BLDGBlog's GM sez, "Ballardian.com just posted a conversation I recorded with them this past summer, about J.G. Ballard, corporate office parks, science fiction, sexual repression, the Taliban, David Cronenberg, the Paris riots, shopping malls, British fashion, right-wing militias, Rem Koolhaas, China Mieville, Max Barry, the US publishing industry, gated housing developments, Margaret Thatcher's son, Steven Spielberg, Sigmund Freud, Archigram, etc. etc. etc."

What I really mean is that, in any discussion of architecture, there are these inevitable holes through which you might glimpse something else, something supposedly outside the bounds of architecture entirely: gravity, say, because you’re calculating stress-loads, or plate tectonics as you design a building in an earthquake zone – Tokyo, Los Angeles, Istanbul. For that matter, you have to decide where to put the windows, and so the movement of the sun comes into play – and, thus, you’re talking about astronomy, and terrestrial rotation, solstices, the equinox, constellations. Soon you’ve got the climate, and topography, and even forestry and botany and global trade and labour law – etc. etc. Global economics. The list expands and expands until ‘everything in the fucking universe has something to do with architecture’. Good moods, bad moods; enclosure, frustration, claustrophobia, imprisonment. Freedom. The price of steel. Natural history. Military bases, oil derricks, mining camps. It’s all architectural.

Link (Thanks, GM!)

Image by Josh Hallett , who tells BoingBoing, "I took the photo before the polls opened, hence the 0 (zero) count on the display. I served as a precinct clerk in Florida and we had no issues with our equipment." (via 27Bstroke6)

Much information pouring out on the topic from many sources, in many precincts. I'll try to update this post as much as possible with pointers our readers send in.

Here are a few: BB reader Glyn says,

In New Jersey, a problem cropped up when the name of Democratic Senator Robert Menendez was automatically highlighted on some machines. That caused some two dozen voters to complain that the only way to de-select it was to press it again, which Republican Party officials said led to some people inadvertently voting for Menendez. Officials notified state authorities about the issue, suspecting a serious computer malfunction or an attempt to manipulate the vote. Link.

Josh Smith says,

In the Maryland area one of the voting area received their voting machines minus the power cords so voters are only able to vote on the battery power which is limited. Link.

Snip from NYT article "At Polls, Scattered Reports of Technical Bugs," Link:

Poll workers in Pittsburgh and parts of surrounding Allegheny County had trouble starting electronic machines today. Problems with printers and malfunctioning computers also cropped up, preventing at least some people from voting at 13 polling sites.

But no similar cluster of problems was reported elsewhere in Pennsylvania, so Barry Kaufmann, executive director of Common Cause/Pennsylvania, a voting rights group, said, “It sounds like there’s either not adequate training going on, or, in the worst-case scenario, a bad batch of computers.”

And 27Bstroke6 blog has an extensive post here: Link. Snip:

Columbus, Ohio's voting machines were so bad, they managed also to take down the county's phone system under the crush of calls that resulted.

Denver has wait times of up to two hours to vote, thanks to machines that are down and new voter identification rules.

Ohio Congresswoman Jean Schmidt couldn't get her ballot read by the optical scanner, while in the infamous Cuyahoga County, the AP reports that at least one voter says he was purged from the voting rolls, despite voting in the primaries.

MSNBC has the best roundup so far, but this is a story happening in every precinct in the country so it's hard to know exactly what's happening.

See also this related Slashdot thread: Link.

Dave "eecue" Bullock tells BoingBoing,

APEX Electronics is an amazing salvage yard in Sun Valley, and Dorkbot SoCal members took a trip there this weekend. I wrote about it and took a bunch of HDR photographs of the lucious piles of hot sexy scuttled scientific equipment. It reminds me of a similar place called The Black Hole, where I worked in high school.

Link. Wow, nice shots, Dave!

Reader comment: cavalaxis says,

APEX is truly a wonderland of junque. But there's always a catch, isn't there? Be aware that there are (typically large) items in their inventory that are only for rent, not for sale. This is especially vexing because these items are not marked as "For Rental Only" and indeed, the saleability of certain items seems to vary from sales clerk to sales clerk. i.e. If they think you love it too much, they'll only let you rent it. I always ask for a sales price with the expectation of hearing "Sorry, that's not for sale. But you can rent it..." The vagaries of living in LA, I suppose.

