From the Full Belly Project, detailed instructions for making your own hand-cranked peanut-shelling machine. As Emeka from the Timbuktu Chronicles told Make Blog, "The vision of the Full Belly Project is that the residents of rural communities in developing countries live lives of abundance - that they awake each morning to days of economic possibility and go to sleep each night with bellies that are full. Our mission is to relieve hunger by taking advantage of the highly nutritious properties of peanuts through appropriate agricultural technology. Our strategy is to effect international distribution of unique labor saving devices, and where necessary, provide the parts to construct such devices whose uses will relieve hunger, improve nutrition, and provide economic opportunities to impoverished rural areas..." Link (via Make Blog)

Matt sez, "Jeroen Offerman took three months to learn to backwards-sing Stairway To Heaven and performed it *memorized*. Backwards speaking is incredibly non-intuitive; to speak in true acoustic reverse, elements like dipthongs and plosive consonants have to be reversed, and they do so in surprising ways. To truly complicate matters, add in the backwards rise and fall of the intonations of speech. When I experimented with backwards speech, this last element made my head hurt. Singing, however, effectively removes the complex pitch contours of speech, and makes things much easier. I'm not sure if Offerman had all this in mind when he set to work on his crazy project, but it very impressive for its breadth and zeal!" Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Update: Andy sez, "Here's something for people to try - record yourself saying something, reverse it, record your imitation of the reversed version and reverse it again. Spooky! It's the audio version of the film trick where action is recorded backwards and the actors all have to move / lip sync backwards through the scene."

Joao sez, "As soon as I saw Smartfilter's bots snooping around I blocked their IP ranges (fight fire with fire)... Looking at my logs it seemed to have worked, since people still access Boing Boing through my Distributed Boing Boing. My .htaccess, may be useful for anyone:"

DirectoryIndex dbb.php
order allow,deny
deny from 66.45.10.64/27
deny from 206.169.110.64/27
deny from 192.55.214.0/24 
allow from all

Link (Thanks, Joao!)

A reader on Dvorak's forum says that the supposed Islamic fundamentalist video games where players are guerrillas in turbans stalking invading soldiers in tanks is a hoax:

The video the retarded writer is referring to is not made by terrorists. It was made by a member of the Planetbattlefield forums. The voice of in the video is not a terrorist - it is Trey Parker from the movie Team America World Police. The article also claims it is a mod created by terrorist. It is not a mod. It is the Special Forces Expansion pack that anyone can buy.

Link (Thanks, Gregory!)

Update: Andrew sez, "Check out Special Force, a game from Lebanon that chronciles the Israeli Lebanon conflict from the Islamic side. It's basically CounterStrike. It's actually more popular than Half Life in Korea."

14 Air Pakistan Pakistan International Airlines passengers awarded themselves an upgrade to the empty first class cabin of a flight from Islamabad to Manchester that was stuck, sweltering on the Islamabad tarmac for four hours. They switched to first class mid-flight and refused to go back to cattle-class. When the flight landed in the UK, they were arrested "on suspicion of endangering the aircraft." Link

This "computer bed" starts out as a hinged desk with room for a PC, printer, and so forth. When you're ready to sleep, the whole desktop swings to the floor and a bed with matress swings down from the wall in its place, converting it to a bed. It's clever as hell. Link (via Make Blog)

Check out these handsome £30 8-bit video-game polo shirts sporting graphics from Breakout, Frogger, and Donkey Kong. Link (via Wonderland)

The "invisible bookshelf" is completely obscured by the books you put on it, creating the illusion of floating piles of books mysteriously affixed to your walls -- best of all is the charming franglais sales-copy that accompanies the shelf's listing at Singulier.com.

Saving in space and a minimum of emcombrement on your wall for this very astute rack which will enable you to arrange your books without seeing the structure of the rack! YOur books are floated...the effect is amasing!

Link (via Cribcandy)

Update: Luca sends word of the Sticklebook invisible shelf, and Manue sent in the Umbra CONCEAL shelf.

Update 2: Philbert sez, "this reminded me of something I had seen here in the Netherlands and had even considered buying. It is similar in that it is a hidden bookshelf, different in that it is actually a bookshelf that looks like a book with the revealing title 'Ceci n'est pas un livre' (for the illiterate, a variation to Magritte's painting of a pipe with the text ceci n'est pas une pipe, so in this case meaning, this is not a book). I found it charming."

The CSPAN store is selling DVDs of the White House Correspondants' dinner where Stephen Colbert kicked so much ass, roasting the president and his spineless press corps. Of course, you can get it on Google Video if you want some instant gratification. Link (Thanks, Jeremy and Brian!)

