First blogged on BoingBoing here in 2004.

* A voice translation gadget for troops in Iraq. Background: See this previous BB post.

* Pros and cons of fingerprint scanners and other biometric authentication devices for home and enterprise computer users. Background: see this Bruce Schneier essay.

* Second Life. I fall off a virtual cliff and lose both legs (which grow back), then shop for goth miniskirts, then we teleport to Tibet.

The show airs a bunch of times, here's the schedule (I think, but check local listings):

Saturday, December 16th: 6am, 3pm

Saturday, December 23rd: 7pm, 11pm

Sunday, December 24th: 2am, 6am, 2pm, 7pm, 11pm, 2am

Bruce is missing a key point in fingerprint reader security: yes, one can steal your fingerprint, but the question is which one of the 10 fingers you are using? 9 of them can still give you access to the database/open doors / start your car / etc., but at the same time could trigger a silent alarm to the security center / 911 / etc that either someone has stolen your finger prints, or they've cut your fingers, or they are forcing you against your will. So, in other words, there's always more than one way to approach a problem ;)

In the photo, a dead horse lies in the street, roped off with string tied to stakes in the dirt road. A man in a top hat, bow tie and jacket sits on top of the horse, and people in the background are standing still, looking toward the camera.

"I always just assumed it was taken as a joke or something like that," said Bill Wangemann, Sheboygan city historian. "I was never able to find out anything about it. What the story behind that (picture) is, I don't have the foggiest notion."

SOLD OUT! Thanks to everyone for ordering these! I hope to sell a new design soon. -- Mark

Everyone starts the game as an Empire, with a couple of free villages and they can settle anywhere in the world. Although peaceful (we had to ban fighting in the first round) the 'politics' of the game already start to form, depending on what oil is discovered and how 'aggressive' the initial settlement choice is.

Send secret messages; fund terrorism; make deals; renege on deals; wage war; expand your empire; forge secret alliances; fund regime changes; kidnap politicians; be the terrorists

Empires then spread over the planet grabbing all available land, searching for the best oil and the most strategic borders. Some go for towns and cities, other spend their cash on extra empire cards, building up their political options. Maybe, if they're lucky, they'll get an early nuke.

Bibliodyssey, a site devoted to rare old books and materia obscura, is one of my favorite blogs. Each page-load is like a peek into the most treasured recesses of an eccentric book-hoarder's stash. I have a tiny attention span and an aversion to collecting too many objects, so for me it's a dream come true. Here's a snip from today's entry, "La Très Sainte Trinosophie," which includes some pages of cool old magic code I don't understand:

The 'Cosmic Master of the Age of Aquarius' and mysterious adept, the Count de Saint-Germain, allegedly died in 1784. He was a spy, virtuoso violinist, diplomat, friend at the Court of Louis XV, adventurer and was said to be able to transform iron into gold. A veritable procession of people have claimed to be the still living Count de Saint-Germain since 1784.

"During the centuries after his death, numerous myths, legends and speculations have surfaced. He has been attributed with occult practices like snake charming and ventriloquism. There are stories about an affair between him and Madame de Pompadour. Other legends report that he was immortal, the Wandering Jew, an alchemist with the elixir of life, a Rosicrucian or an ousted king, a bastard of Queen Maria Anna of Spain, that he prophesied the French Revolution. Casanova called him the violinist Catlini. Count Cagliostro was rumored to be his pupil."

Either the Count de Saint-Germain or Cagliostro is considered to be the author of 'La Très Sainte Trinosophie' (The Most Holy Three-fold Wisdom), from the latter half of the 18th century. It has been called "the rarest of occult manuscripts"¹ and the only surviving copy is owned by the library in Troyes, France.

Reader comment: Neil says,

It's worth pointing out that de Saint-Germain appears prominently in Neal Stephenson's lovely "Quicksilver".

If Saint-Germain sightings are of interest, it's also worth noting that he's all over Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum."

Link 1, Link 2.

"The Ravezooka is a musical weapon that shoots powerful "hardcore" sounds based on your target's distance from the instrument. Squeezing the trigger handle initiates sound and a beam of light. As the user moves the Ravezooka around, the frequency range being played changes based on the distance of the person or object in front of the instrument. The closer the target, the lower the frequency range."

Link to wwmna blog entry.

The Ravezooka was created by Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis and Lesley Flanigan. Here's their project page, and you can hear it in action at New York University's Winter Interactive Telecommunications Program show on December 17 and 18.

Shay says,

I've recently found and scanned some pages from a 168-pages, 24 years old DEC sales booklet. Some of the photos are just hilarious, and some of the features touted (teleconferences, no-screws HD installation) are still being used to sell PCs today.

Columbus, Ohio police just spent about $120,000 in federal homeland security grant money to buy 40 cellular-enabled fingerprint scanners which will allow officers to run a fingerprint of a suspect against 250,000 prints in the city's fingerprint database, according to the Associated Press. The department says the Rapid Identification Terminal (wi-fi enabled!) will cut down on crime since officers will no longer have to route a suspected criminal to the central office, where fingerprinting can take up to an hour. This doesn't replace that procedure but let's officers find out if the person they've stopped has outstanding warrants or may be lying about his or her identity.

"One day I found a dead intact beetle. I then located an old wristwatch, thinking of how the beetle also operated and looked like a little mechanical device and so decided to combine the two. After some time dissecting the beetle and outfitting it with watch parts and gears, I had a convincing little cybernetic sculpture. I soon made many more with other found insects and have been exploring and developing the theme ever since."

Link (Thanks, Sass)

Carla Sinclair (Craft) and Phil Torrone (Make) were among the judges. At left, Julie Jackson's winning homage to Stephen Colbert and his word of the year, truthiness.

Reader comment: Julie Jackson, creator of the winning entry, shares news of how the pint-sized Stephen is celebrating the NPR Craft Contest win. "He and his little 'elf friends' won't shut up about it." Link

The work of several Star Wars veterans (including VFX supervisor John Knoll) is being showcased in a special website just launched to explore the mind-blowing visual effects of this past summer's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest." Interactive clips at this new site allow you to peel back layers of animation to see what ILM had to start with before transforming actors wearing tracking markers into astonishingly real characters.

More: monkey cooking latkes, hannukah celebration, christmas stuff, and... hmmmm... a visit with the truthiness elf, winner of the NPR holiday crafts contest.

A board-gaming colleague of mine created, played, and I beleive subsequently ate, a full gingerbread version of the popular, and oft-expanded tile-laying game "Carcassonne". She has published the details including how long it took and llinks to lots of photos...the little gingerbread "meeples" are the best!

Jon Power points to more coverage on boardgamegeek and says,

Boardgamegeek.com is the centre of the board game universe and a few minutes on there will convert almost everybody away from horrid Monopoly and back into fun games like Carc. My club in York is called Beyond Monopoly!, we'll be meeting tomorrow to play German games all day. German style board games are the future. We go to Essen each year to join 150,000 boardgamers at the biggest show in the world. 4 days of board games in massive exhibition halls, it's unbelievable.

Guillermo Fariñas, "El coco", head of the independent news agency Cubanacán Press, began a hunger strike in February 2006 to demand the right for all Cubans to have access to a "free Internet". The authorities hospitalised him and put him on a drip to try to end his campaign, which was widely covered in the international media.

After he had spent several months in intensive care suffering from kidney and heart problems, the authorities told Guillermo Fariñas he could have "limited" access to the Internet. He refused, explaining that he could not honourably exercise his profession as a journalist by looking only at news and information which had been filtered by the government.

"El coco" only ended his hunger strike on 31 August after a brush with death and the loss of 15 kilos. He is continuing his work at Cubanacán and has become one of the leading voices among Cuban opposition journalists. He also still keeps the foreign media up to date with human rights violations in his country and in particular passes on information about intimidation and harassment of independent reporters. Cubanacán, founded in 2003, is the leading news agency of the new generation of Cuban journalists. None of its 17 reporters has the right to use the Internet or fax to send articles abroad. Their reports are mostly filed from public telephones. Since telecommunications charges are very high, the calls are mostly placed by collect.

Habib Saleh. Syria President Bashar al-Assad has made Syria into one of the worst ‘black holes’ in the Internet. He has set up systematic filtering of online opposition publications and sent his political police to mercilessly track down dissidents and independent journalists expressing themselves online. Writer and businessman Habib Saleh, 59, has paid the price of this systematic repression. On 29 May 2005, he was arrested at his office in Tartus, 130 kilometres north of Damascus. He was sentenced to three years in prison at the end of an unfair trial at which he was accused of “spreading lies” on the Internet.

Yang Zili, China. Computer technician Yang Zili was sentenced on 28 May 2003 to eight years in prison for “subversion”. His “crime” was to post articles on his website lib.126.com, "the garden of Yang Zili’s ideas", in which he wrote about his support for political liberalism, criticised the crackdown on the spiritual movement Falungong and condemned the economic woes of China’s peasants.

Apple France and French ISP Orange are hooking up to provide French consumers with a rented MacBook and 1 Mbps DSL for €60 ($79.50) a month. That works out to about €2 a day. (You can upgrade to 8 Mbps DSL for an additional €5 per month.)

The catch is that you have to sign up for three years, but that includes three years of Apple Care.

Louis-Pierre Wenes, executive director of France Telecom’s domestic operations compared this deal to getting a €150 rebate on the price of a MacBook (€1099) plus an additional two years of AppleCare (€319) — in that €35 that pays for the computer x 36 months = €1260. However, M. Wenes didn’t explain what happens at the end of the three-year deal. (There also appears to be a rent-to-buy option, but it’s unclear how that works out.)

