I snapped this photo of three flying saucerlike clouds hovering over the 101 in Tarzana about an hour ago. I believe they are lenticular clouds. Google images has lots of nice examples of lenticular clouds. Link

Over at my Rule the Web blog, my editor David Moldawer and I have been producing a daily 60-second podcast, each of which offers a tip on how to get things done online. Subscribe in iTunes

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

NYC artist David Hochbaum’s solo show opens this Saturday at Corey Helford. It will include over 50 works including photo constructions, works on paper, and giant (20 x 24”) original Polaroids. Only four of these cameras exist in the world and kodak is discontinuing the film.

Link

The Haunted Mansion ride at Walt Disney World has just undergone a major rehab that builds on the superb work done on Disneyland's Mansion last year. Inside the Magic's Ricky Brigante was there for opening day, and he recorded a high-resolution, night-scope-equipped binaural-sound video that starts at "rope-drop" at the entrance to Liberty Square and runs through the entire ride. The other riders are clearly Mansion-obsessed loonies (like myself) and their gasps of pleasure at the new grace-notes and improvements in the Mansion are a real treat. Link

Author and cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff is teaching an online course called "Technologies of Persuasion." A few years ago he wrote an excellent book on the subject called Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say.

I'm teaching a course through a distanced learning site called Maybe Logic Academy - where Robert Anton Wilson used to teach everything from James Joyce to economics theory.

My course, Technologies of Persuasion, is beginning in just two weeks. I haven't promoted it anywhere - I just haven't had time or energy these days to do more than what's right on my plate - so this should be a small and intimate group. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying for NYU.

Plus, we'll get to be a little crazier than people are generally allowed to get in a college seminar room, with some no-holds-barred discussions on how media and technology shape the way we think, and why we seem to remain so pitifully unaware of the biases of the media we use.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Boing Boing interviews Doug Rushkoff about his Testament comic book
• Rushkoff's new book Get Back In The Box
• Douglas Rushkoff fiction in Nerve
• Rushkoff on Guruphiliac
• Interview with Douglas Rushkoff (MP3)
• Rushkoff's Testament issue #1, now free
• Barbara Rushkoff's new parenting blog
• Rushkoff's Thought Virus #4
• Douglas Rushkoff's Thought Virus #3
• Rushkoff on the futility of artificial workplace fun
• Doug Rushkoff's final Thought Virus from his new book
• Rushkoff's Thought Virus #5: The Ben & Jerry's Syndrome

• Oldsters Help Propel Wii to Number 1 Link

• Apple iPhone Early Adopter Store Credit Live Link

• NEW4LR Robot: Teach a New Dog New Tricks Link

• Optimus Maximus Keyboard Teaser Shot Link

• Immobilizer Stun Gun in the Shape of a Phone Link

• A Peek Inside the Minds of Rock Band Link

• Halo "Museum" Commercial Send-Up from Consolevania Link

• Morning Tech Deals Highlights Link

The science fiction blog Futurismic is now running a regular Friday feature devoted to rounding up the best free sf online this week. As more and more people have discovered it and sent them their picks, the list has grown, and this week, it seems to have achieved some kind of watershed moment, with a list of fiction so mind-croogglingly awesome that it makes me wish I could fork another instance devoted to nothing but reading. Here's just the first few, from manybooks.net:

• Beyond the Vanishing Point by Raymond King Cummings
• The Hunters by William Douglas Morrison
• Cubs of the Wolf by Raymond F. Jones.
• The Devil's Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman
• The K-Factor by Harry Harrison
• The Misplaced Battleship by Harry Harrison
• A World is Born by Leigh Brackett
• Space Prison by Tom Godwin
• The Day of the Boomer Dukes by Frederik Pohl
• The Worshippers by Damon Knight
• The Burning Bridge by Poul Anderson
• Spell of Catastrophe by Mayer Alan Brenner
• Warning from the Stars by Ron Cocking
• -And Devious the Line of Duty by Tom Godwin
• Jubilation, U.S.A. by G.L. Vandenburg

Link

The latest iPods have a cryptographic "checksum" in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn't exist -- like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players.

