Mmmm, smell the leather. And get a load of that rack. Images from "Libraries," a book of photographs by Candida Höfer documenting the very lovely insides of great libraries around the world. Link (Thanks, Siege).

Link to a neon sign in Brooklyn that received a Goatse makeover (worksafe explanation) from BoingBoing reader Ben, who explains:

"My roommate Allyson and I were out in Park Slope, Brooklyn tonight and once again passed our favorite neon sign - Hot Bagels Open. (Indeed.) She had her camera so we snapped a pic of the gaping brightness, and rather than add the famous goatse hands digitally, I thought I'd give it the real life treatment."

Reader comment: Paul Michael Doherty says,

I can do SO much better than that. This photo was taken from a bagel store in downtown Copenhagen.

Stu Mark says,

With regard to your Bagel Goatse, I am reminded of the end gag of a Family Guy episode, which features the Family Guy gang as little kids, Our Gang-style. The end of the situation had Peter and Quagmire swearing off girls forever. Fast forward to the boys turned men, incredibly wealthy because they weren't distracted by the opposite sex. The last line is Peter saying, "I'm going to go microwave a bagel and have sex with it." and Quagmire responding "Butter's in the fridge."

BoingBoing reader Solon Brochado in Brazil writes,

Former US vice president Al Gore will be in Brazil this Tuesday, Oct. 17th, as a special guest at the award ceremony of "Prêmio Eco" (Eco Award), awarded by the American Chamber of Commerce to companies that "adopt socially responsible practices, generating a rich reflection on the development of the Enterpreneurial Citizenship concept and practices in Brazil".

After the awards ceremony, mr. Gore will deliver a speech on the "impact of climate changes caused by global warming". This link (in Portuguese, sorry) is for a release detailing the press credentialing process. The interesting part are the last two bulleted paragraphs, where it explains how the press will be removed from the premises before Mr. Gore's address, "due to copyright commitments with various international entities that contribute data and images used in Al Gore's presentation". Only invitees (and the American Chamber of Commerce's own press aides, of course) will be allowed to watch the presentation.

Am I wrong in finding it rather odd that a presentation that's been thoroughly mentioned in American press, based on a movie that's been screened worldwide, should be closed to the Brazilian press due to copyright issues of data that, I'm quite sure, must be public for quite some time now?

UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Pedro Pinheiro in Portugal offers a translation of the aforementioned Portuguese-language website, after the jump.

BoingBoing reader Kim in Houston, Texas says,

Last Friday night, a small music venue here in Houston (Walter's) was in the middle of a show when a cop walked in on a noise disturbance call (not unusual for Walters), and instead of talking with the management to turn down the music or shut down the show, walked straight up to the stage to tell the band to shut down. The band had no idea what was going on and asked why, at which time the cop tried to grab one of the musicians' guitar, and then slammed the musician to the ground... of course from that point on melee ensued, with at least three people being tasered by this cop, and several people being arrested. One of the kids tasered was a 14 year old kid who was there with his parents! One account states that the boy's father was also tasered.

Several accounts have published online: Link, video, more video, and another.

Local news reports have been almost exclusively based on the police reports, and say the cop was "attacked" by the band and audience and that he did the right thing. However the videos and first person accounts show something completely different.

THIS IS NOT OK. Cops cannot be allowed to just do whatever they want however they want (in this case almost instigating a riot), and that TASERS SHOULD ONLY BE USED IN SITUATIONS WHERE THE COP WOULD HAVE USED HIS GUN. Not just as a convenience. Just last week Houston cops killed a man using their tasers, and again, the question has to be asked, was that a situation where they would have previously used a gun? I would have hoped not.

Looks like metblogs in Houston has been covering this as well: Link.

Reader comments: Kim says,

Just a quick update. The city is having a public hearing on the Houston police officer vs. the band & audience incident today.

"Anyone interested in speaking at city council open session to address the police brutality that happened at Walter's last weekend needs to call 713 247 1840 and have 3 minutes set aside. It will be at 1:30pm . Please mention officer Gabriel Rodriguez's name and make strong note of the fact that he was chasing people with a taser which makes evident he was not threatened but rather being an aggressor."

