This Etsy seller produces lovely brooches and necklaces built from Cracker Jack toys. Link (Thanks, Irene!)

RockBox is a set of "open firmware" for various MP3 players, including the iPod, Archos and iRiver players. The firmware is the operating system for the player, which determines how the player behaves, what programs it can run, and what restrictions it puts on your actions. By loading an open firmware on your player, you get total freedom and lots of bonus features, like video-games and other third-party software. The code itself is free/open source software and has a giant and active developer community that's always adding new features to it. Link (Thanks, Pat!)

Ken sez, "Last year you ran a story about the cremated remains of 5000 people found in the closet of an Oregon psychiatric hospital. Turns out photographer David Maisel has been carefully documenting the canisters that hold those people's remains (!), taking individual photographic portraits of each one. Link (Thanks, Ken L!)

The Supreme Court of the United States has declined to overturn an important case about obscenity and the Internet, leaving anyone who publishes sexual material on the Internet in uncertainty about whether they're open to federal penalties.

At stake is the obscenity section of the Communications Decency Act, which bans publishing "obscene" material on the net. The problem is that US courts use "local standards" to determine whether something is obscene -- so if in the eyes of some local community, the material is obscene, then you can't distribute it there.

But the Internet can distribute material into all communities in the country, and because the Communications Decency Act is federal, prosecutors can bring their charges in the most sex-o-phobic corner of the country (say, the conservative Catholic private town that the guy who founded Domino's Pizza is building in Florida).

By turning down this case, the Supremes have said that the whole country is now subject to the decency standards from its most conservative, anti-sex, anti-nudity corners; that the local standard from that place will become the national standard.

"According to the court's decision," Alan Levy, a lawyer and member of the NCSF, wrote in an article for the New York Law Journal last year, "in order to prove that the statute is overbroad, one would have to present evidence regarding each of the 1.4 million web sites and determine whether each of the local communities in the Unied States would deem the material on that Web site as obscene. ... Considering that there are 94 federal districts in the country (temporarily ignoring that there are numerous communities within a district); if one multiplies the number 1,400,000 by 94, we reveal 131,600,000 possible applications of the CDA, and that only applies to adult sites that happen to have material related to [sadomasochism]."

Link (Thanks, Seth!)

The final Hugo Ballot is online, and my story I, Robot is a finalist for the best novelette! w00t!

Best Novelette
(207 ballots cast)
"The Calorie Man", Paolo Bacigalupi (F&SF October/November 2005)
"Two Hearts", Peter S. Beagle (F&SF October/November 2005)
"TelePresence", Michael A. Burstein (Analog July/August 2005)
"I, Robot”, Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix February 15, 2005)
"The King of Where-I-Go", Howard Waldrop (SCI FICTION December 7, 2005)

Link

What with Tom Cruise reportedly killing South Park's Scientology episode it's a good time to blog about "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant," a 2003 musical depicting the kooky teachings of the Church of Scientology. You can even buy the soundtrack album!

A jubilant cast of children celebrate the controversial religion in uplifting pageantry and song. The actual teachings of The Church of Scientology are explained and dissected against the candy-colored backdrop of a traditional nativity play.

Avant-garde performance art and children's theater meet in one of the funniest and most bewildering holiday shows you will ever see: the OBIE Award-winning ironic masterpiece A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant.

(image caption: "Chigoziri Ikeme, Mario Quinonez, and Nikki Haddad as Thetans, Molly Matzke as Prince Xenu, Kristopher Barnett, and Kyle Kaplan as L. Ron")

Link (via Neatorama)

A Canadian pollster has slimed a law prof who posted his own analysis of their results, and the prof has fought back with more analysis of their rebuttal, making them look like even bigger jerks.

Michael Geist is the copyfightin' prof who posted an incendiary analysis of a poll conducted on behalf of the Canadian Record Industry Association. Michael found that a close examination of the poll revealed that downloaders buy more music than non-downloaders and many other points that invalidate the hysterical rhetoric of Big Music.

