Neuros, makers of the coolest video-recording toys in the world, have just released their OSD, a fully open set-top box. Neuros already made history with its Neuros Recorder 2, a device the size of a deck of cards that turned any TV show or DVD into something you could watch on your PC, PSP or iPod. Now with the OSD, they've gone one better, with a device that has a fully open firmware that anyone can hack and improve. What's more, they're offering cash bounties to hackers who add various features to the device, including $1000 for a YouTube or Google video Browser, $600 for a Flickr Photo Browser, $500 for a WiFi PSP or PDA remote, $700 for a TiVo-like recording function for radio/satellite radio, and $500 for getting VoIP running on the device.

The product's sell-sheet is a wiki and the first batch are only available to Linux hackers who will test, tweak and extend them.

Standard Power Adapter
Imagine you'd like a cigarette adapter for the OSD, or a second wall adapter. Instead of using an expensive proprietary part, the OSD uses a standard power adapter that you can buy at your local electronics store. It's the same Power Adapter the Sony PSP and the Dell Axim X5 use.

Remote Control
The OSD remote control uses a set of standard codes that emulates a Sony VCR. This means that it's easy to replace with a Universal remote of your choosing. If you lose the remote or want to consolidate your remotes, it's easy.

Programmability of the Included Remote
The included remote can control the TV volume and power which means that you can use it to replace the remote that came with your TV. You can flush your TV remote down the toilet (but we recommend you first make sure your toilet is capable of processing such it - consult the user's manual).

Link (Thanks, Mr.Cris!)

From Craigslist SF Bay Area:

I'll Fix Your Computer if You Let Me Feel Your Boobs - 26 (haight ashbury)

Cute/nice IT guy/PC specialist will fix your computer in exchange for a gentle feel of your boobs. I'm a totally non-creepy (really) professional who will repair your hard drive, back up files, install software and peripherals, whatever, for an innocent grope. I have a lot of tech knowledge in my life and regrettably no boobs. Serious inquiries only and thanks.

Link (this posting has been removed by Craigslist community, but reader Rauz Liebling points to a mirror of the page here, just for posterity) (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

UPDATE: BB reader Andrew Ferguson kindly reminded me of a similar story from Craigslist last year that Mark posted. Link

A few people have asked me about the "Biker Billy Jalapeno" peppers I mentioned in my Cult of Capsaicin story. They're twice as large and twice as hot as ordinary jalapenos. You can buy the seeds from Burpee. Here's the info.

We discovered Bill Hufnagle's cooking show several years ago while flipping through the cable channels. Bill is a freewheeling food lover, pepper gardener, vegetarian and Harley rider, totally committed to getting people to play more with their food, cook healthier and ride safe. Hot peppers, Bill says, make for more fun and more flavors than any other vegetable. So take your taste buds on a culinary road trip with our hot Biker Billy pepper seed.

This jalapeno is really packed with rich flavor. Billy likes 'em best when they are flaming red and at their sweetest. Fruits are very large, measuring 2" at the shoulder and 3-1/2" long. Upright plants up to 24" tall. Burpee Exclusive. Grows best in full sun. Harvest 66 days after transplanting into the garden.

Link

Reader comment:

Ethan says:

Burpee has a Flickr page of our Harley "pepper bike" which we custom created for Biker Billy. Flames shoot out of the tail pipes! The bike has a gold leaf hand-drawn logo inspired by an old 1892 Burpee catalog cover, and the paint changes color like a ripening pepper.

A huge art exhibit celebrating thirty years of Fantagraphics Books, publishers of the greatest comix in the world, opens next Thursday, 9/28, in NYC. The Fantagraphics 1976-2006 retrospective will be on display at the Society of Illustrators until October 21. (Seen here: Daniel Clowes' cover to the forthcoming Fantagraphics oral history book Comics As Art: We Told You So, now available for preorder on Amazon.)


