Deliciously detailed visual representation of Apple form factor evolution from 1976 to 2007, from the Apple I to the iPhone: Link, by Edwin Tofslie. Shown above, a detail of the first few. The whole chart is a 3435 x 2280 jpeg, with about 100 items.

Fursuits and /b/tards clash outside furry-con at Pittsburgh hotel. "Yiff in hell," reads the protest sign. Link.

16-year-old drummer of San Francisco punk rock band (Tinkture) loses most of her hand Wednesday night after someone tosses live fireworks at her in Dolores Park. Link. Her father wants to know who is responsible for maiming his daughter, and offers a $20K reward: Link.

San Diego cops arrest guy withdrawing cash from bank because he was wearing life-sized, gun-shaped belt buckle. “They called me an idiot and said 'I can't believe you were wearing that right now.'” Link.

Rare genetic mutation causes whippet dog to resemble Schwarzenegger: Link

Steampunk Barbeque Dreadnought: 1.5HP International Harvester Steam Tractor, with built in barbeque grill (complete with rotisserie), a built in steam powered ice cream maker, and hot dog launching air cannon run off a compressor, also powered by the steam engine. eBay Link.

Accused Texas downloader lady sues RIAA and Sony BMG Music, claiming they employed unlicensed private investigators and knew they were ignoring state laws. Link.

1,000 immigrants sworn in as US Citizens in DisneyWorld on July 4: Link.

Wading pool drain sucks out 6-year-old girl's intestines. Link.

All my sweet childhood memories of Alvin and the Chipmunks destroyed by new CGI movie. Now they're rapping, photorealistic assholes: Link, Link 2, Link 3

(Thanks, Chris, Kevin Evans, Ted Nugnt, David Chasteen, Michael Hayes, Landon, Kevin, Tavie, The Wicked One, Dustin)

Reader comment: Pete Mortensen says,

I took the big JPEG of Apple's products by Edwin Tofslie and turned it into a visual map of Apple's overall product family over time: Link. You can see families appear grow, and contract - it really tells quite a story. Interestingly, Apple goes into chaos in about 1987, the second Jobs leaves, and only fixes itself once he comes back full time, 1998.

I've uploaded the huge PDF (made in Keynote, of course) to Scribd, where it can be viewed at various levels of zoom in Flash or downloaded as a PDF, and I have this link to where the source file can be downloaded and edited into its own new map, rearranging as people disagree with my choices.

Yesterday I wrote about the Steorn's failed demonstration of its Orbo perpetual motion device for the Huffington Post.

With a track record of zero, you would think the perpetual motion school of applied phyics would have shut down long ago. Not so. Today, there's a company in Dublin, Ireland, called Steorn, which claims to have developed a device, called Orbo, which violates, or at least effectively skirts around, the laws of thermodynamics. They say once the technology -- which allegedly exploits hitherto unknown properties of magnets to generate free energy from nothing, is refined -- it can be used to power cars, electronics, and just about anything that needs energy to make it run.

Recently Steorn announced it would unveil Orbo, at, of all places, a London art gallery on July 4. However, the demonstration was a failure, because Orbo failed to work. Steorn's official explanation sounds remarkably like the excuses offered by all fringe inventors after their machines fail to work in front of an audience: "We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting."

Link

My friend Joshua Glenn was the founder of one of my favorite zines, The Hermenaut. He edited a new book called Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance, which can be pre-ordered via Amazon. I've read some samples from the book and they're wonderful.

"'Taking Things Seriously' is a wonder cabinet of seventy-five unlikely thingamajigs that have been invested with significance and transformed into totems, talismans, charms, relics, and fetishes: scraps of movie posters scavenged from the streets of New York by Low Life author Luc Sante; the World War I helmet that inoculated social critic Thomas Frank against jingoism; the trash-picked, robot-shaped hairdo machine described by its owner as a chick magnet; the bagel burned by actor Christopher Walken while moonlighting as a short-order cook. The owners of these objects convey their excitement in short, often poignant essays that invite readers to participate in the enjoyable act of interpreting things."

Link

PopSci has a fun project that shows you how to dissolve the zinc in a penny, leaving only the thin copper shell. Link

My friend Robyn painted this terrific album cover for his son's band's second album: an E.P. called Cosmic Beats in Outer Space.

It's reminiscent of EC comics and Mad editor Al Feldstein's 1959 painting Moon Arch, one of my favorite spaceman paintings. Link

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement) Gary Basemen's first solo show in LA in two years is opening at Billy Shire Fine Arts on July 14, and runs until August 11. He says:

This time I think I am pushing the envelope even more with my little creatures. Basically, ChouChou takes all one’s negative energy and hate away, absorbs it, and excretes it as creamy gooey love.

Link

Today on KCRW's daily radio news roundtable "To The Point," host Warren Olney did a segment on Andrew Keen's internet-damning book "Cult of the Amateur," in which bloggers are described as "enthusiastic monkeys" who try to "steal away our eyeballs."

The "monkey" part I won't dispute, but -- he's dead wrong with "eyeballs," it's all about the BRRRRAAIAIIINNNNNNSSSS.

Mr. Keen has compared Web 2.0 to the evils of Communism (he slurs Lessig as an "intellectual property communist," and Steve Jobs is a "cultural Marxist," LOL). The core premise of Keen's book seems to be that conversational media is destroying culture, ruining the economy, and destroying the lives of "experts."