Pollara, who conducted the survey is a "single-issue pollster" who conducts polls on behalf of industry groups who need stats to back up their talking points. They responded to Michael's post with an 11-page memo that purported to rebut Michael, and went on to call him "impertinent and presumptuous" and that they hoped he wouldn't "distract us from the serious business at hand."

Michael's posted a great rebuttal of their memo:

* I noted the Pollara data found that P2P sources constituted only one-third of the music on people's computers.  Pollara argues that this only reflects the music on their hard drives, not their downloading activity. I frankly don't understand their complaint here.  They didn't ask about downloading activity, they asked about the source of music on their computers.  If they were to ask about all their music (online and offline), I suspect the number would be even lower as many users might well have more CDs that they have not digitized.

* Pollara seems to step out of the role of pollster in their memo by regularly offering what amount to legal opinions on music copying.  At page three of the response, they lump together P2P downloading, sharing with friends, and copying CDs that might not be their own.  Perhaps Pollara is unaware of the private copying user right that exists under current Canadian law that has generated more than $140 million for artists and the industry which specifically covers much of this copying.  This is not, as Pollara suggests, "unpaid-for-music" but rather copying that is well compensated. 

Michael's giving a talk at Toronto's Hart House on Mar 30, too. Link (Thanks, Michael and Derek!)

My latest issue of Lab Notes, research from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, is now online. I hope you enjoy it! In this issue:

* Fracture mechanics of human bones

* How cells move

* Wi-Fi for auto safety

Link

Snip from a statement today by human rights advocacy group Reporters Without Borders:

[D]ocumentary filmmaker Hao Wu (...) was arrested in Beijing on 22 February after attending a meeting of members of a protestant church not recognised by the government as part of the preparation of his next documentary.

Hao, who lived for more than 10 years in the United States, is a contributor to Global Voices (...) "Hao's only crime has been to do his job as journalist in an independent manner," Reporters Without Borders said in its letter to [Chinese] President Hu [Jintao]. The organisation also called on US diplomats to raise Hao's case with the Chinese authorities, above all as part of the preparations for Hu's visit to the United States next month.

Hao was detained by the Beijing division of the State Security Bureau, which has officially confirmed his arrest. Two days after his arrest, police raided his home, seizing videotapes and editing equipment. He has not been charges and the authorities have not explained why they are holding him. Global Voices said they authorities could be trying to get him to provide information about China's underground protestant churches.

Using the nom de blog "Beijing Loafer", Hao maintained an online journal at Beijing or Bust, which was also the title of one of his documentary films. To foil China's state-run internet filters, Hao mirrored his blog at MSN Spaces. Under the alias Tian Yi, he also contributed in English to Global Voices. GV co-founder Ethan Zuckerman has launched a  support site for Hao. Snip:

Why didn’t we speak out about his detention earlier?
Hao’s family and friends in China have deflected questions about his detention for the past month, as authorities in contact with people close to Hao have urged them not to publicize the case. There had been hope that his detention was only for a short period of time, in which case publicity would not have been helpful.

Technical illustrator Kevin Hulsey has posted a fascinating explanation of how he used Adobe Illustrator to create an incredibly-detailed cutaway illustration of a cruise ship. All Hulsey had for reference was a paper blueprint. The illustration took him 720 hours to complete. From the HOWTO in the "Lessons & Tutorials" section of Hulsey's site:

All of the initial line art was done in vector based Adobe Illustrator. Most of the final color work.. was done in Adobe Photoshop. The techniques used in this demonstration tutorial are applicable to any 3 dimensional perspective drawing, regardless of scale or complexity.

This project presented many unique challenges. The actual ship was still in Germany being completed when I started the project. There was no photography or CAD reference to work from, only the paper blueprint... In order to have the brochures completed by the time the ship went into service, the final illustration had to be finished in under two months.

Link (via Drawn!)

Over at NPR's new "Mixed Signals" blog, host JJ Sutherland updates the story of Yodok Story director Jung Sungsan. Sungsan's musical recently opened in Seoul, and tells the tale of his imprisonment in a North Korean gulag. JJ explains:

Many people have posted or written in asking how they can give money [to Sungsan, who] put up a kidney as collateral for a loan to finance the show. (Here's the full story.)

