The Boing Boing Suggest a Link form is temporarily down -- sorry about that! We're working on getting it back online and I'll post here once it's live.

Update: We're back up again! Many thanks to Chris Smith, the Chief Executive Comment Form Manager for Boing Boing International Holdings (Holdings) Ltd.

GlamGuns, the same pranksters who brought us the Hello Kitty AK-47, have a whole line of glamorous notional militaria, including Care Bear Body Armor and a My Little Pony M4A1 Carbine. (via Threat Level)

Today's Wired bears a nice primer on manga in the USA, a 1.9MB PDF of a comic tracing the history of English manga. It's laid out "backwards," which is unbelievably hard to read off a screen (go to the last page, read, go back two pages, read, go forward one page, read, go back two pages, read, etc), but it rewards patience (or printing). This is some fascinating stuff, and it's superbly presented. Link

Two days after JK Rowling disclosed that she'd "always thought Dumbledore was gay", there are already these Dumbledore Pride tees -- "Wizards are Gay" and "I Always Knew." (My favorite meme about this -- the various bloggers using headlines like "Wizard is Friend of Dorothy.") Link (via Kottke)

DEVO founder Mark Mothersbaugh has published a hardcover book collecting his Beautiful Mutants series of "corrected" photographs. As Mothersbaugh writes, these are "images pulled from man's past... then corrected into sickeningly beautiful beings. A study of humans via symmetry using photos both recent & vintage." The Beautiful Mutants book is 288 pages and costs $24.95. Seen above at right is a Beautiful Mutant titled "Kitty and Child: Youngstown, Ohio" (14.75" x 18.75"), which I'm thrilled to have hanging right in front of me.

Link to book ordering page, Link to Beautiful Mutants 2007, Link to Beautiful Mutants 2004

Previously on BB:
• Mothersbaugh's happy mutants Link
• Mark Mothersbaugh on Weird America Link
• Video of Devo on SNL in 1978 Link

I've been following the wildfires here in Southern California on TV and online since early Sunday morning. Many friends and colleagues displaced, or about to be. Many fires in many different parts of the state, I can't recall this many separate blazes all at once for a long time. Link to NASA images of the wildfires from space.

More resources: San Diego Union Tribune fire blog, LA area fires with google maps, SD fires with google maps, KPBS on twitter, Red Cross "Safe and Well" list.

Jerry Sheehan is aggregating blog coverage here: Link. Sam Coniglio is among many who shot images of the orange-red sunsets this phenomenon generated: Link.

Jacob Riskin has posted some data on the Topanga fires: Link.

BB reader Barry says,

I have a few friends that were evacuated from the San Diego fires. It’s now become the largest evacuation in the U.S. since Katrina. I posted a bunch of charities and local resources here: Link.

Emese G. says,

The link is to an interactive map of the San Diego Fires and evacuation areas from Google. It's surprising to see emergency web sites go down when they're needed the most. The county's emergency web site has been on and off for the last day now. KPBS and Channel 8 News have kept up by limiting their pages to essential information. KPBS even has a twitter, On the other hand, the Union Tribune's site keeps going offline and is unreliable. Craig'slist has people offering to help including offering up their homes for pets and people.

(Thanks, Yannick Rendu, Jed, Michael McCarty and others)

Update: Serial tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson says:

I live in San Diego and the situation is unbelievable. 80% of my employees have been evacuated from their homes. The entire North half of the county is shrouded in a thick eye burning shroud of smoke. That's what happens when 200,000 acres burn. Wild fires are being pushed by scorching off shore gusting winds with speeds of 60 miles an hour in some places. Less than 5 percent humidity and two inches of rain the last year don't help.

They are predicting 36 more hours of the winds. Thankfully only a couple fatalities but 600 homes and offices have been burned down already.

I have family staying with me where i have no power but am relatively safe because i am close to ocean. But news reports just said we should evacuate. (We won't cause there's really no place to go.)

