This is rad: Dell will soon start shipping computers with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. I've been running Ubuntu, a slick, easy-to-install, easy-to-use flavor for Linux since last October. It's the only OS I use (well, I still synch my iPod with an old Powerbook, but I hope to have that fixed shortly), and I love it to pieces. Talk about rock-solid.
Link
Shareholders ask Google to counteract foreign 'net censorship
Snip from a post on the Wired News blog Threat Level:
Google, China, and genocide: web censorship and Tibet
The custodian of five major public pension funds in New York City will formally request next month that Google take steps to counteract internet censorship in foreign countries with authoritarian government such as China, Egypt and Iran, according to Google's proxy statement for its annual meeting of stockholders on May 10.Link.
The New York City Comptroller will submit the proposal. The comptroller acts as investment advisor for the five city public pension funds, which include the retirement plans for city employees, teachers, NYPD, NYFD and board of education employees. Together, the funds own 486,617 shares of Google's Class A stock.
Previously on BoingBoing:
Scans of 19th c. science book: "The World before the Deluge"
Snip from description:
The object of "The World before the Deluge" is to trace the progressive steps by which the earth has reached its present state, from that condition of chaos when it "was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the the deep," and to describe the various convulsions and transformations through which it has successively passed.
Shown above: "Ideal Scene of the Lias Period with Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus."
Scanned pages of 'The World Before the Deluge' by Louis Figuier (1872 revision of a 1862 publication) are online at 19thcenturyscience.org: Link. 518 + 8 pages, illustrated with 235 figures. Scroll down to "PLATES" for illustrations of "ideal landscapes" of various geological epochs.
Spotted at Bibliodyssey, where there's more background here: Link.
Gizmo documentary on Google video
Gizmo is a documentary about oddball inventions and inventors from the 20th century. It's one of my favorite documentaries ever. I've watched it a dozen times or so over the years.
David says:
Link (Via kirchersociety.org)Behold...the power of the open mind! Howard Smith's 1977 documentary about improbable inventions is now freely available on Google Video. The documentary compiles old newsreel footage of wacky inventions in action, (or inaction as the case may be), as well as some inventors' physical quirks and others' daring deeds in "bringing their invention to market," all for your enjoyment. A personal favorite, the backwards car, can be seen near the 50 minute mark. A must-see for Boing Boing readers!
Sumo wrestlers compete to make babies cry
CNN has a photo gallery from an annual competition held every year in Tokyo in which sumo wrestlers hold babies and face off in an attempt to make them bawl.
For some reason, I doubt these guys will catch as much flak as the amazing photographer Jill Greenberg did for giving and then taking away candy from little kids to make them cry. Link (Thanks, John!)
Beer bottle cellular automata movie
Emma says:
Artist Lozano Hemmer presented "Synaptic Caguamas" a large motorized Mexican “cantina” table with 30 “Caguama”-sized beer bottles (1-litre each). The bottles spin on the table with patterns generated by cellular automata algorithms that simulate the neuronal connections in the brain.LinkEvery few minutes the bottles are reset and seeded with new initial conditions for the algorithm so that the movement patterns are never repeated.
Winner of Schwarzenegger impersonation contest
Last week, I posted an entry about my daughter's school field trip to the California State Capitol, where she and her classmates met with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Link). The governor chatted with the students for a while, answering their questions, and telling them about his acting acheivements. He said playing Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin was one of his favorite roles.
He also handed out small color photographs of himself to the students. When my daughter returned home, she showed me the photo and I noticed a sticker on the back with a warning not to use the photograph for any purpose besides personal enjoyment by the recipient.
I thought it would be fun to post a reproduction of the sticker and invite readers to impersonate the governor reciting the warning. Within 24 hours, nearly 100 people called the Boing Boing hotline to give their impersonation. Every one of these people did a much better job of impersonating the governor than I could have done. In fact, they did a better job that the governor himself could have done.
It was hard to pick a winner, but I finally settled on Matt Plumb, who not only did a first-rate job of impersonating Governor Schwarzenegger, but also added some awesome ad-lib commentary. Congratulations, Matt!