This is a story about a massive duck passing (at least 2000 have kicked the bucket so far) in Idaho. Experts aren't sure what is causing the die-off, but they are pretty sure that this is not H5N1. Their theory? Probably a bacteria. However, the main reason I submit the link? On page two of the story is the following text: "...They said it was unclear why a similar outbreak had never before occurred in Idaho. SIMILAR EVENT IN IOWA LAST YEAR. On Wednesday, officials outfitted with protective gear were gathering hundreds of mallard carcasses..."

Reader comment: Neil says,

CNN is reporting that the mallard die-off was caused by fungus growing on moldy grain like the earlier Iowa incident.

Seeing as everybody is full of christmas cheer, glee and misery, i thought i'd add to that. I've put together 2400 christmas tracks into one 75 minute mix. 8 seconds of each song is spliced onto one of four tracks, with each track filtered according to frequency. It's not easy listening, and a friend of mine actually copied it because "i already feel like shit, so maybe with this i'll come out on the other side". (paraphrasing a bit here).

Shamelessly self-promoting bonus links: The BoingBoing t-shirt store, and the BB Digital Emporium.

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

The researchers studied six of his relatives, aged between 4 and 14 years. All had suffered many cuts and bruises, and injuries to lips and tongue caused by biting themselves; several had fractured bones without noticing.

This shows the importance of pain for our health and survival, notes Geoffrey Woods of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, UK, who led the study. "Pain is there for a jolly good reason — it stops us damaging ourselves," he says. For example, the pain from a broken arm or sprained ankle encourages us to rest that body part while it recovers.

The children in the study had no such safety check, causing them to be both graceless and reckless. "One girl was continually knocked down in the playground and just didn't mind at all," Woods says...

The SCN9A gene encodes a 'sodium channel': one of the structures that allows electrical charge to flow into nerve cells, triggering a signal, the researchers explain. Without this particular type of sodium channel, the brain does not receive any signal that the body has encountered a pain-causing stimulus.

Of course, the rest of the gang will still be here. If you want to submit a Boing Boing suggestion, use the form. I just delete Boing Boing suggestions I get by email, anyway, so this is always the right thing to do, no exceptions, ever, period.

If you want to talk to someone about doing business with Boing Boing, visit FM Publishing.

If you're looking to talk to someone about licensing some of my stories or novels, or commissioning a speech, article or whatnot, contact my agent, Russell Galen.

Have a great holiday, everyone! See you in 07!

Cory

(Photo "Fornino" from Flickr user Slice)

Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers” while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems” with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life” (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.” Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this link!)

Psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley wrote The Mask of Sanity (1941, Mosby), a classic textbook on psychopathy. Cleckley portrayed psychopaths as superficially charming, intelligent people who don't feel deep emotions and lie about almost everything because they neither understand nor care about others...

Although psychiatrists don't currently label psychopathy as a formal personality disorder, a wave of new research has yielded insights into how psychopaths think and suggested biological and temperamental roots of this condition.

These findings have not only sparked debate among researchers but also attracted widespread interest among lawyers and judges. Courts in the United States and other countries increasingly rely on psychopathy measures to make sentencing judgments. New studies suggest that being labeled a psychopath increases the likelihood that an offender will be locked up indefinitely or even executed.

For decades, the navy has used dolphins and sea lions to patrol harbors, salvage expensive hardware, and locate potential sea mines. Indeed, mounting chemical, auditory, or visual sensors on a shark is the easy part. The challenge is finding a way to steer sharks over long distances. Over millions of years, sharks have evolved to pursue one particular target of opportunity — lunch — and military commanders would need a way to override that instinct in order to dispatch their shark spies to areas of strategic interest...

The military has since made the research classified, and it is now run out of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. But Atema is seeking new funding sources to continue his work on sharks, with potential civilian applications in mind — such as tracking fish populations, changes in ocean temperatures, or chemical spills.

* Video: Market report. Quick walk through the mercado central in Antigua, Guatemala, shot on an Altoids-sized camera. Link to 1:11 video (in Flash or Quicktime).

* Travel haiku: homesick fading battery.

* United Fruit Company promotional video, 1950. Bizarre promo film produced by the United Fruit Company just four years before a CIA-backed coup protected that firm's interests in Guatemala by overthrowing democratically-elected leader Jacobo Arbenz. If the company's foreign policy ambitions had a name: Bananifest Destiny.

* Internet video on CIA role in 1954 coup. Various documentary clips found on YouTube, Google Video, and archive.org which relate to the 1954 US-backed coup. Guest cameo by Richard Nixon.

* Is "Apocalypto" Racist? The actual title of the essay was "Is 'Apocalypto' Pornography," but IMO that gives perfectly respectable porn a bad name. (via Tom Zeller/NYT/The Lede).

* Art in response to "femicides". Over 2,000 women were murdered in Guatemala from 2001 through March, 2006. More recent stats show that 600 women died in 2006 alone. While I was in Guatemala, I interviewed government officials and human rights workers about this -- thousands of women demonstrated in the capital one day. These crimes are often sexualized and extremely violent, with signs of rape, torture, mutilation or dismemberment. A Mexican-American artist in the Bay Area has launched an interactive art project in response.

* Vintage video about evil volcano near Antigua. Sensationalist '30s newsreel about indigenous people who live at the foot of the "volcano of water" near Antigua, Guatemala. It's strange to see this for three reasons: one, I woke up to this same volcano outside of my window every morning while I stayed in Antigua. Two, the smarmy narrator refers to Mayan people as "human mules," and in other offensive terms. Three, the scenes of daily life in this video don't look much different from life today in Guatemala's more rural communities.

Previous BoingBoing roundups from xeni.net/trek - Guatemala: Link. Videos: Link.

I instantly became a fan of his elegant, light-hearted, clear-as-a-bell drawings, and whenever I found old copy of PopSci at a garage sale or used book store, I'd tear through it until I found his two-page cartoon, which he started doing in the early 1950s.

A couple of years ago, I learned that Roy was still actively drawing, for magazines and books. I immediately emailed him and asked him to become the illustrator for MAKE magazine's puzzle page, called Aha! (in homage to another hero of mine, Martin Gardner, who wrote two books I treasure: Aha! Insight and Aha! Gotcha, now available in one volume). Roy was happy to oblige, and has illustrated the column ever since. I can't tell you how exciting it is to get the faxes with his rough sketches for the column. Of course, he needs no art direction; he knows exactly how to illustrate the puzzles.

Every year, Roy sends out whimsical Christmas cards, and this year's is a masterpiece -- a Mousetrap / Rube Goldberg-style holiday celebration machine. Link

Link. (Thanks, Carabassa)

Reader comment: Summer Smith says,

I bought an egg cuber as pictured from Sur La Table a year ago as a gift for a crazy friend. Looks like it's no longer available (at least it's not online), but here's a place from which you can have one shipped: Link.

To quote the friend: "I've found yet another way to categorize people - those who say 'Cool!' when they see a cubic hard-boiled egg, and those who say 'Uh, why?'. I'm glad to be in the former category, as are my friends. I've also learned that many of my co-workers are in the latter."

BTW, the MAKE magazine blog recently featured an Egg Cuber: Link.

Have an eggstraordinary day!

this is just an ebay auction for the 'kubikou' egg cuber you have posted.

square boiled egg? nah, try star/teddy bear/hello kitty boiled eggs. Technically, you can make boiled egg into any shape if you have the mold. Molded egg is quite normal in bento making world, cos it's cute! I'd think that square egg is pretty boring compared to those :D. Link

Not that common in the states, but my grandma used to have one and she used to tease me unmercifully about how I never understood how only she could get cubed eggs. "I get them from square chickens, and only my favorite gransdon is worth the trouble." (my Hungarian is rusty, but I think that's what I remember her saying.)

I'm sure someone else has mentioned the Gillygaloo, a legenday bird which laid cubical eggs -- and with good reason. As Jorge Luis Borges recalled in "The Book of Imaginary Beings":

The Gillygaloo nested on the slopes of Paul Bunyan's famed Pyramid Forty, laying square eggs to keep them from rolling down the steep incline and breaking. These eggs were coveted by lumberjacks, who hard-boiled them and used them as dice.

Link

This month's Journal of Applied Ecology reports that over-production of frankincense is having a deleterious affect on the viability of resin-producing trees in Eritrea.

Tapping frankincense causes the Boswellia trees to use up their carbohydrates replenishing their resin, instead of growing the flowers, fruits and seeds of their reproductive systems, according to Science Daily. The Christmas spirit herein forces natural selection, and the Boswellia forests may not be fit enough for the task.

A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there's a catch.

The being claims that he is able to predict what any human being will decide to do. If he predicted you would take only the closed box, then he placed a million dollars in it. But if he predicted you would take both boxes, he left the closed box empty. Furthermore, he has run this experiment with 999 people before, and has been right every time.

What do you do?

On the one hand, the evidence is fairly obvious that if you choose to take only the closed box you will get one million dollars, whereas if you take both boxes you get only a measly thousand. You'd be stupid to take both boxes.

On the other hand, at the time you make your decision, the closed box already is empty or else contains a million dollars. Either way, if you take both boxes you get a thousand dollars more than if you take the closed box only.

"And by the way, I did eat it," Lisko said. "It was tasty."

Reader comment: glamajamma says,

I am actually in Wisconsin and read about the 7-legged deer over lunch. I was very disappointed on the number of pictures on the subject, so I have been Googling like crazy for more pictures. This link is a more disturbing picture and the comments hints to the deer being a hermaphrodite. The following links may or not be deer deformities, they could just be good camera angles. Link 1, Link 2

Daniel Rubenstein says,

Here are more pictures of the mutated deer.

We are calling her Se-venison.

This is from the Fon Du Lac Reporter.

