Avi sez, "'Is there an Artificial God?' is an illuminating 1998 speech by Douglas Adams. Good to listen to him speak."

This was fascinating. Adams was a brilliant and funny speaker as well as a fantastic writer -- in fact, he was arguably a better lecturer than novelist. The sound quality is terrible, but it hardly matters. He's just GREAT.

So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it's worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it's worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move further and further into the field of digital or artificial life we will find more and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn't an actual god there is an artificial god and we should probably bear that in mind. That is my debating point and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!

Link to transcript, Link to MP3 (Thanks, Avi!)

Seeing Yellow wants you to call your printer's manufacturer and ask them to stop spying on you.

We've known that our printers are spying on us, ever since the Electronic Frontier Foundation cracked the secret codes in the output of color laser printers. These hidden codes -- apparently placed at the behest of the Secret Service -- identify the serial number, make and model of the printer that printed them, as well as a date and timestamp.

What we didn't know is that if you ask the manufacturer of your printer to stop spying on you, they respond by ratting you out to the Secret Service as a dangerous subversive, and a few days later, the SS will show up and ask you why you care about your privacy.

Seeing Yellow -- a project from the MIT Media Lab -- wants to put a stop to this by overwhelming the manufacturers with complaints from their customers, so many that they can't turn us all into the SS.

When you print on a color laser printer, it's likely that you are also printing a pattern of invisible yellow dots. These marks exist to allow the printer companies and governments to track and identify you -- presumably as a way to combat money counterfeiting. When one person asked his printer manufacturer about turning off the tracking dots, Secret Service agents showed up at his door several days later.

Upset? You should be!

Let's stand up to silent tracking and government bullying and send a strong message to printer manufacturers. Our privacy and our control over our own technology is far too important to give up over trumped up fears of photocopied money.

Link

See also:
EFF cracks hidden snitch codes in color laser prints
Do forensic printer marks slow down printers?
Is Your Printer Spying On You?

Andy says:

I did this originally for video for the San Jose Merc's Inside Silicon Valley podcast -- but due to tech. difficulties it's just audio.

Still, worthwhile to hear about the premise behind the follow up to The Long Tail.

This link is to my blog w/ the audio and a link to my notes on his keynote at TOC:

Link

Eddie says:

British troops in Iraq are accused of releasing "man-eating badgers" in Basra, according to a BBC news report.

The creatures, apparently some 39 inches (100 cm) in length, are the size of dogs and have monkey-like heads.

The BBC news story quotes a local woman, Suad Hussain, who claims to have been attacked by one of these creatures: "My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer"

Known locally as Al-Girta (also known as Honey Badgers) the director of Basra's veterinary hospital, Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, refutes the claims, stating: "Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific."

Link

Everybody's favorite techno-babble spouter, Sen. Ted "a series of tubes" Stevens, confounded just about everyone at the Senate Commerce Committee Hearing On Number Portability.

Stevens: "Let me be just the Devil's Advocate here. Could I just decide I want to keep my wireline and I want to add wireless to it? Can I have two providers on the same number?"

Awkward pause: "Um, I don't think that technology exists right now."

Stevens: "If I had an IP phone, by definition, I'd have to leave the wire... wireline phone to use it?"

Answer: "I think that is the case with the technology today."

Stevens: "Is it coming? Why shouldn't I be able to say, just by a little switch on my phone at home that's wired, I'm going off on the wireless now, I want to use this as I ride my motorcycle."

Link

Ghanaian Kojo Nana Obiri-Yeboah, a preacher in Uganda, is under investigation for intending to scam his congregation into believing he has magic powers by shocking them with a commercially-available magic trick called the "Electric Touch." The pastor denies the, er, charge, claiming that he ordered the trick as a birthday gift for his daughter. From the BBC News:

There has been a massive growth in churches set up by charismatic preachers in Africa in recent years, amid fears some could be fraudsters.

The pastor told the BBC that during his prayers, members of the congregation "act as the spirit comes in them".

The website of the company Yigal Mesika, which makes the "Electric Touch" machine, among other magic tricks, says: "Charge a spoon, keys or coins and watch as it shocks a volunteer!

"They will believe you have supernatural powers!"

