Check out this hilarious MP3 of comedian Jean Shepherd touring the It's a Small World ride and Carousel of Progress at the 1964 World's Fair. As Dan Howland notes, "In a pleasant irony, Shep delightedly and sarcastically enjoys the Carousel of Progress as only he can -- in a few years, he would provide the voice-over of the father character in an updated version of the show at Walt Disney World." 10MB MP3 Link (Thanks, Dan!)

Eric sez, "More than a year ago Nynex suggested that songs under Creative Commons could be used in Dance Dance Revolution simulators. To that end, I converted the 18 songs from the Diesel:U:Music 2006 contest's final shortlist, which are released under a Creative Commons license. By using Dancing Monkeys, an open-source automated step file generator, it was just a few clicks (and some overnight processing) to convert the songs to step files that could be used with the open-source StepMania DDR simulator for the PC. Find the set of shortened songs and step files on the Dancing Monkeys homepage under 'Sample Files'." Link (Thanks, Eric!)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has finally unveiled what's behind Blue Origin, his secretive effort to bring space flight to the masses. The Web site has photos and video of Goddard, the company's first vertical take-off and landing vehicle during a test flight in November.
Link to Blue Origin, Link to MSNBC coverage

Here's a lovely photo-set illustrating 200 calories' worth of various foodstuffs, sorted from highest volume weight to lowest. Link (via Digg)

On Tuesday night, this golf ball-sized rock crashed through the roof of a house in Momouth County, New Jersey, and got stuck in a wall. The 13+ ounce rock has yet to be identified. The Federal Aviation Administration says that it's not a chunk of aircraft. From the Associated Press:

Police received a call Wednesday morning that the metal object had punched a hole in the roof of a single-family, two-story home, damaged tiles on a bathroom floor below and then bounced, sticking into a wall...

Approximately 20 to 50 rock-like objects fall every day over the entire planet, said Carlton Pryor, a professor of astronomy at Rutgers University.

"It's not all that uncommon to have rocks rain down from heaven," said Pryor, who had not seen the object that struck the Monmouth County home. "These are usually rocky or a mixture of rock and metal."

Pryor said laboratory tests would have to be conducted to determine if the object were a meteorite.

Link (Thanks, Jennifer Lum!)

In honor of their 25th anniversary, seminal skatepunk magazine Thrasher has posted their first twelve issues online in their entirety. This issue, from December 1981, contains the important article "Indoor Skateboarding: A Guide To Staying Dry."
Link (Thanks, Dave Gill!)

Kevin Kelly has published a wonderful collection of tips in his Cool Tools newsletter.

When a couple of the little rubber feet (LRF) came off the bottom of my laptop, I tried without success to re-attach the small bits of rubber with "super glue", rubber cement, and a hot-glue gun. After the last attempt, I realized that the rubbery material used with the hot-glue gun could by itself serve as an LRF replacement. This worked so well I ended up ripping out the still-attached LRFs. By now the hot-glue replacements have served longer than the original LRFs. -- Preston L. Bannister

Link

I'm looking forward to this new show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. It's called Saul of the Mole Men and the production values rival those of Land of the Lost. It premieres February 11. Link (Thanks, Matter Eater Lad!)

When I was young, I liked when people would "write" on my back with their fingertip and I'd try to guess the word they spelled out. Now, MIT researchers are developing a vibrating vest for the military that does the same thing. Sixteen small vibrating motors connected to a wireless PC display Braille-like patterns on the wearer's back. The research is supported by the US Army who want a method to communicate with soldiers non-vocally and hands-free. So far, the researchers tested how well volunteers recognized 15 symbols, eight of which came from US military hand signals. From New Scientist:

Five volunteers were asked to follow the tactile symbols while being directed around an obstacle course. They were also sent signals meaning "raise arm horizontally", "raise arm vertically" and "hop". Out of the five, only one volunteer made a single mistake during the tests. The vest was also shown to work while worn under a backpack.

"This is best suited to command-based situations like the military or fire-fighters," says (MIT engineer Lynette) Jones. "It could also be used to direct blind people around a city, but because their path is less defined, that would be more difficult."

Link

Julien says,

The digital haven The Principality of Sealand is for sale. Originally an abandoned British naval base by the name of Roughs Tower, Sealand was declared a Principality in 1967 when a family took residence upon it, and declared it sovereign.

Link (Spanish). The article quotes a spokesperson from Sealand's ruling family, the Bates, as saying that one can't "sell" a "principality" -- so the island's current overlords instead plan to "transfer" custodianship. But it seems obvious that money would be involved in the transaction, and probably a fair amount of it. Sealand's caretakers have suffered hard times in recent years, from marauding pirate threats to a fire we blogged here last June. More: Link.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Sealand devastated by fire, sole human on site injured

Interview with Sealand designer

Reader comment: iolaire mcfadden says,

You can see here that the Sealand is for price is 750,000,000 euro. Also that site has a link to a YouTube movie from the bbc.

