By Cory Doctorow at 9:14 pm Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
My story "I, Row-Boat" was just published on Rudy Rucker's awesome new online sf magazine, Flurb. "I, Row-Boat" is a riff on my Hugo-nominated story
I, Robot, and it concerns the theological wars between an Asimov-cultist AI boat and an uplifted coral-reef.
The reef made a tremendous grinding noise. "Yaah!" it said. "Get lost. Sovereign territory!"
"All those fish," the woman said. Robbie had to stop himself from thinking of her as Janet. She was whomever was riding her now.
"Parrotfish," Robbie said. "They eat coral. I don't think they taste very good."
The woman hugged herself. "Are you sentient?" she asked.
"Yes," Robbie said. "And at your service, Asimov be blessed." His cameras spotted her eyes rolling, and that stung. He tried to keep his thoughts pious, though. The point of Asimovism wasn't to inspire gratitude in humans, it was to give purpose to the long, long life.
Link
Podcast: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
By Cory Doctorow at 9:12 pm Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Video blog The Eye interviewed James Patrick Kelly, an outstanding science fiction writer whose podcasted novella "Burn" was a Hugo nominee this year. Jim Kelly is one of the best writers working the field today, and is a tireless mentor to many writers (me included). He has lately become an advocate of Creative Commons as well, and in this video, he talks frankly and succinctly about why a popular and accomplished writer would adopt Creative Commons licensing, and what it takes to make it as a writer.
Part 1 Link,
Part 2 Link
(
Thanks, John!)
By Xeni Jardin at 9:08 pm Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Kembrew says,
The Yes Men convinced the organizers of a major conference attended by contractors and government officials in charge of rebuilding N.O. that HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson would attend the conference. Once at the conference, Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum -- posing as Rene Oswin, a fake HUD official -- delivered a speech that asserted that HUD was wrong and that it would not actually demolish perfectly sound low income housing, as it was planning to do. The Yes Men were working with local N.O. activists who have built a tent city around the site that will be destroyed to make way for a gentrified neighborhood.
Link (
thanks also, Clayton James Cubitt)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:09 pm Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Brad Pasanek (disclosure, one of my colleagues at the Annenberg Center for Communication) is working on a thesis project about metaphors for the human mind in 18th century literature; a kind of view of the steampunk vision of the brain in an era when mechanism was all.
He's put up a database with over 7,800 literary metaphors for the mind in 18th century English lit, with more to come:
"Those raging storms of wrath That so bedym the eyes of thine intent"
"Only a few succeed in arriving at these reasons with the eye of the mind, and when one does arrive, insofar as is possible, the very one who arrives does not abide in them, but as it were the eye (of the mind) itself is beaten back and repelled."
"The World a Scene of murder'd Souls appears, / Interr'd in living Sepulchres, / And moved from Place to Place in walking Tombs."
Link
(
Thanks, Brad!)
By Xeni Jardin at 6:00 pm Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
McSweeney's has released a new book called Arboretum by David Byrne, described as a "collection of drawings/trees/maps." From the McSweeney's preview:
It's printed in a black-and-silver duotone for an uncanny graphite finish that preserves all the erasures and scribbles of the originals, its hard cover is wrapped in unassuming lunch-bag brown paper, and there's a 4-foot-long foldout explanatory guide.
Byrne
explains the drawings:
Well, I guess they're a lot of things. Faux science, automatic writing, self-analysis, satire, and maybe even a serious attempt at finding connections where none were thought to exist.
They began a few years ago as instructions to myself in a little notebook–"draw an evolutionary tree on pleasure," or "draw a Venn diagram about relationships," for example. Mental maps of imaginary territory; typologies of wine descriptions, East Village clubs and bars, and medieval war machines. Maybe it was a sort of self-therapy that worked by allowing the hand to "say" what the voice could not.
Irrational logic–I've heard it called that. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense.
But how can nonsense ever emerge as sense? No matter how convoluted or folded, it will still always be nonsense, won't it?
Here's an Amazon order link, and
here you'll find more info and preview images at davidbyrne.com.