The book's a lot more fun to read if you replace every instance of "YouTube" or "MySpace" with "rock and roll," and pretend it's 50 years ago and you're watching scared old fogeys rag on Elvis and the Beatles. Or just imagine the whole thing being read aloud by General Jack D. Ripper.

I can't help but wonder if some of the bitterness in Keen's rhetoric has to do with the fact that the big dumb web crowds he so eagerly disparages effectively voted down the "content and community" Web 1.0 music dotcom he ran circa 1999-2000. I understand it crashed and burned after 18 months.

Along with Mr. Keen, I was among the guests in today's episode, as was Larry Sanger (Citizendium) and Clay Shirky, whose insightful essays tearing apart technoskeptics like Keen and Michael Gorman have been blogged here on BoingBoing before.

Olney was a generous host, and as usual, Shirky was the smartest guest in the room -- he was a lot of fun to listen to.

And you can listen to the whole episode here: podcast link (iTunes), episode rundown.

Reader comment: Gregory Soo says,

It's a tad ironic that Keen has little qualifications for cultural criticism, and is thus an amateur at the very discipline of his book deriding amateurs. Maybe the only thing Keen is 'professional' at is trolling. And, "natural born filters" is so true.

C.E. Petit says,

Here are my comments from a week ago on Keen; although our reasoning differs, we reach part of the same conclusion concerning Keen.

And I drink only pure rainwater.

Update: Huh, look at that -- Kevin Kelly debated Mr. Keen online. In 8 parts, no less! There's some really interesting stuff in here: Link.

All of us at CRAFT and MAKE have been busy putting together a special edition one-shot magazine called DIY HALLOWEEN 2007. We've got over 40 do-it-yourself projects to teach yoyou how to do everything from applying monster makeup to building a high-tech haunted house.

Here are a few things you'll find inside:

Headless Marie Antoinette costume * Mechanical ghosts and ghouls * LED jack-o'-lanterns * Creature makeup and blood-spurting wounds * DIY tombstones * Kid-tested haunted house tricks * A special "Ghoulbox" section with Halloween kits, tools, and gadgets.

Plus demonic decorations, hideous party snacks, and profiles of extraordinary makers and their creepy crafts.

It'll ship in late August but you can pre-order a copy now for just $9.99. Link

Over at ScienceBlogs, Orac reports that creationists are pointing to Steorn's alleged free energy device (which failed at its public unveiling two days ago, incidentally) as proof that "ultra-materialists scientists" are wrong about the laws of thermodynamics. According to the creationists, the fact that Steorn has claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine proves that evolution is bunk, too. Who can argue with logic like that?

Here's the comment from the creationist:

This is perhaps the best physical evidence I have ever seen against the absurd assumptions of materialism. The materialists are utterly convinced that "free energy" is impossible, but they have totally ignored well documented evidence of miracles (e.g. walking on water, reviving the dead).

Let me explain: Such acts would have required a great deal of energy brought in from apparently nowhere. The laws of thermodynamics as Hawkings understand them say this can never happen. In hawking's world-view reviving the dead is impossible because a long-dead body contains a great deal more entropy than a healthy living body. On the other hand, well documented evidence says these miricales happened. As scientists we must follow this evidence wherever it leads.

This is a perfect example of how ultra-materialists scientists deny legitimate scientific inquiry. It's hardly surprising that the dogmatic neo-darwinist nay-sayers are often the same people who deny that Steorn's perpetual motion machine is possible WITHOUT EVEN SEEING IT!

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Steorn has "technical difficulties" with "free energy" machine
• Steorn's "free energy machine" to be unveiled today
• More on "free energy" company
• Company claims to have generator with more than 100% efficiency

Reader comment:

Jeremy says:

I find it funny that ID people are against the Laws of Thermodynamics considering they often use one of them, specifically the second law, as evidence against evolution in the first place.

A new study supports the theory that chimps can be altruistic just like people. Children as young as 18 months-old also seem to help adults, even strangers, without any immediate benefit to themselves. According to psychologist Felix Warneken of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, altruism goes back as far as 6 million years ago when to the common ancestor we share with chimps. In a paper published in the journal Public Library of Science Biology, the Warneken and his colleagues posit that humans and chimps are predisposed to be Good Samaritans. From Science News:

His team conducted three experiments with adult chimps living on an island sanctuary in Uganda and two experiments with 18-month-old German children. In the chimp version of the first experiment, 36 animals watched one at a time from a barred enclosure as an experimenter in an adjacent room—who had had virtually no prior contacts with the animals—reached through the bars for a stick on the other side. The stick was within reach of only the observing chimp.

Most chimps snatched the stick and gave it to the experimenter, whether or not the experimenter offered a piece of banana as a reward. No assistance came if the experimenter didn't first reach in vain for the stick.

A similar trial with 36 youngsters yielded comparable altruistic behavior, regardless of whether the experimenter offered toys as a reward.

Link to Science News, Link to PLoS Biology

On the Craft blog, Make staff editor Arwen O'Reilly interviews Jessica Polka about her cool wunderkammer inspired crafts.

Arwen: What got you interested in making sea creatures?