Link (via Fortean Times)

If you're in Beijing and eat steamed buns that taste like cardboard, they just may be cardboard. According to an undercover investigation aired on China Central Television, one particular supplier was filling his buns with 60 percent cardboard until cops shut down his operation. From the Associated Press:

Squares of cardboard picked from the ground are first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda -- a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap -- then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning are stirred in.

Link (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty wants us to be terrified of the impending wave of cyborg criminal gangs.

Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.

Mr Keelty said it was hard to estimate how much money the AFP would need to combat technology-based crime.

But he identified the use of robotics and cloning as future challenges.

"Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings - not necessarily in Australia but in those countries that are going to allow it - you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot," he said.

Link (Thanks, Andrew!) (Via Schneier on Security)

Reader comment:

Coop says:

"Now, more than ever, it is important to be protected when the metal ones decide to come for you
... and they will!

Andy says:

"I have successfully located the source of these dangerous cyborg clone criminals, and I think it comes as no surprise that this menace originates from a cyborg cat. "(Image credited to google image "robot + cat" search which picked it from somebody's myspace and then converted to LOL cat with this.)"

DougO says: "Are these sand grains violating the second law of thermodynamics? Certainly not, but the explanation is nonetheless interesting, including reference to "a 'beard' of positively charged grains [that] had formed immediately under the lip of the platform..." Explained in Physics News Update #832.

An experiment at Rutgers shows how two populations of sand grains mixed together and held in a hopper will, when shaken out into a beaker, spontaneously segregate themselves, all because of static electrical interactions. This phenomenon, the opposite of mixing, might have practical uses in the powder industry.

In the recent report, the two types of sand grains (“art sand”), one colored blue and the other red, are mechanically alike but acquire slightly different charg. Through a process not well understood, the grains lose some electrons owing to their jostling motion (“tribocharging”) in the hopper, and become positively charged.

Link

The computer virus turns 25 this year! I'm guessing that "virus" doesn't include "worm," though.

The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. "I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays," Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. "I'd give out a new game, they'd get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen."

When his friends realized his tricky ways, they banned Skrenta from their machines. And that's when he had an epiphany: He could put his code on the school's computer, and rig it to copy itself onto floppy disks that students used on the system. Thus was born Elk Cloner, the world's first computer virus to spread in the wild. The virus didn't do much damage; it infected the Apple II's OS and copied itself to other floppies, and every so often would display a tittering message on the screen:

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

Link (Thanks, Farhad!)

Alan says: "This is absolutely maddening. I just moved back to Canada from the US, and picked up a new cell from Rogers Wireless. I make my own ringtone files and as I was setting them up on my new Samsung phone, I got an error telling me that non-DRM files cannot be used as ringtones.

"Some internet investigation reveals this is indeed Rogers' corporate policy, and has been for about a year now."

That is, until I decided I wanted to change my ring tone. I did not want to have a pop song as my ring tone. I did not want music at all. I just wanted to have (what some people would consider) an annoying sound clip of several Formula One cars screeching past an observer on a straightaway. I’m a big F1 fan. And I figure that ring tone will cut through any sort of background noise I’ll encounter. So I uploaded the .mp3 file to my phone via Bluetooth, and tried to set it as a ring tone. But my phone wouldn’t let me. I started to try to diagnose the problem. Does it expect a CBR .mp3 file instead of a VBR one? No. Maybe it expects a file with a lower sample rate? No. Oh I know what it is, the file is in stereo. It probably expects a mono-encoded file. Hmm, not even that helps. The phone lets me see file details for all the ring tones. One of the metadata attributes is “Copyright”. All the ring tones had a value of “Protected” for this attribute. My ring tone said “None”. No way, I thought; don’t tell me they aren’t letting me use non-DRM .mp3 files for ring tones.

But sure enough, after some Internet research, I found that this was precisely the case. In mid-August, Rogers mandated that all their cell phones prevent users from utilizing non-DRM .mp3 files as ring tones. It was supposedly at the request of the music industry. But I’m sure the fact that Rogers charges $2.99 for a DRM ring tone had something to do with it.

Link

Reader comment:

Toby says:

The post on boingboing mentions his "new Samsung" but he quite clearly states in his blog it's a Nokia.

Robbo says:

I blogged about your post on Rogers DRM ringtones and received a comment suggesting that a workaround was to convert the MP3 to WMA and that would not require any copyright protection to be present. I don't know if that's a fact or if the reader misunderstood the issue (ie. DRM as opposed to MP3 vs. WMA) but I'm curious to find out if that's true or not.

