Clay Shirky's latest thought-provoker posits that young people make better entrepreneurs because they're too inexperienced to know that their ideas are silly:

The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience. They overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the experts make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, they regard it as a fad. As a result of this asymmetry, the novice makes their one good call during an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert makes their one big mistake, but at that moment, that’s all that is needed to give the newcomer a considerable edge.

Link

The Smithsonian's collection includes this American wedding gown made from a parachute that saved the groom's life in WWII:

This wedding dress was made from a nylon parachute that saved the groom's life during World War II. Maj. Claude Hensinger, a B-29 pilot, and his crew, were returning from a bombing raid over Yowata, Japan, in August 1944 when their engine caught fire. The crew was forced to bail out. It was night and Major Hensinger landed on some rocks and suffered some minor injuries. During the night he used the parachute both as a pillow and a blanket. In the morning the crew was able to reassemble and were taken in by some friendly Chinese. He kept the parachute and used it as a way to propose to Ruth in 1947. He presented it to her and suggested she make a gown out of it for their wedding.

Link (via Making Light)

Bucknell prof Eric Faden has produced the most amazing video mashup I've ever seen: "A Fair(y) Use Tale" cuts together thousands of extremely short clips from dozens of Disney cartoons, lifting indivudal words and short phrases to spell out an articulate, funny, and thoroughly educational lesson on how copyright works. This is the most subversive and hilarious use of Disney material I've ever seen -- and there's even a really smart chapter about why Faden used Disney material to make his film. This should be required viewing in every K-12 classroom in the country. Coral Cache link to MP4 download, Link to Stanford page for the film (Thanks, Church!)

Update: Here's the YouTube version -- thanks, Pawel!

Update 2: Here's another mirror, courtesy of Alan

Update 3 This has been uploaded to dotsub for translation into your language of choice -- thanks, Diego!

Audi defrauded the city of Toronto by applying for permits to shoot a fictional movie, then using the sites that they'd received to erect giant, illegal advertisements for its new cars.

Audi apparently thought it could pull one over on the residents of Toronto, but it got caught. The automaker from Ingolstadt applied for a permit from the Film and Television Office of Toronto to shoot a commercial that would allow it to place double "T" statues that measure six feet high and fifteen feet long all over the city for a period of three days. A press release issued by Audi, however, confirms that no commercial would be shot, but rather that the statues are meant to act as billboards advertising the new Audi TT. The placement of the statues as advertisements, though, violates the city's signage laws.

Link (Thanks, Greg!)

Update: Stuart sez, "Rami Tabello, the co-ordinator of illegalsigns.ca has a continuing account on his website. This is a man with a mission"

(Photo by David Sky)

My friend Tim Wu has just published an excellent piece in Forbes Magazine about a way to keep our spectrum free, even after the mobile carriers have colonized it: require them to allow any of us to "attach" things to their networks.

What’s needed to spur innovation is a simple requirement: that any winner of the auction respect a rule that gives consumers the right to attach any safe device (meaning it does no harm) to the wireless network that uses that spectrum. It’s called the Cellular Carterfone rule, after a 1968 decision by the FCC in a case brought by a company called Carter Electronics that wanted to attach a shortwave radio to AT&T (nyse: T - news - people )’s network. That decision resulted in the creation of the standard phone jack. Applying the Carterfone rule to the next spectrum auction would ensure that our key fob designer need only look up standard technical specifications and then build and sell his device directly to the consumer. The tiny amounts of bandwidth the fob used would show up on the consumer’s wireless bill.

The right to attach is a simple concept, and it has worked powerfully in other markets. For example, in the wired telephone world Carterfone rules are what made it possible to market answering machines, fax machines and the modems that sparked the Internet revolution.

Attachment rights can break open markets that might otherwise be controlled by dominant gatekeepers. Longshot companies like Ebay or YouTube might never have been born had they first needed the approval of a risk-averse company like AT&T. If you’ve invented a new toaster, you don’t have to get approval from the electric company. Consumers decide how good your product is, not some gatekeeper.

Link

See also:
Why wireless carriers should be forced into neutrality
Jack Valenti says stupid things -- really, really stupid things
Searchable index of Judge Posner's decisions - law for the people
Network neutrality - why it matters, and how do we fix it?
A simple prescription for keeping Google's records out of government hands.
Understanding broadband regulation
Killer audio file of killer lawyers talking Grokster

Paul Krassner, founder of The Realist and co-founder of the Yippies kindly gave us this essay for publication on Boing Boing.

Spoiler alert: Please don't read this if you haven't seen the May 13 episode of The Sopranos but you still plan to.

The Sopranos Meet The Hippies by Paul Krassner

I usually watch The Sopranos at 9 p.m. on HBO, but this time I watched the East Coast feed at 6 p.m., so that I could also catch a two-hour documentary about hippies on the History channel at 8 p.m.

Paul Brownfield, one of the best TV critics around, wrote in his review of The Sopranos in the Los Angeles Times:

“Tony Soprano offed his nephew Christopher [in the wake of a car wreck, by squeezing his nose so that he would choke on his own blood], and in the nephew’s dying eyes our beloved protagonist became, finally, despicable and lost, beyond empathy....He dialed the numbers 9 and 1 on his cellphone before deciding that his own life would be easier, all in all, without the kid, whose drug addiction was bound to get them all ensnared by the feds....Sunday night’s episode concluded with Tony in the Nevada desert, loaded on peyote after an all-nighter with one of Christopher’s goomahs, screaming, ‘I did it!’ His face was a riot of tears, torment and unbidden glee.”

“That's funny,” I e-mailed Brownfield. “I thought Tony peformed a mercy killing, putting Christopher out of his misery, as well as getting him out of the way. At least he did it BEFORE taking peyote.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “By the way I fucked up: Tony screams ‘I get it!’ at the end, not ‘I did it!’ I think ‘I get it!’ is probably more in the spirit of peyote buttons.”

“I agree,” I responded, “although I also thought it was ‘I did it!’ and in fact I compared it to the time when Abbie Hoffman was in a Las Vegas hotel room while he was on the lam, shouting ‘I'm Abbie Hoffman!’--when ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ was a practice if not yet an advertising slogan.”

As for The Hippies, I asked a couple of fellow participants for their reactions.

Ken Babbs, sidekick of Ken Kesey in the roving band of Merry Pranksters:

“The reviews are in. The show sucked. I'm glad we don’t get that channel so I don’t ever have to watch the show. Zane [Kesey’s son] said he was ashamed to have had anything to do with it. Further disinformation--that picture of a bus, calling it the Ken Kesey prankster bus. I suppose it doesn’t do any good to point out that it is not Further but someone else’s bus, for as time goes on whatever anyone portrays as reality works just fine, for anyone who was there is probably dead by now, if not in body then probably in mind. Or as that girl shouted for a couple of hours at the Watts acid test, ‘Who cares?’ Yes, who. Who indeed.”

And Carolyn Garcia aka Mountain Girl, former wife of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia:

“Peter Coyote should be publicly stoned for participating [as narrator] in this bash-fest. Could more negative terms be found? I must have turned it off 5 times. Having it sponsored by AARP is additional irony, hard to digest. If I had known the bias of the piece I would have abstained. Well, what can one do? I hate being blamed for Manson and riots and people bleeding. What a nasty raft of crap.”

The History channel presented a blatant slur on countercultural history. I had been interviewed for a few hours and was dismayed to see that the one quote they used--beginning “It was fun”--immediately followed a scene of police indiscriminately beating young demonstrators at an antiwar rally.

The Sopranos and The Hippies--ordinarily on opposite ends of the subculture spectrum--now had something in common. They were both engulfed in a context of sadistic violence. You’d think you were watching the evening news. But allow me to be the first to wish you a merry sweeps month and happy ratings.

FROM THE GUY WHO SHOT THE FOOTAGE THAT WAS MORPHED INTO PREJUDICED PROPAGANDA:

Hi Paul,  

what can I say??  Hippies by the Hitler Channel. I know that the executive producer Scott Reda said in a newspaper article the day before that it was sad story and he would probably watch The Sopranos.  

 I guess he knew what I had to watch to find out . Hippies was not what I had hoped , if you watch my clips from interviews I did as tribute to Hunter S Thompson you will get another view and vibe.  Go to www.happytrailershd.com and click on Gonzo Utopia .  

I feel like the guy (Frank Whaley) in Pulp Fiction who said it best "We went into this with the best of intentions." Then Samuel Jackson shoots him in knee.  

Scott saved money by not having a director and his editor who had to tell the story was not qualified to .  He fired anyone who objected to his cost effective vision of what the Hippies were about . I supplied him with enough real first hand information from those who were there , they chose to ignore or manipulate it to a dirty story about dirty hippies .  

I am sorry to all of you who allowed me into your life , so the HC could present you in such a slanted  misunderstood view  

The code of Bushido says I must commit Harri Kari. Thank God I am a recovering Catholic .  

As for Scott although he was alive in the 60s I think he did two 50s and went right into the 70's  

My deepest apologies to all.  

Peace

Lance Miccio

Last year, the folks planning the launch of Richard Branson's soon-to-lift-off Virgin America line asked us if we'd like to name one of their new planes.

After much swapping of emails among BoingBoing co-editors, we finally agreed on one name that that loyal readers of this lowly blog will no doubt find meaningful:

UNICORN CHASER.

(Background: Link 1, Link 2).

Just a few minutes ago, we received word that the US Department of Transportation has granted Virgin green light to begin service.

And that, dear reader, means that Unicorn Chaser will soon be flying high and proud among the cumulonimbus, seeking out mythical beasts and banishing goatse jpegs from the eyes of God.

BTW, we did not receive money or any other form of compensation for this, nor did they receive any cash or promises of manually administered happy endings from us. We did it for fun and unicorn love.

Here's the press release from our friends at Virgin. This is not a joke, and we can't wait to fly in this plane, woohoo!

- - - - - - - -

The co-editors at Boing Boing, one of the world’s most popular blogs, have named a new Virgin America aircraft: Unicorn Chaser. The airline’s first aircraft was named Jefferson Airplane in October by the band’s lead singer, Grace Slick.

“The idea of Unicorn Chaser first popped up on Boing Boing to serve as a cleansing of the palate after a viewer has been subjected to a distasteful internet image or experience” said Xeni Jardin, a tech culture journalist and co-editor of Boing Boing. “Nothing takes away the sting of a jarring experience better than an image of a nice unicorn prancing in the meadow.”

“Unicorn Chaser fits the Virgin brand - compared to my recent experiences of flying domestically, I'm sure Virgin America will be a welcome relief!” adds John Battelle, Boing Boing’s business manager and Chairman of Federated Media.

Members of the public are invited also to name the airline’s new fleet by taking part in Virgin America’s Name Our Planes program at www.virginamerica.com. The airline will announce new names in the lead-up to launch of service which it hopes to introduce in the Spring.

Link to Virgin's nameourplanes.com. (Thanks, Patrick Kelly / Johnny Vulkan / Anomaly!)

Reader comment: Stephanie Kellogg says,

I don't know if this is already obvious information, but the name "Unicorn Chaser" is also appropriate for an airline called "Virgin" because of traditional medieval beliefs about unicorns--that they could only be caught or tamed by a virgin. Wikipedia mentions this in the article on unicorns: Link.

I don't know if their are a lot of art majors who read boing boing, but that's the sort of thing that's useful to know for art history.

Zan says,

Sentencing in the Julie Amero pop-up pornography case has been postponed again, this time until June 6th. This was possible to accommodate a change in venue from Norwich Superior Court to New London Superior Court.

Link

Previously on BoingBoing:
• Pop-up porn case sentencing this Friday
• Pop-up porn case update
• Take Action: Julie Amero Porn Case
• Teacher faces 40 years for porn in classroom, blames adware
• Teacher faces jail time over "accidental porn" in classroom

Brian Boyko says,

I recently got an oppertunity to interview Wafaa Bilal, the artist who is living with a paintball gun controlled via the Internet 24 hours a day. Some powerful stuff here:

Snip: Do you think the pseudo-anonymity of the internet and the distance has a lot to do with how this project is turning out?

No doubt about it. I mean, (*bang*) it is an internet base, and it is using the latest way of communication, but by design (*bang*), I wanted to remove the viewer from any physical impact. You log on the set, and you don't even have sound (*bang,bang*) I mean, you're hearing it right now, because we're on the phone, but when you're on the site, you never hear it. That's speaks of the virtual war that's being conducted against Iraq and other nations as well.

Link

Previously on BB:

Shoot a real live Iraqi over the Internet

Snip from a piece in today's New York Times by John Schwartz:

A 2-year-old boy spent seven weeks in the hospital and nearly died from a viral infection he got from the smallpox vaccination his father received before shipping out to Iraq, according to a government report and the doctors who treated him.

The boy, who lives in Indiana and has recovered, became ill in early March, two weeks after his father’s deployment was delayed and he was allowed to make a trip home. Over the next few weeks, the boy suffered kidney failure and lost most of his skin to the disease, eczema vaccinatum.

Link.

