By Cory Doctorow at 4:38 pm Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
Design shop Fitzsu has challenged several hot designers to create unique toy cars for a charity auction. The cars are all one-of-a-kind and they're really wonderful -- I'm totally loving this melted-wax car from Dalek.
Link
(
Thanks, Mapletree7 and Justin!)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:25 pm Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
The talented folks at DaveFilms have produced a full-cast audiobook adaptation of my award-winning novel
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. They're transmitting it in ten parts, as a podcast -- part 1 just went live.
This is the second audio adaptation of Down and Out -- the podcaster Mark Forman read the book aloud on his podcast in August 2005.
I love the different adaptations of the book -- it's amazing to hear my words read by so many different people, with so many different choices about how to dramatize it. Often, the reading isn't how I heard it in my own head when I wrote it, which is cool -- it's wild to hear how your own words sound to someone else.
Link to part 1 as MP3, Link to part 1 as streaming Quicktime, Podcast feed
By Cory Doctorow at 4:09 pm Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
Jay is disturbed to hear about the Los Angeles Boy Scouts
offering a Merit Patch in copyright. He sez, "As a frequent reader of Boing Boing, a supporter of the EFF, and someone who plans on making a living as a future online communication technology consultant, I feel fairly informed about copyright issues. So myself and my roommate, another Eagle Scout, are in the process of acquiring the Merit Badge Handbook for this badge to review the requirements and information it presents. If it's as one-sided or erroneous as your post worries it will be, I'd like to get other current or former scouts to take part in a concerted effort to write the Los Angeles Area Council with our concerns.
"If you could update the post on Boing Boing with this e-mail address(BSACAC@gmail.com - Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright), or pass it along to any other scouts that might contact you, I'd very much appreciate it. Not all scouts are religious bigots or industry shills. A lot changes between the time when you're a kid joining a group for fun, comraderie, and self-improvement, and when you're grown up and able to form your own views. I'd like to see the scouts improve where they can, and while some changes may be too big to hope for, I'll do everything I can to make sure they don't change for the worse. Help us out."
By Cory Doctorow at 12:12 pm Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
The
Los Angeles Council of the Boy Scouts of America will offer rewards to Scouts who absorb a brainwashing regime written by the MPAA. The merit
badge patch in "respecting copyright" will almost certainly not include any training on
fair use, anything about the fact that the film industry is located in Hollywood because that was a safe-enough distance from Tom Edison that the its founders could
infringe his patents with impunity; that record players, radios and VCRs were
considered pirate technology until the law changed to accommodate them; or that the entertainment industry enriches itself
without regard for creators, who are routinely sodomized through non-negotiable contracts and abusive royalty practices. I'm sure it won't mention the
anti-competitive censorship masquerading as the Hollywood "rating" system, or the way that the studio cartel's copyright term extensions have doomed the majority of creative works to
orphaned oblivion, since they remain in copyright, but have no visible owner and can't be brought back into circulation.
Bravo, Scouts -- letting an industry group brainwash the children in your charge is the only way you could sink lower than being mere religious bigots -- now you're religious bigots who shill for a cartel of Fortune 100 companies.
Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.
The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a "C" enclosed in a circle.
The movie industry has developed the curriculum.
"Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft," Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.
Link
(
Thanks, Kingkong, Cyrus, Jeffrey, Dolface, and Jdaisy!)
See also
Boy Scout badge in Intellectual Property
Update: Liz sez, "Mel Horan of Garbage Island made up Photoshop versions of possible copyright merit badges several months ago, and I posted them on Sivacracy in connection with a story about the Hong Kong scouting program already policing piracy on the government's behalf. Check them out!"
Update 2: Ed sez, "The copyright merit badge is *not* sanctioned by the Boy Scouts of America. It's a local initiative by one group in LA. That's why they called it a "merit patch" instead of a "merit badge". The real list of BSA merit badges here here. The newest one is "Composite Materials"."
