Exonumia galore. More than 300 close-up photos of custom arcade tokens. None have cash value; each once bought a few minutes' time in another world. To what game does this grant admittance?

Link (Thanks, Sean Hannan)

Reader comment: tamarindpup says,

I don't think the Department of Defense token is in fact a gaming token. It's very common in the armed forces for various directorates, ships, bases or other units to give out coin-like tokens as souvenirs. These are given to VIPs, not so VIPs, and other visitors. Many military contractors do the same thing. The idea is to commemorate the visit with something that's unmistakably trivial in value. This DoD one might have the issuing group's name on the other side.

Nick Gamroth says,

Here's the nearly interesting story behind those armed forces coins (at least why the Air Force has them). Back in the old days, and maybe still today, pilots would carry around a single bullet to use in the event that they went down in enemy territory or were near-fatally injured and wouldn't make it back.

So then this ended up being a sort of bar game where these pilots would challenge each other to see if the other one had his bullet.

So, one takes out a bullet at a bar and taps it on the bar (the challenge). If the other one has his bullet on him, he takes it out and taps it on the bar. In this case, the challenger has to buy drinks. If the second pilot doesn't have his bullet, he has to buy drinks for everybody. So somehow it changed into coins instead of bullets.

Matthew Smith says,

If you look at the comments on that picture, you can see the flip side of the coin. Also, the coins given out by different military organizations are generally much larger and thicker, as well as more ornate than the coin listed there. Many military bases still have video games machines on them, and I'm sure during the video arcade craze, they probably had even more than they have now.

Rupert says:

In the latest BB posting, you say of arcade tokens: "None have cash value; each once bought a few minutes' time in another world."

The same could be said of communion tokens, which were handed out in Scotland between the 17th and 19th century to parishioners judged worthy of taking part in Holy Communion. You presented these at the church, and in return got your soul properly salved. The idea spread with the Scots to all parts of the world. Link to pix.

Heath Miller says:

I use to work for The US Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM) in the environmental office making sure that as our guys got rid of chemical weapons, everything was on the up and up. So what did I do to merit the reward of receiving a coin? I moved furniture in the building. Some new VIP guy was coming in and needed an office, so I and another guy were pulled out of our office and moved a large (and quite heavy) desk into his new space. We were appreciative of the coin and the gesture behind it, until we realized that years of saving the Command's ass had gone unnoticed and the fact that because of the soon-to-be reorganization (hence I no long work there) they were really only trying to dump the coins as fast as the could.

Update: Click here for an official response from the BBC.

Someone has apparently abused collaborative reference site Wikipedia in a viral marketing campaign for a BBC online alternate reality game, or ARG. Boing Boing readers ask whether the BBC (or someone acting on their behalf, like a promotional agency) is responsible.

Here's the original Wikipedia entry, which presented fictional details from the game as real: Link. Here's the entry in its current state, after having been "outed" as bogus and edited by Wikipedians into a factual article about the game: Link.

Boing Boing reader Chris says,

I'm a big fan of the BBC and public broadcasting in general, but I think they've crossed a line here. This is a Wikipedia entry for a made-up pop star that's being used as part of some kind of viral marketing for one of their "new media opportunities". It pisses me off that an organisation paid for by the British public and supposedly working to a charter to provide quality entertainment feels justified in spamming up a genuinely useful internet resource in the name of PR.

In fairness, it is also possible for any individual unaffiliated with the BBC (or an employee acting without network approval) to create a Wikipedia entry on their own. Comments on the Wikipedia "talk" page for this entry, however, suggest that a related entry for a fictional band called "Boy*d Upp" were added from someone operating inside the BBC's network.

So, some questions: is a person (or persons) acting on behalf of the BBC responsible? What will happen to the entry, if it is indeed a bogus publicity entry? How often does this sort of thing happen?

One thing I do know: Wikipedia tends to be hastily self-correcting. Bogus or erroneous information of any kind doesn't tend to last long there.

Reader Comment: Anonymous says,

I can't say who I am, but I do work at a company that uses Wikipedia as a key part of online marketing strategies. That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or "leaks" embedded in entries to test diffusion of information. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it (evil laugh).

On the other side, I love it from an academia/sociological standpoint, and I don't necessarily have a problem with it used as a viral marketing tool. After all, marketing is a form of information, with just a different end point in mind (consuming rather than learning).

I imagine quite a few Wikipedia users would beg to differ.

Update: Mike Harris says,

To answer your questions: did someone acting on behalf of the BBC really create the entry? Well, the user 'Jon Hawk' created this entry. I don't have access to his IP address to trace it back further, but his contributions look slightly suspect, frankly. Additionally, Wikipedia user William Pietri noted on your linked-to talk page that the article for the fictional band to which Kane supposedly belonged was added from webgw1.thls.bbc.co.uk. What will happen to the entry, if it is indeed a bogus publicity entry? It has been nominated for speedy deletion due to it being advertising campaign material, as well as having been nominated to go through the normal deletion process, where the votes are overwhelmingly for deletion right now. It will most likely be deleted.

Boing Boing reader John Barberio says,

I've marked the Boy*d Upp and Jamie Kane articles on Wikipedia for deletion. Hopefully this will teach people that Wikipedia isnt the place for viral marketing.

Christopher Granade says:

I added a link to your coverage in this Wikipedia article documenting examples of viral marketing: Link. Echoing reader John Barberio's call to let viral marketers know that Wikipedia isn't for their campaigns, I would ask all readers to let me know what pages have been implicated in such campaigns. I plan to make a page on Wikipedia documenting them so that there is some sort of aggregation of these infringements. Thanks for your help.

Update: 5PM Sunday -- reader Mike Harris says,

The article has now been totally rewritten by a user named Uncle G to factually report on the game.

The corresponding discussion page now includes mea culpas from persons responsible for two of the bogus entries. One of them, "Jon_Hawk," identifies himself as someone unaffiliated with the BBC who just digs the game.

Please do not use my edits to slander the BBC. If this were part of a viral campaign, the grammar of the article would almost certainly be better. I suspect the article would have been created at the same time as the game started also. Jamie Kane was mentioned on several blogs on Friday - did not one of you consider it was created by someone who reads such things? I'm nothing more than a student. I'm sincerely apologetic for purposefully omitting the true nature of Jamie Kane.

But the other, "MattC," identifies himself as a BBC employee:

I created the Boy*D_Upp page from inside the BBC network on Friday evening after stumbling across the Jamie Kane entry linked from the Pop Justice forums. My action was in no way part of an orchestrated marketing campaign on behalf of the Jamie Kane project team nor was it intended for my page to be attributed to the BBC, which has been implied. It was nothing more than common garden vandalism for which I am sorry.

Boing Boing reader Brian says,

After reading your earlier post about the LAPD using a "Sonic Blaster" I was reminded of a little gem from the Consumer Reports vintage photo gallery: "The Mattel Agent Zero M Sonic Blaster 5530 fires compressed air with a deafening blast. Our measurements top out at 157 dB--above a level that can do permanent damage to the hearing of an adult. We rate the toy Not Acceptable."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this not the single greatest children's toy ever created? I certainly would have been very, very happy.

The rest of the photo gallery is pretty interesting as well, actually, including things like Radio Sunglasses and a Portable Steambath.

Previously on Boing Boing:

LA Sherriff Dept.'s new sonic blaster

RNC-NYC -- reported presence of long-range acoustic device (LRAD) at protests

Reader comment: Mulroys says:

If your friend really wants one, he can get one on ebay for about 3-grand. Link. That kind of money would buy a very nice. handmade Italian shotgun. Such a dilemma!

Update: BB co-editor David Pescovitz asked Mark Pauline, founder of Survival Research Laboratories (SRL):

Isn't this a photo of the toy that spawned SRL's Shockwave Cannon device?

And -- Mark says yes!:

I got a Mattel engineer to send me all the engineering drawings in 1979 and started from there in around '83. However, I had my first one in 1963. It broke from excess use after 3 months and when I went to get a warranty replacement, I was told that the toy was "discontinued". The engineer remarked that it was probably Mattel's most expensive toy from a lawsuit standpoint. An awesome and dangerous toy!!

Photos of the shockwave cannon are available on the SRL site: Berkeley show, Tokyo show, and a 6-barrel version appeared in the Barcelona show.

You know, that kid in the photo up top even looks as if he could have been Mark back then...

This has to be one of my favorite internet videos of all time. It's a montage of still photos set to the theme from Deliverance. I could watch 100 times and not tire of it.
Link (thanks, Jim!)

Reader comment: Kevin says: "Mark, I thought that the image you used in the link looked familar and so I started looking for a video I saw in 7th grade and thanks to google I finnaly found it. The video is called 'Dancing Outlaw' and is a 30 minute documentry about a West Virginia tap dancer named Jesco White. Anyway, I found a site that talks about the video and towards the bottom of the page has that image. here is the site. The video is worth checking out if only for the scenes where he talks about huffing lighter fluid."

RU Sirius interviewed Mark on the latest episode of his podcast radio show! Mark talks about his new book, The World's Worst: A Guide To The Most Disgusting Hideous; Inept, And Dangerous People, Places, And Things On Earth, and plenty of other curious topics. Link (Happy Birthday, RU Sirius!)

Google today announced that it has temporarily halted scans of copyright-protected books from libraries into its Google Print database. Snip from a post by Print Product Manager Adam M. Smith on Google's official blog:

Over the last few months, we've been talking with numerous publishers, publishing industry organizations and authors about our Google Print Publisher Program and Google Print Library Project. Today I'd like to mention two new features that reflect these discussions and which we feel will considerably improve both programs.

If you're in the Publisher Program (or you decide to join it), you can now give us a list of the books that, if we scan them at a library, you'd like to have added immediately to your account. This way you can have your books in Google Print, which will put them into Google.com search results, direct potential buyers to your website, provide ongoing reports about user interest in your books, and your books will also earn revenue from contextual advertising – even if they are out of print.

We think most publishers and authors will choose to participate in the publisher program in order introduce their work to countless readers around the world. But we know that not everyone agrees, and we want to do our best to respect their views too. So now, any and all copyright holders – both Google Print partners and non-partners – can tell us which books they'd prefer that we not scan if we find them in a library. To allow plenty of time to review these new options, we won't scan any in-copyright books from now until this November.