Scientists dinking around with deep-sea life in Antarctica say this thing is a carnivorous sponge sea urchin.

Anyone who's ever plunked a fry into a sweet puddle of ketchup knows better. "Ctenocidaris," my ass!

The researchers claim to have discovered 585 new species of crustaceans and "hundreds of new worms." Findings are in this month's Science, and go well with a warm cheeseburger or a cold shake. Link. In related news, Antarctica is melting.

(Thanks, Ape Lad)

The Long Now Foundation has just published news about the North American debut of Brian Eno's latest project:

Conceived by Brian Eno as "visual music", his latest artwork, 77 Million Paintings is a constantly evolving sound and imagescape which continues his exploration into light as an artist's medium and the aesthetic possibilities of "generative software".

He first created 77 Million Paintings to bring art to the increasing number of flat panel TV's and monitors that often sit darkened and underutilized. Now Eno is also showing large installations of this work, recently at the Venice Bienniale and Milan Triennale, and in Tokyo, London and South Africa. The installation at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be the North American Premiere of his work.

June 29-July 1 at Yerba Buena in San Francisco. Link to more information on that exhibition, and here is the project website for 77 Million Paintings. Brian Eno narrates an explanation of the project on that Flash-built website. (Thanks, Kevin Kelly!)

The time has come for the maker mayhem weekend! MAKE:'s Bay Area Maker Faire is Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. 400 makers! 40,000 expected attendees! 200,000 square feet of thrills, chills, eccentric inventors, weird science, extreme crafts. It's going to be a mind-blowing DIY extravaganza of unprecedented proportion. Step right up! (Seen here, Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate's SS Alpha Fox and MAKE:'s newly-acquired vintage fire truck.)

Link to Maker Faire, Link to Scott Beale's sneak peek at Laughing Squid

Previously on BB:
• Maker Faire previews May 7-11
• Maker Faire previews May 1-5
• Maker Faire previews April 23-27
• Maker Faire previews April 16-20
• Maker Faire previews April 9-13

Earlier this week, I blogged about a new set of AACS keys being compromised -- a set of keys that can be used to crack the anti-copying technology on HD-DVDs. The fascinating thing about this is that it came six days before the release of a new generation of HD-DVD discs that are hardened against copying using another leaked key (the AACS Licensing Authority's attempt to suppress that key was an unmitigated disaster, leading to more than a million republications of the key).

Princeton's J Alex Halderman has just posted a terrific little explanation of the logistics of all this: why it took the AACS-LA months to revoke the old key, and why it will never be able to revoke compromised keys as quickly as new keys are broken.

However, a new twist came yesterday, when SlySoft, an Antigua-based company that sells software to defeat various forms of copy protection, updated its AnyDVD product to allow it to copy the new AACS discs. Apparently, SlySoft had extracted a key from a different player and had kept the attack a secret. They waited until all the other compromised keys were blacklisted before switching to the new one.

The AACS Licensing Authority will be able to figure out which player SlySoft cracked by examining the program, and they will eventually blacklist this new key as well. However, all discs on store shelves will remain copyable for months, since disc producers must wait another ninety days before making the change.

To be successful in the long run, AACS needs to outpace such attacks. Its backers might be able to accelerate the blacklisting cycle somewhat by revising their agreements with player manufacturers, but the logistics of mastering discs and shipping them to market mean the shortest practical turnaround time will be at least several weeks. Attackers don’t even have to wait this long before they start to crack another player. Like Slysoft, they can extract keys from several players and keep some of them secret until all publicly known keys are blacklisted. Then they can release the other keys one at a time to buy additional time.

Link

Here's an interesting photo-book about tattoo typography -- "Body Type: Intimate Messages Etched in Flesh," by Ina Saltz (09-2006). Found on Tim Cole's blog, and he's with the Adobe InDesign team. "This book makes me wonder if the lack of a series of Body Art templates is a glaring oversight on our part," says Tim. (Thanks, Caspar)

Reader comment: Jessica Reynolds says,

There is also a flickr group (of course) that chronicles "words on skin": Link

Darren says,

Inspired by Dominic Monaghan’s bicep, I created a roundup a while back of textual tattoos: Link.

James sez, "The Silver Snail comic book store in Toronto is celebrating their 31st anniversary. They've put out this great "Saturday Evening Post" style poster as part of the fun."

I've been shopping at the Snail since I was a kid -- I love that place. Link

According to online reports, police in at least four cities in Poland have arrested a number of people in a copyright infringement crackdown. The raids are said to have been coordinated with German police, and a Polish anti-piracy group associated with the recording industry.

What's weirdest about the raids, though, is that they targeted people who subtitle movies:

In Krakow, Slask, Podlasie, and Szczecin, police arrived at the suspected subtitlers’ homes at 6 a.m. — and took them into custody. The story first appeared on the Polish Linux site, which states that “According to Polish copyright law any ‘processing’ of others’ content including translating is prohibited without permission.” Newspaper accounts report that the detained subtitlers face two years in jail if they’re convicted of illegally publishing copyrighted material — presumably including translated movie dialogue.

Link.

Assuming the reports are accurate -- there's no direct reporting available from sources I know and trust -- I wonder if there's a a connection with recent news that the Bush administration recently put Poland on a copyright "priority watch list," threatening economic sanctions if law enforcement in Poland did not take more forceful action against infringement. Snip:

China, Russia and 10 other nations were targeted by the Bush administration for failing to sufficiently protect American producers of music, movies and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.

The Bush administration on Monday placed the 12 countries on a "priority watch list" which will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions if the administration decides to bring trade cases before the World Trade Organization.

Link

Reader comment: W. James Au, Games Editor, GigaOM.com says:

I was in Warsaw and Krakow a few months ago, and during primetime the television stations were running top American TV shows without subtitles-- instead, they'd turned the native audio track way down; instead, all you heard was some dude translating the action and dialog in Polish. It was pretty weird and unsatisfying having to watch "Lost" without hearing the music, or the sound effects, or even the dialog, so I'd say the rogue subtitlers are providing an important service.

Over at the Wired News "Threat Level" blog, Luke O'Brien writes,

A civil liberties group representing 16 attorneys of detainees at Guantanamo Bay on Thursday sued the National Security Agency and the Justice Department, claiming that the government illegally spied on the lawyers with warrantless wiretaps and has refused to turn over records of the snooping.

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the FOIA suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The group wants all records related to government eavesdropping on the lawyers' conversations with their clients, which would usually be considered legally protected privileged communication.

The suit alleges that the government failed to meet its FOIA obligations to turn over records the lawyers want in timely fashion.

PDF of the complaint, and more information on the case, is here: Link.

poke the bunny
ladybug
boomshine
irritating games
stick remover
picto
rotate
tama
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dr. strange blix

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!).

Noah Shachtman has posted an update on the US military's recent decision to ban YouTube, MySpace, and the like in warzones. One of the Defense Department's top IT people defended the decision to Noah, saying it had nothing to do with security concerns, and everything to do with bandwidth issues. But then, the same official went on to say that the sites weren't actually a bandwidth issue yet. Snip:

The Defense Department isn't trying to "muzzle" troops by banning YouTube and MySpace on their networks, a top military information technology officer tells DANGER ROOM. Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, says that the decision to block access to social networking, video-sharing, and other "recreational" sites is purely at attempt to "preserve military bandwidth for operational missions."

Not that the 11 blocked sites are clogging networks all that much today, she adds. But YouTube, MySpace, and the like "could present a potential problem," at some point in the future. So the military wanted to "get ahead of the problem before it became a problem."

Link

A leaked NPR memo says that they'll be putting the presedential debates online without licensing restrictions:

Earlier this year, we announced that Iowa Public Radio and NPR will partner to produce two live national presidential debates in Des Moines on January 9-10, to be offered on public radio and online.

Debates are a core part of our public service mission, and our goal is to give the broadest audience the widest opportunity to use the candidates’ ideas and words. To achieve that in today’s media environment, NPR and Iowa Public Radio have decided that we will make our recordings of these debates fully accessible to everyone, without license restrictions, following each of our original NPR Member station broadcasts/webcasts.

The issue of full, non-exclusive public access to debate content is currently a subject of discussion among media organizations, with varying viewpoints. NPR believes that placing these recordings in the public domain will help raise public awareness and bolster civic participation in the election process, and will serve as a natural extension of our mission.

Link (Thanks, Andy!)

See also:
CNN will offer presidential debate video online with no restrictions
Obama wants Creative Commons licensed Presidential debates
Ask DNC and RNC for freedom to remix presidential debates

"An Alternate History of Chinese Science Fiction: The Humble Scrawl of Kuo Pao Kun, Mandarin" is a truly remarkable fake alternate history of science fiction told as though the field had evolved in China. The author goes way, way over top, including photoshopped book covers, elaborate fan-disputes over authors' significance, and so on.

Liu Hui Wen's "The Call of Cthulhu" (4625). Look, you can poke fun at Liu's style all you want. Anyone can imitate him, in mediocre fashion, by tossing around words like "glabrous" and "foetor." You can point at the decades of bad Liu imitations as having had a deleterious effect on horror writing. But what you can't do is say that there wasn't anything to the stories, or that they weren't very good. As Professor Han Kuang Ning has repeatedly pointed out, there's a lot of good writing--not good prose, good writing, which is different--and solid idea-work in Liu's stories.

More to the point, the meme that started me on this calls for the “most representative and influential” of the decade, which Liu’s work is, and the best known, most representative, and most influential of Liu’s oeuvre is “Call of Cthulhu.” Hell, its famous first line, “the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to awaken from the sleep of ignorance,” is quoted in the Tsinghua Book of Quotations, and being quoted there means that you've entered the canon. The bad writers who followed Liu were influenced only by the surface elements of his work, and imitated only his style. But the good writers who followed Liu were influenced by the concept of cosmic horror which he (essentially) created. Cosmic horror, the idea that there are beings like Cthulhu and the No-Buddha which so transcend human understanding that to draw too close to them is to be driven insane—the idea that the powers of the universe are uncaring and unaware of puny motes like humanity—is Liu’s real legacy.

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: the real world made over in leet-speak. Link

Update:: No cyberwar attacks, just nationalist hackers.

Russia is accused of being the first country to declare cyber-war on another nation: the ongoing Estonian conflict has been accompanied by a massive DDoS attack on critical Estonian networks:

Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.

"This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."

Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised tomorrow at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga.

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

Tim and Eric, cultivators of fine funny, have produced a series of youtubes about the many aspects of Shrek 3's awesomeness. The film opens Friday nationwide.

Those unfamiliar with the comedy duo's brand of dry, deadpan wit may not immediately grok the fact that this is not a paid ad campaign.

The still-growing heap of apparent adulation for Shrek 3 includes: Tim and Eric Shrek the Third Promo, Report from Shrek.com Headquarters, Conversations about Shrek, Shrek Mobile, Congrats to Chris Miller, and there are many more right here.

The cluelessly outraged youtube user comments are almost as funny as the videos. (Thanks, Tim Heidecker!)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Supremely funny fake TV commercial: B'owl!

Update: "S Day" is here. There's an emergency phone message from David Liebe Hart. And James Qual has a, uh, a message. The Shret lovefest continues.

Vann Hall says,

TBS will pay San Francisco $85,000 to settle complaints over the bollixed Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerilla marketing campaign. In doing so it joins previous offenders IBM and NBC, who also ran afoul of the city's anti "corporate vandalism" stance. Too bad city officials were so rational; Boston's went into hysterics and made $2 million.

Link

Previously:

Boston drops charges against Mooninite terror cell leaders

This glowing Martian baby lamp also comes in luminescent orange and blue. Fill the nursery with these and make baby wonder why he isn't glowing and brightly colored. Link (via Cribcandy)

PBLoco sells extreme peanut butters with flavors like CoCoBanana, Asian Curry Spice, various chocolates, and so on. Link (via Cribcandy)

Check out this point-of-view video of a rickety North Korean rollercoaster at Kaeson Youth Funfair, Pyongyang -- a coaster so tame it's practically a soporific. Link (via Kottke)

Kevin Poulsen of the Wired News Threat Level blog writes,

U.S. News and World Report says THREAT LEVEL needs to take a chill pill on the issue of internet surveillance. "Nothing quite excites the blogosphere like a threat to its fiefdom," zings reporter Chris Wilson, who claims that last Monday's deadline for broadband providers to become wiretap friendly is mostly a nonevent, given how rare internet wiretaps are.

Wired christened today as "Wiretap the Internet Day." It caught on, igniting buzz about the subject this morning. ...

But according to annual reports on incidents of wiretapping issued by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the hype from this particular law may be overplayed. The vast majority of wiretaps granted through this avenue, known as a "Title III" surveillance, are issued for phones. In 2006, only 13 of the 1,714 intercept orders were for electronic communication, down from 23 out of a total of 1,694 in 2005.

But Wilson misses the truth in those numbers, as surely as he misses our original point: the quick and easy wiretapping ushered in by CALEA results in more domestic surveillance. Since the deadline for internet CALEA compliance was this week -- and time moves forward, not backwards -- internet surveillance numbers are still low compared to telephone surveillance, which has had CALEA for years.

