Researchers discover the gene for ear-wax. Cotton-bud vendors rejoice, begin sinister plans. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gnat!)

Mena's written up detailed instructions (and created a printable PDF) for making your own Haunted Mansion stretch-gallery; glue it together facing in and you've got a peep-box; facing out and you've got an ornament. Link Discuss

Special tubs of Parkay will ship with motion-sensor chips that make than say "Butter" and wiggle when shoppers pass them at the supermarket.

"These tubs are a major in-store piece of theater," Kramer told The Post.

He added that research shows shoppers make 70 percent of their buys on impulse - making a Parkay pitch in the supermarket potentially more effective than on TV.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

These "nude clothes" are a couture version of the oversized beach-tees with silk-screened muscle-torsos and bikini-bosoms, the direct descendent of the John-Hughes-movie-rebel tuxedo-tee. Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!)

Quinn Norton's piece on greasy kids' stuff, Ted Nelson's cantankerous insistence on characterizing the Web as "decorated directories" and matters similar is fantastic.

ted nelson, still not buying in, vs. the web. as with all the old wise white guys, he makes some good points, i think he may be right about the semantic web... and as far as he seems to be confused about what xml is, he would be right. fortunately, xml isn't meant to be used as a new set of hierarchical embedded formats. but it's hard to read his purist view because it doesn't screen wrap. still, joey de villa is right- we must respect our sages, our founders. out here we have so little history and we have to treasure it.... my screen *does* wrap because of ted nelson.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Quinn!)

Beijing's largest newspaper ran an Onion article as fact. "America's Finest News Source" indeed. Now more than ever, China needs Peek-a-Booty. Link Discuss (Thanks, Paul!)

David Janes points to two thought-provoking articles on the future of the Internet. The first is a piece on a plan by ISPs to charge you different amounts based on what you're downloading; the second is a nice bit of investigative journalism from Salon about the ever-concentrated ownership of Internet pipes. Together, they're pretty chilling reading. Link Discuss (Thanks, David!)

Fantastic blog-tool comparison table. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jed!)

This is my actual favorite Mark Twain essay of all time, the "Letter to the Queen of England." I am sitting on the floor of Manar's flat here in Shepard's Bush and wondering if this counts as subversion in the UK.

MADAM: You will remember that last May Mr. Edward Bright, the clerk of the Inland Revenue Office, wrote me about a tax which he said was due from me to the Government on books of mine published in London — that is to say, an income tax on the royalties. I do not know Mr. Bright, and it is embarrassing to me to correspond with strangers; for I was raised in the country and have always lived there, the early part in Marion county Missouri before the war, and this part in Hartford county Connecticut, near Bloomfield and about 8 miles this side of Farmington, though some call it 9, which it is impossible to be, for I have walked it many and many a time in considerably under three hours, and General Hawley says he has done it in two and a quarter, which is not likely; so it has seemed best that I write your Majesty. It is true that I do not know your Majesty personally, but I have met the Lord Mayor, and if the rest of the family are like him, it is but just that it should be named royal; and likewise plain that in a family matter like this, I cannot better forward my case than to frankly carry it to the head of the family itself. I have also met the Prince of Wales once in the fall of 1873, but it was not in any familiar way, but in a quite informal way, being casual, and was of course a surprise to us both. It was in Oxford street, just where you come out of Oxford into Regent Circus, and just as he turned up one side of the circle at the head of a procession, I went down the other side on the top of an omnibus. He will remember me on account of a gray coat with flap pockets that I wore, as I was the only person on the omnibus that had on that kind of a coat; I remember him of course as easy as I would a comet. He looked quite proud and satisfied, but that is not to be wondered at, he has a good situation. And once I called on your Majesty, but you were out.

Link Discuss

One of my favorite Twain essays of all time: James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "Deerslayer" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the "Deerslayer" tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.

5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the "Deerslayer" tale to the end of it.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the "Deerslayer" tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.

Link Discuss (via Metalingo)

The Wonder Twins (Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of: a blazing phallus; shape of: a gorilla!) have been optioned for a live-action feature film.

The Wonder Twins are two aliens from the planet Exxor. With the cry "Wonder Twin powers, activate!" Zan has the power to change into any water-based form, while Jayna can become any animal.

Link Discuss

The Heinlein Society has created the occassional Heinlein Award, given for hard sf that inspires the human exploration of space. Judges are Greg Bear, Joe Haldeman, Yoji Kondo, Elizabeth Moon, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Spider Robinson, Stanley Schmidt and Charles Sheffield, plus U.S. Naval Academy English professors Herb Gilliland and John Hill. Link Discuss

Sony's lost the trademark on "Walkman" in Austria. No big loss, as Sony music appears to have strong-armed Sony electronics into giving up on digital personal stereos (Sony's MusicClip, which exclusively supported ass-tastic formats like OpenAG and Real was a total marketplace failure), ceding the market to formerly no-name Singaporean outfits like Creative and major Vaio competitors like Apple. Link Discuss

HST interviewed about Las Vegas for Las Vegas City Life

O'Brien: The city has changed a lot since the book was published. Have you kept up with the changes or, as you seemed to indicate, is the city something you got over a while ago?