NPR's Louisa Lim found the contact info. The person to email is Binna Choi (binna77 at hanmail.net). You can reach Jung Sungsan directly (mrjung1117 at yahoo.co.kr), but he speaks no English so any messages in English should be sent to Binna.

Me, I'm kind of skeptical about the kidney-hock part of this story, but Sungsan claims what he claims. What do I know about North Korean gulag musicals? Besides, stranger things have been pawned for showbiz, here or in Seoul. Link

One of my favorite artists, Amy Crehore, just finished two more "Monkey Love" paintings. (Click on thumbnails for enlargement) The one on the left is called The Two Timer, and the one on the right is called The Nibbler. See more of her lovely work at her site. Link

Steve Worth, curator of that bottomless cornucopia of stunning mid-century art and illustration, the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog, says: "I just posted a fun batch of scifi, horror and adventure related Mexican lobby cards from the late 50s and early 60s. I'm asking the readers to analyze the images and suggest visual techniques the artists use to try to entice moviegoers to buy a ticket. Fun stuff!"
Link

Andrew Tonkin says: Came across this quite by accident on Wikipedia - a 1987 (!) mash-up of Winnie the Pooh and Apocalpyse Now. It's brilliant, and lots of fun seeing which Hundred Acre Wood characters wind up on the PBR Street Gang. This seems right in line with the current "trailer remix" trend, even though it was made nearly 20 years ago!"
Link

Tinselman has an entry about Salvation Mountain, a desert hill near the Salton Sea in California that's being continuously decorated with brilliantly colored things by a man named Leonard Knight.

Rising up out of the desert near Niland California is Leonard Knight's whimsical vision of paradise: waterfalls, flowers, streets of gold, fields of rich green grass and towering pines. It virtually blankets a small hill and still, he continues to build.

Link

Reader comment: Bart says: "We've gone out to Salvation Mountain several times, each time showing more friends and family what Leonard has done. That entire southeast region of the Salton Sea has many interesting stops including Slab City (snowbirds and squatters community on a deserted military base), Bombay Beach (half underwater) and the numerous bird preserves (one dedicated by Sonny Bono). Quite an interesting place. I recently snapped a bunch of photos while out there.

A real estate developer in Taiwan decided to cash in on the coolness associated with the word "blog" by branding a condo project "BLOG." One problem, though: they neglected to register the "myblog.com" domain they stuck all over related ads.

Link to snapshot, and Link to related post on "Taipei Nights" blog, which is not a condo project at all. Neither is BoingBoing, despite the fact that it is my home. (Thanks, Peter and Premshree)

On March 20, 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq began. I don't spend much time sifting through BoingBoing's archives, but just now I clicked on March, 2003 to look back at posts we made about the beginning of the war. Here's a fistful:

• Paul Boutin -- "Where is Raed" Iraq blog: hoax? real?
• Media giant ClearChannel sponsoring pro-war rallies
• Photos of San Francisco business district shutdown
• Is Iraq's Internet still functioning?
• US military leaflets dropped over Iraq
• War-blogging worth reading
• War demonstration pics, vids, audio fills blogs today
• Resignation letter from US diplomat who quit to protest war
• John Perry Barlow: "War in the Land of Peace"
• NYT on mobile tech and frontline war reporting
• WP's Howard Kurtz on warblogs
• French's Mustard: Eat me! I'm not French!
• SMS-psyops: CIA using cellphone spam in war on Iraq
• Newsweek's Steven Levy on warblogging
• American Military operation automatic name-generator
• Iraq-o-meter provides dashboard glimpse of war
• A Librarian slams the PATRIOT Act
• Snacks of Mass Destruction
• How to watch Iraqi Satellite TV on the web: The Saddam Show

Protests commemorating three years since the US-led invasion of Iraq are documented in photo streams at Flickr and other image-sharing sites. Relevant tags include antiwarprotest, march20, peacemarch, and of course, Iraq.