Link to full text of post on the Google blog.

Reactions around the web include this take from the EFF's Jason Schultz:

This is a clear example of copyright failing the public in the digital age. Google isn't selling the books; they just need to scan them to help Internet users find what they're looking for. The fact that publishers are able to hold up this process works against consumers and the marketplace, not in their favor.

Siva Vaidhyanathan has a different take:

Google did not have the right to make wholesale copies of millions of copyrighted books without permission from the copyright holders. Google's original plan fails every possible fair use test ever tried. See, for example, American Geophysical Union v. Texaco. If copyright is to mean anything at all, then corporations may not copy entire works that they have never purchased without permission for commercial gain.

Link to full text of Siva's post.

Derek Slater says,

I think Siva is dead-wrong on the law and policy of Google Print. The law does not say what he says it does, and, even if it did, I doesn't see why it ought to.

Link to Derek's post.

Link to a related CNET story, here is another from Red Herring. Here's the AP story, via Wired News.

Derick Cooper, 43, of Hudson, Florida, was busted for painting a message on the side of his house allegedly directed to his 73-year-old terminally ill neighbor, Carol Hastrich. The sign read: "Die you miserable bitch." The irony is that he was not cited for the content of the message. From the St. Petersburg Times:

Deputies told Hastrich's family the message did not violate any laws, her daughter Dea Albertson said Wednesday.

Instead, Cooper was cited for an illegal sign because the wording exceeded the permitted size for a sign in a residential area, Pasco Code Enforcement Officer Patrick Phillips said.

Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Tibetan monks wax poetic about computers. Boing Boing reader Ben Vershbow says,

"Kim White, my colleague at the Institute for the Future of the Book in New York, recently attended the Changing Book conference at the University of Iowa. There, she saw a spellbinding presentation by Jim Canary, Head Conservator at Indiana University's Lilly Library, on Tibetan book craft and current preservation and archiving efforts being carried out in collaboration with local monks. Kim describes the presentation and quotes from a poem written by one of the monks in praise of computers:"

"Some monks are now working on laptops, transcribing text and burning DVDs. Here is an excerpt from a poem written by one of the monks in praise of digital materials, which, in his eyes, are 'as exquiste as a patina made from lamp black, Yakskin glue, and brains, burnished to a gloss and inscribed with an ink made from crushed pearls and silver are to me.'

A snip from the poem:

'The light of the disk is endless
like the light of the disks in the sky, sun and moon.

With a single push of our finger on a button
We pull up the shining gems of text.'

-- Gelek Rinpoche

Link

Reader comment: Mike Shea says,

It saddens me to see tibetan monks using computer media, media that has no chance to survive the ages as a well preserved book can. How sad a future we will face in 500 years when the 150th generation of tibetan monks goes back to restore data and finds out that oxidation has eaten all of their carefully transcribed material away. They should stick to Yakskin glue, brains, and crushed pearl and silver ink. Now I just have to hire monks to record my blog entries on Yakskin.

Michael Kaiser says,

I would hope that in 500 years the human race will have figured out a way to store 1's and 0's in a non-oxidizing format. What I worry about is this: if China has its way, in 500 years, will there even be such a person as a Tibetan Monk?

By digitizing these books they will be able to spread this information across the world. That alone will ensure their survival in some kind of format for many, many generations and hopefully help spread the word of the plight of the Tibetan people.

Simone Davalos from The Long Now Foundation says,

Long Now has a project that is embryonic, approached with a variety of resources and with the help of many other projects both web and non. It's called The Long Server, here's the discussion thread on Omidyar.net: Link.

Our first project is a clearing house of file format converters, which might eventually lead to a universal file format converter, which will eventually lead to a universal file sharing system, etc etc. It's pretty theoretical in some places, but work onthe file format clearing house is going on with the help of several other non-long now outfits, among them the Vintage Computer Museum in Silicon Valley and other file format clearinghouses on the web.

The National Science Foundation has granted George Mason University researchers over $300,000 to develop technologies to eavesdrop on VoIP phone calls.

The technology that [assistant professor of software engineering Xinyuan Wang] and his colleagues are working on does not decrypt conversations. It tracks packets as they move from one user to another, allowing authorities to see who is talking to whom, but not to see what they are saying. Wang conceded that "from a privacy advocate's point of view, this is an attack on privacy," but he also noted that "from a police point of view, this is a way to trace things."

Link to CNET story (via unwired list)

A Goth-themed home decorating HOWTO site with helfpful tips on how to make your house a darker, more depressing place.

This site sprung from the hypothetical question: "What if Martha Stewart was a goth?" (...) Martha is famous for her how-to projects (which she calls "Good Things") that range from cooking up chocolate candy to painting furniture with faux finishes to making your own potpourri to sewing ribbons onto pillowcases to creating door wreaths for every holiday. Good Things frequently involve the use of a hot glue gun or just a little bit of straight stitching, and many of the projects are quite easy for even the novice.

For quite some time, those of us on the newsgroup alt.gothic.fashion have discussed similar little projects that we could do to make our homes as beautifully gothic as our wardrobes. Many of our projects were direct adaptations of Martha's Good Things -- except we used scraps of black velvet, vintage lace, purple satin ribbons, dried blood-red roses, and other typically goth things we had around the house. Little did Martha realize how easily her elegant eggshell blues and seafoam greens could be turned to black and burgundy!

Link

Boing Boing reader Greg Borenstein says,

My friend Lindsay Fuchs recently completed a mural in our friend's house based on a TerraServer satellite photo of the neighborhood.

She overlayed the image in Photoshop with simplified geometrical designs, made slides, projected the onto the wall, traced in pencil, and then painted in various shades of purple with the house itself in orange. The project took her weeks and was just completed.

Interestingly, she oriented the mural with South up because that's the direction you're facing when looking at it. At first it's disorienting, but then it makes all the sense in the world. Nice to see someone taking this developing panoptic eye that's surrounding us and making it something personal -- even homey.

Link

Toilets themed in Kama Sutra designs, at one of London's trendier nightspots. No telling what goes on in there. Link (thanks, Simon Bisson)

Snip from an AP story about young people in gender-segregated Saudi Arabia reaching out to each other through short-range wireless.

The women would not give their full names when talking about communicating with the opposite sex — so strong is the taboo in this kingdom where men and women are strictly segregated. Unrelated men and women caught talking to each other, driving in the same car or sharing a meal risk being detained by the religious police. But connecting by Bluetooth is safe and easy. Users activate the Bluetooth function in their phone and then press the search button to see who else has the feature on within a 30-foot range.

They get a list of ID names of anyone in the area — names, mostly in Arabic, often chosen to allure: poster boy, sensitive girl, lion heart, kidnapper of hearts, little princess, prisoner of tears. Some are more suggestive, like "nice to touch" and "Saudi gay club."

(...)Many images feature babies — some blowing kisses — perhaps because women consider them cute. Animated cartoons doing belly dances, dreamy Arabic songs and sappy, sentimental messages are also popular. "Last night I sent an angel to watch over you, but he came back soon," said one message. "I asked him why, and he answered, 'Am not allowed to watch over other angels."'

Link (Thanks, John Parres!)

Reader comment: Baylen Linnekin says,

I blogged last month on the Saudi Bluetooth phenomenon you posted on today: Link. Here is the Arab News story that formed part of the basis of my post: Link

A team of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are conducting a giant simulation of the United States and its population -- people, cities, infrastructure -- and blowing it up. The idea: determine how, when, and where the country is vulnerable to attacks. Link (Thanks, hoeken)

In related news -- this is not a sim, unfortunately:

In the second reported major incident in recent days of mishandled hazardous materials at University of California-run Los Alamos National Laboratory, a lab employee was hospitalized for six days with "pneumonia-like symptoms" after inhaling dangerous fumes. Another employee suffered temporary shortness of breath after exposure to what an in-house investigative report at Los Alamos called "hazardous chemical vapors," but was not seriously hurt.

Link to SF Chron story on recent Los Alamos accidents and injuries.

Following up on yesterday's post (link), John Battelle writes:

I had a long chat today with folks from Yahoo about the ongoing "size matters" tempest, and it was once again enlightening. I'm planning a longer post on all this, but the upshot of our conversation was that Yahoo stands by its number, that it agrees with many that size alone does not matter, that any claims that any one company can accurately estimate another's index are simply not defensible, and that, in the end, the proof will be in the results. Yahoo also acknowledged that it was certainly aware of the PR angle when it made its announcement, and that given Google's home page claim regarding index size, it was hardly a new tactic to tout that number.

Link to full text of post.

Previously: Battelle on Yahoo search claims, Google reply

An opera about the history of the atomic bomb. Robert Oppenheimer, Kitty Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, General Leslie Groves, and others associated with the history of the Manhattan Project are characters in this production, which debuts in SF this October. Snip from the American Music Center's blog:

Less than a week after the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, John Adams and Peter Sellars gave a brief sneak preview of their new A-bomb-creation-themed opera Dr. Atomic to a group of journalists and other music industry professionals in Manhattan. (Perhaps appropriate despite the opera's San Francisco premiere since the A-bomb grew out of the Manhattan Project.) The SF Opera's musical administrator Kip Cranna and general director Pamela Rosenberg, who first initiated the project, were also on hand for the discussion at Avery Fisher Hall's Helen Hull Room, which was filled to maximum capacity.

The opera is scheduled for a ten-performance run in San Francisco beginning October 1. It travels to the Lyric Opera of Chicago and De Nederlandse Opera after that.

Link to full text of blog post.

Link to Dr. Atomic website, mit downloadable music files! It ain't over 'til the fat MIDI sings.

There's more than a little irony in the fact that a man named Peter Sellars (a noted opera director) is behind the project. (thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

BoingBoing buddy Michael Perry says,

I read about this in Business Week : the CEO of iFulfill.com, a businesss which did internet fulfillment, published a cheery, wacky blog about running a business -- just as his was failing. There's nothing in the bland, self-aggrandizing entries (with the obligatory Dilbert references!) to alert the reader that things are going to hell in his company until the very end.

It's sort of like looking at the captain's log from the Titanic.

Link to iFulfill blog.

