By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:01 pm Saturday, Mar 18
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Jennifer Sharpe has a great audio segment on NPR about a vocal sound effect genre called eephing.
The eccentric Southern tradition of "eephing" is best described as the hillbilly equivalent of the hip-hop human "beat box" vocal style -- a kind of hiccupping, rhythmic wheeze that started in rural Tennessee more than 100 years ago.
Just like human beat-box artists of the 1980s rendered perfect imitations of drum machines with their mouths, the original eephers of the 1880s imitated the hogs and turkeys living in their backyards.
Link
(via PCL Linkdump)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:31 pm Saturday, Mar 18
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This 1972 documentary entitled "Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing" covers the early years of ARPAnet, the precursor of the Internet, through interviews with the heroes of the internetworking revolution. Tightly wound internetworking geeks like the legendary JCR Licklider intensely recite the benefits that internetworking will shortly deliver, sliding in digs at the telecoms industry, the Bellheads who have no desire to see this future realized. This is a fantastic 30 minutes of paleo-nerd memorabilia.
Link
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Thanks, Justin and Kevin!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:45 am Saturday, Mar 18
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Marvel Comics is continuing in its bid to steal the word "super-hero" from the public domain and put it in a lock-box to which it will control the key. Marvel and DC comics
jointly filed a trademark on the word "super-hero." They use this mark to legally harass indie comic companies that make competing comic books.
A trademark's enforceability hinges on whether the public is likely to associate a word or mark with a given company -- in other words, when you hear the word "super-hero," if you think "Marvel and DC," then Marvel will be able to go on censoring and eliminating its competition.
One way of accomplishing this dirty bit of mind-control is by adding a ™ symbol after the word "Super-Hero." That TM lets the world know that you claim ownership over the word it accompanies. If you can get other people to do it, too, eventually you may in fact get the world to believe that the word is your property -- and then, it becomes your property.
"Super-hero" isn't Marvel's property. They didn't invent the term. They aren't the only users of the term. It's a public-domain word that belongs to all of us. Adding a ™ to super-hero is a naked bid to steal "super-hero" from us and claim it for their own.
The latest trick in its move to steal the word is using the ™ symbol in the bumpf for its California science centre show -- they've recruited a science museum to help them steal "super-hero."
Here's a proposal: from now on, let's never use the term "super-hero" to describe a Marvel character. Let's call them "underwear perverts" -- as Warren Ellis is wont to -- or vigilantes, or mutants. Let's reserve the term "super-hero" exclusively to describe the heros of comics published by companies that aren't crooked word-thieves.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:31 am Saturday, Mar 18
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Stanford's Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a specialist in the physiology of stress, and two of his sterling lectures are available gratis through the iTunes music-store. When I quit my day-job on Jan 1, I finally got around to going to the doctor about all the little ailments that had plagued me for the years leading up, little patches of skin conditions, aches, pains and botheration, and as each was diagnosed and treated, I looked them up online and saw that they were all symptomatic of excessive stress.
Sapolsky's engaging, fascinating lectures trace all the ways that stress creates heretofore unseen ailments in a population that has largely cured all the fast-killing diseases and can now afford to contract slow and lingering ones. From psychogenic dwarfism -- children who stop growing and never go through puberty due to extreme abuse-stress, something that Peter Pan author JM Barrie suffered from -- to the effects of stress on the heart, brain, blood, and long term overall health, Sapolsky's research is mind-blowing to those of us who wear our stress and overwork like badges of honor.
What's more fascinating is Sapolsky's citations to empirical research on the factors that mitigate harm from stress, which are surprisingly simple and intuitive. All told, listening to these two lectures was the best audio experience I've had in months:
Saplosky related a story about a boy from a very psychologically-abusive setting who was hospitalized in a New York hospital with zero growth hormone in his bloodstream. Over the next two months he developed a close relationship with the nurse at the hospital-undoubtedly the first normal relationship he had ever had-and soon, amazingly enough, the growth hormone levels zoomed back to normal. The nurse then went on vacation and the levels dropped again, rising once more immediately after her return.
"Think about it," Sapolsky said, commenting upon the story. "The rate at which this child was depositing calcium in his bones could be explained entirely by how safe and loved he was feeling in the world." He added that while this standard textbook version of stressed dwarfism is rare, there is nevertheless "major league psychopathology" throughout society, retarding human growth.
