This is only the second time I've seen one of these vintage Timothy Leary wristwatches on eBay. (The first time, I bought the timepiece for myself. I only wear it on very special occasions.) Instead of the minutes, it has various drug names: Speed, Coke, Dexy, LSD, Hash, Horse, etc. i dig that the Ups are at 12 o'clock and Downs are at 6 o'clock. Current bid is $20.50.Fair use is the smallest part of the public's side of copyright. Sure, we have the right to quote, time-shift, format-shift, transform and so on. But the big piece is all the stuff that copyright shouldn't/doesn't touch: selling used media, watching your movies no matter what country you're in, the right to privacy in the books you read, and so on. All these are under fire in the copyright wars (I once had an argument with a MPAA vice president who wanted to make it impossible to watch a movie anonymously).
If you want to do something to preserve the public's side of the copyright bargain, check out the Access to Knowledge Treaty, a proposed treaty that the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization has recently green-lighted. Link (Thanks, Evan!)
Also today, Erik Davis, author of the fantastic books Techngnosis and Visionary State, analyzes this magnificent freak culture cover of the 1984 DAW edition of A Scanner Darkly. From Erik's essay:I'll be analyzing the action, looking for common PKD themes and connections to other works, enjoying the new notes on the novel prepared by Jonathan Lethem for the Library of America release, and exploring scholarly work done on the novel...
Dick said this about the novel in an interview:
"I have read [3 Stigmata] and have the distinct impression that it was an extraordinary book -- so extraordinary that it may have no peer. It may be a unique book in the history of writing --nothing was ever done like this. And then I've read it over and thought it was completely crazy, just insane; not about insanity, it is insanity. God, it's a weird book." Link
I use the term freak quite consciously. First injected into circulation by Frank Zappa in 1966, freak captures the experimental, surrealist, anti-authoritarian, and all around less wholesome dimension of the counterculture. Hippies read The Hobbit; freaks read H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Barris, the Scanner character possessed of weird and funny raps, is a freak. Emerging at the crossroads of drugs, the pulp imagination, culture hacking, and media tech, the freak was perfectly poised to both write and consume SF. Link
Jim Leftwich found this bizarre old Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial after viewing the Jolly Green Giant commercial. Eat a drumstick and the Colonel will come and soothe you from your stressful day. (Businessmen still wore hats, albeit ones with puny brims, in 1971!) Link
Reader comment:
Jesse says: Do you feel like "Get back to the easygoing life" is just KFC Kode for "Re-institute slavery"?
Maybe so, 35 years ago. But when I drive by my local KFC nowadays, the message seems to have become "This is a good place for roid-ragers to park their hawt pickup trucks and engage in methamphetamine transactions." -- Mark
Coop says: "I'm not sure what's more creepy: the crude stop-motion animated Maniacal Green Giant, or the fact that Mickey Rooney once had his own TV show." Link (via Lilek's new blog)
Video documentation of important scientific research in Japan. How does an owl respond to a jack-in-the-box? "No sir, I don't like it." Link
I'm beginning to think that Steorn is a game publisher, or some other kind of company that is doing all this as a publicity stunt. LinkThe "stator" is shown in green and blue, and contains a circular arrangement of eight magnets fit into slots around the periphery of a central cavity. In that cavity spins the "rotor", with four magnets around its circumference. The stator and rotor are connected by two bearings, seen in orange -- the weak links that, according to Sean, put an end to the demo.
Some of this detail is conjecture, given the quality of the photos that the design is drawn from. The design resembles a variation of a classic magnet motor, a recurring motif among attempts to create perpetual motion machines. A magnet motor cannot generate more energy than is put into it because, due to the way magnetic fields work, there will either be a stable state where the rotor is being pushed in one direction just as strongly as it is being pushed in the other direction, or else the operation of the motor will progressively weaken the magnets themselves until the spinning stops. If Orbo does work, then it's doing something very unusual with the configuration of magnets, perhaps (according to Sean) somehow taking advantage of the time variance involved in the effect of magnetic viscosity.