Thompson: The city's frightening now. That's the basis of my reaction to Las Vegas. It's not the same city I wrote about. It's not the same place at all. You'll notice that even the - what do you call them? - milestone or trademark casinos are gone.

O'Brien: You mentioned 14 hotel-casinos in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I think only four of them are still standing.

Thompson: Let me make note of that. [Papers shuffle and there's a break in the conversation.]

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve Portigal!)

Guy built a replica light-up NYC skyline just outside his window, obscuring the otherwise mundane view.

Approximately 7 feet past the window is a large (Your mother's been talking about me again has she?) single plane of wood with windows cut into it. The 7 x 11 foot plane of wood is actually two layers of wood with a ~1" air gap where xmas lights are mounted to light up the inside. The front plane is thin (1/8") and has the 1540 windows cut into it while the back plane of wood is 1/2" sheets of plywood. The xmas lights (about 700 lights) are mounted behind the front plane so that the light bounces off of the plywood (back plane) to scatter the light so that pinpoints of light are not visible. The models of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings consist of multiple layers in order to simulate the effect of having lights shining on their own roofs.

Link Discuss (via /.)

Very thought-provoking Michael Wolff article on the theory that the music industry will turn into the book industry; smaller numbers, reduced circumstances, fewer gazillion-sellers. A fair number of book-trade people read Boing Boing -- whatcha think?

In other words, there'll still be big hits (Celine Dion is Stephen King), but even if you're fairly high up on the music-business ladder, most of your time, which you'd previously spent with megastars, will be spent with mid-list stuff. Where before you'd be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units -- that will be your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other aspects of the business will also contract -- most of the perks and largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamour, the influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs -- gone. Instead, it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry.

Link Discuss (via /.)

IRC bootleggers are distributing copies of Spiderman 2, marking the first instance of a movie being circulated online before it's been filmed.

Movie pirates infiltrated Raimi's home while he slept. They used an advanced EEG imaging system along with Apple's new QuickTime 6.0 beta with Brain2Vid technology to capture the movie. Pirates then edited out the unnecessary portions of what they captured such as images of Raimi's mother yelling at him because he forgot to take out the garbage.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Simon!)

Stefan sez:

If you go to a battery display in a drug or convenience store or Radio Shack, you'll find AAA-cell batteries, and AA-cell batteries, and C-cell batteries and big 'ol D-cell batteries.

But no A or B cell batteries.

This has bothered me for years, and past searches turned up nothing.

Now, thanks to an article on the Discovery Channel Canada site, I know what a B cell looks like.

Apparently, A cells are available in Canada, but they didn't include one on the little photoshopped battery line-up included in the article.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

MC Escher paving stones -- what a brilliant idea. I wish I had a garden. Link Discuss (Thanks, Jef!)

Woo! EFF and several ReplayTV customers are suing to establish the legality of their use of ReplayTV devices.

Responding to both the lawsuit brought against ReplayTV and the industry's public claims that these actions are "theft," five customers, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Ira Rothken of the Rothken Law Firm in San Rafael, filed a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles asking the court to rule that their use of the ReplayTV device is legal under copyright law.

"The studios are using their copyrights as an excuse to control what individuals do with their own property in the privacy of their own homes," said EFF Intellectual Property Attorney Robin Gross.

"Rather than encourage innovation and provide customers with an experience worthy of attention, Hollywood intends to outlaw a new and promising technology," commented EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "It's just as alarming as the Betamax case of the 1980s when Hollywood tried to ban VCRs."

"These Hollywood guys want to stop me from using my digital video recorder like I use my VCR, like for watching shows when I want or zipping through commercials," explained Craig Newmark, craigslist.com community founder, ReplayTV user, and plaintiff in the case. "I want to give my nephews and nieces a break from the rampant consumerism on TV by using ReplayTV's commercial skipping feature."

And Hollywood has already started issuing official, dismissive FUD about it:

This suit is nothing more than a publicity stunt.  This complaint mischaracterizes the nature of the case against SonicBlue and ReplayTV.  Our lawsuit is against SonicBlue and ReplayTV - not individual users.  We have never indicated any desire or intent to bring legal action against individual consumers for use of this device.

SonicBlue and ReplayTV were aware that they were stepping over the line of legality when they made and marketed this device.  Any complaint that consumers may have is with SonicBlue and Replay.

You know you're doing the right thing when studio execs go out of their way to tell the world that there's nothing to see here, move along. Link Discuss (Thanks, Robin!)

I downloaded Mozilla 1.0 (for Mac OS X) this morning. In the few short hours I've been using it, I like it a lot. You can search from the same field you use to enter URLs (and select the search engine you want to use), and it seems to be more sprightly than IE. I also like the download manager and bookmark manager better than IE so far, too. I'd like to hear what other Boingers think about it. Link Discuss

Ramone's bass player, Dee Dee Ramone, died in LA of an apparent drug overdose. Link Discuss (Thanks, Meri!)

Neato co-op of Tesla Coil enthusiasts who stage high-energy events. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded)

Cracked Magazine is publishing again, under the ownership of the Weekly World News's senior editor! Did that little low-budg Alfred E. Neuman clone with the janitor's cap and broom have a name?

