Kurt sez, "Early Saturday morning, in the darkest hours of the night, the Department of Justice made good its threat to file a motion to dismiss our class-action lawsuit against AT&T, contending that AT&T's collaboration with the NSA's massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications (which violates the law and the privacy of its customers)--despite being front page news throughout the United States and the subject of government press conferences and Congressional hearings--is a state secret. The motion was accompanied by declarations by Lieutenant General Keith B. Alexander, Director, National Security Agency and John D. Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence. We will vigorously oppose this motion. Donate to EFF and help stop the illegal spying!" Link (Thanks, Kurt!)

Holy Cards are small pictures of Jesus, various saints, or religious scenes with a prayer on the back. Distributed at Roman Catholic churches, Holy Cards have been in circulation since at least the early 1400s. Today's Los Angeles Times has an intriguing article about people who collect these religious curiosités. (Seen here, a German holy card, circa 1910, via Wikipedia.) From the LA Times:

To Julie Ann Brown, they are "visual scriptures, visual faith..."

Ten years ago, the Oxnard resident and marketing professor at Santa Barbara City College found a set of 300 holy cards in a Palmdale antique shop. That discovery brought back memories of attending Mass as a child, when she would use dimes meant for the collection basket to buy cards depicting Jesus.

Always an antique aficionado, she fell into an old passion. Now with 40,000 religious cards stored throughout her house and garage, Brown is determined to preserve as many examples as possible of what she calls "people's art" for posterity.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

WolfenGitmo is a Guantanamo Bay mod of the classic 3D first-person game Castle Wolfenstein. In WolfenGitmo, your hands are bound and you have no weapons, so you merely run around and get mauled by dogs and beaten up by soldiers. The game is presently on display at a show in NYC. Link (Thanks, Evan!)

DDR will soon become a Saturday morning television series on CBS:

In "Dance Revolution", 'tweens' and teens bring their freshest moves to this sensational new dance competition where teams of dancers display their innovative routines. Hosted by the charismatic "Dance Revolution" house band, kid-friendly judges determine the winners as the dancers perform their routines to the cool sounds of the band. "Dance Revolution" will also offer onscreen visuals that constantly encourage viewer participation by demonstrating specific dance moves and steps.

Link (Thanks, Chester!)

Previous BoingBoing posts about Dance Dance Revolution: Link.

Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) introduced a bill in Congress this week that would ban anyone under 18 from logging on to MySpace or other social networking services from school or library computers. Snip from LA Times article:

"The social networking sites have become, in a sense, a happy hunting ground for child predators," said Fitzpatrick, a father of six children, including three teen girls. His legislation, called the Deleting Online Predators Act, "is essentially a bill to protect children from the Internet."

It also would ban access to chat rooms and could block a variety of online forums. In addition, the bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to create a special website for parents and teachers warning of the potential dangers of social networking sites.

Hey, where's the bill to protect children from the follies of pandering congressmen? Link.

danah boyd adds,

The important thing is that it's not just social networking sites and MySpace. It would eliminate Neopets, Flickr, AIM, YouTube, Yahoo! Groups, Blogger, Odeo, Slashdot -- and a whole lot more. It would kill Wikipedia except that it's commercial only.

Here's more on danah's blog. (Thanks, Kathryn!)

David sez, "As part of their blitz of Canadian policymakers, Barenaked Ladies frontman Steven Page and his colleagues Andrew Cash and Brendan Canning (of Broken Social Scene) stopped in for a meeting with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen, the major newspaper in Canada's capital (where I'm an editorial writer). We put MP3s of these kinds of meetings with politicians and diplomats and so on online as a matter of course, and you can hear Page and Cash and Canning on copyright, WIPO, their reception from the responsible ministers." Link (Thanks, David!)