Take care and thanks for BoingBoing.

René says

I'm also a Rogers Wireless user, using a Sony Ericsson w810i, and I had the same problem. After a bit of hunting online, I discovered that sony itself has a free utility to convert audio files into the appropriate format. I have no idea if the other phone manufacturers are using the same format... However, with Rogers selling ringtones, it seems likely. It's simpler than making the phone support a dozen differant DRM formats just for ringtones.

DRM Packager can be found here.

Congressional investigators created a bogus company, and then used that stealth biz front to purchase radioactive materials that could have been used to make a so-called dirty bomb. Spokespersons from mydirtybombfixins.com did not return calls by press time. Snip from NYT piece by Eric Lipton:

The investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, demonstrated once again that the security measures put in place since the 2001 terrorist attacks to prevent radioactive materials from getting into the wrong hands are insufficient, according to a G.A.O. report, which is scheduled to be released at a Senate hearing Thursday.

“Given that terrorists have expressed an interest in obtaining nuclear material, the Congress and the American people expect licensing programs for these materials to be secure,” said Gregory D. Kutz, an investigator at the accountability office, in testimony prepared for the hearing.

The bomb the investigators could have built would not have caused widespread damage or even high- level contamination. But it still could have had serious consequences, particularly economic ones, in any city where it was set off.

Link

SaveNetRadio says:

Time and options are running out for Internet Radio. Late this afternoon, the court DENIED the emergency stay sought on behalf of webcasters, millions of listeners and the artists and music they support.

UNLESS CONGRESS ACTS BY JULY 15th, the new ruinous royalty rates will be going into effect on Sunday, threatening the future of all internet radio.

We are appealing to the millions of Internet radio listeners out there, the webcasters they support and the artists and labels we treasure to rise up and make your voices heard again before this vibrant medium is silenced. Even if you have already called, we need you to call again. The situation is grave, but that makes the message all the simpler and more serious.

PLEASE CALL YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES RIGHT AWAY and urge them to support the Internet Equality Act. Go to (Link) to find the phone numbers of your Senators and Representative.

If they've already co-sponsored, thank them and tell them to fight to bring the bill to the floor for an immediate vote. If the line is busy, please call back. Call until you know your voice has been heard. Your voices are what have gotten us this far - Congress has listened. Now, they are our only hope. We are outmatched by lobbying power and money but we are NOT outmatched by facts and passion and the power of our voices.

The CEO of Whole Foods spent a ton of time on Yahoo messageboards bashing the value of Wild Oats stock -- just before bidding to take over Wild Oats, according to a document made public earlier this week by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is trying to block the takeover in a lawsuit, on antitrust grounds.

In January 2005, someone using the name "Rahodeb" went online to a Yahoo stock-market forum and posted this opinion: No company would want to buy Wild Oats Markets Inc., a natural-foods grocer, at its price then of about $8 a share.

"Would Whole Foods buy OATS?" Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats' stock symbol. "Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small." Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management "clearly doesn't know what it is doing. . . . OATS has no value and no future."

The comments were typical of banter on Internet message boards for stocks, but the writer's identity was anything but. Rahodeb was an online pseudonym of John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. Earlier this year, his company agreed to buy Wild Oats for $565 million, or $18.50 a share.

For about eight years until last August, the company confirms, Mr. Mackey posted numerous messages on Yahoo Finance stock forums as Rahodeb. It's an anagram of Deborah, Mr. Mackey's wife's name. Rahodeb cheered Whole Foods' financial results, trumpeted his gains on the stock and bashed Wild Oats. Rahodeb even defended Mr. Mackey's haircut when another user poked fun at a photo in the annual report. "I like Mackey's haircut," Rahodeb said. "I think he looks cute!"

Link

Brian Doherty, author of This is Burning Man, has an essay up on Reason about reactions to some of the changes taking place at this year's Burning Man (bottom line: the theme is "green," and related companies will be exhibiting products there):

People suspicious of markets and marketing bristle at the word “demographics,” but it can mean something as innocent as “people who are into the same things.”

Emotionally, I don't understand why so many people get so upset at being marketed to, or at gleefully acknowledging the good that comes from crafting a social world that is dominated by people willingly exchanging skills, services, and goods. These types could be called Generation Dobler, after the famous quote from the sad sensitive man-child character, Lloyd Dobler, played by John Cusack in the 1989 film Say Anything.

