent86 adds,

Also, they lied and said it was a million legos, or something along those lines - that would have been impressive. As it is, it looks like they took an hour or so to glue a few hundred legos to the outside of some garbage - not so impressive. I say we smash their cars with a giant rubber-band ball!

Yeah. 5 stars for execution, it's a great video -- but 5 star-neutralizing black holes of righteous and wrathful internet scorn for being douchey. (also spotted on Laughing Squid)

A study conducted by Harvard Med School researchers has concluded that a 16-hour fast prior to long-distance travel can cause the brain's circadian clock to reset, beating jetlag:

Normally, the body's natural circadian clock in the brain dictates when to wake, eat and sleep, all in response to light. But it seems a second clock takes over when food is scarce, and manipulating this clock might help travelers adjust to new time zones, they said.

"A period of fasting with no food at all for about 16 hours is enough to engage this new clock," said Dr. Clifford Saper of Harvard Medical School, whose study appears in the journal Science.

He said a person from the United States traveling to Japan must adjust to a 11-hour time change.

"Because the body's clock can only shift a small amount each day, it takes the average person about a week to adjust to the new time zone. And, by then, it's often time to come home," Saper said in a statement.

Link (via /.)

Michael Geist has assembled a list of ten "frequently awkward questions" for Jim Prentice, the Canadian Minister of Industry who is planning to cram a Canadian version of the USA's disastrous Digital Millennium Copyright Act down the nation's throat at the US trade rep's insistence, skipping any pretense of public consultation in his rush to sell Canada out to a handful of giant multinational entertainment companies.

There's really good intelligence that Prentice is planning on either rushing the Canadian DMCA through before this Parliament closes, or waiting for the furor to die down so he can slip it through when they reconvene.

1. Days before you were scheduled to introduce the copyright bill, you claimed that Canadian business executives were anxious for copyright reform. In February 2008, however, the Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright, which features a who’s who of Canadian business (Telus, Rogers, Cogeco, SaskTel, MTS Allstream, Google, Yahoo, Retail Council of Canada, and Canadian Association of Broadcasters) spoke out against U.S.-style copyright legislation and in favour of an expanded fair dealing provision. Why is Canada's Industry Minister prepared to ignore the concerns of Canadian business?

2. In recent months countries such as New Zealand and Israel have enacted wide ranging copyright reforms that have either rejected the U.S. approach or included significant flexibility to preserve the copyright balance. Why are those countries able to strike a balance in the face of U.S. pressure, yet Canada appears ready to cave to U.S. insistence that it follow its much-criticized model?

3. There has been considerable speculation that the forthcoming bill will seek to drum up public support by including a "time shifting” provision to allow Canadians to legally record television shows. Since Canadians increasingly record shows using digital recorders, users that circumvent digital locks on such shows (which are occasionally inserted by broadcasters and cable companies) will still run afoul of the law. What is the value of "modernizing” the Copyright Act if the provisions are outdated before they are even introduced?

Link

Boing Boing and I get another nice nod today in XKCD, Randall Munroe's fantastic geeky comic. I'm really looking forward to meeting Randall in person for the first time at 3PiCon in Massachusetts this summer where we'll both be guests of honor. Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

These guitar-shaped key covers from Gama-Go are a hoot. They're $6 for a set of six in a variety of colors.
Link

Previously on BB:
• New Boing Boing t-shirt by Gama-Go! Link

Sculptor Ageli Batle makes elaborate, highly detailed sculptures of everyday objects in graphite that can then be used as gorgeous pencils -- you can write with anything from an antler to an olive branch to a callalily or a wing. They write with surprising smoothness and accuracy and are a joy to hold and behold. Link

Today, I'll be winding up this phase of my book tour for my young adult novel Little Brother (now in its second week on the NYT bestseller list!) with an appearance at Books of Wonder in midtown Manhattan, near Union Square, from 5-7PM. I'll be speaking, reading and signing (there are free cupcakes!) -- can't wait to see you there!

Monday, May 26, 2008
5-7 pm

Books of Wonder
18 West 18th Street
New York, NY 10011
(212) 989-3270

I'll be back in New York for one final Little Brother event, the postponed Comic Book Legal Defense Fund benefit, in August. Link to tour schedule

Joi Ito, a shrewd Japanese/American venture capitalist, has written a great little blog-post about why he's not so hot to invest in the "mobile Internet." Basically, when a heavily regulated, big stupid phone company controls your "internet," then your ability to innovate and do cool stuff and make money is entirely predicated on the regulator's or the stupid phone company's willingness to allow that to happen. So if you're making money by disrupting something that matters to the phone company or one of its entrenched partners, forget about it.

The reason that we have vibrant startup driven innovation is because the Internet is open by nature. Anyone can participate without asking permission and anyone can compete with anyone else at every layer of the stack. This DNA of open and free competition (except for the occasional semi-monopoly) is what allows startups like Google to come in and displace incumbents. If it weren't for the Internet, I'm positive that the telcos would have determined that it was the most efficient that THEY design and operate the "online directories"...

In 2006 in Japan, mobile advertising was only $330M vs Content (Ringtones, Song-tones, Games) at $2.2B and Commerce at $4.7B. (http://www.johotsusintokei.soumu.go.jp/whitepaper/eng/WP2007/2007-index.html) Although all of us are experimenting with advertising and advertising is increasing on mobile, the overwhelming percentage of money spent on mobile devices goes to paying for and the collection of payments for a small number of not so innovative products from a small number of providers.

Link

Photographer Phillip Toledano's shoots of bankrupt offices were meant to be archaeological exercises, but the signs of life interrupted make them as ghostly as the frozen statues of Pompeii. Link (via Neatorama)

Joss Whedon fans have already organized a campaign to stop his new show, Dollhouse, from being cancelled, even though the first episode won't air for another eight months. Whedonistas have witnessed so many kick-ass TV shows cancelled by callous goons from teeveeland, they're girding their loins for the inevitable fight and not waiting around for the disappointment before working up a good head of bitter outrage. Good on 'em! Preemptive strikes are just defense as practiced by precogs.

DollhouseForums' trailblazing leader Nathan posted the following as a call to arms: "After seeing some of my favorite television shows get canceled in the past -- as well as the 'save this show' campaigns that followed -- I had the idea that a fan campaign BEFORE the show begins may be the best thing to do."

A Facebook fan page dedicated to the online campaign already has nearly 1,500 members.

Link

John sez, "I painted the bedroom of my old apartment to look like a scale replica of Bubble Man's stage from MegaMan 2. The project took me three months to complete and was 'unveiled' to my roommates for a Christmas party in 2006. I measured, stenciled, painted, and touched up every detail entirely by hand." Link (Thanks, John!)

Excerpt from a blog written by an "exotic dancer" named Grace, in Texas.

Rose was putting lotion on her face when she told me about the abortion. She was brief and matter-of-fact. Maybe I was supposed to ask more questions. The dressing room is not a tearful-hugs-sisterhood rah-rah-girlfriends kind of place. It's a zone of suspended emotion, mostly. It's where you go to get out of the whole chatty, google-eyed gushing sex kitten thing that you do out on the floor all the time. Even the girls on their cellphones breaking up with their boyfriends every day during shift change sound clinical and practiced. The only real raw emotion there is from girls who aren't making money, crouched by their lockers hissing curses into little piles of singles.

Rose and I sat in front of the mirror and put our powder on. It seemed quiet, although it never actually is, with the stage music piped back here and the DJ on the mic hawking five-dollar you-call-em shots. Some people would be saying things right now, because some people show how much they care by saying things. Some people would want to know if she was still with her boyfriend and what does he think and are you OK and where are you getting it done? And maybe those people would be better than me in situations like this. I tend to try to show how much I care by saying as little as possible.

I wish I could let her know just by the quality of the silence that if she needs anything from me it's hers. We're not best friends or anything. Sometimes we sell dances together. Men like to see us entertwined, her slim frame and and spectacular breasts, my pale skin and substantial hips. I love the warmth of her skin and the light gold freckles she's powdering over now so meticulously.