Slate's Sonia Smith delivers this neat history of "booing" through the ages:

The first written record comes from ancient Greece. At the annual Festival of Dionysia in Athens, playwrights competed to determine whose tragedy was the best. When the democratic reformer Cleisthenes came to power in the sixth century B.C., audience participation came to be regarded as a civic duty. The audience applauded to show its approval and shouted and whistled to show displeasure...

While people have expressed displeasure publicly since ancient times, the English word boo was first used in the early 19th century to describe the lowing sound that cattle make. Later in the 1800s, the word came to be used to describe the disapproving cry of crowds.

Link (via Monochrom)

The Scotsman.com attended this year's UnConvention, a gathering of high weirdness organized by Fortean Times magazine. UnCon06 took place in London at the end of April with the likes of Rat Scabies (of The Damned) and Christopher Dawes presenting their Holy Grail quest, and Andy Roberts discussing "UFOs and the Hippy Movement." What fun! Maybe next year. From The Scotsman.com:

Colin Munro and his girlfriend Gayle Probert make up part of the Edinburgh contingent who travelled down for the meeting. Munro lists Fortean interests with relish:

"Forteans are interest in UFO's ghosts, history, forbidden science. Stuff scientists are scared to touch in case they look like loonies." And Colin himself? "I'm interested in all these subjects and keen to keep an open mind."

His girlfriend Gayle is here because of Colin. She doesn't go to the monthly Edinburgh meetings, but she has enjoyed the weekend as it gives her a chance to meet up with other people who have had paranormal experiences.

"I've seen a ghost, my gran, and it helps coming here," says Probert. "People are interested and it's nice to talk to someone who doesn't think you're mental."

Link (Thanks, Greg Benjamin!)

Here's a video of Mark Hosler of the illegal art band Negativland giving his views on the copyfight.

"You don't get total control.” Mark Hosler is a founding member of sound collage pioneers Negativland. He talks about their role in creating the Creative Commons sampling license, and about copyright + culture in general. He says Creative Commons is the Sierra Club of intellectual property, and Negativland is more like Earth First!.

Mark is in Minneapolis for the opening of "Negativlandland" which is touring the country. Here's another video of Mark from the same visit where he talks about the ubiquity of online video and their famous connection to a Minnesota axe murderer.

Link (Thanks, Chuck!)

Morgellons disease is a rare illness (characterized by some as a delusion) that has struck South Texas -- it causes incredibly painful lesions that sprout little "wires" of fiber, and never heal. It's painful and has no cure, and some victims commit suicide to escape the pain:

Patients get lesions that never heal.

"Sometimes little black specks that come out of the lesions and sometimes little fibers," said Stephanie Bailey, Morgellons patient.

Patients say that's the worst symptom — strange fibers that pop out of your skin in different colors.

"He'd have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers, white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful," said Lisa Wilson, whose son Travis had Morgellon's disease.

While all of this is going on, it feels like bugs are crawling under your skin. So far more than 100 cases of Morgellons disease have been reported in South Texas.

Link (Thanks, Cosmo!)

Gonzo sf author Chris Nakashima-Brown has a lovely, snort-milk-out-your-nose-funny story in RevolutionSF called "Welcome Back, Qatar," about the shenanigans that media consultants and culture jammers find themselves getting up to in the battle for the media of the Middle-East:

"Right. Thank you, Mr. Vice President. It's like this. There's more to life than CNN and Al Jazeera. That narrative is way too heavy. People need an escape from the drudgery. They need a few laughs."

The Prince crossed his arms.

"The idea is to present the contemporary Arab experience through the vehicle of our best media product configurations. You'll be amazed how well people can be anesthetized from the pain of a bad day by twenty-two minutes of situational comedy."

One of the grand viziers produced a Siemens Weltmeister 9000 cell phone from beneath his robe and scrolled for a speed-dial.

"And if we can put together some sure-fire hits, there's serious revenue for the Kingdom on top of the cultural pacification. Example. The biggest thing these days is reality shows. You can do regular lives of famous people, a la The Osbournes — move a camera crew in with a colorful member of the royal family. Or regular people in extraordinary situations. Think Survivor: Guantanamo Bay."

