Justine Cooper was the first artist-in-residence at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. During her residency, she explored the back passageways, storage rooms, and specimen cases where the majority of the museum's collection is stored. Cooper documented what she saw using a wood 4x5 view camera from 1910. Her huge photographs are a stunning testament to the wonder and oddity of nature as we collect it. Cooper's show, Saved By Science, at the Kashya Hildebrand gallery in New York closed today, but much of the work can be viewed online. (Seen here: Trophies | 30" x 39") From the press release and artist statement:

Sheer optical exuberance surfaces from a set of Graphium sarpedon butterflies. In the Victorian attic a group of donated ex-Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers Circus seals, swathed in plastic wrap, await their departure to climate-controlled storage. The 21st century liquid nitrogen cooled frozen tissue collection holds a million specimens in a room the size of a studio apartment. Immense corridors of locked steel storage cabinets most powerfully express the veil of structure dropped over the complexity of nature...

The photographs present the stored collections as both an evolution of the collecting and storing process, and as an historical and contemporary perspective on how we systematize and assign value to nature.

Link (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)

Today's New York Times profiles swordswallower/prestidigitator Johnny Fox, proprietor of the recently-closed Freakatorium, a cabinet of curiosities in New York City's Lower East Side. From the New York Times (photo by Douglas Healey):

In January, Mr. Fox's rent went up and he had to close. Now he has moved his wonders to a farmhouse in Connecticut where the only thing they collect these days is dust.

His narwhal tusks stand in the attic near a loose pile of taxidermic heads. His elephant's-foot liquor chest sits in the living room, seen by no one but himself.

His two-headed turtle lives downstairs in the basement with a sleepy boa constrictor. Out in the garage - forgotten - are Tom Thumb's vest and Sammy Davis Jr.'s glass eye.

"I'd love for this stuff to be in New York," said Mr. Fox, a sinewy and black-haired man of 52. "New York needs this kind of stuff, but who supports it anymore?"

It is a hard question to answer. Mr. Fox discovered that his Freakatorium was not the tourist destination he had hoped it would be. Even with its relatively modest $5 admission fee, it drew only 5 to 15 visitors a day....

He has even thought of changing the roguish name of his establishment to cater to a different clientele.

"I figured we could call it the Chamber of Wonders, not the Freak-atorium," he said. "Freak sometimes has a stigma to it. We could do something family-inviting."

Even at its height, the Freakatorium was never meant to be a profit center. It was rather Mr. Fox's chance to earn a living while sharing his obsessions with the world.

Link

This morning I went to the LA garment district knockoff haven known as Santee Alley, with pals Jeff Koga and Sean Bonner. We found lots of neat-o bootleg crap, including these awesome framed pirate gangsta artworks (bad unauthorized photocopy of a still from Scarface on one side, and little diorama of toy machine gun, fake money, and blinged out bullets on the other side). Other finds included scrolling digital LED belt buckles, clothing stores promising plus size fashions for "Phat Women", toy laptops running pirated warez, and much more. The best we can't blog yet... stay tuned for a report on the best booty of pirate-town, slated to run in Wired News on Tuesday (with photos shot by Sean and Jeff).
Link to my Santee Alley Treo snapshot flickr set. Here are more snaps from today's li'l field trip, from Sean: Link

real art
art or crap
silhouette cutting
rasterbater
do it: manual
is this important?
pac mondrian
selling digital art
abc of art
the-artists.org
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

Nina Gordon, late of Veruca Salt, has recorded a mind-blowing cover of NWA's Straight Outta Compton, in the style of a Baezesque guitar folksinger. It's funny at first, then it's beautiful, then it's both. 5.5 MB MP3 Link, Nina Gordon music download page (Thanks, Ben!)

David Weinberger notes that the Indian film industry is going to start pixellating cigarettes in movies "to avoid glamorizing them" and may add anti-smoking messages onscreen while cigs are present.

Weinberger wisely observes, however, "Doesn't the Indian government know that in American movies smoking is a sure sign that you're a bad guy/gal whose comeuppance will come long before lung cancer can take hold?" Link

This year's ExtremeTech casemodding competition theme was "science fiction," and the first winner has been announced: a Star Wars TIE Fighter mod that cost $300 (not including computer components)and took four months. Link (via Wonderland)

I don't hardly eat sugar, and I practically never eat dessert, but last night, Ben Hammersley took me to Hemingway's, a chocolate joint in Florence, Italy. I have never, ever tasted anything remotely as good as the things I tasted last night. I ate so much chocolate that I sweated it all night. It was completely worth it. Examine this picture of me closely: that expression on my face is chocolate ecstasy.

