The other day, my Institute for the Future colleague Paul Saffo showed me a stunning specimen he had acquired for his technological cabinet of curiosities. Manufactured in 1975, the Faber-Castell TR3 features a calculator on one side and a sliderule on the other. Paul photographed the TR3 and put it in historical context on his blog. From the post:

At first blush, the TR3 looks like the proverbial missing link, still dripping wet as it crawls out of the analog ocean onto the digital shore. And certainly proof, if any was needed, that technologies evolve. But the story is not quite so simple. For starters, the slide rule companies took calculators seriously, but only as slide rule substitutes. They assumed that calculators would slowly replace slide rules in the niches where slide rules were sold -- pleces like college bookstores. The slide rule manufacturers thus never guessed that calculators would become a must-have item for ordinary folk who would flock to purchase them in department stores, book stores, drug stores and even supermarkets. This meant that instead of a gradual shift that the slide rule makers could easily manage, the change was exponential and far beyond what they could possibly respond to.

But still they tried, and the TR3 was part of the effort... In the end, the TR3's calculator was far behind the competition, and the slide rule was superfluous as slip-stick jocks defected in favor of TIs, Commodores and HPs.

Link

Will Wright is the guest editor of the latest issue (14.04) of Wired, and has a great essay on the future of games, called Dream Machines.

(Shown here: A planet from Will Wright's forthcoming game, Spore.)

In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers' mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they'll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

Society, however, notices only the negative. Most people on the far side of the generational divide - elders - look at games and see a list of ills (they're violent, addictive, childish, worthless). Some of these labels may be deserved. But the positive aspects of gaming - creativity, community, self-esteem, problem-solving - are somehow less visible to nongamers.

I think part of this stems from the fact that watching someone play a game is a different experience than actually holding the controller and playing it yourself. Vastly different. Imagine that all you knew about movies was gleaned through observing the audience in a theater - but that you had never watched a film. You would conclude that movies induce lethargy and junk-food binges. That may be true, but you're missing the big picture.

Link

Earlier today, I posted Esther Dyson's horrific flickr snapshot of an oven-roasted alligator in a light teriyaki glaze, spotted at the Explorer's Club dinner. Now, George Dyson offers BoingBoing a meat-free alternative with which to cleanse your palate. Above, oven roasted carbogators, ready to be eaten. "It's a family tradition to bring them to life during the holidays," explains George. Here, another specimen with Lauren Dyson. She's George's daughter, and founder of People For the Ethical Treatment of Alligators. OK not really.

The Online Computer Library Center has published its list of the top 1000 books held by its library-members -- The Bible, the Census, Mother Goose, the Divine Comedy and the Odyssey top the chart. Link (via Smart Patrol)

From a 1951 issue of Mechanix Illustrated:

“Tired Of TV? A certain New York executive was, so he took his 19 in. receiver, remounted the front on a swivel and now he and his friends find the set much more stimulating.”

Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Illustrator Saxton Moore ran a drawing contest on his blog inviting anyone to interpret their favorite character from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. All of the posted entries are amazing, but here is the winner, artist Spacesick's illustration of Russell Cosby.
Link (via Drawn!)

Apparently this not a mouse or rat, but a cat. According CBS4, the kitten, born in Tunisia, was the only mutant with rodent-like looks in the litter of five. Check out the video for more rat-cat cuteness.
Link

UPDATE: Thanks to the readers who suggest that this animal is most probably a kangaroo rat and that the cat story is a hoax.

Hilarious blog maintained by Chaucer, who answers readers' questions.

My dog is a retriever, but he won't chase a ball. Every time I throw a toy across the room, he climbs in my lap and licks my face. I know he needs exercise--what do I do?

Pinned To The Floor

Ma Cher Pinnede to The Floore,

By my feithe, firste y oght to praise yow for yowre carefulle husbandrie and governance of yowre hounde. Ther arn sundrie folke who fede ther houndes with rosted flessh, or milk and wastel-breed and reken litel of the helthe of the dogges in question. Yowre care maken myne eyes to watre with teres, so like it is unto my love for litel Lowys my sone.

Link (thanks, Ruth and Coop!)

Over at the excellent Virtual China blog, my Institute for the Future colleague Lyn Jeffery posts about a massive Chinese BBS forum where participants are collaboratively writing a story called "My Seven Years in World of Gangsters." So far, there are more than 21,000 comments that make up the story. It's being translated at EastSouthWestNorth. From Lyn's post:

The post didn't start out as a collective project, or necessarily even as fiction at all. But somewhere along the line other commentators jumped in to continue or augment the story line. The end of the ESWN translation: "The translator does not know how long the story goes on because he has not made it past even a fraction of the comments..."