Look at the linked-to photos closely. In all but the official photos from the news story, it is clear that there are two deer in the photograph. In the first photo of the snowy woods, there is another deer behind the "six-legged" deer. You can see its tummy. In the second photograph of the field, the second deer is standing parallel to the first and its head is concealed, giving it the appearance of being "long." In the third photograph, the extra legs which appear to be attached to the deer are actually those of a baby deer's. Look at the location they are in, and this becomes more plausible than extra legs growing in that spot. Do not believe everything you see.

A group dedicated to photos of people playing the Nintendo Wii has been formed on Flickr, and the results are pretty hilarious.

Half of the fun with the Wii is watching others while they are playing the Wii. Many of the photos consist of what you might expect, young gamers in awkward poses -- laughing, making odd facial expressions, and having a lot of fun while making a total fool of themselves.

The surprise is the photos of people you wouldn't necessarily expect to see, like Michael T. Gilbert's photo of his dad playing Wii Sports Bowling [ shown here ]. They tell an entirely different story, and likely one Nintendo had hoped would come to fruition with the Wii.

However, a stallion that escaped from an Edmonton farm two weeks ago, may be part Quagga.

[Patricia] O’Neil bought Zebastian seven years ago at an auction near Innisfail, thinking he was a hybrid horse. When Zebastian fathered a foal, O’Neil said she sent his DNA for testing at the University of Phoenix. She said Zebastian has the DNA markers of a quagga zebra, a species that has been extinct for more than 100 years.

What: Creative Commons Turns Four!
When: Friday, December 15, 2006, 9pm-11pm
Where: The island of Kula (direct teleport here)

The party is actually a celebration of CC's 4th year in business, and along with Second Life, it's going to be held in San Francisco, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Portugal, and New York City. If you can make any of those, see this Creative Commons listing, for details on getting an invite.

While 65 percent of passwords contain eight characters or less, 17 percent are made up of six characters or less. The average password is eight characters long.

Specifically, the length distribution looks like this.

Yes, there's a 32-character password: "1ancheste 23nite41ancheste 23nite4." Other long passwords are "fool2think fool2thinkol 2think" and "dokitty17darling7g7darling7."

There have been no specific reports of people melting coins for the metal, Mint spokeswoman Becky Bailey says. But the agency has received a number of questions in recent months from the public about the legality of melting the coins, and officials have heard some anecdotal reports of companies considering selling the metal from pennies and nickels, she says.

Under the new rules, it is illegal to melt pennies and nickels. It is also illegal to export the coins for melting. Travelers may legally carry up to $5 in 1- and 5-cent coins out of the USA or ship $100 of the coins abroad "for legitimate coinage and numismatic purposes."

Link

As many know, the Haunted Mansions have gained some inspiration from real homes across the country. Walt Disney World and Tokyo Disneyland Mansions have some inspiration from the Harry Packer Mansion in Pennsylvania. Disneyland Paris' Phantom Manor draws some inspiration from the 4th Ward Schoolhouse (and possibly the Edward Hopper painting, House by the Railroad). Disneyland's Haunted Mansion has been know to have been inspired by the Evergreen House, which is now part of John Hopkins University. However, there was one photo in the WDI archives that proves to be more of an inspiration than the Evergreen House.

While this post is not intending to discredit the Evergreen house as an inspiration to the Disneyland Haunted Mansion, it is geared more towards what it inspired. The inside of the Evergreen House holds great similarity to the style of architecture found in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. In one case, a griffin even stands guard at the newell post of a stairwell...

Instead of sex-bots driving the industry, emotional companions for the aged and depressed may end up being the leading edge of the field of personal robotics. These would not be care-givers in the robot nurse sense; instead, they'd serve as recipients of care provided by the human partner, as it is increasingly clear that the tasks of taking care of someone else can be a way out of the depths of depression. In this scenario, the robot's needs would be appropriate to the capabilities of the human, and the robot may in some cases serve as a health monitoring system, able to alert medical or emergency response personnel if needed. In an interesting counter-point to Turkle's fear of humans building bonds with objects that can not understand pain and death, these robots may well develop abundant, detailed knowledge of their partner's health conditions.

Link to Google Patent Search beta. Instant favorite new timehole. Fascinating, and infinitely better than the USPTO website (all data comes from USPTO, and results on Google do include links to the USPTO entries). No foreign patents for now, it seems, just US. Doesn't work for me in Firefox 2.0 on Mac, but IE and Safari in many variations seem to work just fine, and Firefox on PC or earlier iterations of Firefox on Mac may as well. (via Chris on Wayne's List)

"I arrived to see a large python head peering out of the toilet bowl," (Phillips said.)

Phillips removed the snake from the septic tank because he said it had grown too big to be pulled straight out of the toilet. The mostly nocturnal Carpet Python had probably taken up temporary residence in the septic tank because it was a good place to hide during the day and hunt for frogs.

in the arm of the turntable there are 3 photo cells (light sensors) that are wired into the circuitry of the casio. the record on the player has three red leds mounted on it... when the leds pass under the photo cells, it causes a glitch in the keyboard, making some stange noises.

"There will be some spare time during our search," (Pettit says.) "We'll have tent days, days where the weather is so bad we have to stay in our Scott tents. From past history, this will probably happen one day a week. So what do you do when bad weather confines you to an 8 foot square tent whose basic design has not changed since 1920?”

"I plan to continue my Saturday Morning Science that I started on the space station four years ago. I have a microscope, a centrifuge, cameras and other gear for all kinds of scientific investigations.”

A selected list: Don plans to make a census of microbes in the upper layers of Antarctic ice. He's going to capture and photograph south-polar snowflakes and study their structure. He'll use his centrifuge to separate space dust from melted ice—and so on.

(Image: Steve Wall.)

Continuing in our one, two, oh, screw it, let's make it a three-part series of posts on BoingBoing's De Facto Bruce Sterling Day -- here's an excerpt from the latest edition of His Futuriness' Viridian Design newsletter. He points to an end-of-2006 essay by the "dazed, miserablist-apocalyptophile" John L. Petersen, founder of The Arlington Institute. Petersen's words are a fascinating read, but the ride's a heck of a lotmore fun with Sterling's thoughts interspersed in (((nested parentheses))). Snip:

The world has to act now on climate change or face devastating economic consequences. Sir Nicholas estimated that at most humanity has ten years before the shift is unrecoverable. (((What if it's already ten years too late? Or twenty years? Shouldn't we be giving this prospect a lot more serious thought? We're not averting anything much; there are daisies blooming in Moscow.)))

What's going on here? What does this all mean? (((Settle in, folks; he's about to let fly.)))

These are extraordinary statements about massive earth changes. Are they just random trends that happen to be coincidentally showing up at the same time, or perhaps they reflect some big, historic, underlying dynamic == maybe the world is about to experience a shift unlike anything ever seen before. (((You know what's worse than a futurist who over- promises? A futurist who over-delivers.))) There are reasons to believe the latter could be the case. Many sources, both conventional and unconventional, suggest that we are living in a special time == that between now and 2012 the world will undergo an epochal shift to a new era.

This rapid evolution will produce a world that operates in fundamentally different ways than it has in the past.(((For instance, it might well operate the way a 500-pound gorilla operates when it (a) has Ebola (b) is on fire and (c ) has recently converted to Islam.)))

For each challenge, you're given a budget to buy rope, cloth, metal bars, metal sheet, and other components. Then you have to assemble a structure and adjust the tension of the component so that it will successfully deliver a basketball rolled up armadillo to a circular blue portal. The challenges get harder as you progress. The game cost $20, but you can download a 10-level demo version for free. (It's for Windows only.) Link

Reader comment:

Michael says:

Armadillo Run seems to me to be a mixture between Alex Austin's Bridge Builder and Sierra's Incredible Machine. If you like the physics of the game and can deal with less Rube Goldberg, I strongly suggest the 2006 free version of Bridge Builder. I got it from www.crypticsea.com. There are prettier and more complex versions at www.chroniclogic.com. Then there is a whole community built around the Bridge Builder games at www.bridgebuilder-game.com. Thanks!

Your readers also might like to know that the game's website has a plethora of user-created scenarios, so if they decide to purchase the game they'll have a large quantity of challenging 3rd-party scenarios to choose from after they finish the built-in levels. They'll also have free access to the game's built-in scenario editor so they can create and share their own puzzles. I bought the game a few months ago and I still play it from time to time. There are some extremely challenging puzzles available for download.

Oh, and a minor correction: the "basketball" is actually intended to be a curled-up armadillo (hence the name of the game); although that's not exactly an important distinction.

"We launched an online marketplace today to help Berkeley students with great ideas for projects attract volunteers, mentors, money, and in-kind contributions. Berkeley students have compelling projects that, for example, expand access to safe drinking water, commercialize clean energy technologies, fight malaria, and provide healthcare to the uninsured.

The longer term goal is to create a replicable model for tapping the creativity, energy, and idealism of young people, particularly at research universities, to address the "grand challenges" of the 21st century.

Patrick Strange tells BoingBoing,

Constance is an independent publication out of New Orleans that collects the work of 40 artists that have returned to the city after Katrina and also of those who are still displaced. Edited by local graphic designer Erik Kiesewetter and editor/writer Patrick Strange, the book showcases artists' work with bios and contact info so that they can once again gain an audience that they might have lost due to the storm. We're really excited about it and the prospect that people out there will see that the New Orleans arts community is still here and making good work.