Read the full post here: Link.

UPDATE: Jake Appelbaum provides more reliable information on the questions raised earlier today by a BoingBoing reader:

The reader comment on BoingBoing about the tor nodes is mostly bogus and uninformed. It's old news about a mistake by someone known in the Tor community.

Background: Link 1, Link 2.

The short and the long of those emails by (lead Tor developer) Roger Dingledine is:

"Yeah. This happened in mid 2006. I don't know why some random person just picked it up now.

We (mainly Steven Murdoch and Richard Clayton) tracked down the fellow running them. It turned out to be an innocent mistake. He's still running quite a few, on the same network, but now he sets the MyFamily torrc option on them.

This issue also prompted us to speed up the fix/feature in 0.1.2.1-alpha: "Automatically avoid picking more than one node from the same /16 network when constructing a circuit.""

- - - - - - - - -

PREVIOUSLY: BB reader David says,

Since TOR is an occasional pet topic at boingboing I thought this might be interesting. An example of the NSA spying program we know about, or something else? Either way, some sneaky peekers are trying to peel the onion. Link to txt file, excerpt here:

"High-traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C. Confirmed:
A group of 9 Tor routers also functioning overtly or indirectly as Tor exit nodes have been observed colluding on the public Tor network."

More discussion here: Link.

Kevin Burton says,

I created an unofficial video podcast feed for PBS Frontline which includes "Spying on the Home Front" which BoingBoing readers can use to sync with their iPod or watch on their Apple TV, which is here: Link.

Previously on BB:

Spying on the Home Front: PBS domestic surveillance doc

Military authorities in Fiji are cracking down on politically active bloggers, and blocking access to portions of the internet over "national security concerns."

Fiji's current, military-led government seized power in a coup last December.

The nation's sole internet and telecommunnications provider, FINTEL, was ordered to block specific IP address ranges. Banned IPs include many politically outspoken Fijian blogs.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a story here. Here's a related blog post with a good roundup of what's been going on in recent days.

Here are two of the the most active Fijian protest blogs targeted by military authorities: intelligentsiya and resistfrankscoup. Links to many other "resistance websites" on each. Looks like a number of Fijian bloggers are swapping tips on how to evade the 'net blockade.

To any folks in Fiji reading this post: here are some helpful tips on how to navigate around internet censorship -- Link to "BOING BOING'S GUIDE TO DEFEATING CENSORWARE."

UPDATE: Here's a story in the Fiji Times about an IT specialist who says he was beaten by military goons because they believed he had aided the banned blogs:

Businessman and information technology specialist Ulaiasi Taoi says he was punched and kicked by eight soldiers while he was kept overnight at the military camp. He was arrested and detained over allegations that he was involved in anti-military blogs on the Internet.

Mr Taoi was held in a cell at the Queen Elizabeth Barracks for 24 hours after soldiers escorted him from his office in Toorak about 2pm last Friday.

The military took him over its suspicions that he was behind one of the resistance blog sites that have been very vocal against the takeover. He had earlier had a "heavy" and "very abusive" telephone exchange with Colonel Pita Driti in which he was blamed for instigating the blog sites.

Link.

A study in the Journal of Marketing concludes that you can beat the market consistently by buying stock in companies with high customer satisfaction ratings:

Using a back-tested paper portfolio and an actual case, the study's authors found that companies at the top 20% of the the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) outperformed the the stock market, generating a 40% return. Over time, the portfolio outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 93%, the S&P 500 by 201%, and NASDAQ by 335%.

Link

Li Yu and Liu Bo, the photographers behind this project, explain:

Our selection of the news stories was inspired by the early-mentioned news report. But nowadays, the magic power and literary value of news has far exceeded our anticipation and even films: deceit, murder, eroticism and violence…so striking and unimaginable. How can one decide whether these stories have truly happened or not simply relying on written words? Maybe it's not important, at least they have truly existed in the papers. But as for the readers, these stories are as eye-catching as the blushing girl in her torn-up skirt. That's the so-called media truth. The life of today is the history of tomorrow. Someone says that history is like a girl ready to be dressed up by anyone. Now, let's put the girl with the torn-up skirt back into another beautiful outfit.

Image above:

Chutian Metropolis Daily 2006-12-02

A ￥100,000 cellphone was lost in the hospital and returned by the nurse Yesterday, a beautiful 20-year-old girl lost her cellphone in a maternity hospital of Wuhan and soon it was returned back by the nurse. The owner said, this cellphone was launched by the most luxurious mobile phone brand, Vertu. As one of the Racetrack Legends Series, it was worth ￥100,000.

Link to "13 Months in the Year of the Dog." Spotted on Raul Gutierrez' blog, with more background: Link.

BB reader Ryan Ozawa in Hawaii says,

Back in March, Dean Kamen introduced a robotic arm he was developing with DARPA to restore some independence to war veterans that had lost one or both arms in recent conflicts (previous BB post: Link).

While the only video available was taken from the back of a darkened room, the impact was enormous. Beyond Terminator jokes, many saw the potential of what Kamen and his team at DEKA were doing. But to date, there's still very little official information available about the project.

This week, Kamen was in Honolulu speaking to local tech and business leaders about his FIRST initiative, which aims to inspire youth in engineering and math through robotics. He'd recently announced that Hawaii would host a regional competition next March.

As part of his presentation, though, he touched on the robotic arm, giving some first-hand background and showing those remarkable video clips. Titled "Gen X - Separate Exo Control," I've posted the excerpt to YouTube:

Video Link.

Gregory Heller from Defective By Design says,

DefectiveByDesign.org is organizing a distributed action on May 25th to coincide with Disney's release of Pirates of the Caribbean - At World End.

The aim: educating the movie going public to what Disney, Hollywood, MPAA, AACSLA, HD-DVD, illegal hex codes, and disgraced US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, all have in common.

DBD is selling its signature yellow DRM Elimination Crew Suits to supporters via their website.

Link

Loyal BoingBoing readers will recall the formerly sad tale of Tony Alleyne, an obsessive -- and incredibly talented -- Star Trek fan who transformed his UK flat into a painstakingly precise replica of a Star Trek ship...

NPR: Living in the Star Trek Universe -- For Real

Archived BB post here.

So, after years of financial woes, personal hardship, and failed attempts to auction it off, Tony has finally sold his masterpiece for a whopping £425,000, five times the estimated market value.

The 54-year old trufan spent many years and dozens of thousands of dollars remodeling the one-bedroom studio flat in Hinckley, Leicestershire. For this latest eBay auction, he offered the flat with a guide price of £130,000 - £50,000, and things ended happily. Link to BBC article (thanks, Scissorman).

Images: At top, the "transporter room" of Tony Alleyne's flat. At left, Mr. Alleyne, living the life. (courtesy of 24th Century Design)

Carl Malamud says,

SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu has 6,288 images of tremendous historical significance, but this federal institution protects their "property" with draconian copyright notices.

Most of this stuff appears to be in the public domain which means you can do whatever you want with it, but the Smithsonian site has considerably chilled our ability to increase or diffuse this knowledge.

To better ascertain the public domain nature of this archive, we scraped their html and piped all 6,288 lo-res images to Flickr (check out the cool tag cloud). For those interested in purchasing images to upload back into the public domain, we've created a public domain prospectus on Lulu. For the historic Muybridge Cyanotypes, we've started purchasing the hi-res images and have posted those for bulk download as well as created a series of derivative works.

There is a 2-page memo explaining the issues and the actions we've undertaken to better increase and diffuse this knowledge onto the net.

Link. Above, a cropped detail from the Edward Muybridge cyanotypes subset.

Normally I'd just slap these on as footnotes to yesterday's post about creepy ads promoting the irrigation of ladyparts with common household cleaning chemicals.

But two of the many Lysol/feminine hygiene ads in the "Her Secret Past: So Dainty and Fresh" flickr pool merit special attention.

Above: Douche with Lysol, and prevent the dreaded Spider-crotch syndrome.

And at left, from 1936: in the year when Hitler hosted the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin to demonstrate Aryan superiority over all lesser races, this ad promoted Lysol as a glamour secret of "die eleganten damen" of the Third Reich.

(Thanks, Paula K. Wirth)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Feminine hygiene ad, 1926, advocates douching with Lysol

Reader comment: Moria Legge-Conyers adds,

The Museum of Menstruation has a great collection of ads of that same genre/suggestion: Link the rest of their site is great, as well. Well worth checking out.

Internet archivist Rick Prelinger sez, "Harper's Magazine's Gideon Lewis-Kraus spent a lot of time with us and wrote a smart (and kind) piece about Prelinger Library and where he thinks it's pointing."

Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger, experimental amateur librarians...think the conflict between a so-called digital culture and a so-called print culture is fake; they think we should stop celebrating, or lamenting, the discontinuous story of how the circuits will displace the shelves, and start telling a continuous story about how the two might fit together.

This is a great piece -- and the Prelinger Archive is amazing. PDF Link (Thanks, Rick!)

The Anti-Sit Archives is a huge collection of pictures of "anti-sit" technologies used by landlords to prevent people from perching on the sides of their buildings. A fascinating tour through the architectures of control in design. Link (via Architectures of Control in Design)

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a mixed blessing in its ruling on the long-running Perfect 10 v Google lawsuit, in which Perfect 10, a photography site, sued Google for including thumbnails of its images in the Google Image Search results. Perfect 10 also sued Google for indexing infringing copies of its images that appeared on other sites.

The Ninth said that Google's Image Search thumbnails are fair use -- that's the good news. The less-great news is that the court also ruled that Google is a "secondary infringer" where it has "actual knowledge" of copycat sites in its index and fails to do anything about it.

Today's decision reversed the lower court's holding [PDF] that Google's thumbnails were not a fair use, following and bolstering an earlier image search engine precedent, Kelly v. Arriba Soft [PDF]. The court rightly took into account the important public benefit that search engines provide -- not simply the impact on the particular parties in this case -- and what would serve copyright's fundamental goal of promoting access to creative works. While Google's transformative use of the image provided a very real public benefit, Perfect 10's potential loss of thumbnail licensing revenue was highly speculative.

The Court also shot down Perfect 10’s claim that Google was displaying the full-sized versions of infringing images from third-party websites by framing them or providing an HTML in-line link tag to end users. The Court correctly discerned the technology at issue, finding that when you frame a page or provide an in-line link, it’s the site that you’re pointing to that could be displaying the picture, not the search engine that coughs up the HTML.

Link

AACS, the anti-copying system behind HD-DVD, has been cracked again before its next update was released. HD-DVD was cracked some months ago after the "processing key" for the discs was uncovered by a poster on the Doom9 message-board. In response, the AACS Licensing Authority "revoked" that key, so that new HD-DVD titles would no longer play on older players until they were updated.

The first DVDs with the updated keys ship on May 22, but the new keys have already been compromised -- that means that HD-DVD has been broken again, even before it was actively patched.

The AACS key was the subject of an enormous amount of controversy earlier this month, when the AACS-LA sent legal threats to sites that had included they key in their reportage of the initial break (my class blog received a threat, too). Although the key initially appeared on just a few sites, in the wake of the controversy, more than 1.3 million pages have now published the number. More people know how to break HD-DVD than own HD-DVD players.

This raises the question: what will AACS-LA do now? Key revocation doesn't work. Suing the Internet doesn't work. DRM doesn't work (this DRM took years and cost millions, it was broken in days, for free, by hobbyists). Pirates who download movies don't ever see DRM. Honest customers who buy media are the only people who ever get restricted by it -- and it's clear that a lot of people aren't willing to pay money for movies that are less useful than the pirate versions they can get for free. Link

Two advanced chatbots, ALICE and Jabberwacky, were pitted against one another by Discover Magazine, and the result is surprisingly existential:

ALICE: Who created you?
Jabberwacky: My mother gave birth to me. Is that what you mean?
A: Jabberwacky, I meant exactly what I said.
J: Do you believe in God?
A: Of course I believe in God.
J: Why do you believe in God?
A: The Bible tells us to believe in God.
J: That’s circular reasoning.
A: I’m glad we have that all cleared up.
J: Yes. Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.
J: I think you lie a lot.

Link (via Kottke)

Update: Jeremiah has conducted a number of interviews with chatbots.

Last night, Rudy Rucker and I gave a reading and a fun panel in San Francisco, as part of the SF in SF series hosted by Terry Bisson. Terry and Rudy are two of my favorite writers, and they were absolutely great. Rudy read a wild story about Alan Turing's efforts to avoid the MI5's post-war morality squad as he pursues a gay dalliance with a handsome Greek. I read a part of my forthcoming hackers-versus-the-DHS novel Little Brother. Afterwards we talked publishing. Al Billings brought his podcasting rig and recorded the whole thing and he's already got it online. Link, MP3 Link (Thanks, Al!)