Link

In The Guardian, my favorite living novelist and culture critic JG Ballard explores modern architecture. His point-of-entry is the massive blockhouse, Hitler's fortifications on the French coast. From the article (photo by Sergio Gaudenti):

Death was what the Atlantic wall and Siegfried line were all about. Whenever I came across these grim fortifications along France's Channel coast and German border, I realised I was exploring a set of concrete tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 1950s. Out of favour now, modernism survives in every high-rise sink estate of the time, in the Barbican development and the Hayward Gallery in London, in new towns such as Cumbernauld and the ziggurat residential blocks at the University of East Anglia.

But modernism of the heroic period, from 1920 to 1939, is dead, and it died first in the blockhouses of Utah beach and the Siegfried line. Yet in its heyday between the wars, modernism was a vast utopian project, and perhaps the last utopian project we will ever see, now that we are well aware that all utopias have their dark side.

Link

Broken Frontier published a two part interview with Michael Dooley, who along with Steven Heller, co-edited the excellent Education Of A Comics Artist.

Michael says: "In it, I talk about comics folks like Kurtzman and Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Williams, and Dan O’Neil, and so on, but I also drop the names of several other Boing-Boing favorites like Emmett Grogan and Abbie Hoffman, Michael O’Donoghue and Lenny Bruce, Colin Berry, and others. I even spend some quality time discussing how Paul Krassner (whose '... Comics Artist' essay includes the Disneyland Orgy story) was one of my primary influences, which I think ties nicely into your recent post about him.

"And if I haven’t mentioned it before, there’s a page on my publisher’s site that has free downloadable information (in PDF format) that we couldn’t fit into the book, such as teacher syllabi and an extensive online resources list."

Link to part 1 Link to part 2

Over at my favorite new blog, the Athanasius Kircher Society, there's a link to a 1940 "disturbing" Soviet film about bringing dead dogs back to life.
Link

Update: Ken Freedman of the fabulous WFMU blog wrote a terrific magazine-length article about this amazing film. Well worth reading. Link

Here's the latest news about performance artist Rachel Bevilacqua (AKA Rev. Magdalen), a SubGenius reverend who lost custody of her 10-year-son after a pink judge saw photos of a SubGenius convention she participated in. (Disclosure: I have been a card-carrying SubGenius reverend for 22 years and take the word of JR "Bob" Dobbs to be the literal truth. I have also contributed to Rachel's legal fund.)

Over at News.com, Declan McCullagh reports that the Federal Trade Commission has issued a subpoena to Google for all contents of a user's Gmail account, including deleted e-mails. The demand is not related to the DoJ's subpoena for search terms search database contents, but instead relates to a financial scam case.

In November 2003, the Federal Trade Commission sued AmeriDebt and founder Andris Pukke on charges that the company deceived customers about credit counseling and failed to use customers' money to actually pay their creditors.

AmeriDebt settled, but the courts are still trying to uncover the location of Pukke's apparently sizeable assets. (A Washington Post article in September said the IRS is seeking $300 million from Pukke. His attorney at the venerable firm of Jones Day charges a hefty $575 an hour.)

Pukke's missing money has been linked to a Belize developer called Dolphin Development, which counts a fellow named Peter Baker as a shareholder. The court-appointed receiver in the FTC case, Robb Evans & Associates (click here for PDF), sent a subpoena to Google on Nov. 1 asking for the complete contents of Baker's Gmail account.

Link (Thanks, David Alexander McDonald)

Jason Schultz says,

Here's a PDF copy of the actual order in the Department of Justice subpoena to Google for porn search results and queries (Gonzales v. Google). It's not every day that you see the phrases "teabagging" and "pearlnecklace" footnoted in a legal opinion -- see page 8, footnote 3. Also page 13, footnote 6 is highly amusing. Anyway, the bottom line is that Google has to turn over 50,000 random URLs from its index but no query strings, so most of the privacy concerns are now moot.

Link to PDF (Thanks, Jason Schultz!), and here's a related NYT report on the ruling by Katie Hafner. Attorney Daniel Solove has an analysis post on his blog, here.

Previously on BoingBoing:
DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes.

The government of Pakistan is attempting to block access within the country to all websites that host caricatures of the prophet Muhammad -- and to shut down blogs authored inside Pakistan that post such material. On her blog, Michelle Malkin has posted a roundup of links related to the story.

The Long Goodbye
Jasmina Tesanovic
Belgrade, March 17, 2006

Slobo's body was not accepted in the Museum of the Revolution, the director said. There was no room there since there are other two current exhibits.

So with a little help from the government, Milosevic party members broke into the Museum of History of Yugoslavia and exposed his coffin. The director of the museum sent out a furious public letter of protest, but to no avail. His fans were already gathering and queuing to pay the last respect to their idol.

Some Ratko Mladic photos were also there next to Milosevic. Old phrases I almost forgot from bad old Milosevic days; such as Slobo my love, my hero, you saved us... his fans were always sentimental and hysterical, but never very modern in rhetoric.

War invalids from the nineties, the Milosevic wars, are protesting at the same time in front of the governmental building. Everybody is hoping those two crowds don’t meet.

