Boing Boing: July 8, 2007 Archives

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July 8, 2007

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Jay Lake's "Mainspring": Clockpunk adventure

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 8:28 PM | permalink

Jay Lake has just published Mainspring, a stupendous clockpunk novel about a young man's quest to find -- and wind up -- the mainspring of the planet. Lake made his prodigious reputation in alternative and independent presses, and Mainspring marks his debut with a major house, Tor Books.

Mainspring is a nonstop adventure yarn that's the equal of anything from Fritz Leiber or Robert Howard, with a premise that's so mindbendingly weird that it'll have you giggling in public. The idea is that the universe is a giant, magnificent clockwork, the planets themselves on gears whose teeth are visible in the night sky. A humble apprentice is catapulted into adventure when an angel charges him with a quest to save the world from ruin when its mainspring winds down.

There's zeppelin battles, demented theology, and lots and lots of clocky, mechanical goodness here. This is blasphemy at its finest. Link

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Happy 60th birthday, Howard Rheingold!

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 8:28 PM | permalink

Howard Rheingold, a pioneering Internet writer and oft-cited Boing Boing inspiration turned 60 yesterday. Rheingold's Virtual Communities inspired me to join The WELL, and I was privileged to be interviewed for his Smart Mobs. Howard is a brilliant thinker, a stirring writer, an inspiring speaker and an unstoppable shoe-painter.

Happy birthday, Howard! You're an inspiration to us all!

(Thanks, Justin!)

(Image ganked from Wikipedia)

REM's Dublin gig: bring your cameras!

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 8:19 PM | permalink

Ethan Kaplan is Head of Tech for Warner Bros Records and he's one of the good guys, a 28-year-old geek who's trying valiantly to get the record industry to stop fighting the weather and embrace technology. To that end, he reports on REM's latest venture, REM in Dublin, where the band encouraged fans to bring cameras to their shows and record and upload audio and video, then the band blogged their tour and linked to their favorite fan-recordings. Link

Jewelry made from model railroad landscapes

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 8:14 PM | permalink

I love Sarah Hood's "Landscape" jewelry, made from model train landscape miniatures. I gave my mom a necklace like this for her birthday a couple years ago, and she adores it. Link (via Craft)

Toypography blocks spell words in English or Japanese

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 8:11 PM | permalink

Toypography blocks are kids' alphabet toys that can be used to spell words in Japanese characters or Roman ones -- the characters snap apart and re-form across multiple alphabets. Link (via Grow A Brain)

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William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 8:04 PM | permalink

William Gibson did a wonderful interview with the College Crier Online, talking about his forthcoming novel Spook Country, a science fiction novel set one year in the past. In Spook Country, Gibson finds the pure expression of the science fiction writer's art: to write about the present day through the veil of technology and speculation. Spook Country is a magnificent novel about the leftover spies sloshing around after the Cold War, about locative artists, and about celebrity. I ended up sitting in a blisteringly hot car in a parking garage for an hour while I finished the last 70 pages, transfixed until I found out how it all ended.

I love the idea of science fiction turning its lens on the present, of finding the same frisson of futuristic speculation in looking around at the contemporary world. Gibson's insights on the subject are laser-focused, as his commentary on film adaptations of literature and several other subjects.

TVP: But having said that, isn't it a bit uncanny that all of the dystopian texts of science-fiction appear to be aiming at the present that we're experiencing right now?
WG: Well, I would find that spookier if I had been believing all along that those sort of dystopian themes in science fiction were about some sort of vision of the future. I think they were actually like being perceived in the past when that stuff was being written. 1984 is a powerful book precisely because Orwell didn't have to make a lot of shit up. He had Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin as models for what he was doing. He only had to dress it up a little bit, sort of pile it up in a certain way to say, "this is the future." But the reason it's powerful is that it resonates of history. It doesn't resonate back from the future, it resonates out of modern history. And the power with which it resonates is directly contingent on the sort of point-for-point mimesis, like sort of point-for-point realism, in terms of what we know happened.

Link (via Futurismic)

Update: Joe points out that Gibson is doing a Second Life appearance, complete with a design-an-avatar contest.