Jessica: I have, for several years, been totally fascinated by the idea of a "wunderkammer," or cabinet of curiosity, which was the name given to the earliest of natural history collections. A wunderkammer was quite literally the most amazing, shocking, and befuddling specimens of the natural world -- real and imagined -- jammed together in a room or ornate display case. The viewer, I imagine, was supposed to get the sense that they were beholding all corners of the earth at once, in one glance -- sea shells (once a rarity) displayed next to preserved two-headed lambs, saintly relics, and "unicorn horns."

I got my mitts on a copy of Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, and it was only a matter of time before I made the connection between the beautiful red coral branches pictured in it and a few forlorn balls of red yarn I had earmarked for armwarmers.

Link

I'm sorry to say that I had to cancel my trip to the Bay Area this weekend to present tips and techniques from my book, Rule the Web, at Fry's Electronics. If you were planning on coming to Fry's to attend, I sincerely apologize.

However, I will be at two Fry's Electronics in Los Angeles the following weekend:

Friday, July 13th, 7-8:30pm
Woodland Hills Store
6100 Canoga Ave.
Woodland Hills, CA 91367
(818) 227-1000

Saturday, July 14th, 2-3:30pm
Anaheim Store
3370 E. La Palma Ave.
Anaheim, CA 92806
(714) 688-3000

I hope to see you there!

Download the flyer PDF here: Link

At left, Horror comix artist William Ekgren's psychedelicreepy cover for the April, 1953 issue of Weird Horrors. Ekgren's career is profiled in the third volume of Craig Yoe's terrific Arf Forum comic/art anthology published by our pals at Fantagraphics. This insanely eclectic collection also features George "Krazy Kat" Herriman, Stan Lee, Nancy's Ernie Bushmiller, surrealist Max Ernst, and many other great artists. For samples of the spookier art in the book, see this Monster Brains post. Keep in mind though that the book is utterly genre-defying.)

From the book description:

The third volume of the popular "Arf" series, Arf Forum runs the gamut from Krazy Kat¹s kartoonist George Herriman to heartbreak rocker Elvis, Spider-Man's Stan Lee to New Yorker cartoonist Otto Soglow, Little Nemo's Winsor McCay to silent film star Charlie Chaplin, Nancy's Ernie Bushmiller to Surrealist Max Ernst. The sexy pin-up cover on Arf Forum highlights a feature on historical images of people reading comics: from a young Elvis reading Betty and Veronica on his first tour to a boxer-clad Rock Hudson reading the Sunday funnies. Also ratcheting up the titillation factor is a spread on the sexy cartoons of Italian artist, Kremos. The Arf books have a special fondness for cartoonists doing wacky and surrealistic comics. This Arf features a generous sample of Bill Holman's Smokey Stover, including unpublished rarities. Also in this volume, macabre cartoonist Henry Heath goes devilish in the ongoing "Cartoonists Go To Hell" series. A bona fide super-hero swoops into the pages of Arf when "Captain Marvel Fights The Surrealist Imp" in a classic tale from the Golden Age of Comics; meanwhile, real-life superhero Stan Lee introduces a section devoted to, in Lee's own words, Yoe's own "wacky, weird, wild comics that become Art with a capital 'A'!" And finally, "Yabba Dabba Been Done" examines the caveman and dinosaur cartoons of masters T.S. Sullivant, Winsor McCay and Frederick Opper — all pre-Fred and Wilma Flintstone!

Link

This creature, apparently a half-squid, half-octopus, was found off Hawaii's Big Island. Possibly a newly-discovered species, it was accidentally sucked up into a deep-sea water pipeline from a depth of 3,000 feet. Researchers at the Natural Energy Laboratoriy, where the pipeline leads, found the animal trapped in a filter. From the Honolulu Star Bulletin:

(NELHA operations manager Jan) War, who termed the specimen "octosquid" for the way it looked, said it was about a foot long, with white suction cups, eight tentacles and an octopus head with a squidlike mantle...

Christopher Kelley, program biologist for the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, went to the natural energy lab Tuesday to pick up the preserved octosquid, rattail fish and jellyfish (also found in the filter), which had been stored in a freezer, and brought them back to UH-Manoa's oceanography department.

"It's a beautiful squid. It's a gorgeous ruby red color," Kelley said. "We really enjoy these little mysteries that come up."

Link (via Laughing Squid)

- akiyoshi's illusion page
- exploratorium
- optical illusions + visual phenomena
- depth perception
- masters of deception
- best visual illusion
- natural hallucinogen

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

Image: Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s "Out of Focus," Link to explanation of the optical magic this induces.

Snip from independent photojournalist James Rodriguez' first-person account of a demonstration that took place in Guatemala City on June 30:

The March for Remembrance, organized by H.I.J.O.S. (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetfulness and Silence) [ Ed.: in Spanish, "hijos" means "children," as in "sons and daughters" ] , brought a number of activists and families of victims from the civil war together with the goal of halting the parade which commemorated the 136th annual Military Day.

The demonstration congregated in Jocotenango Park, formerly Morazan Park, in Zone 2 of the Capital City. Those drawn on the sheets represent only a small fraction of the more than 200,000 victims killed during the 36 year internal conflict.