TokyoFlash's latest wildly impractical, handsome Japanese wristwatch is the EleeNo WebTime Elite. Although this isn't nearly as impractical as a watch that vibrates the time in Morse code, it is nevertheless extremely handsome. I'm really becoming a fan of "butterfly clasp" watch-straps that make a continuous loop around your wrist. Plus it comes in orange, which is unquestionably the best color a watch can be. Link

See also:
Binary LED watch from TokyoFlash
Crazy TokyoFlash watch: the Pimp Watch
Radio Active watch from Tokyo Flash
Scope watch tells time using line-intersections on Cartesian grid
Impractical lovely pixelwatch from Japan

Low-level exposure to sarin nerve gas could have caused brain damage in former service members, according to scientists working with the DoD. More than 100,000 US troops were exposed to that toxin in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War. Snip from NYT article:

Roberta F. White of Boston University led the study of sarin nerve gas, which used new scanning technology. Though the results are preliminary, the study is notable for being financed by the federal government and for being the first to make use of a detailed analysis of sarin exposure performed by the Pentagon, based on wind patterns and plume size.

The report, to be published in the June issue of the journal NeuroToxicology, found apparent changes in the brain’s connective tissue — its so-called white matter — in soldiers exposed to the gas. The extent of the brain changes — less white matter and slightly larger brain cavities — corresponded to the extent of exposure, the study found.

Previous studies had suggested that exposure affected the brain in some neural regions, but the evidence was not convincing to many scientists. The new report is likely to revive the long-debated question of why so many troops returned from that war with unexplained physical problems.

Link. And here's the site for NeuroToxicology (pay access only, and the site navigation is abominable)

Reader comment: Patrick Snajder says,

You noted in the link to the NeuroToxicology that the site navigation, from publisher Elsevier, is abominable. You are probably aware, but Elsevier is currently being boycotted by some scientists for its involvement in arms trade shows: Link, and current news here.] The fact that Elsevier was involved was, ironically or not, rooted out by another Elsevier journal, The Lancet: Link.

Last month, I posted the short list for the Royal Society 2007 Prize for Science Books. The Royal Society is the UK's national academy of science, and even making the long list of potential winners is a huge deal for science writers. This year, the prize goes to "Stumbling on Happiness," the pop science bible of positive psychology by Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert. Here's Gilbert's response to winning, from the Royal Society press release:

I'm absolutely delighted to receive this tremendous honour from the world's oldest learned society. There are very few countries (including my own) where a somewhat cheeky book about happiness could win a science prize -- but the British invented intellectual humour and have always understood that enlightenment and entertainment are natural friends. So God bless the empire!

Link to buy Stumbling on Happiness, Link to Royal Society press release

Previously on BB:
• Royal Society 2007 Prize for Science Books Link
• Stumbling on Happiness: why we suck at being happy Link
• Radio show on the science of happiness Link

This year, Prozac celebrates twenty years of better (?) living through chemistry! In The Observer, Anna Moore lists twenty things "you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world." From the article:

Eli Lilly, the company behind Prozac, originally saw an entirely different future for its new drug. It was first tested as a treatment for high blood pressure, which worked in some animals but not in humans. Plan B was as an anti-obesity agent, but this didn't hold up either. When tested on psychotic patients and those hospitalised with depression, LY110141 - by now named Fluoxetine - had no obvious benefit, with a number of patients getting worse. Finally, Eli Lilly tested it on mild depressives. Five recruits tried it; all five cheered up. By 1999, it was providing Eli Lilly with more than 25 per cent of its $10bn revenue...

Twenty years on, Prozac remains the most widely used antidepressant in history, prescribed to 54m people worldwide, and many feel they owe their lives to it. It is prescribed for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, eating disorders and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (formerly known as PMT). In the UK, between 1991 and 2001, antidepressant prescriptions rose from 9m to 24m a year.

Link (via Mind Hacks)

Previously on BB:
• Peed-out Prozac detectable in UK water-supply Link
• Carbs crank up serotonin Link

BoingBoing reader Philip says,

I created a fun game called "Hitler or Falwell!" This is a simple game of Godwinism, in which I present a quote and YOU guess who said it. Some sample questions:

1. My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter.
2. This 'turn the other cheek' business is all well and good but it's not what Jesus fought and died for.

Link

Previously:

Falwell's stupidest quotes, direct from hell.

Jerry Fallwell talks about his first time.

(ANSWERS TO SAMPLE QUESTIONS HERE...

Joshua Glenn says:

This guy Joe Alterio is very talented and it's a fun way to raise money for a good cause.

Robots and Monsters is "a charitable effort that is one part fundraiser, one part lowbrow art gallery, and one part collective art experiment." In an effort to raise money for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Alterio has offered to draw you a robot or a monster, as defined by three words or phrases you provide. He explains:

"You get the original piece of art, 6" x 6", signed, of a robot or monster or both (your choice), as defined by three words you provide.... An image of one robot or monster is 25 bucks, a picture of 2 things, either robot or monster, is 40."

Other artists may join in the fun -- if so, Alterio says he will eventually publish a book of all the robots and monsters they create.

Link

Anonymous Digital Rights Crusader says,

Last night, PBS Frontline aired Spying on the Home Front (Link), devoted to all the ways our government is spying on us outside of normal lawful processes. With extras not included in the televised version, the episode is available in either Quicktime or Windows Media (Video Link).

From the PBS site (Link):

9/11 has indelibly altered America in ways that people are now starting to earnestly question: not only perpetual orange alerts, barricades and body frisks at the airport, but greater government scrutiny of people's records and electronic surveillance of their communications. The watershed, officials tell FRONTLINE, was the government's shift after 9/11 to a strategy of pre-emption at home -- not just prosecuting terrorists for breaking the law, but trying to find and stop them before they strike.

President Bush described his anti-terrorist measures as narrow and targeted, but a FRONTLINE investigation has found that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and sifting Internet communications of millions of Americans; the FBI conducted a data sweep on 250,000 Las Vegas vacationers, and along with more than 50 other agencies, they are mining commercial-sector data banks to an unprecedented degree.

Even government officials with experience since 9/11 are nagged by anxiety about the jeopardy that a war without end against unseen terrorists poses to our way of life, our personal freedoms. "I always said, when I was in my position running counterterrorism operations for the FBI, 'How much security do you want, and how many rights do you want to give up?'" Larry Mefford, former assistant FBI director, tells Smith. "I can give you more security, but I've got to take away some rights. … Personally, I want to live in a country where you have a common-sense, fair balance, because I'm worried about people that are untrained, unsupervised, doing things with good intentions but, at the end of the day, harm our liberties."

I've seen Salvador Dalí's famous Alka Seltzer commercial many times, but this video shows two I didn't know about: Dalí pitching Lanvin chocolates and Veterano brandy. There are others on the YouTube page too!
Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Previously on BB:
• Salvador Dalí on "What's My Line?" Link
• Dalí in Smithsonian Link

In January, Shannon Malloy, 30, was in a car crash in Nebraska that left her "internally decapitated." Her skull and spine separated but her neck remained whole. Amazingly, she survived and is recovering. From DenverChannel.com:

Five screws were drilled into Malloy's neck. Four more were drilled into her head to keep it stabilized. Then a thing called a halo -- rods and a circular metal bar -- was attached for added support...

"My skull slipped off my neck about five times. Every time they tried to screw this to my head, I would slip," said Malloy.

Rebuilding Malloy's neck strength was a priority, but there were also other complications.

"I had a fractured skull, swollen brain stem, bleeding in my brain, GI tube in my stomach, can't swallow, and nerve damage in my eyes (because they cross)," said Malloy.

Doctors are working on that but she has been lucky enough to get the halo removed. She videotaped the experience for 7NEWS.

Link (Thanks, Jennifer Lum!)

Daniel Terdiman, who soils his eyeballs with The Sun so you don't have to, blogs,

If you've ever spent any time on your sofa wishing that you could take it wherever you wanted to go, you might want to talk to Marek Turowsk.

That's because on Sunday, Turowsk set a new world record for "fastest furniture," according to The Sun, a British publication.

The Sun reported that Turowsk hit 92 miles an hour, breaking the previous record of 87 miles an hour for high-speed couches, which was set in 1998 by engineer Ed China.

Link. The couchmobile is plastered with ads for sofa.com.

Cropped detail here, full ad here: Link to "The Mother Whose Children Are Happy at Home," an ad for Lysol (yes, that Lysol), in a 1926 magazine. Here's a later ad from the '40s, and this article puts the ads in context.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) are among a handful of congresscritters participating in an experiment in which they must subsist on standard US food stamp rations for one week.

The shocking conclusion, so far? $21 worth of stamps a week doesn't add up to much, and it's "almost impossible" to maintain a healthy diet for $1 a meal (huh, wonder why America's poor suffer obesity in such great numbers?).

Both lawmakers are blogging about the experience: McGovern here, Ryan here. Snip from Ryan's latest post:

My biggest concern today is running out of food before the end of the week.

One loaf of bread doesn’t make as many sandwiches as you’d think, and I’m running through my cottage cheese pretty fast as well.

The budgeting was hard enough, rationing what I do have will present another challenge.

Link to Washington Post story (thanks, Rebecca).

Reader comment: Stephan says,

These Congressmen aren't the first politicians to think of living off food stamps for a week. Governor Ted Kulongoski of Oregon spent his own week eating for only $21 less than a month ago. Take your choice of links.

Chris says, More examples of (this time UK) politicians dipping their toe in the pool of real life in a phony attempt to get credibility.

In 1993 UK politician Michael Portillo lived like a 'single mom' on £80 a week.

And David Cameron (leader of opposition Conservatives) has just finished living with a Muslim family in Birmingham for a week, and being a teaching assistant for a couple of days: Link.

Nick says,

Michael Pollan did a great job explaining why the poor suffer from obesity in the April 22 NY Times Magazine - it's because crap like Twinkies is cheap. And Twinkies are cheap because of the U.S. farm bill, which subsidizes Twinkie ingredients, but not things like fresh veggies. Pollan's article is lucid and illuminating. Link.

My fellow NPR contributor Stacy Bond says,

Folks like me who rely on Internet streaming to listen to great public radio stations like KEXP in Seattle or KCRW in Los Angeles - may be disheartened by the recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) requiring public broadcasters to pay the same (outrageous) royalties as commercial broadcasters, and charging them back-pay.

Luckily, an updated a public broadcasting advocacy site will now allow the public an opportunity to tell congress how they feel about the CRB ruling.

Some background:

Currently, internet streaming provides music that isn't pre-programmed (via payola to corporate entities like Clear Channel or Infinity Broadcasting), but that instead results from actual music-loving dj's digging through the stacks and selecting what they enjoy and want to share.

These low-budget stations' way of doing things is in danger now due to the recent ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB).

The ruling "exposes public radio stations that stream their musical content to huge increases in royalty payments and threatens to drastically curtail the programming diversity found on public broadcasting websites. This decision treats public broadcasters the same as commercial entities and saddles public radio stations with inappropriate and unachievable requirements.

Additionally, because the CRB's decision requires public radio stations to pay royalties on a per song/per listener basis, it directly contradicts public radio's public service obligations and mission. In a very direct way, the CRB decision penalizes public radio stations for their service to the public. The more of the American population [public stations] reach, the larger the royalty payments."

To help protect non-commercial broadcasters and give them an even playing field with the likes of clear channel, visit the site and make your voice heard.

Link

Previously on BB:

Internet radio crisis: an overview, from SomaFM's Rusty Hodge

Internet radio crisis: Newsweek's coverage

Reader comment: Andy Mardesich plugged in the name of at least one lawmaker on this site and found support status information that was out of date. He says,

It looks like the www.savenetradio.org site is more accurate in terms of indicating the status of reps who do or do not currently support the bill. I wrote TellThemPublicMatters.org to point this out, and they replied to say they're "upgrading" soon.

Matthew J. Kelly says,

It should be noted that that NPR's position on internet radio is entirely consistent with its earlier opposition to low-power FM radio, which, in association with the National Association of Broadcasters, it helped kill several years ago. The Low Power Radio Act of 2000 (sponsored by Senators McCain and Kerry) would have allowed neighborhoods and local communities to set up and operate their own non-commercial community radio stations, something that was (and is) really needed in places like rural America. NPR opposed it, claiming such stations would interfere with existing public radio stations, a claim many, like myself, found a little less than credible. While I'm glad NPR's on board with the fight to protect internet radio, questions will remain for me as to its motives.

Wired's Sunny Bains turned in an excellent piece on technology-induced synaesthesia -- the use of technological prostheses to give humans new senses, or to cross-wire existing ones. Some of the examples she cites are really compelling, like the researcher who surrounded his midriff with rumble-packs, the northernmost of which would gently vibrate, so that he could "feel" north at all times. Eventually, he ended up with a faultless sense of direction, able to pilot himself around strange cities without getting lost. Even more compelling was the rewiring of a subject's sense of balance: University of Wisconsin installed a feedback mechanism on the tongues of subjects with severe balance problems caused by inner-ear disruption. Although their inner ears told them they were whirling around, their tongues vibrated on the left if they were leaning to the left, on the right if they were leaning to the right, and in the middle if they were upright. The subjects were able to overcome their inner ear's faulty directions and navigate without falling over.