Chennai's hand-lettered newspaper

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 7:55 PM | permalink

Wired's Scott Carney's turned in a killer piece on one of the world's last hand-lettered newspapers, The Musalman, a daily liberal Muslim paper published in Chennai, India. Local calligraphers letter the Urdu stories, then the paper is run on an American surplus offset printer salvaged in the 1950s. Don't miss the gallery of photos of the paper and its producers.

The newspaper's content is not exactly hard-hitting. It covers the basics of local politics and the writers translate stories from English papers into Urdu. Still, the paper is widely read and appreciated by Muslims in Tripplicane and Chennai where the paper has a circulation of 20,000.
While the Musalman is a Muslim newspaper, it is a hub of South Asian liberalism, employing both women and non-Muslims. Half the katibs are women and the chief reporter is Hindu. Staff members say that Indira Gandhi, former prime minister of India, once called the business the epitome of what modern India should be.

Link, Link to slideshow

Medical anomalies photoshopping contest

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 7:49 PM | permalink

Love this Worth1000 photoshopping contest on the theme of "medical anomalies." A photoshopper's sideshow exhibit. Link

Girl Talk mashupper hijacks his own Montreal Jazz Fest set

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 7:46 PM | permalink

Mashup legend Girl Talk hijacked his own set at the Montreal Jazz Festival last month. Towards the end of his set, he walked out of the auditorium and set up his laptop in the parking lot with two 200W speakers powered by a generator. 400 people converged on the lot while Girl Talk did another set, open air, no permit, while the cops looked on in bewildered amusement.

Open Source Video, the "open" copyright documentary, captured the event for posterity. Link (Thanks, Brett!)

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30,000 matchheads go up in flame

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 7:39 PM | permalink

Kids fill a tin can with 30,000 matchheads, insert a long-ass fuse, retreat, and set off a gigantic fireball. Don't do this as home. Don't do this anywhere. But: enjoy. Link (Thanks, Mack!)

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DRM guru claims new BluRay won't be cracked for 10 years

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 7:25 PM | permalink

Smokey sez, "Richard Doherty, well-known CE industry analyst, declared to a trade magazine that the BD+ DRM system about to be rolled out on all Blu Ray discs would not be hacked for 'likely 10 years.'"

So, this is dumb for (at least) two reasons:

1. Some teenager will hack this by attacking the least secure implementation of BD+ -- the manufacturer who makes the most mistakes. The BD+ people will argue that BD+ wasn't cracked -- some idiotic company's bad BD+ version was cracked. Yes, true. And that's why BD+ doesn't work: it has to be implemented by companies whose customers don't want BD+.

2. It doesn't matter if BD+ works. There's HD-DVD and all the other compromised DRMs, with the same works released on all of them. If BD+ survives, it's only because DRM crackers can get everything BD+ protects more easily by cracking something else. As the bear joke goes, "I don't have to outrun the bear -- I only have to outrun you." Another analogy: BD+ may be an impregnable steel door, but it protects a safe whose other five walls are made of rice-paper.

Still, it'll be funny to watch BD+ get creamed by a Scandinavian 16-year-old who only started caring about this stuff when the MPAA subverted his country's legal system in a failed attempt to shut down The Pirate Bay (other trackers may be run by the MPAA as honey-pots -- accept no imitations!) Link

Weinberger: Delaminate the bastard telcos!

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 7:16 PM | permalink

On the eve of the Federal Trade Commission's abandonment of Net Neutrality, David "Everything is Miscellaneous" Weinberger has this essay, "Delamination Now! How to keep the Internet from going the way of the Princess Phone."

The Net Neutrality fight is over whether carriers like AT&T should be allowed to charge us three times for our Internet connections. Right now, we pay twice. In the example of Boing Boing, you pay for your Internet connection and we pay for our Internet connection. In the net discrimination world, carriers like AT&T would be able to degrade your connection to Boing Boing unless we paid a fee for "premium service" for the carrier to send you the Internet stuff you ask for.

In Weinberger's essay, he argues that the only solution to Net Neutrality is to kill the carriers' traditional business-model of making profit by selling additional services on their networks -- to "delaminate" carriers, separating providers of bits from providers of services.

Carriers are gigantic corporate welfare bums. They receive an enormous state subsidy in the form of a right of way that gets them into every household in America. Imagine if the location of every tunnel, pole, and line had to be contracted for and paid for separately -- the carriers would go bust.