Joshua Bearman says: "Sadly, when the Griffith Observatory grandly re-opened last month, the laserium didn't reopen with it. That was the last spot you could get stoned and see krypton lasers accompanying Shine on You Crazy Diamond. It was also the first Laserium, I discovered -- the laser light show was created there, in 1973. I tracked down the creator, who still makes the projectors at his facility in Van Nuys. Turns out the Laserium is also part of a long line of synesthetic attempts to divine the common energy of light and music, from Thomas Wilfred to Scriabin back to Pythagoras. Who knew that Floyd at the Planetarium was just another facet of the Harmony of the Spheres?" Link

Smithosnian Magazine has published a collection of articles about tattoos, including an interesting story about a new ink that can be entirely erased with just one laser treatment. Typically, laser tattoo removals are iffy at best with results varying from acceptable to scarred messes. The pigment in the new ink, created by dermatologists from Duke University and Harvard, is entirely dissolved by laser light. The ink may be available as early as the middle of this year through the company the researchers formed, Freedom-2. Meanwhile, the company is also developing another ink that biodegrades over months without any laser treatment at all. From Smithsonian:

(Typical tattoo) ink rests in tiny beads that remain lodged in the skin after a tattoo is applied. During removal, a laser blasts these nano-sized beads with enough heat to make them rupture, releasing the ink into the body. Some of the potentially harmful ink ends up in the body's lymph nodes, part of the immune system.

Freedom-2 inks are made from safe pigments—the orange ink, for example, contains beta-carotene, commonly found in carrots—and trapped in harmless polymer shells. When a Freedom-2 tattoo is removed by laser, the ink dissolves biologically, leaving only the innocuous, invisible shells.

Link

UPDATE: BB reader Mike Palmer says that claims about the potential health risks of chemicals in tattoo inks are questionable. He points to this April 2005 essay criticizing this Medical News Today article.

Video Link (Thanks, David)

Reader comment: Chris says,

Yeah, that's all fine and dandy...until the deserts start spittin' hot fire back at you: Link.

Make staff editor Arwen O'Reilly asked a bunch of makers what their New Year's resolutions are. The answers, posted on the Make blog, are surprising and inspiring.

Bunnie Huang:

1. Learn something new from a child or teenager, especially in your area of greatest expertise. I find the perspective of innocent novices to be most refreshing and enlightening.

2. Revisit an old science book you read growing up and see how your (and society's) perspective on things have changed.

3. Find someone you've always admired and tried to emulate, and thank them for being such an excellent role model, and ask them about some good stories about the "way things used to be done".

4. Find an important social topic and dig as deep as you can; follow up and look for citations, references, and raw data. For example, I learned that some theorists dispute the carbon-reduction ability of certain hydroelectric technologies, because the dams flood large regions causing them to decay, releasing methane (20x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) into the atmosphere. Global warming appears to be a very richly textured topic with lots of unintended consequences just being realized. Unfortunately, a lot of important issues are summarized with a few "talking points" by the press and political groups. As technologists, I think we have the responsibility to always question our assumptions, and to listen to both sides of the story, and to make sure that we are moving deliberately and cautiously as a society.

5. Learn a new tool. Maybe that means picking up a new programming language, or perhaps it means learning how to use a new kind of CAD software. Or maybe it means learning a new kind of calculus or statistics, or perhaps getting into the shop and using the mill you always meant to use. Putting aside your well-worn and efficient tools is often hard to do, but it's also hard to grow when your tools limit your abilities. My new tools for the year are Solidworks and a laser cutter--I have little mechanical engineering background, and I'm hoping that learning tools like these will expand my understanding of the world and my capabilities.

Link

Mark Stover says: "Just a note to let you know that [the stop-motion video you posted yesterday] is most likely a tribute to (definitely inspired by) a short film by Norman McLaren for the National Film Board of Canada in 1952. You can check out the original here." (The opening title cards are beautiful -- Mark) Link

Here's an excellent gallery of vintage mobile luggable phones.
Link

Apple is being sued for monopolistic tactics arising from tying the iPod to iTunes. Apple uses the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to threaten competitors who want to make products that can interoperate with iTunes and iPods -- but it routinely reverse-engineers its own competitors' products and makes its own interoperable versions, such as Keynote and Preview.

"Apple has engaged in tying and monopolizing behavior, placing unneeded and unjustifiable technological restrictions on its most popular products in an effort to restrict consumer choice and restrain what little remains of its competition in the digital music markets. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs has himself compared Apple's digital music dominance to Microsoft's personal computer operating system dominance."

