China's authoritarian bureaucrats may be climate-change deniers, but that doesn't mean they're not actually doing something about it. SEED Magazine's article "The China Experiment" is a fascinating read, a sweeping look at the many ways in which China is reducing its emissions and cleaning up its environment:

The mass adoption of solar power—the Chinese have purchased 35 million solar water heaters, more than the rest of the world combined—is only part of the equation. China is also encouraging investment and research in wind farms, bioenergy, and fuel cell and hybrid vehicles, and aiming to improve energy efficiency by a sizeable 4 percent annually. "It's historic," says Kishan Khoday, head of the United Nations Development Program's energy and environment program in China. "It's going to take efforts on all angles of the issue to get it done."

If China fails, the implications for the rest of the world could be grave. Sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide from China already travel across the Pacific, causing acid rain in North America and Europe. Last year in Japan, two city governments issued formal warnings about pollution from the country's western neighbor.

Environmental conditions are already approaching apocalyptic in a country where coal provides 70 percent of the country's power. Chinese scientists have predicted that the Yangtze River will die by 2011, and with two-thirds of other rivers polluted, more than 340 million Chinese lack access to clean drinking water. An estimated 400,000 Chinese die of pollution every year. By the government's own estimates released in December 2006, climate change is occurring in China at alarming rates, with temperatures due to increase by 1.3 to 2.1 degrees Celsius by 2020. China is unveiling forward-thinking policies and pushing alternative energy because it has no other choice.

Link

Update: Brent sez, "In the latest issue of Wired (15.05), there's an excellent article about an effort underway in China to build a green city from the ground up on Chongming Island, set to house 500,000 people."

Update 2: Timothy sez, "This homeowner built a homemade solar heater for his garage using some soda cans painted black, plywood, and plastic tubing. Great photos and step-by-step."

The current (?) version of iTunes, 7.1.1 has been cracked by the QTFairUse6 project. Now is the time to uncripple your purchased iTunes tracks (especially those brutally expensive, hard-to-rip audiobooks) before Apple spends more engineering dollars to punish you for wanting to "think different," "switch" and otherwise enjoy the stuff you bought from them. Link (via Digg)

Update: Note that this crack is only for Windows -- Mac users are still punished for buying from Apple.

Here's a video of a van (call the Z Backscatter Van) that can slowly drive around and generate real-time x-ray images of cars, revealing weapons, explosives, drugs, and stowaways. Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Here's a video that shows how to make a mini potato gun from a few simple parts you probably have around the house: a butane lighter, a pill bottle, a pen, thumbtacks, and tape. Link (Thanks, Calvin!)

Preschoolers asked: What happens when people get old? (Mark)

Bigfoot porn (Pesco)

Gerald Casale and V. Vale perform Mongoloid (Pesco)

Get Illuminated podcast #9 -- Adam "Ape Lad" Koford (Mark)

Stoned cop calls 911 fearing overdose on pot (Pesco)

Evicted: Berkeley's Shipyard maker community (Pesco)

Sam Kieth cover for comic of Cory's Anda's Game (Cory)

The Mystery of Mingering Mike: part 1, part 2, proto-post (Xeni)

Taking LOLcats way too seriously, and even more so. (Xeni)

EFF sues Uri Geller over DMCA takedown abuse (Cory)

Compendium of psychological curiosities (Pesco)

BoingBoingBoing podcast 12: Q-Burns Abstract Message (All of us)

Indian tsunami refugees and organlegging (Cory)

Liveblogging LA's Griffith Park Fire: one, two. (Xeni)

Open source copyright doc wants you to remix footage (Cory)

Video: high-voltage, high-altitude work (Xeni)

My pal and collaborator Charlie Stross, a Hugo-winning SF writer, published the text of a lovely little speech he's just given about the nature of the future. From the section labelled "Putting it all together" and onward, it's pure gonzo-Strossian skiffy goodness:

10Tb is an interesting number. That's a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That's enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year, including time I spend sleeping, or in the bathroom. Realistically, with multiplexing, it puts three or four video channels and a sound channel and other telemetry — a heart monitor, say, a running GPS/Galileo location signal, everything I type and every mouse event I send — onto that chip, while I'm awake. All the time. It's a life log; replay it and you've got a journal file for my life. Ten euros a year in 2027, or maybe a thousand euros a year in 2017. (Cheaper if we use those pesky rotating hard disks — it's actually about five thousand euros if we want to do this right now.)

