By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:03 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Boris Artzybasheff was a prolific magazine and advertising illustrator in the first half of the 20th Century. His specialty was anthropomorphic machines, such as sneering torpedoes, and smug internal combustion engines. I love the weirdness of his work, and the fact that it frequently appeared on the cover of
Time many times despite its weirdness. If he were around today, his work would be confined to Fantagraphics.
I've long drooled for his 1954 art book, As I See, but even a beat up copy runs $200.
From the dust jacket:
"The artist has divided the book into four sections: 'Neurotica' is a series depicting frustration, timidity, alcoholism, et. al; 'Machinalia' is of machines which take on human forms out of their essence, as in a weird, grotesque dream. 'Diablerie' interprets the fiendish, often ludicrous instruments of modern warfare; the final group, 'Escapades,' ranges widely on our culture and human vanities."
I was happy to learn today that Ken Steacy Publishing plans to re-issue the book. I don't know when or how much it will cost, but I've got my wallet out.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 4:27 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
The Los Angeles Police Department is showing off a new GPS-enabled dart to help cops catch criminals who are speeding away.
StarChase's Pursuit Management System consists of a tiny GPS receiver/cellular transmitter in a glue compound. The police officer uses an air launcher to fire the tracking device at the fleeing vehicle. The device then wirelessly transmits its location for display on a Web-based interface. From the Los Angeles Times:
(LAPD Chief William J.) Bratton hailed the dart as "the big new idea" and said that if the pilot program was successful, Los Angeles' seemingly daily TV fix of police chases could be a thing of the past.
"Instead of us pushing them doing 70 or 80 miles an hour … this device allows us not to have to pursue after the car," Bratton said. "It allows us to start vectoring where the car is. Even if they bail out of the car, we'll have pretty much instantaneously information where they are."
Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:42 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) Artist Any Crehore sent me this photo of her playfully sultry painting of a tropical image moment. Her work gets better with each painting I see.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 3:33 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Boy oh boy, these guys need a new logo.
Link. (
thanks, Jeff)
By David Pescovitz at 3:02 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Former Real World castmember Irene McGee's great radio show and podcast
NoOne's Listening, about media deconstruction, has been picked up by a commercial terrestrial radio station. It will air in the San Francisco Bay Area on Infinity Broadcasting's 106.9 Free FM on Friday nights from 11pm-midnight. The original, longer-format NoOne's Listening will continue to air on college station
KSFS on Fridays 11am-1pm. Both are also available via podcast. The subject of tonight's Free FM show is culture jamming, with Irene interviewing our pals in the
Billboard Liberation Front. (Previous posts about NoOne's Listening
here and
here.) Congrats, Irene!
Link
By David Pescovitz at 2:47 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Helping Hands sounds like a pretty amazing group. They provide trained monkeys as helpers and companions to people who are physically disabled. At their closed colony in Boston, the group trains capuchin monkeys, a species they say that "have an active curiosity and a natural enjoyment for manipulating objects." The monkeys then live in foster homes to further prepare them before they're placed with the recipient. From the Helping Hands site:
When it is time for their training, monkeys come to live at the Monkey College in Boston. During their time at the College, monkeys are taught a wide variety of helping tasks and behaviors they will use to assist their human partners. Professional staff members dedicated to teaching and caring for the monkeys conduct the daily education program.
Monkeys learn how to help people with simple everyday activities such as opening and setting up a drink of water, providing food, picking up a dropped or out-of-reach object, or turning the pages of a book. Monkeys use their small, dexterous hands to do many kinds of specialized tasks.
A laser pointer directed by mouth control enables a quadriplegic or movement-impaired person to communicate his or her specific needs.
Positive reinforcement including verbal praise, affection, and food rewards is the essential tool used to support a monkey’s education and task performance. If a task is not performed as requested, the monkey is not punished but is given more time to practice the task. Most monkeys learn the basic task set within 18-24 months.
Link (Thanks Ruth Waytz, via Xeni!)
By Xeni Jardin at 1:46 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Matthew Rettenmund at BoyCulture blog sez,
This Madonna short, which looks from its condition to have been filmed sometime between the Civil and the First World War, reminds me of Kenneth Anger movies and also thatMadgeeat dubious old porn loop purporting to be Marilyn Monroe recycling a Coke bottle with her vagina. Nothing X-rated happens, though Madonna looks bitchin' in a bikini, suggestively eats and spits out a raw egg (foreshadowing the bukakke craze of the 2000s) and allows a friend to eat the fried egg off of her washboard abs. Yes, she was Madonna even back then.