On the floor, she is silly and bewitching, daffy smile and clownish gestures set off against the essential elegance of her -- her classical face, that serious lode of smoky black hair. She seduces me again and again, like she seduces everyone. I love Rose. But of course, there is no Rose. I don't really know this girl next to me, the girl who's legal name is in my phone. If I knew her, I would say more.

Link to post, on Grace Undressed. Image borrowed from the Flickr stream of Cap'n Monky. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

Thank you Jesus for this, our daily awesome. Link (thanks, too, Souris Hong Porretta).

To-Do Tattoos are skin-safe to-do-list temporary tatts that come with a skin-safe felt-tip marker. I just draw on myself with a sharpie. Link

Neatorama's got a nice roundup post of cars customized with a Super Mario theme -- this stuff makes me wish I had a car. Link

Craig Ferguson snuck into Taiwan's abandoned hyper-futuristic San-Zhr Pod Village, a rotting, curvilinear housing complex that has been cursed since its inception, killing and injuring some of its construction crew. Link (Thanks, Nicholas!)

The Huffington Post just appointed former RIAA CEO Hilary Rosen as its new political director. Rosen presided over the RIAA's total and utter failure to come to grips with the Internet, the period in which the record industry rejected every single overture of money in exchange for licenses to its catalog from venture-backed P2P companies, choosing litigation over cash, and leading to a world in which the majority of music consumption online is illegal and doesn't give a dime to the record industry.

Nevertheless, Rosen is also an old-time political hack, epitomising the wing of the Democratic party that has progressive politics on every issue except the Internet: they're all for freedom, except for when it comes to that magic wire that delivers freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in one package. As far as that wire goes, one Police Academy or Brittney Spears download is grounds for termination of access to the net (and confiscation of every cent you can lay claim to).

But Rosen, 50, has had a long career in politics that spans beyond her 17 years at the RIAA, and it's her network of contacts and know-how that Huffington wants to tap into as The Huffington Post grows.

"Hilary really knows Washington and its political players intimately, and everyone on [The Huffington Post's] team in Washington loves her," said Arianna Huffington in an interview.

Link

The Mounties' anti-terror unit and Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada's top spook agency, have a file dedicated to a harmless punk band called "The Suicide Pilots." Apparently, a grasp of irony is not a prerequisite for intelligence work in Canada -- on the other hand, that's pretty serious punk cred: the Mounties think we're terrorists. Woo!

Following the arrest of the band’s drummer, bones (aka Jeffrey Monaghan), the RCMP’s anti-terror unit opened a file on the band, alleging their logo “depicts an airplane flying into the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill.” A copy of the frightened-looking airplane caricature was included in the 184 page file.

“If you want an example of bloated police powers, this is it,” says Ottawa-based lawyer Yavar Hameed. Hameed notes that the investigation seems to be completely unrelated to the arrest of Mr. Monaghan. Monaghan was alleged to have leaked the Tory Green Plan last spring. The anti-terror investigation appears to have surfaced after media coverage of Mr. Monaghan denouncing the Harper regime’s actions of climate change. Monaghan has never been charged. The investigation is organized through the Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (INSET), and the documents reveal an explicit coordination with Canada’s spy agency, CSIS.

Hameed notes that this case illustrates the unaccountability of police agencies in their efforts to catalog and criminalize activists. The Suicide Pilots have commented that the intelligence effort is another example of state-lawlessness in the so-called “War on Terror.” “The explosion of security culture over the past few years has cost countless innocent people very dearly, in ways we can’t even begin to fully appreciate - but this just straddles the line between disturbing and silly. What’s next? A tag-and-release program for social activists? We already have a make-work program for creepy, paranoid voyeurs,” says the band’s vocalist NaCl.

Link (Thanks, Fat Cramer!)

Here's a nice review of the new book Punk House, which documents the squats and other punk dwellings the authors found on a cross-country trip. I crashed on a lot of sofas in houses that looked like these, and even held the lease on one at one point...

Author and musician Timothy Findlen, along with photographer Abby Banks, spent three months driving cross-country to visit and photograph sixty-five punk houses—communal, low-rent houses typically crammed full of punks, squatters, and artists. The end result is PUNK HOUSE, a collection of 300 full color photos and three short essays.

PUNK HOUSE documents a journey that most of us will have never taken; it shows us homes that most of us have never seen; it gives a small taste of a way of living most of us have never lived, and it does so in an easy yet successful way. Banks’ digital snapshots are assembled by location, and are mainly colorful details of the punk houses, the communal punks that live in them, and the masses of oddball junk that decorate them. The photos range from disgusting (the bathroom at Casa de Otto comes to mind —is that blood or hair dye?) to the artistic (is this a junk pile of sticks or is it considered sculpture?).

Link, Link to Punk House on Amazon (Thanks, Dan!)

This clip of Danny Kaye and company doing "(You'll Never) Outfox the Fox" from The Court Jester (1956) is wonderful and strange. It makes me want to watch the whole film again. Link (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!)

My son and I love watching Yo Gabba Gabba! on teevee. Our favorite episode is Sleep because it features two particularly delightful songs. The first is a lovely tune called Bedtime Lullaby by Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon. The animation is by Lippy. In the same episode is a fun performance of "Pajama Party" by teenage indie pop duo Smoosh. Viacom seems to have insisted YouTube yank the Pajama Party video, but Bedtime Lullaby is still available. Link to Bedtime Lullaby, Link to hear Pajama Party on IMEEM

sausages
bbq rib painting
biltong bell
charred mammal flesh
souvlaki tetris
fast food fiasco
ipod case
meat face
kittens fight over meat

previously on web zen:
meaty zen 2007

Link, Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

An instructional video by a fellow named Ian that shows you all you'll need to know for doing the "Fishstick", as mentioned in the "You Look Nice Today" podcast episode "Sacks-Minnelli Disease," which has in turn spawned a movement. Whoah, look, some other dude made a fishstick video, and he too is Canuckistani. (thanks, Jamie Scanlon!)

A West Virgina woman's heart stopped three times and she was brain dead for 17 hours at a hospital. Rigor mortis had set in and the family was discussing donating her organs when she suddenly woke up. She now appears to be in good heath.

[Val] Thomas suffered two heart attacks and had no brain waves for more than 17 hours. At about 1:30 a.m. Saturday, her heart stopped and she had no pulse. A respiratory machine kept her breathing and rigor mortis had set in, doctors said.

"Her skin had already started to harden and her fingers curled. Death had set in," said son Jim Thomas.

They rushed her to a West Virginia hospital. Doctors put Thomas on a special machine which induces hypothermia. The treatment involves lowering the body temperature for up to 24 hours before warming a patient up.

After that procedure, her heart stopped again.

"She had no neurological function," said Dr. Kevin Eggleston.

Her family said goodbye and doctors removed all the tubes.

However, Thomas was kept on a ventilator a little while longer as an organ donor issue was discussed.

Ten minutes later the woman woke up and started talking.

Link (via Arbroath)

Alexander Uslontsev says:

IQLeague guys have some kind of online IQ test on their site and they group IQ scores of all visitors by different geographical locations (city, country, etc.)

Here is an interesting part - they also group IQ Scores by referrer website and by client browser and operating system.

(No, I don't take this seriously.) Link

Diana sez, "For a limited time only, fans have the chance to ask Neal Stephenson questions about his upcoming novel ANATHEM (though, of course, he may or may not answer...). Questions and answers will be on an online video that will be released before ANATHEM goes on-sale September 9, 2008." Link (Thanks, Diana!)

Paulo sez,

I'm the guy who made the cloudy timelapse video popularly used later "Anonymous Message to Scientology."

Three days ago, Google's copyright bot flagged my own video as infringing because 236.com (Arianna Huffington's comedy news outfit) had posted a parody video using my footage with a content identification sig on it. When I asked who had flagged my video as infringing in preparation for a dispute, I was told that 236.com had graciously allowed me to keep "their copyrighted video."