I say, if the telcos don't want to use our largesse to benefit us, let's take all that lovely right of way back again. Buy out their wires at a fair market price and give their state monopoly on right of way to someone who wants to earn a profit in the public interest -- not by using our connections to bilk network service providers out of "premium service" fees.

Delaminate the bastards. The only way to get Net Neutrality with teeth is by changing the business models of the businesses providing us with access. Peel apart the layers like a piece of rotting plywood.
The first layer will be for companies that want to provide access to the Internet. We'll pay them to let us attach a computer, cell phone or any other device — even a Princess Phone, once we get it all VoIPed up — to the Internet and begin to send and receive bits. As many bits as we want. All bits treated equally. The companies can compete over price, bandwidth, uptime, and other properties of the network.
The upper layer will be for companies that want to provide content and services using the Internet.
The health of these two layers is reciprocal: Customers will use more bits because there are more services and content available to them in the next layer. There will be more services and content because the market now has lots of bandwidth, enough to handle new types of applications.

Link

NASA scientist: ban coal plants now!

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 7:05 PM | permalink

Alex from WorldChanging sez, "We just published a new letter from NASA's Jim Hansen, in which he essentially says the world can't afford to burn coal any more, and we should have a moratorium on coal-burning (except perhaps in a new generation of power plants with carbon capture and sequestration technologies)."

The resulting imperative is an immediate moratorium on additional coal-fired power plants without CCS. A surge in global coal use in the last few years has converted a potential slowdown of CO2 emissions into a more rapid increase. But the main reason for the proposed moratorium is that a CO2 molecule from coal, in effect, is more damaging than a CO2 molecule from oil. CO2 in readily available oil almost surely will end up in the atmosphere, it is only a question of when, and when does not matter much, given its long lifetime. CO2 in coal does not need to be released to the atmosphere, but if it is, it cannot be recovered and will make disastrous climate change a near certainty.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

(Image ganked from Jay Dugger's Flickr photostream: Unknown Coal Plant Near Saint Louis, Missouri)

Wellcome Trust releases 2000 years of medical images under Creative Commons

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 6:55 PM | permalink

Ian sez, "The Wellcome Trust, one of the UK's largest medical charities, has released its image collection under Creative Commons licenses, with a new web site to search through it. I'm not sure how many thousand images there are, but for science teachers and anyone doing research into the history of medicine and biosciences, this will be a huge bonus." Link (Thanks, Ian!)

Artisanal steampunk watches of Japan

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 8, 2007 6:52 PM | permalink

A Japanese artisan makes the superb steampunk watches -- neatly tying together two of my fetishes, timekeeping and Victorian inventor aesthetic. Dear Lord, there's a lot to love here. I want three more arms so I can buy five of them and wear one on each wrist. Link, Link to more work (Thanks, Robert!)

Assload of steampunkery on Boing Boing

Update: Todd, who reads Japanese, notes that most of these watches aren't for sale. I weep.

Update 2: Thanks to Logan and Nicholas for pointing out this interview with the creator of the watches, Haruo Suiekichi.

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Timeline of hazardous made-in-China products, 2007

Posted by Xeni Jardin, July 8, 2007 9:58 AM | permalink

Who-Sucks.com has compiled a master timeline of incidents involving dangerous (sometimes lethal) "made in China" products banned or recalled by the US Consumer Products Safety Commission in 2007.

It's a big list. Well-known killers like Thomas the Tank Engine of Death and Antifreeze Toothpaste are in here, but so are less-known gems like "razor blades for kids," "lead bracelets," "toxic jackets," and "dangerously crappy hammocks."

Link (thanks, Fred Hall)

Reader comment: Dan says,

This reminded me of the great old SNL skit with Dan Akroyd portraying a purveyor of such "exciting" toys:
"Okay, Miss, I wanna correct you, alright. The full name of this product, as it appears in stores all over the county, is Johnny Switchblade: Adventure Punk. I mean, nothing goes wrong.. little girls buy 'em, you know, they play games, they make up stories, nobody gets hurt. I mean, so Barbie takes a knife once in a while, or Ken gets cut. You know, there's no harm in that. I mean, as far as I can see, you know?"
Link

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