Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: this beautifully horrible mural of the Great Wall of China, fronted with rubber plants, on display in the Bank of China lobby in Dalian, China. Link

Julian Dibbell's released the text of his ground-breaking "My Tiny Life" as a free download through Lulu.com.

Part memoir and part ethnography, My Tiny Life is about the social life of the online, text-based virtual world LambdaMOO and my own brief encounter with it in the early '90s. Andrew Leonard, in Salon, called it “the best book yet on the meaning of online life.”

Link (via Terra Nova)

Michael Geist has come up with a manifesto for the Fair Copyright for Canadians group, which has gone from a standing start to more than 38,000 members in less than two months. His "Principles for Fair Copyright for Canadians" contains seven simple, commonsense statements about what a good Canadian (or any nation's) copyright law should look like. Here's the first three:

Anti-circumvention provisions should be directly linked to copyright infringement. The anti-circumvention provisions have been by far the most controversial element of the proposed reforms. The experience in the United States, where anti-circumvention provisions effectively trump fair use rights, provides the paradigm example of what not do to. It should only be a violation of the law to circumvent a technological protection measure (TPM) if the underlying purpose is to infringe copyright. Circumvention should be permitted to access a work for fair dealing or private copying purposes. This approach - which is similar (though not identical) to the failed Bill C-60 - would allow Canada to implement the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties and avoid some of the negative "unintended consequences" that have arisen under the U.S. law.

No ban on devices that can be used to circumvent a TPM. Canada should not ban devices that can be used to circumvent a TPM. The reason is obvious - if Canadians cannot access the tools necessary to exercise their user rights under the Copyright Act, those rights are effectively extinguished in the digital world. If organizations are permitted to use TPMs to lock down content in a manner that threatens fair dealing, Canadians should have the right to access and use technologies that restores the copyright balance.

Expand the fair dealing provision by establishing "flexible fair dealing." Led by the United States, several countries around the world have established fair use provisions within their copyright laws (Israel being the most recent). The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled that Canada's fair dealing provision must be interpreted in a broad and liberal manner. Yet the law currently includes a limited number of categories (research, private study, criticism, news reporting) that renders everyday activities such as recording television programs acts of infringement. The ideal remedy is to address other categories such as parody, time shifting, and format shifting by making the current list of fair dealing categories illustrative rather than exhaustive.

Link

John Mark sez, "A 500-page steampunk graphic novel wins the American Library Association's 2008 Caldecott award, and the 2008 Newbery award goes to a collection of dramatic monologues and dialogues from over 20 characters in an imaginary 13th century English village. Meanwhile, a bunch of the *older* Newbery awardees, including some that are long out of print, have recently been made freely available online, and we've discovered more that are eligible to go online because their copyrights weren't renewed."

The steampunk graphic novel is The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznik, which tells the story of "an orphan in early-20th-century Paris living inside the walls of a train station, trying to finish an invention left by his father. The ALA Caldecott site says 'the suspenseful text and wordless double-page spreads narrate the tale… which is filled with cinematic intrigue.'" I've just ordered my copy. Link, Invention of Hugo Cabret on Amazon, Link to "Invention of Hugo Cabret" site (Thanks, John Mark!)

Gawker is hosting a controversial Tom Cruise Scientology video that other sites were forced to remove after legal threats from the Church of Scientology. In the Cruise video, high-energy music plays while Cruise gives forth a stream of claims about the powers and responsibilities of people who've been turned into mystical beings by the cult's teachings.

The Church has sent a legal threat to Gawker as well, alleging that hosting the video infringes copyright (amid a host of nonsensical allegations about "receiving stolen property"), but Gawker's refused to take the video down. Instead, they've taken the ballsy stance that this video is posted for the purposes of news reporting and analysis, making it fair use. I hope they stick to their guns. Link to video, Link to legal threats from the Church of Scientology (Thanks, Gareth, Ryan, and Siva!)