Update:

Here's another photo of the logo. It's from the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (GRU), or Main Intelligence Directorate. I badly need this on a T-shirt. In fact, the Russian government could probably pay off its deficit by selling clothing and accessories with this logo on it. The GRU could be the next Von Dutch! (Via Riding Sun)

Here's a screen grab in case the page is changed. (click thumbnail for enlargement.) Link

Friday we have Jason Brown lecturing on the connections between Gnosticism, memory palaces, text adventures, cybering, y2k and Roswell, all explained by the movie Tron. Saturday we have the triumphant return of the fry-b-q, this time featuring Joshua Bearman's first hand account of cuddling pandas in China.

Transitional Species: Autonomous Light Air Vessels (ALAVs) 2.0 are networked objects that communicate the concept of connectivity among people, objects, and the environment. Through the use of mobile technologies people can influence the behavior of the ALAVs by starting conversations and building closer relationships with them. ALAVs 2.0 reflects upon the current state of connectivity in our everyday lives. The potential of ALAVs 2.0 lies in its ability to captivate a wide audience and communicate the idea of people cohabiting a shared space with networked objects.

PLACE AND TIME:
Friday, December 15, 2007, 6 – 9 pm
Wind Tunnel South Campus
Art Center College of Design
950 S. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91105

BB pal John Schwartz, who covers space and science for the New York Times, just told me that NASA TV is about to show shuttle crew attempting to retract this solar array, which is the big Discovery mission story of the day.

The thing to watch for, 220 miles over earth? "The old silicone coating is probably dried out, so when they start retracting, it should snow. Orbital dandruff. The big question is whether they'll be able to get this device, which has been open for about 6 years, to fold up neatly into its box."

Link to NASA TV home page. Image: solar array, courtesy Lockheed Martin. NASA coverage here.

My live notes and screengrabs from NASA TV follow after the jump.

The bubble-era vision of a utopian Internet is dented and dirty. The Pew respondents seem to agree that personal privacy is a thing of the past, and they're split nearly 50-50 on whether the costs will outweigh the benefits. Technophobic refuseniks are likely to carry out violent resistance, and they may have good reason: Out-of-control technology is a distinct risk. The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders.

The future of the Internet lies not with institutions but with individuals. Low-cost connections will proliferate, encouraging creativity, collaboration, and telecommuting. The Net itself will recede into the background. If you're under 21, you likely don't care much about any supposed difference between virtual and actual, online and off. That's because the two realms are penetrating each other; Google Earth mingles with Google Maps, and daily life shows up on Flickr. Like the real world, the Net will be increasingly international and decreasingly reliant on English. It will be wrapped in a Chinese kung fu outfit, intoned in an Indian accent, oozing Brazilian sex appeal.

This isn't a 'centipede,' but it's an interesting primer on how to create, leverage and exploit one. It seems to be mostly about timing. You need to toss matches when the grass is dry and the wind is in your corner. As far as media exploitation goes, there's zero practical difference between a 'macaca moment' and a 'bimbo eruption.' What would be really useful at this point would be a primer on 'good damage control.' How do you kill a centipede?

At today's New Organizing Institute/Center for American Progress event, Jim Webb campaign manager Jessica Vanden Berg told a much more nuanced story about how the campaign took their opponent's mistake and ran with it as far as they could. Macaca didn't just happen; the Webb people MADE it happen.

S. R. Sidarth took the original footage of Allen taunting him in front of a crowd on August 11, a Friday. By that evening the senior campaign staff had heard the audio over the phone and realized that they had something that could be significant. After they actually saw the video, they knew they had a real gem — not only had Allen made comments with a racial edge, but he'd also bullied the Webb staffer in public.


But how to spread the word? According to Vanden Berg, they chose to post the video on YouTube because it was free (simple enough). But before they tossed it out for the public to see, they'd already pitched the story to a Washington Post reporter, who wrote about it online on Monday. Only after the Post story appeared and the issue had been properly framed did the Webb folks send an email to their supporter list and to friendly bloggers.

The fact that the video was on YouTube made it particularly easy to distribute, since bloggers could insert it directly into their pages, but it was the campaign's promotional work that spread the word. And as the story developed, they constantly worked reporters and bloggers behind the scenes to shape the public discussion.

In this final design, [Sylvester] Roper’s engine consisted of a small boiler over a coal firebox that was good for about 7 miles on each stoking. As the inventor liked to say, “It would climb any hill and outrun any horse.”

The Boston Daily Globe:

“The machine was cutting out a lively pace on the back stretch when the men seated near the training quarters noticed the bicycle was unsteady,” the paper said. “The forward wheel wobbled, and then suddenly, the cycle was deflected from its course and plunged off the track into the sand, throwing the rider and overturning.

“All rushed to the assistance of the inventor, who lay motionless beneath his wheel, but as soon as they touched him they perceived that life was extinct,” the paper added. “Dr. Welcott was summoned and after an examination gave the opinion that Mr. Roper was dead before the machine left the track.”

Reader comment:

Justin Harris says:

Lindsay Books sells a book that includes a reprint of the Roper steam motorcycle plans. A modern reader recreated the steamcycle from scratch:

"Bob Jorgensen of Memphis took "Motocycles 1899" and immediately fabricated the engine that Sylvester H Roper used on his steam motorcycle."

http://www.lindsaybks.com/gallery/Jorg/cycle/index.html

photos and video of the repro here: http://www.lindsaybks.com/gallery/Jorg/cycle/index3.html

Sadly, I believe that the latest Lindsey book catalog related that Mr. Jorgensen has died.

In this final design, [Sylvester] Roper’s engine consisted of a small boiler over a coal firebox that was good for about 7 miles on each stoking. As the inventor liked to say, “It would climb any hill and outrun any horse.”

The Boston Daily Globe:

“The machine was cutting out a lively pace on the back stretch when the men seated near the training quarters noticed the bicycle was unsteady,” the paper said. “The forward wheel wobbled, and then suddenly, the cycle was deflected from its course and plunged off the track into the sand, throwing the rider and overturning.

“All rushed to the assistance of the inventor, who lay motionless beneath his wheel, but as soon as they touched him they perceived that life was extinct,” the paper added. “Dr. Welcott was summoned and after an examination gave the opinion that Mr. Roper was dead before the machine left the track.”

My girlfriend recently heard an interview on Irish public radio about US Charity "Send a Piano to Havana", a charity setup to send pianos to Cuba to help musical children get access to pianos, another on the list of item prescribed by the US embargo. I had a piano that my daughter learned on, my sister prior prior to that, but which I can't play and is now surplus.

Anyway, they're chock full of donated pianos, but according to their website, seeking funds to build a piano tuning school in Cuba.

I have the normal European dislike of the economic embargo imposed on Cuba (and hence the rest of the world's ability to deal with Cuba) by the US. I'm pitch deaf but all my kids are musicians. I can't imagine them not being able to be themselves because the US said no one could sell guitars, drums or pianos to Ireland.

Check out the website. I particularly like this line: "The Office of Missile and Nuclear Technology gave final approval, under the sole condition that the pianos not be used for "torture or human rights abuse."

In related news, also in Cuba:

The U.S. military transferred the first group of detainees on Thursday to a new maximum-security prison at Guantanamo Bay designed to restrict contact among the prisoners and prevent attacks on guards. More than 40 detainees were brought to the $37 million prison perched on a plateau overlooking the Caribbean Sea from another maximum-security facility at the U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba, said Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand.

[The Pakistani judge] has moved the case of Rashid Rauf, a Briton, from an anti-terrorism court to a regular court, where he faces lesser charges such as forgery. Pakistan has presented Mr Rauf as one of the ringleaders behind the alleged plan to blow up flights out of London. The British authorities say they foiled it with Pakistan's help in August. They say proceedings against suspects arrested in Britain will go ahead.

The arrest of Rashid Rauf in Pakistan triggered arrests in the United Kingdom of a number of suspects allegedly plotting to blow up transatlantic flights. The Pakistani authorities described him as a key figure. But an anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi found no evidence that he had been involved in terrorist activities or that he belonged to a terrorist organisation. As well as forgery charges, Mr Rauf has also been charged with carrying explosives. But his lawyer says police evidence amounts only to bottles of hydrogen peroxide found in his possession.

From the Delaware News Journal:

An article in Sunday’s Local section on the estate sale of former Gov. Elbert Carvel quoted Olin Vanaman of Wilmington about his excitement in purchasing 35 of the governor’s decanters during the auction, including one used at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Vanaman said he used a slang term when describing Carvel as "a big boozer,” but he did not mean that the former governor was a heavy drinker. Vanaman refers to people who collect decanters as "boozers,” he explained, "the same as guys who collect cars are gear-heads.” No reference to drinking or the consumption of alcohol was intended in the article.

Livejournaler kitsch_nista has posted some low-res previews from a space-themed photo spread by Peter Lindbergh in this month's Harper's Bazaar. Link to "The Future of Fashion." You can buy the real thing here (or at meatspace newsstands): Link. (thanks, Susannah!)

TiVoToGo was originally released as a service accessed through the TiVo Desktop software — PC only. Files transfered from a Series2 TiVo unit are saved to the computer in a .tivo format. This .tivo file is actually an encrypted MPEG-2. While we quickly figured out how to remove TiVo’s gunk protection on Windows to free the MPEG, Mac and Linux users have been left out. Over the last year or so a dedicated group of hackers has been reverse engineering TiVo’s decryption mechanism which has now born fruit in the form of TiVo Decode. Utilizing your personal Media Access Key (MAK), TiVo Decode quickly removes TiVo’s protection as it converts the .tivo file to a .mpeg on multiple OSes without requiring any TiVo software.

Bonus links:

* hi! monkey!
* BoingBoing posts about monkeys

And in the news today:

British scientists have supported the use of primates in medical research to improve human health and reduce deaths from disease but only if no alternatives were available. Sir David Weatherall, lead author of a report on the use of non-human primates in research, said in some cases primates are essential to answer scientific questions because other animals such as mice and rats are too different from humans.