He was delighted last week to see Mad raising its cover price from the $2.99 that Cracked charges, suggesting that Alfred E. Neuman's catch phrase change to "What, me greedy?"

"Just when they thought we were gone, they raised their price," he said. "That's why you need competition. We're in business to make kids laugh, not cry. I think it's working.

"This is so classic. Mad hates us. Boy, do they hate us. It's strange. I don't understand it. If your market is healthy, you sell, too. It takes two to play the game.

"I can't worry about them," he added with a laugh. "We are not number two anymore as far as I'm concerned. What - me worry?

Link Discuss (via MeFi)

Derek's posted an interesting analysis of online moderation systems' inevitable gaming, as when Slashdot users Karma-whore. He makes some recommendations about the optimal way to reduce gaming (some of which I disagree with, some of which sound like interesting ideas).

Slashdot has added still more inventive features. A simple but effective reputation management system is in operation now, allowing members to list each other as a friend or foe. The ratings are even public, so you can see who's list you're on. And even better, you can apply a filter to your lists, rating all your friend's comments up, and your foes' down. It's now possible to make it so you never have to see a particular user's posts again: just list them as a foe, and set all foe posts to "-5." In a few clicks, they'll be off your radar forever.

Problem is, all this groovy functionality adds several layers of new interface elements. Every filter, rating, and setting means adding another button, dropdown, and submit button. It's easy to see a future, not very far away, when the site grows so interface-heavy it will scare off all but the most determined new users. While what might not slow down the rabid Slashdotters, it would certainly impede a new site with a fragile audience.

Worse, sometimes all the widgets backfire altogether, encouraging the very behavior they're designed to avert. Sometimes all the rules have a dangerous side-effect: they create a game.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!)

The Learning Annex has cancelled its course on picking up Asian women. Jeez. Link Discuss (via MeFi)

Fantastically fantastic family tree of PalmOS devices. Man, that tree's got some ramified branches. Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

Usability study shows 5 out of 6 Kazaa users can't figure out that they're sharing their entire hard-drives. Link Discuss (via /.)

Neuroprosthesis News is an excellent neuroscience/neurohacking blog. Link Discuss (Thanks, Gyongyi!)

The Pi-Pi-to-Phone is a dangerously cute new Japanese kids' cellphone that is preprogrammed to only dial three numbers. Link Discuss (Thanks, Yuichi!)

Super simple instructions on making a gauss rifle out of a wooden ruler, some tiny magnets, and some steel ball bearings. Also comes with an excellent explanation of how it works, along with why it can't be modified into a perpetual motion machine. You can order the magnets from the site. Link Discuss (Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)

Gordon Mohr sez: "Has anyone else commented yet on the eerie similarity between Disney's proposed controls on all media devices, and the agenda of the evil Master Control Program (MCP) in Disney's 1982 movie Tron? If not, then let me be the first, in my OreillyNet weblog entry." Link Discuss

Last year, a couple of researchers at the University of Berkeley released a report claiming that pollen from Monsanto's genetically-modified corn has ruined native maize from Mexico. Monsanto hired a PR firm specializing in viral marketing to create fake people who posted pro-Monsanto propaganda on various mailing lists. Link Discuss (Thanks, Adam in Poland!)

Visitors to Anthony's website can vote on what Anthony should do next. His life is in your hands:

Should he go to Grand Rapids for a day for no apparent reason?

Where should he make his father sleep when he comes into town for 3 nights?

Link Discuss (Thanks, Alex!)

McDonald's will pay out #6.85MM to vegetarian and Hindu groups by failing to report on the beef tallow used to flavor their french-fries. More suits are pending. Link Discuss

LiveJournal has just enabled automatic RSS discovery for 250,000 online diaries (and the other 250,000 will light up when they are updated. As LiveJournal's Mark Kraft puts it:

Always love it when we can do things like this -- It's like switching on the lights at a baseball stadium.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Dave!)

Forget Photoshop Tennis. The real leet action is PowerPoint bake-offs; competitions to make the "best" deck of PPT slides. Link Discuss (via Kottke)

Cool article describing the labyrinthian world beneath the streets of Moscow.

The underworld is not all rubbish, rats, and dampness. Some accommodations are well equipped--with radio, television, and heat. People cook food and bring up children. In the morning, breadwinners leave their homes through manholes to make a living.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Noel!)

The latest Japanese schoolyard trend is hikaru dorodango (shiny balls of mud). Children painstakingly shape mud into near-perfect spheres, then polish them. A research scientist with an electron microscope uncovered the secret of their lustre.

In the process of making dorodango, the children demonstrated behavior that was surprising from the perspective of developmental psychology. A two-year-old child would walk behind Kayo, imitating his actions. At three, children would come up beside him and snatch his dirt. Four and five year olds pretended to ignore him out of pride, but afterwards they could be seen working with determined expressions on their faces. Children could also be found sharing information about where to find the best dirt and sand for making dorodango or even sometimes keeping such information secret. Dorodango were made famous all over Japan when public broadcaster NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.) took up the phenomenon in a program aired nationally in June 2001.

Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

Peter Bagge has always been one of my favorite cartoonists, ever since I discovered him in the pages of R. Crumb's Weirdo in the mid-1980's. Bagge did a couple of great series for Fantagraphics. The first was Neat Stuff, which had one of my all time favorite comic book characters, Girly Girl, a character who managed to be obnoxious, stupid, mean-spirited, and endearing at the same time. Later, Bagge created Hate which became a lot more popular. Hate's main attraction was the dysfunctional Bradley family. Over the years, readers got to watch the family unravel. I don't remember when Hate stop being published, but I'm pleased to learn that it's back as an annual. I just got issue number 2 (still waiting to get number 1) and it is as good as ever. Buddy Bradley is now married with a baby, but he's just as irresponsible and slothful as ever. Also included are a couple of wonderful stories Bagge wrote for Suck.com (created by Boing Boing's webmaster, Carl), one about the Miss America Pageant, the other about Mike Love of the Beach Boys. I'm happy Bagge is still at it and in top form! Link Discuss

Check it out: Barbie-sized tiki-furniture! My God, my tastes have become mainstream. Link Discuss (Thanks, Suzy!

Zed sez: "A Kenyan village donates 14 cows (precious to them) to the U.S. after the stories of a local returning from studies in the U.S. impress on them what 9/11 was like." Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

Nice satirical essay about the latest Naptersization threat: humming.

The movement has also won widespread support from several of the lesser-known stars of yesterday. At a local Burger King, ex-super star Vanilla Ice was despondent over the lack of money from those who hum his songs.

"Why shouldn't I get more money? I want it. I want it. I want it. Do you think I like eating cat food every day? Everyone else gets paid for work they did 15 years ago, why not musicians?" said a confused VI.

The record companies did not, however, make it clear as to how exactly the "humming rights tax" would be collected. There have been suggestions that a levy similar to those on blank CDs and other media might be a model to follow. Every one who has a larynx (and thus has the ability to hum without paying) could be subject to a fixed yearly fee.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!)

Sweet app that mates your GPS-equipped laptop to your NetStumbler 802.11b network-detector and a satellite, stylistic or aerial map, automatically plotting all the WiFi base-stations you discover as you war-drive/walk through your environs.

mapserver.zhrodague.net is a tool for visually displaying position and signal-strength of WiFi (802.11b) Access-Points. We are still in development, but you can see how quickly we've been able to put this together -- and it works. This was setup and functional in one week. The website and clean-up took another week. It was brought into being to have the ability to show maps, and prove that people actually use this technology in the Pittsburgh area for the Pittsburgh Wireless Community (http://www.pghwireless.com). Soon we will have each point indicating singnal-strength, I had a link to scans near my apartment, but until we get the AP-data coming from a database, it's just way to slow to load the (currently) 33589 entries, and plot them -- stay tuned!

Link Discuss (Thanks, Drew!)

Howard Rheingold, of Whole Earth, WELL, Electric Minds, Mindstorms, Virtual Reality and other kinds of fame, is talking now at Reboot, giving the morning keynote. He's doing a populist spiel: "The computer industry did not create the personal computer; it was created by people in their 20s who wanted a tool of their own. The Internet was created for the most part by people in their 20s, not the phone company. They didn't know what the tool was for, but they knew that other people would invent uses -- they built the Internet without a central control, to enable innovation." Damn, he's stealing my afternoon talk! "The Web was not created by VCs; it was created by thousands of people, because it was a cool thing to do: a public good.

"Now we're at a time when the public good created by these people over the past 20 years are being turned into private property. Hollywood, the recording industry, the electronics manufacturers, the cable companies -- they want us to become consumers again. We're at the beginning of the third revolution (1. Computers, 2. Internet): Communications plus pervasive computing will be the third. Governments think they know what it's going to be, but some of the people in this room will prove them wrong. The mass media, for the most part, does not know what it's talking about.

"Most journalists believe that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates invented the PC. But it's not true: they had stood on the shoulders of giants; living giants; giants who lived within driving distance of my home in the Bay Area.

"Doug Englebart said: In 1950 -- 1950 -- he was 25 years old. He drove to his engineering office every day through the largest fruit orchard in the world, now known as Silicon Valley, when he hit upon the idea of using computers to solve problems. Seems obvious, but in 1950, the world's entire RAM was 1K. He wrote a paper, "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect," which is still worth reading today.

"Not long thereafter, he found himself at DARPA. But Doug didn't want to build weapons. He gathered a group of like-minded souls, people who wanted to augment their minds with DARPA grants, not find better ways of killing people. The hippies of DARPA. In 1968, he demoed their labor, words and graphics on a screen. Everyone who was there was transformed, it changed what they wanted to do with their lives. There were no fonts, so it all looked like handwritten letters, but it was painted on the screen with vector graphics. He demoed links, he demoed outliners (Hi, Dave!).

"So came the birth of realtime computing. The hackers at MIT fed their computers on punched tape, which they kept in an open, unlocked drawer. Anyone could use the tapes, but moreover, anyone could improve them.