There are fires throughout Southern Ca but those in SD are more severe from what i can tell in spite of the fact that the national press is fixated on star studded Malibu.

Lots of links to more resources and first-person accounts in the comments.

In other news, CNN's Glenn Beck is a big fat douche. Link.

Below: Photo of LACD Fire Camp 9 taken from Kagel Mountain with the Buckweed Fire in the background, by Michael McCarty.

Doctors in India removed a three-inch piece of a toothbrush, including the business end, from a 31-year-old woman's nose.

So how did it get there? The woman claims she is not sure. She says, “Around two months ago as I was brushing my teeth, my husband accidentally pushed me and the toothbrush in my hand broke. I was left holding the lower portion of the brush but couldn’t locate the rest of it. Soon after, I started bleeding profusely from the nose,” she said. She visited the family doctor to stop the bleeding. “But since that day, I began getting breathless and a foul smelling discharge began to come out of my nose. I used to get restless gasping for breath sometimes,” she said.

Link (Via Museum of Hoaxes)

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

Can there be any better way to show your respect for the great outdoors than by flicking cigarette ashes into the gaping mouth of a real fish head?

This article from a 1940s how-to magazine (from the personal library of Mister Jalopy), shows you how to make a Game Fish Ashtray of your own.

SciFi dimensions reports that some crank posing as an “undercover investigator” shut down a performance of Ray Bradbury's play Dandelion Wine, with Bradbury himself in attendance.

According to the brief item, the self-described investigator cited an "obscure California law requiring a State of California licensed teacher to be present at all performances with young actors."

If any Boing Boing readers were there, I'd love to get your take on what happened.

When this reporter approached the official for a photo-interview to explain why he had shut down the performance, he threatened to confiscate this reporter’s camera on the claim that he worked as an undercover police officer; however, when asked by this reporter to produce a badge or other official identification, “Egan” refused.

Link

Here an interview with Satoshi Kanazawa, one of the authors of Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, an introduction to evolutionary psychology.

SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.

One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.

Link

kosmik ray says: "A little-known island continent of floating toxic plastic garbage, TWICE the size of Texas, is growing in the pacific between Califormnia and Hawaii. Officially known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, until it can be taxed, U.S. officials will continue to ignore it. I heard of it once many years ago, but it apparently has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950's, and now consists of 80% plastic. It has also been called Gilligan's Island, from the trashy TV sitcom that won't go away."

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

...

The patch has been growing, along with ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s, said Chris Parry, public education program manager with the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco.

Link

EFF's staff technologists, Seth Schoen and Peter Eckersley, have been running experiments on Comcast's network. They've discovered that Comcast isn't just screwing around with BitTorrent packets, they're also jamming Gnutella and (according to another researcher) Lotus Notes packets. Lotus Notes! As in, corporate enterpriseware that suits use to synchronize their projects.

But when you try to run a Gnutella P2P node on your machine, things start getting strange. Gnutella operates in two stages: first of all, your node starts a conversation with other nodes on the network. Once that conversation is happening, nodes can say things to each other to organise searches for and downloads of files. We saw forged TCP reset packets that stop some of the nodes from being able to converse with each other in the first place...

It isn't just BitTorrent and Gnutella that are affected. Kevin Kanarski has reported that Lotus Notes (a suite of software that many businesses use for email, calendaring and file sharing) is also being interfered with. We haven't tested this ourselves yet, but Kanarski's packet traces look a lot like the ones we've collected with BitTorrent and Gnutella.

Link (via Isen)

See also:
Why Comcast's BitTorrent-fux0r is bad for quality of service How the AP busted Comcast for blocking BitTorrent
Comcast actively blocks P2P traffic

Warren Ellis runs the numbers on the dismal state of science fiction magazines -- Asimov's circ is down 13 percent; Interzone is running 2,000-3,000 copies per issue; Analog (which should really change its name back to Astounding) is selling through at 32 percent. This is pretty depressing news.