Others disagree:

[A]nimal welfare organisations condemned the 18-month inquiry as a "whitewash" and a wasted opportunity. They were especially critical of the absence of animal welfare representatives on the committee and its failure to consider the use of monkeys in drug tests. Each year about 3,300 monkeys are involved in scientific or medical research in the UK - about 0.1 per cent of all animals used.

(Ed. note: Monkey Day was earlier in December officially takes place tomorrow, December 14 -- but here at BoingBoing, every day is monkey day. Toss your poo with pride! Thanks Casey Sorrow)

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Reader comment: kurt place says,

while you are on the subject of monkey zen I have to recommend a site of great gaming (board gaming) called Pocket-monkey. it is a free java based site to play chess, backgammon, a battleship variation, and other great classic board games. Try it. Kurt aka stretchboy (my pocket-monkey moniker)

Ad-hoc charity group Valour-IT ("Voice-Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops") has donated more than 700 laptops loaded with voice-recognition software to US soldiers who've lost the ability to type due to lost limbs or severe hand/arm injuries. They expect to have delivered 850 or more by Christmas. A number of blogs authored by active duty military and vets worked together to raise awareness on the project. Mark Glaser at PBS Mediashift blog says,

It started last year when Army Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss injured both his hands and wanted to get back to blogging. His blog readers pitched in for Dragon Naturally Speaking software, and he and another blogger, FbL, put together Valour-IT and have raised more than $330,000 with two online Veteran's Day fundraisers fueled by milbloggers.

We made our goal [to raise] $24,000 for the 10 days leading up to Veteran's Day [in 2005]. To my utter shock, we raised $100,000. I thought, 'Holy cow, what did I get myself involved in?' The VA [Veterans Affairs] and Military Order of the Purple Heart heard about us and the Undersecretary of the VA invited us to come out to visit one of the trauma units and deliver the laptops there...This year, we raised almost $230,000 in the two weeks leading up to Veteran's Day. We've delivered almost 700 laptops now. I figured this time around, with more media connections, I decided to think big and shoot for $180,000 and we blew right through that to $230,000.

The psychological benefits of the laptops are just huge,” FbL said. “The medical people who work with the wounded soldiers say it has a big effect on their recovery. It’s motivational and keeps them in touch with the other soldiers who are still deployed, and it keeps them in touch with their families who might not be able to visit them. In Chuck’s case, he could do literally nothing for himself. He was a tank company commander in Iraq in charge of about 100 men. He went from that position to being in a hospital bed. It was just devastating for someone who was the big bad guy [in charge]. Now he could sit in his bed and talk to the laptop and do anything anyone else could do on a computer

Following up on yesterday's BB post about The Great Georgia Map Massacre of 2006, Dr. Paul J. Camp in the Physics department at Atlanta's Spelman College says:

I'm guessing that Due West, despite the college, was removed from the Georgia map because it is in South Carolina. Maps are funny that way. Mount Berry, on the other hand, is inexplicable as it is fully contained within Georgia and in turn contains the famous Berry College.

The full list of removed towns is here: Link.

I'm pleased to note that the town named for one of my ancestors, Laney, Georgia (mom's family), is not on the removal list. That may of course be because it was never on the map in the first place, being basically a ghost town encompassing parts of three roads and two farms. Satellite image here: Link.

There's something cool about being related to a ghost town.

I've been working on photographing every town on the Minnesota map, as well as from surrounding states/provinces: Link.

I've found that the state's map is definitely the most accurate, while online maps range from showing even the ghostliest of ghost towns (MSN Mappoint) to only showing towns large enough to have their own government (Google Maps).

Google has recently made improvements though, and while tiny towns are still often not searchable, they now show some hamlets at a deep zoom level.

One such town is Lockhart, Minnesota (Google Maps link), which I've photographed here: Link.

Following up on yesterday's BoingBoing post with home video/photos of this weekend's successful, nocturnal STS-116 liftoff, BB reader Zack says:

I thought you might also enjoy reading and seeing the experiences of a first time shuttle watcher -- me. Here's my livejournal entry about the night of the scrubbed launch: Link. And here's an image of the launch platform and its silhouette on the clouds above: Link.

One of those things you really have to see in high-res display, or printed out large-format on paper, to appreciate. Designer W. Bradford Paley has created an unusual set of 25" x 26" calendars for 2007, offered as free PDF download for personal use -- but you're really better off buying the professionally printed ones for $16/set. These are to wall calendars what Cory's "impractical geek watch" posts here are to regular ole wristwatches, though these do seem quite practical in a mindbent way. Snip from Paley's description:

It was designed to allow easy travel conflict spotting (since you can circle contiguous days with no weekend breaks), and to let people mark with one or two words the more important events during the year. It is printed on newsprint-like (though high-quality) stock, folded, and distributed in packages of three to help people feel comfortable using it as a scratch pad on which to plot their lives; inventing their own visual language as they go. (There is a topic on this Web site to which people can upload their visual inventions.)

The visual/cultural resonances with ancient native American calendars, mandalas, antique engravings of the solar system; the red weekends at the bright center and the wavy outer corona all have been turned to directly support the calendar’s use as a tool. It contextualizes every hour, even on a year’s time scale: if someone marks the calendar, then looks back in even as little as an hour, they will be able to see time’s inexorable march.

Update: Whups, looks like their server's inexorable march has been temporarily slowed by too many BoingBoing visitors. Check back later if you're timedout, vale la pena.

when the population exerted pressure on the party to abandon its anti-formalist stance and adopt a version of practical functionalism in design, the SED had to back off its anti-bauhaus line. ‘national in form, socialist in content’ was then the official party slogan for how to produce goods. plastics came to symbolize the practical, and valuable rather than the cheap and disposable. it was largely because of this that plastics came to be seen in the GDR by the majority of the population as a quality material and a sign of technological progress, not a cheap imitation. there was a general acceptance and even pride in the clever use of it to make socialism work even when resources were tight.

Update: Adam sez, "a buddy of mine in Brooklyn has been making custom figures for years for clients all over the U.S. They come in a unique, custom-made package also. At $599 a pop, they're not for everyone. For the person who has everything or who doesn't mind shelling out some cash for a totally one-of-a-kind personalized action figure."

"Process as Content"*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each interview as soon as you can get it processed by your flat-world transcription service in India? (This may sound ridiculous, but it's exactly what wire services such as the AP have long done--they update their stories with each new fragment of information). After you've woven together enough of the threads to have a semi-coherent draft, why not ask your readers to help edit it? (We did it here, and it worked great). And while you're at it, let them write the headlines and subheads, not just for the site but also the punchier ones for the RSS feed and the one that has to work with the art for the magazine.

Upside: Open participation can make stories better--better researched, better thought through and deeper. It also can crowdsource some of the work of the copy desk and editors. And once the story is done and published, the participants have a sense of collective ownership that encourages them to spread the word.

Risk: Curating the process can quickly hit diminishing returns. Writers end up feeling like a cruise director, constantly trying to get people to participate. And all the other risks of the item above.

"The iPaperCraft.com generator lets you choose your iPod, upload an image and viola! You've got a free Christmas gift for any hipster with an iPod." (The image I am using here is a Mary Blair illustration I found at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. See below for Mary Blair links. -- Mark) Link

Reader comment:

Stephen Worth says:

The Mary Blair picture you're using on your iPod cover is from the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. We've got lots of Mary Blair posts now, and I'm working on digitizing the New Golden Song Book in its entirety.

Little Verses Part One

Little Verses Part Two

Baby's House

New Golden Song Book Part One

New Golden Song Book Part Two

Link to entire set. Shown here, the many faces of Boomer. (thanks, Sean Bonner!!!)

See also John Schwartz' excellent coverage of the launch and mission at the NY Times -- here are one, two, three, four of a number of recent pieces he's filed.

In this study, the people taking the drug rated the hallucinogenic experience as "stressful" at some times but "psychologically and spiritually uplifting" - describing encounters with past lives, faraway planets, and communing with deities...

However Dr Paul Blenkiron, a consultant in adult psychiatry at Bootham Park Hospital, York, said: "I'm concerned that the study only measured effects up to 24 hours and OCD is a chronic condition, not measurable in hours and days, but months and years.

"About 12% of people can suffer flashbacks after less than 10 exposures [to psychedelics] many years later, beyond the six months of this study, so long term effects should be carefully assessed."

However, he added: "If this substance was effective and had fewer side effects in severe treatment-resistant case, it would be an option."

As previously reported on BB, the UK music industry signed up a bunch of now dead musicians on a public petition to extend copyright there. Now the Open Rights Group is attempting to compile the complete list of the dead artists whose names the Phonographic Performance Limited (the copyright body representing the record industry) took in vain. Look through their scans and see if your favorite deceased artists were clumsily reanimated by the undead industry. (Then sign ORG's anti-extension petition on Release The Music).

Phil Torrone, an editor at Make magazine, and Limor Fried, a former fellow at the tech-focused art studio Eyebeam R&D, are working together on Adafruit Laser Services, a new, by-appointment-only business in Manhattan that etches custom artwork onto customers' laptops, iPods, cell phones and other gadgets. (...)

"It feels like a tattoo, and now I feel like I need to get more," said Digg founder Kevin Rose, on whose Apple Computer MacBook Torrone etched Digg's logo at Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp conference earlier this year. "This is like a temporary tattoo (stickers) versus the permanent stuff."

They sell laser etching gift certificates online, and I can already think of someone on my Christmas list I'm gonna buy one for: Link. Note that the recipient (or a proxy) must appear in person in NYC with the item to be etched.

Image: a snapshot of Phil's first laser-etched beauty, from this BB post last year.