Previously on Boing Boing:
• Video of Steorn CEO explaining why its perpetual motion device failed at demo
• Huffington Post on Steorn's "free energy"
• Steorn's "free energy machine" to be unveiled today
• More on "free energy" company
• Company claims to have generator with more than 100% efficiency
Update: Adam found this great chart, showing box office gross adjusted for inflation -- the field peaked in 1939, with Gone the With the Wind in top place, with an adjusted gross of $450.5 million. The only movie from later than 1990 in the top ten is Titanic.
Update 2: Adam sez, "The figure listed for Gone with the Wind is adjusted to 1977 dollars...when adjusted to 2007, it's the much more impressive $1,329,453,600."
LinkContinuing to strike fear into the hearts of, well, everyone, Taser has released an electrified round that works with any 12-gauge shotgun. The Wireless eXtended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, is a fin-stabilized, self-contained round with no wires leading back to the gun and a maximum range of 100 ft.
Livingston called Flint a 'bottom feeder.' Flint responded 'Yes, I am a bottom feeder, and look what I found when I got down here.'
Here is the best part: Livingston's replacement was a one Sen. David Vitter (R). Ooops...
LinkUntil his disclosure on Monday night, Vitter had been a rising star in the Republican Party's social conservative movement. He has stressed family issues, supports a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and has pushed for reauthorization of an abstinence education program."
Vitter, R-Metairie, apologized for "a very serious sin in my past." "Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling," Vitter said in the statement. "Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the mater there -- with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.
Interlocals.net founder and inmedia.hk activist Oiwan Lam decided, as an act of electronic civil disobedience, to protest the Obscene Articles Tribunal of the Honk Kong Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) and their classification of articles as obscene for publishing hyperlinks to erotic photography on flickr and other sites. Lam then wrote an essay criticizing the Authority and linking to a tasteful photography found by searching the keywork 'nude' on flickr. The result was a quick response from the TELA, and the classification of the article as a Class II indecent article by the Obscene Articles Tribunal. The maximum penalty is HK$400,000 and 12 months in jail.
This link has an interview in English and Chinese with the Oiwan Lam and links to the original article. Oiwan Lam is also involved with globalvoicesonline.org.
Many years ago, Bruce Sterling handed me a stack of computer printouts and told me that I needed to publish them in bOING bOING (the zine). They were fever-dream science fiction stories written by a mathematician employed at IBM's Watson Research Center. The author was Clifford Pickover. I ran several of his stories and reviewed some of his books, which were about computer visualization, Fortean-style phenomena, speculations on alien lifeforms and cultures, and Lovecraftian horror-fantasy.
Today, Pickover runs a bunch of websites, including Reality Carnival, a blog about quirky science and philosophy. ("Ex-atheist describes near-death experience." "Do fruit flies have free will?" "Self-transforming women with temporal distortion.")
His book titles are intriguing, too: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection, Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes and the Quest for Transcendence, and The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: A True Medical Mystery, are just a few.
The website Alerati has a new interview with this supremely weird and wonderful scientist.
Aliens on dark worlds might develop a very keen sense of temperature and use this for both communication and exploring their environment. While humans can sense gross changes in temperature, some animals on Earth posses thermal sensors far finer than ours. For example, the mosquito can register differences of as little as one five-hundredths of a degree centigrade at a distance of 1 centimeter. Some fish such as the sole respond to temperature changes in the water of as little as 0.03 degrees Centigrade. The bedbug can crawl along a wall of a bedroom, sense a tiny area of exposed skin, and jump to it.LinkHumans sense relative temperatures. We know that one glass of tea is hotter than another. But we can’t tell say precisely how hot it is. Other creatures on Earth sense absolute temperature. For example, some fish can be trained to recognize a particular temperature within 1 degree of accuracy irrespective of whether the fish came out of a previously warmer or colder environment. Some birds have the ability to maintain their nests at a precise temperature and make small alterations to the nest if it becomes a degree too hot or cold.