There were many delicious things on offer at Hemingway's, but two were so good as to be life-changing. The first was a flourless, eggless dark chocolate torte, which had the consistency of the inside of a truffle and was served slightly chilled. Every mouthful of this made me feel like something important in my mouth was bursting. There were medieval princes who spent lifetimes searching for experiences that did this sort of thing to your sensory apparatus. Whatever they found was nothing so good as this.

But the very best was their Mexican-style drinking chocolate, called the Montezuma, a viscous drink made with very bitter chocolate, seasoned with chillies, aged Cuban rum (I don't drink, either, but I had two of these), and cinnamon and nutmeg. The longer I held sips of Montezuma in my mouth, the more flavors and subtleties I discovered. The chillies suffused my sinuses and the rum made my whole abdomen glow gently, like banked coals. This was, without a doubt, the best thing I ever tasted, and possibly the best sensation I've ever experienced. I've seen people in religious ecstasy. That's what this felt like.

Afterwards, I fell asleep for half an hour on the sofa in Hemingway's, collapsed on one of my dining companions. My brain was overwhelmed with the tastes, and it had to shut my body off so that it could process the input. I have a feeling that from now on, whenever a little money finds its way into my pocket, the temptation to blow it on a plane ticket to Florence (cheap from London, as these things go) and have a cup of Hemingway's Montezuma is going to be nigh-irresistible. I no longer feel the need to blow my cash on computers or gadgets -- just hook an IV of this thing straight into my arm and leave me to die by chocolate. Link

The people in the Twin Towers who ignored the instructions from the cops to stay put survived. The ones who paid attention to them died. Gary Wolf's tantalizing piece in this month's Wired concludes that the future of American security lies in ignoring the Department of Homeland Security, with its "rainbow of doom," its magic airport involuntary nudity machines, and its suspension of the Constitution and relying instead on common sense and democratic fundamentals.

After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.

Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives. This disobedience had nothing to do with panic. The report documents how evacuees stopped to help the injured and assist the mobility-impaired, even to give emotional comfort. Not panic but what disaster experts call reasoned flight ruled the day.

In fact, the people inside the towers were better informed and far more knowledgeable than emergency operators far from the scene. While walking down the stairs, they answered their cell phones and glanced at their BlackBerries, learning from friends that there had been a terrorist attack and that the Pentagon had also been hit. News of what was happening passed by word of mouth, and fellow workers pressed hesitating colleagues to continue their exit.

Link

Shawn sez, "I just posted this defense of Bit Torrent on my personal journal after receiving a C&D letter from my webhosting service demanding I stop sharing 'copyrighted' material, even though it's made very clear on my site that the files I host on my Blog Torrent install are my own creations (well, me and my friends, but they're all cool with it). The file in question is a short documentary about Booth Babes my wife and I made and posted on our site back in 2001, and the file that tipped them off was generated by my test install of Broadcast Machine (which has been mysteriously not working on my server)."

I don't want them to turn off my websites. And this is not any kind of civil disobedience, which would involve breaking a law. I'm just uploading my files to the Internet and trying out some technologies to facilitate this with the lowest demand on my webserver. If hosting companies apply some kind of blanket filter against .torrent files, that will seriously limit our ability to share media and content. It is completely unacceptable for web servers to do this kind of unmonitored regulation and threatening. What if I had been on vacation, couldn't respond, and they shut down my site in a week?

The hosting company in question is 1and1. Their phone number is 1-877-GO-1AND1. The main email address is info@1and1.com. Link Updated Link (Thanks, Shawn!)

Update: Shawn sez, "I spoke with a very nice Indian man named "Andre" who seemed to grasp the silliness of the situation. He escalated the issue to his manager, and said I should hear back within 24 hours. So I've been waiting. No reply to my email either so far.

"The story has pretty much nuked elmwoodstrip.com, which is a great local Buffalo journalling site. Out of respect for my friends there, and to keep the word out, I've reposted the entire entry on my personal site.

Link to auction. Goatse is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and I'm fairly sure the seller does not see what we see. Link to worksafe description of the phenomenon in question.
(Thanks, Brett W)

From a New York Times article on a retrospective of the artist's work in Houston:

He sat facing the gallery's largest painting, an allegory of Orpheus' trip to the underworld, 13 feet high and a whopping 52 feet long. Painted between 1972 and 1994, it has been called by assorted names, including, "Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor" - a reference to the Roman poet who, like Mr. Twombly, deftly mixed learned allusion and earthy expression.

