Share and map your RSS reading list

By Cory Doctorow at 11:33 pm Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

Dave Winer's created a service that maps out who reads what RSS feeds -- just upload the OPML file from your RSS reader and it will add your name to the list of subscribers for all the feeds in your rota. Cool to see who's reading you, and who you're reading. Made me remember that I have a bunch of blogs in my bookmark group that I haven't entered into my RSS reader... Link (via Battelle)

Interactive centrifuge simulates g-stresses in flight sim

By Cory Doctorow at 12:45 pm Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

Dynamic Flight Simulator is an interactive centrifuge controlled by a traditional PC_based flight-sim: as fighter pilots bank and roll in their simulated jets, the centrifuge spins to simuulate the g-stresses they'd actually feel in the air. Link

Prisonaires: golden age pop music from behind bars

By Cory Doctorow at 12:42 pm Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

In Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, which I finished on a plane yesterday, there's an amazing aside about a band called The Prisonaires, a group of 1950s black men who'd been sent to jail on faked-up charges and who formed a best-selling pop group behind bars, leaving on special work-release programs to perform and record. It turns out that The Prisonaires aren't fictional -- what's more, you can actually buy a reissue CD of their greatest hits. Link

Flowers From Alice published, soon to appear in a year's-best

By Cory Doctorow at 12:30 pm Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

I've just gotten back into the office and discovered a copy of the new Mike Resnick anthology, "New Voices in Science Fiction," a Science Fiction Writers of America-sponsored book showcasing new, noteworthy writers. Charlie Stross and I wrote a story for it, called Flowers from Alice, a pervy piece of post-Singularity erotica. I'm happy to say that the story was also selected for the inaugural volume of Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber's new Best of the Year anthology. Link

Bush in 30 Seconds finalists

By Cory Doctorow at 10:43 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

The Bush in 30 Seconds finalists are posted. This was the competition to come up with a 30-second, Creative Commons-licensed political ad exposing the Bush regime's failings, with the winning spot to be aired in commercial slots bracketing the State of the Union address. Here's my favorite, but the other 14 finalists are also very good. Link (via Lessig)

Paleo-Internet-coverage from the CBC

By Cory Doctorow at 10:40 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

Darren sez, "Check out this hilarious archived video clip from the CBC on a network called Internet. It's back in the days when 10% growth per month was remarkable, emoticons were hip, and Peter Mansbridge still had some hair. I particularly like the way they refer to 'Internet' without the article--it reminded me of Tron. The report is from 1993...a reminder of how far we've come and how nascent this Intarweb thang still is." Link (Thanks, Darren!)

Nominate for the Pioneer Awards

By Cory Doctorow at 10:39 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

The EFF Pioneer Awards are upon us again -- time to nominate your cyber-heroes for EFF's annual award for "leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology."

Simply tell us:

1. The name of the nominee,

2. the phone number or email address at which the nominee can be reached, and, most importantly,

3. why you feel the nominee deserves the award.

You may attach supporting documentation as RTF files, Microsoft Word documents or other common binary or plain text formats.

Link

Burning Man + MSFT Flight Simulator = Duuuuude

By Xeni Jardin at 10:10 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

Bay Area-based artist Andrew Johnstone has created a digital, virtual, and three-dimensional Black Rock City for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 and 2004 platforms.

[I]n the spirit of Burning Man's no-commerce, gift economy philosophy, he's making his project available for free. One of Burning Man's mottos is "participants only," and, fittingly, Johnstone's Virtual Playa rewards active involvement. On his site, he provides free 3D building tools that Burners can use to model a version of their own camp or art project, which they can then upload and incorporate into the complete Virtual Playa version available to everyone. If people want to design a camp made from pre-fab pieces, he provides digital tents, domes, RVs, U-Haul trucks and many of the other details.

"You can be your own Larry Harvey if you want. You can put whatever you want in," says Johnstone. "They can scratch their playa itch in March when they're not feeling very Burning Man."

Link to Wired News story

Kuleshov and reframing: is it illegal to frame a picture?

By Cory Doctorow at 9:55 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

My co-worker Jason Schultz has written a great LawGeek article about the way that copyright and the Kuleshov effect (in which art can be made to mean opposing things throught framing or recontextualizing) interact. The US courts have handed down some jaw-droppingly stupid rulings on this matter, as it turns out, in relation to a company called   Albuquerque ART.

ART specialized in buying up books and art-cards, cutting them up and glueing them to tiles, then selling the tiles. This seems pretty straightforward: if you buy the book, you own it -- you should be able to glue the pages to anything you care to and sell them on, provided that everyone concerned knows that you're not selling the original deal, and provided that you are actually buying and cutting up actual books, and not just buying one copy and scanning it and running off fresh copies from your laser-printer.

ART got sued by various people, and the courts handed down rulings that said that while framing a picture isn't an infringement of the author's copyright over derivative works, that really, really outre frames that change the context do infringe -- the next time you think about getting a New Yorker cover framed for the toilet wall, think again:

The court cannot agree that permanently affixing a notecard to a ceramic tile is not recasting, transforming or adapting the original art work. Placing a print or painting in a frame and covering it with glass does not recast or transform the work of art. It is commonly understood that this amounts to only a method of display. Moreover, it is a relatively simple matter to remove the print or painting and display it differently if the owner chooses to do so. Neither of these things is true of the art work affixed to a ceramic tile. Moreover, tiles lend themselves to other uses such as trivets (individually) or wall coverings (collectively).