Link to USPTO filing dated October 26 (thanks Amit, via kottke)

Reader comment: Peter Rothman says,

I read the Flickr patent this morning and FWIW I don't think Flickr should be able to get a broad patent on "interestingness". There's a very large number of papers in the image processing and collaborative filtering areas that all define various notions of relevance, interestingness, salience, or novelty. A specific innovative technique might be patentable, but not the general idea of computing how interesting an image or media object is to a person or set of people.

These papers are not obscure, there are many of them, and they are well known to experts in the respective fields. I'd be happy to provide a lengthy prior art file to the patent librarian if they can't find it themselves. I am aware of papers that date back more than a decade in this area. I suspect that the Flickr folks are well aware of this actually and are just trying to get the broadest patent they can get.

FYI I am the chief scientist of a company applying image processing and facial recognition software in the field of bank fraud prevention. My views do not necessarily represent those of my employer however. Previously I was the CTO of Live365.com and the Director of Research and Development at MetaTools, two companies you might have heard of at least.

BoingBoing reader Marcelo Träsel says, "This news is causing a lot of fear among Brazilian Internet users. I've prepared a summary of the original article in Portuguese."

Article summary, translated by Marcelo:

The Brazilian Congress will vote this Thursday, November 8th, on a bill that forces every user and provider under its jurisdiction to identify every transaction.

Should it pass, every time a Brazilian user sends an email, talks in a chat or comments in a blog, he will be tracked either by the provider, either by a government agency.

Data like name, adress, telephone number and CPF, which is like the american Social Security Number, will be stored for at least three years.

Senator Eduardo Azeredo says the proposal aims at discouraging hackers and libel and stopping cybercrime. Reaction from the online community and Internet Providers against the bill has been strong. Some argue the identification threatens the right to privacy, while others criticize the costs of such data storage.

The Brazilian Association of Internet Providers foresees a migration of these enterprises to other countries, where such laws do not apply, causing offices to close down and the sacking of hundreds of workers.

Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, em português. (thanks also Rob and others)

Reader comment: Anonymous says,

First of all, the title "Brazil's congress wants to track Internet users" is inaccurate: only a few people in congress want this. Just like in the U.S., the fact that a bill is proposed doesn't mean it's widely supported. Second, it should be noted the President already declared to be against this bill a couple of days ago. And of course, as someone else said, there's still a long way for this to get approved. I personally don't think there is any chance that it will happen. Plus there's always the Supreme Court, in case it is found this bill is unconstitutional.

Helio Miguel says,

According to the link (it's in Portuguese, sorry), the Congress decided, yesterday night, to suspend the voting of the project. As a lawyer in Brazil, I think it's important to clear some points about it:

(1) the voting that was supposed to happen today was not a final one. If the bill passed, it would pass just through a Senate's comission, and then it should still be voted by all the Senate; (

2) if the bill were approved by the Senate, it should still be voted by the brazilian equivalent of the House of Representatives;

(3) if they finally approved it, it goes to the president, that can still choose to sign it or not.

So there is still a long path for the bill to take, before it becomes official. Not that this makes the issue less important, but at least people should know that we have yet plenty of time to discuss it here in Brazil.

Marcelo Träsel says,

Here's a link for the government's decision to postpone the appreciation of the bill which permitted the tracking of brazilian Internet users. The reason was a queue of other proposals. By force of law, these had to be voted before the one regarding cybercrime. The bill will be voted in two weeks - so, I guess we're still not safe.

Anonymous sez

Here's an amusing comic (in Portuguese, with broken Google translation) explaining how posting on the Internet would work once the recently proposed legislation to make identification mandatory got effective.

Update: BB reader Pedro Pinheiro in Portugal offers a "non-machine translation" of the comic here: Link.

The new Internet

How to post a comment on Senator's Eduardo Azeredo (PSDB-MG) new brazilian Internet

1. Go to a stationery store, and buy the Standard Form for Internet Content Upload [store sign reads "stationery store"]

2. Fill the form in triplicate, stating your name, address, RG, CPF, the site to which you want to upload the content and the comment that you want posted online. Don't forget to sign it.

3. Go to a public notary and have your signature notarized, plus notarized copies of your RG, CPF, and birth certificate. [building's sign reads "notary"]

4. Go to the new Internet government control agency. [arrow reads "single line"]

5. Ask a friendly civil servant to stamp your form. He'll ask for your RG, CFG, voter's registration, working permit, criminal background check, driver's license, a proof of address, military discharge papers, plus some other document that you forgot to bring and that nothing can be done without.