Here's Matt's winning entry, followed by several other excellent entries to the competition. The impersonators are, in order of presentation: Alex Carey, Grey Hodge, Morris Pratt, Anonymous, Mark McQuillen, and Rich Sigfrit. Thanks very much for your excellent comtributions, everyone!
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Kenya: Joseph Linaschke is photoblogging rural aid work
As blurbed previously on a trek-blog I maintain from the road, photographer Joseph Linaschke is currently photoblogging his trip to Kenya with an aid organization that serves extremely poor children in rural, indigenous communities. Link to his Kenya-tagged posts. Here's a beautiful shot of the starry night sky there. (Photos in this post shot by Joseph Linaschke)
Steampunk mouse
Jake of All Trades's homebrew steampunk computer mouse comes complete with a little short story about how it came to be invented!
Link (via Make)
One holds the device in a manner similar to the way a wood-worker holds a sanding block. The palm rests upon the “ball” in the foreground, with the fingers extending forward. The middle digit is placed upon the spiked cog, while the pointing-finger and the ring-bearing finger sit on the studded levers on either side. The thumb and small-finger rest comfortably on the side of the cylinder, helping to grip the contraption. The “Bug”, as the Professor calls it, is slid about upon a table top–thusly controlling a mobile indicator upon the Telecalculograph’s display. Push the device away from one’s self, and the arrow “moves” towards the top of the viewing window. When the arrow has been positioned appropriately so that it is pointing at the desired “item” on the glass, the user pushes down upon the various levers to elicit his desired effect. Turning the wheel in the center produces an action similar to turning a page in a book, or cranking a kinetoscope.
See also:
Steampunk guitar
Spring-loaded steampunk spex
Steampunk magazine
Steampunk Star Wars
Steampunk watch
Beautiful steampunk laptop
HOWTO make a steampunk keyboard
HOWTO make etched brass steampunk journals
HOWTO make a steampunk spinning-wheel
Steampunk walking robot
Steampunk cartoon from SciFi channel: Amazing Screw-On Head
Homebrew mechanical steampunk lion from Belgium
Steampunk robotics
Steampunk weekly serial - handsome editions
Steampunk rayguns
Steampunk Transformer-bots
Ukrainian steampunk plane
Steampunk casemod with a "furnace"
Steampunk submarine free paper toy
Steampunk/dead media photoshopping contest
Brighton's steampunk rolling sea-platform
Steampunk Slashdot
Steampunk mecha-wars
Steampunk car-wars
New York's steampunk pneumatic subway
AACS DRM body censors Cory's class blog
This semester, I've been teaching a USC undergrad class called Pwned: Everyone on Campus is a Copyright Criminal. Back in February, one of my students did a great post about the AACS processing key crack on the class blog.
Last week, I received a legal threat from the AACS licensing authority, promising a lawsuit if I didn't removing the processing key and the link to the Doom9 forum.
On advice from lawyers, I've censored this material off the post. However, Google maintains a list of over 100 sites that link to the Doom9 post, including one from Boing Boing.
Internet radio crisis: Newsweek's coverage
Over at newsweek.com. Brian Braiker writes:
Internet radio crisis: an overview, from SomaFM's Rusty Hodge
Link. Photo above, David Byrne (Radio David Byrne Link). "You may ask yourself, where is my Internet radio?" (Erich Schlegel / Dallas Morning News-Corbis)As you read these words on your monitor, there is a decent chance that you’re also streaming a little online radio. After all, with an estimated listenership of approximately 50 million Americans per month, Internet radio has become a go-to destination for a fuller spectrum of music, an alternative to FM’s mind-numbing monotony. And if you are one of those listeners, mark May 15 on your calendar: it might well be the day that the music dies.
Last month the trio of Library of Congress judges that oversees copyright law’s statutory licenses decided that May 15 will be the date royalty fees owed by Web radio operators will be recalibrated. The Copyright Royalty Board changed rates from a percentage of revenue to a per-song, per-listener fee—effectively hiking the rates between 300 and 1,200 percent, according to a lawyer representing a group of Webcasters. "If this rate does not change, it will wipe out the vast majority of Web radio," Tim Westergren, founder of the music discovery service Pandora, tells NEWSWEEK. "If this stays, we’re done. Back to the stone age again."