Danielle Spencer collaborated with Byrne on the book's design.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:56 pm Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Yesterday I
posted some photos of an old carnival game that belongs to a woman named Marsee who works at O'Reilly. She inherited it from her grandfather, who was a carny and
owned the recieved the game as a gift, but never used it. (He was an honest carny, like most are.)
About 200 people emailed me with their ideas on how this game was rigged. Today, one of Make's interns, Ty Nowotny, took the game apart and revealed its secret: a cylinder with damping material.
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)
When the carny wants to demonstrate how easy it is to throw a ball into the basket and have it drop through the hole, he reaches into the catching apron and pushes the green fabric tacked to the backboard, which makes the cylinder flush against the backboard. Then he tosses the ball into the basket. The cylinder absorbs the ball's energy, so the ball does not bounce out of the basket, but instead drops through the hole.
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)
The very act of throwing the ball against the backboard causes the damping cylinder drop away. Now, when it's the rube's turn, the ball bounces right out of the basket. Here's a photo of the game (the real name is a "Scissors Box") with the back panel removed, revealing the mechanism.
Here are two videos of the thing in action. The first one shows balls bouncing out of it like crazy; the second one shows how the mechanism operates. Video 1 | Video 2
Reader comment:
Mark,
Richard says:
Re: "Now, when it's the rube's turn, the ball bounces right out of the basket."
A technology later perfected by Diebold.
By Xeni Jardin at 4:53 pm Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
BB reader Greg says,
Another mash-up album from djbc (who produced the excellent Philip Glass/Hip-Hop "Glassbreaks" album), this time featuring vocals from the Wu-Tang Clan over dixieland jazz tunes. It's a thing to hear. Online for free, and probably only until the cease-and-desist letter comes. Link, and a torrent for the file can be found here as well.
OMG the whole thing is amazing. I believe my favorite so far is "
When The Meth Comes Marching In," with the unlikely pairing of Louis Armstrong and Method Man.
By Xeni Jardin at 4:39 pm Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Evan Williams (
Odeo CEO and
Pyra/
Blogger co-founder) has an interesting post up about the fading significance of pageview and hit counts in determining the reach and influence of websites.
Ajax,
RSS and
widgets have something to do with it, argues Ev -- but so does crappy design that effectively forces the user to clickclickclick many times to accomplish a task that leaner design would permit in just a single click. Crappy design like you'll find on MySpace. Snip:
Pageview counts are as suseptible as hit counts to site design decisions that have nothing to do with actual usage. As Mike Davidson brilliantly analyzed in April, part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible. As Mike writes: "Here's a sobering thought: If the operators of MySpace cleaned up the site and followed modern interface and web application principles tomorrow, here's what the graph would look like:
Read Ev's entire post here.
Sean Bonner did, and responds with a post observing that "MySpace Can Eat a Bag of Dick." And indeed they can, but it'll take them 20 times more clicks to accomplish the task.
By David Pescovitz at 11:12 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Legendary Moog maestro
Jean Jacques Perrey will perform live in San Francisco tomorrow evening, August 29, at 8pm. The intimate concert is presented by RE/Search Publications who have done wonders to turn on multiple generations of
Incredibly Strange Music fans to the tripped-out tunes of Perrey, a true electronica pioneer. From RE/Search:
Jean Jacques PERREY, resident of France, will play a live concert in San Francisco of "Happy Retro Moog Pop"! In the 60s, the 77-year-old composer produced some of the most amazingly inventive/humorous music ever collaged together with a razor blade and tape, on albums like The In Sound from Way Out! J-J Perrey's recent CD, Circus of Life, is one of the best recordings ever to grace our stereo system (every track is great).
Jean Jacques will play the Ondoline, accompanied by Dana Countryman. (Their new CD collaboration, The Happy ElectroPop Music Machine [Oglio Records], is scheduled for release on Sept 25, 2006.) This personal concert will be legendary and you will be glad you were there in an intimate setting--rabid fans of the music of Perrey and Kingsley should not miss this event!