Link (
Thanks, Blogdonna!)
Previously:
BLOGUE, by Owen Thomas (apologies to Madonna)
Reader comment: Tobias says,
Sly Ciccone - The Immaculate Concoction is the best Madonna mashup to be heard anywhere for years - with album art + bittorrent + individual file downloads (coral cached). Hit my bandwidth baby! Link
By Xeni Jardin at 1:02 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Boing Boing reader peytonchi says,
xeni, my efforts to avoid seeing any pictures of the face transplant patient have failed thanks to david. can we get a unicorn chaser to wash away the haunting image of a face that doesn't quite fit?
Here at Boing Boing, our only aim is to infotain.
Voiçi, un objet d'unicorn art from BB pal
michael donaldson (aka Q-Burns Abstract Message), who explains, "This is a unicorn painting my friend found at a garage sale in Florida."
Link, and here's an even larger size you can use as a desktop image, for whenever life shoves unpleasant things at your eyes: 1500x1125. That jpeg is big, big, big, almost as big as my love for unicorns!
Previous Unicorn Chasers on Boing Boing: Link
By David Pescovitz at 1:01 pm Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Australia's Sunday Times visits Isabelle Dinoire, the 38-year-old French woman who received the world's first face transplant two months ago. (Previous post
here.) From the article:
Miss Dinoire remains reluctant to visit shopping centres and other busy places. But under the close supervision of a team of psychiatrists, she is gaining the confidence to return to society...
She says she is in a positive mood – though she is chain-smoking again – and is making plans to study computers and accounting at college, with a view to opening a baby-clothes shop...
Another of her surgeons, Bernard Devauchelle, said: "Her facial expressiveness is slowly returning and she is talking quite clearly, but has some problems with the letters P and B, which require the lips.
"She certainly does not look like the living dead. She's eating and drinking without dribbling.
"Psychologically, she has totally accepted her new face. Her return to smoking is not the best thing. But that's what she wants to do – we can't stop her."
There is still a risk that Miss Dinoire's body will reject the new face and for the rest of her life she will have to take preventative drugs, which cause an increased risk of cancer and kidney disease.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 11:48 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Cook Industries sells this BBQ Kitchen rig for trucks. It's priced at $3395. The sales videos are quite a treat. From the product description:
No doubt about it. Cooking in the back yard would be more fun if you could have your whole kitchen out there with you. As a matter of fact, so would camping adventures. That's why many homeowners and campers are choosing the Ultimate BBQ Kitchen from Cook Industries.
Beginners may take up to two minutes to unfold the kitchen, while the more experienced will set it up in under a minute. It's just that easy to have your 90,000 BTU propane stove, grill and griddle, microwave oven, mini-fridge and yes, even the kitchen sink.
Link (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)
By Xeni Jardin at 11:40 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
I'll be co-hosting
WNYC's "
On The Media" this week with
Bob Garfield (the show's managing editor and co-host
Brooke Gladstone is on assignment in Israel). Audio will be available later today, and the program airs nationwide at various times over the weekend (
Link to list of NPR member stations that carry OTM).
This week's edition of the show includes a number of items I think BoingBoing readers will dig. Among them:
* Joseph Braude joins us for an interview about his piece in this month's The New Republic on internet growth in Iran, and the boom in Persian language blogs around the world. Stanford researchers say Farsi is now the third most common language for blogs (Link, thanks Paul).
* On the eve of Tuesday's State of The Union address, Slate political correspondent John Dickerson talks with us about his recent Slate piece which traces the history of this annual media spectacle.
* Why are there so many car chases in LA, and why do we love watching them on TV? Tad Friend took a look at that for the New Yorker, and he told us about some wacky moments in the back of police cars going 100+mph on LA freeways, in the course of researching that story.
Link to On The Media home, archived audio online later today.