Link

Obsessive Star Wars concordance

By Cory Doctorow at 9:49 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

Here's a nice, idiosyncratic concordance of interesting stuff in frame in the first (historically)/fourth (narratively) Star Wars movie:

My Dinner With Owen -- Things to spot:
There is a blue treadwell droid wandering in the background. Cybot Galactica manufactures the WED15 units as general purpose machinery maintenance droids.

When Luke says "It's a whole 'nother year" you can hear birds in the background.

Shelagh (Aunt Beru) Fraser's voice is painfully dubbed over, particularly in the Hif Fi Pan & Scan and THX versions. I've heard rumors that is was changed because she had too heavy an Irish accent or that her dialogue was too soft-spoken on locati

Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Royalty-free postmen coming to UK

By Cory Doctorow at 9:47 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

A new music-licensing scheme in the works in the UK will allow postmen to whistle without paying royalties: A new business-licensing scheme in the UK will allow postment to whistle rights-cleared work without obtaining a venue license first.

* Spontaneously singing "Happy Birthday" will NOT be illegal.
* Spontaneous pub singalongs will NOT be licensable.
* Carol singers, going from door to door, or turning up unannounced in a pub and singing, will NOT be licensable.
* A postman whistling on his round will NOT be licensable.

Link (Thanks, Lee!)

NASA's Martian Standard Tribe

By Cory Doctorow at 9:40 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

NASA scientists working on the Mars rover have adopted a Martian sleep-schedule so that they can be awake and working during Mars daylight. Not exactly Eastern Standard Tribe, but not far off, either. Link (Thanks, Paul)

Mars Jiggyvision and QTVRs: silly goggles optional

By Xeni Jardin at 9:39 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

Daniel Root says, "NASA JPL has released stereo views of the red planet- in B&W- from one (actually two) of the on-board cameras. I combined them in a quick animation that gives somewhat of a feel for the 3d effect. (Not my own idea, but I can't find the site where I first saw it...) It's the next best thing to standing on Mars and getting a headache! You can see more stereo sets here."

(Thanks, Kevin Kelly, and Hal!)

And Nick says, "NASA's Explorer has sent back its first low res pictures, which NASA have stitched together into several panoramic pictures. They haven't (so far, as far as I can see) gone the whole way and released them as QTVRs - so I did the job for them, here."

FuhQuake: Quake with "stunning visual effects and eyecandy"

By Cory Doctorow at 9:37 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

FuhQuake is a project to hack "stunning visual effects and eyecandy" into the open-source Quake engine. Does this mean that everyone who's made Quake machinima can now re-render their movies and get Moore's-Law improvements in the quality of their SFX? Link (via Wonderland)

Copenhagen's Christania voluntarily demolishes "Pusher Street"

By Cory Doctorow at 9:33 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

Christania, the Permanent Temporary Autonomous Zone in Copenhagen, has been under threat of demolition for over a year now. With destruction looming, the drug dealers of Pusher Street, the open-air hash-and-pot market, have torn down their stalls, so that the authorities can no longer maintain the pretense that they are attacking the decades-old, pretty and astonishing squatters' village because it presents a drug problem.

Using a tractor, crow bars, saws and hammers, dealers and residents tore down two dozen colorful booths that have stood along the sparsely paved but well-traveled Pusher Street for years...

In 1987, Christiania was recognized as a "social experiment" and two years later the government gave residents the right to use the land, but not ownership of it.

Christiania has become a tourist destination, with some travel guides mentioning it prominently, and Pusher Street appears on several city maps. In May, one of the booths that sold hashish was donated to Denmark's National Museum.

Link (via Fark)

Charles Atlas ad send-up

By Cory Doctorow at 9:30 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

This is the single-best piss-take I've ever seen on an old comic book add: "How I Made a Hacker out of a Slacker." I want a Sea-Monkeys version. Link (via Smartpatrol)

BDSM + MMPORG: a Sims master and slave speak.

By Xeni Jardin at 4:08 am Monday, Jan 5 • Comments • Share

Of Sins and Sims. BoingBoing mentor Bruce Sterling points to this, gasps, and averts his eyes:

In this interview we talk with practitioners of Gor, Mistress Maria LaVeaux and her slave Toy. They discuss their pre-Alpha careers as cyber-escorts in other TSO cities, their arrival in Alpha, and their introduction when Lady Julianna called Mistress LaVeaux to mediate a dispute between two Doms in the Alphaville BDSM community. They discuss the practice of Gor, its culture, history and language (as well as the fictional/literary origins of Gor), and explain the ways in which it differs from other forms of BDSM. They explain how Gor is a projection of their inner selves and is not inherently wedded to any set of doctrines and they reject the claims of some vocal Alphaville residents that they are a BDSM cult.

Link, also see in archives: Evangeline: "Interview with a Child cyber-Prostitute in TSO"