6. Return the next day with that document. Don't pay much attention to the fact that they don't ask for it this time.

7. Go to the post office and mail the stamped form through registered mail, to the site's owner.

8. After two weeks, visit the site and check if your highly intelectual and original post has been accepted. [post reads "http://nerds.gutter.org / Micro$oft sux! / Lula (Brazil's president) is a drunk!]

9. Celebrate your Internet now free of orkut [social networking site] predators! [sign reads "Public Federal Department"]

Christopher Campbell at Cinematical writes,

It is no surprise that someone is planning a documentary about the Abu Ghraib scandal; there will probably be a few. Already there is Robert Greenwald's latest, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, which deals with one aspect of the prisoner abuse, and the PBS series Frontline has included the incident in its recent episode titled "The Lost Year in Iraq". However, there's a good chance that no others are or will be as good as the one Errol Morris is set to make. The project was announced Sunday by Diane Weyermann of Participant Productions (An Inconvenient Truth) during the American Film Market.

Link (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

For today's edition of the NPR News program Day to Day, I filed a report about new "emotion detection" software that could help companies detect when their call center torture victims phone customers are shrieking in agony not happy.

Israel-based tech firm NICE Systems has developed software that records calls and "listens" for emotional signals that the call is going badly. Using algorithms, the system evaluates volume, pitch change, and trigger words like -- oh, say...

"Cancel the account. Cancel the account. Cancel the account. CANCEL THE ACCOUNT. CANCEL THE ACCOUNT. CANCEL THE ACCOUNT. FOR GOD'S SAKE JUST CANCEL THE FUCKING ACCOUNT." (about that)

The technology could be valuable to large companies that rely on call centers, explained NICE Systems' Robin Schaffer, because it can help them spot problems in customer support and improve their service.

Link to archived audio (3:35, in Real or Windows Media). Link to NPR "Xeni Tech" segment archives.

Image: Link to full-size. Screengrab from the NICE Systems "Perform" application. (thanks, Scott Alexander!)

Reader comment: Anonymous says,

I worked at a research company a few years ago that an Isreal-based firm was trying to get to test out their voice-based lie detector for use in criminal justice, so I got a first hand view of it. The examples used were interviews with famous criminals (OJ, Martha Stewart, etc) and the results (percentages of a list of a huge amount of emotions, among them fear, hunger, joy, sexual appetite, etc, all from one voice!) were so vague and quick changing that they could be interpreted to mean anything. It would have been a sad day if a device like that was used for law enforcement. The traditional lie detector is many times over more reliable but even that can barely be relied upon.

So just so you know, since this looks like the same software I saw but with a friendlier skin (literally - same layout with happy graphics instead of serious police-enforcement graphics), nobody has found any correlation between everyones voice and a particular emotion. Although one person might do something consistantly with his/her voice with a particular emotion there hasn't been found ANY rule that could work for a handful of people let alone all of humanity. They will make some money off this since it seems like it could totally be possible, but really it's nothing.

Kristan sez, "I was coming into Birmingham on transit to Singapore from Palma when I was stopped by a customs officer. I was wearing a stripy jumper with the shape of a pink gun sewn on to the front.

"The customs officer stopped me to let me know that if I was leaving the country through Birmingham then he was going to have to arrest me because I had a gun on my jumper. I know it isn’t best to argue with these sort of people but I had to question whether he had confused a pink fabric gun shape stuck on a jumper to that of a real gun. His answer – Some people wore t-shirts which had photo’s of guns in holsters or positioned to look as though they were guns sticking out of trousers (as it happened I had one of these in my bag. I wonder if I could have been done for concealing a t-shirt?

"But for me that argument didn’t stand well as I wasn’t wearing a life like looking image of a gun. When I posed this to him he changed his tune a bit and explained that the reason he wanted to arrest me was due to the fact that wearing the fabric shape of a gun on my jumper was offensive."

Ajit says, "I am gathering relevant videos concerning the mid-term elections at ticklebooth.com. Already on the list, voter intimidation in Virgina. Congresswoman Schmidt unable to vote on machines she approved." Link

Man of La Muncha says,

2600: The Hacker Quarterly is asking hacker voters to inspect their voting machines for something "the average person might miss." While a group of hackers has an interest in circumventing security, they also will share their findings and provide a valuable resource in keeping elections transparent.

'As part of our continuing look at the technology behind voting machines, we'd like to ask each of you who goes to the polls to spend an extra minute or two behind the curtain to thoroughly check out the machine you're using. We'll be accepting calls Wednesday evening on "Off The Hook" at +1 212 209 2900 between 7 and 8 pm ET for you to give us your observations. We'd like you to look for such things as the exact model of the machine you're using, anything that looks odd or out of place, confusing or misleading directions or buttons, unused areas, potential ways of resetting the machine, and so on. In other words, we would like the hacker perspective on the voting machine you encounter.'