I think the biggest impediment to the magazines' sales is that there's no easy way for people who love the stories in them to bring them to the attention of other, potential customers. By the time you've read the current issue and found a story you want everyone else to read, the issue isn't on the stands anymore and the best you can do is to try to get your pals to shell out to pay for an ebook edition.

Contrast this with the online mags, whose stories stay online for months -- sometimes forever. If you love a story in Strange Horizons, you can paste a quote from it into your Livejournal, use the first line as your sig, email the URL to your brother, print the first page and tape it up in the toilet at work.

Is it any wonder that the online mags dominate the awards?

If I were running the mags, I'd pick a bunch of sfnal bloggers and offer them advance looks at the mag, get them to vote on a favorite story to blog and put it online the week before the issue hits the stands. I'd podcast a second story, and run excerpts from the remaining stories in podcast. I'd get Evo Terra to interview the author of a third story for The Dragon Page. I'd make every issue of every magazine into an event that thousands of people talked about, sending them to the bookstores to demand copies -- and I'd offer commissions, bonuses, and recognition to bloggers who sold super-cheap-ass subscriptions to the print editions.

Sure it's lot of work, and a huge shift in the way the mags do business. But hell, how many more years' worth of 13 percent declines can the magazines hack?

Someone recently said to me, “Well, what could you do to save them?” And I said, well, no-one’s asking, but there’s probably about twelve things that could be done. And they said, “Well, maybe, but what I really meant was — why try? Why not just bury them and start anew?”

And then someone else asked me why there’s still an sf magazine called “Analog.”

Link

Flickr user Antonio Amendola took this stunning photograph of Rome's Trevi Fountain on Friday. A prankster dumped dye or paint into the fountain in the middle of the afternoon. There was no permanent damage. From an Associated Press article:

The news agency ANSA reported that a box was found near the fountain containing leaflets by a group that claimed responsibility for the act. The leaflets said the red paint was a protest for expenses incurred in organizing the Rome Film Festival and symbolically referred to the event's red carpet, ANSA reported.

Link to AP article, Link to Amendola's Flickr stream (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Today's "60-Second Science" podcast at Scientific American lists the "six basic rules of persuasion" that former New York Yankees manager (probably unknowingly?) used to his advantage. Those techniques of persuasion are explored in depth in one of my all-time favorite non-fiction books, Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Science of Persuasion.
Link to MP3 of 60-Second Science, Link to buy Influence: The Science of Persuasion

The ingenious designers at eos méxico created this lovely birds in a wire lamp. I couldn't find any pricing or availability information on their Spanish-language site though.
Link to Neatorama

Annette designed "Steampunk Shrew," an adorable little character, for her stationery sets. Link (Thanks, Annette!)

Many useful and practical steampunk links herein

A northern Nigerian college student built his own helicopter from an old Toyota car engine and scavenged parts from a Boeing 747 that crashed near his town of Kano. Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi, 24, has already briefly flown it four times and is now constructing a new model based on a motorcycle engine. He says it will fly for several hours at the low attitude of 15 feet. Abdullahi says he was inspired to build his choppers from watching action movies and learned to fly by reading about it online. From AFP:

The (current model's) cockpit consists of a push-button ignition, an accelerator lever between the seats which controls vertical thrust, a joystick that provides balance and bearing.

A small screen on the dashboard connects to a camera underneath the helicopter for ground vision, a set of six buttons adjusts the screen's brightness while a small transmitter is used for communication.

"You start it, allow it to run for a minute or two and you then shift the accelerator forward and the propeller on top begins to spin. The further you shift the accelerator the faster it goes and once you reach 300 rmp you press the joystick and it takes off," Abdullahi explained from the cockpit.

Link (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

The BBC is challenging readers to build their own "Sputnik in a biscuit tin," using today's marvellous household objects to recapitulate the birth of the space program:

In simple terms, the Sputnik satellite was a metal sphere almost 2ft (61cm) in diameter, containing a radio transmitter. It also had a battery; equipment to measure temperature; barometric and temperature activated switches; and a fan to stop it getting too hot.