From the show announcement:

This massive art exhibition features over 100 original pieces by dozens of authors published by Fantagraphics over the last 30 years, including Daniel Clowes, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Chris Ware, Peter Bagge, Jim Woodring, Joe Sacco, Carol Tyler, Ivan Brunetti, Tony Millionaire, Roberta Gregory, Bill Griffith, Richard Sala, Bob Fingerman, Steve Brodner, David B., Kim Deitch, Al Columbia, Drew Friedman, Kaz, Frank Frazetta (!) and many others. It will be an amazing show, with many iconic pieces from Fantagraphics' history.

Link to an invitation to the opening reception, Link to Society of Illustrators exhibit page

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

On the Boing Boing Boing podcast, I mentioned that I had been passed a phony $1 bill, but now I'm not so sure. Here's why.

Last Sunday, I bought my kids some ice cream ($7 plus tax for two small cups!) and gave the girl at the counter a $10. She handed me two $1 bills and some coins. One of bills was normal looking. The other one was as white as a sheet of photocopy paper, and just as thin. It was very wrinkled and the edges were frayed. It felt extremely flimsy.

When we sat down, I showed the bill to my 9-year-old daughter and I told her that I thought it was counterfeit. She wanted me to go back and exchange it for a real dollar, but I told her that a counterfeit $1 bill is worth more than a dollar to me.

At home, I looked at the bill under a microscope. The printing looked fuzzy, but the paper contained telltale red and blue fibers, the kind found in real currency. I don't think a counterfeiter specializing in $1 bills would use this kind of paper. Also, when I held a magnet close to the bill, it clung to the magnet (as explained here).

My conclusion: the money is real. I think it went through the laundry, though.

Reader comment:

Adam says:

The story of your possibly counterfeit $1 bill (and your recent mention that you lived in Japan) reminded me of the time I found a 10,000 yen note in the gutter on my way to work on a rainy morning. I'm almost certain that the plenty of salary men and office ladies saw it but because it was so dirty they were not interested in it. Not me. When I got to my office I asked what I should do with it. The majority felt I should take it to the police station and that it would be given to me if nobody claimed it.

To my surprise my supervisor said I should just keep it. She had once found some money on a train and turned it in. Six months later she came home from a two week vacation to discover that during that time a postcard with directions to pick up the money had arrived. Unfortunately the date by which she had to pick up the money had already lapsed.

With the decision to keep it made, I took the note home where I laundered and ironed it. Needless to say the color was washed out. Additionally, the bill was no longer square and had two permanent creases - presumably the result of having been run over by cars a number of times. The most anonymous way I could think to spend the note was to buy the cheapest one way ticket at the train station. At first the ticket agent tried to ask a lot of questions but I said I didn't speak Japanese and could he please speak English. I imagine that ultimately he decided that whatever trouble might arise from this note was probably less trouble than trying to deal with a gaijin.

As for counterfeit money, after I returned from Japan (1993) I ended up working on a prototype electronic notebook for some microscopists. They had a contract to try to determine the origin of some extremely good counterfeit $100 bills. If, on a scale of 1 - 10, a bill only has to be a 5 to be easily passed these bills were a 9. As I recall, there were two theories. One was that some other country planned to flood the market with these super counterfeits. The other was that it was the work of a hobbiest hence the extreme attention to detail. In either case, the goal of the microscopists was to look for particulate matter either in the paper or trapped between the paper and the ink with the hope that the particulate matter would reveal where in the world the bills were made. I believe it was these bills that prompted many of the subsequent changes in bill design. My favorite proposed protection scheme involved the use of genetically modified cotton. While it satisfied the requirement that it would be hard to duplicate, the time required to identify a counterfeit meant that you only knew long after it was passed.

Japanese papercraft artist Shin Tanaka makes awesome figurines.

POLICY

Paper toy is:

REPLICABLE, but SHIN makes only one model per a design.

DISTRIBUTABLE, but SHIN's toy is only for the designer and SHIN.

MASS-PRODUCABLE, but all SHIN's toys are made by his hand.

Link

Neatorama has an excerpt of "10 scientific frauds that rocked the world," from a book called Condensed Knowledge, by Mental Floss.