With evident pleasure, the artist recounted the painting's effect on a young Frenchwoman who visited the gallery some years ago. The lone guard found her standing in front of the vivid whorls, scattered verses and bright splatters of color, totally nude.

"Right here in this room!" Mr. Twombly affirmed. He was delighted, he said. "Wouldn't you be? That's pretty good. No one can top that one. Come on. How many people ?"

His words then evaporated like the mysterious markings that twitter across his works before seemingly lifting off and wafting away.

The guard, Guillermo Leguizamon, recalls gathering his wits and telling the museum visitor, "I can admire your beauty, madam, but if you don't put on your clothes, you'll be more famous than Cy Twombly himself." She dressed and departed, leaving a message in the guest book: "The painting makes me want to run naked."

Link (thanks Susannah Breslin!)

Snip from instructional caption for the lethal "MONKEY STEALS THE PEACH" move: "Followers of the Iron Hand styles immediately clench their fists tightly, with a crushing grip, and jerk the hand sharply back to the near hip, effectively ripping away the genitals. Massive blood loss causes death."

Link to flickr post by Theremina, and here's the full-size image (jpeg). (via Warren Ellis)

Reader comment: CMorrigu says,

In reference to the "Teaches with Peaches" story about "Monkey Steals the Peach" - the book this was taken from is Ninja Mind Control by Ashida Kim. I've owned this book for many years, and those two pages have always been the highlight. I used to show that section off to people all the time, but then I forgot about it. Thanks to Warren's post yesterday, I dragged the book out and laughed all over again.

Once you install GNU/Linux on your iPod, you can play videos on it! Link (via MAKE Blog)

This baby punk tee sports age-appropriate nihilistic slogans such as ANTI-CRIB and BEDTIME SUCKS. Link (via Preshrunk)

A pink toolkit -- "for the ladies." Comes with "hot pink screwdrivers, hammer, pliers, scissors 'n more" Link (via Wonderland)

Jeff sez, "CommonBits, the progressive media directory, has links to torrents of new Daily Show clips:"

• Crimes Tom DeLay Hasn't Committed
• Stephen Colbert on Deep Throat
• Bush-Cheney on Amnesty International (we know a gulag when we see one)
• Will Arlen Specter live long enough to see Bush veto his stem cell research legislation?
• Jon Stewart interviews Gerald Posner author of Secrets of the Kingdom
• Rob Cordry on Gas Prices
• Sunday Justice with Stephen Colbert
• Jon Stewart interviews Floyd Abrams author of Speak Freely

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

An Austrian/Japanese design team has launched a line of clothing for chickens. Clothing. For. Chickens. Link (Thanks, Cherie!)

Andrew sez, "SlashdotReview is a daily (except Saturday) 10 minute podcast summary of recent items from Slashdot, plus a single non-RIAA music track. Daily comments from the show are blogged at the site." Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

This prankster started signing his credit card receipts in all sorts of unusual ways (scribbles, heiroglyphics, grids, etc.). The employees handling the transactions didn't care one whit. They didn't even look at the signatures.
Link

I'll be appearing on CNN Showbiz Tonight (4-5PM PT) today in a segment about the class action suit against Apple over iPod battery life problems. Link to show.

Here's the class action settlement website: appleipodsettlement.com. Here's the area of Apple's website devoted to iPods and battery life: apple.com/batteries/ipods.htm. More news on the proposed consumer settlement here: Link to Wired News story.

Previous BB posts on this topic (all from my blog-mate Cory): iPod battery motion comes to Parliament , Anti-advertising to out iPod's dirty secret , iPod batteries have a one-year duty-cycle.

This dress-shirt iron seems like a fantastic idea -- wrap your shirts around an inflatable form and it somehow renders them wrinkle-free. As meditative and Zen as ironing can be, this would kick all kinds of ass when it comes to getting my hated dress-shirts looking good enough to go to meetings in.

12 programmable options for ironing shirts made of silk, rayon, cotton, linen and all other non-stretch fabrics

1 cool programme for airing and freshening outerwear garments like sports coats and jackets

2 warm air programmes for drying damp jackets and ironing them if required

Link (via Shiny Shiny)

Behold the new Cowboy Fluke ukulele, designed by Tiki King. (Flukes are the best sounding ukuleles in the world, by the way.)
Link

Last night, my blog-pal Jen Collins and I crammed our pockets with tiny imaging devices and crashed the "Looking at Los Angeles" launch party at the Gallery at Hermès on Rodeo Drive. The phonecam snap here is Jen with Ed Ruscha (okay, one of his photos) all over her face.