Yahoo issued an announcement earlier this week in which they claimed to have indexed over 20 billion items. Over on Searchblog, Boing Boing "band manager" John Battelle posts:

[This] ruffled more than a few feathers across the web, and nowhere more distinctly than at Google. I spent an hour or so on the phone with a group of Google folks, and they shared a lot of information about how they measure index size, how they deal with issues of duplicate URLs and documents, and why they are baffled by Yahoo's claim. I am still reporting this story, so a longer post is forthcoming, but an update at the end of the day is worth penning.

First of all, I agreed to review some of the Google information on background, agreeing not to disclose it save with permission. (I agreed to this only if I could tell you all that I did in fact agree to it). I am still digesting what Google had to say, and the information they sent me, but it did leave a distinct set of questions percolating in my mind, questions that I plan to speak to Yahoo about (Yahoo has agreed to talk as well, we just haven't had time yet).

In any case, the lead really is this: I asked Google to go on the record with their concerns about Yahoo's index and whether they believed the news was in fact accurate, and Google agreed. The quote, which I can only attribute at this point to a "Google spokesperson," is as follows:

"Our scientists are not seeing the increase claimed in the Yahoo! index. The data we have doesn't support the 19.2 (billion page) claim and we're confused by that."

Details here. A response from Yahoo, and analysis on how their numbers were calculated, is said to be forthcoming in another post. But as JBat says, the larger point seems to be:

This calls for a benchmark/standard for measurement that might makes all of this moot.

In related news, and also on JBat's blog, the widely discussed Google/Meetro buyout rumor is thought to be false: Link.

Over at birdwatchersdigest.com a guy writes about a large praying mantis in his yard that caught and ate a hummingbird.

The other day while I was working in the yard my son urgently called to me. "Dad, a praying mantis caught a hummingbird!" 

Not sure what to expect, but knowing my son is not one to tell an untruth, I came running to see for myself.  By the time I arrived it was too late for the poor hummer and my scientifically minded son had already begun taking pictures and studying the scene.  

As you can see from the photographs this hungry mantis captured and killed a hummingbird not much smaller than itself.  The hummer measured 2 inches and the mantis was about the same!  The mantis used its spiny left foreleg to impale the hummingbird through the chest while leaving his right leg free.

Link (Google cached version here) (thanks, Tony and Jim!)

Our Boing Boing reader poll revealed that 5.53% percent of you are "slackers and scroungers." If so, and you also know your way around a mic and an editing suite, you may want to get off your ass and apply for this job at CBS.

Want to be CBS's first podcaster? The network is searching for an amateur DJ to interview CBS stars and create a podcast about the new fall season. The podcaster will join the nation’s top DJs at the CBS Radio Junket on September 10 in Hollywood to interview CBS talent for the podcast, which will be made available to millions via CBS.com and Infinity Broadcasting’s San Francisco-based KYOURADIO, the world’s first-ever podcasting radio station. For consideration, you'll need to upload a mock three-minute interview.

Link to "podcasting call." Of course, 1.37% of you also self-identified as "criminals," so good luck on that background check. (Thanks, Lloyd Rodenbaugh)

Reader comment: Rick Ellis says, "I saw the CBS thing a day or two ago, and let's just say that I was not impressed by the idea: Link to blog post."

George Pendle, author of the terrific bio of rocket scientist Jack Parsons, wrote a nice piece about an SF story in Astounding Science Fiction magazine that did such a good job of predicting the atom bomb that it got the story's author in hot water with the US government.

The story in Astounding that had caused such uproar in the Manhattan Project was typical of science fiction yarns of the time. Written by author Cleve Cartmill it was called Deadline and described an earth-like planet, in which a commando, albeit one with a prehensile tail, was assigned to destroy a giant bomb. The story was packed with technical data describing "atomic isotope separation methods" and the dangers of being able to control the explosion of a U-235 bomb. While the bomb described in the story didn’t exactly resemble that being constructed in Los Alamos, the story’s descriptions of difficulties in separating uranium into fissionable and non-fissionable isotopes did speak of one of the major problems currently under investigation at the Manhattan Project. The federal authorities believed that these references could only have come from classified research.

Counter-intelligence agents were immediately sent round to Cartmill’s house in Los Angeles, but Cartmill assigned all blame to his editor, Campbell, who had provided him with the technical details. When Campbell was asked how he had come upon such classified information he explained that he was a physics graduate from MIT, and that he had come up with the idea by basing all his suppositions on information freely available to the public. He calmly showed where he had found out about Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman's discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and how he had worked through the normal extrapolation process so common in his magazine's stories.

Link

Reader comment: Deb says: Your posting on cites a fairly recent article about Cleve Cartmill's best-known SF short story. But for more depth on the whole affair, see Bob Silverberg's notes in Asimov's here and here."

Reader comment: Dead Programmer says: I wrote an article about this a while back.

"William Jenkins aka Murray Leinster was in a rather unique position at the time - he was both a sci-fi writer and worked for the War department. In an introduction to one of his books he described this atom bomb episode:

"During the late lamented World War Two, the FBI had occasion to check on me. They decided that I wasn't subversive, and made due note of the fact. As a consequence, one day I had a telephone call. A voice said pleasantly that it was the FBI calling, and they'd like to talk to me. I searched my conscience hurriedly, and then asked where I should come to talk. The voice said graciously that he'd come to see me. He did. In a hurry. With a companion.

One was a large man with a patient expression, and the other was quite young and looked rather shy. They produced credentials and proved who they were, and I obligingly proved who I was, and then one of them said, "Tell me, have you ever read the Cleve Cartmill story, 'Deadline'?"

I said I had. The larger FBI man asked interestedly, "What did you think of it?"

"A pretty good story," I said, "and the science is authentic. Quite accurate."

Then there was a pause. A rather long pause. Then he sighed, and reluctantly inquired, "Well, what we want to know is: could it be a leak?"

"At this point my hair stood up on end and its separate strands tended to crack like whiplashes. Because 'Deadline,' by Cleve Cartmill, was a story about an atomic bomb, and this was a year before Hiroshima. The bomb in the story was made of uranium-235, it was to explode when a critical mass was attained, and there were other details. The story described most minutely the temperature of an atom-bomb explosion, the deadly radiation, the lingering aftereffects, the shock-wave, the heat-effect, and all the rest of the phenomena that a year later were observed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I was being asked about it before Hiroshima, and the Manhattan Project was perhaps the most completely hush-hush of all the hush-hush performances of the war."

"He, himself became pretty famous for predicting a slew of things, inluding the Internet in his 1946 story 'A Logic Named Joe.' Unlike many other sci-fi writers Jenkins not only invented things in his novels, but also in real life. He is the father of rear projection systems."

... You know the Logics set-up. You got a Logic in your house. It looks like a vision-receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the Tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your Logic. Relays in the Tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin comes on your Logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an the screen blinks an sputters an' you're hooked up with the Logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. ...

As a preview of a performance by Lev Theremin's great niece Lydia Kavina this Saturday night in Katonah, New York, the NYT recounts the history of the amazing electronic instrument. As part of the Caramoor International Music Festival, Kavina will be the soloist in Joseph Schillinger's First Airphonic Suite for Theremin and orchestra, completed 76 years ago. (Seen here, Caramoor co-founder and Theremin virtuoso Lucie Rosen.) From the NYT article:

Not two weeks before the fateful stock market crash of 1929, Joseph Schillinger, newly arrived on these shores from Russia, put the finishing touches on a short concerto with the outré title "First Airphonic Suite." A month later, as the country reeled in the wake of Black Thursday, the work caused a sensation at its New York premiere.

The buzz came not from the piece itself - which, perhaps mirroring the composer's migration, begins à la Borodin and ends up like "Rhapsody in Blue" - but from its electrified soloist, Lev Theremin, the inventor and namesake of the featured instrument.

The reviewer for The New York Times, Olin Downes, described the contraption as "a sort of a box on a tripod, with antennae," and so it is today. Theremin, Downes wrote, "moved his hands and fingers in mystic passes in the air, and a tone like a purified and magnified saxophone soared through the atmosphere and through the very loudest fortissimo."

Link

I filed this story for the current issue of Wired Magazine on the uber-elite, invite-only online networking service known as A Small World. Snip:

When it happens, the expulsion is so genteel at first that you might not notice. There is no warning, no email notification, nothing. You think you're logging in to aSmallWorld, the ultraexclusive social networking Web site favored by supermodels, celebutantes, and Eurotrash. But instead of a blue homepage and postings about polo horses for sale or New Delhi nightclub recommendations, you see a green page and the lamentations of those outcast. You have been banished to aBigWorld - the dreadfully nonexclusive sister site of ASW.

"I log on every day to see if it's still green, or if they've let me back into the blue," confesses 22-year-old Talal bin Laden of Geneva. Bin Laden, a recent college grad, admits after some stammering that he's "distantly, distantly related to that guy no one likes." He says that ASW could definitely get ostentatious. "There were posts like, 'I'm going from Monaco to Lausanne tomorrow and need a private jet for one person.'" Still, he used to love hitting the site every day. "It's a great place to network or learn about different cities."

But bin Laden ran afoul of ASW policies when he participated in a thread that devolved into a flame war. "One guy posted some anti-Arab racist slurs, and I responded with a polite deconstruction of why I felt that was inappropriate," says bin Laden. "For that, I was evicted to hell."

Link.

Evatech's RCLM 2006 S-Class is a Hybrid Remote Control Lawn Mower with a gas engine, 22" mulch blade, wireless electric starter, and optional gyro. Just $2299. From the product page:

High tech is not only a question of logic. Sometimes pure passion serves as a motivation force to implement a gyro into a lawn mower. It is a guided mower where its mission is to deliver fast straight lines and pleasure of the strong kind.

Link (via GadgetryBlog)

Crooks recently tried to rob Gary Spirito, host of the Shopping Mania Auction Show in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The odd part is that the attempted robbery occurred while Spirito was shooting the show. Live. It seems that Spirito was interrupted in the studio by crooks who demanded his car keys. Viewers called 911 and police nabbed the perps. From TheMilwaukeeChannel.com:

When a man came in and demanded Spirito's car keys, Spirito informed his audience that this was no joke.

"There's a guy robbing us, somebody call the police, he came in with a gun. Somebody call police, there's a guy in here trying to rob us," Spirito said.

That's when Spirito addressed the alleged robber directly.