Update: Dave sez, "what's arguably even more interesting, IMO, are the "CUSTOMERS WHO BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT ALSO PURCHASED..." links are the bottom of the page"

Presidential Impeachment Proposals
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions
Genocide in Darfur
Downing Street Minutes and Pre-War Intelligence
Freedom of the Press
American Presidents Fact Cards

This Monday, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy will hand out its awards for the Reinventing Public Diplomacy through Games Contest. There's a lot of drama here -- among the finalists are scrappy kids from Montgomery College  in Rockville, MD going up against the Carnegie Mellon's graduate engineering students who designed "Peace Maker," a game which has been featured on CNN and MSNBC. State Department reps will be on-site and in the Second Life virtual awards ceremony that will happen simultaneously. If you're in LA or Second Life, you can attend, too -- and in Second Life, you'll be seated and shown around by hosts from Australia, Canada and the UK. Link (Thanks, Josh!) (Disclosure: I will be a Fullbright Chair at the USC Center in 2006/2007))

Update: This may be a hoax, many of the details are challenged in a message-board here.

Fundamentalist Islamic hackers are reportedly modding militaristic video-games so that the good guys wear turbans and shoot from the hills, and the bad guys invade in tanks and choppers:

Battlefield 2 ordinarily shows U.S. troops engaging forces from China or a united Middle East coalition. But in a modified video trailer posted on Islamic websites and shown to lawmakers, the game depicts a man in Arab headdress carrying an automatic weapon into combat with U.S. invaders.

"I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters," a narrator's voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults.

Then came a recording of President Bush's September 16, 2001 statement: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." It was edited to repeat the word "crusade," which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity.

Two militant videos were also pointed out to lawmakers, including one called Lion of Falluja, the city in Iraqi's violent Anbar province that has long been seen as a symbol of militant resistance.

Link

Jame Lileks comments on paper currency from around the world. As Coop notes, It's "jawdroppingly weird old ephemera, pleasantly seasoned with acerbic comments."

Any note that shows Johnny Cash as a jet pilot is a dollar bill I'd be proud to spend.

Of course, that's not really the Man in Black, but it has his noble cast and sorrowful mouth. Also, his left eye appears to be scarred shut, but obviously that's not the case if he's a pilot. If there had been a military coup in the US in the 60s, this is what our money would have looked like.

Link

Jason Little's second Bee serialized web comic is well underway. He's a terrific writer and illustrator. Enjoy! Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice : How to Rip the Lid Off Your Id and Live Happily Ever After, is ostensibly a humor book, but it really speaks to the lizard brain in all of us that wants to squash annoying people like bugs. That it's also hilarious is an added bonus. Just don't follow his advice, unless you want to end up in prison, or worse. Link

Jim Woodring, one of the world's greatest living artists, has a blog where he shows off everything from toys made from his characters to pencil and pen drawings from his Moleskine notebook. Beautiful. Link (thanks, Jim!)

Ren sez, "I wanted to let you know that IPac, the political action committee for geeks, is kicking off its month 'o new campaigns by launching FireHatch.com. FireHatch is dedicated to making Orrin 'Let's Blow Up Computers' Hatch accountable for his anti-tech, pro-Hollywood cartel positions. Plus, we've got a wicked-good candidate on the other side, Pete Ashdown. Pete is the founder of Utah's oldest ISP, and he's even got a wiki for constituents! This is going to be an exciting race, and it's a great example of good v. evil to lead off IPac's other announcements about the 2006 elections." Link (Thanks, Ren!)

The much-blogged video of Stephen Colbert's searing presidential roast was yanked from popular video-sharing site YouTube this week, after CSPAN complained of copyright infringement.

Today, I learned that the clip has now popped up on Google Video -- evidently, with CSPAN's consent. Huh? This makes no sense.

I asked Google for an explanation, and a spokesperson replied to BoingBoing:

Google Video enables content providers of all sizes to submit videos to Google Video, as long as the user owns the necessary rights (including copyrights, trademarks, rights of publicity, and any other relevant rights for the user's content). This is the case with the "Colbert Roasts President Bush - 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner" on Google Video. Google is always interested in making relevant content available to users - in line with our mission to make all of the world's information universally accessible.

Like other content providers we work with, C-SPAN wanted to be able to air its content in its complete context and in line with their copyright policies. Google Video allows upload of all content that meets our stated polices - regardless of length - and that made the availability of this particular segment possible.

Link to copy on Google Video (Thanks, Glenn Otis Brown!). It's still available all over the place on blogs, USENET groups, and via BitTorrent (all of those methods = without permission), and via CSPAN's own website. I still don't understand why CSPAN won't let YouTube users upload copies to that service, but it does appear to be well within their rights to make that decision.

Previously:
- Why was Colbert press corps video removed from YouTube?