Kent Couch, a 47-year0old gas station owner, attached 105 colorful helium balloons to his lawn chair and took a 193 mile trip across Oregon.
Couch is the latest American to emulate Larry Walters -- who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons. Walters had surprised an airline pilot, who radioed the control tower that he had just passed a guy in a lawn chair. Walters paid a $1,500 penalty for violating air traffic rules.LinkAs [Couch] made about 25 miles an hour, a three-car caravan filled with friends, family and the dog followed him from below.
Couch said he could hear cattle and children and even passed through clouds.
In response, Alaska Robotics made a funny short film with an interesting proposal to let the citizens control the government.
Alaskan citizens are asked to fork over $15 a year apiece. This money would be used to increase the salaries of a supermajority of legislators to about $250,000 a year, which is how much a corrupt special interest group has to fork over to rent a legislator for a year. LinkThe base salary for an Alaskan legislator is around $24,000 a year. Per diem, expense accounts, and other forms of income bring the average pay to about $75,000. This apparently isn't enough to get by since law makers have to rely on consulting jobs and outright bribes to make it through the year.
Our proposal? Buy back the legislature and put them to work for the citizens of Alaska.
...Alex Hell, 45, said he would rather send 5-year-old Max elsewhere because the school balked at taking the boy because of his family name. Hell said he had Austrian heritage and that the name means "bright."Link (via Fortean Times)
Hell, a Roman Catholic father of three, said he and his wife initially offered to enroll Max using his mother's maiden name, Wembridge, but later changed their minds.
"It just didn't sit right," Hell told The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Link (via Wonderland)As you can see, the bottom layer is my fabulous Xbox 360. On top of that is my PS2 and the next layer is my Xbox. If you look closely enough, you can see the DVD remote sensor in a controller port. Such attention to detail! Topping the entire masterpiece (as it should) is the limited edition 'Legend of Zelda' gold GameCube. The back of the cake received just as much love as the front, as you can even see the handle on the GameCube. Cutting that cake with my husband was seriously the hardest thing I've had to do in our marriage. Luckily, I've held onto the icing controllers and the golden GameCube is still in my freezer in wait of our 1 year anniversary. Traditions be damned. There's no way I'm eating that.
LinkWe have always loved one another, we're human, it's something we're good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can plan a birthday party. Add coordinating tools and you can write an operating system.
In the past, we would do little things for love, but big things required money. Now we can do big things for love.
Thank you.
I think the popularity of steampunk also expresses our collective yearning for an era when information technology was in its infancy and could have gone anywhere. In 1880 we hadn't yet laid the cables for a telephone network, and computer programming was just an idea in Ada Lovelace's head. Nineteenth-century technology was often operated by factory laborers, and it meant backbreaking work and the ruination of healthy bodies. Information technology, to the 19th-century mind, would be something that set us free from brutal assembly lines.LinkOne hundred years later, I wish it were so. Information technology has its own brutal assembly lines, mind-numbing data work that cripples our fingers with repetitive strain injuries and mangles our backs with the hunched postures required to work at a computer all day long. Seen from this perspective, steampunk is an aesthetic that tells the truth about us. We are no better off than our Victorian ancestors, bumbling into the future with crude technologies whose implications we barely understand. But let's make our devices pretty, at least. Let's remember the days when the machines that now cage us promised liberation.
See also: What steampunk means
Previously on Boing Boing: A metric assload of steampunk links
Steve sez, "Everyone thinks the printing press led to increased literacy among the average man in the middle ages, but that just might not be the case. Dr Marco Mostert a historian from Utrecht University is instead suggesting that the availability of cheap paper was the main reason more reading material became available. While this isn't surprising, the source of the new cheap paper is. It seems that, according to Dr. Mostert,'These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased - which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making.'"
Link
(Thanks, Steve!)