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 10:15 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
(Link to full-size pic). Burners have their glow-in-the-dark hemp thongs in a bunch over an error in this San Francisco Chronicle article. The subject is a "pollution exchange" at Burning Man modeled after real-world projects like the Chicago Climate Exchange -- but here's the goof in "Burning Man Goes Green":
Encouraged by the resurgence of the green movement, the scientists are taking a hard look at all those sacred flaming temples, gas-powered scooters shaped like cupcakes, and hundreds of rumbling RVs that converge for a week on the dry Black Rock Desert lakebed.
With an idea that would make Al Gore smile, the scientists have created Cooling Man, an online calculator that determines how many tons of greenhouse gases each of the 37,000 "burners" will produce with their art projects and community camps.
Thing is, those infamously cute cupcake art-cars (shown above) aren't powered by gas -- they're electric. And their makers are not amused with the Chronicle's mistake. Using glittery, festooned pens, and wiping playa dust from their eyes, members of the "
Cupcake Corners" camp at Burning Man reply:
My dear editor,
I feel my muffin has been defiled. In Meridith May's August 26 article entitled "Burning Man Goes Green," she made a particularly distressing error (well, distressing to, at the very least, me and my fellow cupcake builders). Gas powered food? Ick. The motorized cupcakes and muffins are all electric, every delicious one of them, charged by solar panels back at camp. No gas. No varoom. None among us has a gas powered Burning Man art vehicle. (And as a matter of fact, my sweetie and co-inventor of the mobile muffins, converted his Honda Civic Del Sol into a fully electric vehicle years ago. He now works at Tesla Motors, the new company in San Carlos manufacturing a long range electric sports car.) Please remember to do your research even when writing about wacky art projects. Though I hope no one digs deep enough to discover that the furry toppings for the cupcakes were harvested from baby seals and stray kittens.
Greenly yours,
Lisa Pongrace
(Otherwise, I very much appreciated the article)
More muffin outrage after the jump...
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 10:01 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Yesterday, after the LA World Science Fiction Convention had wound down, I happened upon the Scientology after-party, held at the far end of the second-floor meeting room. This room had been converted to an anti-psychiatry museum by a Scientology-founded organization called
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights.
A Scientology rep asked me if I wanted anything and I told her I was there to see what the Church was up to. She insisted that The Citizens Commission on Human Rights wasn't a Scientology organization, but on further questioning she admitted that the organization had been founded by the Church and that the majority of its funding came from donations from Church members.
The exhibit was a nightmarish round of blaring video-screens playing the kind of ominous music that you hear on America's Most Wanted during the atrocity re-enactment, each screen competing with the others to fill the room with a cacophonous, stomach-churning gumbo of scary sound-effects. The visuals showed photos of Hitler (a favorite graphic emblem of the Church -- they used it to smear Time magazine after a critical piece appeared there) and atrocity photos. The Church's connection to the "Council" wasn't mentioned anywhere.
At the literature stand, there were a number of brochures on offer, including the one linked below, which encouraged readers to found astroturf blogs that copy-and-pasted information from the Council's own site in order to "get the word out." Astroturf is as astroturf does, I guess.
Link to astroturf blog brochure,
Link to video of exhibit,
Link to my photos of the exhibit,
Link to Wikipedia on CCHR
By Xeni Jardin at 9:57 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
BoingBoing reader Seth says,
Jared Benedict is trying to get all the USGS public domain maps into the actual public domain so they are freely available for everyone to freely use. He's bought all the maps in digital form. Once he's recouped his costs they'll all be available via the Internet Archive.
Link to project info.
Update: wrexen sez, "The map data has been freed and is making its slow journey to the safe harbors of the Internet Archive!"
By Mark Frauenfelder at 9:44 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Derek van Westrum says
I've had this tattoo since 1990, so you can imagine my surprise/delight
on seeing the giant business card Menger Sponge (which I've learned I've
always referred to incorrectly as a "Sierpinski Gasket") on boingboing.