Basically I put out a free public domain video for the internet to use as they wished, 236.com made a thirdhand derivative parody, and through Google Video they made an aggressively claim of copyright over my own material. At the time of this writing my video has not been restored.

Link (Thanks, Paulo!)

The Unusual Suspect sez, "These days it seems that using a camera in public is all but illegal. But Alton Towers amusement park in the UK has instituted a new rule, and has instituted 'special wardens' to enforce it. If you are seen using a Palm, iPaq or other personal digital assistant or smartphone, the special wardens will take it away from you."

Any parent seen tapping on a PDA will have it confiscated by special wardens at Alton Towers.

The resort, which boasts 2.5 million visitors each year, has imposed the rule for next week’s May half-term.

If successful, it could be introduced permanently.

Russell Barnes, a director of the Staffordshire attraction, said: “It’s important for parents and kids to focus on nothing more than having the best possible time.”

Link (Thanks, Unusual Suspect!)

Bugger. One of the people involved in my Comic Book Legal Defense Fund benefit event in NYC this Sunday has taken ill and we've had to postpone the event until August. Sorry everyone -- hope I'll get to see you Monday at 5PM at Books of Wonder near Union Square. All advance ticket holders will have their ticket donation refunded. Link

børge says:

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks has this great photo of a sign reading "Images are being recorded for the purpose of 'crime prevention' and 'public safety' and may be shared with third parties."

Is this a way to admit that the stated goals of the increasing surveillance in society is mostly bull, or is it just a Freudian slip?

Link

Here's a gallery of Rick Ross' stunning photos about the "Architecture of Authority." Shown above: "Homeland Security, San Francisco."

For the past several years--and with seemingly limitless access--photographer Richard Ross has been making unsettling and thought-provoking pictures of architectural spaces that exert power over the individuals within them. From a Montessori preschool to churches, mosques and diverse civic spaces including a Swedish courtroom, the Iraqi National Assembly hall and the United Nations, the images in Architecture of Authority build to ever harsher manifestations of power: an interrogation room at Guantanamo, segregation cells at Abu Ghraib, and finally, a capital punishment death chamber.Though visually cool, this work deals with hot-button issues--from the surveillance that increasingly intrudes on post-9/11 life to the abuse of power and the erosion of individual liberty. The connections among the various architectures are striking, as Ross points out: "The Santa Barbara Mission confessional and the LAPD robbery homicide interrogation rooms are the same intimate proportions. Both are made to solicit a confession in exchange for some form of redemption." Essay by Harper's Magazine publisher, John R. MacArthur, also a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Link to photos | Buy book on Amazon (via Growabrain)

I have been enjoying the video work of artist Peter Horvath. Here's a short film he made, called Boulevard (adult themes and language).

Located in Los Angeles, we follow a striking woman, the passenger of a convertible car, driven by an unidentified driver through the city, passing its generic streets, billboards and motels, with an unknown destination. There is a voice-over, that exposes her feelings of obsession. Running parallel to the piece is a dialogue between a man and woman in intimate, but casual conversation about love. The video sequences are frequently suspended, disjunctive and blurred, distorting our visual and emotional sense of place.

At once lyrical and intoxicatingly beautiful, we pass through discrete emotive atmospheres experiencing ambiguity, desire and longing. - Celina Jeffery

Link

Robbo says; "Weezer has posted a great video on YouTube - "Pork and Beans" - featuring a huge collection of "internet stars" - they even have the band playing within a deluge of Coke + Mentos." Link

Edward Smith, 57, of Washington, is a mechaphiliac. He likes "having sex" with cars. In fact, his last relationship with a human was 12 years ago and he never had sex with her. His current love is Vanilla, a white VW Beetle. The Telegraph profiles Smith and he's featured in an upcoming documentary titled "My Car Is My Lover." From The Telegraph:

"I appreciate beauty and I go a little bit beyond appreciating the beauty of a car only to the point of what I feel is an expression of love," (Smith) said.

"Maybe I'm a little bit off the wall but when I see movies like Herbie and Knight Rider, where cars become loveable, huggable characters it's just wonderful.

"I'm a romantic. I write poetry about cars, I sing to them and talk to them just like a girlfriend. I know what's in my heart and I have no desire to change."

He added: "I'm not sick and I don't want to hurt anyone, cars are just my preference."

Link to Telegraph article, Link to YouTube video of Smith

Previously on BB:
• Man pretends sex with car, busted Link

As a devout believer in resistentialism, I can empathize with this man trying to do his job in the middle of a silent and hostile army of objects intent on hurting him at every opportunity. (via Arbroath)

Gary Peare says: "Award-winning small space design: Abod, envisioned as a low-cost, prefabricated solution to South Africa’s housing shortage. Packs flat; is assembled by 4 people with a screwdriver and an awl!" Link

Dirk Deppey says: As promised, Gary Groth's comprehensive 2003 interview with late Mad Magazine pioneer Will Elder is now online at the Comics Journal website, complete and chock full of illustrations (many of them rarely seen before the interview was published). Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Will Elder, RIP
• Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman's "Goodman Goes Playboy" comic

Artist Shane Glines has been putting his old spin on a few classic comic book pin up pages, including Fantastic Four and Josie and the Pussycats. I like this one of Crystal, an homage to a Jack Kirby page.

Joe Kick Ass found the original art, shown here. Thanks!

Shanes' Cartoon Retro site costs $5 a month via PayPal. It's the only website I've ever subscribed to, and it's well worth the money if you are a fan of great cartoon art. Link

Wendy sez, "Wikileaks has a document apparently leaked from drafting negotiations around the proposed "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement." The discussion paper has the stated objective to 'Establish, among nations committed to strong IPR protection, a common standard for IPR enforcement to combat global infringements of IPR particularly in the context of counterfeiting and piracy that addresses today's challenges, in terms of increasing international cooperation, strengthening the framework of practices that contribute to effective enforcement of IPRs, and strengthening relevant IPR enforcement measures themselves.' Of course the proposed 'cooperation' would once again extend the worst of US IP law and beyond -- DMCA anticircumvention and ISP takedown, criminal penalties for non-commercial copying, enforcement with minimal process -- onto partners such as developing countries for whom these enclosure regimes are even less appropriate. " Link, See also (Thanks, Wendy!)

EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn sez,

For about the last 9 years I've been handling a case against Chevron for their involvement in a shooting of unarmed environmental protesters in Nigeria. The case is called Bowoto v. Chevron and it's finally set for trial in San Francisco federal court in September.

Wednesday, May 28 is the 10th anniversary of the shooting and to commemorate it we're bringing our named plaintiff, Larry Bowoto, to California where he'll be addressing Chevron's annual shareholder meeting in San Ramon, held that same day.

Mr. Bowoto will be joined by people from Ecuador and Burma, who are also facing environmental and human rights abuse at the hands of Chevron, as well as activists from Richmond, California who are trying to resist a Chevron proposal to refine dirtier oil at that facility. Outside, a coalition of groups including Amazon Watch are sponsoring a protest.

The website describes the planned activities. We'll also be holding a press conference on Tuesday on the steps of San Francisco City Hall.

The goal of teaming up activists from around the world is to send a message to Chevron that it can't hide the truth anymore of its poor environmental and human rights record around the world.

More information about the Bowoto v. Chevron case is available here

Link (Thanks, Cindy!)

BB co-founder and Make editor in chief Mark Frauenfelder talks to robot builder Daniel O'Connell about his experiment in the uncanny valley, a tricycle-riding mini-me he calls "My Dummy." Shot at Maker Faire Bay Area 2008.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Hugh D'Andrade -- a professional designer and illustrator -- and EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry produced a great piece and podcast about why artists need to support Orphan Works legislation. There has been an enormous amount of FUD about this -- people saying things about the proposal that just aren't true. It's nice to have someone clear the air, finally.