Apple sought to dismiss the complaint but U.S. District Judge James Ware shot Apple down on Dec. 20 (PDF download) In a Nov. 6 filing (PDF download), Apple argued that "imposing a duty of interoperability would inhibit the very innovation and technological advances that the antitrust laws are designed to promote."

Link (via Consumerist)

Video of real-life Astros and Scoobys, who can say things like "I love mama," and "I want it." Link

Malcolm Gladwell's article in the current issue of the The New Yorker is a self-described "semi-defense." From his blog:

Can anyone explain -— in plain language -— what it is Jeff Skilling and Co. did wrong?

I’m not asking for an explanation for what they did wrong as businessmen. That’s plain. They did a mountain of stupid and arrogant things. Nor is this about what Skilling and company did that was unethical or in bad faith. There’s a mountain of evidence on that too. The question is strictly a legal one: according to the way the accounting rules were written at the time, what specific transgressions were Skilling guilty of that merited twenty-four years in prison? For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that summaries must be three sentences or less.

Link

Dubai-based real estate firm Omniyat Properties plans to construct a tall building in Dubai modeled after the Apple iPod. The name of the 24-story tower: iPad. Architects James Law Cybertecture International will design, and the structure will sit over a six-degree-angled “docking station,” just as the ipod does on its docking station. I can't find any official announcements on the websites of the architects or the developers, but here are some other news references: Gulf News, Guardian, CNN, ITP.net, and an industry trade release here.

Link to a blog post at Italian architecture blog salatti.net. with lots of images. (Thanks, Daniele)

Photo gallery of itty-bitty aquariums. Link (Via Make)

BoingBoing reader Robert H. says,

The New Hampshire Republican Party hired a telemarketing firm to jam the phone lines of a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort, in an attempt to prevent their rivals from co-ordinating rides to polling places for Democratic voters in the 2002 election. State and National Republican parties have agreed to settle the case for $135,000; far short of the $4 million the Democratic party had sought.

Link to AP story.

BB reader Squidocto says,

This past Sunday, the assistant organist at Trinity Wall Street church in NYC improvised a tribute to James Brown and Gerald Ford during the morning service, combining ‘Hail To The Chief’ with the breakdown from ‘I Feel Good’. Someone in the choir told me about it, and I grabbed it from Trinity's website (they stream all their services).

Link

I first read about the cordyceps fungus in Lawrence Weschler's terrific book, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology. Here's how Weschler describes the creepy fungus:

Deep in the Cameroonian rain forests of west-central Africa there lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant -— indeed, one of the very few capable of emitting a cry audible to the human ear -— survives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain-forest floor.

On occasion, while thus foraging, one of these ants will become infected by inhaling the microscopic spore of a fungus from the genus Tomentella, millions of which rain down upon the forest floor from somewhere in the canopy above. Upon being inhaled, the spore lodges itself inside the ant’s tiny brain and immediately begins to grow, quickly fomenting bizarre behavioral changes in its ant host. The creature appears troubled and confused, and presently, for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins an arduous climb up the stalks of vines and ferns.

Driven on and on by the still-growing fungus, the ant finally achieves a seemingly prescribed height whereupon, utterly spent, it impales the plant with its mandibles and, thus affixed, waits to die. Ants that have met their doom in this fashion are quite a common sight in certain sections of the rain forest.

The fungus, for its part, lives on. It continues to consume the brain, moving on through the rest of the nervous system and, eventually, through all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spikelike protrusion erupts from out of what had once been the ant’s head. Growing to a length of about an inch and a half, the spike features a bright orange tip, heavy-laden with spores, which now begin to rain down onto the forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.

Ever since reading this, I've longed to see a video of the fungus at work on an ant. Thanks to YouTube, my wish has been granted. It's from the BBC's "Planet Earth" series, by the esteemed and beloved David Attenborough. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Cuitlacoche: corn fungus delicacy
• The space-fungus that ate Mir
• Fungus from agarwood smells addictively good
• Mushroom looks like guts, tastes like chicken
• Mushroom mistaken for penis in soft drink

Joi Ito's talk at the 23rd Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin last week aimed to explain his obsession with World of Warcraft and MMOs in general. I saw Joi give a version of this talk once before -- he's basically working on the idea that these tools are an amazing way to learn leadership, teamwork, project management, planning and so forth (and he notes that blue-collar construction workers are generally better leaders than MBAs). It's a mind-blowing little riff, especially as he breaks down the way that the UI tweaks and the constitution of each guild are predictors of its long-term success (and how that can apply to the management of open source projects). Link (Thanks, Theo!)

My story, "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" has been published in the magazine The Rake, including the online edition. You may remember the earlier podcast of the story, which tells the tale of gangs of sysadmins stuck in the world's data-centers as a string of nuclear, biological and conventional attacks herald the end of the Earth. The story will also appear in my forthcoming short story collection Overclocked, which will be published later this month.