Link.

Image: BoingBoing reader David says,

Here is a picture from inside a voting booth in New Haven, CT. I know we're supposed to be voting against the Republicans if we want to help the rebels storm the death star, but I don't really like my Democrats that much, either. After all, they're all politicians. Plus, they wouldn't let me register as a member of the Freak Power party, thus evaporating my faith in the system. So, this is my protest. It isn't loud, it isn't obscene, but it's about all I have to say.

Reader commment: You™ says,

Per Scott Adams (Link), here's an example of how you too can subtly protest suspect electronic vote machines with correction fluid and a Sharpie marker: Image Link.

It's why we vote. George Michael "involuntarily" provides the soundtrack for this montage of images from recent years in America: Link to "Freedom," by anonymous. Update: here's a better-quality version: Link. When you finish dancing in your cubicle, get out there and cast your ballot. (Thanks, Wayne Correia and John Parres)

Reader comment: Christopher K. Davis says,

Wham! had a song called "Freedom" on the album "Make It Big" (1984): Link. The video for that song was filmed during their visit to China. George Michael, formerly of Wham!, also had a song called "Freedom" on his album "Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1" (1990). This is often called "Freedom 90" to distinguish it from Wham's. The video for that song featured supermodel lip-syncing and the demolition of the jukebox that had appeared in one of his earlier videos (and the immolation of both his guitar and his leather jacket). The song used for this video is, in fact, "Freedom 90": Link.

Jim Klab has compiled a long list of palindromes, most of which I've never read before.

Dog sex at noon taxes God.
Eva, can I stab bats in a cave?
Flesh! Saw I Mimi wash self!
Is Don Adams mad? (A nod.) Si!
Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak.
Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.

Link (Via Presurfer)

For the past month or so Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has been publishing a series of podcast interviews with Getting Things Done author David Allen. They are all fantastic -- each one has contained at least one mind-rebooting thunderbolt of enlightenment.

Merlin just uploaded episode 6, which is about interruptions, and why you shouldn't consider all interruptions to be a bad thing. Link

Hanan Levin of growabrain says The Red Balloon (1956) is one of the first movies he ever saw. I think it's one of the first movies I ever saw, too. It's been close to 40 years since I've seen it and I'm surprised how familiar it seems. The entire film is available on YouTube.

According to The World of Kane the director, Albert Lamorisse, also invented the board game Risk. Link

The latest issue of MAKE is about to hit the stands, and this time the theme is toys and games. It includes a secret history of Myst, written by Myst co-creator Robyn Miller, a how-to on resurrecting a neglected pinball machine, making an asteroid mining colony on your kitchen table, creating robotic desk toys, building a rubber band ornithopter, making a toy gun controlled alarm clock, making a small batch coffee roaster, a special primer on mold making by Mythbuster's Adam Savage, and a great deal more.

Over on the Make blog, we have a podcast of a visit to the Lucky Ju Ju Pinball Arcadium in Alameda, California.

Order Make Vol 8 on Amazon

This experiment alone was worth the entire cost of the space program. Link (Via growabrain)

Reader comment:

Michael says: I love the Jack Skellington cameo towards the end of the video, here's a screen cap.

I'm having my first gallery exhibit this Friday at Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle. The name of the show is “Retrorama!” and it features nine of my paintings and the work of several other artists that I have long admired. If you are around on Friday from 6-9pm for the opening (with music by DJ Vodka Twist) please stop by and say hi. The show runs through Dec 1st.

If you would like to buy a painting, please contact the gallery owner, Kirsten Anderson at (206) 374-8977 or by email.

Roq La Rue 2312 2nd Ave Seattle WA 98121

(Click on image for enlargement)

"Stumpdance"
Acrylic on canvas
20" x 16"
SOLD
See all my paintings at the Roq La Rue online gallery.

Roq La Rue is very pleased to present a show of work by artists who are influenced by retro animation and design, yet put their own unique spin on it, creating vibrant, playful work.

Mark Frauenfelder unveils a new series of effervescent paintings done in a storybook style mixed with a dash of children’s manga and secret arcane symbolism. Known mainly for his writing and the founding of his uber-popular blog (and former zine) Boing Boing as well as being the editor of Make magazine, Mark is also an accomplished illustrator. This is his first gallery exhibit.