It sent its famous "beep beep" radio signals to earth, altering the transmission to indicate changes in temperature or a sudden drop in pressure caused by a puncture in the satellite's case. And that's about it.

You could probably find most of these components lying around your home. There are transmitters in mobile or cordless phones, wireless internet routers and baby monitors, and you may well have a thermometer in the medicine cabinet.

Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has more thoughts on writing Web-headlines and how they benefit from the use of the passive voice. Nielsen's classic 1998 essay "Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines" is the single most important essay I've ever read on good Web style, and today's followup, "Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings," is an intriguing followup.

Nielsen's thesis is that the passive voice -- which is usually frowned upon by people who love good prose -- enables headline writers to "front-load" their heds with the key concepts from the story, making it easier for people scanning those headlines (as search results or feed headlines) to pick out their meaning more quickly.

However, recent findings from our eyetracking research emphasized the overwhelming importance of getting the first 2 words right, since that's often all users see when they scan Web pages. Given this, we have to bend the writing guidelines a bit, especially for elements that users fixate on when they scan — that is, headlines, subheads, summaries, captions, hypertext links, and bulleted lists.

Words are usually the main moneymakers on a website. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations.

Writing the first 2 words of summaries runs a close second. Here, too, you might want to succumb to passive voice if it lets you pull key terms into the lead.

Link

See also:
Design critique of Jakob Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen consisely summarizes all the reasons that reading PDFs on-screen sucks.
Jakob Nielsen AlertBox on designing the PR section of your Website to make journos happy
Nielsen's top-10 blog usability mistakes
Nielsen: User-education won't fix security
Headline-writing guidelines

Further to the news that Comcast is sneakily degrading BitTorrent transfers, Harold Feld offers this analysis of the idea that this somehow improves quality of service:

First, Comcast is not guaranteeing quality of service. Just the opposite. It is actively degrading service for subscribers, many of whom subscribe to high-bandwidth services precisely for the purpose of getting access to muckin' big files (or, frankly, they'd stick to much cheaper dial up). So when Comcast here speaks of “a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a good experience online,” it really means “We are trying to screw up traffic of high-bandwidth users in a non-obvious way so we don't have to make expensive upgrades or engage in in obvious metered pricing.” As I have written before, cable operators in particular face network capacity constraints because of the way they constructed their systems. So they are allowed to advertise their “always on, all you can eat” speed based on certain theoretical assumptions about network usage that are increasingly unrealistic.

Comcast's basic problem here is it wants it both ways. It wants to advertise all you can eat connections of the highest speed — because that sells so much better than alternatives like metered pricing or explicit bandwidth caps. But it doesn't want to deal with the consequences of the user behavior this sort of advertising generates. i.e., people using their Comcast connection all the time and expecting the advertised speed. Nor does Comcast want to deal with this the traditional way, by spending the money to build more capacity, then charging a higher price for the new “top speed.” Comcast, like any other profit-maximizing firm, would prefer to avoid expenditures and, if it must spend money to gain revenue, would prefer to minimize expenses and maximize revenue. Inserting reset packets to degrade the reliability of BitTorrent, and therefore discourage its use overall, is much cheaper than upgrading from existing hybrid-fiber-coax to fiber. So, as I predicted over a year and a half ago Comcast makes the logical choice and degrades traffic that eats bandwidth rather than pay to upgrade.

Link (Thanks, Ken!)

See also:
How the AP busted Comcast for blocking BitTorrent
Comcast actively blocks P2P traffic

Flickr user Cog_nate got into the Hallowe'en spirit by using a pumpkin as a brewing vessel, documenting the process in a Flickr set. Link (Thanks, Tamara!)

Joe sez, "The machinima animation Bloodspell has now been edited into a feature length 'film' which can be downloaded or streamed. Hugh Hancock tells me it is a fresh cut of the whole tale in one film, with some new footage and soundscape added in too."