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Dutch scientists have developed a system for stopping "racist chanting" at football matches: they feed back the audio of the chant at a slight delay, and the resulting confusion makes it impossible for mobs of football hooligans to synch up their shouting with one another, leading to chaos.

The volunteers were surrounded by loudspeakers that simulated the sound of a chanting crowd and were asked join in. However one speaker replayed the crowds chant with a short delay.

When the delay was greater than 200 milliseconds the volunteers found it too difficult to chant coherently. Increasing the delay, up to about 1 second, was even more effective. "It was very confusing," van Wijngaarden says.

Link (via We Make Money, Not Art)

Douglas Coupland makes a habit of following the Internet gossip about his proclivities and habits -- when he finds a juicy rumor about his hobbies (such as the idea that he's an avid meteor collector), he tries out whatever the rumor has him doing.

He's written a new novel, JPod, in which "Douglas Coupland" appears as a character, based on the nasty things that people write about him on the net.

There's a rumor going around the Internet that Douglas Coupland collects meteorites. Nobody knows how it began, least of all Coupland. But the story started to circulate shortly after his first novel, Generation X, became an On the Road for the '90s. Every effort he's made to set the record straight has been ignored by his many fan sites. So he recently decided to purchase a few choice specimens...

...[F]or JPod, he created a character called Douglas Coupland, based on his online doppelgänger: a one-dimensional egotist with cold eyes resembling "wells filled with drowned toddlers." This Coupland first intrudes on the action when the narrator - Ethan Jarlewski, a game designer working for a lightly fictionalized Electronic Arts - meets him on a plane to China. Coupland is ostensibly writing an article for Wired on "designer prisoner-of-conscience labor," but he's secretly developing a gadget and, not incidentally, looking to poach programmers from Electronic Arts.

Link

Deviation is a lovely short film about a video-game character's existential crisis. It was made using the CounterStrike game-engine, and was selected for incusion in the Tropfest@Tribeca Film Festival.

Macintyre, an online-game character and member of a four-man counter-terrorist squad, attempts to break out of the cycle of futile violence that has been his sole existence.

Link (Thanks, Jon!)

Did the military have a don't-ask-don't-tell policy in WWII? These wonderful towel ads don't answer that question, but they sure are fun to look at.
Link

Enjoy this news segment about a fellow named Denny Klein who has a water-powered torch and a water-powered car.

From the news segment: Klein just patented his process of converting H2O to HHO, producing a gas that combines the atomic power of hydrogen with the chemical stability of water. "it turns right back to water. In fact, you can see the h20 running off the sheet metal." Klein originally designed his water-burning engine for cutting metal. He thought his invention could replace acetylene in welding factories. Then one day as he drove to his laboratory in Clearwater, he thought of another way to burn his HHO gas. "On a 100 mile trip, we use about four ounces of water." Klein says his prototype 1994 Ford Escort can travel exclusively on water [italics mine], though he currently has it rigged to run as a water and gasoline hybrid.

It seems like every 15 years or so some guy comes along and claims to have come up with a way to turn water into clean burning fuel. (Remember the "Bodine Gasoline" pill from the Beverly Hillbillies?) The thing is, any elementary school student can turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, which burns very nicely, turning back into water when it burns. But I have yet to hear of anyone who has come up with a way to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen without using more energy than you produce. If you had an electrolysis machine that produced more energy than it consumed, you could plug it into itself and have yourself a perpetual motion machine.

I couldn't find any claims one way or another on Klien's website about the efficiency of the process, but if it isn't greater than 100%, then what's the big deal? The welding device seems kind of neat, but I've read comments that dismiss these kinds of welding torches.

Link to short-on-facts and big-on-hype Fox News story video (Here's a video presentation on Klein's company site, Hytechapps.)

