Everyone on the internet today is talking about the big launch of J.Lo 3, the latest game in Microsoft's J.Lo Trilogy which, as I understand it, will provide the thrilling conclusion to the events that began in J.Lo 1 and became awesomer still in J.Lo 2. I can't wait!

I think the people at Microsoft are doing a great job keeping this big secret until midnight tonight, because I can't even find the official J.Lo 3 website on the internet. But Google turns up this gaming gem, and some wallpaper. I agree, this game sure was worth waiting for.

Wired's Jennifer Granick has a chilling editorial on what a new decision out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts on cell-phone records means for you: law enforcement can now gain access to the record of where you've taken your cellphone, because "stored data" doesn't get the same privacy protection that "live data" does.

While most courts considering the issue have held that police need "probable cause" to track your movements, a new decision (.pdf) last week out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts holds that law enforcement need show only "relevance to an ongoing investigation" to get a historical record of your past movement (something like the Jeffy trail in The Family Circus cartoon).

Link

A fanciful alphabet invented by Dr Seuss in his 1955 On Beyond Zebra was turned into a Unicode character set in 2001. Now there's a standardized way to use Seussian script on your web-pages (provided the right font is live at the other end)! Link (via Making Light)

Issue three of Steampunk Magazine is out -- this is the quarterly, CC-licensed magazine of all things steampunk (build tips, photography, fiction, essays, interviews, fashion...). You can buy issues (including 1 and 2) for $3 each, or download the whole thing free as PDFs (also: check out the badass steampunk Etsy shop!). I'm still downloading issue 3 to read on the two week's worth of travel I embark upon today, but at 45MB, I'm guessing it's chock fulla steamy goodness. Futurismic notes "In this issue there are interviews with Alan Moore and Doctor Steel, two excellent and unique sewing projects, excerpts from the upcoming SteamPunk's Guide to the Apocalypse, and fiction from Olga Izakson, Will Strop and Rachel E. Pollock." Link (via Futurismic)

See also:
Steampunk magazine
Steampunk Magazine #2

Please sir, I want some more steampunk links, sir

Our pal Saul Griffith, co-founder of the quintessential "make tank" Squid Labs, open source hardware hacker, co-author of Howtoons, and regular contributor to MAKE: and CRAFT has been awarded one of the 2007 MacArthur Fellowships, aka a "genius" grant. This is an unrestricted $500,000 grant given to "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction." Congratulations, Saul! We're proud of you! From the MacArthur Foundation site:

Saul Griffith is an inventor whose innovations span industrial design, technology, and science education. Through a variety of endeavors at MIT and as a principal in Squid Labs, Griffith demonstrates his boundless energy for inventing across diverse disciplines in the global public interest. While still a graduate student at MIT, he designed a unique membrane-based molding system that can produce a variety of common lenses from a single pair of flexible molding surfaces. This prototype has the potential to change the economics of corrective lenses in rural and underserved communities around the world and continues to be a major focus of research and development energy at Squid Labs. At MIT, Griffith co-founded Thinkcycle.org, a web community that has produced socially conscious engineering solutions, such as novel household water-treatment systems. Thinkcycle.org is the forerunner of Instructables.com, a remarkable do-it-yourself website driven by user contributions. He is also a creative force behind HowToons, an animated educational resource designed to engage children in hands-on science and engineering projects. Through the spin-off company Potenco, Griffith initiated the project design for a hand-held human-powered generator, which has the potential significantly to improve access to electronic devices such as laptops and water purifiers throughout the world. Though still quite young, he holds several patents in optics, textiles, and nanotechnology. In these engineering ventures as well as others yet to be imagined, Griffith is a prodigy of invention in service of the world community.

Link to Saul's home page, Link to Saul's MacArthur page, Link to 2007 MacArthur Fellows

UPDATE: More on Saul and another Bay Area recipient, UC Berkeley professor Claire Kremen, in the San Francisco Chronicle. Link

UPDATE: Tim O'Reilly, Saul's friend, colleague, and future father-in-law, has posted a wonderful profile over at Radar. Link

The entire Science section in the New York Times today was devoted to the space age, honoring the 50th anniversary of Sputnik. Russia launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957.