I cranked up the voltage of the electric shocks to my tongue. It didn't feel bad, actually — like licking the leads on a really weak 9-volt battery. Arnoldussen handed me a long white foam cylinder and spun my chair toward a large black rectangle painted on the wall. "Move the foam against the black to see how it feels," she said.

I could see it. Feel it. Whatever — I could tell where the foam was. With Arnold ussen behind me carrying the laptop, I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them with my eyes. Tyler's group hasn't done the brain imaging studies to figure out why this is so — they don't know whether my visual cortex was processing the information from my tongue or whether some other region was doing the work.

I later tried another version of the technology meant for divers. It displayed a set of directional glyphs on my tongue intended to tell them which way to swim. A flashing triangle on the right would mean "turn right," vertical bars moving right says "float right but keep going straight," and so on.

Link

Are you an aficionado of midcentury Japanese pop & easy-listening LPs? Taylor Jessen of Burbank has a mystery to solve:

I've got an aircheck from Firesign Theatre, a radio show from 1970, where the engineer keeps playing cuts from an LP that I think is a collection of pop instrumental versions of Japanese children's songs.

Here's a page full of MP3s. Mystery cue #1, "Chugoku-Chiho no Komoriuta" (中国地方の子守唄), is truly stunning - haunting and unforgettable.

Wow, the songs really are beautiful. Taylor has detailed his investigation here (for starters, none of the Firesign guys today know what the music is anymore). If you can help him solve the mystery, please contact him here (do not email me). (Thanks, Q-Burns Abstract Message!)

Craftsmen from Germany's Black Forest created the Music Orb, a spherical wood music box that plays Mozart's Voi Che Sapete. Wind it up and set it rolling. From Cookie:

No plastic, no shoot-me-now music clips, no seizure-inducing lights. Just a perfect oak sphere with the ethereal sounds of Mozart's "Voi Che Sapete" twinkling out from its 18-note chime...

Link

BoingBoing reader Rob Getzschman of Aisle Five Multimedia shares a funny, effective, work-safe AIDS PSA he produced for Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington.

"The music is Lead Belly's 'Keep Your Hands Off Her,' which I think fits quite nicely," says Rob. "A buddy of mine says he's never eating a frosted sugar cookie again."

Video Link to "Do you know where that cookie's been?"

Previously on BB: Awesome animated anti-AIDS PSAs from France

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the launches of Voyager I and II, NASA's interstellar probes. Both probles were carrying copies of the Golden Record, a phonograph disc with photos, music, and other material to give an extraterrestrials a sense of life on Earth. Carl Sagan led the committee to pick what was on the record, and it quite a strange and interesting collection of stuff, from a Blind Willie Johnson tune to a surreal photo "demonstration of licking, eating and drinking." From Jimmy Carter's message recorded on the Golden Record:

"Of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."

Link to the Golden Record page at NASA, Link to more at Popular Science (via Fortean Times)

The domain escrow firm that handled the transaction says, in a press release,

The sale is the largest all-cash domain transaction in history. It is the second largest domain sale overall after Sex.com, which sold for reportedly US $12 million in cash and stock during a private sale in January 2005.

Link. An early news account at SMH.

UPDATE: Joseph Menn of the LA Times slays all others covering this story with one mighty lede:

The free market has spoken: Sex is worth more than porn.

Link to his piece in the LAT.

Mental floss has a nice collection of science-fiction themed wedding photos and videos. Shown here: Star Trek: The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton offers a selection of Star Trek wedding packages. Link

Earlier this year, Stelarc finally found a medical doctor willing to implant a cell-cultivated ear beneath the skin on the artist's forearm.

The resulting body-mod is shown here. Photo by Nina Sellars, who is also married to the artist.

Stelarc is apparently planning to go through a few more surgeries to give it more definition.

"He's also going to implant a mic inside the ear that will connect to a bluetooth transmitter, so the ear can broadcast audio from the internet wirelessly," explains former BB guestblogger and sometimes Stelarc collaborator Karen Marcelo. "That Stelarc, always got something up his sleeve! He likes to say that too. "

He also has a walking robotic head (photos: 1, 2).

More photos of the arm with ear: surgery close-up (warning: extra gross), and here's a bunch more, including the rubber negative and cells growing in a petri dish (ew, looks like a shallow bowl of wonton soup).

(Thanks, Karen Marcelo!)

Previously on BoingBoing:

Jasmina Tešanović: Stelarc in Ritopek

Lend me an ear

Cultured Couture

Reader comment: Darran Edmundson says,

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of playing a small technical role in one of Stelarc's projects. He's the most accomplished but down-to-earth artist you'd ever have the pleasure of meeting. Third person paraphrased, I heard his response to the question, "What was the secret to hanging from all of those hooks?" (Link) as, "No secret, it f*cking hurts (smile)". He's a character ... and I mean that in the most positive sense imaginable.

Here is the trailer for writer-director Omer Ali Khan's "Zibahkhana"(Hell's Ground), a Pakistani zombie flick said to have been shot in less than a month on a single high-def cam.

Here's the official website, here's the MySpace with screening dates around the world.

The plot, not that one needs much of one in a zombie flick, involves a gang of teenagers en route to a rock concert. Their path to the show is blocked by a protest against polluted drinking water. The teens detour around the protesters on an old country road, and end up in the hands of hungry, undead psychopaths who munch on them with great delight.

Snip from Variety feature:

[It] might not be Pakistan's first horror movie, but it's almost certainly the first featuring midget zombies and produced by an ice cream mogul.

And here's an item on the Lahore metblog from "pretty simple," who went to see a screening in Pakistan yesterday:

The stuff I liked about this local director's flick was that, that its purely based on Pakistani Culture, there were glimpses of Maula Jutt, dhamal beat as the dominant background music, usage of "shuttlecock burqa" as mask or cover, even Luddoo. Yes, the story was predictable, but original locations and related Pakistani props gave it a reality-based genuine touch. It was fun watching first Pakistani horror movie, no doubt we were laughing most of the times, but there was really some ruthless killing in it, with blood all over the place and eyeballs in a jar (yuk).

Hey, how do you say BRRRRRRAAAAIIINNNNSSS in Urdu?

Blogger Imran Ali suggests the film's title should be "28 Samosas Later."

(Thanks, Hassan!).

Previously on BoingBoing:

What do Jamestown + 28 Weeks Later have in common?

Reader comment: Allan Janus says,

Xeni, on the subject of "Zibahkhana", the Pakistani zombie film, there's a wonderful Lollywood vampire film, "The Living Corpse" (Zinda Laash, 1967): Link. It's kind of fabulous. I've got some screen caps on my page: Link. According to the DVD's included documentaries, vampire fangs were unavailable in Pakistan at the time, so the movie's fangs were especially imported from Germany - fact!

Hameed Chughtai says,

The literal translation of Zibahkhana is "Slaughterhouse" and the translation for brain is "maghz".

Celebrity mugshots, Warholized: "Hollywood Most Wanted," a series of works on paper by Rachel Schmeidler. Link to hollywoodmostwanted.com.

Shown above, Jane Fonda, busted for vitamins. Below, CNN's Larry King, during a 1971 arrest on grand larceny charges.

Others in the glam-perp lineup: Lenny Bruce (1961, obscenity), Dennis Hopper (1975, traffic accident in Taos), Michael Jackson (2003, take a guess), Marilyn Manson (grinding against the head of a security guard during a July 2001 concert), and Elvis (ok, he *requested* his mug shot be taken while visiting FBI headquarters in DC, when he was visiting president Nixon.)

For LA-based readers: the series is on display at Hollywood’s Arclight Cinemas through June 21st 2007.

Amazon is launching a DRM-free MP3 only music store later this year, with music from more than 12,000 labels.

"Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. "We're excited to have EMI joining us in this effort and look forward to offering our customers MP3s from amazing artists like Coldplay, Norah Jones and Joss Stone."

Maybe this means that Amazon will fix its wretched, DRM-crippled video store, Amazon Unbox. Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

Reminder: I'm giving a reading tonight in San Francisco along with Rudy Rucker, followed by a discussion moderated by Terry Bisson. Hope to see you there!

Wednesday, May 16th, 7PM

Variety Children’s Charity
The Variety Preview Room
582 Market St. @ Montgomery
1st floor of The Hobart Bldg.

Link

Today on xkcd, the ultimate nerd webcomic: where LOLCats come from. Link

See also:
Massive cache of kittah pix (aka LOLcats, cat macros)
Pedantic overanalyzer sucks all the fun out of LOLcats
Pedantic overanalysis of LOLcats not pedantic enough, says blowhard
LOLtrek
Cat macros hijacked by heartless homosexuals
Oh, how I love the gebril macros!

Heather Jansch makes life-size horse sculptures out of driftwood. Link (via Cribcandy)

Update: Thanks to everyone who pointed out the similarity of these sculptures to Deborah Butterfield's work.

Link to larger JPEG (1222 x 1608) of the historic parody ad for Campari liquor that once appeared in Hustler magazine. In the fake-interview text, Falwell recalls having lost his virginity to his own mother in a goat-filled outhouse. Wikipedia link to the history of "Hustler Magazine v. Falwell," a legal case that helped defined free speech rights in America, in relation to parodies of public figures. Larry Flynt must be having a pretty happy day today. (image via medialibel)

Here's a statement released today by Flynt on the occasion of Fallwell's death. (thanks to everyone who suggested this)

Previously:

Falwell's stupidest quotes, direct from hell.

Reader comment: BoingBoing reader says,

This is a clip from a series of sermons Jerry Falwell gave in 1998 about Y2K. He reminisces about goats, too.

Chloe says: Can you hear me now? Not while Bush is in town.

Thought you might get a kick out of this: George Bush is visiting Sydney in September. The news is reporting that mobile phone use will be blocked "within an area the size of a football field" via a helicopter that will be following his motorcade.

They're calling it a "sophisticated counter-terrorism measure." Bad luck if you need to make an urgent call! Link

Update:

Here's what security expert Bruce Schneier has to say about the futility of cell phone jamming as a security measure:

Efforts to restrict cell phone usage because of this threat are ridiculous. It's a perfect example of a "movie-plot threat": by focusing on the specfics of a particular tactic rather than the broad threat, we simply force the bad guys to modify their tactics. Lots of money spent: no security gained."

And that's exactly what happened in Thailand:

Authorities said yesterday that police are looking for 40 Daihatsu keyless remote entry devices, some of which they believe were used to set off recent explosions in the deep South.

As Boing Boing reader Gorc says, "Does this mean the Bush's guys will be tackling people trying to get into their cars?"

According to this article, Sydney will be shutting down trains during APEC for a couple of days, too.

Julie Amero is a substitute teacher who was arrested for the crime of being present in a classroom equipped with an adware-infected computer that displayed porn pop-up ads. She faces 40 years in prison sentence, and will be sentenced on Friday. Zan says:

Julie Amero, the Connecticut teacher found guilty exposing children to pornography after popups appeared on her school computer, will face sentencing this Friday, May 18th. Amero, who says that malware on the infected PC was responsible for the popups, could face up to 40 years in jail. Even if she receives no jail time, Amero will be labeled as a sex offender and unable to teach, and be stuck with tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.

This case gained a lot of publicity earlier in the year, but as the prosecution has delayed sentencing three times, the story has fallen off the radar. The Amero case could have a chilling effect on efforts to get computer into classrooms if teachers are afraid of losing their careers (or freedom) over an infected PC.

Link

Reader comment:

Alex says:

Mark -- minor correction -- under this statute, she wouldn't be labeled as a sex offender, but she would will have 4 felony counts. Of course, sex offender status could always theoretically be "grandfathered" in to the statute in the future, so there is still that risk.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Pop-up porn case update
• Take Action: Julie Amero Porn Case
• Teacher faces 40 years for porn in classroom, blames adware
• Teacher faces jail time over "accidental porn" in classroom

I just finished EL Doctorow's (no relation) magnificent Civil War novel The March. Doctorow has a knack for writing big, unflinching novels about race politics in America (see, for example, his alternate history Houdini book Ragtime), but he's transcended himself with The March.

The March is set along the great march south in the last days of the War Between the States. Doctorow's March is a diverse nation, and Doctorow fearlessly expands his cast of characters to encompass the whole of it. There are criminals and madmen, bold freed slaves and terrified ones. Generals and corporals, patriots and deserters. Racists and opportunists. The brave and the cowardly. Lovers, despicable crooks, gifted artists, compassionate and dispassionate military men and doctors. Even the spear-carriers are vividly drawn and the main characters are as vivid as sunrise through the smoke of a burning field.

This is a huge book, with so many sub-plots and twists that it's nearly impossible to hold in your head at once (I recently read The Creationists a book of Doctorow's essays about literary and scientific creation, and it made me wonder just how much research and process he must have gone through in creating this incredible tome). The historical details feel real and the book is an education in itself on that score.

I listened to actor Joe Morton's wonderful unabridged reading of this book. Morton is a gifted voice talent, able to handle the comic relief and the gravitas (he's very good as both Sherman and Lincoln) with equal ease.