The only thing I'd add to the description is the fact that when taken to
the limit, the resulting sponge has infinite surface area (it would take
an infinite amount of paint to cover it), but zero volume (it can't hold
any paint). (Click on thumbnail for enlargement)
Reader comment:
Mark Allen of Machine Project says: "I put a couple images of it installed up on flickr if you're curious."
By Xeni Jardin at 9:36 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Idlewild -- aka "the
Outkast movie" -- opened this weekend, and I saw it here in LA at the super-awesome
Cinerama Dome. If you come expecting a long-form music video with cameos by great actors and amazing dance numbers, you'll dig it. It was gorgeous, visually rich, with a score to die for. Full of heart. But if you expect a script that holds together, with lead characters you grow into really caring about, you may be disappointed. It suffers from too much of too much, or as my movie companion said: it tries to cram 10 pounds worth of stuff in a 5-pound bag. Still, I'd go see it again just to catch everything I missed while my head was reeling from the first round.
Jossip's Corynne Steindler says there's a bit of brouhaha over the NYT review:
The New York Times reviewed new movie Idlewild, and described [female lead] actress Paula Patton as "a beautiful singer" and "a lovely woman with a serviceable voice." Funny, since everyone who actually interviewed Ms. Patton on the red carpet was told that the voiceover was dubbed. Patton repeatedly told reporters ""I just wasn’t gifted with that talent for singing." Nice job, NYT!
Link
By David Pescovitz at 9:24 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Common methods for washing dishes and utensils in the wilderness without running water may not be as effective at removing
E. coli as campers think. Microbiologist Joanna Hargreaves of the North Bristol NHS Trust evaluated a variety of wash/rinse/disinfect techniques and reported her results in the scientific journal
Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. She outlines an alternative system that uses an equivalent amount of water and number of rinses. From Science News:
To clean eating implements adequately, Hargreaves proposes a rigorous approach to washing in which backpackers would first fill each of three large bowls or buckets with about 5 liters (1 1/3 gallons) of clean water. Next, add 5 milliliters (1 teaspoon) of detergent to the first container and 10 ml (2 tsp) of 4-percent chlorine bleach (a common commercial preparation) to the second.
To wash dishes and utensils, remove most food residues in the first bowl and, in the second, scrub the items until they are visibly clean. A quick rinse in the third bowl removes the odor of the cleaning chemicals...
By comparison, the methods that are currently most popular among expedition companies removed more than 99 percent of bacteria during the first step. But the quick rinses after that step failed to consistently remove remaining bacteria.
That's why Hargreaves and other wilderness-medicine experts recommend that campers adopt the new system.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 9:10 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
The
Ottawa Citizen has a report with more details on the security overreaction that followed a hapless iPod's dunking into an airplane loo.
Link, and
here's the previous BoingBoing post.
By David Pescovitz at 9:05 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
The Food and Drug Administration approved certain viruses as food additives, to be sprayed on cold cuts before packaging. The bacteriophages are added to defend the meats from
Listeria monocytogenes, a bug that when ingested can cause a nasty bacterial infection in humans. The phages infect the bacteria, binding to the host and ultimately killing it. From the Los Angeles Times:
The FDA spent four years evaluating the safety and effectiveness of the "cocktail" of several phage at the request of Intralytix Inc., a Baltimore, Md., biotechnology company. In presenting its petition, Intralytix referred the government to more than 20 studies documenting the power of phage to fight infection, many of them performed in Russian and Eastern Bloc countries where phage therapies have long been popular in treating certain infections.
Intralytix also conducted studies of its own, trying out its phage mixture (consisting of six different phage that attack the food-poisoning bacterium Listeria monocytogenes) on more than 10 different kinds of deli meats, including sliced turkey, roast beef, bologna, chicken and even raw hot dogs, and found that they effectively killed all strains of listeria.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 9:00 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Michael sez, "On August 1st, Boing Boing
featured an article about the efforts of my summer intern, Emily Hesaltine, to improve on the Department of Homeland Security's website Ready.gov. Her website, launched by the Federation of American Scientists, is called reallyready.org.