According to NASA, "A couple of space colony summer studies were conducted at NASA Ames in the 1970s. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed. A number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made." Here are more than a dozen of them. Ah, the good ol' daze of Gerard O'Neill's High Frontiers and Timothy Leary's rallying call of SMI²LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension).
Link (via MAKE: Blog)

A PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Solid-State Physics has developed a method to infer the "hottest" topics in physics research by scouring the abstracts of scientific publications in a massive database. According to graduate student Michael Banks's ranking system, carbon nanotubes are the top research topic of the day, followed by nanowires, quantum dots, fullerenes, giant magnetoresistance, M-theory, and quantum computation. Banks's index builds on the Hirsch index, a technique developed last year for "quantifying the performance of individual scientists." From PhysicsWeb:

The new index might help potential PhD students to choose their future area of research, suggests Banks. It could also provide a useful yardstick to compare different fields when awarding funds and grants. However, he warns that his index should not become the only way to assess the importance of a particular subject.

Link

Volunteers cleaning up an unused canal in Kent, UK, found an unusual package of items wrapped in a black cloth: a dozen coconuts, a dozen nails, and a package of lentils. The Thames and Medway Canal Association suggest that the items might be remnants from "ritual set by gurus or witch doctors," according to the Bucks Free Press. From the newspaper:

Up until now members have only found junk such as tyres, engine parts and an abandoned car. However, on April 25, they found an odd package containing 28 pounds of black lentils...

Association chairman Brian Macknish said the area does occasionally attract vandals but not ritual-holders.

He said: "It's bizarre. There has to be a good reason for it. I asked someone who said it could be something to do with gurus.

"They tell people to do things to bring them good luck.

"Somebody said to me they scoop out the coconuts, put ashes of the dead in and throw them in the river.

Link (via Fortean Times)

Open Source Radio did a special yesterday on the NSA's indiscriminate, illegal databasing of American citizens' calls, revealed in an expose in yesterday's USA Today. They got William Gibson on for a rare interview and he was fascinating, trying to place this in context as a spasm generated by humanity's inability to master its technologies. Audio starts about 34 minutes in.

I can't explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we've all got some...

The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don't think species know what they're about. I don't think humanity knows why we do any of this stuff. A couple hundred years down the road, when people look back at what the NSA has done, the significance of it won't be about terrorism or Iraq or the Bush administration or the American Constitution, it will be about how we're driven by emerging technologies and how we struggle to keep up with them...

I'm particularly enamored of the idea of a national security "bubble..." Technologies don't emerge unless there's someone who thinks he can make a bundle by helping them emerge...

I've been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal: I've noticed on the Internet that there aren't many people really shocked by this. Our popular culture, our dirt-ball street culture teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to *all* of our telephone calls and reading *all* of our email anyway.

I keep seeing that in the lower discourse of the Internet, people saying, "Oh, they're doing it anyway." In some way our culture believes that, and it's a real problem, because evidently they haven't been doing it anyway, and now that they've started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response.

It's very hard to get some people on-board because they think it's a fait accompli...

I think it's [the X-Files, Nixon wiretapping, science fiction]. I think it's predicated in our delirious sense of what's been happening to us as a species for the past 100 years. During the Cold War it was almost comforting to believe that the CIA was reading everything...

In the very long view, this will turn out to be about how we deal with the technological situation we find ourselves in now. We've gotten somewhere we've never been before. It's very interesting. In the short term, I've taken the position that it's very, very illegal and I hope something is done about it.

Link (Thanks, Brendan!)

This weekend, the BBC's Radio 1 is holding its One Big Weekend music festival simultaneously in Dundee and in the virtual world Second Life:

Every virtual festival-goer will get a wee digital radio to take away with them, which will broadcast Radio 1 in-game, wherever you are. There's also, I hear, these Radio 1 teeshirts for your avatars. And dancing. And a chance that you could appear on-screen at the actual festival - the jumbotrons may or may not take screengrabs of the in-game festivalgoers.