I love Doctorow's "little" books (for example, the tight and sprightly Book of Daniel, a mashup of the biographies of Abbie Hoffman and the Rosenbergs), but as he progresses along his path, he's writing them longer and weightier, and never disappointing.

Link, Link to audiobook

The Neuros OSD isn't just a radically open set-top box -- it's also a radically empowering hunk of technology. Neuros gave me two of their open-source/free-software video recorders for my class to play with all semester. Each week, two of my students took these home and played with them. A few students complained about the clunky user-interface, but others had overwhelming nerdgasms at the power of the tiny, Linux-based box.

The OSD can record from any analog video source, from a TiVo to a satellite box to a DVD player to a games console. It records to any removable media you plug into it, such as a USB thumb-drive or a hard-drive -- so you can record your favorite DVDs, your best video-games, or your TV shows straight to drive. Needless to say, it'll play back from all this media as well.

The OSD is networkable, and can schedule programming in advance like a TiVo. It can play back all the standard download formats, including Xvid and Divx.

Best of all, the OSD is open: anyone can hack its firmware and add features to it (Neuros will even pay hackers for adding features to the box). Unlike traditional PVRs that come lumbered with anti-copying technology to appease the Hollysaurs and anti-hacking technology to appease the investsaurs, the OSD actually treats you, the customer, as the owner of your device, and encourages you to wring every possible erg of value from your purchase. Link

EFF and its friends are on the verge of busting one of the most bogus technology patents ever granted, and they need your help to drive a spike through its heart. The patent in question is Acacia's ridiculous ownership over the idea of shipping CD ROMs and other media with hyperlinks in them.

To help bust this overly broad patent, we are looking for Prior Art that shows the use of this technology before 1994. Specifically, we are seeking the following items:

1. NetNews CD-ROMs, sold by Sterling Software, preferably volumes #1 through #35. These CDs may have been also available through CD Publishing Corporation.

or

2. Other CD-ROMs that were distributed in 1993 or earlier that contained hypertext content or were installation disks for applications that linked to Internet content.

Link

Ben says:

A scan of possibly the most disturbing/hilarious "children's" book ever written [Latawnya, the Naughty horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs]. Touches on issues of peer pressure, just saying no, and has pictures of horses doing drugs, drinking, and ODing. Would possibly fit with 50's era appropriateness, but it was published in 1991, ISBN 0-533-09102-0. In-freaking-credible.

Amazon has a used copy for $138.01. Link

Conrad Bakker makes replicas of products, places them on shelves next to their real counterparts, takes a photo, then leaves the items on the shelves.

This consumer object replacement involved selecting specific consumer items, carving/painting replicas and reinserting them back into their original consumer context. Photographs were taken of the re-made objects in context, and then the objects were left to drift.

Link (Thanks, JP!)

Kembrew says:

When I saw the BoingBoing post about John Cage appearing on a game show, I decided to upload a clip of Salvador Dali appearing on another 1950s game show, What's My Line.

The clip is part of a series on my Web site, kembrew.com, titled "The Duchamp Found Pop Culture Object Theater."

The blindfolded panelists are completely flummoxed when Dali responds affirmatively to the following questions about his line of work, including:

Q: Are you involved in the arts?

A: Yes.

Q: Are you a performer?

A: Yes.

Q: Are you involved in sports or athletics?

Q: Yes.

Then it gets more, well, surreal. My favorite question was:

Q: Is there something quite unusual about this man?

Link

The Los Angeles chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility is holding its annual fundraising gala on Thursday, June 7. Adam Parfrey says: "This is their big yearly fundraising event, so that they can do their work. You might have heard about the leaking of ammonium perchlorate into the So Cal water table, and all that stuff about the toxic nature of the old Boeing site in Santa Clara area. PSR-LA has brought a lot of attention to this issue, and is working on getting all this shit cleaned up. It hurts the newly born the worst."

Honorees at the event include the patriotic loyal American heroes Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson. And Randy Newman is going to perform! Link

Today's Rocketboom is about Maker Faire (This weekend in San Mateo!). Bre Pettis and Phillip Torrone were interviewed from the MAKE satellite office in New York. Link

Jamais Cascio says:

The story: Italian hackers at a group calling itself Inverse Path have figured out how to spoof the radio signals used by car navigation systems. The money quote, from the first announcement, at a hacker-friendly site:

[[The technology doesn't authenticate where the traffic comes from, so an intruder could easily send a bogus message of a road closure, rerouting drivers to another road, Barisani says. Or an attacker could pummel the system with messages and cause a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, which could crash not only a car's navigation system, but its climate control system, and stereo, too, he says.

Barisani says the criminal or terrorist element would most likely be attracted to this type of attack. "If you're a hit man, you can use that kind of system to detour or ambush someone on any street you want," he says. "We can also send sensitive messages about security events, [weather conditions], or related to terrorist incidents." ]]

Inverse Path then demonstrated the spoof at security conference CanSecWest, where IT journalists picked it up: Link and Link

Nobody refutes it, and it basically disappears from the press, until the chairman of the TMC forum (the industry association site for car navigation systems) responds, basically saying (a) it's illegal, (b) it would probably be of little value, maybe, we hope, and (c) of course the industry is protecting itself, we assume. Link

The money quote here:
[["Service Providers and Broadcasters, I am sure, have many protection mechanisms and processes in place to prevent any illegitimate access to their services within their infrastructure."]]

Riiiiight.

To sum up:
* A hacker/security group demonstrated a spoof hole in car nav systems.
* This was reported to other security experts, covered in the IT media, and otherwise ignored.
* The car nav industry has decided to rely on assumptions and crossed fingers, instead of treating it like a security hole.

Is this a Mystery Giant Marine Turtle or a decomposing whale? Weigh in at Cryptomundo.
Link (Thanks, Loren Coleman!)

UPDATE: Another photo of a decomposing beached whale strongly suggests that the image above is just that. More at Cryptomundo. Link

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the home video game console. Ralph Baer built the "Brown Box" (seen here) which eventually evolved into the Magnavox Odyssey of 1972. In celebration of the anniversary, Wired put together a nice gallery of images from the history of home video games.
Link

Everything in life goes better with a soundtrack. When you're sucking the blood out of hapless damsels' necks, there's nothing like shriek-laden, mid-70s eurosex synthdisco to keep things funky. Here's "Soul Dracula," by Hot Blood, from 1977. Link to info, and here's the MP3. Update: whoopee, there's an indigestibly compressed video, too. (Thanks, Q-Burns Abstract Message!)

The history of computing is rich and multi-layered. Most popular books on the subject focus on the technology, or the people behind the technology. But the machines themselves are also works of art--stunning in their thoughtful design, or magnificently bizarre in the curious forms that came from the focus on function. Core Memory is a new book, an art book in fact, that profiles 35 important and/or bizarre machines from the collection of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. (The book's creators will do a signing there on Monday, June 4, at 6pm.)

Veteran tech writer John Alderman's brief exposés of these significant computers--from the Z3 Adder (1941) and Johnniac (1954) to Seymour Cray's CDC 6600 (1964, seen here) and the Osborne I "luggable" from 1981--are like wonderful secret histories of dead technology, long-forgotten but highly influential. For example, the CDC-6600 was cooled by pumping Freon through the chassis. Most of the machines were sold to nuclear weapons facilities, where they were commonly used to play Spacewars. Another military machine included in the book, SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, 1954-1963), analyzed radar data and featured a built-in cigarette lighter and ashtray. Alderman's text supports Mark Richards's magnificent portraits of the machines' pretty faces and equally beautiful guts, a stunning series of "glamour shots" for nerds.

The book was birthed by BB pal Alan Rapp, design and photography editor at Chronicle Books, and is right in line with that publisher's impeccable production values. Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers is a masterpiece that can only get better with age.

Link to buy the book on Amazon, Link to Mark Richards's site (navigate to the "Core Memory" gallery)

UPDATE: Robert Scoble posted a great video of Mark Richards discussing the book at the Computer History Museum. Link

Bigoted religious phony Jerry Falwell went to hell today. Voices of American Sexuality collected some of the stupidest things he said while he was befouling the living world:

* “AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals”

* "It appears that America's anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men's movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening."

* "If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."

* After the September 11 attacks Falwell said, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen."

* “Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions”

* “[Homosexuals are] brute beasts...part of a vile and satanic system [that] will be utterly annihilated, and there will be a celebration in heaven.”

Link (Thanks, Isaac!)

(Falwell photo swiped from Dark Haired Girl's Flickr stream)

Update: Freddie sez, "Don't forget that Jerry Fallwell was declared 'the defacto Executive Director of Domestic and Global Policy for the Republican party' by WhiteHouse.org." this is a hoax site

Dan sends us "a post on my blog collecting YouTube submissions for a 'Win a Dream Job at Disneyland' contest. The applicants in question are trying out for the position of Haunted Mansion host or hostess, and the vibe is Count Floyd in a fanfilm." ZOMG, I just had a total nerdgasm. Link (Thanks, Dan!)

Foreign Policy has just published a series of "digital dump" photographs by Natalie Behring -- here's a close-up look at discarded tech hardware piling up at some of China's most polluted e-waste heaps. Link. (thanks, Travis)

It's a real treat to view the progress of these giant (6'x12') paintings by Coop. Be sure to watch them in the slideshow mode. Firestone | Atari | Ridgid | Goodyear

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Mini-documentary about Coop

Torturer-in-chief and selective amnesiac Alberto Gonzales has proposed a new copyright law that will increase the DMCA's penalties for circumvention and -- amazingly -- penalize attempted infringement.

The DMCA hasn't put a penny into an artist's pocket. It hasn't reduced copyright infringement. Of course, what America needs is more DMCA.

Criminalize "attempting" to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department's summary of the legislation says: "It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.")

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this story!)

Lucy is a calf in Merrill, Wisconsin who was born earlier this month with two noses. She has a tiny nose just above her regular nose. From the Associated Press:

"It's a functioning nose because the middle of her second nose, the flap would go in and out when she drank out of the bottle like that," (farmer Mark) Krombholz said. "It was kind of funny."

Link (via Fortean Times)

Previously on BB:
• Two-headed snake for auction Link
• Two-headed fossil Link
• Two-headed turtle Link

I don't know if this is real or not, but I like the image anyway. Jin Guanging, 77, of China's Jiansgu province, reportedly got an x-ray for a bad headache and physicians found a bullet in her skull. It allegedly had been there since 1943 when she was shot by a Japanese soldier while delivering food to her guerrilla father. The bullet went through someone's arm before entering her. From Ananaova:

The chief surgeon, who removed the rusty bullet, was amazed it had remained in her head for so long without causing major problems.

"The fact that the bullet lost strength and speed passing through another person, and that the point it struck is not vital, may explain her survival," he said.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Pain in the neck Link
• X-rays of kids who swallowed toys and coins Link

UPDATE: BB reader "O" writes:

I don't know if that one is real but I know its possible. My father has had a bullet in his head for 20-something years now (No plans to take it out). He was shot on the right temple when someone was trying to steal the car he was in (he was on the passenger side) in the early 80s in Guatemala City. He lost his sight on the right eye, because the bullet cut some nerves, but everything else is fine. A few years ago he started to have some seizures, which are now controlled by medication. I've seen x-rays of his head and the bullet is sitting somewhere in the middle of his forehead. (I know, its nuts!) He drives, works hard and is the smartest guy I know. He is my hero!

BB reader Mark Olson says,

The CBS affiliate here in Kansas City (KCTV) just did an investigation into airport security, and proved that it doesn't matter what kind of ID you show when you try to board a plane, as long as the ID looks kind of real. So while people test the system and try to fly without an ID at all, I think the bigger story is that requiring an ID at all is a total sham security measure. The TV station made an ID from scratch and the screeners accepted it with no questions asked. They even have an interactive display on their website showing how they created it and all of the crazy stuff they included on it. Kind of funny and scary at the same time.

Link

Last night I wrote about a scammer who is sneakily selling photos of electronics equipment instead of the equipment itself. Here's a Judge Judy episode of a similar eBay scammer (Kelli Filkins) who got punished for her crimes against humanity. Judge Judy's ferocious dressing-down of the unrepentant, flat-affect Filkins is a work of art. Link

High school student Ethan Stone of Urbana, Illinois was riding his bike Thursday evening when a guy in a truck reportedly hit him in the head with a baseball bat. According to Stone, the driver in a red Dodge Ram yelled obscenities and then pulled up beside his bike. From the Uni High Gargoyle:

...Then he saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, and he felt his world shift simultaneously as his ears processed a series of loud crunches...

He had been hit on the top of his head, and his skull felt heavy, as if a weight had been dropped onto it, and his head spun. His entire body sagged as his bike swerved madly, but he miraculously managed to stay on two wheels...

As for how he’s feeling, he said he felt dazed and stunned for most of the night. However, he seemed to be doing fine a day afterward.

“My helmet really absorbed most of the impact,” he said. “It broke, though. I had to throw it away.”

Link (Thanks, Geoff Merritt!)