By Xeni Jardin at 10:46 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
SuitSat will be released into space today, about 3 hours from the time-stamp on this blog post! The SuitSat broadcast takes place soon after that (here in Los Angeles, tomorrow, Saturday Feb. 4th at 10:25 a.m. PST). Space buffs and ham radio enthusiasts around the world are preparing to tune in. Boing Boing pal Michael Perry plans to gather friends on Mount Hollywood (near the Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood sign) at that time, and says:
The odds that we actually hear it depend on many factors most of which are out of our control but we're going to give it a go nonetheless and the worst that could happen is that we'll have had a nice walk. Assuming SuitSat closely approximates the orbit of the ISS, it's going to get up to 69 degrees in our smoggy sky that morning, and be in signal range for just under 10 minutes.
The math: You can calculate ISS orbits here, SuitSat stuff is here, More suitsat stuff here. And finally, how to listen to satellites with a walkie talkie is here.
Also,
Mike Outmesguine says, "It should be noted that any sky will do. Mountain peaks not needed."
Nell Boyce filed a really cool story for NPR News about SuitSat earlier this week, with a sneak preview of what you'll hear if you tune in. Snip:
[Frank Bauer, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland] says [SuitSat] won't be floppy because the astronauts have worked hard to make sure that it looks like a human: "They've put a lot of stuff inside it, like trash ... because they want to get rid of that, too." Even with all that stuffing, SuitSat won't look exactly like a lost astronaut. "People are thinking of the arms flailing around and everything. Well, they're tied, so they're right in front of the suit," says Bauer. "Sort of like you tie a turkey at Thanksgiving, to hold the stuffing in."
Still, the sight of the suit floating away is going to be an arresting image, one that's eerily reminiscent of all those classic scenes from science fiction movies where the astronaut goes hurtling into the black, endless abyss. And it will happen just days after the anniversaries of two shuttle disasters.
Bauer says that he and his colleagues talked about whether the sight was going to be too disturbing for the public. They decided it was worth it: "Isn't it kind of cool to allow us, in a very benign way, to let people see science fiction become science fact?"
Link to archived radio segment (with audio). Image: Cosmonaut and engineer Valery I. Tokarev makes adjustments on SuitSat.
Previously on Boing Boing:
Old space-suit recycled as experimental satellite
Update, 3:22PM PT: Michael Perry says,
They just released it; Mission Control chatter is all in Russian, translated
(mostly) by an American woman in voice-over; however, the cosmonauts switched to English right before they launched the empty space suit saying, "Goodbye, Mr.
Smith," with a thick Russian accent. Cosmonaut humor!
By Xeni Jardin at 10:39 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Apparently this is what has everyone so upset:
Link to image directory, and
here's a related NYT story. (
Thanks, Jake Appelbaum)
Reader Comment:
Anonymous says,
Here is a collection of images of the Prophet Mohammed dating back centuries, up to, including and beyond the present set of cartoons causing an uproar. Warning: some of the more recent images are generally offensive, not just to Islamic fundamentalists. Link
By Xeni Jardin at 10:31 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Snip from
Washington Post story by Guy Gugliotta:
An FBI-led watchdog agency has opened an investigation into multiple complaints accusing NASA Inspector General Robert W. Cobb of failing to investigate safety violations and retaliating against whistle-blowers. Most of the complaints were filed by current and former employees of his own office.
Written complaints and supporting documents from at least 16 people have been given to investigators. They allege that Cobb, appointed by President Bush in 2002, suppressed investigations of wrongdoing within NASA, and abused and penalized his own investigators when they persisted in raising concerns.
The complaints are being reviewed by the Integrity Committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency. The complaints describe efforts by Cobb to shut down or ignore investigations on issues such as a malfunctioning self-destruct procedure during a space shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center, and the theft of an estimated $1.9 billion worth of data on rocket engines from NASA computers.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 10:06 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Boing Boing reader Jim sez, "Maybe it's just me, but the new mountain lion family mascots of the
Department of Homeland Security's Ready.gov kids' site looks just a little too much like
furry hentai for me to not be really creeped out."
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 10:05 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
On Declan McCullagh's always-informative
politech mailing list, ACLU Technology and Liberty Project director Barry Steinhardt shared news of "a new
ACLU white paper and interactive map detailing what is known and suspected about how the NSA's illegal spying on Americans occurs and where the interceptions are likely taking place."
Link to "Eavesdropping
101: What Can the NSA Do?". Steinhard explains, "It looks at the probable connections that
the NSA has made to the U.S. civilian communications infrastructure. The map shows how the NSA's "surveillance octopus" likely entangles the country. We believe it is the first effort to visually illustrate what is happening." More at www.nsawatch.org.