Update: All (?) of Tom Cruise's Scientology videos here (for now) -- thanks Xeni!

I love this "Two dimensional vase" -- a cutout of a vase that you lean against a water-glass with a flower in it. Smart idea for small-space living. Link

Larry Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and one of the most important figures in the copyright reform movement, will give his final address on the subject on Jan 31.

Last June, Larry announced that he was switching tacks. The problems of copyright, he said, were a subset of the larger problem of corruption: capture of the regulatory process by special interests to the detriment of society as a whole. So Larry was going to fight corruption instead.

Larry's final talk on the subject is sure to be a barn-burner:

Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and the future of ideas at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium on January 31st, 2008 from 1pm-2pm. After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the world with multi-media presentations that inspired the Free Culture movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and setting his sites on corruption in Washington.

Link

My pal Tim Wu continues to say incredibly smart and simple things about copyright, this time coming up with a great working definition of fair use for the 21st century.

Tim's been debating NBC's chief counsel on a New York Times blog, and they've gotten as far as fair use. Tim busts out a great working definition for fair use that simple enough to understand that it can be reliably followed by casual remixers and users of content, but not so simple as to be idiotic: if it adds new value, it's fair use; if it substitutes for the original, it's infringing.

It's going to take me a while to get my head around the implications of this -- questions like how complex it will be to adjudicate "substitution" are thorny indeed ("I have a store where I sell licenses to move your DVDs to your iPod; your DVD-ripper substitutes for my product."). But if we expect the general public to abide by some kind of copyright system, it had better be one that's simpler and more streamlined than the current system, which has been described as incomprehensible even by its most renowned scholars.

That’s why it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines: no one (well, nearly no one) would watch Mel Brook’s Spaceballs as a substitute for Star Wars; a book review is no substitute for reading The Naked and the Dead. They are complements to the original work, not substitutes, and that makes all the difference.

This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web. Fan guides like the Harry Potter Lexicon or Lostpedia are not substitutes for reading the book or watching the show, and that should be the end of the legal questions surrounding them. The same goes for reasonable tribute videos like this great Guyz Nite tribute to “Die Hard.” On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.

We must never forget that copyright is about authorship; and secondary authors, while never as famous as the original authors, deserve some respect. Fixing fair use is one way to give them that.

Link (via /.)

See also: Why JK Rowling will lose her suit against The Harry Potter Lexicon

Each year, a string of Yuri’s Night World Space Parties around the globe celebrate humankind’s first foray into space. That first human was Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. The events are a lot of fun (I hosted one in Texas, had a blast!), and the 2008 Bay Area edition is calling for artists and scientists -- deadline is February 8.

We’re looking for visionaries of the sciences and arts to join our celebration: artists who love science, scientists who love art, and those who blur the line between all disciplines. Exhibit or demonstrate your works in the spacious NASA hangars or adjoining tarmac and structures. ively for installations, performances and demonstrations.

This is an exciting opportunity for unique collaboration between the science world and the art world. We encourage partnerships between scientific and artistic minds and may be able to assist in partnering.

We are looking for: New installations of all sizes and types, interactive works, sound works, light works, large-scale sculpture, live demonstrations, working models, table top demonstrations, prototypes, new technology, presentations, impromptu lectures, and unique performances from international and local artists. We are also seeking new video works documenting arts, humanities, performances, installations and microgravity works.

Link.

UPDATE: Organizer Matt Hancher (of the NASA/Google Planetary Content Team at NASA Ames) says:

Thanks for posting the Yuri's Night call for proposals to Boing Boing! Unfortunately, the event website doesn't yet have info about how to propose. Anyone who's interested can send email to proposals@worldspaceparty.org to get more info.

Previously:

Yuri's Night: spacemen branded me with Yuri Gagarin's head!