Now the Department of Homelnad Security is
coming after us because they believe we have infringed on their 'intellectual property.'
Specifically, they take issue with our use of a green check mark over the word Ready. I have posted their letter to us and our response. For the record, it cost them more money in lawyer time to write the letter then it did for us to create the entire website."
Federal agencies aren't allowed to assert a copyright in their works, but they are allowed to use trademark law. But silencing political criticism isn't what trademark law is for -- nor is it for censoring genuinely useful information about disaster-preparedness.
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
By David Pescovitz at 8:52 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
María Esther de Capovilla, the world's oldest person, died yesterday at age 116. The world's oldest man, Emillano Mercado Del Toro, who
celebrated his 115th birthday last week, does not take Capovilla's title though. That honor goes to Elizabeth Bolden of Memphis, Tennessee, who was born a few months before Del Toro.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 7:29 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
This clever little £3.50 wind-up robot/pencil-sharpener winds when you sharpen your pencil. Once your pencil's nice and pointy, your robot can take a celebratory lap around your desk.
Link
(
via Gizmodo)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:27 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Phil sez, "The BPI are a music industry body in the UK. They are now calling for 'Intellectual Property' issues to be 'higher on the police's agenda.' Since police resources are finite, I think we should hold them to account on this one, by insisting that they expand on that by telling us *exactly* what offences should be positioned *lower* on the police's agenda to make resources available."
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 7:26 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
This account of Filipino student protesters using SMSes to organize giant flash-mob political demonstrations reads like adventure fiction for young radicals -- these kids use their pocket-communicators to rally, retreat, change course, and swarm the cops when they try to bust one of their number.
Caught up in the melee, ducking from the swinging batons,
Palatino heard his phone ping loudly.
"GET OUT OF THERE. You are in a dangerous place," warned the
text, from a friend who could see that Palatino was about to
be pinned between the crowd and a wall.
An officer grabbed Palatino.
"ID! ID! Now!" the red-faced officer demanded.
A small group of officers closed in around Palatino, whose
eyes were suddenly wide with terror.
Students who saw it quickly typed a text alert to others,
using Palatino's nickname: "Mong is being arrested."
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 7:17 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Jonathan Zittrain and Laura Frieder have studied over 75,000 pump-and-dump stock-scam emails and determined that they actually produce a pretty good return -- for the spammer.
People who respond to the "pump and dump" scam can lose 8% of their investment in two days.
Conversely, the spammers who buy low-priced stock before sending the e-mails, typically see a return of between 4.9% and 6% when they sell.
I figured that this was true when the number of stock-scam emails in my in-box doubled and redoubled and re-re-doubled. There are so many spammers running this scam right now that I'm filtering thousands of these every day, and a couple dozen make it through the filter on top of that.
Link
(
via Kottke)
Update: David sez, "A fellow on the CISSP mailing list set up a simulation of a portfolio whose strategy was simply, sell short every stock he got a spam about. He 'made' $8K in two weeks."
Update 2: Joshua sez, "I run the spam stock tracker site you listed on boing boing last October. Just got the following email today. Basically it is offering to affect stock price for a fee or a cut of the action. It is the first time I have seen such an offer, and I got it 3 times in just a couple hours. There is a lot of speculation regarding who spams and why, but one thing certainly affecting the volume of spam is the ease at which anyone can trigger the flood of spam, and seemingly do it risk free based on the offer in the email."
By Cory Doctorow at 7:14 am Monday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
I bought a some of these ZipLinq power-cables a couple weeks ago -- they've got a two-prong US plug on one end, and a figure-eight plug that fits the transformers for my PowerBooks, ThinkPad, and many other devices on the other. A quick tug makes them reel back into a compact, tangle-free package.
I love retractable cables, they're the next-best thing to wireless. Power-brick-and-wire assemblies are always problematic, as they require coiling up two wires, making packing up a laptop into a protracted pain. This thing is such a delight to use that I find myself taking it out of my bag just to show it to other laptop junkies.
At this point, I'm ready to replace every power-cable in my house with one of these.
Link