Link

This step-by-step from Instructables tells you how to install an old radio-remote for an iPod/TV/whatever in the guts of a custom teddy-bear, creating an adorable plush remote. Link (via Make Blog)

Jacob sez, "Inspired by the list of most expensive Google words you linked to, I've started a series of poems based on those words. I'm hoping to prove that poetry can be profitable."

Asbestos tragedies,
mesotheliomas
happen most frequently
inside folks' pleuras.

Then they get bloodthirsty
mesothelioma
lawyers to harass their
stingy insurers.

A Clerihew on "Chicago Personal Injury Attorney", A Higgledy-Piggledy on "Mesothelioma Lawyers", A Song Parody On "Lasik New York City", A Limerick on "Asbestos Attorney" (Thanks, Jacob!)

This site has an incredible variety of tips and tricks for painting miniatures and setting them in complex, realistic dioramae. I used to love painting D&D miniatures -- a lot more than I loved playing D&D, really -- and this was my favorite part of it: setting up elaborate, miniature settings for them to frolic in:

The monument bases can be used as column bases for walls. The crosses and roof peaks can be used to decorate the tops of steeples and buttresses. The fence sections can also be used to span archways and put bars into windows.

The coffin was spray painted white, then brown paint was wiped on like a stain. The trim of the coffin was painted a dark brown. Looking back, I should have made the coffin a little more of a gray color.

The skeleton models are Warhammer(TM) miniatures from Games workshop.

Link (via Make Blog)

BrilliantDreams -- a site for lucid dreaming -- hosts a page of famous discoveries and inventions inspired by dreams, like the dream in which Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz discovered the Benzene molecule:

"...I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis."

Link (Thanks, Rick!)

March sez, "It's been 2 years since the last one, but the wait is finally over. This Saturday, May 13, will be the next Vintage Computer Festival East; this time at a new venue on the Jersey shore, precisely where Marconi did his early trans-Atlantic wireless experiments. You'll see computers from the Fifties to the Eighties, up and running in all their former glory. There will also be speakers, including _Creative Computing_ magazine founder, David Ahl." Link (Thanks, March!)

This is a thumbnail gallery of links to Soviet-era technology and gadgets, from the BK0100 Soviet come computer to chunky old mics, radiation meters, typewriters, stereo cameras and the transistor radio kit shown here.

I love this stuff -- Soviet engineers had a terrific eye for physical design. My great-uncle Bora is a curator at St Peterburg's A.S. Popov Central Museum of Communications a tremendous exhibition of Soviet and pre-Soviet gadgetry . It's absolutely packed with things like these. I nearly passed out with joy when I toured it (check out my photos from my visit to Russia last summer). Link (via Digg)

Guatam Rao has produced some whimsical oil paintings showing magnified, impressionistic elements of MacOS X's GUI (like this detail from the Safari interface). Quite lovely! Link, Link, Link (Thanks, Gautam!)

Diebold's notoriously insecure voting machines -- in use across the USA -- have been found to have an even deeper vulnerability than previously known. A new report by Harri Hursti, released on BlackBoxVoting, documents how an attacker with a few moments' of private physical access to a machine could compromise it and load it with his own software, compromising every function of the machine, including the ability to count votes.

Ed Felten and Avi Rubin have written an excellent summary and analysis of the Hursti paper and published it on Freedom to Tinker -- if you care about whether you vote gets counted in 2006, read this now.

Hursti’s findings suggest the possibililty of other attacks, not described in his report, that are even more worrisome.

In addition, compromised machines would be very difficult to detect or to repair. The normal procedure for installing software updates on the machines could not be trusted, because malicious code could cause that procedure to report success, without actually installing any updates. A technician who tried to update the machine’s software would be misled into thinking the update had been installed, when it actually had not.

On election day, malicious software could refuse to function, or it could silently miscount votes.

