Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: Star Wars mashups. I am just loving the Gollum/Yoda pictured here. Link

Stephen Reed Industrial Design installed these Scrabble-tile-holder benches (with Scrabble tile pillows) in the offices of Bloomberg London. Want. Link (via Cribcandy)

Update: Jeremy sez, "I saw your Scrabble Furniture, and wanted to show you the work of my friend Josh Cyr, who has created his own Scrabble Coffee Table."

I dig this kooky-creepy devil inkwell up for auction on eBay. Current bid is $202.01. From the auction listing:

19th Century devil inkwell of handcarved wooden construction by a master craftsman. I believe this to be of European origin - Black Forest or Swiss. Quality of carving and fit of the lid are exceptional. Not a nick or chip or scratch. Original paint. Original well looks to be porcelain. Ink still on inner rim around well and lid shows honest wear. Total height is 4". Satisfaction guaranteed.

Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Union Products, manufacturer of the plastic pink flamingo, has ceased production of the quintessential kitsch icon. Apparently, the Leominster, Mass-based company was hit with financial woes, in part due to the increasing cost of plastic resin. Don Featherstone, who created the classic lawn ornament in 1957 during a countrywide epidemic of Florida fever, is still very much alive though and hoping some other company will crank out his creation. According to Wikipedia, every authentic flamingo is emblazoned with Featherstone's signature under its tail. From the South Florida Sun Sentinel (photo from Union Products):

"They think the pink flamingos could be extinct, and they think I will be extinct soon, too," (Featherstone) said. "It is sad that it is happening, but it may not be dead yet."

Featherstone and (Union Products president Dennis) Plante are hoping for a resurrection. Plante has been seeking another company to buy the molds. So far, two companies in the U.S. and one in Canada have expressed interest.

"I am hoping that someone will come forward and save the plastic pink flamingo from extinction," Plante said.

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Glyph Jockey has kindly posted scans of an entire "Nancy and Sluggo" comic book from 1953, including the fun ads for fireworks, magic tricks, and BB rifles. This makes me very happy.
Link (Thanks, Coop!)

This week, three BB pals invade RU Sirius's MondoGlobo network podcasts. Violet Blue is the guest on the RU Sirius Show while Eddie Codel (GETV) and video artist Ryan Junell, organizer of the Webzine conference, chat up RU on the NeoFiles.
Link

The audio from Tuesday night's talk by Revver co-founder Steven Starr is online. Steve spoke as part of my USC speaker-series on copyright, freedom and technology and his talk was about Revver, a system that puts ads at the end of viral videos, which means that every time the videos are copied, their creators make more money. Steve's talk was great, and there was a rollicking, wide-ranging Q&A session afterwards.

Next Tuesday's speaker was to have been Jamie Love from the Consumer Project on Technology, but he's had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict with a diplomatic event. I will give his talk in his stead, about international development, copyright, and the Access to Knowledge movement. Link, Podcast feed

Democracy Player, the amazing, free, open Internet video player, has just released an important update, bringing tons of new features to the platform. Democracy lets you subscribe to channels of video that are downloaded quickly using Bittorrent. Getting video in channels means you don't have to remember to keep checking for new files, and Bittorrent means the files come down quickly and without costing the creator a fortune in bandwidth. There's a complementary tool, "Broadcast Machine," that makes it easy to publish your own video channel for Democracy and other players.

Democracy runs on Linux, Windows and the Mac, and is overseen by the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation. PCF director Nicholas Reville sez,

This version (0.9.1) has lots and lots of new features. The 3 biggest:

1. The interface is faster and more responsive.

2. You can make 'Search Channels' that automatically search a channel (rss feed) or a website like YouTube and download videos that match the search.

3. The Mac and Windows versions can now both search, save, and play flash video (such as YouTube or Google Video).

Link, Link to new feature list

(Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation)

Undersound is a new project to distribute music around the London Underground trains. Users can upload songs from their collections to centralized distribution points, and download tracks left by other users. The system keeps tack of which tracks came from what station --this is a public-transit version of the "Traffic Napster" that appears in my novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.

undersound will be spatially distributed at individual stations and throughout the wider tube network. I can add music to the system at upload points in the ticket halls , and I can download tracks on the platforms. Architectural configuration of the stations affects my experience of contributing and downloading music as the proximal nature of the interaction with these situated points require s myself and other undersound users to congregate at certain locations within the station for the purpose of interacting with the system.

