Iain Banks, the acclaimed Scottish sf and thriller writer, has joined with an illustrious list of prominent Scots in calling on the British government to reform the Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS received a titanic tax-funded bailout (much of which was diverted into a stupendous pension for Fred Goodwin, the bank's erstwhile CEO, who led it to ruin), which means that the taxpayer is now a major shareholder in the bank. But the bank is still refusing to lend to Britons who need mortgages, preferring instead to make dirty investments in climate-wrecking tar-sands in Alberta, as well as taking the astonishing step of loaning money to Kraft's, an American firm, which is trying to buy Cadbury's a British firm -- if Hershey's succeeds, then RBS will have funnelled British workers' pay into a loan that resulted in the shut-down of British factories and sent British jobs to America.

More than 30 signatories, including Gordon Roddick, who founded the Body Shop with his late wife Anita, leading green campaigner Tony Juniper and Rev Ian Galloway, convenor of the Church of Scotland, take the government to task for failing to push RBS and the other bailed-out banks into supporting socially useful investments.

In their letter, written to mark the first anniversary of the British taxpayer becoming its largest shareholder, they call on Darling to transform RBS into the "Royal Bank of Sustainability".

The strongly-worded communication criticises the Treasury for standing on the sidelines while RBS took a controversial decision to support US foods group Kraft in its bid for chocolate maker Cadbury, despite the fact the bid will put jobs at risk and therefore work against the interests of the UK taxpayer. The bank's conduct has also raised eyebrows in the City because it breached protocol by neglecting to inform Cadbury of its planned defection to the Kraft camp, despite having a decades-long relationship with the confectioner.

Celebrities, MPs and clergy urge government to rein in RBS

Geekologie's superb "Evolution of Storage" infographic traces the history of data, music and photo storage from the wax cylinder to the 2TB hard drive. I think I'll print this out and hang it on the wall of my office, for the same reason poets kept skulls on their writing desks*: "this too shall pass, all is hubris and folly, the future rushes up upon you."

Evolution of Storage

Incidentally, why is a raven like a writing-desk? Because Poe wrote on both of them.

John sez, "Steampunk Tales, the electronic magazine of original steampunk pulp fiction, just released its 4th issue. Selling for only $1.99 on most platforms, Steampunk Tales: Issue 4 delivers 10 tales of adventure and daring for less than the cost of a good cup of coffee."

Steampunk Tales

John sez, "Batman: Year 100 creator Paul Pope illustrated three Japanese concept cars for GQ, as well as a flying car of his own design. You can see all the illustrations at the GQ link."

It Will Come From Japan!

Superpunch's gallery of photos of the actual cars

(Thanks, John!)

R. "Diesel Sweeties" Stevens sez, "These steel keychain-mounted screwdrivers are the ultimate in unbranded, unbreakable gadget gifts. I've had mine since the summer and they work like a charm and make great boxcutters. Planning to pick up a few more sets for stocking stuffers! Unlike a Swiss Army Knife or the like, I've never had trouble flying with these."

Purdy, too.

Screw Key (Thanks, Rich!)

Marilyn sez, "Until 375,000 years ago, plants had be by physically close to each other in order to reproduce. Pollen changed all that. From the article by Rob Dunn in the Dec. issue of National Geographic:"

In the 300,000 pollen-bearing plant species on Earth, there are 300,000 different forms of pollen. The great variety in colors, shapes, and textures of the grains has evolved in accordance with each plant's biological particulars. Beetle-pollinated plants tend to have smooth, sticky pollen, the better to adhere to the lumbering beetles' backs. Plants pollinated by fast-moving bees or flies may have spiny pollen that lodges easily between the insects' hairs. Plants pollinated by bigger animals, such as bats, sometimes have bigger pollen, though not always -- perhaps not even most of the time. In the details of pollen's variety, more remains to be explained than is understood.

A friend with allergies once compared living through high-pollen-count days as "being the involuntary star in a vegetage-kingdom bukkake movie." I haven't been able to think of pollen the same way since.

Love Is in the Air (Thanks, Marilyn!)

A reader writes, "This was our birthday candle a year ago, one day the candle just started playing again (maybe heat change...) and was pathetically trying to get "happy birthday" to sound right... You can't imagine how badly one candle can get this tune."

It's got a sad, defiant, haunted hurdy-gurdy sound to it, like the ghost of Tom Waits was trapped in it, playing a Casiotone.

