COOP is now issuing limited edition vivid Giclee prints. These beauts are signed and numbered in editions of 50 for just $100 each. Whatabargain! (Also coming in the next week, a very special COOP/Boing Boing collaboration!) Link

A TV crew from the show Destination Truth claims that they've found what could be Yeti footprints in Nepal's Everest region. They've taken castings of the three prints and plan to have scientists examine them. From the BBC News:

A Nepalese member of the team spotted three footprints and alerted (Destination Truth's Josh) Gates, who told the BBC the first print was a "pristine" right paw mark, 33 cm (13 inches) long, with five toes in a wide spread of 25 cm.

There was also a heel print and another fainter one.

An excited Mr Gates described the main footprint as anthropomorphic, meaning it had human characteristics.

He said he did not believe the prints were man-made or that they came from a known animal such as a bear.

But he also said he was not sure he believed in the Yeti, and did not know what to make of it.

Link (Thanks, Chris Courtney!)

UPDATE: In the discussion, Noen kindly points out that Loren Coleman's Cryptomundo post includes a photo of the track cast. Link

UPDATE: Loren Coleman has posted about why he's almost certain that the photograph referenced in the update above is most likely a stock photo and not from any Nepalese Yeti at all. Link

UPDATE: Or perhaps it actually is a photo of the new cast. Link

Kathryn sez, "My kids and I attended the New York Botanical Garden's Member's Evening last night and took in their holiday train show which features 140 New York landmark structures as rendered using natural materials. I thought Boing Boing readers would get a kick out of this pic of the Guggenheim Museum as rendered in tree fungus." Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)

In a highly amusing post, Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson annotates a magazine subscription notice under the title, "When is my industry going to stop lying?" Chris points out the innumerable lies that make up the average sub card.

As you have no doubt guessed:

* there is no such thing as a "special courtesy rate"
* "guaranteed savings" is a meaningless phrase (and indeed you can often find magazine subscriptions cheaper through an agent--check eBay--or a credit card loyalty program)
* it makes no difference if you reply by the "reply by" date
* "statement of benefits itemization" are just empty words meant to invoke an invoice
* all those "free" or "included" things are just the regular content that's in the mag for everyone.

Link

Tony sez, "This week, Deutsche Grammophon, the classical music recording giant that's owned by Universal Music Group, launched its own DRM-free online music store. Peter, of the most excellent createdigitalmusic.com, interviewed Jonathan Gruber, VP New Media, Classics & Jazz, Universal Music Group International about the launch."

# The store is truly international: No, really international. Not the US and Canada international. The store will sell to 42 countries, and will extend to Southeast Asia including China, India, Latin America, South Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe including Russia. Two words: 'bout time.

# There's real variety: In a genre badly abandoned by an entire industry recently -- long before Napster, in fact -- DG has put up a serious catalog. And in a big change, instead of publishing a subset of their current catalog, they've actually re-released "out-of-print" albums. Lest you think I'm shilling for UMG, they've released a couple of my personal faves I only had access to on vinyl, and made contemporary music far more accessible.

The terms and conditions are kind of a mess here. On the one hand, the terms say (i) that this is a purchase, not a mere license, so the file becomes your property and (iii) that you're basically only expected to obey copyright law, not a bunch of made-up rules that Universal has imposed on you as a condition of selling you the music.

But on the other hand, you "agree" (iii, iv) that this is only for personal use without any right to redistribute (sell, loan, give away) the files, which are all rights that you get under copyright. Link (Thanks, Tony!)

The Creative Commons licenses turn five years old in December and they're having parties all over the world to celebrate! The main one, in San Francisco, is on Dec 15 from 10PM to 2AM, at the Terra Gallery at 511 Harrison Street.

My first novel was the first book released under a CC license, which means that my novel-writing career is turning five in January. Time sure flies! Link

Purrcast is a soothing little podcast that consists solely of the sound of cats purring. The website includes biographical information on each feline purr-former. Link.