Shown here, Matthew Bradley's photos of a protest yesterday at the Pentagon. Link. (Thanks, Arnold Edmayer, spotted on DCist).

Below: found on Flickr under the "iraq" tag and shot by Daniel Ross -- evidence that Cartman was here.

Merlin Mann -- of the 43 Folders productivity blog -- gave an hilarious speech at BayCHI last week. Merlin is a very funny guy (see his laugh-aloud 5ives site for proof), and he's got a really good handle on personal productivity. MP3 Link (Thanks, Paul!)

Sunday was the first public London Copyfighters' Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop, a monthly fake-champagne brunch followed by impromptu speeches at Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner. Jose recorded the event and turned it into a podcast. Link

(see Flickr for the pics.)

The Cato Institute, an ultra-libertarian, right-wing think tank, has released a white paper damning the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on breaking the anti-copying systems used to cripple digital media, like DVDs and iTunes songs.

It's amazing to watch crippleware come under attack from all points of the compass -- Marxists and anarchists hate DRM. Libertarians hate DRM. Media studies people, economists, and musicians hate DRM.

But it takes sharp free-market types like the Cato characters to bust out elegant critiques like this one:

The movie industry has every right to segment the worldwide market for DVDs, but it should bear the costs of doing so. Those costs might include requiring no-resale contracts with distributors and monitoring sales in low-price countries to make sure DVDs were not being resold outside their intended market. Deciding whether those costs would be worthwhile might be difficult. The indus- try’s desire for market segmentation is not, however, a good reason to outlaw the sale of unofficial DVD players. The role of government is not to ensure that a private business’s pricing strategy succeeds, and consumers, who have not agreed to help enforce the DVD cartel’s segmentation scheme, are under no obligation to respect it.

I've heard for years that the Cato Institute was divided on DRM and copyright, so it's good to seem them taking a stand now. I think they've only scratched the surface, though. Of special interest to free-marketeers should be the way that DRM lets Apple hijack the music companies' copyright monopoly and turn it into a tax on Apple customers who switch from an iPod to a competing product. You can keep your MP3s if you switch from Windows to Mac, but if you switch from iPod to Creative, kiss your iTunes goodbye. Talk about anti-competitive!

And how about TiVo updating its devices to cripple them after their customers have already paid for them? Or Macrovision using its monopoly over DVD anti-analog tech to jack up its licensing prices to the movie industry? If you like free markets, DRM are a nightmare from top to bottom. Link (via Michael Geist)

Artist Coop wrote a glorious essay commemorating his nitro-fueled heroes of the 1970s, especially Evel Knievel.

It would be hard for someone born after 1980 to understand the hallowed place Evel held in the imagination of a kid back then. Forget fakes like Superman and Spider-Man, we had a real-life superhero to worship, a hero who dressed like a star-spangled Elvis, rode a Harley, smashed his bones like brittle Ortega taco shells, and who, in his ultimate act of insanity (and some would say of hubris) climbed into a red-white-and-blue rocket and shot himself over the gaping chasm of the Snake River Canyon. Like Icarus, he didn't complete his flight; missing the far side of the canyon, he plummeted to the canyon floor, narrowly avoiding drowning in the river below. I can still remember witnessing this event on ABC's Wide World Of Sports. just as I can instantly recall his painful slo-motion Caesar's Palace crash, the Zapruder film of my generation. As a kid, I had all the Evel Knievel toys, of course, and later tried to jump drainage ditches on my dirt bike in imitation of Knievel, earning a broken collarbone for my troubles.

Link

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) My daughter and I have been having a lot of fun solving the card puzzles in Perplex City (an alternate reality game that I previously wrote about here.)

