A woman named Claudia is auctioning off a collection of 60 letters (186 pages) that surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote to her over a span of nearly two decades. The starting bid of the eBay auction is $1,000.

"We corresponded between 1974 and 1981. For sale are all the letters he wrote me between 1974 and 1975, when I was writing a U.S. master's thesis about books he'd published a decade earlier, at a time when only the French accorded him critical respect and his first language editions had lapsed out of print: Originals of over 60 individual letters, 186 pages (all those he signed on the right side of the page).

The letters are about Valis and V.A.L.I.S. (because that's what he was writing then); they are also a linear chronology of his "long inner trip" in his own words (the drawing is what a dream instructed him to draw); they are also about Ubik and UBIK (because that's what I was writing about); they say what he wanted them to say."

Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

Japanese salon offers acrylic fingernails that look like old school iMacs. Link (Thanks, Hugh!)

A 1994 Air Force proposal seems to suggest that the most powerful weapons against the enemies of freedom might be bugs, rats, and horny homosexual men. Link to Defensetech post, and see also "Military Lab Proposed Gay-Aphrodisiac Chemical Weapon" (Link) at Russ Kick's Memory Hole. And how does the chemical make you feel? Link.

"Blake's Vomiting Didn't Seem Sincere to Witnesses" -- spotted twice: Link, and Linkerer.

I drew this little guy and am selling a Cafe Press messenger bag with him on it for $25. Link (Click on the image for enlargement.)

"Wondertoonel - Paintings by Mark Ryden, is a forty page catalog containing each of the thirty paintings in the Wondertoonel exhibition and is printed on heavy paper stock, enhanced with gold metallic ink on the interior pages and features gold foil embossing on the cover. Also includes artist and curator statements. The catalog measures 8 1/2" wide by 9" high. Price: $20" Link

Doron of WFMU sez: "WFMU, one of the nation's finest radio stations (and home to lots of boing-boing friendly music) has just launched podcast.wfmu.org. As you probably already know, some broadcast radio stations, BBC, NPR, WGBH have dabbled in podcasting, usually offering random clips or the odd talk show... WFMU is making seven of its shows available for podcast including three music shows.

"Two of the music shows (Antique Phonograph Music Program) and Thomas Edison's Attic consist of DJs hand-cranking old turntables to play cylinders and records dating from the 1880s to the 1920s and should hopefully fall under public domain while the third "Advanced D & D with Donna Summer" (aka Jason Forrest) plays breakcore and random CD-Rs from all over the place.

"The station would very much like to offer all of it's content for podcasting but like other people, we're a bit concerned about the legal ramifications. In any case, we're very excited to be offering our content in a way that allows listeners to hear our programs when and where they want to. hope you guys like it." Link

Some people in Kenya rescued a dehydrated baby hippo that had been separated from its herd. The released it into an enclosure in a sanctuary, and it ran over to a giant tortoise, and is now "inseparable" say officials.

"'When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,' Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters."

Link

My fellow travelers -- feast on this fine assortment of Copyleft Flag desktops for your commie computers!
Link to one collection (Thanks, Ian), and link to another (Thanks, Toby), and Link to a convenient banner for pledging of allegiance (Thanks William v3.0), and some little teeny internet buttons: Link (Thanks, Matthew Bradley). Previous Boing Boing posts on Redmond's Red Scare: one, two.

Update: Boing Boing reader Ryan Schroeder says, "I had to have a Creative Commies shirt, so I threw that graphic up on Cafe Press. Figured others might want one as well. IMPORTANT: All prices are set to the base level, I'm not making a cent here. Cafepress is getting all of our money. If the people demand it I'll boost the prices by a buck or two and donate everything to the EFF." Link to Creative Commies t-shirts.

And reader Ken Mickles says, "Similar to Ryan Schroeder, I had to have a Creative Commons t-shirt for myself. But conveniently for me, I own a screen printing company. So if anyone else wants one, I put up a quick Paypal form and I'm selling them for $5 plus shipping. That's a fair bit cheaper than CafePress, and they should be way higher quality." Link.

I've received lots of email about my wife's catch-22 traffic ticket problem (in short, she is trying to pay the ticket but the court won't accept payment because the ticket hasn't been entered into the computer system yet. And the reason it hasn't been entered into the computer system, apparently, is because the officer who issued the ticket didn't enter the date in the date field).

I'd like to thank everyone who wrote to me about this. We got rid of the messages boards on Boing Boing over a year ago, and I'd kind of forgotten how nice and generous 99.9% of Boing Boing's readers are! It's inspiring and uplifting to get email from so many exellent people.

I thought you'd be interested to read the advice I've received about this so far. There are lots of ideas, but the four most common ones are:

1. Get a lawyer.

2. Get a cashier's check and pay the fine with it (sending it by certified mail).

3. Contact the officer who issued the ticket and ask him what the status of the ticket is.

4. Contest the ticket, because it is invalid with a date on it.

Our next steps: we are going to call a lawyer friend who has dealt with ticket problems before, and we are calling AAA, which apparently has a department that helps people deal with traffic tickets.

Here's one thing that might help (click on thumbnail for enlargement). When my wife went down to the court to attempt pay the ticket yesterday, the clerk gave her this "Proof of Appearance" statement. Hopefully, it'll convince the judge that we tried to take care of the matter.

Here is the email I've received so far. Link

UPDATE: We ended up WINNING! Here's the thrilling conclusion.