Previously on BoingBoing:
Reader comments: Ben says,
The actual text of Rep. Jay Inslee's bill to "Save Internet Radio" is here: internet_radio_bill_april_2007.pdf. I'd suggest everyone contacting their representative and urging him or her to support the bill.Marty Z says,
To make it easier to contact your representative, the SaveNetRadio coalition built this terrific site that includes the ability to quickly lookup the phone # for your representative and also includes talking points. This an urgent matter and I hope all BoingBoingers will participate in saving Net Radio!Eric says,
Just sending this as a FYI. I received this back from Sen Feinstein's office in reponse to my submittal to savenetradio.org.(Ed note: Full text of Senator Feinstein's response after the jump. Short version: webcasters, feel free to crawl off and die.)
Continue reading Internet radio crisis: Newsweek's coverage.
Using floating junk to study oceans
Fifteen years, ago a shipping container fell off a boat crossing the Pacific, spilling tens of thousands of rubber duckies, turtles, and other bath toys. The mishap was actually helpful for oceanographers who to this day occasionally find the toys and use their recovery location and time as data points in their study of ocean currents. This is just one example of how scientists count on floating junk in their efforts to map and understand subcurrents and other ocean phenomena. Interestingly, random bits of flotsam can sometimes work better than electronic devices designed for this purpose due to the limitations of battery power and algae growth that can block the sensors.
From Science News:
Worldwide, about 10,000 cargo containers fall overboard each year. In most parts of the world, the dispersal of flotsam isn't of major interest to researchers. But along the bustling trade routes that link eastern Asia to North America, the tennis shoes, kids' sandals, hockey gloves, and other stuff that drops off ships is enabling scientists to fill in details of how the Pacific Subarctic Gyre works.Link
Often, the lost items float and can be readily identified as coming from a ship at a certain location. Recently, (retired oceanographer Curtis) Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues used almost a century of data from such floating objects to map the gyre's major subcurrents and swirls.
Now, for the first time, scientists have determined that a lap around the Pacific Subarctic Gyre takes about 3 years. That information, in turn, led Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues to identify long-term variations in water temperature and salinity in the North Pacific that hadn't been noted previously.
All this from studying flotsam...
...The flotsam-researchers' techniques may not seem scientifically rigorous, comments Richard Thomson of the institute (of Ocean Sciences) in Sidney. However, he adds, "with oceanographers, the more data, the better. ... [Studying flotsam] is one of the few ways to get it."
BoingBoing week in review: April 23-30, 2007.
Worst practices at funeral home
For years, Co-op Funeralcare funeral home in Dunfermline, Fife, UK has allegedly scattered human ashes outside the parlor to make icy paths less slippery, according to former employees. Whistleblowers are also claiming that coffins used for transporting bodies were occasionally sold as "new" for funerals. Scratches were touched up with a felt tip marker and the inside sprayed with air-freshener. From the Sunday Mail:
It is also claimed staff disposed of ashes which were later to be claimed by a bereaved family by accident.Link
One worker said that, when the family arrived, their urn was filled with ashes which had lain unclaimed in the office for 50 years...
In 2003 (the Sunday Mail) revealed that the Dunfermline Co-op had buried squaddie Jamie Henderson, 22, in the wrong grave by mistake.
They offered to correct their mistake - for an extra £3000.
The firm also delivered flowers from Jamie's young nephews with the message "from the dogs" instead of "from the boys".