Image ganked from Lazy Lightning's Flickr stream. (Thanks, beezers)

- todd hido
- sara hobbs
- mused
- artcoup
- city shrinker
- cowscapes
- a plat venture
- postcard polaroid
- flickrvision
- deleted images

previously on web zen:
- photo zen 2006 pt. 2
- photo zen 2006 pt. 1

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

The Smoking Gun reveals the identify of the director of "2 Girls, 1 Cup," the internet's latest shock-meme. 2G1C's director is a Brazilian named Marco Fiorito. The 36-year-old from Sao Paulo describes himself as a "compulsive fetishist" and "an artist in the art of movie making." He started a porn production company with his wife in the mid-'90s, focusing at first on foot fetish films:

While Fiorito contends that his revolting films are not illegal in Brazil, some of his works have been branded obscene by U.S. prosecutors and led last year to the indictment of Danilo Croce, a Brazilian lawyer who lived in Florida and was listed on corporate documents as an officer of a company distributing Fiorito's films.

In his legal declaration, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fiorito contended that Croce, 43, had no role in his movie business, other than helping to process credit card transactions through a travel company the attorney owned. In June, Croce, who cooperated with investigators, copped a plea and was later sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation (since he was returning to Brazil) and ordered to forfeit $98,000.

In his declaration, Fiorito explained that had he known that selling his films in the U.S. was illegal, "I would have stopped because the money is not the main reason that I make these films." He then added, "I have already made fetish movies with scat/feces using chocolate instead of feces. Many actors make scat films but they don't agree to eat feces."

Link to court filings at The Smoking Gun (8 pages).

See also this essay by internet security expert Adam J. O'Donnell: Security Implications of "Two Chicks, One Cup": not a joke. Snip:

Websites have started sprouting up that claim to host the video, but actually host malware. If you attempt to search for either "Two Chicks(Girls), One Cup" or "Two Chicks(Girls), One Finger", you may end up at malware sites likes these. This is similar to the codec attacks recently described by Sunbelt Software. I am concerned that... I can't believe I am writing this... security vendors will be loathe to post warnings regarding malicious versions of the content because the content itself is so wretched.

Link.

(Image from andrewc; Thanks, Oxblood Ruffin, Jake Appelbaum, and Jota)

Previously on Boing Boing:

Two Girls 1 Cup: a grandmother reacts.

Film review: 2 Girls One Cup

India's Tehelka has an excellent article on the history and state of Indian science fiction:

It all began in 19th century Bengal. The first example of modern Indian SF was probably a Bengali story, Shukra Bhraman or ‘Travels to Venus’, by Jagananda Roy in 1879. Or, depending on your perspective, much before that. “Science Fiction has been a part of Indian literature since the Puranas and the Mahabharata,” says MH Srinarahari, General Secretary of the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies (IASFS). “There was the palace of wax made by the Kauravas and Ram faced Mrigmarichika, which was nothing but an illusion.”...

INDIAN SF also often comes with a moral message. “It should have a social purpose,” says Srinarahari. “If a writer is speaking of an imaginary world or change in his environ, how can he cope with it? Reading about it will educate a person.” Deshpande agrees. “There has to be a mission,” he says. In his story, the protagonist dreams that a bacteria is speaking to him, saying that increasingly powerful antibiotics are not the way to get rid of pathogenic bacteria. Peaceful coexistence between humans and the bacteria is the need of the hour. The subtext here, says Deshpande, is about nuclear weapons and terrorists.

Link (Thanks, Partha!)

Amazon sells uranium ore, "in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations." $23 a throw. Link (via Making Light)

Ashley Hope paints from crime scene photos. The images in this gallery depict murders of women. Snip from artist's statement:

There are certain moments in life when one experiences space and time to an excruciating degree. There are seconds -- fleeting, momentous seconds -- when the world seems relentlessly clear, and the very nature of existence graspable. When the moment passes, you think to yourself, "My God, I just saw it. It. The truth. What was it?" Although you are unable to define, the sensation of knowing stays with you. Most likely, the Real cannot be set in words, it is beyond words. Human tragedy is almost always accompanied by that glimpse of the Real.

Link to her website. Image: Laundry, 4' x 5', oil on panel, 2007. A debut solo exhibition is currently on display at New York's Tilton Gallery. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin, via rileydog)

I'm fanatical about Rolling Stone Cover to Cover: The First 40 Years. It's got every issue on three DVDs and works with Windows and Mac.

Once you install the reader application, searches are fast. They're even faster if you copy the DVDs to your internal hard drive. (You're not allowed to copy them to an external hard drive, which is a bummer, because I have a 100 GB external hard drive that is just waiting to be filled with something like this.) The first disc contains the print run from 1967 to 1983, which is pretty much all I care about, so I copied that one over to my internal drive.