Each track in the undersound system will be tagged with its place of origin (the station where it was uploaded) and this information is visible as the track is being played. This may trigger memories and musings around my personal relationship to that place. Is there also a correlation between the flow of people around the tube network and the flow of music tracks around the undersound network? What might a sense of place for these digital artefacts be? Do they care about geographical location too or might their sense of place revolve around the quality and type of network and the technological devices they pass through?

Link (Thanks, Akshat and Dillo!)

The respected journal Far Eastern Economic Review has been banned in Singapore for publishing an article critical of Singapore's prime minister. The Review has published a stinging analysis of the legality of this action under Singaporean law, suggesting that the government is willing to invent laws for itself when it wants to suppress dissent:

The July article that started this most recent dispute with Singapore, “Singapore’s ‘Martyr,’ Chee Soon Juan,” sought to raise a similar question, only it focused on the methods used to silence the leader of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party. We put it to Mr. Chee himself, and he laid the blame squarely on the country’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who now holds the title of “minister mentor.”

The ruthless suppression of dissent must be kept up, he said, because as long as Mr. Lee is alive, a new generation of leaders is unable to emerge and distance themselves from his record. Mr. Lee’s past actions, which have led to human rights abuses and statist management of the economy, haunt the government. Mr. Chee believes that is the true reason dissidents like himself are hounded: “If we had parliamentary debates where the opposition could pry and ask questions, I think he is actually afraid of something like that.”

After the article was published, we received letters from Davinder Singh, a lawyer for Mr. Lee and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, claiming that these sentiments and several other sections of the essay defamed the two men. Mr. Singh demanded apologies, removal of the article from our Web site, and an undertaking to pay damages and legal costs.

Link (Thanks, HY!)

Mike sez, "The National Trust, a British charity, held a competition to garden-growers across the country to grow the ugliest vegetable possible. This year's winner was Mrs. Hilary Nellist from Bedford with her parsnip from the deep. The contest seeks to promote organically grown fruit and vegetables. Some may not look good enough to end up on supermarket shelves, but they quite possibly taste better and are better for you. Look at the picture of the parsnip and tell me Cthulhu didn't have his hand in this one." Link (Thanks, Mike!)

(Photo thumbnail above taken from a larger picture credited to Hilary Nellist)

Tor editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- an expert on fiction publishing -- has written a great response to a Wall Street Journal article where the Journal asserts that publishing is a hit-driven, winner-take-all industry. She points out that this is far from the truth -- that publishing isn't driven by bestsellers, but by "okaysellers," and that bookstores are filled with these okaysellers.

What irritated me about the story was having the Wall Street Journal trot out the completely bogus standard paragraph about the state of publishing:

Much like Hollywood, book publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest. A publisher has to find a title with huge potential and single it out for special attention. If the book gets traction, the upside is limitless. If it fails, there’s a long way to fall. When a book doesn’t sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant. With 172,000 books published last year, shelf space is limited.

I think they’ve got that paragraph set up as a macro—and they’re not the only publication that uses it.

I’ve been hearing the “publishing is becoming a winner-take-all sweepstakes” riff since I started working in the industry. It’s not true, and it’s not becoming true. I suspect it’s generated by lazy news departments that can’t be bothered to take notice of books that aren’t blockbusters, and from this conclude that blockbusters are all that matters in publishing.

Bestsellers aren’t the whole of publishing. Every year, we publish a great many okaysellers. You guys buy them because they look interesting, or because a friend has recommended them, or because you liked another book by that author. Marketing push only goes so far.