Update 3 Jay is disturbed to hear about the Los Angeles Boy Scouts offering a Merit Patch in copyright. He sez, "As a frequent reader of Boing Boing, a supporter of the EFF, and someone who plans on making a living as a future online communication technology consultant, I feel fairly informed about copyright issues. So myself and my roommate, another Eagle Scout, are in the process of acquiring the Merit Badge Handbook for this badge to review the requirements and information it presents. If it's as one-sided or erroneous as your post worries it will be, I'd like to get other current or former scouts to take part in a concerted effort to write the Los Angeles Area Council with our concerns.
"If you could update the post on Boing Boing with this e-mail address(BSACAC@gmail.com - Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright), or pass it along to any other scouts that might contact you, I'd very much appreciate it. Not all scouts are religious bigots or industry shills. A lot changes between the time when you're a kid joining a group for fun, comraderie, and self-improvement, and when you're grown up and able to form your own views. I'd like to see the scouts improve where they can, and while some changes may be too big to hope for, I'll do everything I can to make sure they don't change for the worse. Help us out."
Update 4 This tacky monstrosity is the "Respecting Copyrights merit patch."
(Thanks Pawel!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:55 am Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
A reader writes, "HauntedHotSauce.com offers Zombie-themed hot sauce products sealed in handmade cedar coffins. In addition to the hot sauce, each coffin comes stuffed with Spanish moss, a bloody toe-tag prop and a few novelty maggots thrown in for effect! There's a creepy fold-out paper mask on top of some of the larger bottles that can also be downloaded free from the site."
I'm a total hot sauce junkie. Remember those Tabasco ads where they asked celebs what they put Tabasco on, and Dan Ackroyd said, "Anything humanly possible?" That's me, too. I'd brush my teeth with hot-sauce if I could.
Combine sweaty pepper juice with gruesome packaging and you've got an unbeatable combination. I just ordered some.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 11:38 am Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
A new survey suggests that six percent of adults experience bouts of compulsive buying that may "leave them saddled with debt, anxiety, and depression." And while it was previously thought that compulsive buying is a predominantly female condition, the recent research shows that it may be just as common in men. To collect the data, Stanford University psychiatrist Lorrin M. Koran interviewed more than 2,500 people over the phone. From Science News:
Compulsive buying, as defined by a high score on a tally of the cardinal signs, occurred in 6 percent of women and 5.5 percent of men, regardless of racial or ethnic background, Koran's group says. Compulsive buyers averaged 40 years of age, compared with 49 years for the other participants. A majority of compulsive buyers reported annual incomes under $50,000, whereas only 39 percent of the others reported incomes in that category.
Compulsive buyers reported having the same number of credit cards as other participants did. However, compulsive buyers tended to stretch credit card limits thin, often to within $100 of the maximum. Compulsive buyers also preferred to make minimum payments on credit card balances, regardless of their annual incomes.
By David Pescovitz at 10:54 am Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
Yesterday, the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online officially launched, bringing 50,000 pages of searchable text and 40,000 images to the public for free. Presented by the University of Cambridge and other collaborators, the site currently contains only half of what will be available by 2009. Seen here, a diagram from the Origin of Species.
_1859_Origin_F373_133.jpg)
From the Origin of Species:
'It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working'
'When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.'
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 9:22 am Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
Check out this incredible gallery of over 1500 Italian pulp science fiction magazine covers, spanning 1952 to the present day.
Link
(
Thanks, Spencer!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:18 am Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
Andrew MacPherson has founded a monthly
Copynight in Hollywood, California. Copynights are monthly gatherings of copyfighters, activists, artists and others interested in copyright reform. This month's inuagural belly-of-the-beast Copynight is being held next Tuesday night.
# Fourth Tuesday of every month, 8 PM
# Barney's Beanery, 8447 Santa Monica Blvd (map)
# Hosted by Andy McPherson, hollywood (at) copynight.org
Link
(
Thanks, Andy!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:14 am Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
Video game economist Ed Castronova (whose
back-of-the-envelope math on the GDP of Everquest's Norrath made a huge stir) has received a $240,000 MacArthur grant to fund the creation of a virtual world built on the works of Shakespeare:
"It's a historical Shakespeare play, so that means it's really easy for us to take all the sort of fantasy stuff like knights in shining armor and peasants and woodworkers...and we can just really fit right into 'Richard III' right away."