Why would anyone want to do this?

I can think of several reasons. Initially, it'll be edge cases. Police officers on duty: it'd be great to record everything they see, as evidence. Folks with early stage neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimers: with voice tagging and some sophisticated searching, it's a memory prosthesis.

Add optical character recognition on the fly for any text you look at, speech-to-text for anything you say, and it's all indexed and searchable. "What was the title of the book I looked at and wanted to remember last Thursday at 3pm?"

Think of it as google for real life.

Link

A researcher from the University of Bath found that helmeted cyclists inspire more dangerous driving from the cars around them -- while bareheaded cyclists are treated with the ginger respect due to the suicidal:

Last September a plucky psychologist at the University of Bath in England announced the results of a study in which he played both researcher and guinea pig. An avid cyclist, Ian Walker had heard several complaints from fellow riders that wearing a helmet seemed to result in bike riders receiving far less room to maneuver—effectively increasing the chances of an accident. So, Walker attached ultrasonic sensors to his bike and rode around Bath, allowing 2,300 vehicles to overtake him while he was either helmeted or naked-headed. In the process, he was actually contacted by a truck and a bus, both while helmeted—though, miraculously, he did not fall off his bike either time.

His findings, published in the March 2007 issue of Accident Analysis & Prevention, state that when Walker wore a helmet drivers typically drove an average of 3.35 inches closer to his bike than when his noggin wasn't covered. But, if he wore a wig of long, brown locks—appearing to be a woman from behind—he was granted 2.2 inches more room to ride.

Link (via Neatorama)

(Creative Commons Attribution licensed bike helmet pic ganked from Hen Power's photostream)

Dudes are running around Burma, sneaking up on long-haired ladies, cutting their hair off, then scampering off and selling it for $100 or more a pound. I wonder if some of it ends up back in the US, for use in hair extensions on the heads of Hollywood elite. Link (Thanks, Doran)

Reader comment: cageitfallsinto says,

A character in A Fine Balance, a novel in the Russia-realist vein by Indian author Rohinton Mistry does the very same thing to beggars and pedestrians alike on the streets of India!

Update: Google has stated that they don't do exclusive scanning deals with university libraries.

Last Friday, NPR's Science Friday featured a fascinating debate on digital libraries with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg, and Michael Keller of Stanford's library (Keller is working with Google on its library scanning project).

The real meaty part of the discussion is in Brewster's call for a book-search that works like web-search. Google's otherwise laudable book-search program is marred by an indefensibly greedy mistake: Google won't let anyone get bulk access to the public domain works in its index, not even for scholarly purposes -- and Google won't let its university partners do deals with any of Google's competitors.

Web-search benefited because anyone was allowed to index it. If the first company to index web-pages had insisted that the sites in its index shut out the competition, Google wouldn't even exist, and we'd all be searching with Lycos. Google has been the immense beneficiary of an open field for search, and it's that field that Google is seeking to foreclose in the book search world.

I am a huge supporter of the ethic of indexing books, but Brewster is right to call Google out on this. For a company whose motto is "don't be evil," it's pretty outrageous to set out to strangle competition in book search in its cradle. MP3 Link

BoingBoing reader Allan Janus says,

I went to a "Public Service Day" fair on the Mall in DC the other day. All of the armed services parked military hardware for the civs to look at, and they were giving away all sorts of freebies. The Army gave away fine squeezable stress-reducing hand grenades. I kept wondering what would happen when the tourists headed home, and the TSA ops saw the grenades in their luggage, or better yet -- their carry-on baggage? I took mine home and had much stress-reducing fun with it!