Wei Wenhua was beaten to death after he snapped photos of a confrontation on the street between village residents and authorities. His death has sparked controversy in Chinese media, and the blogosphere:

Wei Wenhua was a model communist and is now a bloggers' hero -- a "citizen journalist" turned martyr. The construction company manager was driving his car when he witnessed an ugly scene: a team of about 50 city inspectors beating villagers who tried to block trucks from unloading trash near their homes.

Wei took out his cell phone and began taking pictures. The city inspectors saw Wei and then attacked him in a beating that lasted five minutes. By the time it was over, the 41-year-old Wei was slumped unconscious. He was rushed to the hospital but was dead on arrival.

Link to CNN report by Jaime FlorCruz, here's an item from the China Media Project, and here's a statement from Reporters Without Borders.

Yesterday here on Boing Boing, I pointed to two new projects about the sex trade from my friend Susannah Breslin: Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls. She says:

In the comments, a reader posted a link to a project in which the artist had turned sex worker stories into comic strips. That artist is Peter S. Conrad, a Northern California based writer and artist whose work has appeared in True Porn and will appear in I Saw You: Missed Connection Comics. I dropped Conrad an email about the project. He wrote back and sent the comic I've posted here. I asked him if I could ask him a few questions, and he said yes.

So today, Susannah has posted a short interview with Conrad, and the rest of "Going Back," with larger scans of his work. Link (contains explicit, adult material).

Drawn! has a post about tile art in New York City's transit systems, including Ann Schaumberger's tile piece (seen here) in the Fifth Avenue subway station. A Drawn! commenter even points to a guidebook to transit art in NYC, called Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit, which focuses on works commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Link to Drawn!, Link to buy Along the Way, Link to Arts For Transit

Decio sez, "Some pranksters (caught afterwards by police) threw a half million balls down the Spanish Steps by Holy Trinity in Rome. Like the Bravia commercial, but for real."

Half a million, huh? Who says cheap manufactured goods are bad for society? Link (Thanks, Decio!)

Helion sez, "Good news for goth clothing - darkest ever material created from a forest of nearly totally light-absorbing carbon nanotubes. Dark forest indeed."

A team led by Dr Pulickel Ajayan, who is presently at Rice University in Houston, Texas, built an array of vertically aligned, low-density carbon nanotubes. Dr Shawn Lin measured the optical properties.

The roughness of the material's surface was tuned to minimise its optical reflectance. Experiments showed that this "forest" of carbon nanotubes was very good at absorbing light, and very poor at reflecting it.

None more black! Link (Thanks, Helion!)

(Image: Blue'n'black, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from szeretlek_ma's Flickr stream)

Researchers are developing a new ultrarealistic synthetic skin they hope will be wrapped around next-generation prosthetic arms. Made from a designer polymer peppered with carbon nanotubes, the skin will sense pressure and temperature and, if all goes as planned, deliver the sensations to "remapped" nerve endings on the chest. The research team, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NASA, and the National Institute of Aerospace, aim to have a a 6-square-centimeter swatch of the skin ready by the end of 2009. The work is part of the Department of Defense's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. From IEEE Spectrum:

The DARPA goal is to have an artificial skin that can measure a force as small as 0.1 newton, says NIA’s (Cheol) Park; the nanotube composite is not that sensitive yet. But Park and his colleague Joycelyn Harrison are close to reaching that goal. They are tailoring the material’s properties by changing the concentration of carbon nanotubes and the structure of the polymer matrix. They are also close to achieving the spatial resolution of human nerve cells, which can differentiate between two pinpricks 2 millimeters apart. The polymer composite so far has a resolution of 5 mm.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Sense of touch restored for amputees Link

In honor of NASA's new lunar lander design, the Altair, Air & Space Smithsonian is featuring a fine selection of lunar vehicle designs that never took off. The images and text are from Robert Godwin's "The Lunar Exploration Scrapbook: A Pictorial History of Lunar Vehicles," which sounds like a terrificly fun book to review as we set our sights on a new moon mission. Some of the book's art was culled from original photos, blueprints, and concept drawings while other images were recently rendered based on text descriptions of the machines. Seen here is the Chrysler Corporation's Manned Lunar Auxillary Vehicle (MLAV), a nuclear tricycle.