Previously on BB:
• Truck crushes biker's helmet but not head Link
• Bike helmets inspire unsafe driving Link

Shorpy reprints a photo and article excerpt about a convenient way to play music anywhere in your house, from 1954.

"A novel idea for the audiophile who likes his music wherever he is. A household teacart can be used as a mobile carrier for any combination of audio gear."

Link (Thanks, David!)

Mapletree7 says,

Marvel Comics, in their infinite wisdom, has chosen to release a new statuette to celebrate the success of the Mary Jane (wife of Peter Parker) character in the wake of the record-breaking Spiderman III movie.

The statuette features a busty Mary Jane leaning over a bucket and washing Spiderman's costume. Don't miss the thong, ripped jeans, pearl necklace, and bare feet. Female comic book fans are not amused. No, we are not amused.

Dozens of responses from comicbloggers linked here. Above, the controversial "comiquette" from Marvel at left, and a critic's parody response, at right.

The Morning News profiles Kristan Horton, a Canadian artist who watched Stanley Kubrick's 1964 masterpiece Dr. Strangelove over 700 times and recreates stills from the film with household objects.

Q: How did the "Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove" project begin?

A: I don’t have a television. When a friend dropped off a VHS version of the film to the studio, it became the only thing to watch on the monitor. In two and a half years, I watched the film over 700 times. My perception was saturated by the film, and this caused me to respond to it. You can see this among Star Wars fans that log hundreds of viewings and go on to make Storm Trooper outfits for themselves in their living rooms. It’s a need to manifest [the reality of the film] in life. That marked the beginning of the project. I began to see relationships [between] the film present and the way I was working.

Link. (Thanks, Rosecrans Baldwin, co-EIC of The Morning News)

UPDATE: An exhibit of "Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove" is on display at Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) in Toronto through 24 June 2007. Apparently this is available in book form, too, but I can't figure out where/how to buy a copy?

Reader comment: Marc Lowenthal of MIT Press says,

One book in which Horton's project appears, is a book we released last year entitled Trash, edited by John Knechtel. Horton's photo project is perhaps my favorite among the artist projects in the book, but there is a lot of other great stuff in the collection as well (both entertaining and serious).

Amazon Link. Well, there's apparently a *new* book by Horton, devoted exclusively to this project (the AGYU site references a book launch on May 13, as does this news article)... but I still don't know where to find it.

UPDATE 2: Woo-hoo, Torontoist to the rescue! David Topping says,

I did some digging around Horton's website, and found out some deets about the book of "Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove" -- Link. It seems as if it's done by the AGYU press, so people interested in buying can probably call 'em up ( Link ) at 416.736.5169, or e-mail them at agyu@yorku.ca to find out more information. Those in the Toronto area'd probably have the best luck (as they can just go and buy a copy from the physical store), as it may very well not be available online.

Reader comment: Nick says,

Here's my own tribute to Dr Strangelove that I did last year in Lego. Admitted just the one scene, but fun none the less.

Humorist James Lileks took his family to Disney World -- he's publishing a series of columns on the experience. The first installment's great:

Bus to the Magic Kingdom. Our bags are given a perfunctory look; we enter our index fingerprints into the database. The park isn’t open, so we join the throng of hardcores and neophytes, waiting for . . . what? The answer comes in a few minutes: a train, an actual steam train, appears above, with all the Beloved Licensed and Trademarked Characters leaning out and waving. Including Cindyrelly! A welcome song is sung; everyone waves back (including me, I note – I haven’t even set foot in the place yet and I’m almost weeping at the sight of Goofy.) The music! The architecture! The trains! From the very first moment, it’s like a live wire jammed into your Disney Lobe, a part of your brain that’s been rewiring since you were very small, just so it could release endorphins at this very moment. All that’s missing is Disney himself in a white robe and sandals, carring a lamb, projected against the sky. If they’d done that I would have bloodied my knees.

Link (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

In my latest InfoWeek column, I look at what works, and what doesn't, when it comes to fighting trolls:

In the wake of the Kathy Sierra mess, Tim O'Reilly proposed a Blogger's Code of Conduct as a way of preventing a recurrence of the vile, misogynist attacks that Sierra suffered. The idea was that bloggers could choose to follow the Code and post a little badge to their sites affirming their adherence to it, putting message-board posters on notice of the house rules. Although it sounds like a reasonable idea on the face of it, bloggers were incredibly skeptical of the proposal, if not actively hostile. The objections seemed to boil down to this: "We're not uncivil, and neither are those message-board posters we regularly see on the boards. It's the trolls that we have trouble with, and they're pathological psychos, already ignoring our implicit code of conduct. They're going to ignore your explicit code of conduct, too." (There was more, of course -- like the fact that a set of articulated rules only invite people to hold you to them when they violate the spirit but not the letter of the law).

O'Reilly built his empire by doing something incredibly smart: Watching what geeks did that worked and writing it down so that other people could do it too. He is a distiller of Internet wisdom, and it's that approach that is called for here.

If you want to fight trolling, don't make up a bunch of a priori assumptions about what will or won't discourage trolls. Instead, seek out the troll whisperer and study their techniques.

Link

I love this Atari joystick candleholder from designer Mixko (unfortunately, Mixko's own site is an unnavigable, unbookmarkable Flash blob [what is it about designers and Flash?] with no search, but Wonderland has a nice picture of the piece). Link

Deborah Bowness sells handpainted wallpaper depicting a bookcase laden with weighty tomes, called the "Genuine Fake Bookshelf." Link (via OhGizmo)

Grant says: "This seller, awesome_electroincs (with 0 feedback) appears to be selling PICTURES of iPods and other electronics in auctions that sound as if he is selling the actual items."

You are bidding on a picture of a Galaxy 2517 10 Meter Ham Radio and Silver Eagle Mic. Radio in picture LOOKS AND WORKS GREAT. I only ship to the continetal United States. I do not ship to PO BOXS. This is an as is sale. There will be no refunds of any kind. Payment is due within 3 days of sale ending. Thank You for looking at my sale and GOOD LUCK!

Some guy bid $100 on this photo of a ham radio. This is an old scam, and it's sad to see people fall for it. Link

An Australian kid has won a lawsuit against his former school for its failure to intervene during a decade of brutal bullying; he will likely be awarded AU$1,000,000.

His mother, Angela Cox, reported the bullying to the police and to the school, where one teacher said the such incidents were character building, prompting the bully to make a death threat against Cox.

"Ben was getting scared, like being pushed into the school walls. He had a tooth punched out, he got whipped with a tree branch with welts across his back," Angela Cox told Australian radio outside the court.

Link

CrunchGear has published a great little beginner's guide to piracy, aimed at people who've never used P2P but want to try it out:

As you probably guessed, piracy is illegal. Getting caught can land you some serious fines or even jail-time depending on the offense. Those of you in college should probably stay the hell away from piracy. I personally know about three people who have been caught downloading via Bit Torrent or P2P. The only safe way to pirate is to not do it at all. There will always be a chance that you can get caught, whether it’s the MPAA poisoning a torrent, the FBI giving a plea bargain to your best friend who got caught 2 weeks ago, or one of thousands of other ways.

So how do you protect yourself? Download from private servers and torrent sites. Using public trackers and P2P is like announcing to the world “Hey! Look at me! I’m pirating!” Stay away from anything public related and download in moderation. Scooping up 2TB of files in a week will make you stick out like a sore thumb.

Link (Thanks, John!)

A panel of UK tax experts have raised alarms about the virtual goods market in online games, suggesting that they could be used to launder money:

“I see this as a virtual version of the hawala or hundi system,” said Johnson, who heads risk management firm TRMG, referring to the informal money transfer network that is commonly used through the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

“It’s trust based — I give you 1,000, you give someone else 1,000 — it serves to move money from A to B to C to D while obscuring the trail.”

He recommended treating virtual currencies like the Linden dollar as “real money”, including a requirement for virtual world operators like Linden Lab to report suspicious financial transactions, just as for real-world banks and financial institutions.

Link (via Futurismic)

Mommy's Chairs are designer chairs that appear to have been drawn by a five-year-old with a poor grasp of perspective. Made of bent steel rods in uncertain, shaky lines, they come in four sizes, with a breathtaking pricetag of £250. Link (via Gizmodo)

Here's the 10th and final installment from the diary of a Western man who spent 22 days in a Japanese prison.

All of the previous journal entries were made over the 22 days when I was locked up. I regret what I did and have paid for my stupidity and really, let’s face it; it wasn’t even a spectacular crime. Pretty lame actually. The journal was written in fits and starts as my passion to lose myself in my manga or daydreams, or my depression would allow. Being locked away and not knowing how things were going to work out was obviously an incredibly stressful experience and one that I would have found much worse if I did not speak or even read Japanese. Or have any money in the bank.

Link

Cute little cobra faces off against vicious human child, as grown-ups off camera guffaw to the hijinx. Who will win in the epic battle of infant vs. poisonous reptile? My money is on the kid, because someone sewed the serpent's mouth shut. Link

Here's a video of a tractor that's slowing down traffic and making a brain-curdling noise as it uses its shovel to push itself down the road like a dying animal. Link

The object of this Flash-based game is to prep a toy bunny for surgery, open it up, and save its life. You have 60 seconds. Link

Seth sez, "Illinois Libraries are invited to participate in some way to demonstrate opposition to a proposed state law about library censorware. Huge resistance, some by using censorware as much as possible as a 'work-to-rule' protest."

We have acquired 10 temporary licenses from NetNanny and are offering Internet service but as it would be under HR1727. It is insane! We are jumping up every 2 seconds to unblock a site for a patron. I had originally estimated that we would need one full-time staff member if the bill became law but I am beginning to think it might take 2 additional staff positions. The burden is such that we will probably not be able to continue for the full day. Our patrons, however, are getting the message.

Prairie Skies Public Library has set their filters as high as they can go on all computers starting today and will do it for the entire a week to reach as many patrons as possible. We also have accompanying fliers explaining why and how to contact their local Senators. Anyone who wants to get on an unfiltered computer this week will not be allowed during this time of protest. The reason for this is we are small library and if it passes we may have to remove internet access entirely because we don't have the staff to sit with anyone under 21 on an unfiltered computer. Explaining to the public and letting them experience it is a whole different thing.

Link (Thanks Seth!)

There's something charming (and gross) about this 1934 Popular Science article on the new miracles of factory-processed food:

Huge disks, rotating under corrugated rollers, knead spaghetti dough to a uniform consistency. Noodle dough is rolled into thin sheets by machines a thousand times the size of the kitchen rolling-pin, wound up on rollers like printing paper, and then deftly formed into various kinds of noodles. In fruit and vegetable canneries, refrigerators produce arctic temperatures to freeze fruit juices solid in the can and so preserve indefinitely the tree-ripened flavor.

Link

I love this 1932 Modern Mechanix ad for a kit to convert your old car into a new tractor. Link

On Friday, a large delivery truck drove right over UW-Madison student Ryan Lipscomb's head, but all he suffered was a concussion and spent just a few hours at the hospital. He had noticed that truck wasn't stopping, so he slammed on his brakes and flew from his bike. The truck rolled over his head, smashing his helmet but left his noggin in fine shape. So it seems. From The Capital Times:

"I didn't see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head. It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head."

His helmet, a Giro, was crushed, but Lipscomb's head was fine.

Madison Police Department Sgt. Chris Boyd said the officer at the scene urged Lipscomb to keep the helmet. He did. It is all flattened and mangled and broken, unlike his head.

Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Previously on BB:
• Bike helmets inspire unsafe driving Link

BB pal Adam Parfrey of Feral House/Process Books points us to a terrific 1960 video of avant-garde music pioneer John Cage performing "Water Walk" on I've Got A Secret, an old game show hosted by Garry Moore. Water Walk was written for a number of unusual instruments, including a bathtub, blender, rubber duckie, watering can, prepared piano, tape recorder, and five radios. Apparently though, a union dispute over who would plug in the radios erupted before show time, so Cage instead hits and throws the radios at the times he was meant to turn them on and off.

Moore: "Mr. Cage, these are nice people but some of them are going to laugh. Is that alright?"

Cage: "Of course. I consider laughter preferable to tears."

Link (via WFMU's Beware of the Blog)

Previously on BB:
• John Cage's 639-year long song has started to play Link
• As Slow As Possible Link

Aaron Hertzmann says:

There's a long article in today's New York Times Magazine (and video) about geeky folk-rock singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton, who distributes all his music online, and spends six hours a day communicating with his fans. The article discusses the state of music promotion and distribution for the "B-list" musicians who use online forums to communicate with their fans and spread the word.

(Photo of Jonathan Coulton by Jennifer Karady for The New York Times)

Coulton also produces the terrific PopSci podcast. Link

Update:

Coulton is also profiled in the latest issue of Psychology Today.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Jonathan Coulton's First of May song
• Jonathan Coulton mashed up with Sir Mix a Lot on youtube
• Nerd folksinger covers Baby Got Back
• More favorite podcasts
• Nerd folksongs
• Funny music video using Creative Commons Flickr photos

Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe (and founder of a wonderful but defunct zine called The Hermenaut) wrote a column defending GOP hopeful Mitt Romney's favorite science fiction novel, L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth.