Rodeo is pronounced "ro-DAY-oh," and Hermès is pronounced "air-MEHZZ", which led us to wonder whether the cultured elite who frequent both places refer to a popular sexually transmitted disease as "air-PEHZZ."

Guests spotted included Ben Stiller, Diane Keaton, Eve, and artist Christian Moeller -- he designed a multimedia installation on the boutique's third floor with images from this new book of photography, Looking at Los Angeles (Metropolis), edited by Stiller with Marla Hamburg Kennedy. Lots of cool images in the book. Images of the city's past. The people, the architecture, the place as it ages and regenerates over time. Some projected on walls, others viewable through a long bank of little pinholes; attendees bend forward, peek inside, see a photo.

Paparrazi take more photos, tuna tartare trays float by. Young, hot wall candy chat behind flutes of Veuve Clicquot.

But when Jen and I walk outside, we witness something amazing. Like walking into a David Lynch film, or one of the photos from the book. An elderly gentleman -- must have been a vet -- drove by in a big white boat of a car. US and Marine flags on the roof; sad, old music blaring from an ancient radio inside. He'd left the interior light on. The car seemed to swallow him. We wondered how his feet reached the pedals. He drove about 3 miles an hour; even stillettoed celebutantes outpaced him. Everyone on the street stopped as the car approached, stared, listened.

"So was that guy a ghost, maybe, or what?," asked Jen. "I wish I could identify the music--I think that would help me understand him a little. What do you think it was?"

Link to crap-o phonecam video of unidentified elder Marine vet driving amazing boat-car with spooky music (.avi, 4.5 MB).

Reader comment: Kit Goode says, "Nightmare by Artie Shaw was playing in the background of the video you posted."

And Michael Gonyea adds, "The gentleman in your video appears to be driving a 1990 - '97 Lincoln Towncar. I instantly recognized it because I unfortunely drive one at the moment."

Link to crap-o phonecam video of Jen and other Hermès gallery opening attendees. (3g2, 450K)
Link to more phonecam snapshots of Jen.

Here's an excerpt from the book -- an essay by Ben Stiller:

When I was a child growing up in New York, Los Angeles was always a special destination. Coming here meant Disneyland, sunshine, the Skipper Alan Hale Jr.’s Lobster Barrel on La Cienega Boulevard, Dudley Do-Right’s Cartoon Emporium on Sunset, the Universal Studios tour, my Uncle Charlie and Aunt Joanie’s cool turreted little Tudor in what I would later learn was Whitley Heights. The Magic Castle, miniature golf, and a long skateboard run on a new Fibreflex with Road Runner wheels down Sunset to where it fed out to the PCH.

It smelled different, it felt different — it was fantasyland. And I loved it. I guess that might be why I moved here eventually. And of course, I grew up, and my impression of L.A. changed. It became real. I discovered that life happened here like everywhere else. The special places of my youth were still special in my mind. But as time went by, it became just the place where I lived. Disneyland was just another exit on the freeway.

Image: Diane Arbus, A Castle in Disneyland (1962). Link to the rest of Stiller's essay, as reprinted in the LA Weekly. If you dig the book, check out this event happening in LA on June 18 hosted by the LA Conservancy (the group benefits from book sale proceeds): Link.

There's madness afoot over the new Harry Potter book. A UK tabloid tried to score a stolen advance copy and bungled it, amid gunfire (gunfire!). Also: bookmakers had to stop taking odds on who dies in the next book when a string of high-odds bets came in from the town where the book is being printed.

A Northamptonshire police spokesman said a person "in possession of firearms" had attempted to sell a copy of the new Potter novel.

Police said a firearm was allegedly later discharged at a property in Kettering...

Bookmakers were forced to suspend betting on the victim's identity late last month amid fears that the manuscript had been leaked.

Suspicions were aroused because of a string of bets on the death of (redacted for spoilers -- select text to see) the Hogwarts head teacher, Professor Dumbledore.

The flurry of bets came from the town of Bungay in Suffolk, where it is thought the book is being printed.

Link

Update: Tiara sez, "JK Rowling herself has posted in response to the bets - she's not saying anything, as to her it would be a great spoiler, but she says to keep 'those barrels of salt handy'."

Last month, I mentioned that Steve Lodefink was giving away a wonderful painting by Steve Keene. He said he would award to painting to the person who appeared to want it the most. People went to great lengths to try to convince Steve that they deserved the painting.

Lou — cuddled a warm bottle of pee in his cold aluminum foil clad truck canopy home.

chris bellerose — couldn’t wait for the contest to end, so he painted his own version.

matt — and I played a show together the week I got the painting.

