A piece of the picket fence from Dallas' Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated, goes up for online auction tomorrow through Lelands.com. Minimum opening bid is $5000. Some believe that a second gunman fired away at JFK from behind the fence. From the Associated Press:

The fence was rescued from the junk heap five years ago by Dealey Plaza tour guide Ronald D. Rice. When a construction crew began dismantling the fence to replace it in January 2000, Rice grabbed four sections each nearly 6 feet long and 4 1/2 feet high and put them into storage.

When the storage payments were not made, the fence was sold at public auction to Daniel Moses, who approached Lelands last year about selling it off...

Several of the pickets have JFK-related graffiti, including the message, "Oswald Was Framed."

Link

This "WARNING ARTIST SUPPORTS FILESHARING" seal is designed to fit in the slot normally filled by the FBI's new "FBI ANTI-PIRACY WARNING" seal that mars the backs of so many new CDs.

You need something to alert your customers that they won't face 20 years of prison time for letting a friend download your album. In an effort to combat the Anti-Piracy Seal, I have created an alternative logo for artists who aren't concerned with file sharing and federal level copyright infringement.

Link (Thanks, Nick!)

The advent of a blood-powered fuel-cell, intended for use in implanted prostheses, is a real cyberpunkian turn of affairs, rips for plot-twists regardign vampiric blood-farms powering illicit banks of icebreakers and the like.

A Japanese research team has developed a fuel cell that runs on blood without using toxic substances, opening the way for use in artificial hearts and other organs.

The biological fuel cell uses glucose, a sugar in blood, with a non-toxic substance used to draw electrons from glucose, said the team led by Matsuhiko Nishizawa, bio-engineering professor at the graduate school of state-run Tohoku University.

Link (via Futurismic)

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a trade organization to which I belong, has a vocal contingent who are freaked out about "ebook piracy." They publish jeremiads about fans who scan the books they love and post them on the Internet, and even recently promulgated a nonbinding "code of conduct" (e.g. a loyalty oath) in which members were instructed to "not plagiarize, pirate, or otherwise infringe intellectual property rights (copyright, patent, and trademark) or encourage others to do so." (Patents? Trademarks? Huh?) They have a snitch line in case you find a "pirated" ebook and want to fink out the poster. They even created and then patented a surreal and ineffective technique for spoofing corrupted ebooks into P2P networks (why an organization devoted to helping sf writers in a world of declining sf readership should undertake to convince people not to read sf books, however acquired, is beyond me).

Now the organization has sent out a "push poll" to its members about Amazon's tool for searching and retrieving the fulltext of the books it sells, in which writers were asked questions like "how much of [your work] would you like customers (and pirates) to be able to read without paying?" Additionally, it included brief editorials about the coming infocalypse that "piracy" would bring about. Clearly, this poll was intended to tell SFWA's members how to feel, not gauge how they feel, which is very much in keeping with the organization's creations of loyalty oaths on "intellectual property" in which members are instructed to take vows not to violate patents (again: patents? Huh? Why do SFWA members care if I violate a patent? If I have streaming media on my website without compensating the shakedown artists at Acacia, who claim a patent on all streaming media, am I a bad person? What if I used a Blackberry during the months before RIM settled with the DC-area patent squatters who claim a patent on thumb-keyboards? Cheez!)

My friend, John Scalzi, who got a two-book deal with Tor after he posted a novel in installments to his blog, has written an excellent essay about his feelings on ebook "piracy" and why this push-polling and associated torch-and-pitchforkery is so misguided. John's first book is in its third or fourth hardcover printing, so I'm inclined to listen to what he has to say about the needs of successful new sf writers:

Let's ask: Who are pirates? They are people who won't pay for things (i.e., dickheads), or they're people who can't pay for things (i.e., cash-strapped college students and others). The dickheads have ever been with us; they wouldn't pay even if they had the money. I don't worry about them, I just hope they fall down an abandoned well, break their legs and die of gangrene after several excruciatingly painful days of misery and dehydration, and then I hope the rats chew the marrow from their bones and shit back down the hollows. And that's that for them.