Annalee Newitz has a great feature on RFID hackers in this month's Wired -- she tells the story of various RFID hackers who exploit vulnerabilities in RFID tags to hotwire cars, steal gas, break into your office, and get up to other naughtiness:

James Van Bokkelen is about to be robbed. A wealthy software entrepreneur, Van Bokkelen will be the latest victim of some punk with a laptop. But this won't be an email scam or bank account hack. A skinny 23-year-old named Jonathan Westhues plans to use a cheap, homemade USB device to swipe the office key out of Van Bokkelen's back pocket.

"I just need to bump into James and get my hand within a few inches of him," Westhues says. We're shivering in the early spring air outside the offices of Sandstorm, the Internet security company Van Bokkelen runs north of Boston. As Van Bokkelen approaches from the parking lot, Westhues brushes past him. A coil of copper wire flashes briefly in Westhues' palm, then disappears.

Van Bokkelen enters the building, and Westhues returns to me. "Let's see if I've got his keys," he says, meaning the signal from Van Bokkelen's smartcard badge. The card contains an RFID sensor chip, which emits a short burst of radio waves when activated by the reader next to Sandstorm's door. If the signal translates into an authorized ID number, the door unlocks.

The coil in Westhues' hand is the antenna for the wallet-sized device he calls a cloner, which is currently shoved up his sleeve. The cloner can elicit, record, and mimic signals from smartcard RFID chips. Westhues takes out the device and, using a USB cable, connects it to his laptop and downloads the data from Van Bokkelen's card for processing. Then, satisfied that he has retrieved the code, Westhues switches the cloner from Record mode to Emit. We head to the locked door.

Link

In an awkward but interesting closing segment of this week's NeoFiles, Natasha Vita-More tells R.U. Sirius, "We're closing the doors of Extropy Institute." Formed in the late 1980s, Extropy Institute was the first transhumanist organization and More is (or was?) its president.

And on The R.U. Sirius Show, Jason Louv and Chris Arkenberg talk about what's next after "Chaos Magic," and promote their new DisInformation book, Generation Hex. Link

Update: Natasha Vita-More says: "I am still president of Extropy Institute, have been for 5 years. Max is the chair."

On May 13 at the MOCA Store (250 S. Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012), Mark Ryden will be signing copies of his new art book, Fushigi Circus.

This will be a busy day for me, because it's the same day that the craft swap meet, Felt Club, debuts at Meltdown Comics. Link

A suit to force the FCC to stop demanding wiretapping back-doors in VoIP programs has had a major step forward today. EFF and a coalition of public-interest, industry and academic groups brought the suit agains the FCC, and today saw a hearing in the DC Court of Appeals. Judge Harry Edwards presided, and he openly mocked the FBI's arguments:

"'This is wholly ridiculous,' [Judge Harry] Edwards said, saying that Congress' meaning was clear. The FCC's argument 'is such gobbedlygook, it's really funny.... It's utter nonsense.'"

Link

A Swarm of Angels is an ambitious project from an accomplished film-maker to produce a £1,000,000 movie with small donations from 50,000 people. The resulting film will be released under a CC license, and will be developed through feedback from the 50,000 angels who fund it.

Matt Hanson is the impressario here, and he's produced several movies, TV series and film festivals. He's signed Tommy Pallotta (A Scanner Darkly) as a producer, and both Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan) and me are serving as advisors.

The process is very cool. Matt is signing up angels in batches: first 100, then 1000, then 5000, then 25000, then 50000. At each stage, the angels get to participate in different parts of the film production: script development, teaser production, trailer production, pre-production planning, production, post-production, etc.

The first 100 angels are already signed, and Matt's opened the membership again to 1000 more, who get to work on script doctoring and making the first teasers. At £25, it's the cost of a couple CDs, and you get to participate in the production of a major feature film, using a radical, participatory methodology. Pretty cool!

A Swarm of Angels reinvents the Hollywood model of filmmaking to create cult cinema for the Internet era. It's all about making an artistic statement, making something you haven't seen before. Why are we doing this? Because we are tired of films that are made simply to please film executives, sell popcorn, or tie-in with fastfood licensing deals.

We want to invent the future of film. Call it Cinema 2.0.

To do it we need your help.

Link

Geek rapper MC Plus+ has released a song about crypto called Alice and Bob, which goes into some tech detail, such as "if we could factor large composites in poly time, we'd have enough money to not have to rhyme."

Cuz I'm encrypting shit like every single day
Sending data across the network in a safe way
Protecting messages to make my pay
If you hack it you're guilty under DMCA

3.1MB MP3 Link, Coral Cache Link (via Schneier)

The UN's World Intellectual Property Organization has abandoned its plans to create a podcast-killing treaty -- for now. This is the Broadcast Treaty, which will create a new group of rightsholders, the people who transmit information (broadcasters, satellite casters, cablecasters, but for now, not webcasters). These people get a "broadcast right" to the works they transmit, over and above the copyright that goes to those works' creators. That means that even if you have the creator's permission to use a work you've received, you still need to get clearance from the broadcaster, whose only contribution to the work was putting it on the air.