From the book excerpt in Air & Space:

The MLAV had a cargo tray 23 inches by 41 inches in size, and could be operated with a hand controller either by a riding astronaut or by remote control. A full size prototype was built and tested by Chrysler. The power source for this machine was to have been a SNAP 91 radioisotope thermoelectric generator, although it is not clear where this device would have been located. Other refinements would have included a television camera. The three wheels were tested with brushless DC motors which provided enough torque for its projected mission. Its primary use was as a "pack animal," but it could be used to carry one astronaut if required. The entire vehicle could be folded up flat.

Link to Air & Space, Link to buy The Lunar Exploration Scrapbook

Paleontologists in Uruguay have discovered a rodent that likely weighed a metric ton when it was alive around two million years ago. The researchers estimated the animal's size based on the skull they found that measures 53 centimeters long. From New Scientist:

"Our work suggests that 4 million years ago in South America, 'mice' that were larger than bulls lived with terror birds, sabre-toothed cats, ground sloths, and giant armoured mammals," say the Uruguayan researchers.

Link

Debra Jean Dean has done a wonderful, expertly engineered reading of the US Constitution, one of the most inspiring documents ever penned. The reading is released under a Creative Commons license. Link (Thanks, We The People...!)

(Image: Article II, Section 4, United States Constitution v. SCOTUS Police, Outside the Third Guantanamo Hearing (Washington, DC), a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Takomabibelot's Flickr stream)

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

Bobby (last name witheld for his protection) ordered this pizza when we were at a photoshoot in Hollywood on Monday. The menu listed it as "The Monster." I'm told it was very tasty.

The photic sneeze reflex is what causes many people to sneeze when when suddenly exposed to bright light, for example walking out of a dark movie theater. A third of the population seems to experience this odd phenomenon but scientists don't yet know much about the genetics behind it. From Scientific American:

The genetic culprit remains unidentified, but scientists are starting to take an interest in trying to find out. "I think it's worth doing," says Louis Ptácek, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Ptácek studies episodic disorders such as epilepsy and migraine headaches, and he believes that investigating the photic sneeze reflex could shed light on their related neurology.

Epileptic seizures are sometimes triggered by flashing lights and migraine headaches are often accompanied by photophobia. "If we could find a gene that causes photic sneezing, we could study that gene and we might learn something about the visual pathway and some of these other reflex phenomena," Ptácek says.

Link

David sez, "The Library of Congress is now posting photos at flickr so citizens can tag and describe them."

The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

Link (Thanks, David!)

Crash says:

I noticed that 90% of the noise on BoingBoing comment threads came from 3 of the users, so I wrote myself a little Greasemonkey script that makes specified users disappear from the website like they had never existed. Maybe I should have called it "Winston Smith."

Users who install this script may configure it to ignore whomever they like, and enjoy a BoingBoing experience untroubled by differing points of view.

Link

A Boing Boing reader says: "This a first-person account of a raid that took place at a home poker game on Saturday. About ten officers in riot gear ran in with guns drawn. Afterwards they took the homeowner's 13 year old and put them into child protection services. Apparently an officer went "undercover" for a few months before the raid. The reason for the raid was a $5 food and drinks chip-in, apparently you can't charge any fee, even if you're spending more than that on food and drinks and cards. No one ever contacted the homeowner and warned them not to collect any fee. Anyway, the whole story in the link. It's on a number of other sites too, such as Reason.com"

This account suggests the police hinted to individual players that the hosts may have been cheating or defrauding them, though that's not apparent in the news accounts. Firsthand accounts on poker sites have only good things to say about the hosts. Of course, even if the hosts were cheating, it wouldn't justify a full-on raid, particularly in mid-tournament. The SWAT tactics seem more like intimidation. Raiding in mid-tournament also ensures there's a $1,300 pot to seize for the sheriff department's general fund.