"Jobs and Woz started Apple: Jobs wanted to build a business, Woz wanted to build tools, and then along came Bill Gates, and his famous letter, which argued against openness, against a public good, against a commons.

"This commons, embedded in the Internet in the end-to-end principal is now under attack. Governments and corporations keep trying to push the Internet from the edges to the center. Tim Benners-Lee had an idea that embodied end-to-end, the ability for anyone to link to anything. Not just so scientists could share research, but so that anyone could create and share resources. Hey presto, the Web!

"Tim didn't need to go to the owner of the Internet and ask for the architecture to be changed. Because the Internet was created as an open platform, he could just do it. He did it. He put it in the public domain. Journos ask him if he regrets not earning money from each page, but while there's nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur, most innovation comes out of the public domain.

"Innovation is the unexpected combination of things: microprocessors and CRTs, newspapers and telephones. The Internet is place where we're no longer "consumers," we're participants. The very best innovations are ones that are platforms for other innovations. The press thought the PC was a toy until some Boston hackers created the spreadsheet.

"Technology isn't just hardware, nor software: it's the way people use it -- it's the things they create. Without this, you've got appliances, not revolutions.

"Welcome to the third revolution: the intersection of mobile telephones, embedded computing chips, and the Internet. 3G: a top-down, consumer idea is moribund, but 1.5MM wireless cards are being sold in the US alone. And that's just for starters: you will create new things, and they will change everything.

Nikolaj: TBL is now sitting as the chair of the W3C, which is now seen by many as a block to growth. In Denmark, we have a long tradition of co-ops, but it seems that inevitably these become commercial concerns. Will the Internet follow the same pattern? Will it inevitably centralize?

Howard: It's up to you. Commons have vulnerabilities. Viz. the Tragedy of the Commons. There are lots of Commons that are not misused: common grazing grounds, common fisheries. Somehow, these fail to become a centralized resource. Some hold that we will tear each others' throats out until some authority comes along and enforces civility.

"What is it that mobile devices and the Internet give us? They make it easier to take collective action; they make it easier for us to do things together. The sociologists have been investigating this for some time. They ask why the Tragedy of the Commons is not universal, why some commons persist. They study Filipino rice farmers, Japanese forresters, and thousands of others of venerable commons. There are some principles they all have in common:

1. No central authority dictates the terms by which they share.

2. The commons don't rely on altruism; rather they rely on self-interest. Virtual communities are a great example: by inviting people to your community you increase the resources that are available to you. The Spanish farmers had an arrangement like this with their irrigation; every week you got to take a certain amount of water out, and your turn immediately followed your neighbors'. Which meant that if you took more water than was your share, your neighbor noticed, and word got around. Reputation is important

3. In some commons, the sheep shit grass. When you d/l from Napster, you actually make files available.

A civic society is not government, it's not your employer, it's what we do as citizens. No society really can exist and be hospitable unless people cooperate with their neighbors. You must be able to resolve conflicts without recourse to legislation or injunction. The public sphere is how we govern ourselves. It's the debates, the arguments, the discussions that citizen have about everything from foreign policy to the conditions of the road.

The public sphere has always been closely linked to communications. The printing press didn't abolish war, but it did create a literate population that was able to educate itself. Science existed a long time, but it didn't progress much while it depended on geniuses like Newton. It wasn't just the Method that advanced science, it was the idea that any person could read the literature and perform his own experiments and advance the field.

"We have as many problems as ever, but maybe that's not human nature. Maybe we just don't know how to think about human problems yet. Until the 16th Century, people suffered all kinds of hardship, and their explanations for this was superstitious, because they didn't know how to think about these hardships. The germ theory of diseases -- contrasted with ill humors and spirits -- gave us the tools to think about this, and the printing press spread these tools, permanently.

"The mass-media, with the power to reach into everyones' homes, was based on broadcasting, a small number of people who could talk to the mass. If you were in a dictatorship and you want to take over, you capture the televisions station. Samizdat was driven by photocopiers. In a democracy, television is expensive to run, spectrum is expensive. The Internet won't create the public sphere, but it will create the opportunity to create the public sphere.

Audience member: What's the role of money in all this?

Howard: Money is great tech: I don't have to carry around three sheep to trade for shoes. It makes it possible for people to do things that were impossible before. One characteristic of money is that it accumulates. If you have a lot of it, you'll get more of it. Mass media and its power demands so much money that it generates inevitable corruption."

Audience member: What about censorship?

Howard: The Internet may interpret censorship as damage and route around it, but it seems that the Chinese government have licked this; however, Peek-a-Booty and other technologies are arms-racing with the Chinese government. Arms-races are usually very good drivers for rapid innovation.

Audience member: Can't money serve as a motivator for innovation?

Howard: Don't think that money is never a motive force, but the Internet, the PC, and the Web weren't motivated by money. There are 0.5MM blogs, but only three of them make any money, the rest are in it for reputation, love, to contribute to the commons.

Thomas: Didn't the dotcoms fail because they didn't attend to money?

Howard: We may never know -- VCs pumped huge amounts of money in, skimmed the cream very early, and when businesses failed to make a profit in two or three years, they pulled the plug. Most of the great businesses of today weren't profitable in two or three years.