A member of H.I.J.O.S. waves a flag depicting the image of one of the many victims killed by Guatemalan security forces during the civil war. In many cases, the person represented on the flag is the flag-waver’s own father or mother.

(...) Meanwhile, the military parade continued just a block behind the anti-riot forces.

Today is not for celebrating
It’s for struggling and protesting
Because forgiving is not enough
Those who carried on genocide must pay (...)

Who kidnaps, tortures and assassinates?
The Genocidal Army.
Children of the motherland, Children of the Quetzal,
Which son of a bitch took my father?

A demonstrator, while still recovering from the effects of tear gas, adjusts a homemade gas mask in case of a second skirmish.

Link 1, Link 2 (English), Versión en español aquí.

James Rodriguez has many, many photosets on Flickr, including 11+ from Guatemala (where he's based). You might just want to start at the top of the stream and scroll back, tons of absolutely incredible photography in here. Here's his portfolio site. (Gracias, Margarita).

Snip from an advisory about "HIJOS," dated 2000, from Amnesty International:

HIJOS is a new human rights group, made up of young people, many of them students, who were children when their parents were ''disappeared'', killed or massacred and have joined together recently, some of them returning from exile, to try and establish what happened to their parents and who was responsible for it. They also want to help educate the new generation in Guatemala about what happened during the years of repression. Amnesty International shares their view, that understanding what happened, who was responsible and who allowed it to happen are vital in efforts to make sure that no such future violations will be either repeated or tolerated.

HIJOS work to discover the fate of their family members who were victims of the civil conflict which raged in Guatemala over a period of more than 30 years. Before the conflict was formally ended with the signing of the final Peace Accords in 1996, it is estimated that some 200,000 people were extrajudicially executed or ''disappeared'' at the hands of the Guatemalan security services or the civil patrols and so-called ''death squads'' acting under their command. The number of cases where the perpetrators have been identified and brought to justice can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Previous BoingBoing posts about Guatemala: Link.

Wow, what a work of art. Writer Mary Robinette Kowal modded her laptop so that the keyboard would resemble keys on an old-fashioned portable typewriter. This looks so touchable! I wonder how she managed to ensure that the stickers won't fade with lots of fingertip action, maybe a layer of clear plastic sticker over the printed and hand-retouched bits? Meticulously documented here: Link. (Update: ruh-roh, we brokeded the website! It's down as of 9pm PT 7/5/07, no doubt from too much traffic. I'm sure it'll resurrect soon enough). (Thanks, John)

Ben Popken at Consumerist writes:

The Consumerist's 3-month sting operation snared a Geek Squad technician stealing porn from our hard drive, and we've got the work-safe video and logfiles to prove it.

To investigate claims by current and former Geek Squad techies (see "The 10 Page Geek Squad Confession - "Stealing Customers' Nudie Pics Was An Easter Egg Hunt"), we loaded a computer with porn and rigged it to make a video of itself. We captured every cursor movement, every program opened, every file accessed. Everything that the user saw and did, we recorded.

Link, includes video and logfiles, and see also Why We're Not Telling Geek Squad CEO Which Agent Stole The Porn.

The takeaway: this could happen with any tech support service, not just Geek Squad (though Consumerist alleges this is a systemic problem there -- not just one rogue dude). If you've got stuff you don't want strangers to see (or copy or steal), encryption is your friend. By the time your PC needs repair, it will be too late to lock down. Plan ahead, grasshopper!

Snip from NYT piece by David Pogue about "T-Mobile HotSpot @Home" -- which could save you a bundle , but is only available in small test markets so far:

If you’re willing to pay $10 a month on top of a regular T-Mobile voice plan, you get a special cellphone. When you’re out and about, it works like any other phone; calls eat up your monthly minutes as usual.

But when it’s in a Wi-Fi wireless Internet hot spot, this phone offers a huge bargain: all your calls are free. You use it and dial it the same as always — you still get call hold, caller ID, three-way calling and all the other features — but now your voice is carried by the Internet rather than the cellular airwaves.

Link to the NYT review, and here's the dedicated T-Mobile website for this product. Here's another (positive) review at ZDNet, and another at BusinessWeek. Want! (via NYCwireless)

One bummer: they're only offering two phones with this service right now -- the Nokia 6086 and Samsung t409, both clunky flipphones, $50 with 2-year contract. Apparently, the sound quality is terrific (particularly over 802.11) but they look and feel kind of lame, don't include a huge set of features, and the display kind of sucks.

Still, man, what a good landline-replacement deal this sounds like if you just want a basic phone for lots of voice and txt, and you like to hold on to those small pieces of paper with presidents' faces in green ink.

Reader comment: Alta says,

Just wanted to let you know Hotspot at home is now nationwide. Link to BusinessWeek article.

Carl Pappenheim says,

That AT&T phone sounds fantastic but sadly isn't available, say, in the UK. No matter; a few months ago I bought this: link.

Which works really well on any wifi network although it doesn't do that slick 802 to GSM switching for obvious reasons. I foresee this being the conspiracy theorist's choice however as it's pretty much untraceable if you're just on some random wifi point and, unlike the AT&T version, you're guaranteed not to switch to the (readily-triangulated) cell network.

I guarantee this will be a plot device in a Hollywood movie by late 2015.