Link

Some MIT students have transformed their room with a homebrew automation system called MIDAS: Multifunction In-Dorm Automation System. The system is incredibly comprehensive, automating party effects, alarms, music, surveillance cams and much more -- and they've documented it in loving detail on this page. Link (via Digg)

This guy plays music by squeezing air out of his hands. As Tom of Backup Brain says: "I believe in honoring the office of the Presidency, even though I despise the current occupant of the Oval Office. But here's the kind of honors our current President has earned, and deserves." Link

FedEx, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have successfully trained a pair of dogs to detect DVDs in boxes. Why? Because, as you know, DVD piracy supports terrorists.

The dogs were trained over an eight month period to identify DVDs that may be located in boxes, envelopes or other packaging, as well as discs concealed amongst other goods which could be sold illegally in the UK. These DVDs are often smuggled by criminal networks involved in large scale piracy operations from around the world.

For their first major live test, Lucky and Flo were put to work at FedEx’s UK hub at Stansted Airport and were immediately successful in identifying packages and parcels containing DVDs for destinations in the UK.

“This is the first time dogs have been used anywhere in the world to search for counterfeit DVDs and the results were amazing, said Raymond Leinster Director General of FACT. “With the cooperation and assistance of FedEx and Customs we were able to properly test the dogs in a real life situation and prove that they can work in a busy airport environment.”

Link

A farmer in Middlesex Suffolk builds and exports gallows to African dictatorships, where they are used to execute dissidents and others who've been railroaded through corrupt judicial systems. He's been condemned by Amnesty International, but insists that "business is business," and some people deserve the death penalty. His business will be outlawed by a new EC regulation in July.

The execution equipment he says he sells ranges from single gallows, at about £12,000 each, to "Multi-hanging Execution Systems" mounted on lorry trailers, costing about £100,000.

Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: "It's appalling that a British man is apparently attempting to sell gallows to President Mugabe's government [in Zimbabwe].

Link (via Neatorama)

This gallery of "redneck" photos is a testament to human ingenuity. Link (via Neatorama)

A new scientific study reports that monkeys housed alone drink more alcohol than those living in groups. Also, monkeys overall tend to drink after "stressful periods," according to research from the National Institutes of Health Animal Center. From Discovery News:

The study, recently published in the journal Methods, also found that booze affects monkeys much the same way it affects people.

"It was not unusual to see some of the monkeys stumble and fall, sway, and vomit," (researcher Scott) Chen added. "In a few of our heavy drinkers, they would drink until they fell asleep..."

Lower-ranked monkeys and males tended to drink more overall, but certain individuals consistently drank more than others, regardless of status or housing conditions.

"Similar to humans, rhesus macaques have individual differences in taste preference, stress levels, drug tolerance and genetic background that lead to differences in alcohol intake," explained Chen.

Link

This guy explains how he changed the text on some light-up roadside signs which were still in operation long after the construction crew had finished its work.

This was the first time I had attempted a prank like this, so I expected the control box to be locked, and the programming functions password-protected. I was wrong. First of all, the control cabinet had no lock. Swinging open its door, I found a deliciously inviting handheld keypad, then took a wild guess and pushed a button labeled STOP. The display on the control box flashed ENTER PASSWORD. I was about to give up in disgust when I noticed that someone had written the password in large Sharpie lettering above the box.

Link (via Neatorama)

A 47-year-old Munich man tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. He missed and smashed through a window of the engine car where the captain sits. On Tuesday, courts ruled that the suicidal man must pay a couple thousand Euros for repairs to the train and the wages that the driver lost because he was too freaked out to work for several weeks. Link (via Fortean Times)

Adult literacy pioneer Mary Godolphin (1723-1764) (w -- but see update below) rewrote many books, including Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, and The Swiss Family Robinson, in words of one syllable.

I was born at York on the first of March in the sixth year of the reign of King Charles the First. From the time when I was quite a young child, I had felt a great wish to spend my life at sea, and as I grew, so did this taste grow more and more strong; till at last I broke loose from my school and home, and found my way on foot to Hull, where I soon got a place on board a ship.