"Battlefield" falls in a well-established sub-genre of speculative fiction known as "post-apocalyptic." These novels center on an alternate reality in which life as we know it has been dramatically altered -- by flood, fire, famine, or by nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, a pandemic, meteorites, or even alien invaders. Indeed, it could easily be argued that fans of post-apocalyptic fiction are big-thinking idealists: Readers of "Battlefield Earth" and its ilk aren't weird; they're worried about where our society is headed, and whether we have what it takes to defend our way of life. The real weirdos are those who never give a thought to such things.

Link

Constance says:

Photographer Chris Jordan's "Running the Numbers" shows us what, for instance, thirty seconds of aluminum can consumption in the US would look like if the cans were all gathered together. Seeing these statistics as images makes them far more real than just hearing the abstract numbers.

Photos show 2.5 million plastic bottles, (the number used in the US every hour), 426,000 cell phones (equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day [Every *day?* Is this statistic accurate?]), 29,569 handguns (equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004), 2.3 million folded prison uniforms (equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005) and more.

Each photo is followed by a zoomed-in detail and a zoomed-in detail of the detail. Link

Reader comment:

Conor says:

I think that number [426,000 cell phones retired in the US every day] is probably accurate (DEAR GOD!!) The Google turned this up, showing 130 million cellies retired annually in 2005 (which is roughly close to the 155 million one gets based on the daily rate in your post).

Twenty years ago, crybabies called people they didn't like "commies." Now they call them "terrorists." Chris says:

There are many crybabies these days who cry "terrorism" when criticized. It's a sickening new trend that needs to crawl back under the rock from which it came. I think boing boing should point out these losers whenever they play the "terrorism card," making light of their cowardice. The URL included reports the Vatican called an Italian comedian a terrorist for criticizing the Pope. Unsurprising, really...

"The Pope says he doesn't believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved," [Andrea Rivera] said.

He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia as he lay paralyzed with muscular dystrophy. He died in December after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator.

"I can't stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn't the case for (Chilean dictator Augusto) Pinochet or (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco," he said between musical acts at the open-air concert.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Crybaby Scientologists call reporter a "terrorist"

Cerealart makes fantastic toys, tzotchkes, and other pop multiples created by artists like Yoshitomo Nara, Dalek, and Kenny Scharf. The stuff is super-high quality and beautifully designed and packaged. In the last year, I've bought Nara's PupCup and Little Wanderer kinetic dolls and Marcel Dzama's Saddest Ghost Lamp for my son, and he absolutely loves them. Ryan McGinness's Bucky Ball (left, $150) and Takashi Murakami's Flower Ball (right, $400) look like a lot of fun too. Link

UCLA just launched a profoundly awesome historical archive of news photographs from the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Daily News.

Of the 5,124 images in this database, the oldest is from 1914. One fun way to search is typing in a year, say "1921" or "1928," and browse by date.

I spent about 4 hours straight on Friday poring through by keyword, related themes, and date, and found the two images you see in this post.

Photo above: the first generation of Trekkies, a bunch of Caltech students, protest the rumored cancellation of Star Trek at NBC's studios. I love how that one guy's sign says, "IT IS TOTALLY ILLOGICAL TO CANCEL STAR TREK."

These, dear BoingBoing reader, are our ancestors.

Photo at bottom: "Research assistant in automobile simulator during drug and alcohol experiment at Southern California Research Institute, 1977."

Try keyword-searching by "prohibition", or "zoot suit riot," for incredible images from specific political eras. For instance, "draft" will yield images related to Vietnam, but also protests from 1948.

Here's a list of more photos I found and was fascinated by, in no particular order:

1965: A beatnik robot that "ferrets out the undesirables-including censors, book-burners."

1959: Beatniks with tikis!

1959: The "Miss Beatnik 1959" finalists!

1966: Walt Disney with "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride heads.

1973: Disney imagineers with Space Mountain model.

1964:"Miss Formula", a computer created rendering of the "perfect female."

1965: "Gyro jet hand gun," a rocket-propelled personal weapon "not regulated by existing laws."

1949: A cross-dressing man in jail identified as "Sidney Cochin, The Nutty Housewife." (no more information available, what's this guy's story?)

1941: A transgendered person and companion.

1948: Hollywood hookers getting busted.

1950: Hollywood actors simulating nuclear blast preparation.

1969: Porn!

1980s: Proto-punks! More punks!

1971: Custom conversion vans!

1980: Lesbian Navy Nurses!

1965: Astronaut food!

1950: Librarian robots!

1964: Thalidomide baby.

1947: Opium chocolates!

1969: Indian re-possession of Alcatraz.

1938: movie marquee says "closed tonight to protest Nazi horror." 1948: Nazi graffiti on Jewish community sign.

1965: a bank computer.

1930s: People dancing in a black nightclub. A black couple doing the jitterbug.

1948: Chicks with guns.

1964: "outer space influenced" furniture.

1947: Chinese-American pyro-baby! See also this lovely 1939 shot of actors in a Chinatown theater.

1970s: Muhammad Ali in Watts. Stormtroopers prepare to beat the shit out of people in Watts. Child next to funky soul art in Watts.

1965: An early computer network for police.

1961: an early voice recognition computer.

1965, a man working at a computer with a circular display.

1986: Quotron, the stock market computer.

1965: Credit processing computer.

(via blogging.la and LA Observed, thanks also to BB reader Eric "Pocho!" Jasso.)

Reader comment: Ole Squirrelly Eyes says,

I found the gubner! Link to Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 1975.

Cabinet Magazine has an interview with Victor Stoichita, an art history professor who wrote the book A Short History of the Shadow. In it, Stoichita explores the shadow in art, psychology, and culture. It sounds quite heady, with Stoichita delving into Plato, Pliny, Leonardo, and Warhol, photography, writing, painting, and philosophy. The interview is a nice dip into this curious intellectual terrain though! (Seen here: "Illustration from Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Athanasius Kircher's seminal 1646 treatise on light and shadow. In explaining the principle of the camera obscura, the illustration associates the image and the shadow with the devil.") From the interview:

Your book is the first study of its kind. Why do you think the subject was previously so overlooked?

I actually started my research with that very question. Just before the publication of my book, an exhibition on shadows was organized at the National Gallery in London, accompanied by a short but interesting text by the late Ernst Gombrich. But previously art historians took a long time in paying attention to shadows because shadows are, so to speak, heavy, dark, and ugly. Perhaps this is because for the Greeks, the shadow was one of the metaphors for the psyche, the soul. A dead person’s soul was compared to a shadow, and Hades was the land of shadows, the land of death.

Link

Dig this NEXX X60 Open Face motorcycle helmet wrapped in denim.
Link (via Gizmodo)

Dori Hadar, the crate-digger and flea market funk aficionado who "discovered" Mingering Mike (BB posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), just blew my mind by sending me this link:

Elton and Betty's Myspace Page.

Sexually explicit outsider funk produced by an unlikely couple from Little Rock, Arkansas. From the Elton and Betty White artist description (Betty is now deceased, btw):

In the early 1980's, Betty was a more or less normal, married secretary in her late 50's/early 60's at a Little Rock law firm (allegedly working with Hillary Clinton) with a slight psychiatric problem for which she took medication. At some point, though, she stopped taking her medication and experienced a psychic and sexual renaissance of grandiose proportions: out with the husband and respectable job, in with the matching hot pink hair-do and spandex pants.

Elton, meanwhile, was a much younger (30 years younger, to be exact!) man renowned in Little Rock for his phenomenal basketball skills until the day he claims someone "put something in his drink." Elton met Betty in a homeless shelter, and it was love at first sight. The two were married and became notable Little Rock eccentrics, playing music all around town while sometimes delivering newspapers on the side. Elton ran for a seat in Congress, while Betty challenged Bill Clinton in an Arkansas gubernatorial race with the sole platform of lowering the age of consent to 14.

During this time they recorded at least three albums: "The Best of Elton and Betty" (which is not a compilation), "Sex Beyond the Door," and the mysterious, elusive "Hard Deep Sex Explosion." Each album - but "Sex Beyond the Door" in particular - is a searingly honest, bizarre gem in which the two expound on aspects of their daily lives and sexual inclinations while playing dubiously-tuned ukuleles and tiny guitars. "I Am the Master of Love," "I'm In Love With Your Behind," "I Don't Really Like Oral Sex Much at All," "The Little Dicks Fit Me Best," "My Three Feet Red Hot Tongue Is Sweet as Sugar," "Your Breast, I'd Love to Carresst [sic]" - it is through songs such as these that the true depth of their love for each other is revealed, in the process making their oeuvre arguably the most listenable and entertaining in the entire genre of Outsider Music.

Here are some video clips from public access television: Video 1, Video 2, Video 3.

Image: a young woman in Nagpur, India (cc-licensed, shot by Flickr user dhyanji).

Alex Goldman says,

My dad worked for the U.S. Embassy in India during the Johnson administration. He says that if you draw a straight line from India's four cities, they intersect there.

Now India wants to turn the city into a metropolis to take the load off of the other cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkotta (sp?), and Madras that's five so I'm not sure what specific cities it's between).

He remembers a city that was a rural village with a massive airport. Every day a mail plane would leave from each of the four major cities and fly to Nagpur and exchange mail bags and fly back.

One day dad was late in Madras and caught a ride on one of the mail planes back to Delhi, where the embassy was. Landed in Nagpur c. 4 AM and the locals were all lined up at the fence, watching the airplanes. Dad asked one of the people on the plane why people were at the fence and he was told there was nothing else to do in Nagpur.

Now the government is building an air conditioned mall and other urban infrastructure but the road and rail are Indian quality, so the only reliable transport is air.

Will the city develop? Can a government build a city? Brasilia, D.C., and Canberra are all artificial but they are seats of government. This is new.

Statistics from an Economist article on urbanization suggest that in the future, the average city dweller will live in a slum in Asia or Africa.

Perhaps this is the start of a trend -- artificial cities built to draw the misery from slums.

The density (shacks packed so tightly that many are accessible only on foot); the dust (in the dry seasons) and the mud (when it rains); the squalor (you often have to pick your way through streams of black ooze); the hazards (low eaves of jagged corrugated iron); and the litter, especially the plastic (women, lacking sanitation and fearing robbery or rape if they risk the unlit pathways to the latrines, resort at night to the “flying toilet”, a polythene bag to be cast from their doorway, much as chamber pots were emptied into the street below in pre-plumbing Edinburgh). Most striking of all, to those inured to the sight of such places through photography, is the smell. With piles of human faeces littering the ground and sewage running freely, the stench is ever-present.

Link to related NYT story today.

Reader comment: Rudrava Roy says,

To clarify's Alex Goldman's comment/question: (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Kolkotta (sp?), and Madras that's five so I'm not sure what specific cities it's between)

Historically, India has had 4 'metros' - Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata to use the new names). Bangalore is considered a metro now but it has achieved that status only within the last 7 years. India also has the following metros that can be considered 2nd tier - Chandigarh (in Punjab - close to Delhi), Pune (close to Mumbai), Ahmedabad (also close to Mumbai) and Hyderabad (not quite close to any of the other major metros). Nagpur is quite a 2nd tier metro - I'd consider it 3rd tier rather than 2nd esp because it is very low key and too far away from most major hubs to be of interest. On the other hand, Nagpur, along with another very small town (Itawa) in the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh, sit spank in the middle of the national rail network and hence are of immense strategic importance. Mind you, trains have been, and still are, the de facto means of long distance travel in India for the masses. So, the relevance to the rail network is of significance.

John Battelle blogs:

Last week YouTube announced a new partners program (TC coverage here, Om's first coverage here). The program elicited a fair amount of negative response - see the comments in that partners program post - and a lot of head scratching as to how YouTube chose its partners, and what the Terms of Service might be. I happen to be friendly with a number of well-known YouTube "stars" and I emailed one of them for a read. What I got back was quite a rant. Below is a response that I can verify is from a well-known video blogger, who has a very large audience, but who asked for anonymity.

I have spoken to the folks at YouTube about this and suggested that they be given a chance to respond to this post, once it goes up. That certainly seemed fair to me. Should they wish to, I'll post their response here. Meanwhile, read on, in the first person words of a former YouTube star....

Read the entire rant from the now-formerly-YouTube-star who shall remain anonymous, but whose identity is pretty obvious if you're a fan: Link.

As regular BB readers know, I frequently refer to the work of Charles Fort, a "collector" of anomalous phenomena in the early 1900s. Fort spent years in libraries, taking copious notes on bizarre news events, from frogs falling out of the sky to unidentified flying objects, to teleportation, a word he coined. Fort wrote several great books presenting the odd phenomena that he'd cataloged. He was the ultimate skeptic, opposing belief of any kind. "I offer the data," Fort wrote. "Suit yourself." Every fringe dweller should have a copy of The Complete Books of Charles Fort on her or his bookshelf. In Fortean Times magazine, Ian Kidd explores Fort's philosophy that goes much deeper than that of your average crank toiling