Dobler certified his soulfulness by announcing that “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.”

Which is lovely in its way, I guess, but the reason many people can indeed survive doing none of those things is because of the unprecedented wealth created by those who do. Most moderns, at least when pressed, recognize that commerce makes our lives richer in certain ways. What the Burning Man devotee wants is an opportunity to create temporary zones without it, for the entertainment value and for the (very real) additional (temporary) richness of social reality it creates.

But Burning Man is rife with the products of corporations, and always has been. And has always had to be. The prepared food items and bottled water we live on out there; the portajohns our wastes go in after eating that food and drinking that water; the tents we sleep in, the pipe and metal domes we lounge under, the clothes we wear, either exotic or normal—all sold to us not for fellow-feeling but by monied interests, usually corporate, who just want our cash. For Burning Man to be truly free of the products of corporate commerce, it would be a zone we could survive in for at most a few hours, and grimly at that.

Link to Brian's article.

Image: shot by Xeni Jardin, at Burning Man 2003.

Reader comment: Mike Estee says,

In the article you posted discussing Brian Doherty's thoughts on the left's hostility to market capitalism at Burningman there is a reference to John Mackey, one of the co-founders of FLOW (and CEO of Whole Foods), who's mission is to:

"articulate and animate an inspiring vision of a world with sustainable peace, prosperity, and happiness for all, catalyzed and sustained by entrepreneurial initiative and conscious capitalism."

The very next post (not a coincidence I'm sure) on boingboing is "Whole Foods CEO caught bashing Wild Oats stock on Yahoo forums". I can't help but wonder if this is some of the "entrepreneurial initiative and conscious capitalism" which FLOW speaks so highly of. The two articles together are mostly just amusing, but they did get me thinking about something else:

Corporations are made of people, and tend to act like people, but there is a big difference which I feel is at the heart of the left's mistrust of them. Corporations, and by extension their leaders, have more power to enact change than a person does. That balance of power is where the mistrust lies.

As such, I think it's important to ask what kind of person a corporation will be, and weather or not they're someone you'd want to be friends with. Something we naturally do when we meet a person, but something I think few people spend time thinking about when they buy something. If we can find and build good corporations to be friends with, we can enact a great deal of social change around us. In that respect, I agree with the premise of Brian's article. I think the free market is the best place to change the world for the better, and I'm glad someone is preaching it as a tool for doing so.

Elfriede Jelinek, a German/Austrian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, is putting her new novel online for free as she writes it, without DRM or restrictions. Jelinek is agoraphobic and suffers from social phobia, and rarely ventures out of her home (she accepted the Nobel via a recorded video), but she finds it easy to socialize on the Internet.

"I find the Internet to be the most wonderful thing there is," Jelinek said in an e-mail interview with The Associated Press. "It connects people. Everyone can have input."

Jelinek, 60, has been posting chapters of the new book, "Neid" (German for "Envy"), as she writes them. The first two chapters of the work she describes as a "mixture of blog and prose" are already available on her site, www.elfriedejelinek.com, and there are more to come.

"It's a wonderfully democratic method, publishing a text on the Internet," Jelinek told the AP.

Link, Link to Elfriede Jelinek on Wikipedia, Link to Elfriede Jelinek's website (Thanks, Cole!)

Sony BMG is suing the DRM company that sold it spyware-based DRM for its music CDs. Amergence (formerly SunnComm) made a piece of spyware called MediaMax that infected your computer even if you declined its license "agreement." The program spied on your music listening habits, installed itself in a way calculated to make it hard to uninstall, and phoned home with information about your computer. An uninstaller the company eventually released didn't really uninstall the software, but did create security vulnerabilities on your PC.

It's just proof that no good deed goes unpunished: people who downloaded Sony's music from P2P networks without paying for it didn't get deliberately infected, while people who were honest and tried to do the right thing by buying CDs got nailed.

Sony BMG filed a summons in a New York state court against The Amergence Group Inc., formerly SunnComm International, which developed the MediaMax CD copy-protection technology.

Sony BMG is seeking to recover some $12 million in damages from the Phoenix-based technology company, according to court papers filed July 3.