“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could log in to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1:00 a.m., nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—aka Felix’s Law.

Link

Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Deathnote is a long-running Japanese suspense comic about a bored demon who gives a gifted teenager control over a Death Note, a notebook that kills anyone whose name is inscribed on its pages. There are many rules governing the Death Note -- the owner has to picture the face of his victim when he writes the name -- and an imaginative Death Note owner can even specify the way that his victims die, in lavish detail.

Light Yagami, the teenaged protagonist, is the only person who can see the demon who gave him the Note, and he and the demon trade quips as Light sets out to improve the world by killing all of its worst criminals. This works for a hundred or so deaths, but then the G8 and Interpol sic L, the world's greatest, most mysterious sleuth, on the trail of "Kila" (killer), the person responsible for all of the killings.

The pacing is very tight, with surprising twists and turns. Light is a great, cheerfully amoral killer, a teenaged megalomaniac who delights in using his prodigious smarts to test the limits of the Death Note, approaching it like a Royal Society natural philosopher devising a series of tests to determine its parameters, to the delight of his demon companion.

The total absence of any disapprobation for Light's deeds is what sets this apart from American vigilante comics. In those books, there's always someone there to wag a finger at the crimefighter, even if it's just the crimefighter's own tortured conscience. That might appear in later volumes of the Deathnote books (I've only just read the first collection, there are 11 in print or due soon).

I don't read a lot of Japanese comics, but this came highly recommended by Secret Headquarters, my local neighborhood funnybook emporium, whose proprietor, Dave, has yet to give me a bum steer. It's a real treat living near a great comics shop.

Link

Update: Dan sez, "it is also is about to be a major Japanese movie, being released later this month throughout Asia."

Update 2: James sez, "Two Death Note films have been released in Japanese theaters. The latest one, 'Death Note: The Last Name,' was a huge box office success when it was released a couple months ago."

Update 3: Hung sez, "there's also an anime series running right now in Japan. It started running around October of last year."

The streaming video from the Council of the EU is only available in proprietary formats for Windows and Mac OS, with no support for GNU/Linux. The Council offers this baffling explanation for this sad state of affairs:

The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union can be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux.

This is quite simply wrong. What's worse is that the Council requires that its citizens buy American software -- Windows or Mac OS -- in order to tune into the business of the European government, paying a tax to a foreign power to participate in their own government.

There are plenty of non-proprietary video choices for the EU that are perfectly legal. This is the height of bad government, and the Council needs to be stopped.

Sign the petition and demand it.

Link (via /.)

Larry Lessig's keynote from the Berlin hacker conference 23C3 is something else -- I've heard larry talk a lot. I've introduced him. I've never seen him so on top of his form as he is here. If you want to understand what computers do to culture and why the law is totally out of synch with that, watch this. I especially love that Larry describes why neither hacking nor lobbying will solve the problem -- but sets out a strategy that will win, a real path to victory. Link (via Joi)

Awesome post-it prank -- a Jag covered in a layer of stickie notes. The whole build is documented in the Flickr set. Link (via Neatorama)

The Geostationary Banana Over Texas project is an art intervention consisting of a giant banana-shaped airship made from bamboo that is tethered over Texas, flying 30-50km over the state, visible day and night. I love this idea, everything about it, except the crummy gratuitous use of Flash to create a non-searchable, inaccessible, non-bookmarkable website. Link (via Making Light)

If you're looking for a productive way to use up your left-over New Year's Baby Duck, sparkling Mogen David, or other naugachampagne, why not practice your champagne sabering?

This is the process of opening a bottle of bubbly by decapitating it with a swift stroke of a sharp, specially designed sword. A friend first told me about this, explaining that his neighbor loved to saber, and could be relied upon to show up at any party with several very good bottles and a sword, ready to do battle. Link (via Wired)

Update: Derrick sez, "you don't need a special sword. I've sabered bottles with an oyster knife, and I've seen it done with a butter knife. I have one friend whose done it with the base of a wine glass. The trick is just to hit the weak spot where the seams of the bottle and the top meet, so lots of items will work."

A German bought a plane ticket to visit his girlfriend in Sydney Australia, but due to a typo, ended up buying a ticket to frigid Sidney, Montana, 13,000 kilometers away. He figured out his mistake somewhere around Billings, and spend three days freezing his nuts off in the airport waiting for his parents to wire him the dough for a ticket to Australia.

I once tried to buy a ticket to Chapel Hill, NC International airport, completely stymied by the absence of commercial airlines that flew into it. Turns out it's a freight airport that you can only get yourself to via a giant FedEx box. (For the record, the closest airport is Raleigh-Durham, RDU).