"Then I looked up at him and said, 'We're doing a live show here and there's probably hundreds of people out there right now calling the police to come down on this building, just so you know,'" he said.

Link

The Library of Congress Copyright Office is considering requiring use of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser for online preregistration of copyright claims. This is stupid. If you agree, read the request for public comment, then paper-mail an original and five copies of your comment letter to:

Copyright GC/ I&R
P.O. Box 70400
Southwest Station
Washington, DC 20024-0400

Comments are due no later than August 22, 2005. Here's more info on the Copyright Office website, and here's a related story on News.com. (via MeFi, thanks Ted)

Reader comments: Jorge Penso says,

Other government agencies do this also fafsa requires either IE or Netscape. Mac users can only access the site through netscape. I guess they think that mac users can afford to go college without aid.

Tim Waterhouse says,

To apply for a US visa from Australia, one of the hoops you need to jump through is to book an interview with the consulate. You can do this either by paying $2.75 a minute for the privelege of speaking to a human being, or by using their online booking system, which requires IE (or maybe Netscape, which I haven't tried). Keeps those pesky Firefox users out of the country, I guess.

Boing Boing pal Jim Griffin believes there's been a bit of a misunderstanding:

1. The C.O. is not saying it will be Internet Explorer only. It says they *may* implement I.E. functionality *first*, with the others to follow: "Support for Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0.3, and Mozilla 1.7.7 is planned but will not be available when preregistration goes into effect." (Quotation from copyright office notice.)

2. It seems appropriate to me, in an odd kind of way: This reference is to building websites for Hollywood companies to preregister materials for special copyright protection: "In accordance with the Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005 (the ART Act), Title I of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, Pub. L. No. 109-9, 119 Stat. 218, the Copyright Office recently proposed implementing regulations for preregistration of eligible copyright claims." (Quotation from copyright office notice.) Why is this appropriate in an odd kind of way? Because those very same people who are shoving copyright protection at us via Microsoft probably should be required to use Internet Explorer. This is what they want, this is what they get!

3. I point this out because the only thing worse than this kind of crap is the false suggestion that this kind of crap is happening. It wastes our energy and makes us look bad. We have bigger birds to feed than wasting resources on which browser, in which order, media companies are compelled to use when they want special protection for their as-yet unpublished work.

kukkurovaca says:

One of your readers recently commented :

"Other government agencies do this also fafsa requires either IE or Netscape. Mac users can only access the site through netscape. I guess they think that mac users can afford to go college without aid."

I work in financial aid, and I've fielded questions from mac users about this very issue; there is a biggish, mean-looking, technical screen that makes it look like non-standard browsers won't work with the FAFSA (that's the "Free Application for Federal Student Aid" for people who aren't down with unpronounceable government acronyms), but all it really says is, "we don't promise to help you solve compliance issues"; I've used Firefox, for example, with the user-facing FAFSA site and its school-facing cousin with no problems. So those starving, penniless owners of Apple computers (of which I am one) aren't necessarily doomed to the horrors of using Netscape, and certainly shouldn't be dissuaded from submitting their FAFSA online.

Matt Sweeney says,

My last contract was with a DoD organization. While I was officially the DBA, I also doubled as the back up web admin. When I first arrived to the agency I requested permission to install Firefox on my DoD computer. I gave two reasons for the request, first that it would make my work easier and two that it would allow me to validate the web site in Firefox. The security officer for the agency turned down my request on the grounds that the software was not authorized by DISA.

Now, the security officer did have a habit of saying no to any request he wasn't sure about, so I'm not positive that DISA has not approved Firefox for use on DoD computers, but it is possible that this is what is behind the support issue. It isn't that they are actively ignoring Firefox and other browsers, but that they are not allowed to use Firefox on their machines and so can not verify that the site works in Firefox.

Having spent a lot of time rooting through government sites looking for information for various contracts and RFPs, I've found that very few are not viewable in Firefox. Occasionally you'll find one where the layout is a little off, but, unless their using something like ActiveX to do something complicated, they are still readable in other browsers.

A judge has ruled that legendary New York City music club CBGB's cannot be evicted from its current location. A long-running dispute between the club owner and the Bowery Residents' Committee concerns the payment of "about $100,000 in rent increases, interest and fees." In the ruling, Judge Joan Kenney praised the club's cultural and economic impact on the area, saying it "has proven itself worthy of being recognized as a landmark..."

I still have a scar on my leg from slamdancing in shorts there as a teenager, with glass from broken bottles all over the floor. Good times, good scars.

Link (Thanks, Doran)

Previously on BB: CBGB may close due to rising real estate costs

About this NYT article on a technologically adept psycopath who terrorized a company called Micropatent, Bruce Sterling says: "You'd think the IEDs and the lethal toxins would be getting a little more play in this story than the drive-by wifi, but, well, that's the computer-crime game for you."

Unbeknownst to the stalker, MicroPatent had been quietly trying to track him for years, though without success. He was able to mask his online identity so deftly that he routinely avoided capture, despite the involvement of federal investigators.

But in late 2003 the company upped the ante. It retained private investigators and deployed a former psychological profiler for the Central Intelligence Agency to put a face on the stalker. The manhunt, according to court documents and investigators, led last year to a suburban home in Hyattsville, Md., its basement stocked with parts for makeshift hand grenades and ingredients for ricin, one of the most potent and lethal biological toxins. Last March, on the same day that they raided his home, the authorities arrested the stalker as he sat in his car composing e-mail messages he planned to send wirelessly to Videtto. The stalker has since pleaded guilty to charges of extortion and possession of toxic materials.

What happened to MicroPatent is happening to other companies. Law enforcement authorities and computer security specialists warn that new breeds of white-collar criminals are on the prowl: corporate stalkers who are either computer-savvy extortionists, looking to shake down companies for large bribes, or malicious competitors who are trying to gain an upper hand in the marketplace.

Link

I'm a bit late on John Markoff's terrific new book What the Dormouse Said. Been immersed in a copy, hadn't gotten around to posting a review on the blog yet. Boing Boing's esteemed consigliere Kevin Kelly beats us to it in the current issue of his e-zine Cool Tools:

I have always suspected computers had a secret history, and here it is: sex, drugs and rock and roll. This outlaw culture birthed what we now call personal computers. Not VCs, not the military, not universities, but hippies, activists, bums, and outright visionaries with visions. A story this strange you could not make up. The surprising countercultural roots of our essential technology is not only an amazing hither-to untold tale (laid out with fast-paced charm by the New York Times' chief technology reporter), it also remains a pertinent lesson to anyone hoping to use technology to remake society: First, feed your head! The money will come. What a wonderful story!

Here's an excerpt:

Bill Duvall at work on one of the Augment Group's yoga workstations.

Dave Evans was one of the Augment team members who had strong ties to the counterculture, and one evening Steward Brand brought Ken Kesey by for a look at the NLS system. It was several years after the Merry Prankster era and Kesey's legal problems over a marijuana arrest, and he had become a celebrity as a result of the publication of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which he was the main character. He was quarreling with Hollywood movie studios over the film based on his novel Sometimes a Great Notion and was preparing to retreat to a dairy farm in Oregon.

For an hour, Evans took the system through its paces, showing the writer how it was possible to manipulate text, retrieve information, and collaborate with others. At the end of the demonstration Kesey sighed and said, "It's the next thing after acid."

Link to book on Amazon.

Reader comment: Doran says,

I too enjoyed the Markoff book. A lot. If you're interested, here's an interview we (digitalvillage.org) did with a him couple of months ago: Link to MP3.

Update: Boing Boing pal RU Sirius interviewed Markoff about this material on MondoGlobo radio not long ago: link to details, and here's the MP3 of their conversation.

And RU Sirius tells us that that an interview with Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder will be published on the site sometime soon, too!

If you liked yesterday's Star Trek business cards post, get a load of these vintage cards for Star Wars characters from 1977. Link (Thanks, former BB guestblogger Bonnie of Lucasfilm!)

If you waste more than five minutes on the web each day, you've probably read about the man in Washington who died while having sex with a horse. Much ado has been made about the difficulties of reporting such events in conventional news outlets -- how to do so in a non-sensationalist way, how to be accurate while not offending reader sensibilities. Unencumbered by such burdens, Fleshbot tells it straight: turns out he not only died while fucking a horse, he died being fucked *by* a horse. Link to a roundup of blog and news urls.

Reader comments: Jayson says,

There's a book out that seems rather appropriate to the situation: Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover's Soul. Link.

A new commercial Dutch TV station plans to air a show called “I want your child and nothing else” in which a single, childless woman gets to choose a sperm donor with which to, uh, generate a human being.

The program is initially a one-off that will be aired on August 23 with viewers allowed to vote on whether it should stay on the air… The idea for the “Spermshow", as Dutch media are calling it, was already launched once in 2001 but caused a storm of protest in the Netherlands even leading to questions in Parliament…

Link (via Warren Ellis)

Here's what I'm listening to today: a downloadable mix from Florian Keller of intosomethin freestyle radio fame. This one's comprised entirely of music from the year 1994. Link (120-minute MP3)

The trippy "pink elephants on parade" sequence from Disney's Dumbo is remixed in this video with a version of that song recorded years later by the great Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Sun Ra's version, the trippier of the two, seems infinitely more fitting. Link to 17mb *.mov. Hosted on yeahoksure.com, where you will also find this. (via Enjin)

Update: Here's a mirror for the remix video. The original host appears to be all Boinged out: Link

Image shot by Donald Weber, from the series "The Underclass and Its Bosses," shot in Ukraine, 2005. Link to artist website.
(Thanks, Siege, who says "He's got a quiet eye, which is nice.")

Noah Shachtman of defensetech blog tells Boing Boing,

Remember the NYPD's sonic blaster at last years' GOP Convention? Well, the LA Sheriff's Department is testing an acoustic transmitter out that makes the old one look like a "a child's toy" in comparison.

Link to post on Noah's blog.

Previously on Boing Boing:
RNC-NYC -- reported presence of long-range acoustic device (LRAD) at protests

This most excellent collection of Star Trek business cards includes Spock, Kirk, and other universally familiar names -- but I was delighted to find less frequently seen characters like Harcourt Mudd, too. "Mudd's Women" is one of my all-time favorite episodes.