When we had set sail but a few days, a squall of wind came on, and on the fifth night we sprang a leak. All hands were sent to the pumps, but we felt the ship groan in all her planks, and her beams quake from stem to stern; so that it was soon quite clear there was no hope for her, and that all we could do was to save our lives.

Link

Reader comment: Martha Imparato, librarian at Mabee Library, Washburn University, in Topeka, KS says:

I am writing to inform you of a small correction that needs to be made in the article about an author, Mary Godolphin, who rewrote several classic works for children with simple language. The name is actually a pseudonym for Lucy Aikin and she has different birth and death dates than the ones you posted. Something about the 3 titles listed didn't click with me and after investigating, sure enough, one of the titles was published after Mary was supposedly dead. There was a real Mary Godolphin who was a British noble whose dates were those on your post, but she was not an author.

[Here] is a link to Project Gutenburg which will clear things up.

Lucy's dates are 1781-1864.

Swiss Family Robinson was published 1818 so the Mary on your post could not have reworked it since she died in 1764.

A librarian in Kansas sent this link to our state listserv knowing some of us would be interested, so that's how I happened across the story and thus began my investigation.

I don't usually look for things like this, but I hope you will look into this in the spirit of accuracy.

Here are a bunch of old cartoons you can watch on Google Video. "There are 27 Betty Boop cartoons, 11 Felix the Cat cartoons, and 3 Krazy Kat cartoons." Link

Last week I went to the Web 2.0 Expo at the Disney Studios and met, Di-Ann, the co-creator of Platial, a neat web site that lets you create maps grouped by subject. My favorite map is the Lost map, which has locations pertaining to the TV show. When you click on a place, you can see screen grabs for the show, notes, video clips, etc. Very cool! Link

On Saturday, June 3 at 8:30 pm, investigative satirist Paul Krassner and singing satirist Roy Zimmerman will perform at Steinway Hall.

About Krassner... Over the years, Paul Krassner has built up a cult following that has steadily been edging into mainstream awareness. The New York Times calls him "... an expert at ferreting out hypocrisy and absurdism from the more solemn crannies of American culture." The Los Angeles Times says Krassner "...has the uncanny ability to alter your perceptions permanently." And the San Francisco Examiner declared that "Krassner is absolutely compelling. He has lived on the edge so long he gets his mail delivered there."

About Zimmerman... What's funny about war, poverty, ignorance, bigotry, neo-conservatism, homophobia, greed, lust and fear? Ask Roy Zimmerman. He's been writing satirical songs for 20 years. Zimmerman founded and wrote all the material for the comedy folk quartet The Foremen (Warner/Reprise artists) who toured extensively, opening for Bill Maher, Dennis Miller, and even for President Bill Clinton. The Los Angeles Times noted Roy's " lacerating wit and keen awareness of society's foibles...a latter-day Tom Lehrer." Roy's fans include Joni Mitchell and Tom Lehrer!

Link

Our friends at the Imaginary Foundation are selling hand-screened art prints in a limited edition of 100 per design. Each poster is 22"(w) x 28"(h), printed on heavy stock, numbered, and embossed by the Imaginary Foundation Director himself. They're $30 each or $75 for all three. Previous posts about Imaginary Foundation here and here. Coming soon: Limited edition double label Boing Boing / Imaginary Foundation t-shirts!
Link

A new bill called DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act) will require schools and libraries that receive federal funding to block access to social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook, and is written so broadly that it plausibly could encompass blogs, mailing lists, and sites like Flickr.

According to the proposed legislation, the bill

"prohibits access by minors without parental authorization to a commercial social networking website or chat room through which minors may easily access or be presented with obscene or in- decent material; may easily be subject to unlawful sexual advances, unlawful requests for sexual favors, or repeated offensive comments of a sexual nature from adults may easily access other material that is harmful to minors."