Uses that are considered fair under copyright -- things you can do without the creator's permission, like quoting and parody -- won't be fair uses under broadcast rights. And broadcast rights will cover things copyright doesn't cover, like works in the public domain, factual material and government materials. And the broadcast right trumps the Creative Commons licenses that have already been applied to 53 million works in a scant three years; even though those authors want you to distribute their works, the "casters" still get to stop you.

The US had pushed hard to get this new right applied to the web, even though virtually every country in the world had rejected this idea. The US was put up to this by Yahoo and Microsoft, who have giant databases of webcasts that other people have entrusted to them, which they wanted to get an ownership interest over. Over and over again, the world's nations have told the US that this wasn't an option, and over and over again, the Chairman of the committee snuck away between meetings and stuck it back into the treaty.

The fourteenth treaty negotiation meeting has just concluded, and webcasting is off the table again. It's been relegated to its own, separate negotiations, to be discussed at a later date. I hope that when that meeting comes around, the tens of thousands of podcasters who would be screwed by the webcasting right -- because it would cripple providers' ability to index, mirror, transcode, distribute and archive their casts, and make it much harder to quote from other podcasts in your own -- get a seat at the table.

The webcasting provision was killed through hard work from EFF, the Consumer Project on Technology, IPJustice, and many other activist groups that have endured great hardship at these meetings, having their materials stolen, getting shut out by dirty tricks, and being intimidated by UN staff. It's an amazing tribute to their work that they've kept the Internet safe -- for now.

So webcasting is out, but the question is for how long? The U.S., which proposed its inclusion, was not happy about the outcome. It said it was concerned with the "missed opportunity" to provide protection for new entities, but said that it would reluctantly be prepared to accept the two-track approach -- on the condition that if the WIPO General Assembly did not convene a Diplomatic Conference dealing with "traditional broadcasting" when it meets in September, any future discussions on a Broadcasting Treaty would include protection for new Internet entities.

Link

"The Room," a cheeseball masterpiece made for $6MM, has developed an online cult following similar to the one surrounding "Snakes On A Plane." Snip from an NPR News report by my colleague Nihar Patel:

The consensus is that the movie is so bad it's actually painfully funny to watch. What makes the experience so much fun are the hundred or so fans that routinely show up for screenings. During the movie, audience members shout out their own commentary about the dialogue, the sets -- and notably, the framed photograph of a spoon that inexplicably reappears. Each time this happens, plastic spoons are thrown at the screen, in the can-do spirit of Rocky Horror Picture Show fans.

Fans of The Room are cheering a cinematic train wreck. And the film's writer, director and star -- Tommy Wiseau -- even attends some of the screenings. Wiseau is cagey about where he got the reported $6 million he spent to finance The Room. The mystery has fueled numerous theories. But with so many people buying the DVD, soundtracks and T-shirts, it's easy to see why Wiseau goes along for the ride.

He insists that the whole humor-from-melodrama theme was his intent -- that he wanted to provoke the audience into interacting with the movie.

Link to archived radio report, with movie clips and stills.

Snip from Businessweek item:

At a panel this week at the Tribeca Film Festival with BitTorrent's Ashwin Navin, Todd Wagner of 2929 Entertainment, and Dean Garfield of the MPAA, director Steven Soderbergh said he planned to use BitTorrent to release a short he's doing. Steven Soderbergh is doing a an High-Def film with the next issue of the DVD quarterly magazine Wolphin, due out in mid-May.

Link (Thanks, Lily!). Previous BB posts about Soderbergh's digital distribution forays here.

Snip:

CIA Director Porter Goss resigned unexpectedly Friday, leaving behind a spy agency still battling to recover from the scars of intelligence failures before America's worst terrorist attack and faulty information that formed the U.S. rationale for invading Iraq.

AP item here.

Mark Ebner writes,

"[The] mysterious web presence known as 'Project Xenu' did no aerial-advertising at last night’s faux MI:3 premiere. Instead, the evil Lord Xenu made his first red carpet experience in 75 million years."

Link

The Anti-Scientology plane flyover didn't happen because of weather conditions, and organizers explain more here. (Thanks, r3v)

Previously:
- Mission Impossible opening marked by anti-Scientology flyover

Reader comment: Chad Arsenault says,

Hi, Xeni,

I just noticed how similar your name is to Scientology's alien overlord...

Could it be...? Link.

Censorware company Smartfilter has blocked Distributed Boing Boing, a service that helps Boing Boing readers access the site through censoring firewalls. They're classing the service as an "anonymizer" and blocking it for customers that block access to anonymizers on their networks. These customers include several repressive governments around the world, who use SmartFilter's censorware to restrict the information their citizens can access.