The music company accuses Amergence of negligence, unfair business practices and breaching the terms of its license agreement by delivering software that "did not perform as warranted."

Link (via The Inquirer)

The BBC Trust has agreed to meet with open source advocates to discuss the BBC's proprietary, Microsoft-only iPlayer, a DRM-based video player that restricts how British people use the TV they're required by law to pay for. The iPlayer lets Microsoft Windows users in Britain download the BBC's programming for seven days. It enforces the viewing limitation by installing spyware-like code on your system that allows it to lock you out of the video files that the BBC has put on your hard-drive.

This approach is incompatible with free/open source software like the GNU/Linux operating system. This software is intended to be modified by anyone who wants to improve it, and is made as easy-to-tweak as possible. DRM hopes to prevent this kind of thing, because if you can modify DRM, you can change it to turn off the anti-copying stuff. So the BBC is locking Brits into using nothing but propriety software for their video needs -- and they're spending years and millions of pounds to do it, which means that the BBC will be just as locked in as its viewers.

The Trust is supposed to stop the BBC from doing this kind of thing, and it's finally starting to take its job seriously. It's about time.

The development came less than 48 hours after a meeting between the Open Source Consortium and regulators at Ofcom on Tuesday. Officials agreed to press the Trust, the BBC's governing body, to meet the OSC. The consortium received an invitation on Wednesday afternoon.

Link

See also:
Open Source Consortium to regulators: Stop the BBC's DRM!
BBC techies talk DRM
BBC recruits Microsoft DRM exec
BBC Trustees agree to let BBC infect Britain with DRM

My latest InformationWeek column just went live. It's called "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law" and it a rarely seen look at the sausage factory that is DRM standards negotiation. This stuff all happens behind closed doors, and it's ugly as sin. When you've watched them bury bodies in meeting after meeting, it's pretty fun to exhume a couple and rattle their bones.

Intel's presence on the committee was both reassurance and threat: reassurance because Intel signaled the fundamental reasonableness of the MPAA's requirements -- why would a company with a bigger turnover than the whole movie industry show up if the negotiations weren't worth having? Threat because Intel was poised to gain an advantage that might be denied to its competitors.

We settled in for a long negotiation. The discussions were drawn out and heated. At regular intervals, the MPAA reps told us that we were wasting time -- if we didn't hurry things along, the world would move on and consumers would grow accustomed to un-crippled digital TVs. Moreover, Rep Billy Tauzin, the lawmaker who'd evidently promised to enact the Broadcast Flag into law, was growing impatient.

You'd think that a "technology working group" would concern itself with technology, but there was precious little discussion of bits and bytes, ciphers and keys. Instead, we focused on what amounted to contractual terms: if your technology got approved as a DTV "output," what obligations would you have to assume? If a TiVo could serve as an "output" for a receiver, what outputs would the TiVo be allowed to have?

Link

A couple of years ago, I pointed to some beautiful QTVR panoramas of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, shot by photographer Peter McCready (Link to archived BB post). CERN is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, and it is also the birthplace of the world wide web.

Today, Peter writes in to share some new and equally lovely panoramas (with sound!):

CERN recently invited me back to shoot the Compact Muon Spectrometer experiment (CMS): Link 1, Link 2.

And here's A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) at CERN: Link 1 Link 2 (the latter featuring the unprecedented privilege of actually getting deep inside the detector itself!).

And here's a little more of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): Link.

Reader comment: Cary says,

Please forgive me if this has been pointed out a million times, but is it purely coincidence that hadron is a letter flip from hardon? 'Large Hardon Collider' is a great gay porn title. Thanks for the laugh.

Mike says,

This weeks NOVA ScienceNOW episode had a segment on CERN and the LHC. The segment is available (like everything else on NOVA ScienceNOW) on pbs.org: Link.

Ted sez, "The CBC has put episodes of the current Doctor Who series online streamed in flash. It's a pretty major step as it means not Windows Media, and the only restrictions are geofencing. Eps go online the day after broadcast, and will be there for a 4-week period to let people catch up on the series. Too bad it wasn't 13 weeks to cover the whole series, but it's still a giant leap forward."

Also too bad that:

* It's streaming, not download: the CBC doesn't stop you recording the TV shows they transmit, but they stop you recording the shows they webcast. Why should one be different from the other?