Phone company filters customer's name "Gay" as inappropriate
When New Zealand woman Gay Hamilton emailed communications company Telecom to inquire about broadband service, she received an automated reply that said: ""[Your email] was identified by our content filtering processes as containing language that may be considered inappropriate for business-like communication... The content which caused this to happen was ... 'gay' eight times, at two points each, for an expression score of 16 points." Telecom apologized to Hamilton but would not provide a list of other words that its filtering system scans for. From the New Zealand Herald:
...For Hamilton, who happens to be gay, the shock was not isolated to the reply she received but also to the fact that Telecom had spent time and resources deciding that the word "gay" should be audited from staff communications. "If they do have to put content filters on ... then maybe they should ensure that it only gets genuinely abusive words."Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)
EEG controllers for videogames
The Associated Press has a long gee-whiz story about the use of biofeedback devices in video games. The articles profiles NeuroSky, a startup co-founded by Hoo Hyoung Lee who apparently used biofeedback to help train South Korea's Olympinc archery team. From the Associated Press:
Previously on BB:
• Relaxation "game" assigns points for calmness Link
• Video games as koans Link
• Mindball Link
• Mind Games Link
"Whatever we sell, it will work on 100 percent or almost 100 percent of people out there, no matter what the condition, temperature, indoor or outdoors," Yang said. "We aim for wearable technology that everyone can put on and go without failure, as easy as the iPod."Link
Researchers at NeuroSky and other startups are also building prototypes of toys that use electromyography (EMG), which records twitches and other muscular movements, and electrooculography (EOG), which measures changes in the retina.
While NeuroSky's headset has one electrode, Emotiv Systems Inc. has developed a gel-free headset with 18 sensors. Besides monitoring basic changes in mood and focus, Emotiv's bulkier headset detects brain waves indicating smiles, blinks, laughter, even conscious thoughts and unconscious emotions. Players could kick or punch their video game opponent -- without a joystick or mouse.
"It fulfills the fantasy of telekinesis," said Tan Le, co-founder and president of San Francisco-based Emotiv.
The 30-person company hopes to begin selling a consumer headset next year, but executives would not speculate on price. A prototype hooks up to gaming consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.
Previously on BB:
• Relaxation "game" assigns points for calmness Link
• Video games as koans Link
• Mindball Link
• Mind Games Link
Pro-coffee tee tweaks Mormon Church, Church responds with trademark threat
A Utah coffee-shop made a funny t-shirt that showed coffee being funnelled into the trumpet of the Angel Moroni (a sigil that tops Mormon temples -- the Church enjoins caffeine hot drinks). The LDS Church threatened to sue for trademark infringement, so they got an even better design:
Link (Thanks, Amanda!)It shows a giant hand from the sky pouring the java - which the LDS Church urges its members to abstain from drinking - into a disembodied trumpet.
The caption: "The Lord giveth, and a church taketh away."
Store owners Ed Beazer and Van Lidell insist it's just harmless repartee, albeit a tad one-sided.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints isn't talking about the new design and whether it violates the trademark.
(Photo ganked from a larger snap by Ryan Galbraith)
Call Warner Music and complain about lawsuits and DRM
Jason sez, "Defective by Design launched a 'Wake up Call' campaign against Warner Music today. They've given us the names and numbers of many top execs at Warner--it's up to us to call them and ask them to drop DRM and stop suing their customers. I was able to speak to one exec and left messages for two others."
Link
Sony sacrifices goat for Playstation game
Sony recently staged a goat sacrifice in honor of their PlayStation 2 game, God Of War II, complete with fur outfits, topless women, blood, and entrails.
Link to Daily Mail article | Link to Gizmodo article (Thanks, Jim!)
Reader comment:
Sony representatives did not decapitate the goat at the party. Instead, they purchased a pre-decapitated goat for the event.
Portable Childhoods, sf stories by Ellen Klages - beautiful nostalgia
Ellen Klages is the kind of sf writer that comes along about once a decade -- a
short-story-centered writer who produces just one or two brilliant stories a year, stories that end up on practically every awards-ballot in the field. Another in this mould is Ted Chiang, and, like Ted, Ellen is also such an all-fired mensch that it shines through in her work.
Portable Childhoods is Ellen's first book-length collection of short stories, a book that was a decade in the making. I remember many of these stories' initial publications, because Ellen Klages stories make an impression when you read them. They're the kind of stories that make you remember where you first encountered them, little life-changing events, like a Shuttle disaster or a major promotion.