The Quadro Corporation of Harleyville, South Carolina, had an impressive client list: public schools, police agencies, the U.S. Customs office, and Inspector General’s offices to name a few. The product they sold, the top of the line Quadro QRS 250G (also known as the Quadro Tracker, available for $1,000), boasted the ability to find drugs, weapons, or virtually anything worth looking for. The small plastic box supposedly contained frequency chips of an advanced sort not known to regular science. Driven by static electricity, the Quadro would resonate at exactly the same frequency as the searched-for item. When the FBI opened the box, however, they found nothing inside. Quadro threatened to sue Sandia Laboratories when Sandia suggested that the device was fraudulent, but eventually Quadro became the bigger company, and just closed shop.

Link

Reader comment:

David says:

#4 - the peppered moth experiment is not a hoax. The idea that it is has been widely promoted only by creationists. The moths were glued to trees for the sake of photographs, not during the actual experiment/observation, the experiment took into account different places where moths rest, and birds will pretty much eat whatever they can get their beaks on. Link

That rather calls the validity of the list into question...

Coop broke in his new camera by taking some photos of a Stendhal Syndrome-inducing, hand-painted Michelin man (and a companion Michelin mutt).

One of the things that makes me truly happy to be a Angeleno is the handpainted signage of this crazy city. Everywhere you go, there are crudely-rendered depictions of bleach bottles, Mickey Mouse, and polar bears drinking Coke. I have often thought about trying to document some of my favorites, and produce a book/art object, Ed Ruscha-style.

I drive by this tire place almost every day on my way to my studio. Of all the signage in the city, this masterpiece is the one that I always come back to, the one that just blows my mind.

Link

Reader comment:

Maury says:

Also a lover of handpained signage, I enjoyed the post of the Michelin man sign.

Recently in San Blas Mexico, I took a few and here's a link to a small flickr set

Attached is my fave: Tuberculosis.

Over at Hoopty Rides. Mister Jalopy has written an excellent essay on the creation of his "Mister Jalopy's Pocket Guide to Living and Dying with Modest Automobiles"

After being invited to Foo Camp, I decided I wanted to bring something cool to show off and I thought it would be a clever way to get out of hosting a session. Plus, I have a backlog of projects that reach from here to the top of Jack's Beanstalk. Sometimes I think that I should create a list of all the projects, but that invariably leads to an upset stomach and an immediate desire to take a nap.

A favorite idea was to sell books in a standard bulk gumball and sticker machine. Small books. Very small books. A specific volume that would have just enough information to get you started on a new path in life. I have a shelf at home that is dedicated to inspirational books that open a foreign world and change you in a fundamental way. I am not talking about going to Morocco. I am talking about "Getting Started Right with Turkeys." Or "Shop Work on the Farm", "5 Acres and Independence", "Aircraft Sheet Metal Construction", "Locksmithing", "Your Self-Service Store" and "Backyard Poultry Farming". These books give a peek into what might be. One day, you are Joe Average. A nobody. End of the week comes and you are tending baby chicks and picking locks. A transformation has taken place. You are a giant.

Link

Gareth Branwyn says:

Okay, the title lies. It's not really a robot, it's a little one-motor walking machine (no sensors, no feedback), but the project does teach you about basic breadboarding, soldering, use of the BEAM Bicore control circuit, how to hack a servo motor, and other deep geek mojo you can apply to building actual bots.

This is a version of the project that was in my book, Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots, and pictured in Make Vol. 6 and on the issue's Web page. The illustrations were done by Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder and the photos are by Street Tech's court photographer Jay Townsend.