* I can't see it, because I'm using an IP address outside of Canada. The CBC broadcasts all its programming to all antennas, north and south of the US border.

It's a bummer to consider a future in which broadcasts -- which we can all see and record -- are replaced with geo-locked, streaming crippleware netcasts. Hard to understand how that serves the public interest, something that the CBC, a tax-supported institution, is required to do.

I spoke with a friend at the CBC, and he was very sympathetic to my concerns. The BBC -- producers of Dr Who -- insisted on the region-locking and streaming only, as well as the four-week window (significantly, this is a much better deal than the BBC gives to Britons, who are required by law to pay a hefty annual fee to support the BBC -- they only get seven days to see old episodes, and have to use a DRM-crippled product called iPlayer that only runs on Windows).

The bottom line seems to be that the CBC can't afford to buy the right to just put downloads of Dr Who online from the BBC, even if the BBC could be convinced to sell them.

But at the end of the day, both the CBC and the BBC are public service organizations, charged with making material of public value. They are supported through tax (the CBC) and license fees (the BBC), and it's tawdry for them to devote all this energy to locking away their media from one another. The BBC turns over a paltry five percent of its annual budget through licensing deals like this one -- imagine how much benefit the Beeb could get by saying to the CBC, "Give us all your programs and you can have all of ours." Is that enormous vault of programming worth more than the shows that a fraction of five percent of the BBC's budget can produce?

This is how Internet exchanges work -- ISPs don't generally charge each other for the bits they exchange: Earthlink doesn't charge Sprint for the bits it sends to Earthlink customers, and Sprint doesn't charge Earthlink for the bits its users send to Earthlink customers. They're "peers," so they just send bits back and forth freely.

Virtually every country in the world has a state-funded public service broadcaster, all of them charged with the same mission: promote the public interest through programs with public value. They're all on the same side -- why isn't their media? It's time for public service broadcasters to peer with one another -- to create an interlibrary loan system for public media.

All that said: top marks to the first person to demonstrate a working, reliable solution for watching and recording the CBC Dr Who episodes from anywhere in the world. Link (Thanks, Ted!)

Pushindaisies -- "a mortuary novelty shop" -- has a great selection of macabre gifts, from coffin-shaped golf putters to tombstone-rubbing wax to skull-shaped cupcake moulds. Link (via Popgadget)

MIT researchers are designing a "Digital Water Pavillion" for next year's Expo Zaragoza in Spain. The walls of the structure are sheets of water sprayed from suspended pipes. Software-controlled valves enable the valves to be opened and closed with high accuracy to create gaps at very specific locations, forming something like liquid pixels. According to a press release, the liquid surfaces can then become "a one-bit-deep digital display that continuously scrolls downward." From the MIT News Office:

"To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water," explains Carlo Ratti, head of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory...

The facade of the water pavilion will be like a very large display, with text, letters, and interactive patterns. "You could throw a ball at the wall, and then see an open circle drop down to meet it precisely where and when its trajectory intersected the water surface. And, with suitable programming, touching the water surface at any point can propagate patterns horizontally, along the wall, to other locations," Mitchell explains.

Equipped with suitable sensors, Water Walls can detect the approach of people and, "like the Red Sea for Moses, open up to allow passage through at any point," said (William J. Mitchell, head of MIT's Design Laboratory and former Dean of Architecture at MIT). "This provocatively subverts the fundamental architectural conception of an opening as something, like a door, found at a fixed location."

Link to MIT News Link to concept video on YouTube

UPDATE: Previously on BB, Jeep's waterfall display. Link

Between 1965 and 1967, Augustus Owsley Stanley III AKA the "Bear," homebrewed an estimated 1.25 million doses of LSD in the San Francisco Bay Area, fueling a revolution in consciousness, music, art, and the counterculture. The recipe came from a copy of the Journal of Organic Chemistry he found in the UC Berkeley library. The Grateful Dead's first sound engineer, Stanley also pioneered several technologies for live sound. For two decades, Stanley, now 72, has lived off-the-grid in Queensland, Australia. Currently on an extended visit to Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle's Joel Selvin caught up with Bear for a very rare interview. From the article:

Bear, whose grandfather was a Kentucky governor and U.S. senator, grew up in Los Angeles and Arlington, Va. He was thrown out of military school in the eighth grade for being drunk and dropped out of school altogether at 18. He managed to get accepted to the University of Virginia, where he spent a year studying engineering. By 1956, he was in the Air Force, specializing in electronics and radar.