But look at the winners: eBay, wouldn't exist without a lot of individuals.

The People Power 2 demonstrations in the Phillipines. Everyone in the Phillipines watched the government investigation of corruption, until someone in government pulled the plug. Twenty minutes later, coordinated by SMS messages, 20,000 people were demonstrating in the main square. The leaders told the military that they'd have 1,000,000 the next day unless the investigation was made public.

Audience member: How can we finance technology samizdat in the developing world

Howard: 1 in 8 Namibians has a mobile phone -- it's cheaper to set up mobile infrastructure than it is to deploy wire infrastructure.

Thomas: I just got back from Ghana, where ISPs are building 802.11b wISPs on the cheap. Whiel they have a demand for gear that is suited to hot and sandy climate, it seems likely that we can unwire the whole world.

Link Discuss

Letter-grades assinged to the world's flags, by an utterly obsessive flag nut. The commentary ("Do not put a picture of a parrot on your flag! [This goes for you too, Guatamala!]") is wonderful! Link Discuss (Thanks, Derryl!)

Danny's review of Brain Heart magazine is precious:

All the articles are written in a eurojetsetting Scandlish intonation: perfectly grammatical with a plodding sing-song quality. "Let's assume that we would like to take a wireless tourist tour through Stockholm's 750-year-old Old Town, Gamla Stan. What would the tour look like?", begins one rip-roaring read. Every cover has a man and a women from the endlessly dull business world of Swedish telecoms, wearing these perfect clothes, perfectly photographed in perfect settings.

Subscriptions are free! Link Discuss

ATM companies wants to ship ATMs that use expression-analysis software to detect and respond to your moods when you're withdrawing money. Better idea: assume every customer is anxious about not having enough money and assume further that they're pissed off at how long the ATM is taking and how much their bank charges them to use it, and respond accordingly.

"We're teaching the computers to be more like human beings," said Dave Schrader, an engineer with Teradata, a division of automatic teller machine manufacturer NCR. In an attempt to give consumers [(God, how I'm coming to loathe the word consumer; bank-customers aren't "consumers" of anything; they're creditors, for Christ's sake) CD] a better banking experience, Schrader is teaching ATMs to discern emotions.

"The value of the tech is we're taking the ATM one stage closer to behaving like a good, perceptive teller might so that interactive dialogue can start beginning," Schrader said. "The ATM can adapt itself to you instead of you adapting yourself to the technology."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Zed!)

While turbojets may have replaced the venerable pulsejet in most applications, this Kiwi hobbyist has latched onto the pulsejet as a simple and hyper-cool design for building his own jet-propelled go-karts. Instructions included! Link Discuss (Thanks, John!)

Well, the Shrub has finally admitted that global warming exists. He had to, after a study commissioned by his own government said, basically, "Duh, yes, stop being an idiot." However, the same report contains such howlers as:

"Health impacts ... can be ameliorated through such measures as the increased availability of air conditioning."

CO2 junkies in denial are so sad. Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan!)

Now that you've got your $35 wireless card, how about a $53 access-point to go with it? Link Discuss

Heaven help me, but I just can't stop laughing at H4x0R Economist, a comic strip which basically consists of pictures of Alan Greenspan with speech balloons filled with haxor-speak. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bob!)

802.11b cards for $35 after rebate. The chipset costs about $22 wholesale; how much lower can the prices go? I'm waiting for the day when wireless cards are sold in blisterpacks of five and ten at the lcoal WalMart. Link Discuss (via Oblomovka)

Patrick's selling off cheap copies of the first two volumes in his Starlight original sf anthology series. To call these seminal is to badly undersell them. They are the best anthologies of original sf to be published since Damon Knight's Orbit series, and are the kind of summer reading that every one of us should be enriching our minds with this year. Starlight 3 is brilliant, too (hey, I'm in it), but it's still fresh and new and so you'll have to shell out several dollars more for it -- still, I like to think that once you've finished 1 and 2, you'll be drawn straight to 3, hang the price.

Starlight 1. Winner of the World Fantasy Award. Original science fiction and fantasy from Michael Swanwick, Andy Duncan, Gregory Feeley, Robert Reed, Susanna Clarke, Susan Palwick, Martha Soukup, Carter Scholz, John M. Ford, Mark Kreighbaum, and Maureen F. McHugh, and Jane Yolen. From this volume, Jane Yolen's "Sister Emily's Lightship" won the Nebula Award. "The best original science fiction anthology of the year." --Gardner Dozois, editor, The Year's Best Science Fiction

Starlight 2. Original fantasy and science fiction from Robert Charles Wilson, Susanna Clarke, M. Shayne Bell, Raphael Carter, Martha Soukup, David Langford, Carter Scholz, Ellen Kushner, Esther M. Friesner, Jonathan Lethem, Angelica Gorodischer, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Ted Chiang. From this volume, Raphael Carter's "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation" won the Tiptree Award, and Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" won the Sturgeon Award and the Nebula Award. "The sort of anthology that science fiction desperately needs, driven by straightforward notions of good writing and good storytelling." --The New York Review of Science Fiction

Link Discuss

The Social Security Administration won't provide benefits to the in-vitro, post-mortem child of an football-player who was conceived from sperm frozen before her father began chemotherapy. Welcome to the future, I guess.