KaiBeezy — wrote some really nice stuff.

Heidi — had “huge tits” (self described).

Mark Breakspear — denounced his candidacy.

In the end Tom Raywood used a combination of sheer tenacity, poetry, painting analysis and a strict interpretation of the contest mandate to convince me that he wanted it the most. Due to overwhelming response, I have decided to end the contest at the “end of the month” rather than “after one month’s time”

Link

Charles Phoenix has a huge collection of old photography slides, and he goes around the country giving narrated slide shows to large audiences. His next show is at the John Anson Ford Theater across from the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on June 16. (For ticket information go to www.fordamphitheater.org)

He also has a "slide of the week" mailing list. Sign up here. Here's the latest:

A friend and I were to be driving by the Sears Service Center in San Gabriel and a sign company had just finished removing the big, beautiful 50s era neon Sears sign off the front of the building. It was one of the last remaining examples of the old Sears signs “handwritten” in that classic script.  We stopped and asked the sign man if we could have it. He said that he couldn’t let us have the sign but we could have all of the neon. He hadn’t broken one tube while taking the sign down. So we carefully put all the neon in the car and kept begging for enormous porcelain letters. I thought no was his final answer… but there was hope! He said that he was going to take the sign to the dump in Santa Ana and we could be there when he took unloaded it and we could then take it - deal.  

We arrive at the dump and sure enough there he is, unloading the sign. We pull up right next to him in our borrowed pick-up and start loading up the letters. The letters were huge. The “S” was a taller than me. Just as we got it loaded on the truck a dump worker yells “hey, you can’t take that. This place is only for dumping, not for taking and you can’t take that sign.” Well, I begged for at least forty-five minutes until I realized that my pleading just wasn’t going to get us that sign. So I had to do what I didn’t want to do, cry. The first tear did the trick and five minutes later we were leaving the Santa Ana Dump with the Sign.

I filed a story today for Wired News about tech workers' reactions to news of a possible strike against game publishers by voiceover actors.

The video-game industry's geek workforce has something to say to Hollywood actors: Get in line for your share of the industry's profits.

"I'll back (the actors) when game programmers and artists get residuals first," said Mark Long, co-CEO of independent game-development company Zombie Studios. Based in Seattle, Long's 12-year-old company is behind such titles as America's Army and Shadow Ops: Red Mercury. "(They're) nuts if they think they deserve residuals for a half-day of voice-over work," said Long. "A development team (might) slave away for two years to produce a title."

The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists recently contacted members who have worked as game voice-over actors to request authorization of a labor stoppage against about 70 game publishers. The unions argue that actors who voice game characters should be entitled to a share of the industry's skyrocketing profits.

But the actors' demands have sparked renewed protest in tech circles that game workers deserve better treatment, too. If actors deserve residuals, the argument goes, then so do the people who write the code, build the characters and make things blow up.

Link

American Airlines ran a contest to give away a dozen tickets for two to anywhere in the world, but the way that they valued the prizes was falsely inflated, meaning that the "winners" paid more in taxes for their tickets than they would have paid if they'd bought the tickets over the net.

I spoke to the representative from Shamrock Companies, who indicated to me that American came up with this valuation based on a "worst case scenario" price. I explained to him that it was highly unlikely that I would be able to use all, if in fact, any of the vouchers to fly to exotic destinations. Due to the one year time limit, there is no way that I could get the time off for 12 such trips in such a short time, let alone pay the ancillary costs of the trips. Most likely, the majority of the tickets would be used to fly domestic short hops to places such as Miami or Chicago to visit friends. This is where American's valuations become absurd. On American's Web site, a ticket to Chicago costs approximately $200 including airport taxes. Yet, if I were to use one of these vouchers to fly to Chicago, I would be required to pay income tax on $2200. This could amount to approximately $1000 out of my pocket in taxes for a ticket worth $200. Not a very good deal, especially when you consider that I would also have to pay airport taxes on top of this.

Link (Thanks, Jack!)

The Russian successor to the KGB is considering a system for broad-scale Internet censorship (a la China) in order to forestall the Internet's use in political organizing, as in the Ukraine and elsewhere.

"If such attempts will be successful," he says, "if the Security Service will really carry out actions to control the internet, to block unfavourable internet sources, this will set Russia back many years in the sense of civil society."

Russia's already been widely criticised for winding back on democracy. The Kremlin controls most broadcast media, the Judiciary and the Parliament. Controlling the internet would be another sign that those in power won't brook any challenges.