Later, Bear studied ballet, acting and Russian, worked in jet propulsion labs as well as radio and television, and then entered UC Berkeley in 1963, but lasted less than a year.

Then he discovered acid...

Owsley Stanley (he legally dropped the "Augustus" 40 years ago) has also not joined the ranks of the penitent psychedelicists who look on their experiences as youthful indiscretions.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he says. "What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Here's a nice little Wired News story celebrating the 40th anniversary of Jamaica's Trojan Records. Scott Thill, the author, contends that remixing, mashups and other ground-breaking forms of musical expression were all created in Jamaica, flourishing in a perfect combination of liberal copyright rules, broad access to British and US source material, and a culture of music.

"There's never really been any stigma associated with sharing or using the works of others," says British musician, journalist and Trojan producer Laurence Cane-Honeysett. "If anything, to most it's regarded as a compliment."

This sharing-friendly approach was carried further by visionary Jamaican producers like King Tubby and Prince Jammy, who, in the early 1970s, started releasing versions of the day's most popular songs with the vocals removed. Using primitive, sometimes handmade equipment, they would drench the instrumental backing track in reverb and echo, then add sound effects to build a throbbing, psychedelic stew.

It was here the remix was born -- the Jamaicans simply call it "dub."

Link

Rufus Pollock, a PhD candidate in economics at Cambridge University, has just released "Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright," a brilliant new paper on the economically optimal term of copyright. He's presenting it in Berlin this week, but it's already online. Here's the abstract:

The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.

Link (Thanks, Rufus!)

On Tuesday, I blogged Will Shetterly amazing new American magic-realist novel, The Gospel of the Knife -- now, Will has released the whole text of the novel under a Creative Commons license!

That's just for starters: Will has also released the full text of Dogland, the book that comes before "Gospel." This is an incredible, magical novel about a kid whose father opens a dog theme park in Florida in the 1950s, and lands his family in the middle of the segregation fight, the wonderment and despoiling of Florida, and a centuries-old mystery. Dogland is one of my favorite novels of all time, and having it online to email to people will greatly ease my task of ensuring that as many people as possible read this and have their lives changed by it.

It was a dream, then a place, then a memory. My father built it near the Suwannee River. I like to think it was in the heart of Florida, because it was, and is, in my heart. Its name was Dogland.

Some people say you can know others if you know the central incidents that shaped their lives. But an incident is an island in time, and to know the effect of the island on those who land there, you must know something about the river they have traveled.

And I must warn you before we begin, I don't know that river well. I visit that time and place like a ghost with poor vision and little memory. I look up the river and see fog rolling in. I look down the river, and the brightness of the approaching day blinds me. I see shapes moving behind me and beyond me, but who they are and what they do, I cannot say. I will tell what I know is true, and I will invent what I believe is true, and that, I think, is all you can ask any storyteller to do.

Link to text of Gospel of the Knife, Link to Dogland

Wesabe, a service that lets users upload anonymized financial data and se automated comparison tools in order to spend better and save money, has launched its API today. This allows programmers to write even better tools for making use of Wesabe -- and since Wesabe can slurp in data from banks and credit cards all over the world, the API allows you to manipulate financial data from hundreds of banks.

We already provide a set of tools for automatically uploading your bank and credit card data to the Wesabe site. With the release of this API, we’re adding tools to help you automatically download and manipulate that data, too. As a result, we’re not just providing an API for our own site, but also for all the bank and credit card sites that Wesabe supports, as well. Since Wesabe supports banks and credit cards in over 30 countries around the world, we’re effectively providing developers everywhere a way to unlock data from their financial institutions and put that data to work.

Wesabe is a site that exists in order to change the balance of information — and with information, power — between consumers and the businesses we patronize. As I’ve written before, we believe that businesses know way too much about consumers (where we live, how much we make, our roommates, our magazine subscriptions, and so on), and consumers know way too little about businesses...

We want to take the idea of a credit bureau (where businesses report their experiences with consumers so that other businesses can benefit) and turn it on its head — building instead a value bureau, where consumers can share their experiences with businesses, so all consumers can benefit.

Link

See also: Wesabe: community money-saving service

(Disclosure: I'm a proud member of Wesabe's advisory board)