Reader comment: Daniel V. Klein reminds us that, "Etch-a-Mac has been doing this for a few years now."

Inveneo is a non-profit that brings information and communication technology to remote and rural ares in the developing world. We're holding a Thumb Drive Drive. Donate old USB thumb drives (16mb and larger) so that they can be provided to school labs in the countries where we operate including Uganda, Rwanda, and Mali. Low capacity thumb drives are the AOL floppies of the 2000s. We'd like to put them to good use. Donations are tax deductible.

Largest personal data breach ever at a US educational institution. BoingBoing reader Jonathan says,

I just got an email from UCLA, linking to the above site, in my inbox. Someone hacked and accessed their database which contained social security numbers. But it wasn't the student database -- I've never attended UCLA. It was their applications database -- I applied to their law school 3 years ago.

In what appears to be one of the largest computer security breaches ever at an American university, one or more hackers have gained access to a UCLA database containing personal information on about 800,000 of the university's current and former students, faculty and staff members, among others.

UCLA officials said the attack on a central campus database exposed records containing the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates -- the key elements of identity theft -- for at least some of those affected. The attempts to break into the database began in October 2005 and ended Nov. 21, when the suspicious activity was detected and blocked, the officials said.

The amount of personal data held by universities often make them a particularly juicy target for hackers. And lax network security — sometimes in place to facilitate communication across departments and schools and institutes, all linked under a rangy university system — can make them easy targets.

This is the second bit of bad news in roughly a month for U.C.L.A., which is still reeling from the disturbing, viral video of one of its students being tasered by campus officers in Powell Library. The school’s chancellor announced an independent investigation into the incident on Nov. 17.

See also:
DJ Riko's Christmas mix album
Whistler's Delight mashup mixes 22 whistling songs
Best mashups of 2005

San Francisco resident "Tremain Calm" shares this scan of a legally-obtained bag of medical marijuana, featuring the presumably illicit use of Homer Simpson's likeness. Although -- who knows? Perhaps Homer, too, is a card-carrying member of that club, which would explain in part the character's penchant for donuts. Link to larger size. Bag label reads: "TRAINWRECK. Contingent to California H&S Code 11362.5 For medical use only. Do not operate heavy machinery or drive. This means you, Nicole Richie."

Reader comment: Jesse Raub says,

It's probably a reference to a mid series episode where Homer gets his eyes pecked out by crows and gets prescribed medicinal marijuana - one of my favorite episodes. "They call 'em fingers, but I've never seen them fing. Oh! There they go." - Otto

Image: old-school asteroid vanquishment technology from Atari -- Link. These death rays were very powerful in 1976, but do not work as effectively on contemporary space matter, hence the contest.

Snip from announcement:

Apophis is a near-Earth object (NEO), which will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of our geostationary satellites. On that pass, the asteroid will be gravitationally perturbed to an unknown orbit, one that that may have the slim possibility of hitting Earth in 2036. Very precise tracking may be needed to determine the probability of such a collision. Such precise tracking may require "tagging" the asteroid, perhaps with a beacon -- a transponder or reflector -- or some other method. Exactly how an asteroid could best be tagged is not yet known, nor is it obvious, which is why The Planetary Society is holding a competition.

We've noticed that our RSS feed stats, provider by Feedburner, have been fluctuating quite a bit lately. We've heard two reasons for this - one, Yahoo's reporting to FeedBurner has been down, and MyYahooRSS makes up a large percentage of our RSS readership. But a second source of Boing Boing RSS readers has skyrocketed lately - from a company called Pageflakes. We frankly don't believe that nearly two million folks have decided to subscribe to Boing Boing via this relatively new service, and we suspect someone (or more specifically, somebot) is taking advantage of the service for some kind of spammy reasons. We're looking into it with the folks at FeedBurner and PageFlakes, and will report back once we know more.

Update: BB reader Casimir Couvillion says,

I have a clue as to why Pageflakes may be over representing in Boing Boing logs.

I used Pageflakes for a short time a while back. Pageflakes had an annoying bug that would replicate the Boing Boing RSS "flake" many times over between visits, if the duplicates were deleted, they would reappear at the next visit. I just checked and there are 84 copies on my page alone. I don't know why Boing Boing was susceptible to this bug while other feeds weren't. I never submitted it to them as a bug and it was about that time that Google started supporting multiple pages on their personalized home page and I stopped using Pageflakes altogether.

Over at Valleywag, Clay Shirky has a terrific, meaty rant debunking factually sloppy hype in recent press coverage of Second Life.

I suspect Second Life is largely a "Try Me" virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use. Pointcast was a Try Me virus, as was LambdaMOO, the experiment that Second Life most closely resembles.

I have been watching the press reaction to Second Life with increasing confusion. Breathless reports of an Immanent Shift in the Way We Live® do not seem to be accompanied by much skepticism. I may have been made immune to the current mania by ODing on an earlier belief in virtual worlds:

Similar to the way previous media dissolved social boundaries related to time and space, the latest computer-mediated communications media seem to dissolve boundaries of identity as well. [...] I know a respectable computer scientist who spends hours as an imaginary ensign aboard a virtual starship full of other real people around the world who pretend they are characters in a Star Trek adventure. I have three or four personae myself, in different virtual communities around the Net. I know a person who spends hours of his day as a fantasy character who resembles "a cross between Thorin Oakenshield and the Little Prince," and is an architect and educator and bit of a magician aboard an imaginary space colony: By day, David is an energy economist in Boulder, Colorado, father of three; at night, he's Spark of Cyberion City--a place where I'm known only as Pollenator.

This wasn't written about Second Life or any other 3D space, it was Howard Rheingold writing about MUDs in 1993. This was a sentiment I believed and publicly echoed at the time. Per Howard, "MUDs are living laboratories for studying the first-level impacts of virtual communities." Except, of course, they weren't. If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City. Ou sont les TinyMUCKs d'antan?

You can find similar articles touting 3D spaces shortly after the MUD frenzy. Ready for a blast from the past? "August 1996 may well go down in the annals of the Internet as the turning point when the Web was released from the 2D flatland of HTML pages." Oops.

Link to item, and there are many previous BoingBoing posts about Second Life here.

Reader comment: Richard Gray says,

I caught your post on Boing Boing quoting some old research about MUDs and the like. It prompted me to recall my days MUD'ing and the great folks over at the Realms of Despair.

Amongst the miscellaneous stuff stored in their archive is a reasonable collection of early research into the social aspects of MUDs. I thought you'd be interested in seeing the papers, and they are here: FTP link.

In particular I'd point out a rather interesting one regarding rape in virtual worlds. FTP link.

Roosterville, Hemp, and Cloudland are also among the nearly 500 towns removed from the state's official map, nuked because mapmakers say there isn't enough room to fit 'em all. Creative typography could help -- mapmaker Rand McNally won't be killing these communities off, because their map designers use varying font types and sizes. It's also nice to know this problem need not exist with digital maps. Snip from AP report:

Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau. The state began handing out the new map at rest stops and welcome centers over the summer.

(...) "We're not under obligation to show every single community," department spokeswoman Karlene Barron said. "While we want to, there's a balancing act. And the map was getting illegible." That doesn't ease the snub to the people who live in those places.

"This gets back to respect for rural areas," said Dennis Holt, who is leading a community group that wants to restore the good name of western Georgia's Hickory Level Community, population 1,000, which was founded in 1828 and recently put up five new welcome signs. "I'm not sure we're going to accomplish anything, but I would have felt bad about myself if I didn't say something about it."

Reader comment: Jeremy says,

This is a college in Due West, SC, one of the small towns being left off the map. How are they leaving it off the map with a college in the town? Oh, and my grandparents live in Due West.

Above: These comics were used in door-to-door holiday fundraising by Boston's Children's Medical Center, in 1949. Link.

Below: "Security is an Eye Patch." This "comic with a problem" was created by Charles Schultz in 1968, and features Peanuts characters Charlie Brown and Sally. A quick glance at the front cover, and you might think they're talking about crypto or keystroke logging, but no: this is a public health info-strip about an ocular affliction known as "lazy eye," produced for the US Department of Health. Link. (Thanks, Ethan!)

PicoCricket
(Picocrocket.com, $250) If your child's interests run more towards felt and pipe cleaners than motors and gears, more CRAFT than MAKE, he might like the PicoCricket kit more than Mindstorms. Built in cooperation with LEGO, it includes a microcontroller and sensors, but it's more about embedding these technologies inside of other things (puppets and robotic plushies, kinetic sculptures, interactive lighting, etc.). In some ways, this kit is maybe more forward-looking than NXT, because it's about the disappearance of computer and robotic technologies into the fabric of our lives, and that's the future into which these kids are really growing.

I Don't Know

Wavy Gravy once asked a Zen Roshi, "What happens after death?"

The Roshi replied, "I don't know."

Wavy protested, "But you're a Zen Master!"

"Yes," the Roshi admitted, "but I'm not a dead Zen Master."

Klassic Komix Klub is a BRAND NEW limited edition comic self-published by Johnny, which debuts at Felt Club on December 9. KKK collects all 24 highly scatological, not-for-the-squeamish classic literature parody strips Johnny has drawn into one gorgeous package, wrapped up in a display-worthy three-color letterpress printed cover (w/metallic bronze and silver inks!) produced by Buenaventura Press. Only 200 copies were produced and we have limited quantities available. Each copy is signed and numbered. Various inks and papers were used, the pic above is just one sample of what you might receive.Please note that Johnny's last few parody books sold out extremely fast; also these are not available in stores. Only $10.