The Orphan Works legislation would help resolve those fears and, in the process, encourage the display and re-use of these “lost” works. Under the proposed law, individuals who would like to use an orphan work must put diligent effort into searching for the owner of the copyright in the work, based in part on best practices to be outlined by the Registrar of Copyright. If that search comes up empty, they can use that work. And, if at some future time the copyright owner comes forward to demand payment, the legislation requires the second author to negotiate with that owner in good faith to determine reasonable compensation for the use, and promptly pay that compensation.

And if the second author doesn't follow the new rules under the law and simply uses the work without making a diligent search? The copyright owner can sue them under the current rules and potentially obtain statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work -- just as they can now.

Congress also plans to certify searchable databases for visual works like photographs, graphic arts, and textile designs that will collect information about works and contact information for the related copyright owners. There are not “formalities” associated with these databases. No artist will be required to “register” with the databases, and failure to register will not result in it being considered “orphaned.”

Link to blog post, Link to Podcast

Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its series of HOWTOs inspired by my novel Little Brother -- this time, it's "How to blend in with a crowd."

Stay as close to the most dense part of the crowd. It is easier to find people straggling about on the edges. It's harder to find people that are in the middle of everything since everyone is moving around you. If people are moving in small groups through the crowd, pick a random one and pretend that you are with them by following closely behind.

Link, Other Little Brother Instructables

Since 2005, NASA has observed 100 explosions on the surface of the Moon. The big booms, usually equivalent to a few hundred pounds of TNT, are caused by meteoroids smashing into the Moon's surface. The flashes of the bigger impacts are easily spotted by amateur astronomers on Earth using a backyard telescope. NASA launched the monitoring program in response to the recent plans to send humans back to the Moon.

These explosions don't require oxygen or combustion. Meteoroids hit the moon with tremendous kinetic energy, traveling 30,000 mph or faster. "At that speed, even a pebble can blast a crater several feet wide. The impact heats up rocks and soil on the lunar surface hot enough to glow like molten lava — hence the flash..."

Fortunately, says (the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, Bill) Cooke, astronauts are in little danger. "The odds of a direct hit are negligible. If, however, we start building big lunar outposts with lots of surface area, we'll have to carefully consider these statistics and bear in mind the odds of a structure getting hit."

Secondary impacts are the greater concern. When meteoroids strike the Moon, debris goes flying in all directions. A single meteoroid produces a spray consisting of thousands of "secondary" particles all traveling at bullet-like velocities. This could be a problem because, while the odds of a direct hit are low, the odds of a secondary hit may be significantly greater. "Secondary particles smaller than a millimeter could pierce a spacesuit," notes Cooke.

Link

Wired's Threat Level has a leaked Cisco document discussing the great "opportunities" inherent in supplying censorship and surveillance technology to China.

The 90-page document is an internal presentation that Cisco engineers and staffers in China mulled over in 2002 as the central government was upgrading its local, state and provincial public safety and security network infrastructure. Under the category "Cisco Opportunities," the document provides bullet point suggestions for how it might service China's censorship system called the "Golden Shield", and better known in the West as the Great Firewall of China.

The document is the first evidence that the networking giant has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression. It reinforces the double-edged role that Americans' technological ingenuity plays in the rest of the world. Companies including Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have faced criticism for cooperating to various degrees with the repressive Chinese regime, and the document leak on Monday came one day before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing into U.S. technology companies' participation in foreign government censorship programs.

Link (Thanks, W&W)

Japanese food maker Tohato launched a mobile multiplayer online game to promote their new snack products, delightfully named "Tyrant Habanero Burning Hell Hot" and Satan Jorquia Bazooka Deadly Hot." Buyers use their mobile phone to scan the 2D barcode on the bag and then join either the Habanero Evil Army or the Satan Jorquia Evil Army. I like that both armies are "evil." Carlo Longino has more on the fun over at MobHappy. Link

Fans at the St. Paul Saints game this Sunday will be treated to the fine "bobblefoot" giveaway pictured here, a dig at Senator Larry Craig's foot-tapping sex solicitation wide stance incident at the Twin Cities airport last year. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

One of the feet is springloaded and "taps," which, the Saints' press release says, is in honor of National Tap Dance Day.

Right.

The team also takes pains to note: "It doesn't matter if your tapping style is done with a 'wide stance' or is used as some sort of code."

Link to Star Tribune article, Link to images at Smoking Gun

The original Surrealist Manifesto, penned by André Breton in 1924, sold at auction as part of a 3.2 million Euro (approx US$5 million) collection of manuscripts. From The Telegraph:

After selling the nine documents separately, Sotheby's then offered the whole lot to any bidder prepared to put down more than the sum total reached. Following a battle with several telephone bidders, they all went to French collector Gérard Lhéritier, founder of the privately-owned Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris...

Mr Breton, who died in September 1966 at the age of 70, defined surrealism in the manifesto as "psychic automatism in its pure state".

It is the "transcription of thoughts without any form of control by reasoning and without any reference to aesthetic or moral considerations."

Link (Thanks, Imaginary Foundation!)

Yosuke, a parrot who lives in Nagareyama, Japan, escaped from his cage and was lost for two weeks. He was found on a rooftop and brought first to a police station and then a veterinary hospital. Fortunately when he met the vet, Yosuke remembered to recite his name and address. From the Associated Press:

"I'm Mr. Yosuke Nakamura," the bird told the veterinarian, according to (policeman Shinjiro) Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.

"We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we've found Yosuke," Uemura said.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

I took these photos of five- and six-year-olds' wishes for the Earth.

Todd Davis is the CEO of LifeLock, a company that offers protection from identity theft. He includes his social security number in advertisements to show how great his company is.

Now, LifeLock customers in Maryland, New Jersey and West Virginia are suing Davis, claiming his service didn't work as promised and he knew it wouldn't, because the service had failed even him.

Attorney David Paris said he found records of other people applying for or receiving driver's licenses at least 20 times using Davis' Social Security number, though some of the applications may have been rejected because data in them didn't match what the Social Security Administration had on file.

Link (Thanks, Cowicide!)

In our latest installment of Boing Boing TV's "SPAM THEATER" series, a cash proposition from a faraway land, and the secret to what girls want. Special thanks to Erik Sheppard of Voice Talent Productions for contributing -- well, voice talent!

Link to BBtv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Previously on Boing Boing tv:

SPAM THEATER: Love Song of Kseniya
SPAM THEATER VOL II

Ken Ohyama's remarkable Flickr set of Tokyo freeway interchanges is all graceful, swooping curves and spirals. Link (via Making Light)

Great news: The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Corynne McSherry arm-twisted Lockheed Martin into giving up on their crazy attempt to stop people from posting 3D models of the WWII bombers that they built at government expense, claiming a trademark in the design:

Last month we told you about Lockheed Martin's effort to use trademark infringement claims to cause the removal of digital images of classic military aircraft from TurboSquid, a stock images site. The central mark at issue was the term “B-24,” which Lockheed managed to register as a trademark for use in connection with scale models of airplanes. We sent an open letter to Lockheed’s licensing agency, demanding that they withdraw their improper objections. We're pleased to report that Lockheed has decided to withdraw its claim, and TurboSquid is putting the images back up forthwith.

This is a good outcome, but the problem remains. Because online communication and commerce often depends on intermediaries like TurboSquid, who may not have the resources or the inclination to investigate trademark infringement claims, it is much too easy for trademark owners like Lockheed to ignore fair use and shut down legitimate content. And not every target of improper claims is going to have the resources to push back.

Link (Thanks, John!)

See also: WWII Bomber: "Trademark Infringement"

Spaceless is a concept for zero-footprint balcony furniture -- it's a deck with pop-up, fold-flat recessed benches and tables, so that your little balcony can be a clear space when you want one, then turn into an al fresco dining area when needed. Link (via Cribcandy)

Whitney sez, "I recently interviewed Ele Carpenter, who runs the Open Source Embroidery Project, a "socially engaged art project" that "brings together programming for embroidery and computing." She has some interesting things to say about the gendered nature and gift economy of both coding and crafting. The project is currently on display at the HTTP Gallery in London."