Science News has an interesting feature about the future of concrete. For example, Ductal is five times as strong as regular concrete, but it also bends a bit under heavy loads and shows "warning" cracks instead of failing in an instant. Agilia packs itself, negating the noisy and time-consuming process of passing a vibrating machine over it. And LiTraCon is the cool translucent stuff pictured here that I posted about last year. Link

A comics fan who thinks downloading comics is immoral posted a long rant to a message board, urging readers to shun comics-trading sites. The debate that follows has several excellent posts -- but the most interesting ones come from fanatical comics-buyers who download books they already own in hardcopy because it's a "good way to be able to go back and reread a book without running the risk of damaging it" and so forth.

The comics industry has been creaking and threatening collapse for as long as I've been reading funnybooks. One thing that's always frustrated me is the incomprehensible lag between the monthly books and the bound collections: if you wander into a bookstore and discover issues 1-5 of Y: The Last Man or Issues 1-5 of Fables (both stone brilliant; run, don't walk) and fall in love, why you can go on to pick up the subsequent collections, three or four books each in all. Now, say you've read up to issue 20 of Fables and you don't want to wait for the next collection to come out: you want to take the plunge and become a regular, monthly comics reader. You go down to your local comics store and say, "Please sell me issues 21 through the current issue of Fables, and put the current ish aside for me every month: I'm hooked!"

What usually happens is the comics person will say, "Sorry, we've got issue 25, which is the current one, and number 24, but that's it -- the older ones are out of print." In other words, you got on the Fables boat too late and you're not going to be able to catch up with the book in comics form without buying issues from collectors or off of eBay.

So here's a gedankenexperiment for ya: what if the DC and Marvel put all their funnybooks on the Web two months after they were shipped to the stores? My guess is that the kind of comics reader who downloads issues so that he won't be "running the risk of damaging" the hard-copy will continue to buy as many comics as ever.

But if you believe the comics industry, it's going broke selling to just the people who put their comics in mylar bags and stack them in hermetic vaults. Funnybooks need to attract a civilian audience who will dip their toes in from time to time, buy the occassional collection, read one or two books a month: it needs a LOT of those people.

The bound collections are a great way to hook new readers. They're retailed in regular book-stores, so they're visible to the kind of person who never goes into a Graphic Novelle Emporium. All that's missing is a way to turn collection readers into monthly-plus-collection readers. The Web could be that way. Scott McCloud has written some brilliant stuff about what a comic that's designed for the Web should look like, but here's the whole other way to use the Web to advance the comics biz: give old issues away to bridge the gap between customer acquisition and customer retention.

Here's at least one comics dealer who sees free downloads of comics driving his business:

This is a message from Derithian who for some reason newsarama wont let him post it......maybe I just need to restart but I'm to busy right now RUNNING A COMIC SHOP!

I am going to come out and say it; I am a member of the z-cult. Not only that I'm a forum mod. To say anything different would put what I say in a different light. I found the Cult about a month after it started. I hadn't read a comic in more than 5 years and hated it all. Comic books were for kids and stupid. Then I downloaded because someone told me I had to read something. So I read it. A month later I opened my own shop.

Not only did I open my own shop, I sell comics to foreign members of z-cult from my shop who are interested in buying books but aren't in areas where you can buy them. Interesting isn't it. You can say all you want that downloading hurts the industry when I have personally because of the cult put tens of thousands of dollars back into the industry. Not to mention I started my own comic development studio to publish local writers online.

Link (Thanks, Max!)

A group of shepherds on La Gomera in the Canary Islands communicate with each other by whistling. Now, researchers at the University of Washington say that functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals that the shepherds' brains process the whistled language, called the Silbo Gomero, in the same way spoken languages are processed. From a Reuters report:

When the whistlers listened to Silbo sentences, regions in the left side of their brain were activated, including areas linked to language production and comprehension, along with a region in the right hemisphere thought to be associated with linguistic processing....

The Silbo, which is thought to have been brought to the island by Berbers from North Africa, condenses Spanish into two vowels and four consonants.

Whistled languages are also used in Greece, Turkey, China and Mexico, according to (researcher David) Corina.

Link

Neuroscientists at CalTech are studying a woman (known as SM) who can look at a person and recognize when they're happy, sad, or angry. But she can't tell if someone looks frightened. The reasons they've uncovered could someday lead to new treatments for people with autism. From News@Nature:

The researchers were intrigued to find that SM totally avoided looking at people's eyes. She discerned her information simply from looking around the nose and mouth.

This was generally enough for her to identify emotions such as happiness or anger, where features such as a smile, or bared teeth, are important.

But wide eyes are a particularly important component of a fearful expression. Because SM was only looking at the nose and mouth, she did not notice the eyes and concluded that the person was feeling neutral.

"First you have to look at the eyes, and then the brain has to make use of that information to figure out it's fear," explains (researcher Ralph) Adolphs.

Link

This website presents a key to translating Starbusian pidgin Latin (want a mochalattamericanafrappaspressachino?) into English for coffee civilians.

Single Made with just one shot of espresso. This is the normal amount for all Tall-sized drinks except Mocha Valencias and Americanos.

Double Made with two shots. This is the normal amount for all Grande- and hot Venti-sized drinks except Mocha Valencias and Americanos. Also the normal amount for Tall-sized Mocha Valencias and Americanos.

Triple Made with three shots. This is the normal amount for Grande- and Venti-sized Mocha Valencias and Americanos. Also the normal amount for most iced Venti-sized drinks.

Quad Made with four shots. Hope you weren't planning on sleeping anytime soon.

Ristretto This is so rarely requested that even many baristas don't recognize it. A normal shot of espresso takes about twenty seconds to pull; a ristretto shot is stopped at fifteen seconds, making a slightly smaller, less bold shot.

Link (via Kottke)

Following up on yesterday's Boing Boing post about Bill Gates describing free culture advocates as a "modern-day sort of communists," reader Jaime whipped up this bit of Soviet Constructivist goodness. Further the cause, comrade! Link to full-size.

Update: More propaganda here.