Dressed for the Australian summer in T-shirt and shorts, Tobi Gutt left Germany on Saturday for a four-week holiday.

Instead of arriving "down under", Gutt found himself on a different continent and bound for the chilly state of Montana.

"I did wonder but I didn't want to say anything," Gutt told the Bild newspaper. "I thought to myself, you can fly to Australia via the United States."

Link (via Digg)

An eBay seller posted a load of NES consoles decorated with hand-painted scenes out of classic Nintendo games. The paintings are really quite lovely -- the perfect thing to improve the fetish-worthiness of these classic mass-manufactured objects. Link (via Digg)

Who needs a space-pen when you can get a writing instrument made out of solid metal alloy that leaves metallic residue instead of ink:

The solid metal 'nib' consists of a metal alloy, that leaves a mark on most types of paper. If you use the sort of paper typically used in printers and photocopiers, the pen leaves a mark that looks as if it was made by a pencil. However the line will not smudge, and cannot be rubbed out.

Since there is no ink, there is nothing to dry out, so the pen will work just as well in 25 years time as it does today. And of course it never needs sharpening!

Link (via Gizmodo)

Toronto's Serial Diners are mad eaters -- every week, they visit another restaurant, working their way through the Toronto phone book, in alphabetical order, for decades.

I. Let the record show that the Serial Diners are not only permitted by their essentially arbitrary charter of rules, but are indeed encouraged, to avoid dining at any restaurant, appear though it may in the Toronto Yellow Pages (West or East Edition), and be listed though it may in the Serial Diners' official agenda, if that restaurant should be known or strongly suspected (whether as a result of public allegations or inside knowledge), to be conducting their business in a manner that is unethical, as defined below.

II. Unethical behaviour is defined as any action (especially if ongoing) that is directly and unconscionably detrimental to specific human beings in an extreme and significant way.

III. A partial, and by no means exhaustive, list of actions that would constitute unethical behaviour by the terms of section II might include the following: killing people; publishing hate literature; serving human flesh on the menu; funding a genocide; forcing customers to eat their meal even when they're full because the sign doesn't say 'All you want to eat', it says 'All you can eat'; fomenting wars for the purposes of arms profiteering; inflicting irreparable psychological damage on children by shining bright lights in their faces and repeatedly screaming 'You exist only to serve me!'; wishing people into the cornfield just because they didn't tell you it was a good thing that you made it snow; and, as a purely hypothetical example, using immigrant slaves as your cooks and waiters and making them sleep on the restaurant tables at night.

Link

Toronto's wonderful Anarchist U free-school is open for enrollment for the 2007 semester. Anarchist U uses wikis to collectively organize courses among students and instructors, then offers ten classes over ten weeks according to the agreed material from the wiki.

What's a free school?
Anarchist U is a free school. Of course, many schools are free of charge. However--to paraphrase Richard Stallman--to understand the concept of "free school" you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer." Free schools are schools that allow and facilitate students to pursue their goals in ways that work for them. Students are not forced to learn anything. Teachers are seen as resources of knowledge rather than as authoritarian figures. There has been a long tradition of free schools. Two examples are Summerhill and Stelton , both of which charged a fee.

So is there a fee?
No. Anarchist U is free of charge. In some classes students may have to cover for the price of books and photocopies. The total cost should be under $30 per class.

Link

See also: AnarchistU, Toronto's wiki-based free school

Who knew? Amazon sells whole skinned rabbit carcasses. Link, Link to "People who bought rabbit carcass also bought" screenshot (Thanks, Travis!)

Update: Chris sez, "They have other exotic meats on Amazon -- I've personally had lion, aligator, kangaroo, and elk."

Areae is the just-launched multiplayer world startup from Raph Koster, the famed creator of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxy, and author of the classic "A Theory of Fun" (the "Understanding Comics" of gaming).

There's not much public about the game yet, though one of the investors has published this comment: "Areae sits at the intersection between Web 2.0 and MMOGs. If you think about it, the Web 2.0 and the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming communities have largely been pretty siloed - gamer developers go to game industry conferences and Web 2.0 folks go to Web 2.0 conferences, and there has not been enough intermingling between the two communities."

I actually know all about it, because I'm lucky enough to be on Areae's advisory board. I can't say any more than what's above, but I can note that Raph has hit on a really smart idea that combines fun, community, and user-creativity to make an entirely new kind of online world experience. Link

See also:
Koster's keynote from Game Developers Conference
Koster's amazing "What are the lessons of MMORPGs today?"
Theory of Fun PDF
Destiny of Games: what will become of fun?
Theory of Fun: Understanding Comics for games
Civil liberties in gamespace
Star Wars Galaxies economy laid bare
Lifecycle of a gamer

The Telegraph published a map of London as it would look following a one-metre rise in sea-levels. It's not pretty -- several billion dollars' worth of real-estate ends up under water. The proposal is to build defenses against the rising Thames, but of course that won't do much good if the Gulf Stream stalls out as many predict it would following such a rise in sea-level. If that happens, they won't need to defend London's pricey riverside real-estate from the rising seas, it will already be frozen under 10 metres of ice.