Notice that this has nothing to do with piracy -- this is about Apple limiting the choices available to people who buy their iPod hardware. I kept my iPod when I switched to Ubuntu Linux a year ago, and I've been using it happily with my machine ever since (though it took me a solid week to get all my DRMed Audible audiobooks out of iTunes -- I had to run two machines 24/7, playing hundreds of hours of audio through a program called AudioHijack, to remove the DRM from my collection, which had cost me thousands of dollars to build). I'd considered buying another iPod when this one started to show its age -- it's a perfectly nice player to use, provided you stay away from the DRM.

The new hardware limits the number of potential customers for Apple's products, adding engineering cost to a device in order to reduce its functionality. It's hard to understand why Apple would do this, but the most likely explanations are that Apple wants to be sure that competitors can't build their own players to load up iPods -- now that half of the major labels have gone DRM free, it's conceivable that we'd get a Rhapsody or Amazon player that automatically loaded the non-DRM tracks they sold you on your iPod (again, note that this has nothing to do with preventing piracy -- this is about preventing competition with the iTunes Store).

It won't be the first time Apple has rejigged iTunes/iPod to lock out competitors: back when Real built a DRM player for its own music that would run on an iPod, Apple threatened to sue them and engineered a firmware update to break their code (again, nothing to do with fighting piracy). This is the soul of anti-competitiveness: Real made code that iPod owners could use to get more legal use out of their iPods, Apple threatened to sue them for endangering their monopoly over delivering iPod software.

This is all par for the course, of course. Businesses have taken countermeasures to prevent competitors from interoperating with their products for decades. Apple had to break Microsoft's file-formats to give Numbers, Pages and Keynote the ability to read Office files -- they're enthusiastic participants in "adversarial compatibility." Decades ago, IBM lost a high-profile lawsuit against competitors who'd been making compatible mainframe accessories and selling them for less than IBM, wrecking IBM's business-model of selling cheap mainframes and charging a fortune for accessories. The law of the land has generally been that compatibility is legal, even if it undermines your profitability -- making a product does not create a monopoly over everything that your customers might do with that product.

That was then. Now, Apple has the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on its side, which makes it illegal to "circumvent an effective means of access control" -- that is, to break DRM. I don't know if Apple will invoke the DMCA against people who break this latest measure (they threatened Real with the DMCA before) but I guarantee you that the attorneys and investors advising potential iTunes competitors are going to be very conservative about this. The upshot is that iPod owners and the public interest lose out, because competitive products that expand the utility of the iPod are less likely to come into existence, thanks to the DMCA and Apple's locking technology.

I guess my next player won't be an iPod after all.

With the release of the new range of iPods - the new Nano, the iPod Classic and the iPod Touch, we were expecting more of the same - a few tweaks here and there and everything would be fine. No so.

At the very start of the database, a couple of what appear to be SHA1 hashes have been inserted which appear to lock the iTunes database to one particular iPod and prevent any modification of the database file. If you try to do either of these, the hashes will not match and the iPod will report that it contains "0 songs" when the iTunesDB would otherwise be perfectly adequate.

Link

The beloved Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencil (Its slogan, "Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed," is stamped in gold foil on each pencil) went out of production in 1998. It sold for fifty cents. In 2002 you could get one on eBay for $10. They now fetch $30. How much with they cost five years from now?

I've written about the Blackwing on Boing Boing in 2002, 2005, and 2006. I guess it's about time for a new post about this incredible pencil.

Andy says: "As a pencil enthusiast, I recently bit the bullet and bought a Blackwing off eBay for thirty bucks. It was pretty awesome, but *perhaps* a bit over-hyped. I'm a product reviewer for pencilthings.com, too, so I posted a review over at the product blog. It's some advice for what a layman should to do if he or she is thinking about getting one."

I am impressed with the performance of the Blackwing. I might pay $5, or even $10 per pencil, but $35-$40 per actual pencil? I think not. Recently, eBay had a lot of 144 Blackwings, and that sold for about $1400. I almost bid on it, thinking that I could then make a fortune by splitting up the lot and selling individual pencils. But I stopped myself -- I love pencils, don't get me wrong -- because I couldn't bring myself to make a major (for me) investment in this particular writing instrument.