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Here's a Flickr photo of Disney's new Pirate Planks-brand fishsticks. Pirate Planks! Link

Today's moment of inappropriate banner ad juxtaposition zen. BB reader David Grenewetzki says,

I had to laugh out loud while chasing "Deep Throat" links all over the web this morning when I ran across this interesting juxtaposition between headline and Career Builder ad on the Chicago Tribune site.

Link to full size screen grab.

Here are MP3s made from hundreds of 78RPM discs recorded between 1900 and 1930. Included are notes on the transfer process and discographic information. Link (via MAKE Blog)

Bob Woodward has written up an amazing description of the security practices instituted by Mark Felt during his Deep Throat period. Felt had been a G-Man for years, and had shadowed various suspected Soviet agents, so he knew how the Fed worked when it wanted to watch you, and devised a plan that would keep his deeds secret from his employer.

If you keep the drapes in your apartment closed, open them and that could signal me, he said. I could check each day or have them checked, and if they were open we could meet that night at a designated place. I liked to let the light in at times, I explained.

We needed another signal, he said, indicating that he could check my apartment regularly. He never explained how he could do this.

Feeling under some pressure, I said that I had a red cloth flag, less than a foot square -- the kind used as warnings on long truck loads -- that a girlfriend had found on the street. She had stuck it in an empty flowerpot on my apartment balcony.

Felt and I agreed that I would move the flowerpot with the flag, which usually was in the front near the railing, to the rear of the balcony if I urgently needed a meeting.

Link (via Schneier)

Jason Scott, creator of the kick-ass, five hour BBS Documentary, has written a stupendous essay on why he chose to license the produce of his years-long labor under a very liberal Creative Commons license:

Even if you are honest, open, friendly, making a kick-ass product and totally changing the world with your little whooziz, some people, on principle, do not pay for media. This is what they do and they have tools to get media for free, tools that are better than your tools are and which are much more ubiquitous and better updated. In realizing this, perhaps you will stop treating every single person who purchases your product like a scumbag, guilty until proven innocent, beneath and below you. A number of people do not pay. This happens at the circus, the rock concert, your local supermarket and at your job. To turn your customer base into a constantly-on-alert totalitarian wasteland is not the effective solution. Instead, assume that if you've actually made a unique, interesting product and put your heart into it and made something that can't truly be duplicated, people will pay. And if you treat them like they're human beings, they'll ask other people to pay too.

Result: You save a lot of lawyers fees, and people feel like customers and not shotgun targets. Also, your breath will smell better.

Link (via Waxy)

This summer, San Franciscans can send their kids to tinkering camp -- a week-long sleep-over camp for young inventors where they collaborate on hardware hacking projects under expert tutelage. Man, I would have loved to go to this camp when I was about 13 -- much more fun than ceramics camp!

The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids - ages 7 to 17 - learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized.

Link (via Make Blog)

The Joy of Tech has created an hilarious Steve Jobs dressup Flash app -- why should Steve be forced to do yet another MacWorld keynote in turtleneck and jeans? Dress him in a pirate hat, leather jacket, and tattoos, or a space-helmet and Mac boxers, or bell-bottoms and an Hawai'ian shirt. Link (Thanks, Robert!)

Matt Hinrichs of Scrubbles has a short review of a 1955 industrial movie on the Prelinger Archives called "Design for Dreaming." What a find!

In it, a woman dreams that a masked stranger floats her to an auto show to see the gleaming General Motors product line for 1956. Lovely! For some reason, she's then transported a space-age kitchen to make a cake. Then she performs a rhythmic "dance to the future" which I'm sure had Bob Fosse quaking in his boots.

Link

Reader comment: Mike Sizemore says: "As an update to the Boing Boing post on that Design for Dreaming movie, you may want to add that it's a favourite of David Lynch too.

"Back around the time that Blue Velvet was released the BBC did an ARENA special on Lynch and Blue Velvet. Most of the doc featured Lynch in a cinema talking about his influences and Design for Dreaming was one of the movies featured. Lynch also 'played' the projectionist who would have to spring into action whenever his doppelganger in the seats shouted 'roll it.'

"Maybe one of the Boing Boingers has a copy of the documentary? I'd love to see it again..." (email Mike if you have the documentary and want to loan it to him.)

Update: A bunch of people have emailed me to let me know that "Design for Dreaming" was adulterated by one of my least favorite TV shows, Mystery Science Theater 3000. That's a shame.

Mari of Japan has an informative blog entry about the hanko system. Hanko are cool looking little stamps used in Japan as signatures on legal documents. After an introduction to the hanko system, she goes on to report on a recent mix-up involving hanko.