Link.

Reader comment: Klash says,

The bit about TSA finding grenades in luggage is what caught my eye. Based on experience, you have nothing to worry about.

Last fall I was in North Carolina area for meetings. A co-group had done up these same squeezee-foam grenades as internal schwag. My son loves all things related to munitions, so I decided to take a few home for him. I had FOUR of the "grenades", packed together and stuffed in my very-full carry-on. When going through screening, I did not offer up the fact that I had such toys in my bag, figuring if they were discovered and confiscated, no big deal.

Their screening process required me to remove belt and shoes, but the machines did NOT detect the foam grenades.

I thought about zombies a lot yesterday. All day and all night.

First, I heard this really great segment on Weekend America that counters some of the bogus history around Jamestown, one of the first European colonies in North America.

Why is colonial Virginia in the news? This week marked Jamestown's 400th anniversary. A 300-year-old broad from Britain came to celebrate (btw, check out this related LOL headline, published in all seriousness by at a Caribbean newspaper).

So, the Weekend America segment blows apart hokey Thanksgiving dinner myths with a reminder that those pilgrims were starving to death, and living in absolute horror. It got so bad, some were reduced to subsisting off old shoes, rotting corpses, pools of blood left behind by the sick and dying, the salted flesh of murdered spouses, and -- BRAIINNNNNSSSSSS! The story of Jamestown and Pocohontas and Thanksgiving was not so much a Disney movie, explains radio producer Nate DiMeo in the voiceover -- it was more like a Wes Craven movie.

Later on that day, I went to see the {quasi-}zombie movie 28 Weeks Later with some friends. Super scary, super smart. It's Iraq meets Ebola meets Hurricane Katrina meets Children of Men meets [pick any zombie movie]. One friend was upset about the ending, though -- he said it made the whole film feel like sequel-bait. But because that sequel will be set in Paris, it'd be alright for this line alone: BRRRRRIIEEEEEEEEEE!*

- - - - - - - - - -

Link to "The (Kind of Gross) Story of Jamestown," for American Public Media's "Weekend Edition" by Nate DiMeo.

Link to 28 Weeks Later official website, here's Wikipedia, and here are reviews and stuff. (* someone funnier than me thought of this).

Reader comment: Luke Hildebrand says,

I just thought I'd comment on the irony of this Jamestown exhibition that you mentioned on BoingBoing, back in 1907 (300th Anniversary of Jamestown) they did something to the same accord. They celebrated the "Disney" type story instead of the true gruesome events that took place. The irony comes in when your realize that the 1907 and this current exhibition are both failing financially.

The 1907 one lasted only half of the month long celebration; it got so bad that ones running it had to start charging the family's of the workers who were supposed to get in for free. The workers family's made up about 60% of the entire attendance.

I learned most of this through reading through the minutes of the 1907 exhibitions executives meetings. Here are some interesting facts about the 1907 exhibition:

It had a ride called "Shoots of Danger" where the rider would have to paddle his/her way through an enclosed, man made swamp that had many crocodiles, Poisonous snakes and other assorted dangerous creatures.

The land on which it was held was sold about 1/5th of its original value and turned into the current Norfolk Naval station.

Many workers would show up and ride the rides due to the lack of customers.

Ed. note: A bunch of readers wrote in to say "But Thanksgiving happened in Plymouth, not Jamestown!" I know about Plymouth, and I know these are two different places. But there's more than one "Thanksgiving" in America's myth-history -- the Jamestown settlers celebrated a "First Thanksgiving" when British ships arrived with grub. Various iterations of the myth tend to merge into one bogus story, the sum of which isn't based in much fact at all, and that's my point. Here's one reference to the Jamestown part, and click along the timeline for others.

About the Plymouth version, which of course is the direct source of America's official Thanksgiving lie, BoingBoing reader Will (a "lifelong New Englander") says,

Here's an interesting point-by-point comparison of the two colonies.