Wednesday Kirwan creates gouache paintings that evoke fairytale themes. For this exhibit she has created a series of paintings depicting mermaid type creatures, as alluringly sweet and strangely eerie as her subject matter has been described to be.

Lynne Nailor and partner Chris Reccardi both come from the animation industry. Lynne designing for “Ren and Stimpy”, “Samurai Jack”,” and “Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go!”. Her paintings usually features angular yet voluptuous pin up style gals done in a Barbarella meets Beatnik aesthetic.

Chris Reccardi also hails from “Ren and Stimpy” (as a storyboard artist, animator, writer, director, and composer and performer of the show’s opening theme music!) as apprenticing under such legends as Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi. He also worked on “Powerpuff Girls”, “Samurai Jack”, and Rob Zombie’s upcoming “Haunted World of El Superbeasto.” His work is similar to Lynne’s, mixing a jazzy mod look with retro sci fi style.

Both Lynne and Chris have been working on co-producing and directing their original pilot for Nickelodeon, “The Modifyers”, due for completion in January 2007, but were ready to drop some fantastic paintings off for their Roq la Rue exhibit.

Johnny Yanok mixes current pop culture?with a 60’s Little Golden Book type style. His paintings usually are narrative and humorous and feature an array of characters in each piece.

Link

Award winning gonzo sf writer Paul "Steampunk Trilogy" di Filippo is the improbable author of an improbably rollicking new movie tie-in novel, Creature From the Black Lagoon: Time's Black Lagoon.

This is evidently part of a larger series of classic monster movie tie-ins called "Universal Studios Monsters." At a recent sf convention, I found a number of writers intrigued by the idea of having a romp in a classic monster movie, and it's clear that di Filippo was more than up to the task.

Creature From the Black Lagoon won't win any prizes for advancing the state of literary sf, but it is undoubtedly a Paul di Filippo novel, which means that it is funny, deeply weird, and action-packed. Di Filippo's story starts on a Rhode Island university campus in 2015, where a young biologist finds himself working with the department's mad old tenured prof -- who turns out to have been the junior scientist on the ground during the vivisection of the original Creature From the Black Lagoon, discovered in the 1950s.

In the tradition of the great sf adventure story, our biologist just happens to have a boyhood chum who has just built the world's first functional time machine (out of an nth-generation iPod, no less!) and the rest is basically inevitable -- the title, after all, is "Time's Black Lagoon."

Di Filippo manages to cram every great tradition of the science fiction adventure novel into this one, giving it the feel of one of his baroque masterpieces, like Ribofunk. It may not have the heft of classic di Filippo, but it surely has the style.

If you're looking for a fun little paperback to take you away from your life for a couple hours, you need look no further. Link

Update: Bbum sez, "Creature from the Black Lagoon is also considered to be one of the best early 1990s pinball machines ever made. Beautiful machine. Totally captured that campy '50s/'60s horror flick feel, including a swamp monster hologram below the playfield that glowed green and moved."

From Warren Ellis's BAD SIGNAL mailing list: "Karl Rove is not Aleister Crowley, Severus Snape, Darth Vader or Satan. You can kill him by ensuring your vote is counted and being vigilant at your polling station."

The Australian Institute of Criminology analyzed the music and software piracy loss-figures for the the Attorney General, and drafted a report that found them to be errant nonsense

The report calls the losses cited by software and music industry lobbyists "self-serving hyperbole," "epistemologically unreliable," and "absurd." The Institute of Criminology promises to tone down the language in the final report. You can feel the outrage of some poor economist who found herself going down the rabbit-hole as she analyzed the phony-baloney numbers these giant corporations use to argue for new laws to line their pockets.

Many copyright holders claimed links between piracy and organised crime, but AIC researcher had found nothing to support that view.

"Either there is no evidence of any links between piracy and organised crime or it is simply beyond the capacity of rights holders to identify these links," he wrote, adding that he was concerned about the way piracy figures were being used.

"It is inappropriate for courts and policy makers to accept at face value currently unsubstantiated statistics.

"Either these statistics must be withdrawn or the purveyors of these statistics must supply valid and transparent substantiation."

Link (via /.)

Technorati founder David Sifry continues his excellent quarterly reports on the "State of the Blogosphere" -- a statistical roundup of the blogs seen through the lens of Technorati's gigantic blog-scraper. Here's the big picture:

* Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.
* Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
* Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.
* About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
* About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
* There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.
* The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
* Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times. Link

(Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Technorati advisory board)