Link

When news came out on Monday that Willie Nelson and his crew were busted on their bus for possession of pot and shrooms, the Associated Press used the phrase "narcotic mushrooms." (Previous post here.) I'd never heard psilocybin mushrooms described as a narcotic before but apparently the word "narcotic" has a more general meaning when used by police. Over at the excellent new 10 Zen Monkeys webzine, RU Sirius has the real dope:

Among the drug hip, the use of the word narcotic to describe mind-active drugs other than opiates carries with it an implicit irony. (Implicit only because irony, by its nature, can’t be explicit.) On the other hand, the mainstream media, even the San Francisco Chronicle, from the drug-sophisticated Bay Area, tends to use law enforcement misnomers for illicit drugs, when reporting news around drugs. For instance, one report called the disassociative hallucinogen Ketamine a “date rape drug.” There is, of course, no such thing as a date rape drug. There are drugs that were developed to be used — and are used – for other purposes that are, on rare occasions, used for date rape. And then there’s alcohol, which has been the more easily available and frequently used substance of choice for date rapists since time immemorial. Unlike some other US papers, The Chronicle, at least, never reported on an LSD overdose, something this is virtually impossible to achieve, however hard some of us may have tried back in the days of heroic dose experimentation.

Link

McSweeney's has a lovely parody of an RIAA threat-letter:

If you would prefer not to be stripped of your home and dignity, please send us $3,750 in the return envelope. If your toddler has been named in this lawsuit, explain to them that the fruits of their labor as an adult will go to pay a debt that will ultimately lead to their death at a young age due to their inability to afford medical insurance. Toddlers never understand that, but they'll get the point if you make them cry. If your household pet has been named in this lawsuit, it will be euthanized. If you are a 13-year-old girl, do not expect that the bad publicity in the past has made us hesitant to sue little girls—it has only made us hate you even more. If you, your household pet, or your toddler did not commit any of the acts above, then we will sue you and ruin your life forever for lying. Then we will sue you again, because it's not about the money anymore. It's about revenge.

If you would like to make an excuse, please mark one of the boxes below with a No. 2 pencil and return.

1. My computer was hacked.

2. I am poor and cannot afford music. That is why I download songs at the public library. Please don't sue me or my children will starve. :(

3. One of your goons was in a van outside my house using my wireless connection to frame me.

4. Other children were singing the "Happy Birthday" song, but I was just lip-synching.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

The Vintage Disneyland Souvenirs Flickr group has dozens of fantastic photos of fabulous Disneyland souvenirs, from an era of widespread use of ashtrays and cocktail serving-platters. Link (Thanks, Matt!)

Martin Roth has written a review of a book that sounds interesting, called Kamikaze Diaries, by Professor Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It tells the stories of seven young men who were compelled to become kamikaze pilots – essentially airborne suicide bombers, flying into Allied warships (the Wikipedia entry on kamikaze is here) – by the Japanese military. Most of the seven had been students at elite universities, and they kept diaries, which form the basis of the book.

It’s an invaluable study. It makes clear that high levels of coercion were used to compel the students to “volunteer” for their assignments. And it shows that these were no grinning fanatics – the image that many in the West have of the kamikaze pilots. (An image I vaguely held myself, despite having lived in Japan. It’s not a topic that the Japanese discuss much with Westerners.)

Link

Zack Exley (the pioneering online activism strategist from MoveOn) and other online politics hackers have put their heads together to produce the world's greatest fan-party planner for Battelstar Galactica fans. FrakParty.com's mission: "Everyone we've ever met who's into Battlestar is pretty frak'n cool. So we thought, why not get all these people together and have one big cool nationwide party when the new season Premieres on October 6th." It's like MoveOn parties, but for BSG crazies. Link (Thanks, Zack!)

Zimbabwe has run out of foreign currency and can't pay the satellite companies that provide the country's Internet service; the satellite companies have shut off throttled the whole country's Internet access until the bills are paid:

Government-owned TelOne, which owns the country's main satellite Internet link, said satellite firm Intelsat had cut its international bandwidth because it failed to pay the $700,000 fee.

"The link is slow because they reduced the megabits on our satellite link until the payment is made," TelOne spokesman Phill Chingwaru told Reuters on Wednesday.

"We have approached the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe for foreign currency and they are working on that, but meanwhile there would be delays in browsing because of the partial cut-off."

Link (Thanks, Daniel!)