It's fun to search on terms to see when they first appeared in Rolling Stone. "Punk Rock" made its debut in 1973 (though it was about garage punk, not the punk rock that began in 1975). An October 1977 article by Charley Walters called "Punk: Pretty Vacant Music" is the first to mention The Clash. (Walters has good things to say about The Clash, but dismisses punk rock music in general as "overly simplistic and rudimentary. It's also not very good.")

Hunter S. Thompson's first article for Rolling Stone (October 1970) is an exuberant, drug-fueled 12,000 word account of his nearly-successful run for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado.

The magazine got its first taste of MDMA on Decemeber 19, 1985 in Gary Wolf's article "Don't Get Wasted, Get Smart!" in 1991 P.J. O'Rourke's "Tune In. Turn On. Go to the Office Late on Monday." (Thanks, Jack!)

Boing Boing didn't show up until February 22, 2007 ("a must click resource for budding futurists since it broke news of the Segway personal transport in 2001").

It's also fun to simply browse through the early issues and admire its zine-like design.

I'm still just beginning to understand the awesomeness of having a searchable complete run of Rolling Stone at my fingertips. If I'm not answering my email or phone calls, you'll know why. Link

John Gaeta, the Oscar-winning special effects guru behind The Matrix trilogy and the forthcoming Speed Racer film, just told me about one of his favorite online hangouts: VRMAG. It's an online magazine about virtual reality in all its forms including, as John describes it, "interactive photography and explorable documentary art." Prematurely hyped during the cyberdelic 90s hysteria, virtual reality has actually progressed in amazing ways as an art form. VRMAG isn't just a technical publication for folks in the biz like Gaeta, but it's also an online gallery for some stunning VR experiences. The new issue features a look inside the closed zone of Chernobyl, Red Square, Mayan ruins, a pill's eye-view from a medicine bottle, the scene inside a washing machine, and many more articles and experiences. (Image above from Aldo Hoeben's "To Be In A Bubble Party At Sziget 2007.") Here's what John Gaeta says about VR MAG:

I have been inspired especially in the last couple years by the effort the magazine is making and have referenced many articles while making Speed Racer...which will be a nearly 100% GREEN SCREEN movie (like 300 and Sin City on crack) with many virtual sets created with HD QTVR locations...something that many VRMAG contributors are converging toward. I also think there is a new entertainment medium under way which will be manifested through some of the experiments reported by them.

Link (Thanks John Battelle for the intro!)

WFMU has mp3 files of the late humorist Roger Price's album, Roger and Over. Price was the author of several humor books as well as the classic critique on dumb culture -The Great Roob Revolution.

I was fortunate to become friends with Roger Price in his later years, and fondly remember his encouragement when Carla and I were publishing the print version of bOING bOING.

Roger Price is my favorite forgotten comic, though this album may only give you the slightest idea why. Mr. Price is the self-same Price who co-created Mad Libs with Leonard Stern, and is therefore the Price in Price/Stern/Sloan (or pss!) – but that's not why, either. He also wrote for Bob Hope, Harvey Kurtzman's Mad and Steve Allen's Tonight Show, but that's also not why.

In the early 1950s, Roger Price invented the Droodle. That's why.

More specifically, Roger Price is aces with me because of the two collections of Droodles published by pss! – a little red book called "Droodles" and a little green book called "Oodles of Droodles" (formerly "Droodles #2"). I've had them since I was very young, and they were a major force in shaping my sense of humor. It's not the Droodles themselves so much, though they were certainly amusing and clever, as the commentary beneath them, which would often be ambling monologues only tangentially related to the picture above. Check out the "Crookshank" essay on the back of the "Roger and Over" record jacket for a sample of what I'm talking about.

Link

eBoy, the art collective that designed the Boing Boing logo, has created several styles of beautiful giftwrap, which you can purchase from the eBoy site. Link

Article in the Telegraph reports on scientists' thoughts on the idea that the life of the universe might come to an end sooner because people are studying it.

New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have provided evidence that the universe may ultimately decay by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have determined that the cosmos is in a state when it was more likely to end. "Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may provide evidence that the universe will ultimately decay," says Prof Krauss.

Link (Via TDG)

The Independent reports that prosecutors in Turkey may charge the Turkish publisher of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion with the crime of "insulting believers." He could get up to a year in prison.

Richard Dawkins' best-selling atheist manifesto The God Delusion was at the centre of a growing row over religious tolerance yesterday after the Turkish publishers of his book were threatened with legal action by prosecutors who accuse it of 'insulting believers'.