The kind folks at Perplex City know I'm a fan, so they've given Boing Boing an exclusive link to a new card that will be available as a real card later this month. But you can solve it here and still earn a point. Also, Michael Smith, one of the creators of Perplex City, will be on G4's Attack of the Show tonight.)
Link

Espen Andersen -- a Norwegian net-head and a prof at the Norwegian School of Management -- has written an excellent article on why students should choose math at the high-school level, giving 12 reasons to pursue math at the secondary level. Here are my two favorites:

Choose math because you will lose less money. When hordes of idiots throw their money at pyramid schemes, it is partially because they don't know enough math. Specifically, if you know a little bit about statistics and interest calculations, you can look through economic lies and wishful thinking. With some knowledge of hard sciences you will probably feel better, too, because you will avoid spending your money and your hopes on alternative medicine, crystals, magnets and other swindles -- simply because you know they don't work...

Choose math because you will live in a world of constant change. New technology and new ways of doing things change daily life and work more and more. If you have learned math, you can learn how and why things work, and avoid scraping by through your career, supported by Post-It Notes and Help files -- scared to death of accidentally pressing the wrong key and running into something unfamiliar.

Link (Thanks, Espen!)

The Keyring Kite fits in your pocket and unfolds to something 80cm long, with 30m of string included! Link (via Gizmodo)

Update: Sasha found this on sale on a US web-store for only $3.50!

Longtime bOING bOING (the zine) and Happy Mutant Handbook contributor Shawn Wolfe had an art opening at Goods last week in Seattle, where he exhibited paintings as well as customized Adidas shoes.

Adicolor is this Adidas shoe that's being (re)introduced this week and there were similar solo artist shows in NYC, LA (and a couple other cities, not sure where) The blank white shoe comes with miniature Adidas spray paints and markers.

For these events the artist was given two pairs to customize. You'll see mine there. One pair reads "Trans" "Action" and the other pair reads "Movin'" "Units" (And new paintings on wood panels hanging in the background.)

Link

Sun has released the "code" for one of their microchips, the new OpenSPARC, under the free/open GPL license. This is awesome news -- now, if only Sun would stop shipping crippleware DRM that relies on trusted computing to shaft its users, I'd be totally, utterly thrilled.

Goals of the OpenSPARC Initiative

* To significantly increase participation in processor architecture development and application design by making cutting-edge hardware intellectual property freely available.
* To eliminate barriers to the next big build-out of the Internet.
* To improve collaboration and cooperation among hardware designers.
* To enable community members to build on proven technology at a markedly lower cost.
* To encourage innovation.
* To foster bringing bold new products to market.

Link (via Lessig)

In Make Vol 2, we ran instructions on how to make a marshmallow shooter gun. At this year's eTech conference, we brought a bunch of supplies so attendees could make their own.

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid took this awesome photo of a marshmallow gun in action, and it was picked up by Fark, where countless funmakers fired up their copies of photoshopped and tweaked the photo in hilarious ways. Link

I'll be on a radio show called Your Call today at 10am to talk about Make and DIY. I'll be joined by my friend Shoshana Berger, editor of ReadyMade magazine.

It's on 91.7 KALW in Berkeley San Francisco. You can listen to the KALW stream here, and an archive will be available after the show here.

On the next Your Call, we're whipping out the tin snips and firing up the soldering iron. The DIY movement is back in force and isn't just punk rockers and suburban housewives. Every week a new magazine pops up on knitting, whittling or home repair. Are people actually doing any of this? Or is being handy as much a fantasy as other magazine standy-bys, like having rock hard abs? We asked you to try two projects, and we tried our hand at them ourselves. Join us as we talk to the editors of Make Magazine and Berkeley's-own Ready Made and on the next Your Call with Rebecca Roberts and you.

Link

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman looks at a video clip that a man named Richard Sade says is a Bigfoot he caught on tape at the side of a road in Ely, Minnesota in January. One would think that a real Bigfoot from Minnesota wouldn't be so stumbly in the snow. From Loren's post:

I have no background or personal information on Richard Sade. Who is he? What was he doing on the road at that hour? Is this a hoax? Does the hair seem rather long on this Sasquatch? Is it a good video? What was the weather like at 4:30 am near Ely, Minnesota on that January day? Have there been other recent sightings from around there? If Bigfoot exists, won’t we expect such new footage to appear? What is actually seen occurring in this video? Is it a human in a suit or an authentic unknown hairy hominoid?