Even I did not expect such an overwhelming response to yesterday's silly post about some traffic stop things in Oregon that resemble a part of the anatomy specific to males. Dozens of BB readers wrote in with pointers to buildings and large public objects of similar snicker value in other locations, and I've updated the post like 50 times.
Link, I'll keep updating that entry until I'm sick of the meme.
Here's one of them, from BB reader Ben, Las Vegas snapshot above:
I'd like to add to the concrete cock craze. The attached photographed phallus was waiting for us outside a casino in Vegas @ 8am after 13 hours of gambling and drinking. What a site to behold.
BB pal Todd Lappin, proprietor of faux-firm Telstar Logistics, reminds us that today is the 40th anniversary of Telstar I, America's first active telecommunications satellite. Telstar I is still orbiting the Earth even though it permanently broke down seven months after launch. Lappin has deemed today a corporate holiday at Telstar Logistics, but he still took time to post a brief history of his company's namesake on the Telstar blog.I was debating whether you guys were burned out on stories about the ridiculous no-liquids rules for boarding planes, but when I saw today's "HOWTO smuggle liquids onto an airplane" post I thought this story might still be of interest. Federal inspectors were able to slip a fake bomb through a checkpoint at Albany International Airport in New York - but their water bottle was taken away!Link
John Brownlee says,
In 1935, the San Diego City Council threw an Exposition to help boost the local Depression-era economy. Amongst the hundreds of exhibits that were shown at the Expo were Alpha the Robot and Zorine, Queen of the Nudists. At some point during the Expo, Alpha the Robot wandered into the nudist colony in Balboa Park and spent the day frolicking with Zorine and her constabulary of hot, topless, buxom girls. Of the shots that captured Alpha's lustful adventure, one in particular -- in which he wraps his servo-controlled arms around the voluptuous waists of eight bronzed nudists -- is perhaps the most memorable photograph of the great Depression.Link to a post by John at ectomo.com with much more.
I'll be reading and signing on July 18 -- hope to see you there!
Time: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 7:00 PMLink, Link to events-page for Mysterious Galaxy
Title of Event: Clarion instructor Cory Doctorow visits!Mysterious Galaxy Books
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd.
Suite #302
San Diego, CA 92111
Tel: 858.268.4747
Ten years after the publication of his Dogland is one of my all-time favorite books, a piece of gentle American magic realism about Chris Nix, whose obsessive, authoritarian (but lovable) father moves his family to Florida in the fifties to open a dog amusement park, showcasing 200 breeds of dog. The Nixes end up ensnared in local southern race politics, and in Florida's mystical Spanish past, and the resulting story is such a surprising, seamless blend of the historical and the fantastic that it is like a series of small, satisfying surprises, leading up to a wonderful, giant surprise.
Gospel of the Knife is set a decade later, and Chris is a long-hair teenager in the southland, dreaming of San Francisco, harassed by the local rednecks, and locked in a death-struggle with his father over individual rights and parental authority. Gospel gets weird fast, and matter-of-factly. Magical stuff just starts to happen, and in the best tradition of contemporary fantasy, Shetterly doesn't let his characters dwell too much on the magic, just has it stir and shake their lives in ways that are absolutely engrossing.
This is a neat trick, and it's one that Shetterly is very good at. I loved practically everything about this book -- with the exception of the ending, which wasn't really to my taste. Still, in a book with as much going for it as this one does, it's easy to overlook a few subjective flaws.
Link
Update: Will Shetterly corrects me: "While I'm delighted that you think Dogland won the World Fantasy Award, it wasn't even on the final ballot. Except in the universe you read it in, relaxing in a Zeppelin somewhere over Free North America on your way to consult with President Lessig about turning the recently liberated Disney cities into true centers of shared culture."
Link (Thanks, Tom!)It covers the cyclist's nose and mouth with a shield behind which the filtered air circulates.
Used air is expelled via a plastic tube when the cyclist exhales.