Thomas Valley says,

T-Mobile's releasing the Blackberry 8320 in 3 weeks that will be compatible with the Hotspot @ Home service. The 8320 is simply an upgrade of the existing 8300 (or "Curve") model: Link. This hot little number does everything the top model of BB (8830) does except for GPS integration with maps, and it's smaller and lighter, too.

Sprint/Nextel recently notified some customers that their accounts would be involuntarily terminated by the end of this month because these people made too many support calls to customer service:

"Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information," the letter reads. "While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs."

"Therefore after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007."

Subscribers who have gotten letters from Sprint terminating their service won't have to pay the early termination fee. Their account balances will also be set to zero. But subscribers will have to sign up with a new wireless provider by July 30 if they want to keep their phone numbers. Otherwise, the numbers won't be available after the Sprint service ends, the letter states.

Link to News.com article by Marguerite Reardon.

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) When Apelad saw this photo on a website in thumbnail size, he says he "couda sworn [it] was a horned ostrich of some sort." The drawing on the bottom is what he imagined it would look like when enlarged. He must've been sorely disappointed. Link

Program your TiVo to record the PBS documentary about the masterful guitar player and inventor, Les Paul.

Among inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, his name comes alphabetically after Louis Pasteur. In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it follows Parliament-Funkadelic. This singular distinction belongs to Les Paul, whose insatiable curiosity and experiments gave us the musical instrument of the modern era - the solid-body electric guitar - and the predominant studio recording technique - multi-tracking. Audacious and indefatigable at every turn of his career - from small-town Waukesha to Harlem music haunts to Hollywood studios - Paul, at age 92, still holds court every Monday night at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City. AMERICAN MASTERS explores the revolutionary results of his drive to create sounds that had "never been heard on earth" when Les Paul: Chasing Sound premieres Wednesday, July 11 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS.

Link (Via Sound Scavengers)

Coop has resized a bunch of his photos of girls and Japanese monster toys so you can use them as iPhone wallpaper. You can grab them at his Flickr account. (Some are NSFW.) Link

New Scientist reports that researchers at University of Southampton, UK, have developed a tiny electric generator that converts environmental vibrations into stored electrical energy.

The generator converts 30% of environmental kinetic energy into electrical power, and could keep all sorts of low-power devices running without batteries – particularly when alternatives like solar power are not an option.

Steve Beeby, an engineer at the University of Southampton, UK, led development of the device. He says it could power devices attached to bridges, large buildings and other structures that experience vibration.

Link

In 60 AD, Greek engineer Hero built a self-propelled and programmable cart to carry automata around a theater stage. According to University of Sheffield computer scientist Noel Sharkey, this was probably one of the earliest programmable robots ever. Recently, the editors at New Scientist built their own version of the bot. From the New Scientist blog:

Power (for Hero's cart) came from a falling weight that pulled on string wrapped round the cart's drive axle, and Sharkey reckons this string-based control mechanism is exactly equivalent to a modern programming language...

Our cart was made from a child's scooter, a broom handle, wood, string, and lead weights from an old sash window.

Link

BoingBoing reader Uri says,

I just got back from India where I encountered this mutant cow near the monkey temple in Jaipur. Mutant cows are considered extra holy and its owner charge money from visitors. I saw 2 more with similar oddity near other holy places.

Link to photo.

"Let the unicorn rebranding movement begin with me," says Dieselsweeties creator R. Stevens. Why do we think of these projectile-enabled beasts as elfin accessories, or fairy vectors? They have spears coming out of their heads, ffs. They're WARRIOR STALLIONS.

R. Stevens has created some "warrior stallion" iPhone wallpaper, for friends of BoingBoing (320 x 480) and computer desktop wallpaper in the same manly theme (1600 x 1200): Link.

Guy changes his middle name to "Megatron": Link

Meet the zorse, offspring of a zebra and a horse: Link.

No ice, no cold -- but seal clubbing is apparently quite popular in Namibia: Link

Speaking of clubbing... Tiesto cancelled, Bahrainians rioted: Link (via)

T-shirts: "Free Hans Reiser!" (coder, accused murderer)

"It is time, indeed long past time, to update Billy Joel's classic song We Didn't Start The Fire." Link to Times Online (UK) contest.

Guy in China dies after battery (probably a knockoff) on his Motorola phone explodes in chest pocket: Link.

With the power of crocheting, discarded VHS tapes become fashionable purses: Link.

Lady with no hands sues McDonalds after two locations refuse to serve her at drive-in window: Link.

Price of machetes in Nigeria drops after elections. Thugs hired by politicians no longer need as many with which to threaten voters: Link.

Your mom would LOVE this Osama bin Laden tattoo on your arm: Link.

(thanks, Laird, Greg, Kris, Bonnie, John Hutchison, Patrick Hirlehey, Vikram, Rico_Pico!).

Reader comment: J. Froman says,

Guy changes his middle name to megatron? Big Deal. Last name to megatron, way cooler. First name to Sunshine? not sure. Link. This is the guy who owns tshirthell.com, too. Link.

Text by Jasmina Tešanović
Photos by Bruce Sterling

Stefan Sagmeister

In Belgrade... he came and left, but not altogether... For days now, in this half-abandoned summery Belgrade, mysterious billboards are puzzling our citizens. Zen Buddhistic minimalist statements, or street-art, or New York ads, or something completely new to us...