Two peoples withdrew money from a bank with identical seals. Guess what?  They both lost $4000 or so. In the court sentence for this case, the guy will be reimbursed in full, because the seal of the copy hanko was different. The edge was thicker. As a proffessional, the bank should have found the difference when they saw the paper. The women will not get any money, because in her case the copy seal looked very close and it was hard to tell the difference...

Link

Reader comment: Joi Ito says: "I was on a government study group of the National Police Agency in Japan and we were discussing digital signatures. One police forensics guy said that with Hanko, they traced the hanko inks used in different banks for verifying where the hanko was used and they were worried, at the time, that they wouldn't be able to use this technique with digital signatures. Also, there have been some very good hanko copying technologies demonstrated on TV.

"One more thing, in Japan, you have 'jitsuin' and 'sanmonban.' Jitsuin is the hanko that you register with the government. Anything stamped with that is legally binding whether you stamped it yourself or not. With a sanmonban, which is not registered with the government, unless you stamped it yourself or allowed someone to stamp with with intent, legally, I think you can get out of being responsible."

Bukkake opens all doors! BB reader Stanley says,

Japanese porn makes its way to the PSP's movie format. An interesting comment from the article: "Some consumers are questioning Sony's decision to accept material from adult-content publishers, while others surmise that the company has learned from the war between Betamax and VHS that adult-oriented movies can significantly affect the expansion of a new media format. One of the reasons for the failure of the Betamax format was the explosion of VHS adult movies, since this genre was not given production clearance in Sony's Betamax format."

Shown here, the cover of one Glay'z title destined for the PSP -- it bears the timeless janglish title, "The Nurse Of A Big Breast." Not worksafe.

Link to gamespot news item, which is worksafe.

The Expression Synthesis Project (ESP) from the University of Southern California uses an automobile's driving interface to control a piece of music. Engineer/pianist Elaine Chew and her grad students first transform a MIDI musical score into a "road" that maps the basic structure of the piece. The wheel and pedals enable the performer to "drive" the song and reinterpret the composition in real time. From USC:

The road's turns suggest to the driver when to slow down and speed up. however, the ultimate decision on what to do at each turn is entirely in the driver's hands (or foot). The foot pedals control both the tempo and the volume of the music. Additionally, buttons mounted on the wheel (see photo) act as the equivalent of the pedals on the piano, making the notes either sustain or cut off crisply.

Link to press release, Link to project page

Here's the Daily Show segment on the revelation of Deep Throat's identity. As always: blisteringly funny and very true. 6.3MB Quicktime Link Updated Link

Quinn Norton has a terrific article in today's Guardian on the tension between infringing and noninfringing uses for BitTorrent:

Anyone can put up a link to a small ".torrent" file on their website, host an initial "seed" file, and set up an independent "tracker" that points downloaders to each other. If the file becomes popular, copies begin to sprout up around the internet, at no extra cost.

This, while unpopular with the MPAA, was great for Shane Felux, maker of the fan movie Star Wars: Revelations. Felux and his wife, Dawn Cowings, worked with fans all over the world for three years to make a surprisingly beautiful 47-minute movie, complete with Star Wars-quality special effects. Revelations has moved thousands of gigabytes a day of 250MB movies and a DVD version. George Lucas is fine with fan creations as long as they don't slander his original and are free. Since Felux and Cowings can't charge, paying for hosting wasn't an option. BitTorrent allowed that burden to be carried by fans downloading and sharing the files themselves.

Link (via Ambiguous)

Tom sez, "The Virgo Consortium, a group of astrophysicsts from the Britain, Germany, the US and Canada, have created a simulation of the universe:"

"The simulated universe represents a cube of creation with sides that measure 2bn light years. It is home to 20m galaxies, large and small. It has been designed to answer questions about the past, but it offers the tantalising opportunity to fast-forward in time to the slow death of the galaxies, billions of years from now..."

"Unlike people who study human behaviour, who can study many humans, cosmologists have been stuck with only the one universe. Well, from today we have more than one."

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Tom sez, "Ever want to listen to all the audio mentioned on Boing Boing instaautomagicaly? Ever wish all that great audio would just show up via your Podcastcher and autmogaical on you mp3 player? Ever just want to kick back and stream it all to whereever you happen to be in meatspace?