The helmet, called Breathe Air, was created by 22-year-old Brunel University industrial design and technology student Luke Pannell.
All you need to do is surrender the bottle at the screening station, wait for the the TSA to throw it away in an unguarded trash-barrel on the "secure" side, and then retrieve it from the trash.
Hargrave is the same character who smuggled a quarter-ton of electronics into the Super Bowl and cleared TSA security with a live vibrator in his pants.
The reason this "smuggling" technique works, of course, is that liquids aren't dangerous. Everyone knows this -- even the TSA. That's why they don't guard the barrel after they confiscate your wine, water, and salad-dressing. The point of taking away your liquid isn't to make airplanes safe, it's to simultaneously make you afraid (of terrorists with magic water-bombs) and then make you feel safe (because the government is fighting off the magic water-bombs). It's what Bruce Schneier calls "security theater."
Link (via Schneier)I took my time packing up my things, watching her wrap the bottle loosely in the paper and drop it into the trash barrel.
I looked around casually. There weren't very many TSA agents servicing the area, and they were joking around, screening oncoming passengers, watching the X-ray monitor. Everyone's attention was focused elsewhere. No one was watching me.
I moseyed over to the walkway and glanced in the barrel. It was filled with half-empty coffee cups and discarded water bottles. There, on top of the trash, wrapped in its protective paper, was my salad dressing...
Calmly, I reached down into that unstable barrel of atomic liquid and grabbed my salad dressing. Then I calmly boarded the moving walkway, and stuffed the salad dressing down my pants. The TSA lets you keep things there, apparently.
Update: Many readers have written with remarks to this effect: "I wanted to let you know that there's an even easier way to smuggle liquids through airport security - put the item in your pocket. As long as the liquid isn't in a metal container it won't set off the metal detector and you have to really screw up to get patted down/searched. I fly frequently and usually take a bottle of water with me in my cargo pants. I've never had a problem with the TSA nazis."
Update 2: Thor sez, "Just a quick comment that my friend tried this liquid smuggling method a few months ago, on a flight out of Puerto Rico, and was summarily taken into a small room, given all sorts of strange gestapo-like treatments for 3 or 4 hours (they would bark at him in Spanish, switch the lights off and leave him in the dark, etc.), and finally allowed to leave after giving them all his information. 6 weeks later he received an official notification that he was being fined almost $10,000 by TSA. He's still sorting it out with his lawyer, and his research into it seemed to imply that TSA is all about fines these days to fund its increasingly expensive and time-consuming exploits. So try this smuggling technique at your own risk."
I love this stuff. There's such elegance in using simulated hives to let computers evolve surprising, counter-intuitive and highly effective solutions to our problems. I took a stab at exploring the social consequences of this in my story Human Readable, where simulated ant-colonies are used to allocate all of humanity's resources.
I just finished reading a killer novel that goes way farther down this road. Chris Moriarty's Spin Control concerns itself with the clash of civilizations between hive-like, genetically engineered, ant-obsessed clones and the remaining baseline humans, after the Earth has been razed by climate change. Moriarty included an impressive and exhaustive bibliography at the end of the book that had me drooling and wishing for another eight hours in the day, just so I could read half the books on it. (Moriarty also has a good collection of links on the subject).
"When a forager has contact with a patroller, it's a stimulus for the forager to go out," Gordon says. "But the forager needs several contacts no more than ten seconds apart before it will go out."Link (Thanks, Marylin!)To see how this works, Gordon and her collaborator Michael Greene of the University of Colorado at Denver captured patroller ants as they left a nest one morning. After waiting half an hour, they simulated the ants' return by dropping glass beads into the nest entrance at regular intervals—some coated with patroller scent, some with maintenance worker scent, some with no scent. Only the beads coated with patroller scent stimulated foragers to leave the nest. Their conclusion: Foragers use the rate of their encounters with patrollers to tell if it's safe to go out. (If you bump into patrollers at the right rate, it's time to go foraging. If not, better wait. It might be too windy, or there might be a hungry lizard waiting out there.) Once the ants start foraging and bringing back food, other ants join the effort, depending on the rate at which they encounter returning foragers.