Link

Egglings are ceramic eggs with seeds. They're $8.95 each and are available seeded with lobelia, phlox, thyme, mint, and petunia (seen here). From the ELSEWARES product description:

These ceramic EGGLINGS look and feel just like real eggs. Just crack one open, add water, and you’ve created a springtime oasis for your desk or window (even if it's winter outside). Each comes with a terra cotta tray and seed pack. Growing is EASY — plants thrive for months in their shell and can be replanted in soil. Sold individually.

Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

In February, we brought you the sad news that Octavia Butler, the genius science fiction writer, had died unexpectedly.

Now a charitable scholarship has been founded her name. The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund will "will enable writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Octavia got her start." These are the science fiction writers' workshops in Seattle and East Lansing that serve as a kind of "boot camp for science fiction writers," graduating talented writers who often go on to fame in the field and outside of it (I am on the Board of Directors of the charity that oversees Clarion East).

The charity is seeking tax-deductible donations to raise a full endowment of $100,000.

Octavia E. Butler (1947 - 2006) was a brilliant African American writer who broke barriers with her courageous and profoundly truthful books and stories. Winner of many awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, and speculative fiction's highest honors, the Hugo and the Nebula, Octavia was greatly loved during her lifetime and will be greatly missed.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Supporters of South Park who've launched a web petition and protest-letter campaign say:

Comedy Central suddenly switched out episodes of South Park -- replacing the previously-scheduled "Trapped in the Closet" without any explanation. According to a friend of mine (secretary for a certain company that owns Comedy Central), Tom Cruise has blackmailed the company into not showing the episode, which portrays him as a homosexual and his religion (Scientology) as a cult.

Update, 522pm PT: Here's a new url for the protest site: chefgate.info.

The French Parliament is considering a law that would force music-lockware companies like Apple and Microsoft to license their anti-copying software to other companies, so that customers who bought crippled music could play it on other vendors' players.

This is a good step, but for me, it leaves the big question hanging: will Apple and Microsoft have to license their players to free and open source software authors? The problem is that anti-copying software always comes with a licensing condition that requires implementors to design their players so that users can't modify them. It's like requiring everyone who licenses your internal combustion engine design to weld the hood shut.

Free and open source software (FOSS) -- collectively authored programs like GNU/Linux, Firefox, Sendmail, Apache and VLC -- has proven itself to be an important new way of producing valuable goods and services. From Amazon to Google, from the US military to the Mac OS, everyone who uses computers relies on FOSS to keep them running. What's more, FOSS upsets the dominance of incumbents in the marketplace, letting new entrepreneurs, non-profits, individuals and educational institutions compete with entrenched giants.

But the cornerstone of FOSS is that it should be modifiable by its users. Even though most of us will never write a line of code (no more than most of us will service our car-engines), the ability for all users to choose to understand, modify, improve upon and distribute the software they use is fundamental to FOSS.

Now, given that all anti-copying software requires that users can't modify it -- because you could change the "don't copy this" routine to a "allow this to be copied" routine -- and given that FOSS requires user-modifiability, how will the French Parliament resolve it?

An analogy: Apple iTunes is like a blacksmith who puts a toll-box at the head of a major road. Unless your horse is shod with his shoes, you may not pass. The French Parliament might require Apple to let horses wearing Microsoft shoes to use its road, and that's great -- if you're on horseback.

But if you're in a car, you're screwed. FOSS is an entirely different industrial production system that Apple and Microsoft crippleware can't accommodate -- will the French Parliament outlaw it because of that? Do the blacksmiths get full employment for life, even if it strangles the automobile in its cradle?

The French proposal would let music fans download music to their iPods from services other than iTunes or to rival players from the French iTunes store.

It could force Apple into choosing between making its service compatible with rival players or shutting down its online store in France.

Apple has so far declined to comment on the bill, which would also affect how its rivals run their music services.

Link (Thanks, Ben!)

Click MORE... below for tons of juicy commentary on this fight -- who's screwing whom and how.