This is really a tremendous spread -- about 10 articles, plus lots of multimedia stuff -- and I can't stop reading it right now, even though it's late in the day and I should be eating or sleeping.

John Schwartz has a wonderful piece in here about what might be ahead for the next 50 years in space travel: Link. About today's special edition, he tells BoingBoing:

The top story is by John Noble Wilford, the NY Times reporter who wrote the story beginning "Men have landed and walked on the Moon." [Ed. note: Oh snap.]

Just about every story in the section is tied to the theme, and there is plenty of video with a beautiful interactive graphic that shows Sputnik inside and out.

Link to the section.

Here's a snip from "New Horizons Beckon, Inspiring Vision if Not Certainty", presented next to a video interview with Schwartz:

NASA has embarked on a program to return to the Moon by 2020, not just for what some critics call “flags and footprints,” but also for a lasting presence with scientific research and preparation for expeditions to asteroids and, eventually, Mars. The space shuttle program is being wound down by 2010 to create the next generation of vehicles.

Other nations, notably Russia and China, have ambitious plans and could spur a space race like the one that sent Americans to the Moon. “It took Sputnik for us to recognize what the Soviet Union was up to,” said Harrison H. Schmitt, who flew the last mission to the Moon, in 1972. “I don’t know what it will take this time.”

Private enterprise is moving ahead, beginning with space tourism and, later, transport services for NASA and other governments to outposts like the International Space Station. Beyond that, ventures could include mining on asteroids and manufacturing drugs in space.

John M. Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George Washington University, says a big question has yet to be answered. “At the level of government, I think we’re still struggling as to why we’re sending people to space,” Dr. Logsdon said. “It’s a decent question, and I think it’s an unanswered question.”

Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly created a personal countdown clock that shows him how many days of life he has left to him. He made the clock to remind himself to make the best use of his remaining days, all 8500 of them.

I am now 55 years old. Like a lot of people in middle age my late-night thoughts bend to contemplations about how short my remaining time is. Even with increasing longevity there is not enough time to do all that I want. Nowhere close. My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

I've been using this system for several months now and it has been very powerful. Day to day I am aware -- and can rattle off if I am asked - how many days I have left. I decided to post my project today because on my clock it shows a handily rounded off sum. So here is the news: As of today I have 8,500 days left to live. That's not much in my book. I can almost hear them ticking away as we speak. I look at my lifelist of current dreams and I realize that in only 8,500 days I won't get to but a few of them. And what of any new dreams?

Note also that Kevin's blog contains all the posts he makes on all the other blogs he's active on -- Cool Tools, Geek Dads, The Technium, etc. He calls this his "Lifestream." Cool idea! Link

Matt says:

This is a picture of Ikea's "Optimal" shopping hours. At first glance, it seems like a good idea, and a good chart to follow. If you actually try to figure it out though, it makes no sense. It appears to be a 12 hour clock, but it also appears to reference 24 hour time. What?

Link

"It's knitterin' time!"

Knitty-cat made knitted a doll of The Fantastic Four's The Thing for a lucky fellow named Matt. Link (Thanks, Angela!)

Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel Johnson has been liveblogging the UN Summit on Climate Change today -- check out the posts! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Image: Sez Joel, "The audio console in a U.N. press room. The big cup with the wire is the headphone. It doesn't have much to do with what's below, but is where I'm sitting now."

The PR people for The IT Crowd have posted two high-larious clips from this week's season finale episode to YouTube. Can't wait for the episode -- and the DVD! Clip 1 Link, Clip 2 Link

Update: Thanks to Ondre in the comments for pointing out that this season is scheduled to go eight episodes, not six!

Update 2 In the comments, aristan presents compelling evidence that this is indeed the finale -- bugger. (Disclosure: I was an unpaid consultant on series one of The IT Crowd, and my fiancee works at Channel Four)

See also:
IT Crowd, season 2, episode 5: the boob joke episode
IT Crowd Season 2, Episode 4 -- and DVD!
IT Crowd Season 2, Episode 3: Great anti-piracy PSA sendup
IT Crowd Season 2, Episode 2 -- keyboard-destroying nerd sitcom
The IT Crowd -- season two, episode one

The Chinese mafia has come to South Africa to supply meth ingredients in exchange for rare abalone meat.