For the past five years, Chappell, a single parent living on a teacher's salary, has fought the Social Security Administration to get survivor benefits for their daughter.

The Social Security Administration says the case has yet to be decided at SSA's Baltimore headquarters, but the agency cautions that because Sayana's parents were never married, government attorneys have no law or precedents to guide them. That issue makes the case unique, the first in Washington and possibly the nation.

Laws pertaining to children of deceased parents have changed little since survivor benefits for children were first paid in 1940, and surely haven't kept pace with how technology has redefined reproduction.

Link Discuss

UC Berkeley is offering a for-credit course in blogging, taught by (of course) experienced journalists: John Battelle (late of Wired and the Industry Standard) and Paul Grabowicz (director of the New Media Program). A quick Googling reveals that both participate in a group-blog, which is good news. Also interesting is that the class-blog will concentrate on intellectual property issues -- nice! Wonder if they're looking for a guest lecturer? They've sure got their pick of textbooks coming out in the next couple months. Link Discuss (Thanks, Sumana!)

Interesting CNN piece about 802.11b density in cities and on campuses. As more people purchase and establish wireless networks at home, work and school, the signals begin to overlap and confuse the receivers (after hearing David Reed's lecture on Open Spectrum at ETCON, I no longer say "interfere with each other," since, according to Reed, "two radio signals that pass through one another do not harm each other -- there is no interference with radio waves, only confusion by receivers").

I was out with Howard Rheingold (who's also speaking at Reboot) and some of his Danish pals from his online community last night, and we got to talking about this. My feeling is that there are two very simple measures that can in large part solve this:

1. Bundle NetStumbler with the configuration tools that are shipped with wireless base-stations, revising the app so that after taking a survey of the nearby 802.11b spectrum, it makes a recommendation as to which channel the base-station should run on.
2. Bundle NoCat or another captive portal app with the base-station firmware, so that users who stumbled upon a network could easily get contact info for the base-station's operator. That way, people who are thinking about adding yet another, redundant access-point to an already saturated location can instead make contact with nearby operators and ask if they mind sharing their connections, perhaps after splitting the costs.

Of course, there are a lot of very ambitious solutions to this, too: opening up more spectrum, revising the 802.11 standards to allow for automatic back-off on busy channels, switching to ultra-wideband technologies, etc. I'm sure that in the long-term we'll see all of these approaches tried, but in the meanwhile, I think that simple software fixes can go a long way to solving the problem. Link Discuss (via /.)

A brother and sister in Ontario who were mercilessly bullied through high-school, physically and mentally, by a pair of boys who actually put up public websites and took videos to document their artistic torment, are suing their high-school administrators for not putting a stop to it. I tend to think of this as a good thing. In Junior High, I helped organize a nuclear disarmament group among my classmates, and was consequently the object of frequent harassment and assaults by a small group of military cadets who attended the school. The lame-duck administrator, a guy named Lloyd Hogg, was a supporter of nuclear proliferation and so refused to do anything about it until my father showed up to pick me up from school one afternoon and caught two boys about twice my size hurling empty glass pop bottles at my head, whereupon he leapt out of the car and dragged the little jerks into the principle's office.

Hogg's response was to retaliate by confiscating the banner and pamphlets our peace-group had made. The story linked below, about the torture these kids suffered while the administration sat idly by, is pretty familiar, though what they went through was a thousand times worse. I hope they win their case. While anti-bullying rules in other jurisdictions have had their occassional excesses (expulsion of students who have minor, isolated schoolyard scraps under a nonsensical "zero-tolerance" policy), I'd love to see a world where absentee principals like Hogg (and the unnamed prinicpal of Pearson High in Burlington, ON) are hung out to dry for their complicity in bestial torture. Maybe a little personal liability would convice these soi-distant guardians of student safety to take their responsibilities seriously. Link Discuss

The NY State school-board has been sanitizing its tests, removing all references to age, race, hate, religion, and, it seems, acrimony in the excerpted reading-portions on its standardized English exams. It wants to make sure that students aren't made "uncomfortable" by the readings. The living authors whose works are excerpted are understandably livid, as are parents and everyone who gives a damn about good writing (which lets out NY State's educational bureaucracy, I'm afraid):

Certain revisions bordered on the absurd. In a speech by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, in addition to deletions about the United States' unpaid debt to the United Nations, any mention of wine and drinking was removed. Instead of praising "fine California wine and seafood," he ends up praising "fine California seafood." In Carol Saline's "Mothers and Daughters" a daughter no longer says she "went out to a bar" with her mother; on the Regents, they simply "went out."

In an excerpt from "Barrio Boy," by Ernesto Galarza (whose name was misspelled on the exam as Gallarzo), a "gringo lady" becomes an "American lady." A boy described as "skinny" became "thin," while another boy who was "fat" became "heavy," adjectives the state deemed less insulting.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Edward!)