SmartFilter never talks about the repressive governments they do business with. Instead, they focus on a story about keeping little kids from accidentally seeing naked people. But by targeting Distributed Boing Boing -- a service only ever used deliberately, by sophisticated Internet users who know what they're looking for -- SmartFilter once again shows its true colors: they're about censorship, not protecting kids.

The "anonymizer" classification is just as spurious, of course. An anonymizer is a service that lets you look at web-pages without your identity being logged. Distributed Boing Boing lets you look at Boing Boing, period.

It's amazing to think that there are CIOs still writing checks to these vindictive clowns -- they're not in the business of accurately classifying the Internet to help companies contain liability. They're in the business of persecuting sites that criticize them.

In the meantime, you can still access Distributed Boing Boing by checking the Google cache of the page, which SmartFilter doesn't block. Link (Thanks, Jamie!)

Update: Gordon sez, "Did you know that Boing Boing is also blocked by Websense, which my company uses? In this case you are actually categorized as ‘Sex’. I can access the distributed site though."

Andrew sends us a YouTube link to "a short-film adaptation of science fiction author Terry Bisson's short story "They're Made Out of Meat." Directed by Stepehn O'Reagan, and starring Tom Noonan (The X-Files, Robocop 2) and New York standup Ben Bailey, it won grand prize at the Science Fiction Museum's First Annual Short Film Festival.

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

Link, Link to text of story

Ever wanted to know what a $10,000 bill looks like? The US Treasury's Bureau and Engraving has a gallery of high-denomination money. Link (via Digg)

RyanAir -- the discount Irish airline -- lost a reporter's prescription shades, and refused to compensate him for them, citing abusive fine-print on their tickets and other legal mumbo-jumbo. The reporter took them to a UK small claims court and they fought it (spending far more than they would have had to to settle his £100 claim) and then, when the judge ruled against them, argued that they needed extra time to raise the £100! (Ryanair's present valuation is £4.2 billion).

I reported the loss the next morning, via expensive phone calls (Ryanair’s number is a premium-rate line) and then faxes. Ryanair refused to consider my claim, aiming a double-barrelled shotgun at me. Bang: I had not filled in a Property Irregularity Report at Stansted, detailing my loss. Bang: I should not have packed “valuable” spectacles in my checked baggage...

The judge did, however, quite like my rhetorical rejection of Ryanair’s valuables argument. Where, I wanted to know, did the lawyers pack their no-doubt valuable suits, if not in checked-in luggage? The judge upped the ante. What about the value of an Armani suit packed in a suitcase? In any case, said the spectacle-wearing Solomon, loads of people pack a pair of spare specs in their checked-in luggage as a matter of course. What’s more, there was no mention of spectacles among the “valuable” items excluded from compensation in the Ryanair bumf.

Link (via Consumerist)

This is a hilarious list of Harry Potter fanfic titles we'd rather not see:

Harry Potter and the Uneventful Year When No One Tried to Kill Him
Harry Potter and the New Love Interest Who Happens to Have the Same Name as the 15-Year-Old Girl Writing this Fanfic
Harry Potter and the Uncomforatble Oversexualization of Minors
Harry Potter and the E Street Band
Harry Potter and the Things You Have to do to Get By in Prison
Harry Potter and the Prisoner Detainees of Azerbaijan
Harry Potter and the Wand of Franchise Extension
Harry Potter and the Order of the Pizza

Link (via Making Light)

A chain of Kiwi pizza joints, Hell Pizza, delivers its pizzas in a novelty box that can be folded into a coffin "for your remains." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

Photoshop can recognize money and refuse to let you open a scan of a bill (the latest version will open it but not print it). But Photoshop expert Deke McClelland has a hilarious five-minute podcast about the ins and outs of scanning US currency. He's very energetic. I don't have this much personality until I've had five cups of coffee.
Link

EFF's gotten 73,000 of the 100,000 signatures it's seeking for a petition on the recording industry's insane campaign of suing thousands of music fans. 27,000 more to go!

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is on a rampage, launching legal attacks against average Americans from coast to coast. After over 18,000 lawsuits and counting against P2P users, file sharing has continued to increase rapidly. Meanwhile, music fans, like 12 year-old Brittany LaHara, college student Cassi Hunt, and parent of five Cecilia Gonzalez, are being forced to pay thousands of dollars they do not have to settle RIAA-member lawsuits, and many other innocent individuals are being caught in the crossfire.

This irrational crusade is not generating a single penny for the artists that the RIAA claims to protect. The RIAA should be working to create a rational, legal means by which its customers can take advantage of file sharing technology and pay a fair price for the music they love. With artists increasingly turning against the lawsuits, momentum may be shifting in favor of a better way forward.

Copyright law shouldn't make criminals out of more than 60 million Americans — tell Congress that it's time to stop the madness!

We have 73044 signatures so far - this is amazing! If we can get 100,000 signatures, we will deliver the petition to the Senate and House Commerce and Judiciary Commitees.