One of my joys of pencils is the fact that they're cheap. Even top-quality products like California Republic's various pencils aren't any more than a couple bucks apiece -- and that's at the higher end. If I go out and splurge on a couple unique pencils for my collection, my wife isn't going to get mad. I'm not collecting antique fountain pens, after all.

If you are looking for a good low cost pencil, try the California Republic Palomino HB ($5.15 for 6) and 2B ($4.75 for 6), sold here. Link

John K (creator of The Ren and Stimpy Show) says: "I just started a new series of blog posts on the Bakshi Mighty Mouse cartoons we did.

"Every week (Thusday nights) I'm putting up a freshly packaged episode of The Bakshi Mighty Mouse Show I directed.

"I'm including funny bumpers and commercials that didn't appear with the show but should have, a throwback to the old directly sponsored age of TV."

This was my favorite of all the Bakshi Mighty Mouse episodes. It came out the closest to what I envisioned. There are many episodes that make me cringe. BTW, I have restored some scenes in this cartoon that were cut out way back when. They aren't in this copy, but you can see the cartoon uncut wherever I do a retrospective.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Interview with John Kricfalusi
• bOING bOING interviews John K.
• John Kricfalusi on the art of Milt Gross
• Outline for John Kricfalusi's new cartoon
• John K's animation for Weird Al's video
• BB Digital Emporium: John K's "George Liquor Xmas" video
• John K on the "Death of Form"
• John K's drawing school
• John K's storyboard for "Stimpy's Invention" episode
• The $100000 animation drawing course (for only $8!)
• Foolish Warner Bros. lawyers trying to clobber John K.
• Jack Black Tenacious D video directed by John K
• Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes
• John Kricfalusi has a blog

Caprgras Syndrome is a mental condition that causes those afflicted to think that they people they know have been replaced by imposters, a la Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

My patient, a 37-year-old homemaker, gazed at the man in the red plaid shirt as he sat on the couch in her living room.

“Who are you?” she asked.

There was something familiar about him. He wore her husband’s boots, but the shirt made him look like a truck driver.

“Yeah, and who are you?” the man replied with a laugh. “Come here and give me a kiss.”

She gave the man a peck on the cheek, but she felt guilty, fearing that her husband would arrive at any moment and admonish her. Not only did the man want a kiss — he also wanted sex!

Link

BB reader Meredith says, "This guy (my roomate, in fact) has made these awesome PCB (printed circuit board) skull bracelets."

BB Gadgets: Apple's $100 store credit thing is now live.

Here's an article in Der Spiegel about German people who fetishize Native Americans.

Lacrosse, Kansas, is the barbed wire capital of the world, and home of the Kansas Barbed Wire Collectors Association. The Kansas Barbed Wire Museum is currently closed for the season but their competition, the "Devil's Rope Museum" in Texas, is not -- in case you get a hankerin' for such hard-to-find titles as "The Fencin' Tool Bible".

The Indian government has withdrawn a controversial report which questioned the existence of the Hindu god Ram. The report was filed to allow for the construction of a canal wich would destroy Lord Ram's bridge - a natural formation that some conservative Hindus believe was built by Ram and his army of monkeys.

"What 'The Sopranos' taught me about technology." (plus, a quiz)

Prince announces his intent to sue YouTube and other video and music websites for unauthorized use of his work, in an attempt to "reclaim his art on the Internet".

Flowchart: all the historic influences that led to creation of the Laugh Out Loud Cats.

Trent Reznor on his Australian label: "I've garnered a hardcore audience that you think it's OK to rip off? Fuck you!"

David Pogue's latest New York Times piece asks why customers purchasing some ringtones based on music tracks are being asked to pay three times as much for a 30-second, time-limited excerpt than they would for the entire work.

Check into Cash into Tequila. BB reader Rob Cockerham says, "After noticing the apparent proximity of liquor stores to check cashing places, I got out and measured twelve of them. The average distance was less than 200 steps."

(Thanks, Patricio, Virtual Tours, Javier, Tian, Astrofiammante)

Why is Pluto chasing this kid around at breakneck speed on Main Street USA? And why does that woman grab Pluto and push him to the ground? I don't know, but it makes for a great vacation video moment for all the camcorder-wielding visitors to the Magic Kingdom. Link (Via Nothing to do with Arbroath)

In this episode of MAKE's Weekend Projects, Bre Pettis shows you how to to make a "foxhole radio" out of a paper tube, wire, paper clips, a razor blade, and a pencil.