If you still want to link it all back to zombies, of course, it's well worth noting that the native American population of Massachusetts was decimated by a succession of plagues before and just after the arrival of the colonists. Here's a short and tragic history of the Massachuset tribe. The Speckled Monster gives a nice, horrifying account of the symptoms of smallpox.

Matt Hassett adds,

Thought you would also like to know it was Zombie March Day in Boston yesterday (May 12th). Flickr Pictures.

BoingBoing reader and Citizen Security Analyst jesse says,

A couple weeks ago my family came to New York, where I live, from my hometown near Salt Lake City. Before leaving, my mother had purchased a small tube of lotion and put it in her purse. When she got to the security checkpoint at the airport, she realized she still had the lotion. She handed it over to the TSA worker who told her that it would be donated to a local homeless shelter. Could it be that the FAA ban on liquids is really a plot to rid the country of homeless people, through the use of explosive liquids?

The final countdown to the MAKE: magazine Bay Area Maker Faire has begun! The DIY extravaganza is next weekend, May 19 and 20, at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. 400 makers! 40,000 expected attendees! 200,000 square feet of thrills, chills, eccentric inventors, weird science, extreme crafts... All of it.

Here are last week's previews from the MAKE: Blog:

• Steam turbine tank (image left) Link
• Picture frame Tetris: Spark Fun Electronics Link
• Maker Faire press release: 200,000 square feet of DIY mayhem Link
• Power Tool Drag Races Link
• Flying over Maker Faire? Let us know! Link
• SwapThing Link
• Kids make salt water potable (image right) Link
• King of Fling contest Link
• Robotics blowout Link
• ultraOrb Link

Link to purchase advance tickets for the Maker Faire

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

This incredible video clip -- I don't know where it's from, or when? -- documents the everyday work of a man whose job is to maintain and repair high-voltage overhead power lines.

He is transported to those lines by flying on top of a helicopter, and he crawls around on the lines with some special gear. Without that gear, he'd fry.

He wears a fire-retardant "hot suit" made in part from metal threads, so the garment functions as a Faraday Cage.

"A half a million volts pass around my body but I can work without interference from electricity," he says in the video. "There's such a hunger for electricity these days, nobody wants to take lines out of service to maintain them."

Link (thanks D.! via Wayne's List)

Reader comment:Scott Eric Kaufman says,

The video's from Straight Up: Helicopters in Action.

Josh Kirschenbaum says,

Your entry on BB today about the high-voltage line worker is from an IMAX film about helicopters (Link), and a clip: Link. I saw it a few years ago at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air & Space Museum - a MUST-SEE by the way! My Udvar-Hazy photos: Link.

Ryan Rawson says,

You posted about the high voltage video. There was an episode of "Modern Marvels" called "High Voltage" that had a full 42 minutes of similar video. Lineworkers have used "hot" techniques to work on high voltage lines for years, so it's fairly common to maintain and reroute active wires. They have 2 cool technologies for handling 500k+ voltage lines. One is a highly insulated cherry picker, the other is special helicopters seen in the video you linked. By clipping on to the line the worker brings the helicopter up to the same voltage potential as the line. At this point they can touch the line barehanded. The suit they wear is electro-static shielding - it doesn't actually protect them from 750k volts (nothing really would). At 750k volts the electricity will arc up to about 10 feet to ground, so the episode of modern marvels had a portion devoted to high voltage line rescue. Not for the faint of heart.

Jasmina Tešanović:
Stelarc in Ritopek

photo by Bruce Sterling

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Most people in Belgrade have never heard of Stelarc and just vaguely know of Ritopek.

I met Stelarc last week in Athens, where I listened to his literally heartbreaking presentation on the obsolete human condition and the body's failure to follow the technological arc of his cyber-desires.

He spoke of breaking the boundaries between death and life by preserving bodies in plastic, by repairing bodies with 3D fabricated artificial organs, of unborn future people grown in vitro outside the wombs of women.

The linear analog counting of our lifespans will cease; we will not longer tread a natural path from life to death... We must find a different, truer way of talking and living.