Erol Karaaslan, the founder of the small publishing house Kuzey Publications, could face between six months and a year in jail for "inciting hatred and enmity" if Istanbul prosecutors decide to press charges over the book, which has sold 6000 copies in Turkey since it was published this summer.

Link (Via TDG)

The designers at New Zealand's Unit Seven created this New Brainland Map that visualizes and, er, maps out various neural regions. They used a reference photo of a human brain to model the 3D terrain. Computer wallpapers of the image are free and large color prints on silk paper are available for US$15-US$70 depending on the size. From the project page:

This digital elevation model was then used to create contour line data, relief shading and to plan where the roads and features should be placed for map compilation. Real New Zealand public domain data was then added for the surrounding islands.

Link (Thanks, Mike Love!)

The object of this simple game is to click on the light colored dots to create a barrier that prevents the kitty from getting away. Each time you click on a dot, the kitty gets to move from one dot to another.

Link (Via Neatorama)

VB says:

We have recently started a weblog of images of various Owls and Owl-related human cultural representations, with minimal commentary. This project began as a casual parody of the contemporary art-scene weblog www.VVORK.com.

Of possible interest is where the links tend to go:

Laibach parody

Canned Heat

Auto parts distribution database

Astronomy Student Photography

Luftwaffe production politics

How to properly dispose of old Owl costumes

FBI's spy network

Ookpik amputation

Link

Video of a home-made bike that lets you can spin while you ride. Link

This guy is asking you to send him pennies minted in 1968. He will add it to his collection of other 1968 pennies and put you name on the contributors' list. The current total is 9,887 pennies.

Won't you please help him in this worthy endeavor?

The 1968 penny collection began on September 27th, 1999 with just a single 1968 penny, and over the years it has steadily grown both in size and the number of contributors.

The goal of this website is to keep the collection growing indefinitely by soliciting 1968 pennies from as many people as possible. This is a group effort.

Everybody who contributes pennies to the 1968 penny collection will be featured on this website.

Quality and condition of pennies is unimportant, as all certifiable 1968 pennies (whether uncirculated & shiny, or well-worn & grimy) are accepted and added to the collection equally.

All pennies are 100% 1968 guaranteed, and this collection is never to be cashed in, as its value as a collector's item is greater than its monetary value.

Of the 4,858,503,583 pennies minted in 1968, an untold number have been forever lost to history, which is why it is important to save the remaining 1968 pennies NOW while they are still relatively easy to find. If every American donated just one 1968 penny, the collection would number in the hundreds of millions.

Link

Craig sends in this "video of Charlie Stross's visit to Google's headquarters where he gave a reading of his book, 'Halting State'." Halting State -- a novel about a heist in a multiplayer online role-playing game -- is one hell of a fantastic book and Charlie's a GREAT reader. Link (Thanks, Craig!)

See also:
Charlie Stross's Halting State: Heist novel about an MMORPG
Opening chapters of Charlie Stross's "Halting State"

Glyn sez,

If you're in the UK, please help petition the Prime Minister to abandon plans to create the Information Sharing Index, a national database of all children between birth and eighteen.

How many parents are aware that the DfES is planning a huge national database of every child in the UK? As well as their names and addresses, it will also hold parent's contact details and the name and contact details of every education, health and social care practitioner that children come into contact with. At this stage we don't know exactly who will be able to access that information, but the plan is that practitioners will be able to contact each other to share information without parental consent. Parents will no longer have the right to act as gatekeeper and your child's privacy and the right to withhold information about their education, health and social welfare will be lost completely. Remember, this will effect every child, not just children deemed to be 'at risk'. Could this be a national identity scheme by the back door? Once a child has been given a unique ID in a database such as this, how easy will it be for the Government to keep that ID after the age of 18?

And in all the protest about Contactpoint, let's hope that the other national database, eCAF, doesn't quietly slip through. A national system containing the in-depth personal assessments of 50% of children is even more dangerous.

If you're intrested in these types of issues in the UK you should check out the Open Rights Group.

Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

Austrian tech-art-pranksters Monochrom show us how to hack into the human brain using a vintage calculator, duct tape, a USB drive, and some pickled onions (preferably Romanian). Then, Mark shows us how to make a very simple motor -- another fun project from scitoys.com.

Link to video for this episode, and full text of blog post with comments.