The calling card for Kang, Klingon High Commander, reads, "WARS ARRANGED / PLANETS CONQUERED / NO WAR TOO SMALL."

Link to business card images. (Thanks, Christophe)

Update: Boing Boing reader Nick Younes says, "You may now bid for them on eBay: Link."

When I was driving back from NPR this morning in L.A., I noticed these posters beneath a freeway underpass. I fumbled for my phonecam and snapped them just as the light turned green and the driver behind me began honking -- here's the snapshot. They read, "Feed A Musician / Download Legally." I hadn't seen them before, but presume they're a recording industry street campaign (perhaps from the RIAA). Jason Schultz sends along links (one, two) to "creatively altered" copies of the same posters -- they've been showing up around San Francisco. Apparently they're in NYC, also.

Update: Yes, this is an RIAA effort. Link to June 29 press release announcing the campaign, from The Music United for Strong Internet Copyright (“Music United”) Coalition.

Local laws about gluing posters up in public places and construction sites no doubt vary from city to city, but -- it sure would be ironic if the RIAA were advertising illegally here...

Winning entries have been chosen in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's 15th Anniversary Blog-a-thon. Congrats to all who responded to the invitation to write about what digital liberty means to you! Link (Disclaimer: I was one of the judges.)

Phil Torrone says: "My wife plays those multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies. With populations of real people in the millions, it's pretty insane. One thing I noticed is the "crafting" culture. On one of the games she plays, all the gear -- weapons, everything -- is made by players. You have to mine the soil, build stuff, it's neat. So I had her make a video.

She tells me there are people who are fashion designers, that make virtual (and real) money making clothes.

The art of crafting in many MMOs (Massive Multiplayer Online Game) can be just as sophisticated and as satisfying as being an artisan in the real world. Depending on the complexity invovled it can take a great deal of time to learn all the ins and out of an ingame crafting system. This video How-To is a beginner guide to one element of crafting in the Star Wars Galaxies universe: surveying for materials.

Link

Reader comment: Callum says: Thought the BB readers might also be interested in a pair of videos about making/building/selling stuff in our virtual world - Second Life. Both were made by residents and demonstrate the practically limitless variety of things you can create in world along with some background on how it can become immensely lucrative. Here and here.

Frank Keeney says,

I finally edited and posted the video from the DEFCON WiFI Shootout event along with some photos and topographical information. It was great fun being there and watching the team set this record!

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
DefCon WiFi shootout champions crowned -- 125 miles

It would be great to have a Boing Boing reading family on the TV show "Wife Swap." I got an email from Christine Composto, who works for ABC's casting department and is looking for a "a very techno-savvy family" to be on the show. Here are some details:

Wife Swap is part of ABC's primetime line-up and we are currently casting families for its second season. The premise of Wife Swap, which generated a lot of buzz in its inaugural season, is that one parent from each household swaps places for ten days to experience how another family runs their lives. It is an incredible family experience and opportunity to both learn and teach different family values. Wife Swap is a fascinating story of what happens when two married couples see themselves, and their spouses, in a whole new light.

The reason I am contacting you is because we are specifically looking to have a very techno-savvy family on the show - where both parents and their children are into the latest and greatest that technology has to offer.

Potential families can live anywhere in the United States, but we ask that families who apply consist of two parents that have at least two children, over the age of 5, living at home.

All participating families receieve a $20,000 honorarium fee too!

Email Cat if you fit the bill.

Today on NPR's "Day to Day," I speak with host Madeleine Brand and guest Dan Gillmor about a very public flap over private data between Google and CNET News.com.

It all goes back to a July, 2005 CNET story. The volume of personal data available on the web through Google and other search tools has long been a cause for concern among privacy advocates. But Google also gathers data about its users through its email service, map apps, and shopping search tools (as do its competitors). The CNET story asked what the consequences might be if Google user info fell into the hands of government investigators, ill-wishing hackers -- even a Google employee violating company privacy practices.

To illustrate the concern, reporter Elinor Mills lead her story with an anecdote revealing personal data about Google CEO Eric Schmidt -- data she obtained from Google searches -- including the value of his Google shares, where he lives, his wife's name, and the fact that he's been to Burning Man. In response, CNET says Google retaliated by declaring it will not speak to CNET reporters until August 2006.

Link to NPR "Day to Day" report on l'affaire Google/CNET; archived audio (Real/Win streams) online after 12pm PT.

Nik Schulz, the guy who does most of the excellent project illustrations for Make magazine, is selling his killer slot machine set-up for $300.

This is a fully detailed 4-lane, slot car track on a 4'x8' table. Hook a laptop up to the track and it'll keep track of your lap times. So much more fun than boring old foos ball and with four lanes, you can race the CEO, VP of Marketing, and Creative Director at the same time.

Comes with cars, coltrollers, laptiming software, other odds and ends. The table has folding legs and can be stored on its side when not in use. Quality build and wiring.

Cost $800 to build. Selling for $300.

Link

ReadyMade editor Shoshana Berger interviews the amazing cartoonist Daniel Clowes, creator of Eightball, Ghost World, Ice Haven, and Art School Confidential, his latest big screen collaboration with director Terry Zwigoff. (Previous links to Clowes interviews here and here.) From ReadyMade:

RM: What was your favorite comic book when you were growing up?

DC: Mad magazine. Not necessarily the comic books, but those little paperbacks. I have all 78 of those.

RM: Did you ever have any other worldly ambition than cartooning? Like, did you want to be a fireman?

DC: I've always just wanted to be a cartoonist. From the time I was three years old, I had a stack of 300 comic books in my room that my older brother had left me. I just pored over them hour after hour. I'm sure if I had a computer or TV or something else, I would just go, "OK, comic books, I'm done with that." But they hit me at a primal time in my development. I could never really shake it.

Link (via Drawn!)

Kevin says: "The film of the month. Reverse footage of a guy balancing rocks. Quite amazing. Watch the video."
Link

Reader comment: Chris Null says: If you think that's cool, check out Andy Goldsworthy's work, best seen on display in the film (now on DVD), Rivers & Tides. He specializes in balanced-rock sculptures and his work can be seen in museums around the world. When he builds a sculpture on a beach it's almost heartbreaking when the surf carries it away. filmcritic.com review.

As a birthday gift yesterday, MAKE: Blogger Phil Torrone received this excellent wall vase made from a spent shotgun shell and a suction cup. Link

UPDATE: BB reader Deadprogrammer writes in, "During and after the two World Wars artisans made a mind boggling array or vases, lamps, pens, lighters and who knows what else from discarded shells. Some are very beautiful, executed in Art Deco, Art Nouveau and Craftsman styles." Link to eBay search

Inigo Cubillo, a collector of 78 records, presents an excellent collection documenting "laughing records" and "crying records." From The Shellac Shanty site:

In the infancy of recorded sound technology, record labels had different ideas about what would be popular. Various attempts at humour (some quite subtle and elegant, some.... were not) were recorded, some of them being 'laughing records'. These were more than likely played at parties or other social occasions as a novelty, and (hopefully) a source of amusement.

Link (via MetaFilter, where there are links to more examples)

They NYT's John Schwartz files this story on plans by Space Adventures, Inc. to send tourists into lunar orbit. They've already sent two civilians to the ISS with help from the Russian Space program -- US businessman Dennis Tito in 2001; and South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth in April 2002.

Today, it is to unveil an agreement with Russian space officials to send two passengers on a voyage lasting 10 to 21 days, depending partly on its itinerary and whether it includes the International Space Station. A roundtrip ticket will cost $100 million.

The space-faring tourists will travel with a Russian pilot. They will steer clear of the greater technical challenge of landing on the Moon, instead circling it and returning to Earth.

Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures, said he believed the trip could be accomplished as early as 2008. Mr. Anderson said he had already received expressions of interest from a few potential clients. The Soyuz vehicle to be used does not have the power to reach the Moon on its own, so the Russians have devised a plan to send up a booster. The Soyuz would dock with the booster, either in low Earth orbit or at the International Space Station. The booster would take the passengers the rest of the way. The price of the two tickets, Mr. Anderson said, would pay for the costs of the Moon shot. His company's demographic research, he said, suggests that 500 to 1,000 people in the world can afford to do this.

Link

Recently on Boing Boing, I posted an item from Declan McCullagh's politech list about a Montana judge's ruling that it's okay for police to rummage through your garbage for incriminating evidence -- even without a search warrant or court order. Declan has posted a number of updates to politech, including this reader comment:

I think someone could come up with a business plan around this: truly private garbage collection. You don't put the trash out at the corner, but contract with the garbage collector to pick up the garbage in your yard, with some sort of contract that the garbage is still yours until properly incinerated, and the collector would dispose of it in a way that guarantees privacy - incineration.

I suspect this garbage company could charge a pretty penny. After all, just because people are disposing of something (because it has outlived its usefulness or is taking up too much space) doesn't mean they want it ending up in the hands of others who wish them harm. -- Bryan Murley

Politech followup items:

Russell Roberts on Hayek and the social norms of trash privacy

Local paper digs through police trash -- after cops say it's OK for them to do

Jonaathan Weinberg on 1984 and right to privacy in your trash

That's pretty much all there is to say. Here's a blog post about it with photos, and here is www.chickenpecker.com.
Previously on Boing Boing: Cluckin' Chicken SNL parody

Taiwan's toilet bowl themed restaurant

Crappy restaurant

Reader comments: Mike Kelly says,

I thought I'd tell you about a restaurant I came across while touring eastern Canada a few years ago. The restaurant is called "A & K Lick-A-Chick", and also features a dairy bar named "A & K Lick-A-Treat". It's located in Bras D'Or, just outside of Sydney Nova Scotia. On their website, they proudly proclaim themselves to be the "Home of the Good Chicks". Link.

John Howard Thompson says,

In Ocean City, MD, there is a restaurant called "Big Peckers" and another restaurant called "Brass Balls", both of which sell a lot of t-shirts every summer. (Totally work safe). Link.

Boing Boing pal Michael Nank says,

I recently saw a couple of pretty cool exhibits at the Vancouver Art Gallery, including a show of work by an artist named Wang Du. One of his pieces -- Tapis Volant -- had some relevancy given that the shuttle was landing that weekend. Tapis Volant is a huge "flying carpet" which features the Feb 10th cover of Time Magazine, the one with the picture of Space Shuttle Columbia's fateful return to Earth. The image is about half way down on this link. You can get a sense of scale if you look to the upper right hand corner, where you see a couple of people walking next to it.