"For the last couple of months I have been using the amazing webjay.org to do just this. I have been making a webjay playlist of all the audio stuff mentioned on boing boing so that I can grab it via my podcatcher, let folks play it on a web based flasher player on my web page and in general just have one place to send folks when I am babling on about the cool thing I heard on Boing Boing in recent months." Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Snipped a report issued by China's official news agency Xinhua:

Dell Inc. is facing severe criticism in China for allegations that a US-based salesperson sent an email discouraging former IBM clients in America from buying Lenovo products. In the alleged email published last week by a Chinese business newspaper, a Dell salesperson wrote: "As you know Lenovo is a Chinese government owned company that recently purchased IBM's desktop business. While the US government has given its stamp of approval to continue to purchase these units, people must understand that every dollar clients spent on these IBM systems is directly supporting/funding the Chinese government."

Link (Thanks, Tian)

Richard Giles previously interviewed Cory, Xeni, and Mark and Carla for his Gadget Show podcast. His interview with me is now online too. We spoke about some of my favorite curiosities, how I met Mark and Carla, and an assortment of other mutant topics. I hope you enjoy it! Link (Thanks, Richard!)

In today's Wall Street Journal, a feature on a PC modder subculture devoted to making computers as quiet as possible. Carl Bialik of the WSJ online team says,

To eliminate background hums, the sounds of noisy fans and whines from spinning parts -- even levels as low as 30 to 35 decibels are considered objectionable by some -- engineers have used tools as varied as a clothes-dryer exhaust hose and an empty plastic snack cup. One computer programmer tells the Journal, "This is what happens when you start getting into quiet computing. Your standards for how loud is too loud...get lower and lower."

reg-free Link to article.

Previously on Boing Boing: Computer sits in an aquarium filled with oil -- and still works

"MEDIA ALERT: Prophet Yahweh, Seer of Yahweh, will be calling down UFOs and spaceships for the news media to film and photograph. During this time, a spaceship will descend, on Prophet's signal, and sit in the skies over Las Vegas, Nevada for almost two days." Beats the earnings reports and photo opp alerts one usually finds on PRweb.

Link to press release. Apparently this began on June 1, so we're admittedly a bit late on the news. Sorry about that. (Thanks, Alex Kelly)

Update: INTERGALASMIC HOAX ALERT: A warning for those of you who've been snorting too much Oxytocin -- it's entirely possible that none of this is true.

Boing Boing reader Gridlock adds,

Through the wonders of security-through-obscurity, you can view a video of Prophet Yahweh summoning a UFO in his /video/ dir on his site. Have to say, I'm impressed - I wish I could make bouncy shiny things appear at will.

Link to Windows Media vid.

Reader Scott says,

I have been following this story since I first saw the television news footage of him supposedly summoning a UFO through prayer ( Link ). A bit of research has turned up a site called "A False Prophet" ( Link ), which has links to pictures of Prophet Yahweh holding up mylar weather balloons, which are commonly mistaken for more exotic UFOs. The pictures were taken in 1997, shortly before he came public about his "abilities." From his 1997 press release....

"The reason why I'm writing you is so I can introduce myself to you and because I'm trying to find people that will help me get a new camera. Because of how these UFO's and spaceships are appearing before me and allowing me to film them, I'm destined to be a wealthy man in the very near future. Maybe we can make money together on my research."

Additionally, a source suggested to me that Prophet Yahweh, aka Ramone Watkins, does not lead the life of humility and poverty that he sometimes claims. It appears that he currently has an income of $150,000 ( Link ) and owns a TV production company ( Link ).

Deep Fried Geekboy hollers,

Here's more video of prophet yahweh summoning UFOS, for ABC news [Las Vegas ABC television affiliate KNTV] this time. The reporter is flummoxed.

Link, alternate link, still another link. (thanks, Chris, thanks Michael)

vnt sez:

All the Yahweh videos, easy to access on this mirror site: Link. The prophet hide the links to the vids hosted on his site :)

(Thanks, Jay in Pittsburgh, and Pesco!)

I've just finished listening to the audio of last month's NY Public Library presentation by Larry Lessig and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, moderated by Steven Johnson, author of such books as Everything Bad is Good For You.

It starts out as a standard (which is to say, brilliant) Lessig presentation that runs about 20 minutes, but even if you've heard such before, the next hour-plus is a remarkable dialogue between Lessig and Tweedy, in which Tweedy really takes the fore, running down the artist's case for Free Culture, for embracing P2P and explaining that opposing P2P is pretty moot, given that P2P isn't going anywhere. I was especially fascinated by the idea that the ban on sampling -- which disproportionately punishes African-American forms of music -- is at its root racist.

I've gone to a lot of events like this, and it's tempting to think that you've heard it all before, but there was a lot of new material here -- it was inspiring. Link (via Lessig)