Link

Coop has a mouth watering gallery of antique tools that he picked up at a garage sale. He almost got into a fight with an Armenian gentleman who also wanted the tools, but Coop prevailed.

Aren't they pretty? I doubt I'll ever use any of 'em, but how could you leave these sad orphans behind? It would be like kicking puppies.

Link

I interviewed Danny "Applied Minds" Hillis, entrepreneur and Disney Fellow, about the similarities and differences between a day in Disneyland and playing a video-game -- the interview ran in last month's Wired:

WIRED: In a sense, Disneyland itself was the first massively multiplayer game - all these people milling around, lots of open-ended missions to choose from. HILLIS: You go to a theme park with people you have a relationship with - friends, family - and you interact with each other in ways you wouldn't in normal life. You get into situations where you're frightened or excited together.

Parks take you out of the everyday and re-create that sense of wonder from childhood, the time when nothing made sense, when you didn't know what would happen next and didn't need to. They're wonderful, thrilling, and unpredictable - but safe. That's how I felt the first time I played The Legend of Zelda. It was a new thing. I didn't know what the rules were or what would happen next. But I didn't worry about it.

Link

The mind-blowingly creative geniuses at eboy have announced the publication of their giant-sized poster of NYC, which contains enough eyeball kicks to keep you busy for at least a year.

Shown here: an infinitesimal detail of the poster. Here is a shot of the entire poster. Here is ordering information. Link

The anti-Scientology activists at HailXenu.net will fly an airplane towing banners making fun of the cult over the tonight's LA Grauman's Chinese opening of Mission Impossible: III. The movie stars Tom Cruise, a well-known member of and advocate for the cult, and the banner will sport cryptic anti-Scientology messages in leet-speek: "Hail Xenu LOL <8 OT" and "The baby is Xenu's." Link (via Digg)

Update: A reader writes, "the prank is being put on by offtopic.com - hailxenu.net is just a site dedicated to it."

On May 12/13, Boston's Berkman Center will host a conference called "Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture."

It's an open convening for public broadcasters, social media makers, and technology developers to discuss, debate, and demonstrate the future of public media."

Now that the BBC has taken the lead in reinventing what it means to be a public service media company, the US public media folks are trying to figure it out too.

They are also setting up a Second Life conference area where the proceedings will be webcast.

Link (Thanks, Jake!)

I read Mr. Jalopy's account of the Maker Faire with rapt attention. He writes about how he broke some important bolts in his car's engine just a couple of days before he was supposed to drive from LA to SF, and how he finally arrived at a solution. Then he goes on to describe the experience of teaching four sheet metal workshops, and shows photos of the neat things his pupils made from sheet metal and pop-rivets. Along the way, he touches on a great many valuable observations on the human condition.

Here, he explains why the six-hour drive from LA to SF on Interstate 5 was not boring:

No Ipod, no stereo, no air conditioning and not a smidge of boredom. Who could want for stimuli when you have time to consider custom van themes, firecracker packaging, modern farm equipment, blossoming trees, tremendously smelly stock yards, crackpot inventions, net generational impact of Mad Magazine vs. Playboy, LED voltage requirements, future Make articles, the Uniball Deluxe Micro, the merits of a brass drift, LiteBrite, telephone ringers, John Steinbeck, laminating machines and fiberglass lamp shades. Sweet luscious, generous hours spent without a paint brush in your hand. Just when you think you could possibly run out of things to think about, you can wonder about how they bronzed baby shoes. And then Harris Ranch appears on the horizon and you realize it is time for a restorative breakfast and bloody mary at the bar. The uneventful road trip is an incredibly rich gift to a busy person. The blank fields of the Central Valley are a stark contrast and unambiguous pleasure in comparison to the more subtle joys of using tweezers to pick metal filings from your hands.

There's a lot of wonderful stuff in this essay. I nominate it for a Pulitzer. Link

Update: image at left courtesy of BB reader Shawn Stricklin. Link to full-size.

Following Cory's posts about Stephen Colbert's amazing performance Saturday at a White House dinner, many BoingBoing readers wrote in to ask:

"YouTube has taken down the videos [of Colbert's performance], citing copyright infringement. Since those videos were taken from C-SPAN, which I thought was owned by the public, who owns the copyright and could have asked for the videos to be taken down?"

(thanks, Parker, and many others). YouTube customarily removes copyrighted content at the request of rightsholders, but some troubled readers wrote in asking whether censorship or alien conspiracy theories were to blame in this case. I asked YouTube spokesperson Julie Supan, and she replied:

The Colbert videos were removed at the request of CSPAN, the copyright owner. Many of our users have inquired about whether or not the speech was considered 'public domain' and therefore exempt from copyright protection. Unfortunately, the video footage uploaded was broadcasted and owned by CSPAN.

I might recommend contacting CSPAN to better understand the situation from their perspective.

Here's the "Contact Us" page on CSPAN.org.