The enormous value of the delicacy has brought the Chinese Triad gangs to South Africa. In a cash-free transaction, the Triads swap the abalone for the ingredients to make methamphetamine, or 'tik'. Hundreds of tonnes of abalone is smuggled out of the Cape every year, to be exported through Hong Kong, according to Wildlife Department officials who say that the local abalone is on the brink of extinction.

Link

A high school English teacher in Connecticut was forced to resign after the parents of a 13-year-old girl complained that he gave her a copy of Daniel Clowes' Eightball, a comic book published by Fantagraphics.

Daniel Clowes wrote the screenplays for Ghost World and Art School Confidential. His comics books often deal with adult subjects, but are PG-13, not "lewd" or "pornographic." He has also started a new weekly comic that appears in the New York Times magazine on Sundays called Mister Wonderful, which you can read online.

The parents of a freshman student whose teacher resigned after he gave her a sexually explicit illustrated book said Wednesday their daughter has been the target of harassment from fellow students, and they want the school district to do more to clarify the issue with other parents.

The girl’s father, who asked that his family remain anonymous because it has already been the target of criticism, described the graphic novel that English teacher Nate Fisher gave the student as “borderline pornography.”

The book, one of a series of comic book novels by Daniel Clowes, is called “Eightball #22.” It includes references to rape, various sex acts and murder, as well as images of a naked woman, and a peeping tom watching a woman in the shower.

“It’s not even like a gray area,” the father said. “It’s clearly over the line.”

Link

Dane Brown says,

Last week a number of computers were stolen from our office in Vancouver, BC. One of those computers was a shared iMac with Flickrbooth, an app that automatically uploads photo booth shots to our flickr account, installed on it. Just this morning a friend called to tell us that there are photos of whoever has the computer now in our flickr stream! Obviously the guy didn't know he was uploading images of himself and his awesome tattoos.

Here's a link to the shots on the company's flickr account. Do you know who this guy is? The theft victims and the Vancouver police would love to hear about it. Looks like the SomethingAwful forums are all over the case, too.

Update: A gem in the comments thread: "There should be a word for this, thinking you're getting away with something on the sly while the world laughs at you, anticipating your inevitable demise -- schadendouche?" [beatnik]

And looks like there are more security cam photos of this man here, and video here.

And a clarification: we don't know for a fact that the guy in these photos is the thief, that's for the legal system to decide. It is possible that he is simply an innocent new owner of a previously pilfered laptop or laptops.

Found in the This is Broken Flickr pool:

I am in Las Vegas for a conference this week. The hotel is really nice, but I encountered this bizarre keypad to work the curtains in the room. There is no natural mapping between the buttons and their functions. I went through quite a bit of trial & error before figuring it out. And the problem is that even once you figure it out, it's not very logical.

Link

(UPDATE: Cory just told me he took this photo when he was in China!) Sign found in a clothing store in China that tells clerks what to say and what not to say to customers.

Recommended Words:

1. What price are you willing to pay?
2. Wonderful and it fits you perfectly!
3. You have good taste. You have made a good choice.

Forbidden Words:

1. You are crazy.
2. Just go away.
3. Stupid guys.

Link

Rolling Stone writer and "But Enough About Me" author Jancee Dunn's dad worked for JC Penney for 35 years. She recently scanned some terrific pages from one of their 1975 catalogs. Ah, I yearn for the good old daze when big department stores dealt in Superfly threads and party hookahs. Link and Link (Thanks, Tom Vanderbilt!)

This hairdryer serves the market of people who want to pretend to kill themselves while drying their hair. Link (Via PopGadget)

Chris Coleman made this self-balancing one-wheeled skateboard, using an Arduino microcontroller. The YouTube video shows Chris trying it out. As a bonus, you get to hear Chris's little kid talking to his mother about everything but his dad on the Jetsonian go-board. Link

Michael Hanlon of the Daily Mail tries out a table-top demonstration model of Raytheon's pain-ray weapon, dubbed "Silent Guardian." He say it hurts.