Declan wrote,
I think the ACLU's map is intended to be more fanciful than based on any confirmed participation by U.S. telecom or Internet companies. The closest we've come to actual confirmation was a paragraph buried in the middle of a Los Angeles Times article last month about AT&T, mirrored here and cited in the EFF suit. Am I missing something?
To which the ACLU's Steinhardt replied,
You are right-- in part. No one outside of the Government and the providers themselves can confirm which specific companies are cooperating with NSA's "program". Our map very intentionally does not point to at any specific company or companies. Although if any company would like to make a pledge not to cooperate with the NSA's warrantless and illegal communications spying, we would be happy to publicly applaud that pledge on the map and our other materials.
What the map shows are the various access and interception points that are likely involved in the NSA's surveillance.Many of those points have been described over the years in reports from well informed journalists like James Bamford and government reports like those prepared for the European Parliament. Several of the nations involved in what had been called the Echelon program have also admitted to its existence.
Read the full posts here:
NSA surveillance: EFF lawsuit; new white paper by ACLU
Barry Steinhardt on ACLU's map and NSA surveillance
Previously on Boing Boing:
EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:41 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Joe Simon bought a piece of Andy Warhol art (shown here) for $195,000. But the seemingly capricious Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board deemed it not to be Warhol's work, even though it OKs questionable mass-produced stuff from the Warhol Factory.
The Manhattan-based art historian John Richardson, a friend of Warhol’s, owns several paintings that Warhol gave to him as presents, but says he wouldn’t “dare submit these things to the board for fear of being told they’re not by Andy”. The Authentication Board’s judgments seem so capricious that you wonder if its work isn’t some kind of performance art, a deathbed prank bequeathed by Warhol to make a continuing mockery of the art establishment.
Richardson, in any case, queries the very concept of authenticity in relation to an artist who mass-produced art the way Warhol did — and who did it so shamelessly that he even named his studio The Factory. “He used to do these silk screens,” Richardson explains, “and assistants would come in at night and run off a few copies for themselves. But did that make them any less authentic than the ones they ran off for Andy during the day?”
Not only did Warhol mass- produce art, he often couldn’t be bothered to sign it. So friends stepped in; with surreal consequences. “I’ve heard that Sotheby’s will authenticate an ‘S&H Green Stamp’ poster if it has my forged Andy Warhol signature on it,” says Warhol’s friend, Sam Green. “If somebody else has forged the signature, then it’s not an Andy Warhol.”
Link (Thanks, Joe Simon!)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:30 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Laugh at the video of funny soldiers tripping on government supplied LSD.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 9:29 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Boing Boing reader Ben Shapiro says,
I stopped by FedEx.com this morning to ship some stuff and accidently clicked to indicate that I'm from Afghanistan (it's next to the Good Ole USA option). Much to my surprise, FedEx has a pretty graphic to let me know how Frightentingly Easy it is to ship from there to just about anywhere.
Link to Fedex Afghanistan, screenshot
here.
Update: Mercy! A quick series of pull-down menu tests shows it's also Frighteningly Easy to send packages from Iraq, Rwanda, Niger, Egypt, Bhutan, and other friendly places. (Thanks, Bill)
Reader comment: Courtney says,
I can confirm the ease of shipping from Afghanistan. I worked as a civilian on a Canadian military camp and we used Fedex to ship a lot of our documents back to Canada. Whenever we had something that needed to go out we'd give them a call, they'd show up at our gate and voila, the transfer was made. Almost easier than trying to use Fedex back home!
By Xeni Jardin at 9:25 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Boing Boing reader BReed says,
Google repression is old news. With all the hullabaloo about Google's restricting Chinese access, I thought I'd point out that the same is true of folks living in Azerbaijan (where I've live the last 1 1/2 years). If you surf to the main Google.com site, you get bumped to Google.az, which gives you a significantly restricted set of search results. The same is true of countries like Uzbekistan. The work-around, at least in the former Soviet Union, is to go to Google.co.uk; can Chinese Googlers do the same?
Link. Both Google.com and Google.cn are made available for users inside China, and the latter returns censored results. But remember also that government 'net traffic filters likely mean that users in China who may be able to reach Google.com could receive filtered search results from that domain. Someone entering an identical search string to Google.com from, say, the United States, might receive different/more results.