Not like Belgrade's normal ads, loudly promoting cigarettes, drinks, cars, and open sexism...

TRYING / TO LOOK / GOOD / LIMITS / MY LIFE...

Every piece has a different billboard of its own, placed in a different part of the city...

No semi-nude women, but blue areas / fences / undetermined nowheres...I would rather get lost in that nowhere than sit in some fancy car with a carton of great cigarettes next to some super-model robot. Yes, and if I do that, then what?

So, the performance of this artist-designer, an Austrian living in New York, is called 'Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far.'

Money does not make me happy; Being not truthful works against me; Having guts always works out for me; Trying to look good limits my life; Everything I do comes back to me... And some other thirty aphoristic wisdoms of this kind, which the artist threw into his lecture in the National Library. They also appear in his exhibition in the SUPERSPACE gallery on the Danube river.

Les Miserable says:

Two Paris tobacconists and an unemployed man cheated a customer out of a €35.5m win on the EuroMillions lottery last month. The shopkeepers did the old switcheroo - they told the customer, a 30-year-old accountant, that his tickets were all losers and they binned them. In fact, two of them, with exactly the same permutations of numbers, had won the weekly jackpot. It wasn't until French Intelligence got involved that they were able to work out what happened.

Link

Link (thanks, Breanna!)

Matt says:

Steorn are supposed be demonstrating their "free energy" machine via a live webcast today. However, they've published the following announcement:

"We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today. As a consequence, Kinetica will not be open to the public today (5th July). We apologise for this delay and appreciate your patience."

There's no permalink to this announcement but I've blogged it here. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Steorn's "free energy machine" to be unveiled today
• More on "free energy" company
• Company claims to have generator with more than 100% efficiency

Reader comment:

Ken says:

I've been following your postings regarding Steorn's perpetual motion machine and they're failure to demonstrate it (how surprising!). Their excuse... the effect of the "intense heat from the camera lighting" reminds me a lot of something I came across a while back, in which the Amazing Randi debunks James Hydrick on national television ("That's My Line" with Bob Barker). Hydrick blames the failure of his telekinetic powers on "static electricity caused by the lighting" or something like that. You'd think they'd at least attempt to come up with better / more original excuses.

More on Hydrick.

The youtube video is worth watching for the guy's haircut alone.

(I probably found all this on BoingBoing in the first place... ) (Maybe so, here it is -- Mark)

Hemmy.net has a gallery of side-by-side screenshots showing how Disney animators re-use animation from their earlier movies. Link

On this week's NeoFiles podcast, RU Sirius and co-host Jamais Cascio interviewed Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak about living the prankster life and ethical hacking. The Woz has been in the media lately promoting his new book co-authored with Gina Smith, "iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon." From excerpts of the interview posted on 10 Zen Monkeys:

SW: I have these professionally printed stickers that I've had made. They're done with this sort of foil-type stuff in the exact OSHA style and the OSHA colors. And it says, "Danger: Do Not Flush Over Cities." And I put 'em in the bathrooms on airplanes...They're red with a black-shadowed airplane picture. The bathroom has a little seat fold-down. I fold that up and there's a sign in the middle of it saying, "Don't throw trash here." And I put my two little stickers behind it, so the stewardesses won't notice it right away. If they notice it right away they might realize that somebody put that there. But after a while, if they slowly get used to it, they'll stay on for years...

RU: In Robert Anton Wilson's book, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, there's this character, Markoff Cheney, who leaves weird bureaucratic commands in offices and places like that just to sort of boggle people's minds.

SW: That's almost like what I read about in the The Pentagon Papers – the psychological warfare. You kind of put out a message saying one thing, but it implies that something horrible is going to happen just because you're saying that it isn't going to happen. It triggers bad thought in people's mind.

RU: Cognitive dissonance...

SW: Yeah!

RU: ...is a great weapon of war, and also of...

SW: … comedy!

Link to transcript excerpts Link to podcast, Link to buy iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon

Previously on BB:
• Steve Wozniak interviewed by Pesco Link
• The Woz lines up for an iPhone Link

At MTV.com, my old pal Gil Kaufman surveys the unusual, eccentric, underdog, and truly independent characters running for president of the United States in 2008. You can't tell the players without a program! From MTV.com, here are profiles of a few:

Jonathon Albert "The Impaler" Sharkey (seen here, photo from Project Vote Smart) — 43, Satanist/pagan who is the founder, national chair and commanding general in the 1st Vampyre, Witches, Pagans Party Regiment (2006-present); former U.S. Army soldier; former board member of Hillborough, New Jersey's County Executive Republican Committee; dark priest/ advisor to the Church of the Followers of Lucifer; founder and national chair of Vampyres, Witches, Pagans Against Impaired Driving (2005-present). As an ordained Satanic dark priest, vows to perform same-sex marriages at White House at least once a month and to only impale criminals and terrorists, not law-abiding American citizens.

Gene Amondson — 64, running for the second time for the Prohibition party, Amondson has spent the past 20 years dressing up as the Grim Reaper with a whiskey bottle in one hand and a scythe in the other to preach the ills of liquor. Also a wood carver, oil painter, pie baker, children's book author and professional impersonator of 1900s evangelical anti-booze preacher Billy Sunday...