Hm, does the ingredient list include sugartits? BoingBoing reader Rob Klause says,

I haven't seen Apocalypto yet, but when I saw the teaser-trailer some months ago, I was inspired. The result: Hot Chocolypto, a quick cooking show done in the same style of the teaser-trailer for Apocalypto-- quick visuals and many layers of sound. My budget didn't allow for panther rental, so my dog had to suffice.

Also, SNL aired an awesome remix of the Apocalypto trailer this weekend which sheds light on the *real* reason those pyramids were abandoned. Here's that video: YouTube Link.

Update: Amazon link to the book, GONZO, which includes an intro by Johnny Depp.
Reader comment: Steve says,

Don't forget that Starz is showing a Hunter S. Thompson documentary tonight called "Buy the ticket, take the ride."

Notice how all of these companies use shades of red and yellow in their logos? One might argue that Waffle House doesn’t really have red, but their buildings have red trim just below the roofline. I couldn’t find the logo for the L’il Cricket convenience stores (no website), but their logo is also yellow and red. One other one not visible from the photo above, but with the same color scheme is Pizza Hut...

The story is gripping as anything, and the characters are likable and funny and charming. I adore caper stories, and this stands with the best of them, a geeky version of The Sting.

The book is also flat-out great-looking too, the best-designed self-published book I've ever seen, thanks to Dakan's prodigious graphic design talents (he's definitely the kind of polymath that makes for excellent geekery -- he's the co-creator of City of Heroes, besides!). The entire text has been released under a Creative Commons license, so you can try before you buy, and starting today, Rick's slashed the price for the book to a mere $5 -- a real bargoon.

There's only one small niggle I have about this book and that's that it was very poorly copyedited and proofread. There's a clunker of a typo, grammatical error or malapropism on practically every page. Rick promises that this will be fixed in subsequent editions, and that he's going to get a better editor for the sequel, which he tells me he's almost finished with.

That said, this is one hell of a book. A smart publisher could do a lot worse than to get Rick under contract -- though given his smarts and marketing savvy, he may not want such a thing. Link

A reminder, I'm co-editing Tesseracts 11 with Holly Phillips -- the deadline for submissions is December 31!

We live in strange and perilous times.

This statement is no less true for having always been true. Times have always been strange. The future is as unknowable as it always was. As always, storm clouds have lately gathered on the horizon. As always, there are scattered rays of hope.

Sometimes, however, the storm seems closer than ever. You can hear the thunder and feel the lightning in the air. The going gets tough, and the thoughtful get nervous.

* * *

The nineteen-fifties and early sixties were such a time. Media iconography has draped that era in fading, contradictory images and emblems: Joe McCarthy vs. Marilyn Monroe; the radioactive atolls of Eniwetok and Kwajalein vs. the gilded, monoracial, faux-Christian suburbs imagined in such prime-time sitcoms as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Ask the average seldom-reader what the science fiction of the nineteen-fifties was like and he’ll probably venture a guess involving The Jetsons, flying cars, and hyperoptimistic visions of cities on the moon.

There is some truth to this, but less than you might think. In fact, in those days, science fiction had fallen on hard times. The old pulp magazine markets had dwindled to a precious few. The revolution in paperback publishing took up some of that slack, but did so, in part, by mining the rich back catalogue of those same defunct magazines. SF was occasionally declared dead, and its salvageable organs were freely donated to B-movies and television.

A Swarm of Angels is producing a £1 million film using money raised in £25 increments from individual "angels" who get to participate in choosing the script and overseeing the production. It's an experiment to see if you can make a movie without sucking up to a big dumb studio.

The Kleptones are on the Swarm's advisory board, along with comics genius Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis and me. It's really exciting to watch this project mature -- I can't wait to see the movie!

As part of the ethos of the project we want to work with music artists who are distributing their work under Creative Commons licenses. We’d like to hear from you, so The Kleptones can consider your work for more extensive mash-up releases as the project progresses (leave a comment or post to the forum if you have subscribed).

The next Kleptones moodcast for The Unfold (the other script under development) is ready for release next week (members preview). The next series of podcasts after this are planned as ‘character playlists’.

Kathleen Schneiderwind is one patient who was desperate to get rid of the lightning bolts of pain shooting through her spinal cord. But she and her husband lost their health insurance when they retired, and the hip-resurfacing surgery doctors promised would help cost $30,000 in the United States.

Schneiderwind and her husband, both in their late 50s, didn't have that kind of money, and the thought of so much debt was scary. So they began searching for alternatives.

"We began to look at places outside the United States and traded e-mails with doctors in Turkey and India. It turns out that the doctors in Bombay were both more experienced in this particular surgery and would only charge a fraction of what we were going to have to pay at home," said Barry Schneiderwind by phone as he sat with his wife who was recovering at Wockhardt Hospital in Mumbai.

Not only has the treatment been first-rate, they say, they have been able to pay for their plane tickets and even get some dental work and a vacation in Goa for $10,000.

Update: J sez, "Over three years ago, a Somethingawful member, ignoramus, made an excellent, more traditional version of Chewbacca as Che. Here's the forum page containing his picture as well as those made by other members. Here is a direct link to the picture."

David Pogue at the NYT has presented this classic airplane on a giant treadmill problem, and people are arguing about whether or not the plane would take off or not. Here's the problem:

“Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off? “I say no, because the plane will not move relative the the ground and air, and thus, very little air will flow over the wings. However, other people are convinced that since the wheels of a plane are free spinning, and not powered by the engines, and the engines provide thrust against the air, that somehow that makes a difference and air will flow over the wing.”

I've added the comments to this link in the extended entry.

(A Scottish Executive spokesman) said scientists were experimenting with a "fertility control agent" which had been used successfully in the US and was now being tried on a range of species, not just squirrels.

The squirrels are caught in humane traps before being given the contraceptive.

The spokesman said: "The materials are administered by injection, and recent formulations can render an animal sterile for a number of years with a single dose."

He stressed there were a number of problems still to be overcome, one of which was to make sure the contraceptives were not ingested by other species.

Nail Polish Meets House Paint

qwikie.com
$5 (US, estimated)

Sometimes a tool comes along that’s so ridiculously simple, but makes such a huge impact on how you go about your business. Qwikie Paint Pots are such a wonder-widget. Basically, they're like large nail polish jars that you use to store house paint in for hassle-free touch-ups. When you're finished painting a room, you put some of the leftover paint in one of the Qwikie pots. They have a brush built into their screw-on tops. When a scuff or a chip on a wall calls for a touch-up, it takes seconds to grab the jar and fix the boo-boo. This is a huge improvement over having to head to the basement, find the right can, pry it open, peel off the “skin,” mix, find a brush, use it, clean it, put the lid back on the can, etc. You can store all of the colors to your entire house in a shoebox in the hall closet! Maybe a little pricey at $5 each, but still worth it. -- Gareth Branwyn

The webcomic "Breakfast of the Gods" by Brendan Douglas Jones is a pitch-perfect spoof of contemporary grim'n'gritty superhero crossovers like (mostly) "Identity Crisis" and (a little bit) "Infinite Crisis" and "Civil War" -- featuring old-school cartoon cereal mascots.

My favorite part is where the crazed Frankenberry beats the Honey Nut Cheerios bumblebee to death in Count Chocula's dungeon. Also the scene with Sugar Bear out by the pier, where he's all Wolverine-ish in his attitude, drinking beer and bitching about how hard it is to carry a beast around inside him.

In the dazzling tradition of The Crucible's Fire Operas, this first-ever Fire Ballet is a theatrical spectacle that fuses ballet, classical music, aerial performance, and the fire and industrial arts into a compelling modernized rendition of Shakespeare's tragic tale. Choreographer Corinne Blum, formerly of the San Francisco Ballet, has been recognized as one of the West Coast’s most exciting, young choreographers. Dazzling fight scenes—expect real fire when tempers flare!

Classically trained ballet dancers share the stage with fire performers, while the aerial dancers of Flyaway Productions soar in the industrial vastness of The Crucible’s 56,000 square foot studio. Capulets and Montagues stage their brawls with urban dance and Capoeira in explosive fight scenes against a backdrop of flaming sculptures.

Michael Crook does not own the copyright to the image in question. It is that simple. With photographs and videos, copyright law protects the photographer, not the model. It even says so on the United States Copyright Office Web site in plain English. Despite his claims of holding a “copyright interest” in the work, its copyright belongs squarely to Fox News, who has given clearance to use it.

Written by Stu Maschwitz, co-founder of the Orphanage (the legendary guerrilla visual effects studio responsible for amazing and award-winning effects in such movies as Sin City, The Day After Tomorrow, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), this book is a must-have for all those budding filmmakers and students who want to produce action movies with visual effects but don't have Hollywood budgets.

The Orphanage was created by three twenty-something visual effects veterans who wanted to make their own feature films and discovered they could do this by utilizing home computers, off the shelf software, and approaching things artistically. This guide details exactly how to do this: from planning and selecting the necessary cameras, software, and equipment, to creating specific special effects (including gunfire, Kung Fu fighting, car chases, dismemberment, and more) to editing and mixing sound and music. Its mantra is that the best, low-budget action moviemakers must visualize the end product first in order to reverse-engineer the least expensive way to get there.

Readers will learn how to integrate visual effects into every aspect of filmmaking--before filming, during filming and with "in camera" shots, and with computers in postproduction. Throughout the book, the author makes specific references to and uses popular action movies (both low and big-budget) as detailed examples--including El Mariachi, La Femme Nikita, Die Hard, and Terminator 3.

We pieced together that this was probably a surviving copy of the legendary Scepter Studios recordings, which had been regarded as lost (hence the application of the moniker “the lost Scepter Studios recordings” to these unheard sessions over the years). The recording is composed of the primitive first “finished” version of the LP that Andy Warhol had shopped to Columbia as a ready-to-release debut album by his protégé collective.