Bloodspell is the first feature-length machinima film, made entirely with a game-engine, and it's a pioneering and important start for a new industry. Well worth a look! Link (Thanks, Joe!)

Bob Truby is a dedicated pencil collector. His online gallery features thousands of pencils from more than 100 different pencil brands. From Bob's welcome message:

As both an art teacher and a pencil collector, I desire this site to be a visual encounter with the incredibly diverse world of brand name pencils. I hope you will be amazed at the scheer number of pencil brands once produced in the USA and abroad. Sadly those days are over and the craftsmanship, skill and pride once put into the ordinary pencil is but a thing of the past. This site salutes two USA Pencil Companies: General and the Musgrave Pencil Companies for their continued efforts to supply our basic writing needs.

Link (via Drawn!)

In today's episode of Boing Boing tv...

Xeni talks to the filmmakers behind King Corn, a new documentary about the corn industry. And royalty of another kind - Count Smokula!

Video Link.

Image: an IBM 360 computer from 1968 Seymour Cray's CDC 6600, from 1964. From an image gallery found on a Russian website: Link. All the text is in Cyrillic, I'm afraid I can't figure out who to credit. (thanks, WayneCo!)

Update: D'oh! I've been haaaad! Looks like the gallery is all ripped from the book Core Memory, which Pesco blogged here previously: Link. Apols.

An engineer using a 240-megapixel scanner he invented has uncovered the painted history of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, including some of the artist's original sketch lines, faded parts of the image, and what may have been the original colors. The results of Pascal Cotte's research are now being shown as part of the Da Vinci: Exhibition of Genius exhibition at San Francisco's Metreon. From the Associated Press:

Using sensors to detect light from both the visible spectrum and the infrared and ultraviolet ranges invisible to the human eye, Cotte said, his camera allowed him to make these and other findings:

* Da Vinci changed his mind about the position of two fingers on the subject's left hand.

* Her face was originally wider and the smile more expressive than Da Vinci ultimately painted them.

* She holds a blanket that has all but faded from view today.

Link (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!)

Previously on BB:
• Mona Lisa's voice? Link
• Mona Lisa made from computer parts Link

Sean Bonner points to an amazing cache of radio show recordings and photos by Glen E. Friedman which feature the Beastie Boys, some 20 years ago, back when they were considered a hardcore punk band. Link. Awwwwww B-E-A-S-T-I-E! (Photo © Glen E. Friedman.)

I think Patty Limerick's "pedestrian diet and exercise plan" makes a lot of sense. In short, it's got two parts: "Part One: Walk as much as you can. Part Two: Eat all the time. Never go hungry on the Pedestrian Diet."

Never go hungry. Eat whenever the impulse strikes. Eat everything you can find in the way of apples, bananas, oranges, grapefruit, strawberries, blueberries, grapes, watermelon, cantaloupe, peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, pineapple, and I have probably left out several fun and appealing fruits. Reduce the obstacles presented by the seeming hassle of preparation: every day or two, put ten minutes into cutting apples in quarters, washing grapes and strawberries, etc., and storing them in the refrigerator for easy access, so that not a second will pass between feeling hungry–and eating! Nothing can count as “forbidden fruit” on the Limerick Pedestrian Diet. On the contrary, as you settle into these new habits, fruit will become more and more astonishing in its power to knock your taste buds for a loop, almost overpowering the unleashing of endorphins as a good time.

Same for vegetables: asparagus, broccoli, or zucchini with feta cheese can taste like a gourmet meal. Eat enough salads well-stocked with cucumbers, celery, bell peppers, carrots, mushrooms, lettuce, and arrgula, and you are well-installed on the high-ground. Thus you are free to indulge in any salad supplement like olives, avocado, artichoke hearts, anchovies, smoked salmon, slices of roast turkey or beef. You do not, in other words, have to become a vegetarian (although it is always an interesting fact to contemplate, that it takes seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat). Perhaps most important, do not hold back on the salad dressing. Dump it on. Do not ask for the dressing to be brought on the side, and do not dribble out a drop or two on an otherwise graceless salad. Once again, dump it on. If you are eating a salad, you have made the fundamental commitment to eating a plate filled with lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, carrots, etc. (really, when you think about the make-up of these items, you are lunching on a big bowl of water with a little fiber thrown in), and no one (not even you yourself) has any right to punish you by withholding the salad dressing.