Built by the U.S. firm Raytheon, it is part of its "Directed Energy Solutions" programme.

What it amounts to is a way of making people run away, very fast, without killing or even permanently harming them.

I tested a table-top demonstration model, but here's how it works in the field.

A square transmitter as big as a plasma TV screen is mounted on the back of a Jeep.

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation - similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker - that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

This tabletop model looks pretty nifty. I can imagine teenaged boys making them and then having contests with their friends to see how long they can endure the pain-ray. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Pain transmitter to be used for riot control (Thanks, Steve in Paris!)

Here's a photo gallery of large natural and man-made holes in the ground. There are mines, a reservoir drain, and a sinkhole, such as this 330-foot deep sinkhole that killed three people this year in Guatemala when a sewer line broke. Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

Steampunk wizard Jake von Slatt sez, "I was checking referrers in my web logs and saw significant amount of traffic from this oversea modding forum. So I checked it out a found this incredible water-cooled Steampunk PC case mod! Damn! the bar has been raised again!" Link (Thanks, Jake!)

Ye Olde Collection of Previous Boing Boing Steampunk Linques

Many science fiction writers and readers recoiled in horror when Howard Hendrix (who was then the vice-president of the Science Fiction Writers of America) decried writers who give away their work online, calling us "webscabs" and threatening a future filled with "pixel-stained techno-peasants" whose fortunes had been destroyed because of us scabbing give-it-away-ers. Howard debated web-novelist/podcast-novelist Scott Sigler last week at San Francisco's SFinSF event, and Rick Kleffel recorded it. The debate is pretty civilized, but also often unsatisfying.

I confess that I don't understand Howard's argument -- it seems to be that a world in which free text-files circulate is one in which readers stop paying for printed books. This isn't supported by the facts -- indeed, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the biggest problem writers have is that readers don't go to bookstores, and that books compete with MMORPGs and other networked activities for time. Giving away ebooks puts them on an equal footing with all the other online activities, and puts books in serendipity's way, where non-bookstore-going readers might find them. (Howard also seems to labor under the misapprehension that writers are being pressured to do free online releases, when the reality is that writers have to fight and spit and pitch tantrums to get permission to put their work online)

Part of Howard's argument seems to be that big corporations profit from the free circulation of materials online -- ISPs, telcos, search-engines, hosting companies, etc. This is undoubtedly true, but not endemic to online solely. Bookstores, phone companies, newspapers, publishers, shipping companies, and so on -- they've all profited through the ages from writers' activity. The important question for a writer who cares about writers' economic fortunes isn't "How much money does Google make from a world of free text?" but rather, "Do writers make more money from a world that has Google in it?" The answer to the latter question is an unequivocal yes -- the easier it is for a work to be found, the easier it is for an audience to be found, the better off a writer is.

Finally, Howard characterizes supporters of online distribution as blind techno-optimists who've never heard of the law of unintended consequences. This is an ugly straw-man, visibly untrue. Liberal copyright campaigners are also generally the loudest anti-DRM/pro- Net-Neutrality/ pro- Free-Software voices, people who spend their lives warning everyone who'll listen of the danger of technology in the wrong hands.

The biggest expense a writer bears is search-cost: either directly (writers who self-publish and have to market their work to a diffuse audience) or indirectly (writers who "pay" their publishers 90 percent of the cover price to get their words into the hands of an audience). The lower the search costs are, the more leverage writers have. The net diversifies the ways in which works find audiences and vice-versa, undoing the 20th century's enormous trend to concentration and more bargaining power for fewer media companies. And that is good news for writers indeed. Link (Thanks, Rick!)

See also:
April 23 is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day
Big collection of Pixel-Stained Technopeasant contributions
Pixel-stained technopeasants talk about free online fiction

DaveX sez, "The leaked Media Defender e-mails contain a serious of 'approved' instructions for how to create 'chopped and screwed' versions of popularly-searched mp3s using a variety of odd techniques, which result in damaged versions of the songs users hope to download. In this blog entry, I discuss these instructions, as well as provide an example of all these techniques being put to use on the new Britney Spears single, 'Gimmie More,' (now featuring readings from Lessig's 'Free Culture'!)" Link (Thanks, DaveX!)