More here, here, and here. Josh's last video post before returning to prison is here today. Previous BB posts about Josh's case here, also in this week's BB podcast. Benefit concert tomorrow night, details here. Wolf plans to blog from prison, by way of paper notes presumably. RSF says:

Reporters Without Borders today accused the US justice system of “persecuting” freelance video journalist and blogger Josh Wolf after three appeal court judges decided on 18 September to revoke his bail and send him back to prison for refusing to hand over his unedited video footage of a demonstration to a grand jury.

Wolf had until 1 p.m. today to report to the federal prison in Dublin, California, where he was already held from 1 August to 1 September.

“We say again that the federal judicial authorities cannot invoke national security to imprison Wolf, as they have - abusively - in contempt of court proceedings against other journalists involving professional secrecy,” Reporters Without Borders said. “At no time has Wolf tried to run away since these proceedings were brought against him. The month he already spent in prison was both absurd and unjust. Sending him back is cowardly and persecutory.”

The press freedom organisation added: “Would Wolf be suffering this fate if he were not a 24-year-old freelance journalist? We doubt it. And he was given such a short deadline to return to the prison that his lawyers did not even have time to appeal against the latest ruling.”

James D. Calabrese, a hot-rodder in Orange County, was buried in a coffin tricked out with parts from his beloved 1958 Chevy Biscayne. A funeral procession of hotrods took him to his grave. Link (Photo thumbnail from a larger photo on OCRegister.com, credited to Leonard Ortiz, The Orange County Register)

Scott "Understanding Comics" McCloud is taking his family -- including his talented 13-year-old daughter, Sky -- on a one year cross-country tour. Scott's going to be touring with his new book Making Comics, giving speeches, and his kids will be home-schooled by producing a blog and a series of podcasts and video podcasts documenting their travels. Scott and Sky talked to Henry Jenkins's students at MIT about this (listen to the 2-hour webcast), explaining:

Each member of the family is blogging about the trip over on Live Journal. And they are working together to produce a series of podcasts which they are calling Winterviews (after youngest daughter, Winter, who will be the on-camera presence in these films). The daughters will research about some of the comics people they will meet along the way, read and discuss some of their work, prepare questions, do interviews, and edit them for transmission via the web. Sky is also preparing an evolving powerpoint presentation as they travel to explain to various audiences about the trip and what they have learned along the way.

Meanwhile, she remains in contact with a larger circle of home schooled kids who are also tapping into their interests in popular culture (in this case, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars) to inform critical essays and research projects. We all concluded that Sky could be a poster child for the new media literacies we have been exploring through our project with the MacArthur Foundation -- someone who is tapping the full range of new media technologies to learn and share what she is learning with a larger community. Sky is incredibly articulate, holding her own debating the fine points of comics aesthetics with her dad and fully comfortably plopping herself down and conversing with a room full of graduate students. We were delighted to hear her say she was potentially interested in being an MIT student some day. She won the hearts of many of us here.

I met Scott this summer and he told me about Making Comics -- it's a tutorial for people who want to learn how visual storytelling works, drawing on styles from manga to Will Eisner. The book is a tutorial for budding comic-book creators, with exercises and patient, lucid and funny instruction, just the kind of thing that made Understanding Comics into the best book on media I've ever read. Link

Began yesterday. There's more on Bangkok metblog, start here: Link. Image: Daniel Cuthbert, © 2006.

This $3500, eight-foot-high Anglepoise lamp was released to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the original 1227 Anglepoise Lamp. Link (via Gizmodo)

It's not clear whether a British roulette-predicting device will be illegal under a new UK gambling law, or whether it will be up to casinos to deal with them on their own. These devices record the sound of the wheel and predict where the ball will land with a high degree of accuracy:

Mark Howe, who sells the devices for £1,000 from a workshop in Sheffield, claims his software will also work on level wheels. Surrounded by the soldering irons and laser sensors he uses to make his devices, he gave the Guardian an apparently successful demonstration of the software he said earned him a substantial sum before he was banned from British casinos in the 1990s.