Reader comment: Darren says,
Back in 2001, I worked at an Irish startup called Cape Clear (Link). We built this absurdly simple thing: If you send an email to google@capeclear.com, with your search terms in the subject line, you'll get an email back with the top ten results. It was just a trivial gimmick for us, but it got ridiculous attention from the media. It didn't seem very useful, but we heard back from two groups who dug it: blind users, whose automated readers liked the plain text emails as opposed to websites and Chinese folks, who could apparently use it to circumvent censored results. The address is still functional--I'm not sure if it's a useful strategy for Chinese searchers in 2006 or not.
Reader comment: Sean O'Rourke says,
I'm not sure what people think of China's blocking power, but it's not as strong as the impression BoingBoing gives. And this gives a different impression of Google's complacency. In Beijing, I am able to access the "Tiananmen" Google searches and images without much problem. I can see all of the protestors' images. The Great FireWall of China only shows up in a couple ways:
(1) Blocks entire domains. E.g., the BBC. Certain subdomains may be blocked as well. This can be gotten around by proxy. Google.com will show all these sites as results, but you will be unable to directly access it in China. Images from sensitive sites will not be shown on an image search, but you will see where they were supposed to be.
(2) Prevents a page from loading. This is the most annoying, as you are often unsure whether there is a slow connection problem (which happens often). The page will simply stop loading before it gets to sensitive text. You'll then wait a few minutes for the timeout. News sites and blogs often have this happen. When the sensitive material is removed, the page loads normally.
(3) Temporary blocking. Not sure if this is keyword or a per-site/page basis. The latest news pages on the HK Disneyland fiasco were having issues (i.e., I could load www.local6.com, but not http://www.local6.com/news/6681871/detail.html) until Xinhua came out with their own version. Search for something too sensitive on Google ("6-June Incident" in Chinese), and you can't get to it again for the next five minutes or so.
These are the most common, but sometimes there are other fortuitous "errors" that I'm unsure about.
The point is that the FireWall cannot prevent you from knowing that there's something you're not seeing. **That's the insidious nature of Google.cn: you're now never sure if there's something you're not seeing.**
Reader comment:
Andy Armstrong says,
There's also monty@hexten.net. You can use it either to fetch an arbitrary URL by placing the URL in the subject /or/ to perform a google search by making the subject
"google " <my search term>
Send it mail with the subject 'help' to get a reminder of those. I haven't touched it for a while - but if there's demand I'll add functionality...
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:18 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
A reader says: "[Here's] a well-written piece on death metal (in particular, the use and history of the "Cookie Monster voice") -- in the
Wall Street Journal. They even got ahold of Frank Oz, the originator of Cookie Monster, who says that the appropriation of Cookie Monster's distinctive vocals by death metal artists is "a whole new thing to me .. I've never heard of it."
Mr. Oz agrees that making Cookie Monster sounds is an arduous occupation. "I never trained for it and I blew my pipes out," he told me. "It's completely unnatural, an explosion of force that comes from the belly through the throat. I would do a day of it and my normal voice would be a half an octave lower." (During our conversation, Mr. Oz demonstrated the Cookie Monster voice. The sudden force was startling and the volume so loud, I had to pull the phone from my ear.)
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 9:15 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Boing Boing reader Jim says,
Following up on previous Boing Boing posts about the region-locked issues on the Bubble DVD, it might interest your readers to know that they can get an XviD version and NTSC region-unlocked version on Usenet now (alt.binaries.dvdrcore and alt.binaries.movies.divx). This link is to a screenshot from the XviD version.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:02 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
The upstanding gentlemen of the Bionic Genius Roundtable interviewed me for their podcast yesterday. We talked a lot about comic books, one of my favorite subjects. As it happens whenever I'm talking to anyone who humors me by showing the barest interest in comic books, I spent too much time fervently imploring them to read
Kamandi.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 8:57 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
We could use a few of these on Hollywood Boulevard, too. Jasper Steutel writes,
This is a photo of a new street sign in Amsterdam which locals and tourists will see appear in some neigbouroods.
The accompanying article is in dutch but says so much that a neigbourhood in Amsterdam has put up these new signs and is also selling the signs to other neigbourhoods for 80 euros.
The text under it reads "blowverbod," which your travel dictionary would translate as "blowing forbidden."