Dr Nassos Vafeidis of the University of the Aegean, Greece, and Prof Rob Nicholls of the University of Southampton and colleagues have weighed up the impact of rising levels on the Thames Estuary, where 1.25 million people currently live, 1.5 million commute and there are assets worth up to £100 billion.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Over the Christmas holidays, I visited the Fort Wilderness Campground at Walt Disney World to check out the famed, over-the-top Christmas displays put on by some of the regular campers. These people come back every year, some reportedly pitching their Winnebagos for months, and set up thousands of dollars' worth of lighted Christmas decorations, hanging them from the trees, stringing them on their fences, setting them up on the lawns and in the windscreens of their RVs. It's a remarkable bit of virtual community group activity, part status-display, part potlatch, part celebration. And all Disney Xmas geek. Link

This Getty Images pic showing Amazon UK's warehouse getting ready for the Xmas rush is sheer logistics porn. As a former mail-room shipper, it gives me major cargo-wood. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Update: Here's a better photo on Flickr, under a CC license.

Wired humor columnist Lore Sjöberg outdoes himself with a wonderful end-of-year prediction roundup:

# The record industry's dubious prosecutions continue, as the major players file suit against several unlikely defendants, including a 3-year-old child, a whippet in Cincinnati, George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824), minor Harry Potter character Eloise Midgen and "the smell of fresh waffles on a Sunday morning." Most defendants settle out of court, but the smell of waffles vows to fight the charges.

# Aliens from the planet Rylos descend upon the planet and reveal that they gave Nintendo the technology for the Wii so they could train and recruit young people to fight in their desperate interplanetary battle for freedom. One brave teenager volunteers to fight for them, but the war is lost when the wrist strap on his starfighter breaks.

Link

I believe that this is the absolute pinnacle of awful Christmakitsch -- a Santa-chimney costume for your toilet. It includes a chimney covering for the tank, a huge Santa-hat for the lid, and a mat that has sooty Santa footprints from where the Jolly Old Elf sat down and pinched off a giant brown one in your craps0r. Link

Silent Star Wars is a sheer genius youtube that re-cuts all three of the good Star Wars movies as a black-and-white silent film. It's sheer hilarity. Link (via Jason Cosper)

A high-school student in Portsmouth, RI is fighting tooth and nail with his high-school administration for the right to dress in chain mail and hold a sword in his yearbook photo. The school has resorted to dirty tricks to keep him out of the yearbook -- including manufacturing fake photo deadlines -- and the student has attracted the assistance of the ACLU in fighting for his right to display his inner geek.

More seriously, the issue is that the principal is interpreting the school's zero-tolerance weapons policy as including a prohibition on holding a prop sword in a yearbook pic. The ACLU is interested in the case as an investigation of the harmful effects that zero-tolerance policies have on free expression.

First, school officials have admitted that last Monday was not the deadline for submitting yearbook photos. The deadline for publishing the yearbook is actually February 28, two months from now. In light of this new deadline, the ACLU has agreed to withdraw its motion for a temporary restraining order prohibiting the school from printing the yearbook without Agin's picture.

Link (via McDaid)

(Photo from an East Bay RI article)

Larry Lessig writes with bitter disappointment about the Democrats' appointment of loony copyright extremist Howard "Hollywood" Berman to chair the House IP committee. Berman once proposed a bill that would let movie studios hack your PC if they thought you were infringing copyright -- and would immunize them from liability if they destroyed an innocent bystander's computer in the process.

Dems to the Net: "Thanks for the blogs. And please continue to get outraged by MoveOn messages. But don’t think for a second we’re interested in hearing anything beyond the charming wisdom of Jack Valenti. We appreciate your support. We appreciate your money. But come on — you’re all criminals. Don’t expect your criminal ways to be taken seriously by an institution as respected as the US Congress."

Link

See also:
Emmett Plant on the Berman-Conyers P2P bill
Hollywood asks Congress for Letters of Marque

Creative Commons has a new "Termination of Transfer" tool that could change the way that copyrights work in America forever. If you're a creator who's signed over your copyrights, the law lets you get them back from your publisher, label or studio 35 years later, no matter what your contract says. However, the process for reclaiming your rights is incredibly complicated, so practically no one can take advantage of it.

Enter the Termination of Transfer tool -- a tool to simplify the process, so that anyone can reclaim the rights to her work as easily as you can add a Creative Commons license to it.