See also: BBtv: Monochrom's love song for Lessig

Jason Thomas of Red Rocket Farm and nerdcore rapper MC Frontalot have just released their video for his latest single, "Bizarro Genius Baby." This is one of my favorite tracks off the last Frontalot album, and the video is awesome. Link (Thanks, Frontalot!)

See also:
Video for Frontalot's nerdcore song about Zork
New MC Frontalot nerdcore album
MC Frontalot: Nerdcore rapper

The Board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has reinstated Andrew Burt as chairman of its copyright committee, despite the recommendations of the group that was chartered to investigate SFWA's work on copyright in the wake of August's illegal and damaging campaign against the text-hosting site Scribd.

Last August, Andrew Burt, the vice president of SFWA, sent a list of thousands of works that he alleged violated the copyrights of Robert Silverberg and the Isaac Asimov estate. This list was compiled by searching the Scribd site for the words "asimov" and "silverberg" and it included my own novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a teacher's guide to great science fiction for young readers, and the entire back-catalog of a science fiction magazine whose editors had placed their work on Scribd. Burt sent an email to Scribd's management in which he said that this list wasn't "idle musing, but a DMCA notice."

In the ensuing debacle, Burt (who's position as SFWA vice president is the result of an uncontested ballot) repeatedly claimed that his list contained "three errors" -- the real number was more like dozens, if not hundreds, of innocents who were accused of being pirates because they had quoted or merely mentioned science fiction writers.

He also singled me out for vilification, suggesting that I had timed my public disclosure of this in order to cause him damage -- I posted the information as soon as I had all the facts, in the middle of the afternoon at the World Science Fiction Convention, after taking the time to talk it over with many fellow writers, including fellow past officers of the organization (I am the former Canadian Director of SFWA). Burt persists to this day in claiming that I posted "at midnight on a holiday weekend," a gross mischaracterization that's as absurd as the claim that "only three works" were misidentified by his notice.

Burt's copyright projects for SFWA have been controversial and divisive. He created a push-poll that attempted to convince the membership to stop Amazon from indexing their books; he created a non-working system for poisoning ebooks and ruining the download experience and then patented it, in his name, at the organization's expense (he has promised to return the money); he helped create a loyalty oath in which members were told to swear to "respect patents and trademarks" and so on.

SFWA's response to Burt's embarrassing and damaging negligence in the Scribd matter was to dissolve the "E-Piracy Committee" that Burt had chaired and to charter a new committee to investigate better ways for the organization to grapple with copyright. That committee was chaired by John Scalzi, whom I respect and like. I declined to work on the committee, however, as I was skeptical that it would make progress , given that Burt was to have a seat on it. Update: John Scalzi clarifies in the comments below, "the committee of which I was the chair did not have Andrew Burt on it; I would not have participated on it if it had, for the reason that having him being the committee would not have been useful."

The committee returned its recommendations to the SFWA board and included (in the words of committee member Charlie Stross) "[a] further recommendation was discussed...brought to the attention of the president of SFWA via a back channel...at all costs, Andrew Burt must be kept the hell away from the copyright committee. In view of his earlier activities, his appointment to it would automatically destroy any credibility the new body would have."

Stross has posted an angry public denunciation of the Board's response to these recommendations -- specifically, the Board's decision to reinstate Burt as chairman of the renamed Copyright Committee. One commenter has pointed out that Burt got to vote for himself in the Board's deliberations, and did not recuse himself on the basis of a conflict on interest.

John Scalzi has also posted on the matter, in less heated voice, but with equal definitiveness: dissolving the E-Piracy Committee and replacing it with a new committee with the same chairman is not an effective resolution to SFWA's problems with copyright.

Stross feels that the Board's reinstatement of Burt was a betrayal of the committee members who volunteered to work on a new direction for the organization on copyright. I believe he's right.

To say that this is a fuckwitted decision is an understatement. Under Dr Burt, the new copyright committee will almost inevitably devolve into a reincarnation of the old piracy committee. If I thought it'd do any good I'd be resigning in protest right now; only the expense of a life membership purchased a couple of years ago is restraining me right now. Clearly the current executive of SFWA is making damaging decisions and ignoring input from committees it appointed, and and in view of this I call on SFWA president Mike Capobianco and the rest of the SFWA executive — including Andrew Burt — to resign immediately. Meanwhile, I'd like to call on all other SFWA members who don't want to see their organization commit public relations suicide to make their voices heard.