Link

Kirsten Anderson, the owner of Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, explains the difference between the Lobrow and Pop Surrealism art movements. From an interview in My Art Space.

When I first got involved with this movement a decade ago it was called "Lowbrow". That term was used by Robert Williams to describe his own work and the work of the artists who sort of orbited him. It was meant tongue-in-cheek, but also it stayed in usage because it unapologetically stated that this art was not trying to appeal to overly academic art critics. At the time, I think people involved knew something big was happening but the prospect of this work (with the exception of Robert Williams) ever appearing in museums or scholarly treatises seemed very remote. Now that is very different, this whole scene has become a whole different animal so to speak.

In the late 90's the scene was small and mostly confined to Southern California. Juxtapoz magazine was in circulation and really helped shape what was starting coalesce as a "movement". Juxtapoz focused on figurative and narrative art with a big dose of cartoony freak appeal, but they also celebrated artists who were outstandingly technically proficient, whether that meant an underground cartoonist or someone like Mati Klarwein or Ernst Fuchs. Being unshackled from what everyone else thought was pretty liberating and allowed a lot of room for artists to work within. Out of this scene came artists like Mark Ryden, Camille Rose Garcia, Glenn Barr, Liz McGrath, Shag, Tod Schorr, and Tim Biskup- all of whom are wildly different yet share some undefinable something that links them. That undefinability has been the main problem with "naming" this scene.

Link

More than 90% of the Writers Guild of America's voting members have opted to approve a strike. This means that the WGA can, and may, call a strike at any time. Link to a Hollywood Reporter item.

It's well-understood that such a move would have a major impact on conventional entertainment productions -- movies and television. But the strike rules contain clauses that would also affect writers working on (or pitching, or negotiating) projects for the web or mobile platforms. The guild wants more pay for content distributed in "new" media.

The Rules prohibit writing services performed for a struck company in connection with new programming intended for initial viewing on non-traditional media (such as the Internet and cellular telephones), and the option or sale of literary material for that purpose.

Link to full text of WGA strike rules. I don't know what everyone's so upset about. A labor strike would ensure more quality reality programming on TV, and everyone knows that is good for America. Baby Borrowers, Rock Star INXS, and Fat March FTW!!! Come to think of it, I might just go pitch a show called "America's Amazing Top Fat Kid's Model Ultimate Race Nation Not to Wear Dance." (Thanks, Gus!).

Speaking of labor strikes and mobile devices, some NYC cabbies are now on strike in part because they're pissed about location-tracking GPS units. Link.

Information R/evolution is the latest short film from Michael Wesch, whose earlier moving video "The Machine is Us/ing Us" explained why Web 2.0 mattered in s few deft and vivid strokes. Information R/evolution is Wesch's take on information management and categorization in the age of the Internet -- his view of the Everything is Miscellaneous question, and it draws heavily from both Weinberger and Shirky's work. This is a gloriously optimistic video about our collective power to make sense of the world in a way never dreamt of in the days of paper organization. Link (via Netzoo)

See also: Web 2.0 explained in a short, moving video

Nick sez, "Famous Italian anti-government campaigner and blogger Beppe Grillo describes a proposed new Italian law which would force all bloggers to register, pay tax and be regulated by a government body."

Ricardo Franco Levi, Prodi’s right hand man , undersecretary to the President of the Council, has written the text to put a stopper in the mouth of the Internet. The draft law was approved by the Council of Ministers on 12 October. No Minister dissociated themselves from it. On gagging information, very quietly, these are all in agreement.

The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.

Link (Thanks, Nick!)