This means that all those old, out-of-print songs, books, stories, movies and so on can be returned to their creators and freed from the vaults of the absentee landlords that run the world's culture industry.

Briefly, the U.S. Copyright Act gives creators a mechanism by which they can reclaim rights that they sold or licensed away many years ago. Often artists sign away their rights at the start of their careers when they lack sophisticated negotiating experience, access to good legal advice or any knowledge of the true value of their work so they face an unequal bargaining situation. The “termination of transfer” provisions are intended to give artists a way to rebalance the bargain, giving them a “second bite of the apple.” By allowing artists to reclaim their rights, the U.S. Congress hoped that authors could renegotiate old deals or negotiate new deals on stronger footing (and hopefully with greater remuneration too!!). A longer explanation of the purpose of the “termination of transfer” provisions is set out in this FAQ.

Despite this admirable Congressional intention, the provisions are very complex and have not been frequently used. CC’s tool is intended to go some way towards redressing that.

Link (via Lessig)

Scott Westerfeld, a writer of wonderful young adult sf novels, has posted a great little meditation on how he names his characters -- balancing out the need to have names that taste futuristic, but that don't jar the reader on every reading. It's a great little piece on how writers think about language, made-up words, and the way that names evolve over time.

Uglies takes place 300 years in the future. Names probably won’t be the same as now. So I needed something that’s not a current name, but that doesn’t make your brain fritz when you read it. So I chose a regular word in English.

That’s right: “tally” as in “count.” As in “Hey, Mr. Tally-man, tally me bananas.”

Thus, the little spell-checker in your brain doesn’t ping every time your eyes scan across those letters. (And the real-world MS Word spell-checker doesn’t draw a squiggly line under it.) “Tally” is capitalized, of course, so you know it’s a name, but otherwise “tally” reads as a perfectly normal word.

But not too common. When’s the last time you actually used the verb “tally” in a sentence, like “Let me tally those Scrabble scores for you, Old Chum?”

Link

See also:
Midnighters: YA horror trilogy mixes Lovecraft with adventure
Conclusion of Westerfeld's Uglies and Pretties trilogy is out
Vampire novel as a work of first-rate science fiction
Cool-hunter detective story

Duracell's 9-volt batteries contain six 1.5 volt batteries that are each nearly the same size as a AAA battery, close enough that you can substitute them. The gimmick is that a 9V battery costs lots less than six AAAs -- which means you can save a fortune on finicky little batteries by performing minor surgery on 9V batteries. Link (via Gizmodo)

This Japanese Showa retro watch has an analog telephone dial on its face; you dial 117 (the Japanese speaking clock number) and the Japanese speaking clock robot lady recites the time to the second. Link

1936 saw the introduction of the first-ever light-gun game -- a duck-hunting game from a company that specialized in vacuum tube jukeboxes.

Ray-O-Lite Rifle, Seeburg, 1/36, a duck shoot game, this rayolite gun game is the first light activated gun games. Seeburg was a company with an engineering departments focused on the design of vacuum tube amplifiers and gearing systems for jukeboxes. It was no surprise then that when the electric eye light sensing vacuum tube was introduced in the early 1930s that the Seeburg design teams would introduce a light ray game.

Link (Thanks, Rich!)

A staffer for Montana congressman Denny Rehberg tried to hire a hacker to break into the computers at Texas Christian University to change his GPA. Instead, the hackers led the staffer to go through a series of hilarious rigamaroles, and then published the whole email exchange on the web.

From: security curmudgeon (jericho@attrition.org)
To: Todd Shriber (nascar24_08530@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 18:51:26 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Question for you or other Attrition members

: I don't live near the college anymore, I'm 1,000 miles away. Is there
: some other sign of trust I can extend to you or should I wait a few
: weeks and travel to my school and get these pictures?

A picture of a squirrel or pigeon near where you live is fine. One close up, one from the distance enough so there are buildings or anything to help identify the location of where the pic was taken from.

Link (via Schneier)

Gabe sez, "Albuquerque's seen record snowfall this week, and being snowed in, I decided to make the best of it by creating a life-sized bust of Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, out of snow. I hope you enjoy." Link (Thanks, Gabe!)

Arista, Capitol, Warners, Capitol and Universal Music Group have disclosed that they are seeking $1.65 trillion from the Russian music site AllOfMP3.com, claiming that the site is subject to US law, even though it operates entirely in Russia. (One wonders how the record companies feel if a Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice argued that their music put them in contravention of Shari'a law.)

This the latest salvo in the entertainment industry's new war on Russia, which has also included a recent US/Russia Free Trade Agreement in which Russia was forced to agree to license and police CD and DVD presses. Uncle Sam, bringer of freedom.