As for my own role in the affair, I consider this to be a betrayal of trust. I've been used as a stalking-horse to legitimize a process I absolutely despise; I've put in a fair amount of work on a project that was clearly intended as a distraction and which has now been set aside and ignored by the man who commissioned it. I will not forget this — and the current SFWA executive should consider that cozening and lying to their own members is not usually considered best practice for representing the members' best interests.

Link to Charlie Stross's post, Link to John Scalzi's post

See also:
Science Fiction Writers of America abuses the DMCA
Why writers should stop worrying about "ebook piracy"

Wael Abbas is an award-winning blogger in Egypt whose work documenting human rights violations through online video has been blogged here on BB before.

Wael claims that his YouTube account, with which he has posted more than a hundred videos of alleged police abuse, has been terminated over complains the clips contain "inappropriate material."

Abbas said YouTube sent him an e-mail saying they had suspended his account. "They didn't ask me to remove it. They said 'Your account isn't working,' " he said. When asked about Abbas, a YouTube spokesperson said, "We take these matters very seriously, but we don't comment on individual videos."

YouTube regulations state that "graphic or gratuitous violence" is not allowed and violations of the Terms of Use could result in the ending of an account and deleting all of the videos in it.

Link to CNN account.

Snip from related item at Foreign Policy blog:

There are plenty of other video-sharing sites and third-party tools out there for posting viral videos, but Abbas says he's lost his entire archive, the fruit of years of painstaking work. Also this month, Yahoo! accused Abbas of spamming and shut down two e-mail accounts of his.

Link. Here's the post on Wael's blog about the suspension of his Yahoo email account: Link. (Thanks, Rafe)

Previously: Supporters Work to Free Egyptian Blogger

Drawn! ran Meomi's fabulous designs for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic mascots. They just need to add a 'frop pipe in that Yeti's mouth and all will be good.

Leave it to Canada to have a cryptozoological beastie like a sasquatch as its Olympic mascot. Earlier today Vancouver 2010 unveiled their Olympic and Paralympic mascots: Quatchi the Sasquatch, Miga the Sea Bear, and Sumi the Thunderbird.

Link (Thanks, Scott!)

Boing Boing reader: Recalibrate thyself. One unicorn, one cup. Link, By Ape Lad.

Continuing in BoingBoing's ongoing exploration of highbrow internet cinema, I now present to you a reaction video of some guy's poor grandma seeing the German New Wave classic "Zwei Mädchen eine Tasse" for the first time.

Clearly, she is overwhelmed by the heady metaphysical influence of Fassbinder and Herzog evidenced in this masterwork, which treats its characters in a scope of almost Wagnerian breadth.

Link. (thanks, Jason, and Teapunk!)

Previously:

Film review: 2 Girls One Cup

Webby Awards: Most Influential Online Videos of All Time

(Warning: This is my serious voice now. The reason I will never link directly to the shock video referenced in the title of this post can best be expressed in this equation from BB reader Ivan: 2Girls_1Cup = Goatse * TubGirl / White_Unicorns).

Update: Here's a t-shirt idea for fans of this cinematic great from Flickr user Andrewc.

In today's NYT, a feature (with lots of great photos) about folks who build elaborate stereo soundsystems for their bicycles. It's not a new phenomenon, but it's neat to see it treated with such formal examination. Link, and pix here shot for the Times by Tyler Hicks. (thanks, Mark Hurst)

Turkish-born artist Pinar Yolacan, who is based in Brooklyn, is best known for her portraits of ladies wearing clothes fashioned from meat parts (tripe, guts, assorted offal). She has a new show opening today at New York's Rivington Arms gallery. Snip from a Style.com feature:

This time around, the women are Afro-Brazilian, dressed in the style of the Portuguese colonizers, and the organ in question is the placenta of cows. That sounds repulsive, but like Yolacan's earlier photographs, these have a strange and haunting beauty.

She explains why meat is her medium in the Style.com interview...

How, exactly, do you make clothes from meat?

I make the clothes the morning of the shoot, so the meat doesn't rot. In Bahia, I froze it beforehand, so it wouldn't get smelly, because it's really hot. It's quite domestic, really—I have to buy meat, clean up, sew. For this series, I got the fabrics in local markets, and the meat, too. I try to accentuate each woman's skin tone and expression with the clothes; I take Polaroids of them when I first meet them, then I work from those.