Previously on BoingBoing:
- Stephen Colbert kicks ass at White House press corps dinner
- Mainstream press: Colbert wasn't funny, so we ignored him
- Bush and cronies livid about Colbert's White House gig
- NYT finally notices Colbert's White House gig
- Jon Stewart praises Colbert's White House gig

Reader comment: François Bar says,

Interesting that C-SPAN sells it at the (discounted) price of $24.95: Link.

Reader comment: Karen says,

I thought you might like to know that Crooks and Liars still has the video of Colbert's speech on Saturday night. Here's the link. Both of the video links were up and working as of 5 minutes ago (12:31 MT on 5-4-06). I hope YouTube will have it back up soon.

Reader comment: John Paolozzi says,

YouTube or CSPAN is inconsistent with application of copyright. As you can see from this functional link, the clip from the 2005 dinner is still up. Why?

Reader comment: Joe says,

Regarding the Colbert performance being taken down from YouTube, the link to their video is about halfway down the page, but I couldn't get it to load in Safari. I think it is the whole show about 1:45, according to the blurb on the link: "White House Correspondents' Dinner, White House Correspondents' Association: 92nd Annual Dinner, 4/29/2006: WASHINGTON, DC: 1 hr. 45 min."

Reader comment: McGrude says,

From this URL: "C-SPAN is a private, non-profit company, created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a public service. Our mission is to provide public access to the political process. C-SPAN receives no government funding; operations are funded by fees paid by cable and satellite affiliates who carry C-SPAN programming." So yeah, they've got the right to ask for it to be pulled.

Reader comment: Eric Denny says,

Apparently video of President Bush's performance from the same event doesn't violate copyright: Link.

Reader comment: Bill Brazell says,

I just called C-SPAN to complain about the Colbert removal. C-SPAN says they removed it because YouTube didn't ask permission, and that in any event people can watch the video on C-SPAN's own site (though prob. not in condensed form).

Reader comment: John says,

I just wanted to mention that C-Span is a non-profit, doesn't run ads or have 'underwriters' (like PBS or NPR do) on its channels, and doesn't run ads on its website. It is financed by the cable industry. So if they are charging too much for their videos, and have an incentive to pull stuff off of YouTube, one can take that to mean that they are either (a) underfunded by the cable industry or (b) have an inefficient / arcane revenue model. It does NOT mean that they are greedy bastards.

Don't get me wrong, I hate how they deliver their video in a streaming format, and in general their website could use some serious information architecture and aesthetic redesign. Maybe BB readers could get together and offer them some suggestions for redesign and a new delivery model? Hell, I bet if they sold a high quality, full length version of the Colbert speech on the iTunes store, they'd make a killing.

Reader comment: Daniel Sieradski says,

My friend Aphid is working on a project called Metavid at UCSC which saves C-Span's feed online for public usage. Within weeks of going live (tho it hasn't had a public launch yet) C-Span came a sniffin' and Aphid went running to the EFF. What it comes down to is that recordings of Senatorial and Congressional sessions are public domain and anyone can use C-Span's stuff, but all other recordings (Congressional hearings, Presidential briefings, press corps dinner, etc.) are owned by them. If there was another crew in there filming making the material public domain, like a non-profit or a federal agency, that material could be used in the public domain as no one has exclusive rights to those hearings/briefings/events. However there is currently no cable television company or foundation which is recording these events for public use. Therefore C-Span can claim ownership of their specific recordings.

BoingBoing reader Craig says,

"The ESA AND NASA have synthesized the Huygens Titan landing telemetry into a cool little movie. Not only is it interesting from a sicnece perspective, the movie embodies some of Edward Tufte's information display principles to represent and relate the data in context."

Link to Cassini-Huygens Titan Landing video, published at nasa.gov earlier today.

Following up on previous BB posts about Congress' sharply-worded letter to the Smithsonian, news today that the Interior subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations put their money (or lack thereof) where their mouth is. Details of the FY07 budget allocation include:

[S]tatutory language limiting the Smithsonian’s ability to execute any contract or legal agreement which could limit public access to the Smithsonian collections. In addition, the bill reduces the Smithsonian’s salaries and expenses account by $5 million.

Link to Committee on Appropriations press release dated May 4. (thanks, Carl Malamud)

Previously:

- Smithsonian becomes Showtime's exclusive first-refusal archive
- Smithsonian's Showtime deal: critical attorneys shred it
- Hundreds ask Smithsonian not to sell out to Showtime
- Smithsonian's Showtime sellout needs FOIA sunshine
- Smithsonian's sellout to Showtime slammed by Congress

Today, CBS debuted a free, ad-supported broadband TV "channel" called "Innertube." Snip from TVWeek story:

Program offerings include sketch comedy, reality, talk, animation and music from CBS Entertainment, King World, CBS Paramount Network Television, CBS Paramount Domestic Television and Showtime. Innertube will also serve as a distribution outlet for episodes of programs from CBS's current prime-time lineup as well as material from CBS's library. CBS will also make available episodes of series that don't draw high enough ratings to remain on broadcast TV.