Jackson Kirk Grimes — 56, a single pagan with a GED who once portrayed Hitler on "Star Trek," this director of the United Fascist Union (which promotes the economic theories and political ideologies of Benito Mussolini and Saddam Hussein) and two-time presidential candidate promises to abolish paper money and create a global government if elected... Yaphet Kotto — 67, Yes, that Yaphet Kotto, the actor best known for playing a no-BS federal agent chasing Robert De Niro in "Midnight Run" and appearing in such films as "Brubaker," "Alien," "The Puppet Masters" and "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare." The Web site for his exploratory committee lists as its main goal the popularizing of "vibration politics," which seeks harmony among all men and planets...

Link

From the Associated Press:

Exposure to methane gas led to the deaths of four family members and a farmhand, but whether they suffocated from the fumes or drowned in 18 inches of liquefied cow manure may never be known, authorities said.

Link

The Notificator, featured in the August 1935 issue of Modern Mechanix, was designed for installation in public spaces so that individuals could leave messages for each other. In a short MobHappy post, Russell Buckley briefly puts it in the context of today's mobile tech.
Link

The town of Silver Spring, Maryland, gave $100,000,000 to a private developer to rehabilitate its downtown. Now the developer says that the whole downtown is a private mall, and has banned photography there.

Jordan sez, "The DC Rights Flickr group made good on its promise to stand up for photographers' rights in Silver Spring, MD. On 4th of July, over 100 photogs descended on the street, whose part-owners, the Peterson Company, have declared it a no-snapping zone without legal backing. The Peterson Company had recently backpedaled in a bid to diffuse the situation and protect their image (the very thing the company was trying to do by banning photography in the first place), but the citizenry was not appeased... The event was publicized and organized online, thanks to the efforts of bloggers, Flickr users, and citizen activists, and Bill Adler was there to document the scene for NowPublic." Link (Thanks, Jordan!)

See also: Photography banned in Silver Spring, Maryland

Tom sez, "With sticks lashed together, a bicycle wheel, a bike generator and rudimentary information gleaned from a primary school text, a Malawian teenager built a wind power system for his house. As others heard of his work, they and his family members chipped in to improve his system. He now provides lighting for his parents' home, and battery charging for his neighbors. His blog (with pictures) is wonderful." Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Readersheds, a UK site, has chosen its garden shed of the year: a fanciful Roman temple with "Roman cushions" and an amphora.

Features: The Roman Temple is a Folly. All the best stately homes can look across their estate and see a temple in the distance. It's just that this one is a bit nearer to the house, that's all !

Addtional Info: I remember admiring a ruined temple one year at the Chelsea Flower show in a garden-stone display. Following on from my interest in all things Roman, I was standing at the kitchen window one day some time later when I casually suggested to my wife that the shed might look better if it was converted to a Roman Temple. She was not amused! Three years passed during which time I produced a computer- simulated view of the garden with the proposed shed / Temple, and I continued to promote the idea at every opportunity. Then, on 23rd December 2004, I was at home when a parcel lorry arrived with my Christmas present, four (very big 2.2 metre) plastic/fibreglass Roman columns. I assumed this meant that I now had "Official Permission" to go ahead. Also featuring - Roman window bars / Amphora / Grape lights / Blue LED mood lighting / Alarm and CCTV / Roman cushions / Interior mural panels / Mosaic table / Two time zones (Britannia and Rome time). Future projects - statue of the Emperor.

Link (Thanks, Uncle Wilco!)

Noah from MoveOn writes:

MoveOn members are calling on the presidential candidates -- Republicans and Democrats -- not to take campaign money from the HMOs, big health insurers, and drug companies. They get a fair amount of money, but not so much that they couldn’t give it up if forced to.

MoveOn members are going to more than 7,000 screenings with hundreds of thousands of fliers asking people to call presidential candidates with a toll-free number we set up. You just call and connect to the candidate of your choice.

Go see this movie -- and bring along some fliers.

Link

See also:
Sicko inspires grassroots action in Dallas cinema
Moore's "Sicko" leaks onto P2P
Google to HMOs: pay us and we'll defuse "Sicko"
More on Google vs Sicko

The Open Knowledge Forum Network -- a federation of groups that work to create open data-sets and to promote access to knowledge -- has just launched Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network. This is an exciting project, aimed at creating a single web-repository for huge sets of freely usable knowledge. They call it a "Freshmeat for open knowledge."

CKAN links in especially closely with our recent discussions of componentization: we envision a future in which open knowledge is provided in a much more componentized form (packages) so as to facilitate greater reuse and recombination similar to what occurs with software today (see the recent XTech presentation for more details). For this to occur we need to make it much easier for people to share, find, download, and ‘plug into’ the open knowledge packages that are produced. An essential first step in achieving this is to have a metadata registry where people can register their work and where relevant metadata (both structured and unstructured) can be gradually added over time.

Link to post about the Archive, Link to Archive

I did a little interview yesterday on the CBC program "Q," talking about the Universal Music Group threat to pull out of iTunes. MP3 Link

Here's an interview with artist Kent Rogowski, about his "Bears" photographs. Furry, huggable teddybears, gutted and inverted.

Q: I love these bears so much. They remind me of my early sewing experiments. What happens when you take such a beloved and iconic toy and transform it by literally turning it inside out?