COUNCIL CHAMBER - SECOND FLOOR - CITY HALL 901 BAGBY - HOUSTON, TEXAS

Christina says,

Link to another account, complete with multiple videos and photographs of the injustice of the HPD responding to a "noise violation."

Kim says:

I attended the public hearing yesterday, however there were somthing like 260 people signed up to speak to the City Council that day, the majority of which were there regarding the upcoming vote on a smoking ban. It was three hours or so before they got to the speakers regarding the incident at Walter's.

I had to leave before that, but if I remember correctly, between 8 and 10 people had signed up to speak, and when it was time to speak, I was told about 5 of the people signed up were still there. But I'm still impressed that people came out to speak.

A friend was watching the hearing online, and said that the Council actually seemed concerned with what the speakers were telling them. And he said that one of the council members who usually sides with the HPD looked very worried and concerned for speakers.

Thank you to those who stayed for speaking out!!

There is also an article on Pitchfork where the band playing (Two Gallants) speak out about what happened.

And there's a a new article in the Houston Chronicle regarding how this incident could hurt our music scene.

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA will soon become America's largest solar electric installation on a single corporate site, and one of the largest such projects in the world, according to solar power systems integrators EI Solutions.

The solar firm will build an installation at the Googleplex with a total capacity of 1.6 megawatts ("enough to supply 1,000 average California homes," according to EI's press release). Equipment will include 9,212 solar panels by Sharp Electronics, to be placed on rooftops and parking lot tops throughout Google's campus.

3D rendering: here, and EI Solutions will present these renderings at the Solar Power 2006 expo in San Jose this week.

Top image (full-size): Conceptual design of the planned solar installation, created using Google Earth and Sketch Up. Lower image: (full-size): Andrew Beebe of EI Solutions (L), with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (R).

The New York Times reports:

Lynne F. Stewart, the firebrand lawyer who was charged as a terrorist for helping a client in prison on terrorism charges to communicate with his followers, was sentenced today to 28 months in federal prison, far less than the 30 years the government had sought.

Prosecutors had argued that Ms. Stewart repeatedly flouted the law to aid the violent designs of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted in plots to blow up five New York landmarks and assassinate Egypt’s president. Ms. Stewart represented him at his 1995 trial.

Link. A statement on the website of the self-described "radical human rights attorney" compares her case to to historic legal cases of "Haymarket [and] Sacco/Vanzetti," and states that the 67-year old woman is "fighting breast cancer and has suffered the worst punishment —- she is no longer able to legally represent people in Court." Link. Here's the Wikipedia entry on Omar Abdel Rahman.

The OV-Watch is a $99 wristworn sensor that measures the salts in the wearer's sweat to identify when she's most fertile. From the product page:

Researchers in the late 50s and early 60s noted that numerous salts (chloride, sodium, potassium) in a woman's sweat fluctuated in relation to the menstrual cycle. Chloride levels are low at the start of the menstrual cycle and peak three times during the cycle (see graph below). Using a patented biosensor, OV-Watch detects a baseline chloride ion level for each woman and then accurately predicts ovulation based on the timing of the first peak. The OV-Watch detects the chloride surge 3 days prior to the estrogen surge, 4 days prior to the LH surge and 5 days prior to ovulation, making it an earlier predictor of ovulation than any other chemical surge during the month. During the clinical trials for FDA approval with Dr. Arthur Haney at Duke University, approximately 3 out of 4 women received the full 5 day notice of ovulation while only 1 in 6 women were given more than 12 to 24 hours notice with urine tests or LH kits.

Link (via Gizmodo and Medgadget)

When Matthias Wandel took an introductory music class in college, he was inspired to learn piano. He couldn't afford to buy a Casio keyboard to practice on, so instead he built his own pipe organ from scratch. He started by building two wooden pipes in his dad's workshop and mounted those on a vacuum cleaner motor as the pump. He had to insulate the motor in a foam-paced box to make the noise tolerable. Eventually, the vacuum motor burned out and he replaced it with a much more durable precision blower from a surplus auto part shop. From Wandel's build notes:

After the vacuum cleaner motor died, I was very lucky to find a 1/12'th Hp motor and precision blower at Princes Auto (A surplus store), for a grand total of $20. I used a scroundged O-ring as a belt, and adapted the paper feed pulley from an old teletype by sanding an indentation into it for the O-ring to run in. The pulley on the blower also needed modifications, so I removed the shaft and cut a groove for the O-ring into it on a metal lathe in the student machine shop at the University.