Link to story. Too bad they don't own innertube.com. Whups. CBS will make the "channel" available from this link on the CBS.com domain, and they've started by offering three shows there. The interface is built in Flash, which everyone on the internet just can't get enough of. (Thanks, D.A.!)

Reader comment: Rob Mills says,

"Innertube" was a short pilot produced by Jim Henson's Muppets in 1987, as the forerunner of what became "The Jim Henson Hour". It marked the first time a digital puppet character graced television screens. Part of this Wikipedia entry reads:

Digital puppetry was pioneered by the late Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets. The character Waldo C. Graphic in the Muppet television series The Jim Henson Hour is widely regarded to have been the first example of a digitally animated figure being performed and rendered in real-time on television and grew out of experiments Henson conducted in 1987 with a computer generated version of Kermit the Frog for InnerTube, which was the unaired television pilot for Jim Henson Hour.

At a space conference in Los Angeles today, The Planetary Society (co-founded by Carl Sagan) announced news from the "Save Our Science (SOS)" campaign protesting planned budget cuts for NASA's space science program:

"Budget action is needed now," said Planetary Society Vice-President Bill Nye, "The longer you drive in the wrong direction, the longer it'll take you to get where you really want to go." (...) The proposal, submitted by the Bush Administration for NASA, would slash $3 billion from the planned exploration of the solar system as well as from space science research and analysis.

The Planetary Society announcement goes on to say that following missions will be killed if the budget passes:

* Europa mission - a prime candidate for finding life beyond Earth
* Terrestrial Planet Finder - a search for Earth-like worlds elsewhere in the galaxy
* Mars Sample Return mission and all precursor activities for human exploration of the Red Planet.
* Mars Telecommunications Orbiter - to relay lander data and begin an infrastructure for future Mars exploration
* The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) - an airborne infrared observatory
* In addition, the budget cuts astrobiology, the study of and search for life beyond earth, by a full 50%.
* University research funding also would be cut 15% across the board, eliminating many bright young people from the field of space science.

Link to "SOS" online petition.

In response to panicked partisan panty-bunching caused by Spanish remakes of The Star Spangled Banner, we pointed this week to a Morse Code MP3 and a binary expression of the American national anthem.

BoingBoing reader Remy Porter kindly translated that binary code into this sound file (157K MP3 Link). It's an unsigned 8-bit PCM rendition at a 2400Hz sample rate. If it sounds like monotone noise, well, that's 'cause it is. Remy explains:

Generally binary data ends up coming out like that. For a fun experiment, grab a JPG and a linux box and type:

cat /path/to/jpg > /dev/sound

- being far more random, those have much more noise; bleeps and bloops across a wide range. ASCII text- which I assume this was encoded from- has a much smaller randomness- a VERY small randomness, and it ends up sounding about the same.

And BoingBoing reader Tony writes,

Some of your readers are not quite old enough to decode Morse or binary files. For their benefit, here's the national anthem in OCTAL [full code-text follows after the jump -- XJ]. A translation is available here. With some effort, I *could* also encode the National Anthem binary into an audio file using Amplitude-Shift-Keying, replacing each 1 with a single cycle of 1000 Hz sinewave and each 0 with a silence. This would produce a little over 15 seconds of sound, with a result something like a highly-resonant beard trimmer. I believe this would be a world-first effort ... one with some glitchitudinous artistic merit ... but would require some time, even *after* acquiring the Phil Dick bust.

Ladies and germs, bald-headed worms, we now proudly present: The Star Spangled Octal Banner. Ahem:

Jasmina Tesanovic: Belgrade, 3 May 2006

To Hague, to Hague
photos by Goranka Matic (Serbia in the early 1990s)

General Ratko Mladic, the world's most famous living war criminal, has not been arrested today. The president of the war tribunal in Hague, Carla del Ponte announced today that Serbia is in the dog house again: negotiations with European Union again suspended, US monetary help too... and many other repressive measures to follow, called the invisible wall of sanctions.

Carla del Ponte said angrily: President Kostunica deceived me, only a month ago he said they were closing in with the operation.... Mladic is hiding in Belgrade, moving from one flat to another, helped by the locals.

President Kostunica in return read a short notice for his people, not much really, except that he did his very best, which is next to nothing.

A Swiss radio broadcast is interviewing me: how do I feel about Carla's harsh statement against Serbia? Great, I say. She could do better, and this is not her first time. But who cares, what practical difference does it make if Mladic is hiding in Serbia, or in Switzerland or Moscow, or anywhere on the globe? Interpol exists. The secret police have gone anywhere, hit-men are everywhere...