The astounding $1.65 trillion figure was calculated by multiplying the statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement (provided for in the No Electronic Theft Act) by the 11 million songs that AllOfMP3.com has sold. Link (via /.)

See also:
US Trade Representative bends Russia over on copyright
Record labels sue the bejeezus out of AllofMP3.com
AllOfMP3 loses Visa account, switching to ad-supported
Is it legal to buy songs from Russian MP3 sites?
Russian MP3 site sells music for about five cents a song
Russian MP3 site given thumbs up by investigators

Danah boyd, the sharpest researcher on social networking services around, posts a great nugget from her field work. Many kids don't worry about losing their passwords for their MySpace and similar service accounts, and happily create a new profile. It gives them a chance to discard all the "Friends they don't know" in their buddy-lists and start over. Danah notes:

While this feeling of ephemerality is not universal amongst teens, it's far more prevalent than you'd ever see in adult culture and it has some significant implications for design:

* Focusing on "lock-in" will fail with these teens - they don't care if they lose track of something they put hours into building.
* Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm.
* Paying for an account can help truly engaged teens remember their accounts (i haven't found any teen who permanently lost their MMO login) but it can also be a strong deterrent for those accustomed to starting over.

I should note that i don't think that the answer is "help teens remember passwords." I actually think that this tendency to shed is advantageous in the way that we shed clothes every year because the "old me" is no longer relevant. Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting.

Link

See also:
danah boyd on Facebook's 'privacy trainwreck'"
danah boyd talks social networks - video
Danah boyd's Friendster papers, all in one place
What social networks mean for friendship
danah on Orkut
boyd's social networks talk from ETCON
Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles ETCON talk notes
MSNBC: Social Networks Go to Work

Update: Alas, it's not true, as many of you have pointed out. Creator Graham Linehan sez, "I'm not sure where this came from. I am going into production soon but the show won't be out for another few months. Maybe they're repeating it?"

LO2 sez, "Season Two, Episode One of The IT Crowd premieres Friday night (January 5th)," and adds, "You posted a link to a torrent of my mashup of the IT Crowd theme song last year. There's a direct link now."

The IT Crowd is a h4wt, geeky britcom about sysadmins, created by Graham Linehan, who created the convulsively funny show Father Ted. It's the TV show I waited for all my life. Link (Thanks, LO2!)

See also:
The IT Crowd -- the geek comedy I've been waiting for all my life
Episode 3 of The IT Crowd is available for download
HOWTO stream The IT Crowd from outside the UK
The IT Crowd episode four is up for Britons who use DRM
New episode of The IT Crowd, awesome sysadmin sitcom
Fan t-shirt for The IT Crowd
Dance remix of The IT Crowd theme
Episode six of awesome sysadmin sitcom The IT Crowd is downloadable
IT Crowd cross-stitch
IT Crowd DVD has subtitles in leet
US version of IT Crowd coming to NBC
Homebrew IT Crowd ringtone
HOWTO Download sysadmin sitcom from Father Ted creator

CopyrightWatch.ca has a list of creators whose works went into the public domain on Monday. In Canada and other countries where copyright lasts 50 years after death, this means creators who died in 1956. In the US and other life-plus-70 lands, this means creators who died in 1936. Their works are now the in the public domain. They are the shared property of the whole of humanity, to be preserved, enjoyed, remixed, and remembered without barrier, permission, let or restriction.

The list is humbling and amazing and exciting and it goes on for page after page. Humanity received a truly wonderful gift this January 1, Public Domain Day the world 'round.

Three years ago on this day, millions of pages of archival documents, whose authors had died before 1949, became public domain in Canada. This was the result of long-overdue amendments to the Copyright Act in 1998, which ended the perpetual copyright in unpublished “works.”

Unfortunately, there will not be another archival Public Domain Day for archivists, historians, genealogists, and others, to celebrate in Canada until January 1, 2049. This is because the short-sighted 1998 amendments to the Copyright Act also provided that the “works”, including historical documents, by “authors” who died between 1949 and 1998 inclusive, would have a copyright term fixed neither to the life of the author nor the creation of the work, but to the coming-into-force of the amendment. Those unpublished literary works – the raw material of history – whose authors died between 1949 and 1998, will not be public domain for nearly another half- century. This, even though the published material by those same people will continue to come into the public domain. In fact, starting in 2020, the archival public domain in the United States will overtake that of Canada in size: the American public domain for unpublished works is growing every year, while that in Canada is frozen for nearly half a century.

Link (via Michael Geist)

Restoration Hardware's clever Parking Meter Alarm is a keychain that holds ten quarters in a spring-loaded compartment with a countdown timer on top. Use it to feed your meter and to tell you when you need to feed it again. Link (via Shiny Shiny)

Update: John sends in this earlier version of the timer, "a family heirloom" from San Francisco.