"Major stress is the police and social workers breaking down the door of the apartment, finding the kids who have been locked in the closet for two months, the food slipped under the door. Total nightmare situations that turn out often in history. . . kids in war zones, kids in areas of civil strife."
Link to report on Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers lecture,
Link to Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers on iTunes Music Store (free),
Link to Stress and Coping: What Baboons Can Teach Us on iTunes Music Store (free)
(
Thanks, Gnat!)
Update: Avi sez, "I have a page with links to hard to find articles, interviews and videos of Sapolsky on Stress.
Many have found them of benefit both tactically and to understand the wider context of Stess."
Update 2:
Jason sez,
The statement that J. M. Barrie never went through puberty is simply untrue. Your source (Robert Sapolsky) might be a great lecturer and a competent endocrinologist, but he apparently can't be bothered to check the facts about the people he uses as historical examples to see if the diagnosis actually fits.
In an article based on the lecture you recommend, Sapolsky writes: "In the 1850's there was an eight year old boy growing up in Victorian England. One day he sees his beloved twelve year old brother killed in front of him in a horrible accident. This accident destroyed the family. There were no other siblings, and the older boy was the mother's favorite child." In the audio version he instead says "1870's".
But both are incorrect; JMB was born in *1860*, and lived in *Scotland*. His brother David died just before his *14th* birthday, when JMB was *6*. They had *six* other surviving siblings. (It is true, however, that Queen Victoria was on the throne, and that David was his mother's favorite.) Sapolsky talks about the mother shutting down for the rest of her life, and never talking about anything but David, which will come as a surprise to anyone who has read JMB's biography of her (a bestseller in its day). How can you believe his conclusions, when so many of his basic "facts" are wrong?
Sapolsky continues the misinformation, getting into the diagnostic particulars: "He lived to be 60 years old and 4'10". It was confirmed in his autopsy that he never reached puberty." He claims that JMB's balls never even dropped.
Where does he get this garbage? Barrie died at the age of *77*. His passport listed his height as *5 ft 3.5in* which is short but not abnormally so. And every existing photo of him shows a man with a big bushy mustache. I'm no endocrinologist, but I'm pretty sure you need to go through puberty to pull that off. Confirming (or rather, refuting) these basic "facts" is trivially easy.
Sapolsky goes on to says that JMB repeatedly got in trouble with the law for molesting little boys, which is complete and utter fiction. It's the kind of made-up crap that you read (or hear, apparently) on the internet. I don't know if JMB did anything (I suspect not), but there is no record that anyone ever actually accused him of it. The mother of the Llewelyn Davies boys even trusted him enough to leave them in his care when she died, and they each denied to their deaths the gossip that came along later that he'd ever done anything inappropriate. Sapolsky appears to have pulled this directly from his ass.
This smacks of intellectual dishonesty, plain and simple. Sapolsky wants a famous example to spice up his lecture, and apparently there are none, so he finds someone who kinda sorta comes close, fudges the facts, tosses in a few turds of complete fiction to confirm his diagnosis, and he's finished. Which certainly doesn't deserve your endorsement.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:17 am Saturday, Mar 18
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Yesterday at a conference in Amsterdam, I met one of the proprietors of Simuze, a Dutch-language service for indie music publishing and fan activity; a kind of non-profit Myspace that helps artists and fans connect to one another without having to kiss up to giant entertainment companies.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:12 am Saturday, Mar 18
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The BSA, MPAA and RIAA have officially objected to a proposal to let the public break DRM that "threatens critical infrastructure and endangers lives." They argue that if it becomes legal to break DRM that could
kill you that it might harm their business:
In order to protect their ability to deploy this dangerous DRM, they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives.
Link
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via EFF Minilinks)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:05 am Saturday, Mar 18
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Amazon is allowing publishers to specify how many pages can be viewed in its Search Inside program, which allows buyers to browse a book the same way that they would in the store -- yeah, that's going to sell a lot of books.
Amazon.com is pleased to offer our customers the ability to view copyrighted material from books participating in the Search Inside! program. To protect this copyrighted material, the books are subject to publisher-approved page-viewing limits.
You have reached a page-viewing limit. For security purposes, we are not able to provide further information about the specific limit reached.