Link

Update: Patrick Nielsen Hayden adds, "What Teresa was trying to get at, and she’s absolutely right, is that while book publishing may be greatly driven by our need for bestsellers, in the same way that many American policies are “driven by” our national need for easy access to petroleum, we don’t in fact spend every second of every day wandering around in a frenzy obsessing about bestsellers, any more than everyone in America spends all their time invading Middle Eastern countries or grovelling at the gas pump. When the Wall Street Journal writes that “publishing is becoming a winner-takes-all contest” and says that “when a book doesn’t sell right away, the large chains sweep it into the back room, making space for the next aspirant,” they’re grossly misrepresenting how most of book publishing works. We may be driven by a need to have some books that “bestsell,” but our daily life is far from dominated by work on bestsellers to the exclusion of all else. To the contrary, smart publishers know that publishing is more like gardening than it’s like factory-farming; if you want giant successes, you’d better have a whole lot of little experiments going all at the same time. We need bestsellers. But we don’t spend all of our time on them, and we don’t sweep non-bestselling books (or their authors) off to the glue factory. We need all the other books as well. Because you never know."

At "the f blog," former BB guestblogger Jenn Shreve has posted a an oddly engaging collection of "sorry I haven't posted in a while" excuses found on a wide assortment of blogs. Here are a few:

"I got promoted to an officer in my World of Warcraft guild "Trick Model" on Illidan."

"I've been honestly overwhelmed by trying to keep up with my two language courses"

"I forgot my password..."

"I've been busy shooting soccer teams."

"I've been very depressed since Ginger died."

"I was planning on working more on my chibi characters. "

Link

Ugly Overload (via Spluch) posted this beautiful portrait of a cute proboscis monkey. Text on the proboscis monkey from Blue Planet Biomes:

The proboscis monkey gets its name from its large, fleshy nose. Both males and females have the large noses. Female noses are not as large, although larger than most monkeys, and juveniles have small upturned noses. The male's are so large that they hang down over their mouths, reminding one of the old comic, Jimmy Durante. Sometimes they have to push it out of the way before putting something in their mouth. Their noses swell and turn red when they become excited or angry. They also make loud honking sounds as a warning when they sense danger, which make their noses stand out straight. The nose acts as a resonator when the monkey vocalizes.

Link to Ugly Overload, Link to Blue Planet Biomes page (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Computer scientists at New Zealand's Massey University are studying the mysterious low-frequency hums that have been reported in various places around the world. (It's sometimes referred to as the Taos Hum because many people in Taos, New Mexico claim to hear it.) Massey University professors Tom Moir and Fakhrul Alam began their research on "Unidentified Acoustic Phenomena" with a visit to the home of a Brown's Bay woman who said a hum she heard at home was sickening her. Moir and Alam couldn't detect the noise but are now expanding their efforts by talking with others who hear a hum. From a Massey University press release:

"The fact of the matter is that we do not yet have an answer even though there has been keen interest and plenty of speculation world wide on this phenomenon,” says Dr Moir.

“At this stage we believe there are two possible explanations. The hum could be a very low frequency sound that only some people can hear. Or, it could be that microwaves in the atmosphere trigger a hum like sound in the heads of some people that would not necessarily be heard by others or picked up by recording equipment.”

Link to Massey News Article, Link to Television New Zealand article

UPDATE: BB reader Gerard Hughes comments that it might be a little premature to speculate on a cause:

They left out the most important possibility--that there is no hum. Before speculating on what causes a phenomenon one should prove that it exists in the first place. There are a number of famous scientific self-deceptions when people thought they could see or hear things even though their instruments detected nothing. René Prosper Blondlot's "discovery" of N-Rays is one such example. He thought the rays made a calcium sulfide thread glow very faintly but it turned out that the researchers were just fooling themselves. Link

Last month, I posted about artist Annamarie Ho's art installation/performance piece, "Binlang Shi Shr," about Betel nut girls, the scantily-clad young girls who sell the stimulant from streetside booths in some Asian cities. (Background here.) The closing performance takes place this Saturday, October 21, from 2-5pm at the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY College of Old Westbury in New York.

From the show program:

Ho simulates a vending stand of the sort that becomes, in effect, a free-standing display case, where the "betelnut beauties" function as commodified mannequins. She includes an example of the accompanying neon business signs often phrased to sound like the names of love hotels in East Asia. In Binlang Shi Shr (Betelnut Girls), Ho not only expresses a concern over the "entrapment" of women in sexual-economic exploitation, but also exoticizes this selling process, as an actor hired for the performance interacts with viewers like a betelnut girl. Ho assumes her role as a stand owner who monitors the girl's behavior. Bringing this simulating experience of betelnut girls to the space of the art gallery, Ho also raises a larger issue of what's being sold in contemporary commercial galleries, as she uses the actor and the performance piece as a means to sell her installation.