During World War II, GIs in the field built really amazing simple radios to listen too. These were made with materials that they could get their hands on and were small enough to carry around in a big pocket. You can modify this design if you want to set it up so that it's tuneable too!

Link

Link to 8698 x 8735 pixel 7.32 MB jpeg of Black Rock City, as seen from space the sky, during Burning Man 2007. If this link dies, I'll host a copy somewhere. (thanks, Wayne Correia!)

Update: BB reader Frogbeater points us to the source...

Pict Earth has the Black Rock City image in place in the Black Rock Desert. I've never used them before and it's a little clunkier than Google Earth, but it has some more current images in some places than Google does. Doesn't seem to work with Safari though, Firefox works fine.

BB reader William Harmon points us to an interesting similarity...

The jpg of the burning man site reminded me of the early paleolithic site in Louisianna called Poverty Point. The site layout is stikingly similar. Most Americans are completley unaware of the massive earthen works associated with the archeology of the US.

Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson says,

Just a quick note about that Burning Man image. My understanding is that it's not from space, but rather a mosaic of shots taken from a Cessna. Pict'Earth is working with us on similar UAV imagery and we did the Wired Science UAV episode with them. Here's a shot from that session at the Alameda Naval Air Station (AKA the set of the Matrix 2): Link.

talk like a pirate day
british hq
how to talk like a pirate
jobby roger
toast
socks
undercover pirate
hide the rum
rum reviews
pirate pots
pirates vs. ninjas 01
pirates vs. ninjas 02
bubblebeard

yo ho ho! pirate zen 2006
yar! this be pirate zen 2005
yar! 'tis pirate zen 2004
yar! this be pirate zen 2003

and for a limited time...
david byrne's pirates
(this will disappear on 09.20.07)

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

Snip from a blurb published today by the Project on Government Oversight, a group that has been tracking security breaches at America's "National Security Science" center, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico:

A computer which may have contained highly classified nuclear weapons information from the Los Alamos National Laboratory was traded in exchange for drugs, according to unconfirmed sources.

The computer was owned by Jessica Quintana, the former contractor employee at the Lab who pled guilty in May to removing classified information after hundreds of pages of documents were discovered in a methamphetamine drug raid at her trailer.

Among the list of items collected by the Los Alamos Police Department during the execution of the search of the trailer were three memory sticks containing classified LANL documents, as well as hard copies. No computer was listed. A senior POGO source claims that the LAPD did search the computer looking for drug information and found none. They did not search for classified LANL information. POGO has also been told that the FBI never obtained a search warrant to seize the computer for a review of evidence of classified information.

Ms. Quintana allegedly broke down during an FBI polygraph session and indicated the computer she was using to work with the information on the memory sticks was now missing.

PDF Link to docs related to the case, Link to Department of Justice press release, May 15, 2007 (whups, that link's 404 right now, I'll try to find an alternate source).

In 1997 National Geographic published an archive of all its back issues on CD-ROM. Some writers and photographers sued National Geographic, claiming the magazine didn't have the right to do that. This scared other magazine publishers from selling digital versions of their back issues.

But in June, two US Appeals Courts ruled that National Geographic did have the right to sell back issues on CD-ROM. The said digital archives were like library microfiches, which freelancers never got paid for either. (More about this here.)

I'm not going to argue for or against the courts' decision. I'm just glad that I'll be able to start buying complete back runs of famous magazines. I already have the complete run of Mad, and am looking forward to getting the the complete run of National Lampoon (all 246 original magazines from 1970 through 1998), and the complete runs of Silver Age Marvel comic books.

In a couple of days, Bondi Digital Publishing (which published the complete run of The New Yorker as a DVD set and as portable hard drive) will release a DVD of all the 1950s issues of Playboy and all 40 years of The Rolling Stone.

Other magazine and comic back issues I'm hoping will soon be offered on DVD: Scientific American, Popular Science, Harvey Kurtzan's Trump/Help/Humbug, Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.