Happy Birthday to YOU

Good thing the PlayStation 3 dropped in price. The US Department of Defense ordered 2,200 more of the consoles to crank up their PS3 supercomputer, currently consisting of 336 of the devices in a Linux cluster. According to the official Justification Review Document (cache link) required for the purchase of the PS3s, the game platform, with its IBM Cell microprocessor, is a much better value for the money than IBM's Cell-powered products designed for supercomputing applications. Ars Technica points out that the price difference comes in part because the PS3 is a loss leader for Sony. From the Justification Review Document:

With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.

"Sony still subsidizing US military supercomputer efforts" (Ars Technica, thanks Rob Rader!)

These handsome Sasquatch and Yeti ornaments for the Christmas Tree are around 4.5" tall and made from glass and resin. They're available from Loren Coleman's International Cryptozoology Museum gift shop. Coming soon on BB, an interview with Coleman about the new public museum!
Bigfoot & Yeti Ornaments

Mark and I have rounded up some of our favorite items from our 2009 Boing Boing reviews for the second-annual Boing Boing gift guide. We'll do one a day for the next six days, covering media (music/games/DVDs), gadgets and stuff, kids' books, novels, nonfiction, and comics/graphic novels/art books. Today, it's novels!

Makers (Cory Doctorow): Technology lets low-cost providers take market share away from established companies, as Detroit auto makers and Paris fashion house designers have seen. Even high-tech companies have a hard time building sustainable businesses now that good ideas are copied so quickly that they become commodities.

In a time of great change, fiction can sometimes provide better understanding than facts alone. "As the pace of technological change accelerates, the job of the science fiction writer becomes not harder, but easier--and more necessary," he writes. "After all, the more confused we are by our contemporary technology, the more opportunities there are to tell stories that lessen that confusion." L. Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal Full review | Purchase

The Strain: Book One of The Strain Trilogy Someone said The Strain is a combination of The Stand, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I am Legend, which I'd say is a pretty fair way of describing it. The first chapter is about an airplane that lands at JFK from Germany and goes completely dark on the runway. It's so creepy that when I told my wife and daughter about it *they* got creeped out just from my description. Full review | Purchase

Professor Alexander's Botanical Vasculum - Steamed 300 watt Moss Terrarium from Etsy seller SteamedGlass is a beautiful blown-glass steampunk Rube Goldberg terrarium: "This is the largest of our "steamed" light bulb terrariums with a bulb measuring 3 3/4" x 7 3/4". It stands 10 1/4" tall as mounted on the SteamPunked stand made of a simulated cherrywood base, copper tubing, chemistry glass, an adjustable 4x magnifying glass and other ornate trimmings. The bulb houses a small solar powered LED bulb that lights itself when all other lights go out and throws a dreamlike shadow pattern on your walls making the perfect night light. It can also be turned on and off with the old fashioned knife switch mounted to the base."

Drool.

Professor Alexander's Botanical Vasculum - Steamed 300 watt Moss Terrarium (Thanks, Armand!)

The Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund is a venerable institution that sends sf fans from North America to Europe and vice-versa, to bridge the world's fandoms (there are other funds that bring together fans from other parts of the world). Frank Wu, Anne KG Murphy and Brian Gray are fundraising for this year's fund, and they've solicited many writers -- Charlie Stross, Nalo Hopkinson, David Brin, Elizabeth Bear, Julie Czerneda and Mary Robinette Kowal and me! -- to donate "tuckerizations" in forthcoming works for a charity auction. Tuckerizing is the inclusion of a real person's name in a fictional piece (previous tuckerizations from charity auctions in my novels include General Graeme Sutherland in Little Brother, Suzanne Church in Makers, and Connor Prikkel in the forthcoming For the Win; my god-daughter Ada has also been tuckerized in my story "I, Robot" and in Makers).

TAFF is also auctioning off a first edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (!), and John Hersey's "Hiroshima."

It's a great cause, and great prizes that make killer gifts (how cool would it be for a kid to grow up with her name on a character in a wonderful novel?)

TAFF updatery! (Thanks, Frank!)

How do giant whales get so big eating such little krill? By using their baleen like a parachute and sucking in their body-weight in water in one go, then straining it out:

Since then, Potvin has brought his expertise on parachute physics to these parachuting whales. He and the other scientists have developed a sophisticated new model that tracks the incoming water more carefully. It's a lot of water, the scientists have found: in one lunge, a fin whale can momentarily double its weight.