If you're wondering what would qualify as an "online social network," the bill defines it as "a commercially operated Internet website that allows users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users and offers a mechanism for communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, email, or instant messenger." That definition is rather broad, of course, though apparently it would not apply to noncommercial websites. My guess is that commercial blogging tools and email list services could be subject to this legislation as well - though I do not know if it would block access to these services writ large or on a blog-by-blog/list-by-list basis.

Link (Thanks, Andy!)

Chris sez, "A lawmaker in New Jersey is pushing a bill that would make it a crime to photograph or videotape power plants, sewage facilities, etc."

The state Senate Law and Public Safety Committee is expected to discuss a bill today which would make it a crime -- punishable by up to 18 months in jail -- to photograph, videotape or otherwise record for an extended period of time a power generation, waste treatment, public sewage, water treatment, public water, nuclear or flammable liquid storage facility, as well as any airport in the state.

At the very least, it will allow law enforcement officials across the state to detain the individual or confiscate any recorded materials to further their investigation, according to state Sen. Fred Madden, D-4 of Turnersville, who is the bill's sponsor.

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Volkswagen has a fully automated garage made of 20-storey-tall towers in Wolfsburg, Germany. These photos make it appear to be some kind of egg-chamber for the Queen VW to stash her larvae in before they hatch into marauding auo-duellists. Which is to say that it's really quite lovely. When cars are ordered, they are robotically fetched down for delivery: "In a fully automated procedure, your new car is brought down to you from one of the 20-story Car Towers. Large signboards in the Customer Center show you when your turn has come. Then, you're handed the keys, your picture is taken, the glass doors open and your brand-new car appears. You're all set to go." Link (via Gizmodo)

Update: Rusty sez, "This reminds me a lot of a restaurant called Aureole in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas that has a four-story wall of wine. Once you order, an acrobat ('wine angel') scales the giant wall to get your bottle. It's inspired by a scene in Mission Impossible."

The uproariously funny net-video serial "Ask a Ninja" tackles net neutrality in this week's segment. Net neutrality is the idea that the net works best when ISPs deliver every Internet site's traffic without discrimination, rather than, say, charging Yahoo to deliver its search results faster and more reliably than Google's. At stake is whether new services can be developed and thrive if the big, evil, stupid phone companies get to stick toll-booths on the network and give preference to the highest bidders. The Ninja's explanation is a lot weirder -- as Brent puts it, "Apparently the internet service providers want to put up a wall to stop us from watching the girl from Hot Dog On A Stick make lemonade and instead wants us to watch Robin Williams' cousin make bacon juice. " Link (Thanks, Brent the Closet Geek!)

See also: Network neutrality - why it matters, and how do we fix it?, Principles for Network Neutrality from USC Annenberg

Jamedo, a social hosting service for Creative Commons licensed music, has crossed the 1,000-album threshold, and now publishes torrents for 1063 discs that are distributed with the blessings of their creators. Link (Thanks, Laurent!)

At left, one guy who couldn't get in yesterday (shot by John Parres.).

I'll be at the Electronic Entertainment Expo today, shooting a TV project. If you're around and you see a dazed blonde walking around with a cameraman and a sound guy -- oh wait, dazed blondes with cameramen and sound guys are a dime a dozen at E3. Anyway, if you spot us, come say hi! Even if we're shooting. I don't care. Come tell us what you saw at the expo that rocked (coughGuitarHerocough) or sucked (did I mention Paris Hilton's debuting a new mobile game in which she loses her jewelry?).

Bill sez, "I run grocerylists.org, a collection of found grocery lists, and I'm currently working on a book based on the site. I'm looking for people to send me even more shopping lists, especially odd/funny ones or ones from specific states in the U.S. (and around the world)." I'm partial to any list containing "turkey necks" and "family-size box of Velveeta" -- now that's a meal! Link (Thanks, Bill!)