Link to Ho's "Binlang Shi Shr" site with images and video from the installation

Dan Howland of the excellent Journal of Ride Theory is presenting an excellent art-project at London's Dana Centre. He sez,

Brendan Walker has arranged for various people with an interest in rides, thrills, etc, to do brief presentations, then we bring out the telemetry equipment, which allows us to monitor facial expression, heart rate, breathing, etc, all in real time via Bluetooth, and we send some poor sucker on a fairground ride out in the Science Museum's back yard, while the audience watches. Then we let the audience outside to experience the ride themselves. We've actually been getting some interesting data -- it appears the subjects' heart rates are highest in anticipation of riding. It drops during the actual ride. Who knew? The release form for the riders is printed on a sick bag.

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

Bruce Schneier has a thought-provoking essay up about the nature of architecture and security, inspired by the gradual removal of the concrete "anti-bombing" bollards that were arrayed around buildings after 9/11. Schneier points out that whether or not the barricades are good security, they are at least removable security that can be taken away as the threat (or our understanding of it) changes. He contrasts this with "security" measures that are permanently integrated into architecture -- both technological and physical -- which we have to live with forever, even if it no longer protects us from any threat.

When Syracuse University built a new campus in the mid-1970s, the student protests of the late 1960s were fresh on everybody's mind. So the architects designed a college without the open greens of traditional college campuses. It's now 30 years later, but Syracuse University is stuck defending itself against an obsolete threat.

Similarly, hotel entries in Montreal were elevated above street level in the 1970s, in response to security worries about Quebecois separatists. Today the threat is gone, but those older hotels continue to be maddeningly difficult to navigate...

It's dangerously shortsighted to make architectural decisions based on the threat of the moment without regard to the long-term consequences of those decisions.

Concrete building barriers are an exception: They're removable. They started appearing in Washington, D.C., in 1983, after the truck bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut. After 9/11, they were a sort of bizarre status symbol: They proved your building was important enough to deserve protection. In New York City alone, more than 50 buildings were protected in this fashion.

Link

Lisa Vollrath documents a beautiful book-binding art project: she took the cover off an old, falling-apart encyclopedia and filled it with wallpaper, art, photos, and other scrapbook sheets. Then she rebound it with wire and old rulers. It's gorgeous. Link (via Craft)

This enterprising crafter cross-stitched a cover for a Nintendo DS case that looks like a controller from an old Nintendo Entertainment System -- cross-stitch patterns are included. Link (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

Update: Margaret sez, "That DS case is needlepoint, not cross stitch! It's not your fault, the creator referred to it wrong as well. Cross stitch looks like little x's. Needlepoint purists would even call this plastic canvas rather than needlepoint."

Wendy Seltzer of the Chilling Effects project has done a comprehensive roundup of the unfair and undesirable language in the new Windows Vista license -- all the abusive crap you "agree" to when you give Microsoft your money. Upgrading to Vista is the start of an abusive relationship that could last for years.

4. Problem-solving prohibited. "You may not work around any technical limitations in the software." Microsoft might be referring to anticircumvention of technical protection measures here, but since it's often hard to tell the difference, from the user's perspective, between a TPM and a bug, this reads as a prohibition on user debugging and problem-solving. After all, down-rezzing, HD content or refusing to allow users to copy quotes from an e-book don't strike most people as wanted features. Can you work around a document's failure to save properly?

Link

Wired News rounds up its top-ten list of virtual goods for sale in the virtual world Second Life, from working yachts and space-ships to auto-translators and musical instruments.

5. Auto Emote
L$300

Now, your avatar can express facial emotions. Outy Banjo's script "shows your emotions based on what you type," with more than 300 different phrases that will automatically trigger expressions of anger, fear, laughter and more. Banjo, whose SL business is his full-time job, said his primary income comes from configurable scripts, but in only two months, the Auto Emote (SLurl) has become his best-selling item.

Link