Reader Comment: ScottG In NYC says,
If you run the story text into WordLingo's translator, it seems there's a little more to the story...the translation seems to imply that the signs were quickly stolen a couple of times since they went up Wednesday, so the neighborhood gov't (A'dam is divided into something like a dozen boroughs, sorta like NYC) decided to start selling the signs for a "good aimcause" of some sort (in NL, it could be anything!).
(
Thanks, Richard)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:53 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Librarians from the British Library and from a UK-wide librarians' alliance have given a report to the British government describing how DRM technologies -- which indiscriminately restrict how the legitimate owners of electronic works can use their property -- undermines their mission to be "custodians of human memory."
In written evidence, the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance (Laca) said there were "widespread concerns in the library, archive and information community" about the potentially harmful effects of DRMs.
"We have grave concerns about the potential use of DRMs by rightholders to override existing copyright exceptions," its statement said.
In the long term, the restrictions would not expire when a work went out of copyright, it said, and it may be impossible to trace the rights holders by that time.
"It is probable that no key would still exist to unlock the DRMs," Laca said. "For libraries this is serious.
"As custodians of human memory, a number would keep digital works in perpetuity and may need to be able to transfer them to other formats in order to preserve them and make the content fully accessible and usable once out of copyright."
Link
(
via /.)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:40 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
On a forum for student doctors working in emergency rooms, a thread for "lessons learned from my patients," oscillating between the sobering to the uproarious:
One thing I've learned from 3 EM rotations is: Stay away from people named "Some Guy" or "This One Dude", because they for whatever reason, just punch someone in the face or hit them with a crowbar and run off. If I see them on the street, I cross the street to get away from them...
Never, ever leave flashlights, shampoo bottles, beer bottles or any long, circular object on the floor because someday you will fall on it and it will somehow, work its way up your rectum.
Link
(
via Making Light)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:22 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
From BMEZine: a stellar tattoo of a guy (?) with a Pac Man level tattooed on his bottom. [NSFAtari]
JPEG Link
(
via Wonderland)
Update: How about DefenderSpace Invaders on your tummy? (Thanks, Dylan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:19 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
The Duke Center for the Public Domain has released a knockout comic book about fair use and filmmaking. "Bound By Law" riffs expertly on classic comic styles, from the Crypt Keeper to Mad Magazine, superheros to Understanding Comics, and lays out a sparkling, witty, moving and informative story about how the eroded public domain has made documentary filmmaking into a minefield. Jamie Boyle, one of the project's instigators, told me this: "It's ironic that many of the groups working on policy issues that involve the arts, don't actually use the arts to make their point. We are working on the effect of IP on the arts -- our first project is on documentary film. We want to talk to artists, reach a wider audience, actually show the problems that filmmakers face. Doing a comic seemed the best way to go -- plus it was really fun."
The comic will be released under a Creative Commons license (natch) and sold online -- I'll post again once it's on sale so you can get your copy!
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 1:15 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
Ampulex compressa is a wasp that has evolved to tackle roaches, insert a stinger into their brains and disable their escape reflexes. This lets the wasp use the roach's antennae to steer the roach to its lair, where it can lay its egg in it.
Parasite Rex author Carl Zimmer tells the story in gooey, graphic detail:
The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.
The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.
The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 1:11 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
This site is hosting a 16-page PDF of a scanned in 1971 model-rocket designers' guide, with instructions for building multi-stage and payload-carrying rockets.
Link
(
via Make Blog)
Update: Mike sez, "Here's the competition's 1971 catalog. The two companies later merged, and the resulting company and
technology survives to this day. At least one kit from that
era is still being sold."
By Cory Doctorow at 12:09 am Friday, Feb 3
• Comments • Share
An anonymous writer from The Register writes to say that Andrew Orlowski was not the pseudonymous author of an article that attacked the Electronic Frontier Foundation by erroneously alleging that EFF loses the bulk of its cases. Though my source at The Register declined to identify the anonymous author, my source did say that he had been writing for The Register for quite some time, as can be seen by
this search for his byline.
I previously wrote an article describing Orlowski's unwillingness to correct himself when he has taken pot-shots at people and organizations he holds in low regard (for example, taking three months to acknowledge that a tipster had forged an email from Robert Scoble), in which I cited the EFF-attacking article as an example of this. However, according to the source at The Register, the person who made the factually incorrect statements in that particular article was a different regular contributor to The Register.
There's no indication of whether The Register will correct the inaccuracies in its piece on Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Link