Link. (thanks, Susannah Breslin)

OpenRoad.TV, the terrific video travel guide for the American West, joined CRAFT magazine blogger Natalie Zee Drieu and her pooch Lulu as they visited San Francisco's Embarcadero, home to the historic Ferry Building and Claes Oldenburg's huge "Cupid's Span" sculpture. This is the fifth episode in OpenRoad.TV's "Life Outside The Box" series where they're accompanying bloggers to their favorite real world spots. Link

Previously on BB:
• OpenRoad.tv and Pesco visit the Musée Mécanique Link

A reader writes, "South Florida artist, Sarah J. Pierce has lovingly re-created Leisure Suit Larry's ladies as little quilts. They look just like the original computer game girls." Link

The Pencil Bench was designed by Boex 3D Creative Solutions. The seat contains 1600 pencils that can be yanked out for use. I like how much it resembles a bed of nails. Link

Michael Carney, in a Teesside, England, court on charges of being a serial flasher, claimed that there's no way he could be guilty because his penis is so small that he's too embarrassed to show it anyone. The repeat offender was convicted of seven counts of "outraging public decency." From the BBC News:

During the three-day trial the defendant told the court: "It causes embarrassment to myself, even to the point where it is with my wife. I wouldn't want myself to be seen in public like that.

"My genitalia are underdeveloped and it is so much smaller than average."

He showed the jury photographs taken by his wife to prove his claims.

Link (via Fortean Times)

The UK's first SMS service for finding the nearest toilet launched in London today. Just text the word "toilet" and SatLav, run by the Westminster City Council, points you the nearest public toilet. Someone should build a recommendation system on top of that and name it George, after the Seinfeld character who knew the location of every good bathroom in Manhattan. From the Associated Press:

The system, which covers 40 public toilets, pinpoints the caller's position by measuring the strength of the phone signal. The texts cost about 50 cents, and most of Westminster's toilets are free.

The council said it hopes the service will stop people from urinating in alleyways, saying some 10,000 gallons of urine ends up in Westminster streets each year.

Link

Reason's Hit and Run blog reports that a British schoolteacher is will be tried for "blasphemy, inciting hatred, and insulting Islam" because she named a teddy bear Muhammad.

Contrary to reassurances from the Sudanese embassy in London, Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in Khartoum who did not realize naming a teddy bear Muhammad was verboten, has been charged with blasphemy, inciting hatred, and insulting Islam. The possible penalties include a fine, 40 lashes, and six months in jail. The government promises a "swift and fair trial," saying, "she will be brought in front of a judge, and now she must prove her innocence"—which gives you a sense of how the court system works in Sudan. Gibbons' lawyer says the defense will be straightforward: She had "absolutely no intention to insult religion, and for blasphemy to take place there must be an insult."

Link | Time Online article

Nice Reuters graphic shows the people, animals, and vehicles that travel with the United States President.

(Update: This graphic probably isn't from Reuters, but the numbers match this New Zealand Herald story.) Link

Here's a clip from a Japanese TV show that sends a fake gang of murderous Samurai after the world champion race walker to find out if he will run or walk quickly from the perceived threat. Link

Twenty-two-year-old Felix Kha will be reunited with the marijuana police took from him two and a half years ago, ruled the 4th District Court of Appeal.

Lawyers for Garden Grove said they were not seeking to have the state's medical marijuana laws declared unconstitutional on pre-emptive grounds, but were simply arguing that the city did not want to be in the position of having to return marijuana to a patient once it has been seized -- lawfully under federal law -- by police.

Kha's attorneys argued that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution effectively prohibits federal interference with California's medical marijuana laws, and the three-justice panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal agreed.

The justices found that because, under state law, Kha was lawfully entitled to possess the marijuana, "due process and fundamental fairness dictate that it be returned to him."

The justices said Kha is "nothing more than an aggrieved citizen who is seeking the return of his property."

Link (Via LAist)

Jason Hackenwerth creates massive surreal balloon sculptures that can take more than a week to complete. This bizarre organism was blown and twisted for a gala last year at the New Museum New York. Link to Jason Hackenwerth site, Link to photos of a Hackenwerth installation at a wedding party (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio show Search Engine is soliciting your questions for an interview with Industry Minister Jim Prentice about the upcoming Canadian DMCA legislation, which will give Canada one of the most backwards copyright regimes in the world.

We want to give Canadians one last chance to be heard on this subject before their government moves forward, and that's why we're asking Industry Minister Jim Prentice on to Search Engine, to answer questions posed by you. We have every confidence that when Minister Prentice sees the amount of public concern on this topic, he'll make himself available for a conversation. Submit your questions in the comments.