Klages's stories are infused with Bradbury-like nostalgia, and her recurring young girl character is clearly some version of her own childhood, studious and funny, a little introverted and enchanted with the world. This is a Madeline L'Engle heroine, a Philip Pullman heroine, utterly likable, but also drawn with enough honesty that she's anything but a benign cherub.
These stories are mostly very short -- half the stories in the book run just a few pages -- and the very short ones have the feel of the best of the golden age of science fiction, like stories from Avram Davidson. They're funny and witty and have great skiffy conceits that'll turn your head around.
But the real treasures are the handful of longer stories. "In the House of the Seven Librarians," an arch little fairy-tale about feral librarians. "Time Gypsy," a bit of gender-bent time-travel that'll wrench your heart. "Guys Day Out," a story about bringing up a Down's Syndrome child (Ellen's has a sister with Down's) that'll do more than wrench your heart. And "A Taste of Summer," a story so sweet and perfect that I want to read it again this summer, the way I sometimes read Bradbury's Dandelion Wine on a beach in the summer, just to cement the fine day and the finest season. Link
See also: Sf story of great note: Klages's "Green Glass Sea"
Kitchen of Tomorrow, from 1967
1999 AD is a short film produced in 1967 by the Philco-Ford Corporation about the world of 1999. In this short clip, they introduce the creeptacular kitchen of the future, in which drunken fathers and obnoxious sons harass mothers to push buttons fast to irradiate frozen, computer-inventoried pre-fab meals: "Split second lunches, color-keyed disposable dishes, all part of the instant society of tomorrow. A society rich in leisure and taken-for-granted comforts." Link
London 2012 Olympics: We only buy security tech from sponsors
The London 2012 Olympics won't use security technology unless it's being provided by a major sponsor of the event. No matter how much safety your product would contribute to Londoners, there's no chance of it being used unless your company bribes the International Olympic Committee.
So who has bought their way into being the security experts of choice, and with whom our security and that of the visiting millions will rest? Visa. Oh whoopy-doo, I admit to feeling much more reassured now, after all these are the same people who do not suffer from any problems with identity and authentication and fraud and crime on a huge scale within their own business sector after all. Not...Link (via Schneier)Personally I find it beyond contempt that security decisions that will impact upon the whole country, and the billions watching around the world, come down to a money making opportunity for a sponsor rather than being a Government controlled process. Wyatt readily admits it is nothing to do with him, his committee or indeed the Government as the deals arrangements are between the IOC and their sponsors. He also readily admits he doesn’t see why the UK should have to foot the £1billion cost of security in that case.
Hugo Gernsback explains gadgets, 1935
In February, 1935, Hugo Gernsback (who coined the term "science fiction," and for whom the Hugo Awards are named) published this Science and Mechanics article about the hot new phenomenon of "gadgets." Gernsback explains what a gadget is, and why you might want to get into business designing them.
Link
YOU will not find the word “gadget” in many dictionaries; perhaps for the reason that most dictionary compilers consider the word to be slang. Yet, the word “gadget” is well known to everyone, and is used in everyday language in connection with some article that has a practical use and, usually, can be bought at a low price...As I have said before, the market for gadgets in this country is really tremendous. There is constantly room for these novelties, and the public is always willing to buy them. There is, in fact, a sort of craze, that many people have, to be the first to have this or that new gadget to parade it proudly among their friends...
And let no one think that the gadget market in this country is apt to decline. With our advance in civilization, the chances are overwhelmingly in the opposite direction; since the more mechanized we become, the greater the demand for gadgets. We probably have not even scratched the surface, and in the years to come we may expect to see a flood of gadgets on the market that will dwarf anything we have seen so far.
Propellor-driven monorail from 1933
The June, 1933 issue of Popular Science covered this gorgeous "propeller-driven cars" that "hang from a monorail." This is what the future was supposed to be.
Link
An improved airline cab, capable of 155 miles an hour, is the latest invention of the French engineer who developed the trench mortar used during the World War. Suspended on monorails, the cabs resemble airplane fuselages.