Environmental health organization Blacksmith has announced its 2007 top ten list of the "World's Worst Polluted Places." Topping the list is Sumgayit, Azerbaijan, followed by Linfen, China; Tianying, China; Sukinda, India; Vapi, India; La Oroya, Peru; Dzerzhinsk, Russia; Norilsk, Russia; Chernobyl, Ukraine; Kabwe, Zambia. From the description of Sumgayit's situation:

SUMGAYIT, AZERBAIJAN

Potentially Affected People: 275,000

Type of Pollutants: Organic chemicals, oil, heavy metals including mercury.

Source of Pollution: Petrochemical and Industrial Complexes

The Problem:
Sumgayit was a major Soviet industrial center housing more than 40 factories manufacturing industrial and agricultural chemicals. These included synthetic rubber, chlorine, aluminium, detergents, and pesticides. While the factories remained fully operational, 70-120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released into the air annually. With the emphasis placed on maximum, low-cost production at the expense of environmental and occupational health and safety, industry has left the city heavily contaminated. Factory workers and residents of the city have been exposed to a combination of high-level occupational and environmental pollution problems for several decades.

Untreated sewage and mercury-contaminated sludge (from chlor-alkali industries) continue to be dumped haphazardly. A continuing lack of pollution controls, dated technologies and the improper disposal and treatment of accumulated industrial waste are just some of the issues that plague the city.

Health Impacts:
Sumgayit had one of the highest morbidity rates during the Soviet Era and the legacy of illness and death persist. A study jointly conducted by the UNDP, WHO, Azerbaijan Republic Ministry of Health and the University of Alberta demonstrated that residents of Sumgayit experience intensely high levels of both cancer morbidity and mortality. Cancer rates in Sumgayit are 22-51% higher than average incidence rates in the rest of Azerbaijan. Mortality rates from cancer are 8% higher. Evidence suggests that lower reported cancer rates are flawed as a result of underreporting.

A high percentage of babies are born premature, stillborn, and with genetic defects like Mongolism, anencephaly, spina bifida, hydrocephalus, bone disease, and mutations such as club feet, cleft palate, and four or six fingers or toes.

Link

My friend Jens-Martin Skibsted, the Danish industrial designer behind Puma's Urban Mobility bicycle and Biomega, created this ingenious set of cutlery. Each utensil has an integrated little "stand" to keep the business end from touching the table when you set it down. Keeps food off the table and germs off your cutlery. Jens-Martin designed the product, called "Side-On Cutlery," for Mater, a Copenhagen-based brand all about "ethical business strategies" and "working methods that support people, local craft traditions and the environment." Jens-Martin told me that he was blown away by how rigorously Mater scrutinizes the business and environmental practices of their suppliers before contracting with a particular factory for production. From the Side-On Cutlery description:

A polished, stainless steel cutlery collection consisting of fork, knife, spoon and tablespoon, inspired by Japanese oki table setting. the side-on standing cutlery range offers an attentive (sic, "alternative"?) to the traditional table setting. Produced in a family-owned factory located in the guangdong province of southern china.

Link to Mater's Side-On Cutlery, Link to Skibsted Ideation

Previously on BB:
• Biomega's new Puma bike Link
• Biomega/Puma sneaker for biking Link

I gave a talk in Beijing this week at the Beijing Bookworm, an excellent bookstore/cafe. Filmmaker Victor Muh recorded the whole thing and put it up on YouTube! Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

sez, "MC frontalot has an awesome new video for his song 'It Is Pitch Dark,' which is all about, you guessed it, being eaten by a Grue. As he says on his website: 'We welcome the general public to begin its viewing of the It Is Pitch Dark music video. This is directed by Jason Scott as an HD extra for his documentary on text adventures, Get Lamp. If you do not care for the wee QuickTime or DivX files at frontalot.com, you can help yourself to the gigantor 1280x720 HiDef QT, a mere 474 megs, available via torrent, or! you can go in the other direction and check out the shittiest available res over on YouTube. Blind fans will probably enjoy the mp3 instead.'"

This is hands-down my favorite track on the new Frontalot album, and the video is great. MOV Link (Thanks, xzackly!)

See also: New MC Frontalot nerdcore album

The Teapottery sells this teapot in the shape of a streamlined vintage toaster -- alas, it does not appear to actually make toast, which would make it deliciously dangerous (as Gizmodo notes). Link (via Gizmodo)