Link

See also:
Canada's coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
Canadian DMCA: how it might have happened

(Disclosure: I am a paid columnist for Search Engine)

The latest installment of the Hijinks Ensue webcomic dramatises the now-infamous Wired interview with Universal Music CEO Doug Morris in which the scared old man claimed that the record industry had been unable to respond to Napster because they don't understand technology and are too naive to hire a technologist to explain it to them because in their ignorance, they wouldn't be able to tell if s/he was lying. Link (Thanks, Emily!)

See also:
Universal Music CEO: Record industry can't tell when geeks are lying to us about technology Universal Music CEO: iPod owners are thieves

The organizers of last week's "cocktail robotics" festival in Vienna, Austria, the annual "Roboexotica" event, have posted the audio from the lectures in German and English. I gave a talk there called "A Singular Metaphor" in which I tried to delve into the reason that the idea of uploading our minds is so attractive right now. Sean Bonner had a fun talk on user power on sites like Digg called "The inmates have taken over the asylum...," while Jens Ohlig from the Chaos Computer Club proposed that robots should create all literature, David Fine pondered consciousness, and Make Magazine's Bre Pettis gave a talk called "Machines: If you can't beat them, join them," about the utopia of apocalypse. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)

Mark shows us how to make an explosive miniature cannon out of some breath spray and an empty film canister (don't try this at an airport, folks). Then, good foods gone bad -- an excerpt from "Snack Mansion," a short claymation film by Lauren Adolfsen. When the pizza makes out with the cookie and the banana barfs, you know it's a party.

Link to video, BBtv post, and comments.

Vernor Vinge has put the entire text of his magnificent, prescient, mind-alteringly good novel Rainbows End online as a free download. This was one of the best books of 2006, a book that practically defines what "post-cyberpunk" really means: stories about what happens when the world (and not the street) finds its own use for technology. The tech touches -- massive, augmented reality ARGs; adaptive full-body user-interfaces; destructive book-scanners -- are half-predictive, half-allegorical, and entirely provocative. What a treat!

The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for Defense against Disease. On July 23, schoolchildren in Algiers claimed that a respiratory epidemic was spreading across the Mediterranean. The claim was based on clever analysis of antibody data from the mass transit systems of Algiers and Naples.

CDD had no immediate comment, but in less than three hours, public-health hobbyists reported similar results in other cities, complete with contagion maps. The epidemic was at least one week old, probably originating in Central Africa, beyond the scope of hobbyist surveillance.

By the time CDD got its public relations act together, outbreaks had been detected in India and North America. Worse yet, a journalist in Seattle had isolated and identified the infectious agent, which turned out to be a Pseudomimivirus. That was about as embarrassing a twist as the public relations people could imagine: Back in the late 'teens, CDD had justified its enormous budget with a brilliant defense against the New Sunrise cult. The Sunrise Plague had been the second-worst Euro-terror of the decade. Only CDD's leadership had kept the disaster from spreading worldwide.

The Sunrise Plague had been based on a Pseudomimivirus.

Link, Buy Rainbows End (Thanks, Ori!)

See also:
Vernor Vinge on computers, freedom and privacy
Vernor Vinge interview
Vernor Vinge and Cory on the Singularity on NPR

A pair of new Electronic Frontier Foundation reports prove that Comcast is degrading and interfering with BitTorrent, and shows how you can use free software to test your own ISP to see if it is doing the same:

In addition to providing evidence of network interference, the EFF study also explains how Comcast's selective degradation of BitTorrent traffic undermines future Internet innovation. "The Internet has enabled a cascade of innovations precisely because any programmer--whether employed by a huge corporation, a startup, or tinkering at home for fun--has been able to create new protocols and applications that operate over TCP/IP, without having to obtain permission from anyone," the EFF wrote. "Comcast's recent moves threaten to create a situation in which innovators may need to obtain permission and assistance from an ISP in order to guarantee that their protocols will operate correctly. By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are the foundation of the Internet."

The EFF also published a second report (PDF), which provides detailed technical instructions explaining how to use Wireshark to reproduce their study and test for ISP packet injection.

Link

See also:
How the AP busted Comcast for blocking BitTorrent
Why Comcast's BitTorrent-fux0r is bad for quality of service
Comcast also screwing with Gnutella and Lotus Notes (!?!)
Comcast actively blocks P2P traffic
Modest proposal for Comcast's net-filtering