But "Arden" has a more serious goal than just letting gamers cavort around in an Elizabethan playground.
Castronova likens "Arden" to a "petri dish" where he and other researchers can conduct ongoing social-science experiments. He said the idea is similar to a biologist running multiple versions of an experiment, each with slight variations in conditions, to see how those conditions affect the outcome.
"Now we have this technology for making little pocket societies and we can do different governments, different economies, different social norms in the different environments," he said, "and see how it affects the things we care about, like equality and justice and growth and efficiency."...
He said one of the more unique elements of "Arden" is that the game will be seeded with Shakespearean texts, many of which will be the most valuable treasure players can find.
"If you collect the 'To be or not be' speech and then take it to a lore master or to a skilled bard, he can then apply the magic to your broad sword or you (could) utilize the magic in a battle situation to give you this massive (advantage)," Castronova explained. "So there (will be) this intensive competition to get the best speeches of Shakespeare in your play book.
"You've got to know your Shakespeare, but...if you do, collect these texts and you can just playfully kick butt the way wizards do."
Link
(
via Wonderland)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:07 am Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
iGlow is a chemo-luminescent hair gel that makes your head glow -- perfect for Hallowe'en.
Just like Voltage, iGlow does not rely on UV, neon or black lights to create glow. Instead, it produces its own light!
Tiny, microscopic particles in the gel come together in the mixing process to produce a bright colorful glow that can be
seen in partial light and in the dark for several hours.
While iGlow is classified as a "temporary hair color" it does not actually color the hair cuticle. It "coats" the hair
with color. The gel is the delivery medium for the luminescence (glow). As such it is safe for color-treated or bleached
hair when used as directed.
Link
(
via Popgadget)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:58 am Friday, Oct 20
• Comments • Share
Wired News has released the source code for a program written by its editor Kevin Poulsen to catch pedophiles on MySpace by comparing MySpace profiles to registries of sex-offenders. Poulsen is a notorious reformed hacker who wrote the code to produce empirical data on the use of MySpace by sexual predators, though he acknowledges that the code only catches predators who use their real names, and that some sex offenders use the site for innocent purposes, to stay in touch with friends and family. The code is released under a BSD free software license:
Finding sex offenders on MySpace is a three-step process. First, you need the list of offenders. I put together the first script, scraperps.pl, in late April. From a list of ZIP codes, the program simply fills out the query form on the DOJ's registry, maxing out the query by running five ZIPs at a time. Then it stores the results -- name, ZIP, city, county, state -- in a database, within a table called `perps`.
My first run quickly got me temporarily blocked from the site. It turns out the DOJ server doesn't like you running a lot of queries back-to-back. When the ban was lifted (never let it be said that the Justice Department is unforgiving), I incorporated a 30-second pause between queries, which seemed to satisfy the server. That raised the run time to over 71 hours.
While that was under way, I went to work on screen-scraping MySpace. When you register for MySpace, you're prompted to provide your full name and your ZIP code. That information doesn't appear in your MySpace profile, which may help explain why so many offenders felt comfortable providing it. But MySpace's search engine lets you search by name, and restrict the results to within five miles of a particular ZIP code. That made it a natural match for the sex offender registry.
The MySpace scraper, myspacebot.pl, performs this search for every entry in `perps`, and loads the result into a table called `myspace`.
Link
See also: Wired News editor catches MySpace pedophile
Update: EPIC's Guilherme Roschke sez, "The code 'caught' lots of people, and it took human work to sort out who was a predator and who was not. "
In his latest paintblogging experiment, Coop created a neat time-lapse video from the still photos he shot while creating his latest artwork. I love watching a master in action. It makes creative work look magically effortless.