A print ad for women's designer handbags that hurl forth in a projectile stream of vomit from the model's throat. Protein spills are HOT. Link. Ad is in Chinese, I believe this may be for a Taiwanese retailer. (Thanks, Mike Lietz)

Brady sez, "Northeastern University in Boston is having its Free Culture Movement kick off event this Thursday. There will be a panel discussion with panelists Lawrence Lessig, Derek Slater from the EFF and Nelson Pavlosky, founder of FreeCulture.org." Link (Thanks, Brady!)

This is an MP3 of a scan of the the NYC FM band the night that John Lennon died, courtesy of the masters of audio oddities, WFMU. Link (Thanks, Nemo!)

Gaylon Murphy and Steve Zingali of Orange County, CA, designed and build 3-foot remote control flying saucers and buzz them around town, sometimes scaring the locals into calling the cops.

Nick Peterson was stunned when he saw one of the disks fly past his girlfriend's upstairs apartment.

"I thought, that can't be a UFO, can it?" he said. "It's pretty weird."

The disks are made of foam and weigh about a pound. Each runs on a 7.4-volt lithium battery and has a propeller.

On weekends, Murphy flies the disks in Aliso Viejo, Newport Beach, Mission Viejo and Laguna Niguel.

He and Zingali, a facilities engineer and Mission Viejo resident, have sold four of the gizmos at $1,000 each and concede that their streaking light show is part hobby, part promotion.

Link

Here's William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") converted into the programming language ActionScript:

// Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
// by William Shakespeare
// ported to ActionScript 2.0 by Satori Canton
//
// Original poem can be viewed at:
// http://plagiarist.com/poetry/915/

var summer:Object = {};
var thee:Object = {};

summer.name = "Summer Day";
thee.name = "Thee";

summer.lovelyness = 9;
thee.lovelyness = 10;

summer.temperature = 98;
thee.temperature = 98.6;

summer.lease = new Date(2006, 7, 31).getTime() - new Date(2006, 5, 1).getTime();
thee.lease = new Date(2042, 6, 12).getTime() - new Date(1970, 8, 25).getTime();

summer.complexion = 0xFFCC33;
thee.complexion = 0xFFCCCC;

Link (via Digg)

In this video, gamers sadistically torture an action-hero in a game, until they get an hilarious, surprisign comeuppance (which I won't say anymore about, for fear of spoiling things for you). Link (warning, embedded WMV crashed my Firefox) (Thanks, Renzo!)

Update: Gudlyf sends in a link to a YouTube Mirror of the video.

A most disturbing stage video in which Celine Dione impersonates mid-'80s Madonna, most badly. Link to Paper Mag blog post with clip. (thanks Susannah Breslin)

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a program that takes your voice and finds the closest matches to the sounds you're making in a database of snippets from music videos, then plays them back. The creator describes this as "vocally describing" the sounds you'd like to hear to a computer, which can then find close matches and play them back. There's a video-component, too, as the video bits that accompany the samples from the music videos the computer selects are played back for you. The author has promised to release his code under the GPL free software license as soon as he can "find time to clean up that mess / comment the code / document it and find a way to make it easily installable." In the meantime, the videos of the code running are highly amusing and inspiring:

What would it mean if a mind music machine existed which would render it unnecessary to write, play or sequence music by allowing one to just think music to make it happen. What would it mean if such a machine would construct imagined music out of samples of ones digital music library, or even out of the vast amount of music found on the internet? Of course it would be used - for no other reason than its existence.

It would have discursive power just like P2P has discursive power. The very fewest P2P users share data because they feel that information wants to be free. They share just because they can. But that also causes a notion to be formed on what unlimited copyability and digitality actually means. A clear case of massage.

As there is no appropriate technology to read minds to transform thoughts into music the human voice supercedes the thoughts as it is the original instrument - the most direct way to express imagined music.

Even if s?H! in the existing form is far from being able to really recognize the desired music expressed by a vocal description it is working well enough to let, with some phantasy and my suggestion, the hypothetical mind music machine become vivid.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Esther Dyson's amazing food snapshot from the recent VIP "Explorer's Club" dinner may not answer that question, but it does show you what oven-roasted alligator looks like. Yikes! Or, as Esther might type in her disemvoweled flickr notes, yks! If I'd been there, I would have opted to nosh on the orchids instead. Of course, they're right next to the hissing cockroach skewers...

Update: Esther is always ahead of her time. "How Do You Properly Cook an Alligator?" is the subject of a front-page story in today's Wall Street Journal by Jane Zhang. Link (paid subscribers only), and here's an excerpt:

Award-winning author Will Shetterly has created a new comic-blog devoted to the parodical adventures of Supervman, the original costumed underwear-pervert. I wrote this weekend about Marvel recruiting science museums to give credence to its bid (with DC comics) to hijack the word "super-hero" from the public domain and turn it into property. Link (Thanks, Will!)