Embroidery is constructed (mostly by women) in hundreds of tiny stitches which are visible on the front of the fabric. The system of the stitches is revealed on the back of the material. Some embrioderers seal the back of the fabric, preventing others from seeing the underlying structure of the pattern. Others leave the back open for those who want to take a peek. A few integrate the backend process into the front of the fabric. The patterns are shared amongst friends in knitting and embroidery 'ciricles'.

Software is constructed (mostly by men) in hundreds of tiny pieces of code, which form the hidden structure of the programme or interface. Open Source software allows you to look at the back of the fabric, and understand the structure of your software, modify it and distribute it. The code is shared amongst friends through online networks. However the stitches or code only make sense to those who are familiar with the language or patterns.

Link (Thanks, Whitney!)

In "China's All-Seeing Eye," Naomi Klein explains the terrifying and banal reality of China's new surveillance state, and the way that it represents a triumph of "Homeland Security" technology swaps between the US and China:

In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang is preparing for a major test of his own. "It's called the 10-million-faces test," he tells me.

Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. The idea is to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match the images to other photos of the same people in the government's massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao's, have been invited to compete. "We have to be able to match a face in a 10 million database in one second," Yao tells me. "We are preparing for that now."

The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is almost there: "It will happen next year."

When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government.

Link (via Schneier)

Bruce Schneier's latest Wired column is a stirring call-to-arms for a comprehensive data-privacy law:

Who controls our data controls our lives.

It's true. Whoever controls our data can decide whether we can get a bank loan, on an airplane or into a country. Or what sort of discount we get from a merchant, or even how we're treated by customer support. A potential employer can, illegally in the U.S., examine our medical data and decide whether or not to offer us a job. The police can mine our data and decide whether or not we're a terrorist risk. If a criminal can get hold of enough of our data, he can open credit cards in our names, siphon money out of our investment accounts, even sell our property. Identity theft is the ultimate proof that control of our data means control of our life.

We need to take back our data.

Our data is a part of us. It's intimate and personal, and we have basic rights to it. It should be protected from unwanted touch.

We need a comprehensive data privacy law. This law should protect all information about us, and not be limited merely to financial or health information. It should limit others' ability to buy and sell our information without our knowledge and consent. It should allow us to see information about us held by others, and correct any inaccuracies we find. It should prevent the government from going after our information without judicial oversight. It should enforce data deletion, and limit data collection, where necessary. And we need more than token penalties for deliberate violations.

Link

A Japanese "pet architecture" book contains detailed papercraft architectural miniatures to cut out and assemble. These are gorgeous. Link

Los Angeles Magazine has a tell-all memoir penned by one of the "Jack Sparrows" that play Disneyland -- a steamy tale of resistance and women throwing themselves at you.

I'll be honest: I didn’t follow all the Disney rules. I played Jack like he was real, and if a woman flirted, I would flirt back. Women loved it. But there were also women who would have too many beers at California Adventure or smuggle in alcohol you could smell on their breath, women who were clearly sloshed.

Here’s a napkin someone wrote on for me: “I will give you a blow job on your break, so sexy! Kim—714-XXX-XXXX.” I would also get offers from women in my ear: “Anything you want, just find me.” I had a girl who had turned 18 the day before. She was with a high school group, and she wrote down her room number at the Downtown Disney hotel. I had a lady hump my leg one day in the park.

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John has spotted this fabulous, $100K gold toothpick/earwax scraper, retreived from a Spanish galleon dating back to the late 16th Century. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets --

Remixed into being by 19-year old Nick Bertke, who is based in Australia. Link to video on YT, found on Kottke, with this link to audio download. What a sweet little unicorn chaser of a video this is. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

The new book of Charles Burns art, Permagel, looks amazing. More samples here: Link

Lisa Katayama wrote a feature about Hiroyuki Nishimura, the charismatic anti-establishment leader of the Japanese web for in the June issue of Wired.

Nicodou has brought the 2channel style of community to Web video. The site lets users plaster their comments directly on top of any uploaded video. Posts are sometimes so numerous that they obscure the clips. "Even when the videos are boring, the viewers are getting together and entertaining each other," Nishimura says.

"Hiroyuki's figuring it out as he goes along, not really giving a shit, but he hit the nail on the head," says Joi Ito, a Tokyo-based venture capitalist and CEO of Creative Commons. "Japan is an unhappy culture. The people are lonely and depressed, and the Internet is a release valve."

To the online communities at 2channel and Nicodou, Nishimura is a folk hero and role model. (In Japan he's referred to solely by his first name, a privilege afforded only to top-tier pop stars and TV heartthrobs.) And in a nation that actually has a word for "death from overwork," Nishimura takes pains to point out that he hasn't had to exert himself much to achieve success and fame. He's just a slacker who showed a nation how to goof off. In his 2007 book Why 2channel Will Never Fail, he wrote: "If running the site required me to get up at 9 am every morning, wear a suit, and not have time to play videogames, I'd probably quit."

Link

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes in with the latest news on the fight with the State of Oregon's claim that Oregon's laws are copyrighted:

Last week, we posted a draft declaratory judgment action indicating our seriousness in getting to the bottom of the controversy over copyright on Oregon state law, and asked people on the net to comment. Today, we received a letter today from the Legislative Counsel of the State of Oregon. The letter says:

"The established policy of the committee - unchanged since 1953 - has been to copyright those portions of the Oregon Revised Statutes that are not the actual law itself. Your clients advocate a change in that copyright policy. The committee wishes to meet to consider its copyright policy in light of technological developments and the Internet. The Legislative Assembly is not currently in session, so getting immediate policy direction from the committee is not possible. The committee plans to meet on June 19, 2008, and would be interested in hearing testimony from you or your clients on the changes your clients seek in the copyright policy of the committee."

Link (Thanks, Carl!)

For Those Who Tried To Rock is a brilliant new project to tell the "sonic history of the American pop band." The site's founders are seeking the stories and photos of every teen band who rocked their parents' garage fueled by big dreams and cheap beer. For now, the material they collect will end up on the Web site, preserved for posterity. Eventually, they hope to compile it into a book. In my opinion, their logo, above, nails the suburban American experience they want to document. Link (Thanks, Birdman!)

Japanese pop artist Yoshitomo Nara has just published his first children's book, The Lonesome Puppy. I bought a copy for my two-year-old a few days ago and we both love it. He's asked me to read it to him at least a half-dozen times already. It's a delightful story with, of course, beautiful artwork about a dog who is so big that people don't even know he's there. Then a little girl notices the puppy's paw and starts climbing...
Link to buy The Lonesome Puppy, Link to excerpt from The Loneseome Puppy

The Defiant Agents, by Andre Norton was published in 1962.

Alien technology scavenged by U.S. and Russian scientists has started a race to colonize planets outside our solar system -- and the U.S. scientists are losing! In a desperate move the U.S. government decides to use a group of Apache volunteers in an experimental attempt to colonize a primitive planet, but before they can even begin their spaceship crashes on the planet Topaz...

Link

Today's the last day of the Bay Area leg of my book tour for my young adult novel Little Brother. This afternoon, it's the Los Altos Library Main Branch and tonight, the wonderful Borderlands Books in San Francisco. Hope you'll make it!