As for the people who can't pay for things, well, look. I grew up poor and made music tapes off the radio; my entire music collection from ages 11 to 14 consisted of tapes that had songs missing their first ten seconds and whose final ten second had DJ chatter on them; from 14 to 18, I taped off my friends; from 18 to 22 I reviewed music so I could get it for free. And then after that, once I had money, I bought my music. Because I could. As for books, I bought secondhand paperbacks through my teen and college years. Now I buy hardbacks. Again, because I can. Now, being a writer, you can argue that I'm more self-interested in paying for creative work than others, but I have to honestly say that I don't know anyone who can pay for a book or a CD or a DVD or whatever who doesn't, far more often than not.

Link

I've just finished my review copy of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. Steven also wrote such fantastic books as Emergence and Mind Wide Open, so I had high expectations for this one and I wasn't disappointed.

The thesis of Everything Bad is Good for You is this: people who deride popular culture do so because so much of popcult's subject matter is banal or offensive. But the beneficial elements of videogames and TV arise not from their subject matter, but from their format, which require that players and viewers winkle out complex storylines and puzzles, getting a "cognitive workout" that teaches the same kind of skills that math problems and chess games impart. As Johnson points out, no one evaluates the benefit of chess based on its storyline or monotonically militaristic subject matter.

Johnson's thesis emerges in a delightful and accessible blend of stats, anecdotes and argument. His chapter on television, which compares the plots of Dragnet, Hill Street Blues and the Sopranos, is a flat-out hoot, which made me re-think the way that I judge the value of TV. Likewise the stuff on video games, and the idea that the point of most games is to first figure out what the point of the game is, mirroring the real world, where the point is often to figure out what the point is.

The field I work in, science fiction novels, has been in decline now for decades, with readership, con attendance, magazine subscriptions and print-runs all way down. In large part, they're being displaced by games and TV and DVDs, which also make up the majority of square footage in your typical sf specialty bookstore. Understanding the appeal of these media -- and in particular, the neuroscience of gaming and its relationship to brain-reward -- makes me feel like I'm better prepared for the future.

At 52,000 words, Everything Bad is Good for You is about the same length as a walk-through for a PC game (something Johnson points out with great delight), but it's far more entertaining. Johnson's a sharp thinker and observer, and while he's not afraid to argue politically unpopular arguments like the one in this book, he's also no reflexive contrarian out to shock people with his naughtiness. This is a thoughtful, thought-provoking read, and one that I heartily recommend. I wish he'd arranged for a Creative Commons online edition, because there're so many well-argued passages that would be a natural for pastebombing into online discussions. Link

Wolfgang Puck is deploying a new canned latte with a chemical heating element in the base that boils your drink in six to eight minutes.

It took a California company named OnTech seven years and $24 million to create the self-heating cans, which are activated by pushing a plastic button on the bottom. Water flows into a sealed inner cone filled with quicklime, which is mostly calcium oxide. A chemical reaction heats the coffee to a pleasant 145 degrees in six to eight minutes, the amount of time it might take to order, pay for and receive a latte from a barista.

Link (via Make Blog)

Aardman Animation, the genii behind the stop-motion claymation films Wallace and Grommit and Chicken Run, have hired John Cleese to write a 2006 movie for them, about prehistoric tribal clashes.

Monty Python star John Cleese is writing the next feature film for Aardman Animations, the makers of Wallace and Gromit have announced.

Aardman co-founder Peter Lord said the Fawlty Towers actor was currently writing the "pre-historic comedy".

Link (via /.)

This 12" tiki from Disneyland's Enchanted TIki Room is on sale for seven freaking thousand dollars on eBay. For that kinda money you could commission Oceanic Arts (who supplied many of Disneyland's tikis) to knock off an entire garden of these adorable lil guys for you. Link (Thanks, Swanky!)

Inhabitat writes about a shelving system made from modular Tetris shaped boxes. They look really nice. Link (Thanks, Dan!)