Though the same compositions and even a few of the same takes (albeit in different mixes) were used on the subsequent commercial release, The Velvet Underground & Nico is a significantly different creation. I had heard of these nascent recordings before — it was said by some that the master tapes had burned in a fire, by others that all of those recordings ended up being on the released album, and still by others that the only existing copy of that material was on an acetate owned by David Bowie and that he was known to tout it as his most prized possession. The truth about what we held was fuzzy until Hill managed to track down the N. Dolph referred to on the label for an interview.

The inspiration for this piece came a couple years ago from a New Yorker article about robotics. In the field, there's a term called "the uncanny valley." Briefly explained: when a person encounters an artificial being, they are more likely to empathize with it if it has distinctly human characteristics. However, if the artificial being is too human, revulsion takes the place of empathy. The Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori termed this sudden dip in empathy the "uncanny valley..."

As I read the article, I started to wonder what it would be like if the uncanny valley was an actual place. Who would live there? And what would it take to finally push them to the point of revulsion? When I started to create this fictional place, I found it was not all that different from the gated, suburban communities many live in now. My nameless protagonist wakes up one morning to find himself disgusted with his life. The story is his attempt to cut through the unreality of his life and finally live and feel like a real human being again.

US Charities

Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF always gets my largest annual donation. No organization works harder, spends smarter and gets more done for your personal long-term technological liberty than EFF. I spent years inside the org and I know for a fact that every dime donated makes a difference.

Creative Commons: Just four years after launching CC has turned into a global movement. More than 160,000,000 works have been released under CC licenses. It's good news for creators and audiences -- but it's amazing news for the public interest. The proof that there's more than one kind of rightsholder using technology today has stayed the hand of more than one regulator. CC keeps getting better, smarter and more global.

Free Software Foundation/Defective By Design: It's wonderful to see a campaigning group based on fighting DRM. Defective by Design has pulled off a number of audacious and clever actions that have raised public awareness of DRM. The fight starts here.

The Internet Archive: What would we do without it? I use it every day. Its mission: Universal access to all human knowledge. What could be more noble?

The Gutenberg Project: The world's leading access-to-public-domain project. They have truly created a library from nothing, and oh, what a library.

The MetaBrainz Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the MusicBrainz project. MusicBrainz is a free and open alternative to the evil (dis)Gracenote, which took all the metadata about CDs that you and I keyed in and locked it away behind a wall of patents and onerous licensing deals. The org that controls the metadata controls the world -- this needs to be in the public's hands.

The Participatory Culture Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which produces ass-kicking media software in the public interest. The best-known of these is Democracy Player, an Internet TV program that just works -- add feeds based on YouTube keywords, or published feeds from creators, and new video arrive automagically and just play. Because TV is too important to leave up to Microsoft and Apple.

The Clarion Foundation: I'm on the board of this charity, which oversees the world-famous Clarion Writers' Workshop, a bootcamp for sf writers that has produced some of the finest talents in our field, including Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Lucius Sheppard. I'm a graduate myself, and an instructor (I taught in 2005 and I'll be back in 2007) -- I received a substantial scholarship to the workshop in 1992 and it changed my life. I will pay that debt forward every year.

Hospice Net: I make a donation to this charity every year in memory of my dear friend, former Boing Boing guestblogger Pat York. Pat was killed in a car accident, and her family nominated this charity for memorial gifts.

ACLU: For the liberties the EFF doesn't cover, here in sticky meatspace, we have the ACLU. Fearless upholders of the Constitution -- an org that knows that you have to stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, or you aren't in a free society.

Consumer Project on Technology: CPTech was the first copyright activist group to take the fight to WIPO, the UN agency that makes copyright treaties (you can thank WIPO for the DMCA -- they have the same relationship to bad copyright laws that Sauron has to evil, a kind of origin-node for all the crap that's destroying the infosphere). They marshalled a huge and effective activist opposition there, and are presently turning the agency upside down with a progressive treaty called Access to Knowledge.

Public Knowledge: Public Knowledge are the best copyfighters on the Hill, real DC insiders who know the ins and outs of fighting in the halls of administrative agencies like the FCC. We never could have killed the Broadcast Flag without PK, and I'm grateful that someone else is willing to be the person who puts on a suit and explains things in plain language to Congressional staffers. It's a thankless task. These days, they're leading the charge on Net Neutrality, a fight that we have to win if we're going to have any online future to speak of.

Canadian Charities

Online Rights Canada: ORC (awesome acronym, huh?) is Canada's leading cyber-activist group, a collaboration between EFF and CIPPIC at the University of Ottawa. They really mobilized during the last Canadian federal election and managed to kick out a corrupt politician who took campaign contributions from huge multinational media, software and pharmaceutical companies and then wrote laws in their favour.

Youth Challenge International: YCI sends young Canadians abroad to work on sustainable, community initiated development projects. Challengers work in international teams that include Costa Ricans, Guyanese, and Australians. I'm an alumnus, having done a hitch in a Nicaraguan squatter village in rural Costa Rica when I was 21, and it changed my life forever.

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation: My aunt Heather died of breast cancer when she was only 41. My whole family is now involved with the society. I don't live in Toronto and can't join the annual run for the cure there, but at least I can donate to the cause.

UK Charities

Open Rights Group: Danny O'Brien and I co-founded ORG a couple years ago and I continue to serve on its advisory board. ORG has done stupendous work since its founding, culminating in its aggressive lobbying of the Gowers Commission review of copyright. The Gowers Report is out now, and ORG won -- the Commission has strongly recommended that UK music recording copyrights not be extended to 95 years. This is the first time that I know of that a copyright term extension has been shot down, and it's in no small part thanks to ORG.

NO2ID: As the UK sleepwalks into a surveillance state, NO2ID stands as the nation's best, last bulwark against an Orwellian nightmare of universal tracking. NO2ID has won substantial victories against the Blair regime's compulsive move towards a national ID card, keeping it at bay for years.

MySociety: Software in the public interest -- it's a damned good idea. MySociety produces software like Pledgebank ("I will risk arrest by refusing to register for a UK ID card if 100,000 other Britons will also do it") and TheyWorkForYou (every word and deed by every Member of Parliament). It's plumbing for activists and community organizers.

I've set my latest novel free under the usual Creative Commons license: you can get Blindsight (Tor, October) by going to my backlist and clicking the relevant thumbnail. I've also produced seven alternative dust-jackets for the same title, using (with the artist's permission) artwork submitted to Tor but not used for their official Blindsight cover. You can get those here. (And take a look here for an impressionistic, documentary-style taste of the novel itself.)

I do this only partly to add data to the ongoing get-rich-by-giving-your-stuff-away experiment. The other reason is that a lot of people seem to be having trouble actually finding the book in brick-and-mortar stores. All the buzz in the world is worth jack-shit if the product isn't readily available.

So check it out and go wild. And when your eyes start to fall out from phosphor burn, consider buying an old-fashioned paper version. There should be enough to go around before long: I'm told Blindsight's going into second printing.

See also:
Peter Watts's wonderful dystopias under a CC license
Paul di Filippo on Maelstrom

Other Grand Prize nominees included Queasy Games' cleverly designed abstract shoot-em-up, Everyday Shooter, which grabbed 3 nominations in total - nominees for the top prize were rounded out by Peter Stock's intelligently complex physics puzzle game Armadillo Run, Three Rings' Wild West indie strategy MMO Bang! Howdy, and Naked Sky's Xbox Live Arcade/PC action-puzzler RoboBlitz.

Other notable IGF finalists grabbing nominations for design-related innovation include DigiPen-constructed first-person shooter set in a world of blocks (which act as both terrain and weapons!), Toblo, as well as NABI Software's extremely original turn-based ragdoll fighting game Toribash. Elsewhere, Best Web Browser Game finalists include Amanita Design's beautifully drawn adventure title Samorost 2, Visual Art finalists also have a plethora of highlights, including The Behemoth's Xbox Live Arcade title Castle Crashers.

Finally, the Excellence In Audio category includes Skinflake's Racing Pitch, in which the player uses a microphone to imitate a car engine in order to power his on-screen vehicle, and Technical Excellence also has a multitude of stand-outs, including Cryptic Sea's physics puzzler Blast Miner and EvStream's multiplayer space title Armada Online.

For the second edition, Larry posted the whole text of the original on a wiki and invited his readers, fans and detractors to help him edit out and add in material that had changed in the years since the initial publication.

Now, Codev2 is out as a genuine print book, and, as befits the co-founder of Creative Commons, as a liberally licensed CC download that even allows for commercial remixing of the text. Link

Update: MC Frontalot sez, "there is another Nerdcore documentary feature (trailer) coming out. It is called Nerdcore Rising, from Vaguely Qualified in NY. There's a preview trailer online which focuses on me & my touring -- but as I understand it the movie has interviews with a bunch of the same artists as Nerdcore For Life."

Machinima films are made by generating custom graphics for sophisticated video-game engines and then "playing" the game in such a way as to generate the 3D animations for the film, then dubbing in your own audio.

Bloodspell stands as the most ambitious machinima project ever attempted. Each installment has been released under CC licenses, and the film's audience has taken an active role in the production, adding subtitles in many languages and avidly kibbitzing on the group's forums. Now with the whole film in the can (and hosted for free forever on the Internet Archive's gigantic server farm), it's the perfect time to watch it. Link

See also:
Part one of machinima epic "Bloodspell" online under CC license
Bloodspell censored by Leipzig Games Conference Machinima epic Bloodspell continues

Update: Andreas sez, "I just made a torrent of all the Bloodspell episodes and all available subtitles. It's available for free to all, at Sweden's most excellent the Pirate Bay."