Los Altos Main Library, Los Altos, CA
13 South San Antonio Rd
Los Altos, CA 94022
* Event held in conjunction with Linden Tree Children's Books
(650)949-3390
Thursday, May 22, 2008
4:00 pm

Borderlands, San Francisco, CA
Thursday, May 22, 2008
866 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
7:00 pm

Link to tour schedule

Virtual Iraq is a virtual reality system that enables veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder to revisit their trauma in order to become desensitized to it. The Department of Defense is testing the Iraq simulation on ground troops who have come back from the war with deep psychological trauma. The sim's engine comes from the game Full Spectrum Warrior but it's augmented with a head-mounted display, earphones, and smell-o-vision. This week's New Yorker has an in-depth piece on the Virtual Iraq clinical trials and the technology's inventor Albert Rizzo, a University of Southern California clinical psychologist who has also built VR systems for diagnosing and treating ADD and memory problems. From the New Yorker:

Strictly speaking, using virtual reality to treat combat-related P.T.S.D. is not new. In 1997, more than twenty years after the Vietnam War ended, researchers in Atlanta unveiled Virtual Vietnam. It dropped viewers into one of two scenarios: a jungle clearing with a “hot” landing zone, or a Huey helicopter, its rotors whirring, its body casting a running shadow over rice paddies, a dense tropical forest, and a river. The graphics were fairly crude, and the therapist had a limited number of sights and sounds to manipulate, but Virtual Vietnam had the effect of putting old soldiers back in the thick of war. Ten combat veterans with long-term P.T.S.D. who had not responded to multiple interventions participated in a clinical trial of Virtual Vietnam, typically lasting a month or two. All of them showed significant signs of improvement, both directly after treatment and in a follow-up half a year later. (P.T.S.D. is assessed on a number of scales, some subjective and others based on the observation of the clinician.) As successful as it was, though, Virtual Vietnam didn’t catch on. It was an experiment, and when the experiment was over the researchers moved on.

Like Virtual Vietnam, Virtual Iraq is a tool for doing what’s known as prolonged-exposure therapy, which is sometimes called immersion therapy. It is a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy, derived from Pavlov’s classic work with dogs. Prolonged-exposure therapy, which falls under the rubric of C.B.T., is at once intuitively obvious and counterintuitive: it requires the patient to revisit and retell the story of the trauma over and over again and, through a psychological process called “habituation,” rid it of its overwhelming power. The idea is to disconnect the memory from the reactions to the memory, so that although the memory of the traumatic event remains, the everyday things that can trigger fear and panic, such as trash blowing across the interstate or a car backfiring—what psychologists refer to as cues—are restored to insignificance. The trauma thus becomes a discrete event, not a constant, self-replicating, encompassing condition.

Link

Previously on BB:
• VR Goggles Heal Scars of War Link
• NPR "Xeni Tech": Virtual reality to treat PTSD for Iraq vets Link

Ross Hershberger says: "This is a story relating to Homeland Security Theater. A retired Army Lieutenant Colonel was able to drive a van onto a runway at Sea-Tac to pick up a military passenger with no challenge, inspection, attention or concern from security personnel. Subsequent investigation revealed no problems with the airport's security measures."

"We were sitting there, the engine idling, nobody around, when all of a sudden I realized: We're out on the goddamn runway," [retired army lieutenant colonel Greg] Alderete recalled. "We're in a gassed-up, seven-passenger van, and no one really knows who we are. We have an unobstructed path to the main runways, the commercial gates, the whole place. It was unbelievable."

No one asked their names or screened them or the van. Both were in civilian clothes.

"Within 30 seconds we could have been flooring it down the runway," Clodfelter says. "They couldn't have stopped us."

"With a van full of weapons we could have shut down the entire aviation system," Alderete said.

Link

Oh hell yes! Warners just released season one of Freakazoid, the best TV cartoon since the Max Fleischer era, on DVD. This is the most demented, hilarious, madcap, witty, surreal, fantastic toon of all time, and now you can get it for the home collection. Yes yes yes! Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

The Men Who Stare At Goats is a must-read 2005 book by UK journalist Jon Ronson about the US government's interest in very strange stuff, like Jedi powers, psychic spying, subliminal sound weapons, and the potential to kill something (like a goat, or an enemy soldier) just by looking at it. Fact or fiction, or most likely some of both, it's an absolute blast to read. (And Ronson's BBC documentary based on the book, Crazy Rulers of the World, is a lot of fun too! You can find it here on Google Video.) Yesterday, it was announced that Grant Heslov will direct a feature film based on The Men Who Stare At Goats. The star? George Clooney. From Variety:

Script was penned by Brit Peter Straughan ("How to Lose Friends and Alienate People"). The project has been around for some time, but international buyers only just received the script this week as the Cannes fest and market got started. Script topped the 2007 Brit List of best unproduced screenplays.

Link to Variety, Link to buy Men Who Stare At Goats

Previously on BB:
• The Men Who Stare At Goats Link
• Documentary: Crazy Rulers of the World Link

Wired's posted a photo gallery from the new show of vintage Japanese robots opening at the Sci Fi Museum in Seattle.

Iconic graphic designer Tom Geismar, whose firm Chermayeff & Geismar has created memorable logos for Mobil, PBS and other U.S. institutions, has been collecting the shiny bots for decades.

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle will exhibit toys from Geismar's collection in Robots: A Designer's Collection of Miniature Mechanical Marvels through Oct. 26. The vintage robots on display reflect Geismar's trained eye. "I've really restricted myself to ones that appealed to me as interesting, imaginative designs," he says.

Link

If you know me, you know I love bookcases built into EVERYTHING. This sofa (the Flexform Oltre) with bookcases in the arms: no exception. Link (via Cribcandy)

This 1958 Japanese tin toy features Laika, Sputnik 2's brave cosmo-dog. Poor Laika. Link (Thanks, Erin!)

See also: Laika - graphic novel tells the sweet and sad story of the first space-dog

Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez,

Vista users are complaining that Media Center refuses to let them record broadcast digital TV shows on NBC.

Here's a screenshot of what they're seeing.

After we won the fight to stop the Broadcast Flag three years ago, over-the-air digital TV shouldn't have any copy controls -- and if it did, Microsoft shouldn't have to obey them.

Is it a bug in Vista's DRM systems? Did Microsoft and NBC cut a deal? What other receivers out there are going to obey the broadcasters instead of their owners?

Link (Thanks, Danny!)

BB pal and inspiration V. Vale is the publisher of RE/Search, chronicles of underground and fringe culture since 1977. The RE/Search books, from Industrial Culture Handbook and Pranks! to Modern Primitives and Incredibly Strange Music, are essential encyclopedias of alternative thought, art, music, literature, and methods to circumvent "control" in all its manifestations. (Pranks!, Industrial Culture Handbook, and RE/SEARCH #4/5: Burroughs, Gysin, Throbbing Gristle are now available in limited edition hardcover!) Vale attended the recent Maker Faire Bay Area and was blown away by the connections he saw between the hacker/maker/crafter culture and what he suggests are the original, unspoken "principles" of punk rock: DIY, Mutual Aid, Anti-Authoritarianism, and Black Humor. Vale saw all those characteristics embodied at the Maker Faire and, inspired, wrote a wonderful piece about what the Faire meant to him. Here's an excerpt from Vale's RE/Search blog post, "Maker Faire and Punk Rock":

The first, quintessential principle of “Punk Rock” was (obviously) “DO-IT-YOURSELF”… meaning Create All Your Own Culture: music, recordings, record labels, distribution, “Punk Rock” stores, art, graphic art, collages, drawings, interior decor, your clothing, hairstyles, sculpture/installations, social gatherings, community centers, squats or shared housing, art studios, shows — everything that makes your life “meaningful” and “fun.” And this “principle” made EVERYONE at least a naive or “outsider” artist, if not more...

Well, for more than thirty years Punk’s “Do-It-Yourself” signified (to me, at least) Doing It Yourself — but pretty much restricted to the “Arts.” But for the first time we attended last weekend’s Maker Faire and realized that: Why shouldn’t D-I-Y also apply to Science and Technology? (Now, we had ALMOST thought that, years ago, when Survival Research Laboratories began, but — we’re dense.)...