Canadians who commute across the US border to attend school part time are SOL: the US government has decreed that such students are a threat to homeland security and can just stay home (or switch to full-time, which will, of course, significantly mitigate the threat) from now on. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)

Richard Kadrey -- the cyberpunk co-founder of Future Sex, author of Metrophage, co-editor of the Dead Media project and photog for Suicide Girls -- has finally put up a personal site. Lots of good stuff here, especially full-length novels and other lovely bits of writing. Link Discuss

Jack Valenti's 1982 Betamax hearings testimony is finally online. This is the source of the "VCR is to the American film industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone" (yes, Jack, releasing new technology is just like commiting a series of brutal rape/murders), but the actual testimony is even more egregious, racist, and repetitive than that. As my colleague at EFF, Seth Schoen, has noted, Jack Valenti's on a twenty-year loop, with phrases like, "The avalanche of [VCRs|P2P]" cropping up to demonize whatever technology-bogeyman has gotten up his analog hole today.

Now, my first card, Mr. Chairman, deals with what I consider to be one of the essential elements that you cannot ignore and, indeed, you must nourish. The U.S. film -- and I will read this -- "The U.S. film and television production industry is a huge and valuable American asset." In 1981, it returned to this country almost $1 billion in surplus balance of trade. And I might add, Mr. Chairman, it is the single one American-made product that the Japanese, skilled beyond all comparison in their conquest of world trade, are unable to duplicate or to displace or to compete with or to clone. And I might add that this important asset today is in jeopardy. Why?

Link Discuss (via Vitanuova)

My latest O'Reilly Net column, "My Blog, My Outboard Brain," is online:

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this -- it's one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.

Link Discuss

Ah, cowboys, they have so much to teach us:

Mr. Polhamus operates an annual rodeo in La Crosse, where one of the most popular events is "cowboy poker," a contest in which four volunteers from the audience sit at a card table as a Mexican fighting bull is released into the ring.

The last person remaining in his seat in the face of the charging bull wins a $100 prize.

Link Discuss (via New World Disorder)

Have you got an RSS feed on your blog? You can help others automatically discover its URL by adding:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="XML" href="URL_of_your_RSS_feed" />

to the <head> section. Link Discuss

Mark's got a great piece in the new Yahoo! Internet Life about the underground camgirl economy where Amazon wishlist items are traded for skin:

Now meet Natalie. Or better yet, don't meet her, just buy her an RCA CC9370 AutoShot compact digital camcorder ($450). If you do, this 14-year-old girl from a small Kentucky town "will love you forever." Or so she says on the link from her site to her Amazon Wish List. (Hint: She'd probably settle for the book Girl Director: A How-To Guide for the First-Time, Flat-Broke Film & Video Maker.) But do it quick, because Natalie hasn't been having the best luck of late, judging from the nasty messages posted to her guestbook: "Did I mention that you're the 2nd ugliest girl I've seen in my life?" and "Your site SUCKS ass because of your f---ing brutal WISH list, you ain't even good-looking and yet you think people are just going to ship you that stuff?" Natalie isn't shy about how she feels about these tirades: "WAAAAAAAAAHHH people don't like me because I'm 14 and I don't know anything and I'm ugly and I have a huge Wish List and other people are stupid and I'm honest about wanting to whore my site!!! I'm a whore and you've hurt my feelings!

I was talking about this with my hosts in Denmark last night, weirdly enough. The Internet is putting pornographers out of business (witness the folding up of Penthouse), largely by connecting voyeurs and exhibitionists to have one-to-one relationships. While the wishlist-compensation phenom demonstrates that there's still money in porn, it suggests that there's not a lot of business left there. We got onto the subject while talking about musicians and P2P file-trading. Many music publishers are shutting down their Danish operations, folding up in the face of declining CD sales. One of my hosts wondered if music was becoming a commodity, but (to use the analogy), the camgirl phenom suggests the reverse: "old" porn was a commodity -- one picture for 1,000,000 viewers; this is much closer to one-to-one "bespoke" production.

I don't know how musicians will make money in a P2P universe, but I think it's a mistake to assume that technological changes that harm the music industry necessarily harm musicians. Link Discuss

George Scriban's been doing some great analysis of Viant's scare-story about online movie "piracy" on his blog:

the Newsbytes headline is no big deal, though, when competitors like the San Jose Mercury News go to press with screamers like "Online film piracy cuts into industry profit: BOOTLEG COPIES BEING TRADED AT INTERNET SPEED". naturally, the Merc (like the BBC and c|net before them) leads with the Big Scary Numbers but they go one further when they haul Jack Valenti -- Big Content's most richly-rewarded foghorn -- out of cryosleep to proclaim that we are in the middle of what may (or may not) be the end of days: "It's getting clear -- alarmingly clear, I might add -- that we are in the midst of the possibility of Armageddon."

as an aside, i realize that "professional" journalists are supposed to avoid editorializing, but when Jack Valenti's morbid neo-Ludditry has driven him to compare the VCR to the murder of women and the internet to the annihillation of life as we know it in a final battle between the forces of good and evil, shouldn't someone suggest that Mr Valenti should plug the analog hole in his face?

Link Discuss