The first chapter in a subscription-based ebook from Diane Duane, a popular author of young adult fantasies, is online.

Back in February, I posted about Diane Duane's vow to write the last volume in her Feline Wizards trilogy as a reader-supported open ebook. She's soliciting donations from readers, who get early access to her chapters as she posts them and a hardcopy of the book from Lulu.com once it's done.

Diane posted her first chapter for her subscribers last week and has just opened it to the general public -- now it's time to sign up to subscribe to chapter two!

Four-thirty on a Sunday morning is about the closest the City that Never Sleeps ever gets to turning its name untrue. Midtown Manhattan, in particular, is quieter then than at almost any other time except when it’s snowed. But there was little chance of that happening today. It was the third of June, and though New York’s wizards can do unusual things with their weather when the need arises, right now the busiest group of them had far more important business on their minds.

The light at the corner of Eighth Avenue and West Thirty-first Street changed from red to green, without any other visible result: no cars were waiting to move on either side of the intersection. In fact, nothing at all could be seen between Eighth and the River but various parked cars – not a single pedestrian, not even a stray dog. The only thing moving down that way, down at the far end of Thirty-first, was the Hudson River – seeming to slide slowly with the inward tide from the Great South Bay just now swinging, and the surface of the water gone the color and texture of tarnished beaten pewter in the pre-dawn twilight.

Sitting at the corner of Eighth and Thirty-first, watching the river, watching the paling sky, was a small black cat. To human observers, city cats often look furtive or nervous: but this one sat there like she owned the street. This morning, she did. The most senior worldgating technician on the East Coast of North America let out a long breath and turned her attention away from the placid slow roll of the river, looking uptown along Eighth.

Link (Thanks, Diane!)

I've just posted the final installment of the podcast of my story, "Nimby and the D-Hoppers," originally published in Asimov's, reprinted in a Year's Best anthology, and translated into French, Russian, Chinese and Hebrew.

Nimby and the D-Hoppers is an alternate future of deep green anti-technocracy, and the collission with dimension hoppers from more technocratic realities. I read the story in three installments and they're all online now. Next up, the three-story "Bugouts" trilogy, starting with Shadow of the Mothaship.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Podcast feed

This Guardian article, written by a former goth, makes the case that goths disproportionately grow up to be high-earning professionals -- and includes a 10-point quiz to help you figure out if your boss is a closet/reformed goth.

Visitors to the Archangel dental surgery in west London are confronted by a goth dentist, Didier Goalard, who says: "I've got goth friends who are doing quite well. There's a dentist in Lyon, a couple of solicitors, a Church of England priest."

"Goths are like masons," I have been told. "They're everywhere." But rather than blaming some sinister conspiracy, let us look at the reasons people become goths in the first place. According to Choque Hosein, formerly of goth band Salvation but now running a record label, "Goths tend to be the weirdo intellectual kids who have started to view the world differently." Cathi Unsworth is now a successful author, but she remembers that her own dark gothic past gave her an outlet for alienation. "I loved the bands, especially Siouxsie and the Banshees, but it wasn't a pose - I felt authentically depressed," she says. Unsworth was a teenager in Great Yarmouth, where she felt that "people didn't like me. It got to a point where I wanted to stop fighting against being different and embrace it."

Link

Copyfightin' humanities prof Siva Vaidhyanathan has just published a paper in which defines a new discipline that encompasses the copyfight. "Critical Information Studies" is Siva's name for the interdisciplinary field that the copyfight crowd are creating, a field with some comp sci, some law, some philosophy, some economics, some poli sci, some public diplomacy, some critical theory, and so on. Siva proposes that "Critical Information Studies" will cover:

* the abilities and liberties to use, revise, criticize, and manipulate cultural texts, images, ideas, and information;

* the rights and abilities of users (or consumers or citizens) to alter the means and techniques through which cultural texts and information are rendered, displayed, and distributed;

* the relationship among information control, property rights, technologies, and social norms; and

* the cultural, political, social, and economic ramifications of global flows of culture and information.

Link (Thanks, Siva!)