In other words, for thirty years the underlying message of all my publications has remained: “Everyone Is An Artist.” But, now I want to add an additional message: “Everyone Is A Scientist” — or, “Everyone is an Artist/Scientist.” Because, who doesn’t want to figure out how things work? ”

Link

Buddhist monk THich Dang "Tom" Phap is building a beautiful Buddhist Meditation Center in a very unusual and unlikely location: the barren high desert of Adelanto, California. The centerpiece is a 60-ton marble statue of the saint Quan yin, donated by a Malaysian businessman. Phap bought 15 acres in Adelanto four years ago as a home for the statue and the center that he hopes he can complete if enough donations come in. Right now, the place has no power or water. The Los Angeles Times created a lovely short video visit with Phap to accompany an article on his project. Link to video, Link to article (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

QA Create sells these elegant cufflinks made from Scrabble tiles. You pick the letters! They're $15.99.
Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Did you know archive.org has lots of cool old feature films in the public domain you can download for free? Here's one they just added to the archive that looks promising: The Hoodlum, from 1951.

I'm downloading it now.

(Here's the RSS feed for recent additions to the movie archive.)

Lawrence Tierney ("Reservoir Dogs") plays an unreformed, hardened criminal who has just been released from prison. Working at his brother's gas station, he becomes very interested in the armored car that makes regular stops at the bank across the street.

Link

Here is an old soulful cover of Sam Cooke's "Having A Party" by Greg Dulli, former frontman of one of my all-time favorite modern rock bands, Afghan Whigs. The first national magazine article I ever wrote, for Alternative Press, was about the Whigs, who I knew growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio. And Cooke's "Having A Party" was my wedding song, so this cover has special meaning to me. On hiatus from his current band Twilight Singers, Dulli just put out a killer new record with Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age), under the moniker Gutter Twins. The album, titled "Saturnalia," is some heavy-ass neo-gothic gospel.


Link to Dulli's Having A Party video
Link to buy Gutter Twins
Link to Summer's Kiss for more on Whigs, Gutter Twins, Twilight Singers

frog Design's concept facemask would let you escape reality by augmenting or replacing what you see, smell, and hear with sensory inputs of your own choosing.

In a troubling future, these augmented reality devices would offer a new dimension - a virtual layer that could be used to “re-skin” the troubling outside world. A boundary between the wearer and the world around him, the device would become a sort of visual drug, used to make the world appear a better place – even if just for a moment.

The device itself acts as a mask between the user and the outside world, expressing the internality of the human-device interaction. It offers a physical distinction between those moving in the real world and those who are “plugged in” to their private dimensions, the world as they wish to see it.

The visual design casts the mask as a lifestyle product of the future, as it plays with a glaring, exaggerated coolness of the wearer. It gives an almost robotic appearance, and suggests a diversion from what we define today as “normal” physical human interaction.

Within the mask, smells, sounds, even air quality would be imitated to create a full sensory experience. The facial expressions of those wearing the device would be detected and projected onto personal avatars visible to others also living behind the shield of the mask.

Link

Richard sez, "Apparently there are still places in the US where people are still using the old-fashioned analog gear driven pumps to meter gas instead of the common digital ones. The old pumps will need new gears to go past $3.99/gallon for gas and those parts are getting harder to come by. It is strangely like having a Babbage Difference Engine run the gas pump. Gear driven gas pumps are another unexpected but sad victim of rising gas prices. No more clicks and bells." Link (Thanks, Richard!)

(Image: Tracy A. Woodward -- The Washington Post))

Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics writes: "I came across this incredible Will Elder photo this morning, looking for some nice Elder photos in our MAD PLAYBOY OF ART files, to give the Los Angeles Times for its obituary, which I'm told will run tomorrow. Was there ever a man who embodied the vivaciousness of his work more perfectly?" Link

A 29-year-old Swis man died in a spitting match with a friend, reports the daily Blick newspaper. Apparently, the two pals were up late at a hotel in Cadempino, Switzerland when they decided to see who could spit the greatest distance off the balcony. One of the men took a running start and, well... Link (via Fortean Times)

This poster sure beats most motivational office posters. Created by artist Andy Smith, it's hand-printed in a small edition and sells for £25.
Link (Thanks, Koshi!)

Yesterday, I posted the sad passing of Mad cartoonist Will Elder, one of the undisputed giants of comic book artists. Today, The Comics Journal blog has made available a scan of a Harvey Kurtzman / WIll Elder story from Help! magazine that Archie Comics took from Help! in a copyright infringement battle.

During Will Elder’s run on the ill-fated Help! Magazine — one of three such publications upon which Elder collaborated with Mad founder Harvey Kurtzman following the latter’s exodus from the magazine that made him famous — a story starring Kurtzman and Elder’s naïve leading man Goodman Beaver attracted the ire of Archie Comics for taking their signature characters and grafting Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Philosophy” onto them. That story was “Goodman Goes Playboy,” and it resulted in waves of lawyers raining upon the strip’s creators, ultimately leading to Kurtzman and Elder handing the copyright to the story over to Archie and signing an agreement promising never to reproduce it again.

Some 40 years or so later, Gary Groth or someone close to him discovered that Archie had forgotten to renew the copyright to the strip, and that it had fallen into the public domain. Armed with a copy of Myron Fass’ underground zine Portzebie Illustrated, which contained a copy of the strip, we reproduced it in The Comics Journal #262 — and here it is again, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s “Goodman Goes Playboy,” available either as a PDF file (5.9MB) or, if you’d prefer to use your comics-reader software to read it, as a Zip file (also 5.9MB). Next Friday, we’ll present a copy of Gary Groth’s 2003 interview with Elder for TCJ #254 here on the website, so there’s more Elder on the way, don’t you worry.

Link

Here's another comic book gem from Ethan Persoff, outré ephemera scanner extraordinaire.

Vietnam month continues with a great mid-month snack. Tod Holton was a school student from the 60s who fought the Vietnamese through use of a magic beret. Presented here is every Tod Holton story ever produced. A patriotic kitsch classic, now presented in full.

Link

Atlanta's Crissy Thompson is the queen of coupon-clipping -- she's so skilled at it that she's cut her weekly grocery bill to $10 for a family of five:

She buys two copies of the AJC's daily double Sunday paper, getting four papers, four sets of coupons, for $5. She also goes to her favorite coupon websites (see links).

On the day we're with Crissy, we tell her we just want a sampling of what she does. She tells us we're going to CVS and Publix, two of her favorite stores.

I do coupons every week myself so I was very curious to see how she did it.

At the Publix, Crissy got her best deals with the buy 1, get 1 free items.

Most local grocery stores will let you buy only one item and get it 50% off. If you pair a coupon with that (most grocery stores double coupons up to 50 cents) you can sometimes get the item for free or next to nothing.

What I learned from Crissy is that you can use one coupon per item.

All this time I had misunderstood what it says on each coupon, only one coupon per purchase. I took "purchase" to mean "transaction." It's not.

For example, Crissy grabbed two boxes of cereal that were buy 1, get 1 free. The cereal was $3.79 a box. Crissy had a three dollar coupon for each box of cereal. She made over $2.00 when she pulled those boxes off the shelves. I thought I could only use one coupon, no matter how many boxes or cans or whatever I'd bought. So that's good for me to know.

She didn't buy any produce or meat when we were with her. The best deals that week were elsewhere and she told us she often gets her produce from local farmers at a nearby market where prices are very inexpensive. When we got to checkout her bill was $15.38 and she saved $36.22. Basically she saved two thirds of the bill.

Link (via Consumerist)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John's spotted this Ringshot contraption, a stainless steel sheath for your thumb and forefinger that protects you from misfires in your school/office/airplane rubber-band wars. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

The California Senate passed a new bill yesterday, legalizing membership in the Communist Party for California state employees. Now the California Assembly has to agree. Next up: legalizing the practice of lady teachers wearing dresses that expose their ankles.

California is the only state that allows public employees to be dismissed for membership in a political party.

In addition, current law requires that any organisation that applies to use a public school facility can be asked to sign a statement that "the applicant is not a communist action organisation or a communist front".

"SB 1322 seeks to protect the rights of free speech and political affiliation by repealing the no-longer necessary statute from the books," Lowenthal said.