The equipment consists of a clicker that records the deceleration speed of the rotor and ball, a remote computer device concealed inside a mobile phone or MP3 player, and an earpiece that instructs a player which zone the ball will land in.

Mr Howe says a gambler with the equipment can gain an edge of between 20% and 100% over the casino, overturning the casino's normal 2.7% edge over customers. "Next year is free hunting for anyone interested in making money from casinos," he said. "All you need to use this is nerves, a good front and consistency."

Link (via Kottke)

Capitol of Punk is a locative media walking tour about Washington DC's "harDCore" scene of the late 70s and 80s. DC was the birthplace of such seminal punk bands as Bad Brains, Ignition, Dag Nasty, and, of course, Minor Threat. The Yellow Arrow tour includes video podcasts with interviews and music, a PDF map, and text messages tied to key DC hardcore locations around the city.
Link

USBCells are standard-sized AA batteries whose heads flip open to reveal a USB plug; plug them into your PC and they'll recharge off the USB port. I already use USB chargers for my phone and music player and GPS when I'm on the road -- this completes the picture. I wish that every rechargeable device came with a USB recharge point! Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Update: Charlie sez, "Like many NiMH rechargeables in the AA and AAA form factors these are 1.2 VDC and not 1.5 volts like 'real' batteries. This is usually not a problem when a device only uses one or two batteries, but anything that uses four or more in series is unlikely to work properly due to the cumulative difference in voltage. My son's giant robot battle scorpion, for example, requires six batteries in series for 9 volts total, but rechargeables typically only provide 7.2 even at peak charge, and this leaves the scorpion unable to fend off enemy robot cockroaches or the neighbor girl's robot kissing bug."

Wired Magazine is hosting an interesting event in NYC tonight at the New York Public Library:

Join Cameron Sinclair, Kate Stohr and Cynthia Barton of Architecture for Humanity, editors of the book Design Like You Give a Damn, along with cultural commentator John Hockenberry as they discuss how a new breed of designers is responding to humanitarian crises and rethinking the social and economic future of the more than two billion people currently surviving in sub-standard living conditions.

starts at 7pm. Link (thanks, Melanie Cornwell!)

Remote-controlled, robotic battle-beetles: presumably if you got enough of these together, you could completely skeletonize that smug little Tickle Me Elmo Extreme bastard. Link (via Red Ferret)

Clay Shirky has written an excellent analysis of the flawed assumptions behind Citizendium, an expert-focused online encyclopedia from Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. Sanger has long criticised Wikipedia and Wikipedians for failing to accord special status to "experts" -- but as Shirky shows, an expert-focused Wikipedia would likely devolve into interminable pissing matches over who was and was not qualified to be called an expert, because expertise isn't a measurable quantity, but rather something that is socially constructed.

Sanger himself experienced [interminable fights over credentials] in his fight with Cunctator at the dawn of Wikipedia; Cunc questioned Sanger's authority, leading Sanger to defend it with increasing vigor. As Sanger said at the time "...in order to preserve my time and sanity, I have to act like an autocrat. In a way, I am being trained to act like an autocrat." Sanger's authority at Wikipedia required his demonstrating it, yet this very demonstration made his job harder, and ultimately untenable. This the common case; as any parent can tell you, exercise of presumptive authority creates the conditions under which it is tested. As a result, Citizendium will re-create the core failure of Nupedia, namely putting at the center of the effort a process whose maintenance takes more energy than can be mustered by a volunteer project...

Citizendium is based less on a system of supportable governance than on the belief that such governance will not be necessary, except in rare cases. Real experts will self-certify; rank-and-file participants will be delighted to work alongside them; when disputes arise, the expert view will prevail; and all of this will proceed under a process that is lightweight and harmonious. All of this will come to naught when the citizens rankle at the reflexive deference to editors; in reaction, they will debauch self-certification (leading to irc-style chanop wars), contest expert preogatives, rasing the cost of review to unsupportable levels (Wikitorial, round II,) take to distributed protest (q.v. Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf), or simply opt-out (Nupedia in a nutshell.)...