Previously on Boing Boing: Wang Du's Mixed Media

Dr. Mizuko Ito (better known to friends and family as Mimi) tells Boing Boing,

The book I edited with Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda is out from MIT Press and available on amazon.com. Click here for a pdf of a draft of the introduction.

The book is an edited collection of social and cultural studies of keitai (mobile phone) and pager use over the past decade or so in Japan. We included our own research as well as research by a variety of mostly Japanese scholars whose work we translated from Japanese.

I've been reading an early copy, and I'll post a more thorough review as soon as I can, but -- if mobile culture is of any interest to you, go buy this thing! It's a terrific, rich work -- and a very readable read. Link

Filmmaker and internet-funnyhunter Jason Wishnow does a weekly "video of the week" thing on Nerve; this week's selection is a music video for this song that starts out:

"Nobody loves you like your mama loves you
But who's lovin' your mama? I am. I am."

Jason tells Boing Boing, "If Michael Jackson's video for Billy Jean was made by the traumatized kids at the Neverland Ranch instead of a committee of record producers, it would be our current Weekly Pic." Here's a snip from his review on Nerve:

The other night, a couple of friends invited me over to watch television with their three-year-old son. He's infatuated with the latest European children's program, in which rainbow-colored ovum move about the screen, powered by flatulence. There I was, watching what suddenly seemed to me the Decline of Western Civilization, wondering whether my parents worried as much about my childhood exposure to Blacula. But then I realized that my friends and I fretted about our parents' influences as much as they worried about ours. The new music video for Kennedy's song "Your Mama," in which the singer brags about sexing up a MILF, plays right into kids' anxieties about their parents' moral rectitude. I spoke with the director, Joel Lava.

Link

Ten years ago today, Netscape went public. (Wow, that decade went by fast.) This guy is auctioning off a copy of the Netscape IPO Prospectus on eBay. No bids yet. Link (thanks, Kevin!)

Crema is the wonderful tan colored foam that appears on the top of a well-shot espresso. High quality espresso joints have a saying: "No crema, no serva."

I recently got a Rancilio Silvia espresso maker, generally considered the best consumer espresso model available. Trouble is, I can't seem to get it to make a shot with crema. It's shooting blanks, so to speak. The next issue of Make magazine is going to feature a couple of coffee hacks that should help espresso fanatics produce precious crema. I'm going to give them a try.

In the meantime, I'll just drool over these photos over at espressoporn.com. The photo here shows a machine using a "crotchless" portafilter. Some people might consider that a cheater's way to get creama, but I'll take it any way I can get it.
Link (thanks, Kate!)

Coffeegeek comment: Rob N.says: "I can only say this: if you're not getting crema from Miss Silvia, then you've got a breakdown somewhere in your technique or your ingredients.  You can fake crema by using false filter bottoms with pressure disks and such to "whip" up your coffee into something foamy.  However, thin, bitter espresso with a fake layer of foam is still thin, bitter espresso.  Properly made espresso from fresh beans, ground, tamped, and brewed properly, will make plenty of its own crema - the quality of qhich is generally indicative of the shot.  

"First - what grinder did you get to go along with Silvia?  If you're using a whizzy-blade or other inexpensive bean basher, you're not getting the best grind.  Espresso must be made with coffee that is ground uniformly fine, with no large chunks and little dust.  The Racilio Rocky or Gaggia MDF are considered to be basic workhorses of home espresso.  The MDF's the least expensive unit that will produce a uniform espresso grind.  Alternately, you can use a Zassenhaus hand-crank mill with the plates set very close.  

"If you're using pre-ground coffee, shame on you.  To get the precious crema and the best shot, you need to use whole beans, ground moments before using.  Pre-ground coffee stales faster than the first season of 'Joey.'  You want to try to get your hands on those beans within 24-48 hours of roasting, too.  Seal 'em up air-tight in a cool place for storage (they only give you a bag so that you don't have to carry the beans in your bare hands - it's not long-term storage).  If you must freeze beans, don't make that your working stash - every time you take the beans from the freezer or fridge, moisture (bad) condenses on your coffee.  Buy what you'll use in a week and keep it sealed up.  If you can't use a pound of beans in a week, freeze half and only take them out from cold storage when you're ready to transfer to your air-tight working container.  

'You also need a tamper sized properly for your filter basket and has a sturdy handle.  Grind your coffee to fill the basket, tap the portafilter on the counter 4-6 times to settle the grounds.  Grind 'til full again, strike off the excess, and tamp lightly.  Tap the tamper against the side of the portafilter to settle any grounds stuck to the side of the basket, and tamp again firmly.  Lock the portafilter into the machine and brew.  For a single, you should get 1 oz in 25-30 seconds.  For a double, you should use twice the coffee, grind a little bit coarser, and you should get 2 oz. in 25-30 seconds.  

"Always make sure your machine, portafilter, and basket are hot before brewing, and pre-heat your cup with water from the steam wand.  

"Sorry to be so long-winded, but anyone venturing into crafting their own caffeinated Nirvana at home deserves a helping hand."

Coffeegeek comment: Aaron says: "I also had the same trouble with my fancy-pants machine, but solved the problem through experimentation. Here are some possible solutions.

"The number one problem is the espresso not being ground fine enough - in needs to be quite a bit finer than coffee to get the crema.

"Try putting a larger dollop of grounds in the holder.

"Try pressing down on the grounds harder before attaching the holder to the machine.

"So as you can see, the problem most likley isn't with the machine, but with what and how you load up the machine. I've found espresso prep to be rather subtle, but after getting to know the machine, things get fast, easy, and crema filled.

Coffeegee comment: "Crotchless portafilters aren't really for 'cheaters' who want crema; if the coffee's fresh and roasted well, it'll get crema either way. Professionals and hobbyists alike have noted a slight difference in the body of the espresso, but not much difference in crema quantity has been noted. A good resource, by the way, for all your coffee needs, is http://www.coffeegeek.com/"

Coffeegeek comment: "Your cry for help won't go unheeded, especially by the crema fanatics at alt.coffee where I learned my stuff.

"Don't wait for Make, though. There will be too many bad coffees consumed by the time they post the feature.

"* Start with the grinder. (You're not buying preground, are you?)

"* Then, look at the tamping. Twenty pounds or so -- do it on a scale to see how hard you're pushing.

"* If you do it all correctly, it's supposed to take twenty or so seconds, and you'll have a beautiful cup.

"I'm drinking Intelligentsia's Black Cat from a Gaggia Classic. It's great. They're great, too.

"Best of luck, and happy drinking.

Coffeegeek comment: Cory says: "FWIW, I switched to a Bialetti stove top espresso machine which makes a very nice shot with nearly perfect crema."

Coffeegeek comment: Jack says: "I've had a Silvia for nearly two years now and can attest to its finicky nature. However, with a little patience and the rights tools and materials, you are on your way to pouring God Shots, my friend.

"There's plenty of good stuff online about the Silvia. http://coffeegeek.com is a good place to start.

"Things to consider (worked for me, anyway):

"1) Grinder. You have a good burr grinder, right? NOT the kind with little spinning blades.

"2) Grind. Probably the biggest factor. You'll have to play with this. Having a consistent, quality grinder is key. Different beans make a difference. Hell, different HUMIDITY can make a difference in the fineness of the grind. Really.

"3) Beans. Get 'em fresh and not over-roasted (a la *$). If they're oily, this is not good. Someone else's idea of the perfect 'spresso roast may not be yours.

"4) Tamp. Not too hard, not too soft. Again, experiment.

"5) Warm up. Leave it on for 30 minutes before pulling a shot. Leave the portafilter in while it's warming up.

"6) There are no crema gimmicks."

Coffeegeek comment: Dylan says: "I read boing boing and saw your post about the Silvia and Crema.

"I literally just bought a Rancilio Silvia yesterday and made about 20 shots so far. The first few sucked... in fact the first one didn't actually produce any liquid at all :) But by the 10th I'm having some pretty wicked crema happening :) Even got the wonderful guinness effect on my last one (the wonderful cascade as the crema and coffee separate).

"I've found that it takes a nice balance of good beans, a good grinder, the right grind, the right amount of coffee, the right tamp, the right polish, the right water temperature, and of course a good pull. :) Easy, no?

"This is the page that got me my crema:

http://www.coffeegeek.com/opinions/edgabrielle/09-15-2002

"And here are some excellent other references.

http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/contrib/rancilio_silvia/

http://www.coffeekid.com/archived/rancilio/cheatsilvia

"And of course just a general search for "Rancilio Silvia HOWTO" on google is pretty impressive as well.

"Take it easy. Enjoy your machine."

Coffeegeek comment: Graham says: "Coincidental to your Silvia BB post, last night I happened across this page dedicated to Silvia tricks and upgrades.

"I thought the DIY PID upgrades were pretty slick. Also, the method the 'Cheating Miss Silvia' article shows seemed to work well when I adapted it to my (non-Silvia) machine."

Cleveland's Scene has an excellent article about the two brothers who created the most popular pinup poster of all time -- the famous Farrah Fawcett poster. I bought mine when I was 14 or 15 from a 7-Eleven. I believe I paid $3 for it.

For Mike and Ted Trikilis, the two Ohio brothers who created the pinup, it was the engine that powered a multimillion-dollar poster empire called Pro Arts Inc. Before Farrah, they were just a couple of college dropouts, trying to make a quick buck selling black-light posters to hippies at Kent State. After her, they became celebrities in their own right, star-makers whose services were highly sought by Hollywood. Ted was even crowned "King of the Posters" by The Washington Post.

"These people are looking for something more than just a pretty picture," he told the paper in an interview at a posh Beverly Hills restaurant, where he furiously munched peanuts by the handful. "This is something that lasts. I call it the mental bullet."

But while the image proved enduring, success did not. Farrah, of course, would eventually meet the fate of all aging beauties and become a fallen star, fodder for tabloids and rubbernecking snarks. The Trikilis brothers fared no better. They frittered away their fortune on bad business decisions and expensive lawsuits. It would cost them their business, their homes, and eventually, each other.

Link

A new study oddly posits that mosquitoes are actually attracted to people who already have malaria. Scientists from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie ran a study in Kenya where odors from children infected with the transmissible stage of the disease were wafted toward mosquitoes. Twice as many mosquitoes targeted those children than went after the kids who were healthy or weren't in the transmissible stage. The weirdest thing is that the parasite itself appears to be orchestrating the phenomenon. From New Scientist:

“What’s surprising is that this is not to the advantage of anybody but the parasite,” says Jo Lines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. “This tremendously important interaction for the person and the mosquito – both can die as a result – is being engineered by the parasite.” But he stresses that scientists need to find out what mechanism is causing the change in odour, before this can be exploited in a practical way.

Link (Thanks, Big Friend Alderman!)

Today's New York Times reviews "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens." Written by Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy, the book delves into such interesting topics as sleep paralysis (see previous post), pop culture alien imagery, and "source errors, misattributing sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a barely remembered movie with a dream." From Benedict Carey's NYT review:

Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another" factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role."

Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a middle-age divorcée engaged in a quest for personal understanding: "You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all interconnected in some way. Everything is."

At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, at some personal psychological level, true.

Link to buy the book, Link to NYT article

New Scientist reports on Peekaboom, the fun collaborative online game where you help train computer vision recognition algorithms. The aim is to identify an image when only a portion of it is visible. From the article:

Currently, computers or robots apply statistical rules to a database of known images to identify new ones. Although relatively effective, this requires thousands of images and hours of training by humans. Peekaboom aims to ease the burden by harnessing the brain power of willing web users.

"The collected data can be applied towards constructing computer vision algorithms, which require massive amounts of training and testing data not currently available," von Ahn told New Scientist. "The target database will contain millions of images, all fully annotated with information about what objects are in the image, where each object is located, and how much of the image is necessary to recognise it."

Link

A 28-year-old South Korean man died of heart failure minutes after completing a 50-hour session on a first-person-shooter game.

Lee had planted himself in front of a computer monitor to play on-line games on August 3. He only left the spot over the next three days to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed, they said. "We presume the cause of death was heart failure stemming from exhaustion," a Taegu provincial police official said by telephone. Lee had recently quit his job to spend more time playing games, the daily JoongAng Ilbo reported after interviewing former work colleagues and staff at the Internet cafe.

Link

Last night, my wife Kelly opened the new issue of RES magazine and literally gasped at a two-page reproduction of one of Seonna Hong's beautiful paintings. We're both huge fans of Tim Biskup and Kelly was pleased to find out that Hong is Biskup's wife. Her work is absolutely stunning. (Link to previous post about Hong.) The July/August RES is an excellent issue devoted to contemporary comics and animation, including Hong, Paper Rad, Dave McKean, and Garbage Pail Kids creator Mark Newgarden. Link to Seonna Hong's site, Link to RES Magazine

UPDATE: Xeni informs me that Seonna Hong is represented by BB pal Sean Bonner's LA gallery sixspace! Link

Space shuttle Discovery landed safely on Earth before dawn landing in the Mojave desert, two weeks and 5.8 million miles later. Here's a snip from John Schwartz and Warren Leary's story in the NYT:

The shuttle began the end of its mission at 7:06 by firing its engines over the Indian Ocean for more than two minutes in what is known as a de-orbit burn. About 30 minutes later, at an altitude of 76 miles, the shuttle entered the atmosphere at a maximum speed of more than 16,000 miles per hour, guided at first by its steering jets and later, as the atmosphere became thicker, by its wing flaps and rudder.

During the computer-controlled descent, Discovery bled off excess energy and reduced its speed by performing a series of four banks. The shuttle streaked across the California coast from the southwest and flew north of Los Angeles on a course that took it between Oxnard and Ventura. A characteristic double sonic boom could be heard over Edwards as the craft passed overhead.

Once Discovery's velocity dropped below the speed of sound, Colonel Collins took over the controls and brought the spacecraft - now, essentially, a brick with wings - in for its approach. She executed a 196-degree turn to line up with Edwards' 15,000-foot concrete runway 2-2. Main gear touched down and the parachute was deployed; the nose gear touched down immediately after, at 8:11 a.m. Eastern time, one minute ahead of schedule.

"Discovery is home," said James Hartsfield, the NASA spokesman narrating the return.

Link to story. Image: Chris Carlson/Associated Press -- Discovery lands in the Mojave desert at 5:11 a.m. PDT, before dawn.

Former BB guestblogger Johannes Grenzfurthner reports on an unusual development in how the Vienna government funds net.art/culture projects. The Commissioner For The Arts, a member of Vienna's Social Democratic Party, is supporting a consortium of more than 100 net.art groups, called Netznetz, in the development of a reputation-based software system that the group will then use to help decide how to distribute the grant money it receives from the government. From Johannes's post at the monochrom blog:

The new funding system strives for guaranteed and dispersed distribution of funding in the sector while the parameters of the distribution are meant to remain flexible, providing a dynamic scope. The aim is to encourage project-based collaborations by distributing various smaller grants. Therefore, everybody who is involved in the sector is subject to the principle of permanent reconfiguration of the system and the network...

The beneficiaries of the so-called 'network grants', a yearly spending account for approximately 20 groups, is to be evaluated with the aid of a social software tool -- a reputation system currently under development. Even before it has been coded, criticism as well as scepticism and fear start pouring into the media sphere. While even computer veterans criticise the alleged blind trust in a 'computer program', so-called left circles brand it as 'too neo-liberal' as the structure strives for 'collaboration instead of institution'.

netznetz is preparing a protoype in the course of a programming 'sprint' this week and is inviting international experts for an upcoming symposium in autumn 2005 in Vienna.

Link

Sugar in the Gourd is an endless stream of old time music. Good stuff. Link (via Irregular Orbit)

Japanese company Nissui has a new product -- strawberry flavored milk flavored sausages.

In the Mainichi article, an executive from the company said what I've been telling friends for years: "Strawberries go well with minced fish."

Link

Steve Lodefink is welding together a double size Nelson Ball Clock. He'll be describing the project on his blog, Finkbuilt. He also included a great quote from Nelson about the Ball Clock's origins.

“… there was one night when the ball clock got developed, which was one of the really funny evenings. Isamu Noguchi came by, and Bucky Fuller came by. I’d been seeing a lot of Bucky those days, and here was Irving and here was I, and Isamu, who can’t keep his hands off anything, you know- it is a marvelous, itchy thing he’s got- he saw we were working on clocks and he started making doodles. Then Bucky sort of brushed Isamu aside. He said, “This is a good way to do a clock,” and he made some utterly absurd thing. Everybody was taking a crack at this,…pushing each other aside and making scribbles.

At some point we left- we were suddenly all tired, and we’d had a little bit too much to drink- and the next morning I came back, and here was this roll (of drafting paper), and Irving and I looked at it, and somewhere in this roll there was a ball clock. I don’t know to this day who cooked it up. I know it wasn’t me. It might have been Irving, but he didn’t think so…(we) both guessed that Isamu had probably done it because (he) has a genius for doing two stupid things and making something extraordinary…out of the combination….(or) it could have been an additive thing, but, anyway, we never knew.”

(George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design; pp 111).

Link

I'm in LA this week, but I haven't seen this billboard everyone's talking about. If anyone has a snapshot, do tell. Update: BoingBoing reader Jason* delivers the goods.

Snip from news report:

A McDonald's near LAX has a big poster outside showing hamburgers, and a neighboring gas station mini-mart ad displays its snacks and beverages. And now a nearby strip club and adult shop on Los Angeles' Century Boulevard is advertising exactly what it has to offer -- in very plain language. Passersby on the busy thoroughfare were greeted Tuesday with a freshly posted sign outside the Century Lounge proclaiming "Vaginas R' Us." (...)

"The word 'vagina' is not an obscene word and we're not in a position to question the First Amendment," Councilman Bill Rosendahl said.

Link.

* BB reader Jason, who shot and shared the photo above (link to larger image), says, "I work a block away... in a COMPLETELY unrelated field! ;-)"

My inner copyeditor notices that the strip club owners didn't do such a good job of spelling 'R.' But hey, a gold star for getting "LIVE VAGINAS" right.

Reader comments: One BB reader -- a *real* copyeditor -- points out that "we" would actually be the appropriate pronoun here, not "us."

And John Brooks, PhD, MD says:

I noticed you complimented the club in LA for getting the term 'vaginas' correct. I suppose that is indeed more admirable than most, and while 'vaginas' is technically correct, a more correct spelling would be 'vaginae'. I guess that would look weird on a sign though.

So if our readers ruled the world, strip club billboards would look like this.

Kenny Byerly adds,

My girlfriend was the copy editor on the actual Daily Breeze article. As stated in the article, opponents of the sign were going to challenge the sign on the grounds of it being a code-violating vinyl sign and/or on the grounds of infringing on the Toys 'R' Us copyright. Looks like the strip club owner changed the sign to a marquee and changed the wording to cover his bases before the photo was taken -- hence the 'R' vs. "are" discrepancy.

Kim Cooper says,

What's not being discussed in this whole airport strip joint signage controversy is the fact that The Century previously sported one of the most gorgeous vintage logos in all LA. You can still see 4 letters of the original '60s type in the word "Nude"--but time was, you'd drive past and see the quaint promise of "Nude Nudes!" in that same fluid, psychedelicized font. So that sign has always specialized in interesting linguistic tricks.

Seth says,

In the 1970s and 1980s it was also a bowling alley that advertised, on that same billboard, "live, nude bowling". We never understood if this meant total nakedness, or if bowling shoes were allowed. As far as we could tell, this was the only live, nude bowling alley in the country, but some time in the 1990s they closed the bowling alley. So much for clean family fun.

Kevin says,

My friend Brian took this photo of the pre-alteration "Vaginas R' Us" sign the other night: Link.

An anonymous reader provides another "pre-alteration" photo, shown above (link to full size), and says:

Here's a photo I took during the day on Aug 5, and here's a copy of the one i took at night on Aug 2. You can see that they've deleted the apostrophe in between the two snaps! Glad to know that the live nude bars have no shortage of copyediting talent.