Humans have always feared themselves and their capacities, in past, in present, and in future: man is an obsolete body in the space of The Other.

Very postmodern: very posthuman.

We reach the outskirts of Belgrade, climbing hills above the Danube, heading through narrow roads with sharp stones, turning into trails over an abyss. We meet hippies and geeks doing the same thing on foot.

I see a huge tower and an empty white house in glass, with a huge deep square hole dug before it.

Tian says,

"I bought this carton of cranberry juice from Spar in Austria today. I was amazed by the number of languages were printed on the carton. A total of 28 languages! 16 of them printed on one side, and the rest on other. In U.S., we would be lucky to have two or three, English & Spanish or French."

Link. More, more, more.

Reader comment: Andrew Gray says,

FWIW, including this many languages is a fairly popular trick - it complies with the legal labelling requirements for a couple of dozen countries at once, meaning you don't have to repackage the product (or design new packaging) for each different country you want to sell it in. Very useful if you have a business plan that involves selling material to supermarkets across Europe, or if you don't know at the outset quite where you're going to sell the product to. In the UK, and I guess elsewhere in Europe, you often find strange things like Arabic-labelled cans of Coke or Sprite, produced somewhere for a Middle Eastern market and then rerouted here. Each one gets a little red sticker with the obligatory content labelling placed on it, in English, to comply with the regs... you can see how it's more efficient to pre-empt it by printing it in advance.

The biggest density of languages I've seen, though, was the old Soviet rouble banknotes - they had the denomination written on them in all fifteen official languages of the individual SSRs, using four different alphabets, all on a single small slip of paper. See, eg, Link.

Earlier this week on BoingBoing, I posted observations from the Griffith Park Fire, which burned very close to my home.

A number of BoingBoing readers are close to two other even larger blazes that happened this week -- the fires in Georgia and Florida, and another blaze on Catalina island, offshore from LA. Here's an aerial view of the Florida/Georgia fires, seen from space.

As I understand it, that whole, massive series of blazes in the southeast was started by a single lightning strike.

Link to a related post on BoingBoing reader Adam Selvidge's blog -- the images also reveal a big storm making its way toward them.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Hollywood is burning (yet again)

Readers weigh in on the Griffith Park fire

Reader comment: aaron says,

don't forget about us minnesotans! Link.

Following up on earlier news that prosecutors in Boston have dropped charges against the two artists behind an LED sign campaign foolishly misinterpreted by authorities as a terrorist threat... BoingBoing reader Ted says:

It is sad that the Boston Moonite bomb scare artists had to do community service and were clearly being held to a higher standard of "planting a hoax device" than the carpenters at the New England Medical center: Link 1, Link 2 to Boston Herald article.

(Ed. Note: Right, so remember how the same day when the Boston Mooninite LED sign freakout happened, there were reports of pipe bombs at Tufts Medical Center in Boston? That's what he's talking about. Those reports were real, and the pipe bombs were not planted by the two guerilla marketing guys. OK, back to Ted...)

These other guys were ADMITTEDLY planting hoax devices to scare each other and received nothing more than that of a suspension from work. No charges, no fines. How is this possible when they were trying to make them look as real and menacing as possible?

Also not mentioned much is this fact the the bomb squids blew up a traffic counter a few days later in the financial district - after they were told - again... it's a traffic counter. yet the city takes NO responsibility for any of these actions?

Additionally, this speaks to the need for more "education" of the community at large and the need for more public art. Seems like public art is headed the way of the dodo in our communities as we can't have art that could be a public hazard... maybe we should start allocating money to send public officials to Burningman to see what dangerous art really could be.