The philosophical issue here is one of deference. Citizendium is intended to improve on Wikipedia by adding a mechanism for deference, but Wikipedia already has a mechanism for deference -- survival of edits. I recently re-wrote the conceptual recipe for a Menger Sponge, and my edits have survived, so far. The community has deferred not to me, but to my contribution, and that deference is both negative (not edited so far) and provisional (can always be edited.)

Link

The moon might be a good place for a massive storehouse of digital information, sort of a Lunar Library of Alexandria (that hopefully won't burn down). That's the idea proposed by NASA scientist David McKay, who ten years ago led the team that announced that a Mars meteorite contained evidence of life. According to the New Scientist blog, McKay says the lunar library could be stored on computers buried in the ground, placed inside craters, or located in hollow lava tubes. The New Scientist blog post refers to a white paper that McKay wrote on the subject, but I can't seem to find it online. From the post:

The benefits of lunar storage are that there is no oxygen to erode the material, constant sub-freezing temperature and the Moon is currently free of all of the havoc wreaked by humankind...

Families could even pay a fee to preserve photographs in the lunar library for future civilizations. McKay calls it the "ultimate time capsule."

Link

UPDATE: BB pal Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Net News says:

Your post reminded me of the superb novel by Jack Williamson, "Terraforming Earth," which I believe was overlooked at the time it came out. In his story, Earth is at a nuclear dead-end, and one scientist manages to take several people, vast stores of knowledge, and flora/fauna archives to a previously established moon base. Computers clone and teach "descendents" from time to time over millions or perhaps hundred of millions of years. Sometimes they find that earth belongs to alien species. Sometimes, Earth is back to high technology. Once, they save future humanity from total extinction. Link

UPDATE: Richard Morgan writes:

Your post reminded me of an article I wrote over the summer for the science section of the New York Times, about the alliance to rescue civilization and its efforts to store -- not just a compendium of human knowledge -- on the moon, but also an ark of all genetic material as well.

Link

UPDATE: Jamais Cascio writes:

For whatever it's worth, the idea of putting an information repository on the Moon is something I've been writing about for awhile, too. I first discussed it in a column in 1999 (an archive copy of the article is here) and brought it up again on WorldChanging more recently (link) in connection to the massive seed vault being built in Norway to protect plant DNA in case of global catastrophe. The ARC folks first wrote about their version of the idea in 1999, as well. While we all came up with the concept independently, I would not be surprised to find even earlier non-fiction iterations of the proposal.

It all boils down to making backups. As anyone who has done tech work (even for themselves) knows, backups are not substitutes for maintenance. Dealing with disasters after the fact is always far more costly, time-consuming and frustrating -- and, on the scale we're talking about, life-threatening -- than performing regular maintenance. Maintenance projects (fighting global warming, eliminating global poverty, eradication of pandemic diseases) reduce our need to use backups; backup projects are our last hope when maintenance fails.

The reoccurrence of this idea is an acknowledgment that sometimes maintenance fails, and that if human civilization is worth keeping around, we need to think big.

The incredible Internet Craftsmanship Museum celebrates the passion, precision, and "craftsman's touch" as embodied by "anything from furniture to stained glass to a clock to a model steam engine." Seen here, Roger Ronnie's miniature 1896 Bergmann pistol and Iqbal Ahmed's Victoria horizontal steam engine with working boiler. The virtual museum, and its real world counterpart in Vista, California, was founded by Joe Martin, owner of machine tool manufacturer Sherline Products.

From the Museum's Welcome page:

While good machinery can produce parts of great consistency and accuracy when properly operated, without the craftsman's touch the results will be acceptable but not noteworthy. Pieces that truly grab our attention and admiration go beyond the minimum of what is required to add what we can only call the "craftsman's touch"... This museum will feature works that represent the spirit and skill of individuals; not committees or manufacturing companies. These projects were built by people with skilled hands and brains, but, most importantly, they were built for the love of doing it. Coming from the hands, the brain and the heart, they should be judged not just as a collection of parts, but rather as art.

Link (via MAKE: Blog)