This combination I placed in the box I had built of 2" planks. The combination was so quiet that its noise became a total non-issue. At about the same time the real vacuum cleaner we were using in the house died, and I was able to reuse the bearings from that motor to fix our actual vacuum cleaner.

Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Many pro portrait photographers end a shoot by asking their subjects to jump into the air as a way to catch them at their "loosest." Latvian-American photographer Philippe Halsman, who shot more than 100 Life magazine photos, pioneered the technique in the 1950s. The new issue of Smithsonian honors Halsman's jumptastic images. (Seen here, Richard M. Nixon.) From the article:

In 1950, NBC television commissioned him to photograph its lineup of comedians, including Milton Berle, Red Skelton, Groucho Marx and a fast-rising duo named Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Halsman noticed that some of the comedians jumped spontaneously while staying in character, and it was unlikely that any of them jumped with more antic enthusiasm than Martin, a crooner and straight man, and Lewis, who gave countless 10-year-old boys a class clown they could look up to.

It may seem like a stretch to go from seeing funnymen jumping for joy to persuading, say, a Republican Quaker vice president to take the leap, but Halsman was always on a mission. ("One of our deepest urges is to find out what the other person is like," he wrote.) And like the true photojournalist he was, Halsman saw a jumpological truth in his near-perfect composition of Martin and Lewis.

Link

Are UFOs actually the devil's minions sent not from the stars above but the fires of hell below? Over a Fortean Times, Sheffield University folklorist David Clarke surveys this odd niche of ufology literature identifying ETs as demons or, if we're lucky, angels. From the article:

On the one hand there is a group of evangelicals – mainly Americans, such as Dr Billy Graham – who have said the UFO occupants may be angels sent by God to watch over us. The best-known exponent of this idea is the Presbyterian minister Rev Barry Downing, author of Flying Saucers and the Bible. Downing appears to be open minded about aliens as part of God’s creation and to look to the scriptures for evidence of early ET contacts.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are some members of the Christian Orthodox Church 1 who find it impossible to accept that there is any goodness in the elusive and contradictory nature of UFO behaviour. The most extreme expression of this view is that there can be no ETs because life on other planets is not mentioned in the Bible. It’s a point of view that leads its proponents to a further conclusion: if there are no aliens in the Bible and the UFO occupants aren’t angels, then UFOs can only be demonic in origin.

Link

Gary attended the Big Fresno Fair and found a "Copyright-protected area" sign by a stall where a busker was selling the chance to have your picture taken with a bird. The idea was to use copyright law to stop you from taking your own pictures instead of buying them.

One of the side-effects of the entertainment industry's war on copying is that it's created a kind of folk-mythology about copyright being a kind of magic word you can invoke to put a fence around anything that you want to police. There's no such thing as a copyright-protected area -- it might be reasonable, if you're in the taking-pictures-of-kids-with-animals business, to take some steps to shut out the competition, but appropriating the extraordinary "author's monopoly" that is copyright is both lazy and dishonest.

Any businessperson has to contend with the realities of the world. Blacksmiths don't get to demand that we abandon the railroad and go back to riding horses they can shoe. Maybe it was once possible to take a studio photography business (where you could control who came in and hence set the rules about taking your own pictures) on the road with a county fair. But if your business depends on ensuring that your photons only enter the lens of your camera, then putting those photons in a public place is a bad idea.

You've either got to take the losses you get from amateur photographers, use norms ("Please don't take your own pictures without asking, I do this for a living") instead of threats, or get into another line of work. Inventing magical copyright protection for the patch of dirt where you pitched your tent is the wrong answer. Link (Thanks, Gary!)

Edward Lee is a talented photographer who specializes in shooting dramatic pix of toys poised for action. Link (Thanks, IZ Reloaded)