A: (...) Teddy bears are designed to be innocuous and non-threatening creatures. Inside-out the bears are still sometimes recognizable but are now much more complicated and contradictory. The seams of the bear now look like scars, and some bears lose their limbs and other appendages depending on how they were constructed. When you look at the inside-out bears they appear to have a history or a past. They no longer offer comfort but instead seem to want our empathy.

These are phenomenal. I think this one's my favorite -- the poor li'l guy looks like he's all tubed in to a catheter or an oxygen tank.

Link to interview by Nicole Pasulka at The Morning News, here's the gallery show in NYC through August 10, and here's an Amazon Link to buy the book (thanks Rosecrans!).

Metropolis magazine has a beautiful photo-feature about the design story behind a memorial for victims of the 2004 train bombings in Madrid: Link (Thanks, Susannah / via La Petite Claudine!)

Reader comment: Scott Andress says,

A few months ago we visited the M-11 memorial in Madrid. It was a very moving experience and the memorial design is striking. If you're interested, we have some photos posted on flickr from our Madrid podcast.

Photos: Link
Madrid Podcast: Link
I have a few additional photos on my personal flickr profile: Link

Pictures just don't depict the atmosphere completely. It is a place that must be visited in person to fully appreciate.

Scott Beale says,

Here are some photos of The Long Now Foundation members event for "77 Million Paintings" by Brian Eno, an exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The installation consisted of a 45 long projection by Obscura Digital of Brian Eno’s “visual music”.

Link

Previously on BoingBoing:

Brian Eno's 77 million paintings

This one's dedicated to all the lovers and the dreamers out there. Don't stop believin'. Stock will replenish soon. Link, shared by Dubi Kaufman of Chicago, IL.

Previous iPhone-themed posts on BB: Link.

Here are photos of funny signs in a Greek deli which is closed for the July 4th holiday. That date, as you see here, commemorates the Great Greek Battle of Tabouli. Shared by BoingBoing reader Paul of Minneapolis.

You know, when I think of tabouli, I think, "nom nom nom," and that's precisely the kind of talk you might see emanating in speech-clouds from the mouths of Laugh Out Loud Cats. They, too, would like you to has a happy Independence Day: Link, here is moar. (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

BB reader Austin says,

Here is a fabulous (and lengthy) nearly line-by-line dissection of the Declaration of Independence. This essay really highlights the elegance in this one document. The crappy part is I can't imagine any group of politicians today coming up with anything nearly as well thought out.

And finally, dear reader: please do not blow yourself up today. Leave explosives in the hands of pros. Here's a gruesome wire story about a lady in Michigan who blew her head off Monday night with a 3-inch mortar bomb.

Security forces in Islamabad, Pakistan today arrested the leader of a radical mosque after a bloody standoff -- the man was trying to escape the siege disguised in a burqa, according to authorities, but his pot belly is said to have given him away. Link to Reuters account. The Islamabad metblog had the most thorough online coverage I could find as the event was unfolding -- kind of wild to watch a story like this documented in real time, by folks who live there. Link to one of several much-updated posts on that site. (thanks, Sean Bonner)

In this photo shot by EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz, EFF legal intern Ruben models the "AT&T Deathstar banner" on a handsome new Apple iPhone "to remind people that AT&T is still evil... Turns out it's a perfect fit for the screen!" (Thanks, Cory!)

Previous iPhone-themed posts on BB: Link.

Developer "gj" and others behind the iPhone Development Project (http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki) claim to have released a "proof of concept activation program for the iPhone" that makes it possible to activate the device without an AT&T account, or re-activate after an AT&T account has been terminated.

Project participants explain that their work is intended to discover "additional uses for the iPhone by (legitimately) enabling its potential capabilities," and that the project is "for informational purposes only." Snip from the "goals and milestones" page:

The current goals of the iPhone Development Project are as follows:

* Break DMG Password *COMPLETE*

* Break Activation *COMPLETE*

* Unlock Phone

* Run Third Party Applications

* Allow DUN/Tethering

* Remove IMEI Transmitting

* Enable Disk Mode

(...)Also, as we enable certain features of iPhone, other features previously thought impossible may become reality.

And from the "Activation process" details page:

* Phone activation - Using a "known" token (one used to activate an iPhone legitimately), we can activate an iPhone even after deactivation. We can use this "known" token to activate multiple phones, but the token is believed to contain identifying information so we have not provided a token. I want to emphasize that a known token will work on any phone, and once you have a known token you can use wifi, iPod, etc.

The group claims to be having a "popularity problem" -- their servers can't take all the attention they're getting right now -- and they've asked folks to point to this IRC channel ('#iphone on irc.osx86.hu), instead of linking from high-traffic sites directly to the wiki page ((http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki).

In related news, yesterday "DVD Jon" Lech Johansen announced the results of a code project with similar goals:

Link to previous BoingBoing post. (Thanks, Jake!)

Reader comment: Eli says,

Might be nice to point out that thanks to a fairly recent Copyright Office ruling, it's perfectly legal to unlock your iPhone (or any other phone) to run on competitor's networks: Link. Heck, if I were in charge of Alltel or T-Mobile, I'd put a team of engineers on it and then offer free iPhone unlocking if you come in the store...

Previous iPhone-themed posts on BB: Link.