And as a friend reminded me last night, those Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED signs had been placed in a number of other cities, including LA, in weeks prior. Nowhere else did authorities overreact as they did in Boston. And in none of those cities do law enforcement officers run around blowing up traffic counters, either.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Boston drops charges against Mooninite terror cell leaders

LED ad campaign ignites terrorism scare in Boston

Boston Mooninite installer arrested

Boston Channel photoshops Mooninite LED signs

Video of Mooninite menaces

Mark on ABC news about Mooninite devices

Boston LED terror scare: a message to the media

Mooninite response explained in an old Peanuts comic

Mooninite on the Haunted Mansion

ATHF invades Boston -- the game

Public game involves hidden blinking LED signs

Reader comment: Fred Scharmen, aka sevensixfive says,

I'm really glad that you guys keep following up on the Boston Mooninite thing at BoingBoing. But I think there's at least one more angle on this story that for some reason keeps getting lost: these guys are not artists, and this is not art. It's advertising that's using the tactics of street art to spread a message, and there's something really evil about that.

In street art there's a strong tradition of 'giving it away', it's out there in the public space, freely viewed by everybody, and can't easily get hauled off into a gallery and sold (witness REVS, for instance). Street art also has historically turned the methods of public advertising against the institutions that support it, I'm thinking specifically of some of the billboard hacks executed by Mark Pauline of SRL before he got into robots.

That Berdovsky and Stevens took money (not even that much money, suckers) from a guerilla marketing outfit to put these things up, and then tried to link them with other, better work by the Graffiti Research Lab is outrageous. They're colonizing a space cleared by artists with a marketing message. Evil. I'm really glad they're not getting charged with criminal wrongdoing, but please stop calling them 'artists', maybe start using 'shills', 'touts' or even 'suckers' instead.

I've written more about this here, if you're interested: Link.

BoingBoing reader says,

Fred Scharmen is right that in some way the guys who were busted for ATHF marketing are in some way different than artists who are simply something for the sake of art, but he's totally full of crap to claim that by taking money they're no longer considered artists. The fact that they're working for those in power and not against doesn't change the fact that they're artists. Artists take money all the freaking time. You think the Mona Lisa was painted for free? Advertising campaigns employ all sorts of artists all the time. Sure a logo isn't as high minded as a Mondrian, but it's still within the broad category of art. That said, calling them marketers might still be more appropriate, but isn't wrong.

The podcast edition of James Patrick Kelly's Hugo-nominated novella Burn won the Nebula Award last night. As far as I know, that makes it the first Creative Commons licensed work and the first podcast to win an Nebula.

Congrats are also in order for Justine Larbalestier, whose Magic or Madness won the Andre Norton Award. Link (via Whatever)

See also:
Jim Kelly's Hugo-nominated "Burn" free ebook
James Patrick Kelly's new podcasts: "Look into the Sun" and a story every week
James Patrick Kelly's wonderful sf stories online as free audiobooks
Hugo nominee James Patrick Kelly video podcast
Three James Patrick Kelly audio stories free and CC-licensed
James Patrick Kelly's podcast
James P Kelly's "Burn" short sf novel podcast concludes
Asimov's magazine on DRM, copyright and Creative Commons

An article in the Sept, 1944 issue of Popular Science pondered the future peacetime uses of Britain's "human torpedo" -- a "submarine motorbike" built for two. The article imagines that after the war it might find use for family outings and romantic underwater sight-seeing trips.

Little serious thought has been given to the peacetime possibilities, for sport and industrial use, of the “human-torpedo” craft designed to attack enemy ships and harbor installations. But I know of two men now assigned to one of these new naval weapons —one is a hairdresser in civil life and the other a dry cleaner—who hope to buy a decommissioned jeepmarine from the government after the war and use it to explore the Spanish Main for galleon gold.

The submarine motorbike has a cylindrical chassis 21 feet long. Two persons sit astride it behind conventional-looking motorcycle windscreens. They wear diving suits that weigh less than 50 pounds, and their hands are left bare. Each person can dress himself for undersea cycling in less than five minutes. Oxygen flasks carried on their backs permit them to remain submerged for 10 hours. They may dismount at will and, by regulating the air-escape valve, make their suits so buoyant that they can float like fish at any level. Deflating their suits permits them to walk, with their lead-soled boots keeping them vertical.

Link