Link

ZT Online is a wildly popular Chinese massively multiplayer online RPG with really different game-mechanics, a combination of casino, revenge-fantasy and VIP lounge:

Lu Yang received an excellent professional education, her husband is a businessman, and she has substantial financial assets. To her, money has never been a problem, but she still calls some well-regarded players in the game "RMB gamers" in frustration. Though she has invested tens of thousands of yuan in the game, she has suffered defeat after defeat due to the fact that others are more willing to spend, and to spend much more money than she is.

Like ZT Online creator Shi Yuzhu says, this is a game well-suited to the rich. In this world, the authority to bully others and the legal right to harm them are both for sale...

Good equipment means money. Unlike other games, in this game there are no items dropped when killing monsters or completing missions. "We all want the best," said Lu Yang. "You have to go to the system's shops to buy materials, and then use the system smith to make them. Or, you could go gambling."

"Gambling" means "opening the treasure chest." Gamers can buy keys and chests from the system for cheap: one yuan per set. When the key is applied to the chest, the screen will display a glittering chest opening. All kinds of materials and equipment spin inside the chest like the drums on a slot machine as the wheel of light spins. Where it stops indicates what you've won. Chests will frequently contain the high-class equipment that gamers desire, but the spinning light wheel always passes over them.

Lu Yang recalls that during her craziest period she was like a gambler in a casino. She would shout at the screen the name of the item she wanted, like "ebony, ebony," or some high-class material, but ultimately she would obtain nothing but a pittance of experience. Ebony, or that powerful "ring of the nether world," remained in the chest, gleaming seductively.

Link (Thanks, Julian!)

Yesterday, the California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that same-sex marriage is legal, on the basis of a strict-scrutiny analysis of the Constitution. This will make it essentially impossible for California to keep any kind of anti-gay-marriage laws on its books, and could lead to other states abolishing their laws discriminating against gay marriage.

Damn right! I foresee a lot of happy marriages by Californians who are finally free to marry anyone they damned well please, without the government (or their bigoted neighbors) being able to stop 'em. The very idea that the government should be in charge of whether consenting adults should or shouldn't be allowed to marry is just bizarre.

the Chief Justice kept going. He explicitly found that discrimination against gays, on the basis of their sexual orientation, was equivalent under the California state constitution to discrimination against racial minorities. To my knowledge, California's is the only state high court to have come to this conclusion (the federal Supreme Court has not weighed in). For gays, this pronouncement is critical because it is portable—that is, gays can now challenge any California state policy that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. As Marty Lederman points out elsewhere in Slate, this in its own right is a signal advance for gay people.

The magisterial conviction of Thursday's opinion would be extraordinary no matter what court had delivered it. But its issuance from the high court of California is nothing short of revolutionary. Recent polls show that the California Supreme Court is the most respected state high court in the country. This suggests that other courts may borrow its strict scrutiny standard, under which most bans on same-sex marriage would fall. Even if no other court adopts today's reasoning, the mere fact that millions can marry in the Golden State will have its own effects. California is the most populous state in the nation and one of the top 10 economies in the world (alongside nations like Canada and Italy). Because of its cultural, political, and economic influence, what happens in California does not stay in California.

Link (Thanks, Philbert!)

Tom sez, "mySociety's WhatDoTheyKnow.com (an in-beta UK Freedom of Information service), has just added a piece of functionality perfect for the blogging classes. Just drop in any search term (I've used 'adwords' because one of the results is amusing/amazing) and it can generate RSS feeds when new requests or responses enter the system. So if you live in the UK and want to know whenever anyone has made a Freedom of Information request or got a response mentioning something you're interested in, you can now get notified immediately. Basically, it's a cool hack on a good law." Link (Thanks, Tom!)

The Fizz Cup is a cup that screws on to the top of a pop bottle. You fill it with ice-cream and squeeze the bottle and the soda rushes over the ice-cream and turns into an ice-cream float that fizzes out and into your gob, sparing you the mess of making ice-cream floats the old way. Link (via Shiny Shiny)

Here's a scan of the 1983 Byte review of the Compaq, the first "portable" PC clone. I think I still have a rotator cuff injury from carrying one of these around.

Ultimate Compatibility When a company advertises a computer as being “IBM PC-compatible,” the best way to test its claim is to try to load an IBM release of PC-DOS, CP/M-86, or the UCSD p-system. I didn’t have the p-system, but I did have both PC-DOS and CP/M-86 and was able to try both of them on a prototype of the Compaq computer. The systems loaded and executed perfectly, with the exception of the BASIC on PC-DOS, which wouldn’t execute because the Compaq doesn’t have ROM BASIC. The BASICA provided on disk and all of the IBM PC sample BASIC programs found on the PC-DOS disk ran without incident. I also tried some CP/M-86 assembler-level software that I had written, and it worked without a hitch as well. I spent about an hour loading and running a number of game programs and some professional packages such as Wordstar and Supercalc. With one exception, they all worked correctly. The one that didn’t was a game program that ran perfectly but died when I tried to terminate the game. One of the programmers told me that the problem was probably a result of not initializing the hardware correctly when the system was powered up. The company assured me that the problem would be solved before any machines were shipped.

Link

Foreign Policy Magazine's roundup of the world's most dangerous gangs kind of stretches the definition of "gang" -- 100,000 armed men, operating in the open with impunity? I'm thinking "army," not gang.

Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), United States and Central America

Membership: 70,000 worldwide (60,000 in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, plus 10,000 in 42 U.S. states and Washington, D.C.)

Stronghold: Central America and U.S. suburbs

Known for: elaborate tattoos (which makes ending gang membership almost impossible), suburban bloodshed, and a loose but widespread network of subsidiary groups, perfect for disseminating drugs and brutal violence

Why they’re dangerous: The MS-13 grew out of a posse (mara) of street-tough Salvadorans (Salvatruchas) who fled to Southern California in the 1980s in the wake of El Salvador’s bloody civil war. With each new wave of vulnerable immigrants from Central America, MS-13 grew in strength and breadth, forming a lose cohort of semiautonomous subsidiary gangs across the United States and Central America. Though their hallmark tattoos and violent outbursts dot North America, analysts are still uncertain just how interconnected the maras really are. In the United States, the strongest maras are based in Southern California, the northeast, and the mid-Atlantic, including the Washington, D.C., metro area. Just last spring, Salvatruchas hacked away at a rival gang member in the D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Virginia. But U.S. maras are nothing compared with their counterparts further south. Fueled by gang members deported from the States, maras in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala terrorize police and residents in hundreds of communities across the region.

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: Jose CABEZAS/AFP/Getty Images)

Wired's got a strange and evocative slideshow of paleo-air-hostesses from the early days of commercial aviation online. Did they really fly long-haul in miniskirts and knee-high high-heeled boots? Christ, they must have been in agony. Link

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John's spotted this Darth Vader made entirely out of type, from the Ironic Sans blog. The dark side of the font is revealed. Link, Discuss this post on Boing Boing Gadgets

In today's Boing Boing tv, More gems from Bay Area Maker Faire 2008: Boing Boing co-editor David Pescovitz speaks with Kaden Harris, author of Eccentric Cubicle, and the brains behind Eccentricgenius.ca -- eccentric antiques from a parallel universe. He shows us his Silicon Projectile Centrifuge (a lovely lethal weapon that shoots marbles at high velocity), a combination lamp/bong, and other exotica from the halls of beautiful Eccentric Manors.

Then, Xeni is zapped by Jack Sparx, who uses his body as an electrical transformer, zapping all who come near with low-level shocks in the name of science. As Xeni demonstrates, the jolts from his mini-Tesla Coils are not *that* low-level, either.

Bonus: ironic t-shirt catwalk; Xeni and the BBtv crew stopped Maker Faire attendees in their tracks, and asked them to explain their hipster t-shirts.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion and downloadable video.

Previous Boing Boing tv episodes from Maker Faire: