Alex Pang, my colleague at the Institute For The Future, has written an excellent personal essay for the San Jose Mercury News about the joy of the iPod. From the article:

...Making media experiences private often seems to raise concerns about the consequences of isolation.

Usually the fears seem misplaced in retrospect. In the Middle Ages, reading had been a public, group experience; the rise of literacy rates and diffusion of cheap books sparked worries that people would start reading and thinking for themselves -- and deviate from religious teachings. Society survived, and people have found a way of reconnecting over books: book clubs.

More recently, in the 1950s, people lamented that the transistor radio would spell the end of families gathered around the radio; it did, but it didn't stop families from listening to music and talking together. Parents were no longer able to prevent their children from secretly listening to rock 'n' roll, or doo-wop, or even jazz, but that hasn't pulled families apart, either.

Some technologies even move from one extreme to the other. Parents who used to worry that the personal computer would isolate their kids now fret about them spending too much time instant messaging.

Link (free reg. required but BugMeNot.com's login seems to work: FrodoBaggins@mailinator.com, valinor1)

From The Cryptozoologist:

At the 5th Annual Texas Bigfoot Conference in Jefferson, Texas, October 15-16, 2005, and the Bates College Cryptozoology Symposium in Lewiston, Maine, October 28-29, 2005, Loren Coleman will be unveiling the details of a $1 million bounty to encourage the public to assist in the safe capture of a Bigfoot, Yeti, Lake Monster, Sea Serpent, or other cryptozoological specimen.

This is for real. Cryptozoology's creatures can truly come in from the cold.

Link

I received a ton of emails regarding my post on Thursday about the Archimedes Death Ray recently demonstrated at MIT. Professor David Wallace has posted an FAQ with more info on the project.

From the FAQ:

...By saying "feasibility estimate confirmed", we mean that our mathematical feasibility estimate was confirmed by the experiment and that the myth is at least possible.

This is not '"myth confirmed" in the Mythbusters sense. In the context of the class, the goal was to verify our order-of-magnitude feasibility estimation and accomplish the effect in a very simple manner that might have been possible in Archimedes' day. We were not trying to make a statement that Archimedes did it (which, of course, one could never prove conclusively). However, it is hard for me to say the death ray was impossible.

Link

RSS Announcer is a program that helps people submit their RSS feeds to aggregators. However, it also submits it to the Boing Boing Suggest a Link form. However, we never, ever link to RSS feeds (especially not the kinds of feeds that come through the form, for stuff like insurance settlements, etc), and so this just wastes everyone's time.

The author of RSS Announcer went to great lengths to get users' feeds submitted to Boing Boing. We've got a whole ton of sekrit anti-spam stuff built into our submit-a-link form (mostly precipitated by some company that thought that sending us 400 "site suggestions" an hour advertising Polish rosaries was a great idea), and RSS Announcer gets around it.

We're going to add some more specific anti-RSS Announcer code to the form, but really, a better answer would be for RSS Announcer to just stop sending us this stuff. We're never, ever going to link to anything that RSS Announcer sends our way, so this is just a waste of everyone's time, including that of the author of RSS Announcer.

So here's the question: how do we get ahold of the author of RSS Announcer? I've emailed the WHOIS contact for the domain of the site that sells RSS Announcer, and tried calling the phone-number associated with it (it's no good). I tried looking up a current phone number for the domain contact using various white-pages and background check services, all to no avail.

Does anyone out there in interwebland know who wrote RSS Announcer and how to get ahold of her or him? The volume of junk submissions we're getting is making it basically impossible to manage the legit submissions, which means less link action on BB. If you know the person or can get in touch with her/him, email me

Update: Very important to note: there are many, many distributors of this software. I'm looking for the author, which means I'm looking for someone who knows who wrote this or can track it down.

My kid brother DJ Carlito, a club deejay who specializes in rare world eclectica, shares the following roundup of goodies on his blog:

I bought 3 awesome heavy metal vinyl LPs from Kuala Lumpur today. When i looked "Malaysian Heavy Metal" up on the internet to find out more background, I learned that it's making quite a controversy again in Malaysia, as it did in the 1990s.

Some news links: Malaysian Authorities Ban Heavy Metal (BBC), Herbal cure for Malaysian metal fans (BBC), and Dissonant Voices.

I found some interesting Asian metal websites, too. Here's the Malay-metal band Mandatory, they do "spiritual metal": Link. Here's some metal from Indonesia (AWESOME!!) Link. A big international list: Link. Some clips of some bands from Malaysia: Link. Also found a great site with Vietnamese death metal and punk: Link.

Idda is the Malay-Metal vixen you see on the left hand side of the image above. Here's her '90s glam metal song
Sembilu Cinta: MP3 Link.

Thanks, Carlito!

A small, rural Chinese town seemed poised for prosperity after an entrepreneur connected it to the Internet. "Then fate stepped in." Snip from LA Times story by Ching-Ching Ni:

This village on the edge of the Gobi desert entered the 21st century much as it had the previous one, with yellow sand blanketing the mountains and poor farmers sharing their mud huts with cows, donkeys and pigs.

No homes had running water. No shops sold clothes, just bundles of fabric to be sewn into shirts and pants. Donkey carts plied the dusty main street, rarely troubled by the rumble of a motor. No one in this forgotten section of northwestern China seemed to realize that the nation's east coast was booming or that dot-coms were changing the world. But then, out of the blue, came an idea - and a multimillionaire - that promised to bring prosperity here.

High-tech entrepreneur Sayling Wen heard about the village and decided that by harnessing the power of computers, he could beam its 30,000 inhabitants into the Information Age economy.

Never mind that the Taiwanese tycoon had never laid eyes on the place. He would turn Yellow Sheep River into China's first "Internet village."

Link (Thanks, Nikki Brown). Image: "Yu Kaike, right, lives near a now mostly empty hotel built for the 'Internet village.' It's the first hotel he's seen." Shot by Xu Qiang for the LA Times.

Troubled negotiations in Geneva have yielded an unprecedented result: the US may have to give up control of the internet to a coalition of governments. That sounds great, right? OK, well -- some of those governments are countries like China, Iran, and Syria, who have horrible human rights records and would be expected to impose greater government control. Freedom to wiretap, censor, and firewall? Eh, not so great -- not that the US doesn't have experience with those activities, or an increasingly troublesome human rights record of its own. Snip:

Old allies in world politics, representatives from the UK and US sat just feet away from each other, but all looked straight ahead as Hendon explained the EU had decided to end the US government's unilateral control of the internet and put in place a new body that would now run this revolutionary communications medium.

The issue of who should control the net had proved an extremely divisive issue, and for 11 days the world's governments traded blows. For the vast majority of people who use the internet, the only real concern is getting on it. But with the internet now essential to countries' basic infrastructure - Brazil relies on it for 90% of its tax collection - the question of who has control has become critical.

And the unwelcome answer for many is that it is the US government. In the early days, an enlightened Department of Commerce (DoC) pushed and funded expansion of the internet. And when it became global, it created a private company, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to run it.

But the DoC retained overall control, and in June stated what many had always feared: that it would retain indefinite control of the internet's foundation - its "root servers", which act as the basic directory for the whole internet.

Link to Guardian UK story. Declan McCullagh wrote a related column -- Link to "Power grab could split the Net". See also this related politech post.

Bala Pitchandi says,

As you may have seen, a 7.6-magnitude quake with the epicentre 80km (50 miles) north-east of Islamabad wiped out several villages. At least 500 died in North-West Frontier province in Pakistan. More than 450 died on both sides of Kashmir. The aftershocks have been felt all the way upto Aceh & Sumatra. The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami (SEA-EAT) bloggers have again assembled to blog about this disaster in our blog where the latest news, disaster helplines & relief requests are being posted.

Link

Kathryn Cramer says,

I have set up a Islamabad Earthquake Community Walk site to which I believe (if I checked the right boxes) users can add markers to. I put in all the significant quakes that happened in the past 24 hours plus a marker for Islamabad with Flickr photos of the collapsed 19-storey building.

My writeup on the Islamabad Earthquake Community Walk site: Link

The Islamabad Earthquake Community Walk site: Link.

My first blog entry on the earthquake: Link

See also this news story, from the SEA-EAT blog:

Army seizes Uri town, bars media entry

The Army has seized Uri and barred media from entering the town of Baramullah district in Jammu and Kashmir even as the injured were being evacuated hours after the 7-plus magnitude earthquake flattened it this morning.

Survivors of the giant quake said in this hamlet, 20 km from Uri, that the death toll was "much higher" and the entire town had been flattened. They complained that the relief and rescue efforts had not come speedily and were not enough.

Link

Bill Gates got into a shouting match with Sony CEO Howard Stringer over Sony's support for Blu-Ray, a stupid DRM standard for suck-ass next-gen DVDs, arguing that Microsoft's sellout suck-ass next-gen HD-DVDs are better.

Me, I say they all suck ass. The idea that the entertainment industry should design next-gen technology is hilariously stupid. These are the dumbasses who are calling for mandatory watermark detectors on analog-to-digital converters, after all. They still believe in crazy snake-oil like robust watermarks! They believe that it's practical to control the design of analog-to-digital converters, even though high school science students often build them as class projects!

This is ideological science, Soviet in its approach: like the Soviet apparats who insisted that it was possible to make ideologically correct weeds that would magically transform themselves into wheat; these boneheads insist that it's possible to make computers and networks that are less-good at copying files.

Gates has lain down with dogs and now he's waking up with fleas. Inviting the entertainment industry to design Windows for him was a move of such breathtaking commercial stupidity that it's hard to credit. Where's that monopolist swagger when we need it?

Gates argued that Sony's new high-definition DVD standard, called Blu-ray, needed to be changed so it would work smoothly with personal computers running on Microsoft's Windows operating system. Stringer and two lieutenants defended the technology, insisting Blu-ray would work fine in PCs.

Yet Gates's ire only grew. "There must be something much deeper going on," Stringer said later, according to another person who heard the comment. A Microsoft spokesman acknowledges that Gates and Stringer talked at the conference, but says things did not become "heated."

Link (Thanks, Javier!)

Here in Britain, closed-circuit cameras are everywhere: the average Londoner is said to be photographed some 300 times a day. Equally ubiquitous are the signs that demand that you take off your hoodie's hood or your motorcycle crash-helmet so that it won't interfere with the universal surveillance.

So imagine the reaction that these awesome, masked French hoodies will evince when they land on Britain's shore. All they lack is a cluster of hidden, high-intensity infra-red LEDs that can overwhelm the charge-coupled device arrays in some digital cameras. Link (Thanks, W1nt3rmut3!)

Hollywood has convinced 20 congressjerks to sneak the Broadcast Flag into another, unrelated bill as way of getting their pet law passed without any democratic debate or scrutiny. Lots of us have been writing to our own lawmakers to tell them to stop this assault on transparency and accountability in government.

Lawmakers are listening.

On Copyfight, this note from Terry Frazier, whose email to Senator Saxby Chambliss prompted a personal phone-call back from a staffer who vowed to fight the flag:

Today I got a surprise telephone call - I mean a real surprise - from Heather Riley in Senator Saxby Chambliss' office. On Wednesday I sent an e-mail to my Congressman and both Senators regarding the Broadcast Flag issue I saw on Copy Fight...Heather called to tell me that Senator Chambliss received my e-mail, that they are aware of the Broadcast Flag amendment in a reconciliation bill coming up for consideration, and that the Senator will try to have the amendment removed when they take up the bill after recess. According to Heather the Senator agrees with consumers - this bill needs to be debated on its own merit, not slipped in under the radar attached to some unrelated matter.

Thank you Senator Chambliss. I routinely complain about my representatives voting for big business and against consumers. It's nice to be surprised.

The Broadcast Flag turns the FCC into a PC regulator: under the proposal the Commission would have to vet every new piece of technology to make sure that it didn't disrupt the entertainment industry's cushy business-model. This is a real "Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act" and it needs to die, die, die.

Write to your lawmakers today and tell them that elected reps who break their constituents' televisions don't get re-elected. Link

A Greek company called Intermat sells "anti-thermal/IR coatings" -- paints and make-up creams that confuse heat-signatures so that soldiers and materiel don't show up on heat-sensing scopes:

* You cannot afford to be Visible in IR
* From now on your enemy is Thermally Identifiable but you are not
* You are Protected from thermal threat
* You now have the flexibility to Adapt to the IR environment
* A Sustainable advantage for you, that is
* A technologically advanced yet low cost Force Multiplier. Exploit it
* Because camouflage and deception are now taken one step Further. A new Era of camouflage has now begun
* Erase your assets… Let your enemy wonder...

Intermat is widely known for being the only company that exclusively provides thermal signature management. All anti-thermal coatings are state-of-the-art that have been developed after many years of R&D. Applicable at the wide IR spectrum of 400 –20.000nm they perfectly conceal against thermal observation and protect you from heat-seeking weapon systems.

Link (via Futurismic)

Salon has a joint interview with Susanna Clarke (author of the award-winning Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) and Neil Gaiman (whose striking novel Anansi Boys completely ate my life last week, when I dropped everything to just read it, start to finish):

Those little cultural differences can really make an impression. I remember being astonished by how many flavors of potato chips they have in England.

N.G.: Gherkin! The English grow up with pickle-flavored potato chips, so I probably wouldn't think to put them in a story. With "Anansi Boys" it was frustrating. I had the idea for the story first. I had Anansi [a West African trickster god], his son Spider and this other one who eventually got called Fat Charlie. Then I spent about seven years lazily reading every Anansi story I could and finding a book from the 1920s, when someone went out to Jamaica and talked to people. It's out of print, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I was able to get a copy. Reading stories about Anansi and death, this was all part of it. And then I had to go out to the Caribbean. And then I had to go to my friend Nalo Hopkinson and say, "I am a floppy-haired, white English person and I'm going to be writing Caribbean dialogue. I need somebody to read this and make sure that I am not making an absolute idiot of myself." Bless her, Nalo read all of my dialogue and offered suggestions where needed. I didn't actually breathe a sigh of relief until I heard the audiobook with Lenny Henry reading it. Lenny's from Dudley, but his mother came over from Jamaica, and he does all the accents. And they all work.

Link (Thanks, Sumana!)

This photo-realistic anime video (more here) of slow-moving plants with tentacles, tongues, beaks and lazily blinking eyes actually made my stomach do one of those slow somersaults you get when you step on a turd. Something about these evinces a genuinely atavistic reaction, a whole-body squick. There's nothing overtly gross here, but the net effect makes me go all ooey-gooey. Link New Link (via JWZ)

Boing Boing reader Morelos Barros says,

I am a loyal fan and reader from Mexico City. My country is being hit by hurricane Stan and we are in pretty bad shape.

I am sitting here at work drinking coffee and thinking how lucky I've been so far. Hurracaine Stan has hit Mexico in the worst possible way and if you think the devastation in NOLA was terrible, just look at international news and see how we are in such a bad shape.

Seven states have been declared red alert and disaster zones. As of this writing there are several thousand people without a home and children asking for food.

As usual, government has been quick to hide the real death toll, but bloggers and unofficial info report that it's in the thousands. This is a dark time for a poor country.

In related tech news, a group called Telecom Without Frontiers (TSF) says it's deploying emergency satellite communications facilities throughout storm-affected Guatemala and other Central American countries. Link.

Here's a New Scientist article with more detail on areas where mudslides and flooding have occurred.

Guatemala appears to have sustained the worst damage, with nearly 200 confirmed dead throughout the country -- 70 died from a mudslide in a small pueblo called cantón Panabaj, in the Sololá area near beautiful lago Atitlán.

I've driven by that village. The people of this country have witnessed so much death. Whether the cause is political or "weather violence," the gente natural always suffer the hardest blows.

BoingBoing -- and my own family -- has friends throughout this region. Best wishes go out to them, and their surrounding communities.

Image: Mayan women mourn dead after the Panabaj mudslide today. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd).

Update: up to a thousand or more people are now presumed to have died in the Panabaj mudslide -- possibly the entire population of the pueblo. Link

Snip from a breaking! news! report! I just phoned in filed for Wired News:

When the Comedy Central program The Daily Show With Jon Stewart canned its original set for a slicker, newsier replacement, much wailing and rending of garments could be heard throughout the land.

But while the old set may be sorely missed on TV, one group of die-hard Daily Show junkies plans to resurrect it for a cross-country tour -- and a new life online. The fans purchased the old set in an eBay auction held earlier this year benefiting 826NYC, a nonprofit youth-literacy center in New York City.

Using the name Mouth of America Network, or Moan TV, the winning bidders now plan to produce an internet project called "The Daily Set Without Jon Stewart," to consist of podcasts, a blog and video webcasts that chronicle the adventures of the old set as it travels cross-country.

Link to Wired News story.

"The Daily Set Without Jon Stewart" spokesfan Hal Bringman tells Boing Boing the Old Set seems to have special awesome superpowers. It is a magnet, and trufans are steel. Here's a short excerpt from a long lovenote it received today from Alyson West in Atlanta:

Dearest Daily Show:

If only I had been wise to your ways I would have tuned you out at the start. But it was inevitable. You grew on me. You, with your flirty headlines and seductive reports. I wasn't really expecting to feel this way, but I do.

This is worse than that time in 9th grade when a senior basketball player came by my locker to ask me to the homecoming dance. You're reducing me with your charm. If I still used notebooks, then I would scribble your name all over their pages. If I did not have a car, then I would ask you to walk me home. If I wanted to put myself at risk for mono, then I would kiss you nonstop, Daily Show. That is how much I love you.

Boing Boing reader Jason Bobe says, "The Long Now Foundation has put their seminars online. They have already posted the recent Ray Kurzweil talk and the panel [with George Dyson, Esther Dyson, and Freeman Dyson] last night should be up soon -- it was excellent."

Vlad Spears went, too, and exclaims, "My brain is filled with science! I've posted a write-up on 2Sec of the evening: Link."

Jake Appelbaum also attended the event, and shot photos including the one shown here. L-R: George, Freeman, Esther Dyson; Stewart Brand.

Next up on the Long Now event calendar: a talk by Clay Shirky on Monday, November 14 -- "Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories." Link.

Previously:
In SF, 3 Dysons - Freeman , Esther, George - speak Wed 5 Oct.

* Philadelphia: The blogosphere's own Susannah Breslin, who was recently displaced from her home in New Orleans, visits Philly this weekend to represent Ducky Magazine at the 215 Festival. Another highlight on the event schedule -- "Bad Sex With Neal Pollack." Is there any other kind? Ba-dump. Here's some related press coverage.

* Los Angeles: An exhibit of work by often-mispronounced artist Seonna Hong opens at the new sixspace Saturday night.

* Online: dude, where's my corset? Adventurous gentlemen may want to grab a credit card and prepare to lace up in one of these over the weekend.

*Everywhere on the planet, after sunset: Observe earthshine on the surface of the waxing moon. It baffled Leonardo centuries ago, and no, not Di Caprio. Link

The new RU Sirius Show on the MondoGlobo Network includes an interview with John Leland, author of Hip: The History. Here's a snippet from the show:

Leland: [Hip] should be a way to invent a hierarchy where people who are on the bottom rung of one social ladder can place themselves at the top of another one. And to consider the other social ladder superior to the one that would put them at the bottom.

Also, Junket 415, a local SF events show, features a remix of segments from Allen Ginsberg's Howl and John Perry Barlow's talk at the EFF's 15th Anniversary Party, among other goodies. Link

Soapdetectives is a podcast of golden-age radio plays about private eyes and other hard-boiled types, including Sam Spade, The Saint and so forth. Link (Thanks, Andreas!)

Bradd Libby has written instructions for making your own silver FSM brooch. Bradd is also selling one on eBay.
Link

This week's NTK newsletter has an hilarious story about my recently released paper on Europe's coming Broadcast Flag:

While scientists valiantly warn of the pandemic spread of the DRM flu, has anyone considered that innocent-seeming CORY DOCTOROW might be an unsuspecting carrier? After years of close physical contact with the biohazardous hands of MPAA lawyers during the brief Broadcast Flag outbreak of 2004, he now seems to have been in *just* the right spot to see the pestilence jump the species barrier to European Digital TV. And this variant seems a lot nastier: tweaked by Hollywood lawyers to determine at a much finer grain what Europeans get to record off their TVs, where you get to save it, what constitutes a "family", and who exactly in open source will be buggered this time. And while the American Broadcast Flag appears now to be at least temporarily cordoned off in a batch of carefully isolated politicians, this European "CPCM" mutation looks to be spreading through the sprawling, marshy standard bodies endemic to the European continent. Will we live in a locked-down, quarantined TV world? Or are we *insufficiently paranoid*?

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

Justin sez, "Google just announced a new feed reader (available off of labs.google.com) at Web 2.0." Link (Thanks, Justin!)

If you liked the gallery of Soviet pocket-calculators, you'll love this stupendous nostalgia site for PCs from Soviet Eastern Europe -- Czecheslovakia, the USSR, East German, Hungary, Poland, and so on. The collection of Sinclairs alone is brilliant, to say nothing of the Apple ][ compatibles. Link (Thanks, Nick!)

The Jamaica Star reports that a 40-year-old barber styles his hair to look like a hat.

Darain Housen has not taken off his hat for the last 20 years. He bathes, he sleeps and does everything possible in it. It is a perfect fit. But unlike other hats, his is not made of cloth but from the very hair on his head...

...Housen said that he was once stopped by a policeman while coming from a dance early one morning who insisted that he removed it. "Him shine di light pon mi an' look. When him see it seh a mi real hair him frighten an' seh mi mus come check him a di station di following morning. When mi go him shake mi han' an' seh mi have talent an' mi fi keep it up.

Link (via Christopher Porter) (thanks, rev rob murray!)

If this guy has one of those bumper stickers that says, "The worst day fishing is better than the best day working" he's probably going to remove it from his car. When his line became snagged, he pulled his pole, which caused the sinker to fly through his eye socket and shatter his cheekbone.

"I was so lucky - if it had been a few millimetres in the other direction then I would have lost my eye," he said.

He is keeping the weight as a souvenir after doctors gave it back to him.

"It's my lucky weight now. I will carry it around with me," said Mr Williams, of Acrefair.

Link (thanks, Marty!)

This is a gigantic gallery of photos of Soviet-era Russian pocket calculators, along with scans of documentation, pix of the internal circuits (including some with tubes!), and box-art. Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

An article in the August issue of EOS (published by the American Geophysical Union) says we're well on our way to a "summer ice-free Arctic Ocean" and the short-term consequences will be catastrophic.

The ramifications of a transition to this new system state would be profound. The deglaciation of Greenland alone would cause a substantial (up to 6 m) rise in sea level, resulting in flooding along coastal areas where much of the world’s population resides. Shrubs and boreal forest will likely expand northward, further decreasing the albedo. Less certain is the fate of vast stores of carbon previously frozen in the permafrost. Would they be exhaled as carbon dioxide and methane, further accelerating warming?

The article also says there's nothing we can do to stop this from happening:

The change appears to be driven largely by feedback-enhanced global climate warming, and there seem to be few, if any, processes or feedbacks within the Arctic system that are capable of altering the trajectory toward this “super interglacial” state.

As Mike Davis writes about this:

The demon in me wants to say: Party and make merry. No need now to worry about Kyoto, recycling your aluminum cans, or using too much toilet paper, when, soon enough, we'll be debating how many hunter-gathers can survive in the scorching deserts of New England or the tropical forests of the Yukon.

Link to PDF Link Mike Davis essay.

Southwest Airlines passenger Lorrie Heasley was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Bush, Cheney, and Rice that bore the caption "Meet the Fuckers." Other passengers, gravely offended, tattled on her and Southwest Officials kicked her off the flight.

Flight attendants, saying passengers had complained, first asked Heasley when the plane stopped to let off and pick up passengers in Reno to change into other clothes, Heasley says. She told them she didn’t have any other clothes on board, but agreed to partially cover the T-shirt with her husband’s sweater. When the sweater fell down into her lap as she was napping, flight attendants asked her to change out of the T-shirt, turn it inside out or leave the plane, Heasley says.

When attendants told her that Southwest would refund her money for the flight, Heasley says, she and her husband, Ron, decided to leave the plane. But she says Southwest officials have since rejected her request for a refund. Forcing her off the plane, she says, was both ridiculous and a violation of her right to free speech.

Link

Last Sunday I was a guest on the This Week in Tech podcast, recorded live at the Gallery Cafe in San Francisco. This is the podcast that a lot of the old TechTV/screensavers people migrated to -- I had a TON of fun. Audio's live! MP3 Link

Update: Hey, there's video too! (Thanks, Costoa!)

I just spoke with MIT professor David Wallace and grad student Barry Kudrowitz who are both involved in MIT's Product Engineering Processes course, a creative deisgn and engineering class. Last week, the class demonstrated that Archimedes's Death Ray, as previously "busted" on TV's Mythbusters (episode 16), could have been real. Legend has it that during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC, Archimedes made a burning glass to burn up the enemy Roman warships. To see if it was possible, the MIT crew built a 10+ foot long model ship out of wood and positioned 129 1-foot square mirrors nearby. The results:

Flash ignition!

In an instant there is a large, open flame. The volatiles liberated from the wood ignite at roughly 1100 F.

Open, sustaining flame occurred less than 10 minutes after the sun was in a clear patch of sky!

Link

UPDATE: Site seems to be down intermittently available right now.

My friend Paul Spinrad just published a new book called "The VJ Book: Inspirations and Practical Advice for Live Visuals Performance." (Paul is also the author of the classic RE/Search Guide To Bodily Fluids and an editor at MAKE:) Even if you're not into making video art, the book has great history and interviews with the likes of filmmaker Craig Baldwin, Laserium creator Ivan Dryer, and curator Kathleen Forde. It's also packaged with a software and videoclip DVD so you can trip out in your own home. As I said in my blurb on the book jacket: "The revolution may not be televised, but it's certainly being projected."
Link

To follow up on Mark's note about Dylan Thomas audio: Salon has got the entire, eleven-volume set of Dylan Thomas recordings from Caedmon as free MP3 downloads. Subscribers get 'em by clicking, others will have to watch a brief ad. This is stupendous: there are few writers in the history of the world who read their work as well as Thomas. I nearly burst when I saw that the collection included his reading of "Lament," IMO his greatest-ever reading.

When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a telltale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Ninepin down on the donkeys' common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

Link (Thanks, Sumana!)

Great recording of Dylan Thomas reading his famous poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night."
Link (via PCL Linkdump)

My pal Vann Hall alerts us to a strange choice in phrasing from Howard Dean while talking about Bush supreme court nominee Harriet Miers. From an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC-TV's Hardball:

Well, certainly the president can claim executive privilege. But in the this case, I think with a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, you can't play, you know, hide the salami, or whatever it's called.

Link

Creative Commons has just launched its first fundraising campaign. In 2.5 years, over 50,000,000 works have been licensed under CC licenses (including mine, I'm proud to say). CC licenses promote a free and open Internet, undermine the arguments for technology mandates and DRM, and benefit the developing world, disabled people, and educators and archivists (as well as creators). There are CC projects in dozens of countries around the world, which means that soon everyone will be able to play, no matter what legal system you live under.

The goal is to raise a very modest $225,000 by December 31. That's so do-able. CC is a charity, and you'll get a tax-receipt, but you also get to strike a blow for a digital future that expands our rights and freedoms.

The alternative is a future in which every click and every use and every innovation requires permission and payment. A pay-per-use, pay-per-second, ask-first world. I'll do anything to stop that world from coming to pass. My $250 donation is cheap insurance. Link

Author and BoingBoing band manager John Battelle is hosting the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week -- sounds like this year's edition is a great one (I think Cory's there, too!). Here's press and blog and Flickr coverage: Link.

But the backwards-compatible Web 1.0 conference, pictured above and below, was the place to be last night for folks who lived through the dot-com hype years and secretly miss them. It was held in the rear corner of a back-alley dive bar -- "Listen for people yelling 'Sell! SELL!' into StarTac flip phones," the invite read. Paradigms were shifted, man. Photos.

Stefan Jones says: "Dang. Here I was cynically blaming oil companies and neo-conservative hawks for goading Bush into invading Iraq. It turns out God gave him the idea."

President George W. Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

...

[Palestinian Foreign Minister] Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Link

Mark Dery reports on the Art and Politics of Netporn event, billed as "the first major international conference on netporn criticism," that took place in Amsterdam last week. Dery gave a keynote titled "'Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere': The Sublime and the Grotesque in Web Porn." From his presentation:

Things are getting weird out there, so much so that imaginary obsessions such as exophilia, the "abnormal attraction [to] beings from worlds beyond earth" that is the subject of the underground novel Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, are starting to sound downright plausible. Can we be far from the future foretold by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans of Space Age snuff thrill to footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness induced by media bombardment—the "demise of feeling"—would open the door to "all our most real and tender pleasures—in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena...for...our...perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game."

(NSFW) Link

Jeez, talk about trufans. The old set from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart on Comedy Central set was recently auctioned off for charity. The winning stalkers bidders now plan to drag the damn thing all around the United States, "Where's Waldo" style, with bloggy, podcasty, road-video hilarity likely to ensue. There's even -- wait for it! -- a Jon Stewart lookalike contest in the works.

Where in the World is the Daily Show Set Today will be a daily show produced along the back roads, on the main streets, in the small towns and in between all the wide spots that make up this diverse land.

Jon Stewart look-alikes, in addition to towns and people interested in having the set come to their city, should log on to thedailyset.com and submit an email to us about who they are and why the Daily Set should come to their town.

Link to "The Daily Set Accross America Without Jon Stewart, Rob Corddry, Samanta Bee, Ed Helms, Stephen Colbert, or anyone else from the actual show."

On Declan McCullagh's politech list, Paul Alan Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group says:

I want to call your attention to a very good decision issued today by the Delaware Supreme Court in Cahill v Doe, quashing a subpoena to identify a citizen who criticized a public official on a newspaper's blog. The decision contains a very good discussion of the potential chilling effect of such subpoenas, of the important role of the Internet in facilitating citizen communication, and of the need for a standard that balances the First Amendment right to speak anonymously against the interest of one who believes that he has been defamed to vindicate his reputation.

Most important, the decision agrees with most other courts that a plaintiff should not be allowed to identify his critics unless he presents evidence to support his defamation claims. This is the third appellate court in the country to weigh in on the topic, and all of them -- the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in Melvin v Doe, New Jersey's Superior Court, Appellate Division in Dendrite v Doe, and now the Delaware Supreme Court -- have required the presentation of evidence before a Doe defendant may be deprived of his right to remain anonymous.

More info here (PDF link to opinion, here's the brief in PDF), and the decision will (eventually) be made available here.

Dressed to "slam doors and sulk." The Spring 2006 ready-to-wear collection from Japanese designer Junya Watanabe includes doc-martenish boots, wack-ass giant mohawks, and what look like shower caps for minefields.

Conde Nast's Style.com reports that he was "inspired by a Japanese band [named] Mad Capture Maggots."

I can hear it now in the alley behind Neiman's in Beverly Hills, while their greatest hits blare from an iPod nano on someone's arm: "My Watanabe can beat up your St. Johns, bitch!"
Link (Thanks, Tolz)

Reader comment: BoingBoing spoilsport Emile says,

I believe he was refering to "The Mad Capsule Markets" when the article mentions "mad capture maggots". They're a Japanese band reminiscent of Mindless Self Indulgence.

Whatever, "Maggots" would be way more punk rock! Here's the website for Mad Capsule Markets, which is in fact the name of the band that inspired Watanabe -- despite Style.com's typo. (Thanks, Steven)

For sale on eBay; it used to dispense das feine pfefferminz und zo weiter.
Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded)

I'm loving the new design that Salon launched today to commemorate their tenth (!) anniversary. Holy crap -- TEN YEARS. I'm really proud to have published so much fiction with Salon over the years. Link

Because I know nothing puts me in the mood like a pair of "ASK ME ABOUT BIRD FLU" boxer shorts. Hoodies, baby-doll-tees, and trucker hats sold separately.
Link (Thanks, John D)

Last January, I got an email from a trusted source swearing that a good pal of his had been arrested while making a donation to an online tsunami relief fund because he'd been using a non-standard text-based browser that triggered the donor's intrusion detection system. I blogged the story.

Now the "lynx user" has been found guilty of unlawful intrusion, and has changed his story. He says that he wasn't just using nonstandard browser, but that'd he'd also probed the system when his attempt to make a donation had failed and he got a suspicion that he'd been suckered by a phishing scam.

If this is the true story (and the judge didn't dispute it, according to the ZDNet story), then that could very well have been me -- lots of times when I suspect a site is dodgy I'll do things like check the operating system and server version of the remote end by using probing tools and compare the result against a list of known-compromised combinations.

But in court on Wednesday, Cuthbert said he had made a £30 donation to the site, after clicking on a banner advert. When he received no final thank-you or confirmation page he suspected he might have fallen victim to a phishing scam, so he carried out two tests to check the security of the site.

Cuthbert's defence team had argued that he had merely 'knocked on the door' of the site, pointing out that he had the skills to break into it if he wanted.

Section one of the CMA says that it is an offence to make "unauthorised access to computer material". There is no burden on the prosecution to prove that the accused had intended to cause any damage.

Judge Purdy accepted that Cuthbert had not intended to cause any damage, and also pointed out there was almost no case law in this area.

Link

Update: Stephen de Vries sez, "The details of this case are important to understand exactly how absurd the verdict was. What Daniel actually did to 'knock on the door' was to insert a ../../../ character sequence into the web address and a single quote into the credit card field - THROUGH HIS BROWSER. He did not use any attack 'tools' or 'probes' other than Internet Explorer. Furthermore, typing these sequences into a browser does not an attack make - it only proves that a website may be vulnerable. It takes a hell of a lot more effort to actually gain any form of unauthorized access to the site. Daniel did none of this, he only typed the sequences and watched the responses - and don't forget, he actually donated the £30 p towards the fund using his real credit card and personal details. I am a security consultant and not the only one to be outraged by the way this case was handled and by the outcome of the final verdict. The incompetence and ignorance of the Computer Crime Unit can be understood - but that the judge chose to interpret the vague Computer Misuse Act in this way simply beggars belief and sets a worrying precedent in UK law. So to all UK based web administrators, if you encounter ../../../ or single quotes in your web server logs, please forward this information on to the CCU. They can be contacted on: +44 20 7230 1279 or +44 20 7230 1280, http://www.met.police.uk/computercrime/#SO6"

The Australian High Court has ruled that mod chips that allow consoles to play out-of-region games and games that are being played off of backup discs are legal. The heart of the ruling is that the law against breaking software locks (the anticircumvention law) only prohibits breaking locks that prevent infringement, not merely those that prevent access. Since region control and preventing backup aren't part of the rightsholder's copyright monopoly, the presence of software locks to accomplish these ends is not protected under Aussie law.

The free trade agreement which Australia signed with the US last year and which came into effect this year stipulates that copyright laws here have to be aligned with those in the US by 2007.

According to the FTA, consumers cannot circumvent "effective technological measures" that control access to a tech device.

All six judges of the High Court held that widely used mod-chips are legal and that playing a game on a consumer's machine does not constitute an illegal copy.

Sydney Morning Herald Link, The Age Link, ABC Link (Thanks, Kerno, Meika, Adrian, and Doug!)

D.C. Denison, the Boston Globe's technology editor, wrote a story for Make online about the end of a great idea called Sparqs -- an "industrial arts club." I hope this idea spreads to other cities, and flourishes.

One large, startling work-in-progress was a "buscycle," a bus that is designed to run entirely on the energy produced by pedaling passengers. Coming together on the bed of a 1989 Dodge box van, now sheared of its top, the buscycle was usually surrounded by a small swarm of artists and bike nuts, welding and twisting wrenches. It occupied the main stage in the shop, except when it was being pushed around the empty parking lot on tentative test runs.

A number of smaller projects were also in residence. Dan Grunberg and son Ted, 14, were leaning into a variety of tools around the edges of the shop. Dan was using the MIG welder and plasma cutter to fashion a firebox for a custom BBQ smoker. So far, he's put about three weeks of free time into the pursuit of this "perfect smoker."

Link

Last Call Poker is an alternate reality game built around the frame of a dodgy poker site. The site asks for your "date of death" when you register. After filling out a profile and playing poker for a few minutes, you start getting phone calls, emails and had strange images show up on you screen. There seems to be quite a bit of story hidden within the site including movies (with ex-child star Todd Bridges--better known as Willis from 'Diff'rent Strokes'), audio segments, and live poker games played at cemeteries around the country (using the tombstones as cards)." Link (Thanks, Pablos!)