See also:
Giant email leak from MediaDefender -- MAFIAA hitmen
MediaDefender sends takedowns for leaked mail, gets savagely taunted
MediaDefender's source code leaked?
Pirate Bay suing major media companies for sabotage, based on MediaDefender leak

Ha'penny is the sequel to Jo Walton's chilling, heartbreaking novel Farthing, an alternate history about a quisling Britain that makes peace with Hitler and helps create a stable, thousand-year Reich on the Continent. The story, a murder mystery in a Britain on the edge of fascism, made several none-to-subtle (and very apt) comparisons to Tony Blair's Britain, where Habeas Corpus and due process have been replaced by universal surveillance and a National ID Database.

Ha'penny is a thriller, not a murder-mystery, but it is otherwise the twin of Farthing. It continues the story of New Scotland Yard Inspector Carmichael, a compromised, closeted homosexual who is the pained lackey of the fascist plan to sell Britain out to the Reich. In Ha'penny, Carmichael is called on to investigate a plot to assassinate Hitler and the Prime Minister, a plot that's mixed up with the IRA, radical Lords, and a family of divided aristocratic girls, one of whom is a Communist, one of whom is married to Himmler, and one of whom is Viola Lark, a star of stage who has just been cast as Hamlet in a cross-cast production on the Strand.

Viola narrates half the book and through her eyes, we see a Britain that is credibly and horribly transformed, a Britain where fear of terrorists has driven sensible people to believe evil things, such as the need for the ubiquitous identity cards that play a key role in the oppression that is at the heart of this book.

Walton is doing amazing work here, writing a kind of latter-day 1984, a savage blast against the authoritarian opportunists who have cynically manipulated terrorist tragedies to suppress political speech and whip up fear to a high froth of CCTVs and identity papers. She is part of the artistic response to the Blair Years, and Ha'penny is a literary Guernica, a scathing indictment of New Labour and the chickenhawk War on Abstract Nouns that is its hallmark.

It doesn't hurt that this is a top-notch thriller, a page-turner of a book that had me reading it while walking down the street, eating breakfast, going to bed, anywhere I could, compelled to keep reading until I'd turned the last page. I hear there's a third in the series, and I can only pray that it brings some hope to Walton's Quisling Britain, some chance of redemption for the all-too-plausible authoritarian alternate history that is such a sharp mirror of our sad present world. Link

See also:
Farthing: Heart-rending alternate history about British-Reich peace

Steve Erenbgerg, aka "Radio Guy," collects unusual scientific apparatuses, globes, industrial masks and helmets, medical equipment, anatomical models, steam engines, antique toys, antique lighting, weird tools, and, of course, radios. He also deals in such curiosities on eBay. Seen here at left, "important light therapy cage." Middle, "bee model." And right, "radio wave therapy cage," also "important." Link (via Kircher Society)

My latest Information Week column has just gone up: "The Solution To Mobile Phone Deadlock? Somebody Has To Die." The column discusses the way that mobile phone manufacturers, carriers and record companies all blame each other for the ways that mobile telephony sucks, and how we can solve the problem by tanking one or more of those industries.

The triumvirate of phone manufacturers, mobile carriers, and entertainment companies are the world's reigning champions at shifting blame and pointing fingers. Ask Apple why it won't let you use any song in your iTunes library as an iPhone ringtone and they'll tell you it's the fault of the greedy record companies.

The music industry is supposedly so addicted to the vanishing ringtone market that they won't let Apple get away with letting you use the music you own in new ways without paying a ringtone tax (and some of them won't let you use your music this way at all).

Likewise, ask Apple why the iPhone comes locked and they'll tell you that AT&T (T) insisted on this as the only way that they'd offer Apple handsets. AT&T will tell you that locked handsets and vicious, one-sided term contracts are the only way to recoup the upfront cost of offering subsidized handsets to customers (what, they never heard of the installment plan?).

Link