And my co-editor Mark Frauenfelder points us to this LA Times piece, Strip Club Forced Into a Pole Dance With Its Sign. Snip:

Laurie Hughes, executive director of Gateway to L.A., a business- improvement district composed of 40 major business and property owners near the entrance to LAX, said her group contacted both White's landlord and Toys 'R' Us Inc. to protest the sign. Hughes said officials from the toy retailer raised the issue of trademark infringement with White.

Friday afternoon, Hughes notified the toy company of the new sign and its wording.

"Once he spells out the 'are' instead of using an 'R,' he's probably OK," Hughes said of White. "The property owner is a member of our business district association. He can't do anything because he has a lease that isn't up until August of 2009."

As for the sign's content, "about all we can do is get him on misuse of apostrophes," she said.

Link.

Now -- if we can just get Chippendales to advertise, "We Are Dicks!" all will be right with the world.

BoingBoing pal Vidiot in NYC just set up a public photo pool called The Panopticon: Pictures Of Surveillance Cameras. (Image shown above: snapshot of a Banksy site in London). Link to group pool.

Reader comment: John says, "A commenter in the Panopticon photopool listed two other Flickr pools on the same subject. Link 1, ."Link 2.

Science News surveys recent innovations in the way humanoid robots walk. There's an emerging approach to robotic locomotion based on a theory called passive dynamics. Seen here is Denise, a robot designed at Delft University, that leverages just a few well-placed motors to take energy-efficient strides. From Science News:

The principles of passive-dynamic walking emerged in the late 1980s, pioneered by roboticist Tad McGeer, now with the InSitu Group in Bingen, Wash. While at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, McGeer showed that a humanlike frame can walk itself down a slope without requiring muscles or motors. Unlike traditional robots, which guzzle energy by using motors to control every motion, McGeer's early passive-dynamic robots relied only on gravity and the natural swinging of their limbs to move forward...

Although McGeer's entirely passive robot could walk only downhill, a new generation of related, mostly passive, machines uses small motors to navigate flat ground. Some roboticists still see these robots as toys that can't handle complex tasks. Others see them as a step toward more-sophisticated machines.

An increasing number of researchers say that the energy-efficient walkers are providing insight into human locomotion. Such devices may inspire new prosthetic-limb designs and eventually move robotics closer to science fiction's popular vision of ambulatory humanoids.

Link

Steve Robinson, mission specialist on Space Shuttle Discovery, sent home an audio report from outer space: Link (Thanks, woojay).

Chris Spurgeon is among several observant Boing Boing readers who ask, "Hmm, is it a podcast if there's no RSS feed?" Back when I was a kid, we used to walk uphill, barefoot, in three feet of snow to download these things they used to call "digital audio files on the internet." I'm pretty sure this is one of those. But while the link in question does not include an RSS feed for automated updates -- and that's what makes a podcast a podcast -- the fact that it came from space is still neat-o.

If you're hankering to sequence your own genomes, this may be good news: Harvard researchers claim to have found a faster, cheaper way to do so. Cheaper meaning only about two million bucks per person.

George Church and colleagues at Harvard Medical School hope eventually to reduce the cost further to $1,000 per genome -- the entire DNA code of a person, plant or other organism.

Their new method, described in a report in the journal Science, bypasses the traditional gel-based technology for analyzing DNA and instead uses color-coded beads, a microscope and a camera. It is considerably cheaper than the current methods, which cost an estimated $20 million for a human genome.

Link to AP story. Details in the article "Cut-Rate Genomes on the Horizon?" by Elizabeth Pennisi, in the current issue of Science magazine (article currently locked for paid subscribers only)

Reader comment: Andy says:

The researchers might be willing to do it for $2 Mil, but they say that if you do it yourself it only takes $140,000 in equipment. Future project for Make?

Declan McCullagh reports:

The Federal Communications Commission has become weirdly schizophrenic. In a pair of decisions on Friday, the commissioners voted to veer in two radically different directions: deregulating DSL lines while simultaneously imposing onerous wiretapping requirements on broadband providers. [...]

The text of the FCC's CALEA order is not yet public, but early signs are worrisome. The FCC's two-page summary says that voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers like Vonage that mimic traditional phone service must rewire their networks to be easily wiretappable.

It also proposes--and this is the worrisome part--to levy the same requirement on "facilities-based broadband Internet access service providers," which seems to cover any company or school offering any type of cable modem, DSL, satellite or wireless service. They'll have 18 months to comply or be fined.

Link

In light of challenges facing NASA's Space Shuttle program, BoingBoing recently asked the question, "what would Burt Rutan do?" Many wrote in with possible answers, but the golden jackhammer prize goes to reader Brady Hauth, who says:

Pungent greetings, indefatigable Xeni, Midas of vivacity!

The specific energy required to reach the altitude SpaceShipOne (SS1) reached is this, corresponding to this speed. Orbits are only stable above around 180 km. A 200 km orbit requires a speed of 7.78 km/s, so getting into a 200 km high orbit requires a specific energy of this, corresponding to this speed. That's 7.54159384 times faster! The formula for the speed of a rocket tells us that to go that much faster requires 693.390852 times as much rocket.

The exact cost of SS1 isn't public, but was probably between $20 and $50 million - I'll say $30 million here. Scaling this up to a low earth orbit capable rocket, we get $20.8 billion. I'm estimating the payload of SpaceShipOne at 400 kg from the rules. The shuttle launches 24,400 kg - 61 times as much. Scaling costs up to something that size, we get $1.2688 trillion The costs of the shuttle program over its entire life? About $145 billion.

Add in the costs of protecting the craft from re-entry from actual orbit, and things start to look expensive.

Now, one can get higher specific impulses than Rutan did, which reduces that number above the e. It makes for more expensive engines, but it doesn't have to cost nearly as much as it costs NASA. (Maybe they're paying people to make presentations like this one from the military?) One can argue that Rutan could make a design that could make orbit cheaply. However, his building SS1 is not good evidence of that. That is a completely different requirement requiring entirely different engineering. A much harder and much more expensive requirement.

Previously on Boing Boing: WWBRD?

compare your height
hasselhoffian recursion
mr. t and me
lucy in the sky with shatner
walken the wildside
ross kemp
rosy grier's needlepoint for men
unholy matrimony
go fug yourself

and the classic...
britney spears on lasers
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank).

BB pal Kirsten Anderson has posted a gallery of photos of her friend Steve Bard's incredible home in Seattle. Bard's house is a wunderkammern that Kirsten says is "literally crammed to the rafters with high weirdness." Seen here is the Sci Fi Room, "a whole room full of glow in the dark, flashing, strobing stuff! (Plus an isolation tank) It's like a Spencer Gifts exploded in there. The effect is strangely quite refreshing after all the dusty Victoriana." Judging from the photos, the pad reminds me of what PT Barnum's American Museum would have looked like if it was curated by the Collyer brothers. More from Kirsten's post at her Thumbmonkey blog:

It's like the Addams Family mansion dialed to 11. And when I say crammed I really mean it- there is NO place to sit- only a tiny walkway meandering through all the rooms...the rest is devoted to weird taxidermy, pickled...things...,monster movie props, victorian hair art, strange books, questionable medical devices, sci fi art, toys, funeral ephemera, and basically anything really unusual.

Link to Thumbmonkey, Link to Seattle Unusual Homes (scroll down)

In this project, titled Spore 1.1, the life or death of this rubber tree plant is tied to fluctuations in Home Depot's stock. Created by Douglas Easterly and Matt Kenyon, Spore 1.1 was exhibited at last week's SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. The project is in the tradition of Nancy Patterson's Stock Market Skirt, Koert van Mensvoort's Data Fountain, and Roy Want's Internet Stock Fountain at Xerox PARC. From the artist statement:

In this project, Home Depot is responsible for the plant in two ways: first, an unconditional guarantee to replace any plant they sell, for up to one year; secondly through an implied cybernetic contract. This second responsibility is the creative content for the work, where Home Depot's economic health is transitioned through a series of physical computing techniques to a mechanism for controlling the watering of the plant. An onboard computer uses a Wi-Fi connection to access Home Depot stock quotes once per week, keeping a database of these week ending stock values. From the fluctuations in Home Depot stock, various programs and circuitry are controlled accordingly. As the company does well, so does the plant - if the company suffers losses, Spore 1.1 does not get watered. If the plant should parish, due to poor stock performance, it is returned to the Home Depot and replaced with another-at no additional cost.

Link to project page, Link to technical paper PDF (Thanks, Cynthia Bruyns!)

Two scientific teams are reporting success in experiments that at least hint at the future possibility of mind reading via brain activity monitoring. University College of London scientists were able to identify which of two patterns volunteers were looking at just by watching their fMRI brain scans. Meanwhile, UCLA and Weizmann Institute of Science neuroscientists used electrodes implanted in two pre-surgical patients to record brain cell responses to scenes from Clint Eastwood's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." Based on that data, they then predicted the fMRI signals generated by eleven healthy patients watching the same clip. From the BBC:

Professor Itzhak Fried, the neurosurgeon who led the (UCLA) research, said: "We were able to tell one part of a scene from another, and we could tell one type of sound from another."

Dr John-Dylan Haynes of the UCL Institute of Neurology, who led the (UK) research, told the BBC News website: "What we need to do now is create something like speech-recognition software, and look at which parts of the brain are specifically active in a person."

He said the study's findings proved the principle that fMRI scans could "read thoughts", but he said it was a very long way from creating a machine which could read anyone's mind.

But Dr Haynes said: "We could tell from a very limited subset of possible things the person is possibly seeing."

Link to BBC article, Link to UCLA press release

This 19-year-old guy was busted for smuggling drugs from Colombia when customs officers noticed that he was wearing a bad toupee. He apparently glued packets containing $100,000 worth of heroin on to his head and then slapped on a hairpiece. From CBS 5:

"Because he used superglue, they took him to a medical facility to have it removed," said Officer Jennifer Conners. "Even at that, it pulled out the hair wherever they removed a package, so he ended up looking like a spotted cat."

Link (via Fark)

I'm supposed to be on holidays, but I would be hideously remiss if I failed to note that my pal and collaborator Charlie Stross just won the Hugo award for best novella for The Concrete Jungle. Charlie, it couldn't have gone to a more deserving soul (and I scoured the afterparties for you but missed you somehow, so take these congrats in lieu of a celebratory drink!) Link