If a whale simply let the water come rushing in, there would be a tremendous collision-more than a whale could handle. Instead, the scientists argue, the whales actively cradle their titanic gulp. As the water rushes in, the whales contract muscles in their lower jaw. The water slows down and then reverses direction, so that it's moving with the whale. (It just so happens that fin whales do have sheets of muscle and pressure-sensing nerve endings in their lower jaw. Before now, nobody quite knew before what they were for.) Once the water is moving forward inside the whale it can then close its mouth and give an extra squeeze to filter the water through its baleen.

The Origin of Big (via Kottke)

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: "Graffiti Ren" -- scenes from fine art improved with graffiti.

Graffiti Ren 2

Here's a fascinating rumination on the Bitworking site about how much of the promise of RFID tags is being realized by charge-coupled devices (CCDs -- the sensor in your digital camera) instead. CCDs seems to be subject to Moore's Law, and are falling in price and increasing in capacity at an alarming rate. The potential applications are significant:

Put them on a car and point them out and you have a backup camera. Buy why restrict it to just backing up? Why isn't the rear-view mirror a full panorama of the environment around the whole car stitched together from a dozen CCD cameras?

That's pointing out from the car, point them at the car and the possibilities are different. Put them next to highways to monitor rushhour traffic. Point them at your license plate and you have either an automatic red-light running ticket writing machine, or a new toll system, where a camera based system that reads license plates could be used instead of the current RFID based solutions.

Put them on your house pointing outwards and you have a security system. Point them into the house and you have a system that turns the lights and HVAC off in rooms that are empty. Think how much better it would be than those motion sensing systems in some meeting rooms today, where the lights switch off in the room and everyone waves their hands in the air like a bunch of drunk pelicans trying to get the lights back.

If I hang one over my kitchen table will it be able to count calories for me? Can I hang one over my desk and not need to buy a scanner? How about one in the bathroom? How much health information could you extract from an image taken every morning? Could it track my weight? Detect signs of depression? Obviously there are security and privacy concerns.

CCD (via Making Light)

(Image: CCD, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from AMagill's Flickr stream)

Dan sez, "Game publisher and miniature manufacturer Games Workshop just sent a cease and desist letter to boardgamegeek.com, telling them to remove all fan-made players' aids. This includes scenarios, rules summaries, inventory manifests, scans to help replace worn pieces -- many of these created for long out of print, well-loved games. GW did this shortly after building a lot of good will by re-releasing their out of print game 'Space Hulk' to much hoopla. And it's not their first attack on their biggest fans"

No doubt those of you who have supported Games Workshop in the past by creating files for use with their games will have noticed they are all being deleted from BGG at the behest of their lawyers.

So here's a little paeon to the games that I spent many hours creating rules summaries and reference sheets for that are no longer available here. They're still at my personal site, but I don't imagine they'll be there for long.

No doubt they'll be more items on this list before long.

The Games Workshop Files Purge of '09

The Eigenharp, a crazy, science fiction instrument from Eigenlabs, comes on two forms, the "Alpha" ("Our professional level instrument allows the musician to play and improvise using a limitless range of sounds with virtuoso skill. It has 120 playing keys, 12 percussion keys, two strip controllers and a breath pipe. Available in a variety of custom finishes.") and the "Pico" ("It's ideal as a solo instrument or for playing in a band. With 18 playing keys and 4 mode keys, a strip controller and breath pipe, the smaller Pico has the majority of the playing features of the Eigenharp Alpha. It plays an unlimited range of sounds and is available in two finishes."). Check out the stunning performance of the Bond theme.

Eigenlabs (Thanks, Alan!)

A British pub has been fined £8,000 because someone using the WiFi there allegedly committed a copyright infringement. Even though British law exempts people who provide Internet access from liability for their users' copyright infringements, the pub was still fined (the details of this are confused).

Graham Cove told ZDNet UK on Friday he believes the case to be the first of its kind in the UK. However, he would not identify the pub concerned, because its owner -- a pubco that is a client of The Cloud's -- had not yet given their permission for the case to be publicised...

According to internet law professor Lilian Edwards, of Sheffield Law School, where a business operates an open Wi-Fi spot to give customers or visitors internet access, they would be "not be responsible in theory" for users' unlawful downloads, under "existing substantive copyright law".

Pub 'fined £8k' for Wi-Fi copyright infringement (Thanks, Zoran)