"A forager won't come back until it finds something," Gordon says. "The less food there is, the longer it takes the forager to find it and get back. The more food there is, the faster it comes back. So nobody's deciding whether it's a good day to forage. The collective is, but no particular ant is."
Apple Inc. plans to launch a cheaper version of the iPhone in the fourth quarter that could be based on the ultra-slim iPod Nano music player, according to a JP Morgan report.LinkKevin Chang, a JP Morgan analyst based in Taiwan, cited people in the supply channel he did not name and an application with the U.S Patent and Trademark office for his report dated July 8.
Apple filed a patent application document dated July 5 that refers to a multifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad control, similar to the Nano's scroll wheel.
Mileage Running isn't good for the planet, but it makes a certain perverse sense as a response to the airlines' incomprehensible pricing schemes, capricious upgrades policy, and emphasis on mileage. It's probably not a coincidence that Southwest Airlines, who pioneered simple, transparent pricing schemes, is more profitable than all the other US airlines put together.
In my last job, I flew to 31 countries in three years, fighting copyright treaties and DRM standards, and made top-tier on three different airlines. I didn't get much sport out of it, but I can now locate a working electrical outlet in the meanest airport.
Link
"I personally find airlines and airplanes to be really neat," explains Joshua Solomin, a 28-year-old mileage runner who works as a software manager in San Francisco. Solomin began running in 2006 after a year of business travel vaulted him into the Premier tier of United's Mileage Plus program, giving him his first taste of the first-class upgrades and other coveted perks that come with elite-level frequent flyer membership. "Mileage runs are a way to maintain that status," he says.Of Solomin's five runs to date, one of the more impressive was a trip from San Francisco to Tampa via Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington, then back with connections in D.C., Seattle and Portland. Thanks to his Premier status, he earned double miles for the trip, more 16,000 of them, for just $232.
On Sunday, he completed his first international run: a $1,450 round trip between San Francisco and Singapore with stops in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Sure, he had only five hours in the middle of the night to explore Singapore, but with United's July triple mileage bonus he earned a whopping 78,000 miles. And he flew business class the entire way.
Link (via Beyond the Beyond)
It recently occurred to me that someone had to actually design those logos. But how did they decide who gets to do it? Did the job go to whichever terrorist had a copy of Adobe Illustrator?I did some research and rounded up as many logos as I could find from terrorist groups past and present. While I hate to give terrorists any more attention, I still think it’s interesting to see the various approaches they took in their logos, and wonder what considerations went into designing them. Does the logo successfully convey the organization’s message? Is it confusingly similar to another group’s logo? Does it exhibit excessive drop shadows, gradients, or use of whatever font is the Arabic equivalent of Papyrus?
Link (via Gizmodo)Without the use of external power or batteries, the Phonofone inventively exploits the virtues of horn acoustics to boost the audio output of standard earphones to up to 55 decibels* (or roughly the maximum volume of laptop speakers)
Upon connecting active earphones to the Phonofone their trebly buzzing is instantly and profoundly transformed into a warm, rich and resonant sound.
Sixty to a hundred kilograms is all it takes to store an entire 21st Century of human experience.LinkAnd some time after our demise, this information will be available to historians.
And what a mass of information it will be. For the first time ever, they'll be able to know who was where, when, and what they said; just what words were exchanged in smoky beer halls 30 years before the revolutions that haven't happened yet: who it was who claimed to be there when they founded the Party (but didn't join until years later): and where the bodies are buried.
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TorrentFreak have announced the winners of their Anti-DRM t-shirt design contest. I love all three, but my favorite is this one, which took third place. All are for sale, at cost.
Slinkachu makes itty-bitty handpainted people and photographs them in the streets of London. This guy is clinging to a drain grating.