We encourage you to use the other Search Inside! features that are available to you regardless of your limit status. These features include the ability to search inside any book in the program and view text-only excerpts from that book. You can also browse sample pages for any book in the program by clicking the links in the "Browse sample pages" box found on that book's product detail page.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:02 am Saturday, Mar 18
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This site collects photos of gloriously overloaded vehicles -- trains carpeted with clinging riders, trucks bulging with three heights' worth of junk PCs, and overloaded bicycles like this one -- it's a kind of testament to humanity's ingeniuty and willingness to run its tools into the ground.
Link
(
via Geisha Asobi)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:59 am Saturday, Mar 18
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This city built out of eggs contains an incredible pixellated mural of Chinese labor heros. I have no idea if it's a patriotic celebration, or cheap irony -- I don't even know if the eggs are real. But man, is it ever cool.
Link
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via Geisha Asobi)
Update: Eric says that this is an image of a 50 Yuan note.
By Cory Doctorow at 5:55 am Saturday, Mar 18
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Derek Powazek reports from a panel at SXSW where a representative from the MPAA faced down an audience of geeks who called her to account for the MPAA's war on its customers and on technology; the session is also available as an MP3. It's typical that the MPAA only sends speakers to events where they're not likely to face an audience who knows how to call bullshit on their talking-points, so this is a rare and delicious debate, in which the MPAA rep is utterly defeated:
Think about this: I can go to the store and buy a five inch reflective disc that holds digital media. If that disc is a music CD, I can pop it in my computer, encode it, put it on my iPod, and listen to it whenever I like. But if that disc is a movie DVD, I cannot, even though the same iPod is perfectly capable of playing the same digital content that I own just the same. (Oh, and by the way, Apple created a billion dollar industry in legal song downloading because of this. Where's the Apple Movie Store? Ask the MPAA.)...
The audience was filled with other examples of an industry gone crazy. One guy moved to the UK and all his DVDs stopped working because they were region-encoded (as most are). Her answer? That was in the contract you agreed to when you bought the DVD. Another guy asked why he can't just download the Sopranos. After all, he's a HBO subscriber, so he paid for it, he just happened to miss the last episode. Her answer, again, was that the time is part of the contract. My answer: Give it a couple years and HBO will be doing this, or they'll be out of business.
Link
(
Thanks to everyone who suggested this link!)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:50 am Saturday, Mar 18
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Babble is an online, competitive version of the parlor game Boggle, played in 24-hour rounds against the entire Internet. Boggle is a word game that challenges you to make words from lettered dice shaken and randomly arranged in a grid. I find in incredibly addictive; my family plays interminable, fiercely competitive Boggle games on holidays, late into the night, with much posturing, loud objections, and friendly acrimony. The Internet version is a little less ferocious, but it's still addictive; I just glanced at it and then it was ten minutes later and I'd scored 212 points.
Link
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via EvHead)
Update Alex sez, "A "more ferocious" internet-edition of boggle is available here, using xmlhttprequest for real-time Massively Multiplayer Online Boggling. It's easy to get sucked in to trying just one more game. Also, no registration is needed."
By Cory Doctorow at 5:43 am Saturday, Mar 18
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This iPod Shuffle skin says "Do Not Disturb Please" on one side and "Talk to Me Please" on the other side was created by Marco, "a German design student whose final thesis is about the social implications of using headphones. One aspect of this acoustical privacy is the sign for non-communication."
Link
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Thanks, Marco!)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:39 am Saturday, Mar 18
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The Canadian Record Industry Association (the Canadian version of the RIAA) has released a study in which they conclude that P2P downloaders buy lots of music, and that P2P doesn't particularly harm their industry:
In summary, CRIA's own research now concludes that P2P downloading constitutes less than one-third of the music on downloaders' computers, that P2P users frequently try music on P2P services before they buy, that the largest P2P downloader demographic is also the largest music buying demographic, and that reduced purchasing has little to do with the availability of music on P2P services. I've argued many of these same things, but now you don't have to take my word for it; you can take it from the record labels themselves.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 5:31 am Saturday, Mar 18
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Pac Man: The Insatiable Hunger is an hilarious spoof bio-pic on the life of Pac Man, positing that his unhealthy obsession with pills was only the tip of a wife-beating, child-abusing, substance-dependent iceberg.
Link
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via Waxy)