Update: Toby sez, "Here's some proper engineering from Scotland. It's some lovely footage of the Bennie Railplane, a glorious 'Metropolis'-style bullet which sped (briefly) through a twee bit of the Glasgow suburbs in 1930. It was designed to do 120mph, and to use adjustable aerodynamic 'planes' at each end to trim its lift/downforce. It's well-described here and here. Wouldn't it be fantastic to drive to the railplane terminal in your Leyat Helica?"
Anti-piracy group pirates anti-piracy report
A reader writes, "The International Chamber of Commerce 'Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting And Piracy' initiative has been accused of pirating thousands of documents from anti-piracy tracking service Gieschen Consultancy. The documents apparently later reappeared in a slightly different format under the ICC's own brandname. Statement from the consultancy:"
"The ICC and BASCAP misrepresented themselves as a partner in 2006 and 2007, gained access to proprietary information and then took what they learned and incorporated it into their own product offerings.LinkIts functionality, user interface, presentation, method of classification, and delivery is clearly based on our designs and existing products. It is extraordinary that an organization committed to fighting counterfeiting and piracy would steal the intellectual property of another organization."
Coachella, pt. 3: plastic crunch, raver cruft, ghosts of desert past.
(Photos: crowd above, security chart below, by eecue of blogging.la, more here, cc-licensed).
I've been posting Coachella notes (one, two) to BoingBoing between band sets, from inside my buddy Wayne's biodiesel tour bus.
I hear there are several temporary cell towers on-site while the event lasts, to keep the voice, data, and SMS service moving. So unlike other desert events (say, Burning Man), phones are everywhere at Coachella, in-hand.
People walk while txting, wandering from stage to stage with eyes fixed on display. Fans hold them up during night performances, to snap photos or video or pay tribute by beaming display-light back at the band.
Stepping between tight rows of cross-legged attendees, waiting for one act to go on, I smell weed. I glance down, looking for the source glow. But all I can make out are luminous Sidekicks, fingers punching out txts, blotting out glow in staccato code.
We watched one superstar techno headliner play earlier tonight, to a packed field under black sky. When the music ended and those tens of thousands of fans exited, a chorus of crinkly, plasticky sound rose from beneath all those feet. Stomp, crunch, crackle; flattened water bottles and brittle glowsticks on the grass.
"Raver cruft," said Wayne. "That's what we used to call this smushed-up trash carpet back in the day."
Hard to remember to pick up your junk when you're rolling on all that E.
Coachella organizers came up with a crafty way to encourage attendees to help recycle, though, and it does minimize the mess: Turn in 10 empty watter bottles, get a cold, fresh bottle of water, free.
(Photo: Willie Nelson performing Sunday at Coachella. Shot by eecue, cc-licensed).
Peel away the art, the crowds, the stages, the taco and t-shirt vendors, pull up the turf -- and you got desert here. Beyond Coachella the event, the same is true in the greater Coachella Valley. Virtual reality, as long as the water lasts. Suburban lawns where only a creosote shrub might have managed to choke out a living before.
(Photo: ?uestlove of The Roots, performing Sunday at Coachella. Shot by eecue, cc-licensed).
Old date palm plantations are disappearing, giving way to new housing developments. The wild desert still pops up here and there, a cactus peeking out between planned, rectagonal community plots.
But the unplanned community plots are what make events like Coachella fun. Late last night, we wandered into the parking lot where all the artists and vendors camp. Hobo land, some were calling it.
One guy scavenged scrap wood to ignite in a burn barrel. "Burn first, ask questions later!" someone whispered at him. Someone else deejayed, dozens danced, others did somersaults and stiltwalking.
A guy from Reno named Chris, whose card I lost, set up this wild infrared light projection system on a sheet, with software he'd written -- people dance in front of the infrared lamp, some kind of crazy command-line magic happens, and their moving silhouettes end up projected on that flat sheet, with retro video trail effects lagging behind the outlines. Imagine an iPod TV ad mashed up with the sfx from a 1972 Deep Purple video.
Then, that robot showed up again, trash talking and trying to pick up all the chicks.
Goodnight, Coachella.
(Photo above: Dancing with the infrared video display thing at "Hobo Land," in the small hours between days. Shot by Xeni, cc-licensed).
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