Link

Matt Mason sez, "I've just posted a video of a cut down version of my stump speech on my new book The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, explaining why it's often better to compete with pirates in the market place rather than fight them in the courts, and why we as a society need to reevaluate the ways we think about sharing information."

My copy of this book has been near the top of must-read pile for a couple weeks (unfortunately, it's a big pile) and I can't wait to get to it -- especially after watching Matt's video. Link to video, Link to source files, Link to The Pirate's Dilemma on Amazon (Thanks, Matt!)

Flickr user B_Zedan went on a six-week-long sculpture binge, which she's documented in her Flickr stream. One of her creations is this amazing "Saints of Steampunk": six tiny little saint figures in steampunk garb with clockwork halos. All six fit on a quarter. Link (Thanks, Lea!)

A news anchor for Korea's MBC news was replaced after she giggled at the end of a live newscast.

Frankly, it was just a small giggle... it was inappropriate but not bad enough to cost her the job if it was happening on a common day. Unfortunately though, the headline of the day was a warehouse blast that killed 40 in Icheon; the public was critical of the laughing incident because of the circumstances.

MBC spokesperson has responded that they won’t be reinstating Moon Ji-ae in near future for the news anchor post. Her works on other shows are however not affected at the moment.

Link

Radar Online has a rundown end of the world scenarios, including peak oil, bee colony collapse, supervolcanoes, genetic engineering disasters, bird flu, drought, telomere erosion, and Earth wobble.

UNCOMMON COLDS
Generally speaking, officials at the World Health Organization and the Department of Health and Human Services try to avoid language that might spark a panic. So when experts from both agencies describe a devastating global pandemic as "overdue," it's probably time to pass the zinc supplements. Many scientists consider the most likely outbreak risk to be from H5N1, more commonly known as bird flu. It's not yet easily passed to humans, but 61 percent of those who've been affected have died. Virologists like Dr. Robert Webster, who heads a WHO bird flu research lab, estimate that if the virus mutates, the death toll could be in the billions. Maybe now's a good time to get that cough checked out?

How to Survive: As there's no vaccine readily available, your best bet is to keep your eyes peeled for outbreaks and, like Dr. Webster, stow away three months' worth of food and water.

Link

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

Mike Lorenz says

My wife recently acquired a box full of old TV Week supplements to the Philadelphia Inquirer, those small TV listing magazines for those who were too cheap to buy a TV Guide.

I was browsing the issues when I came across this incredible full-page ad on the back cover of the January 23, 1972 issue.

There are just so many gems on this page, it seems like a joke, but it's really not. "The gun of 1000-and-1 uses", "Dial-a-flame Action", "Clear stairs (except wood)", "So easy even your wife can use it."

If I saw that gal outside her suburban home with a flame gun, I'm not sure whether I'd want to call the police or ask her to marry me.

This Web based drum machine is based on the Roland TR-909.
This drumcomputer hits the market 1984 and was a long time the state of art in house and techno productions. Shift-Click the Step-buttons for accent triggers. Shift-Click-Move knobs for smoother resolution. Press Save to store a snapshot of the current settings to a flash cookie. Restore snapshot by pressing Load. Clear to delete all patterns and reset all knobs. Drag and drop a pattern button (invisible) to copy a pattern to a new location.
Link

The Handpresso marries a bicycle pump with an espresso machine. You pump it up to 16 bars, pop in an espresso pod (ick -- I hate those things), add hot water and hit the release and the water is driven through the ground to make an instant espresso at a picnic, on the road, or wherever (assuming you carry around a thermos full of hot water). Runs about €100, which is the cost of a mid-range home machine -- but I suspect you wouldn't want to replace the kitchen machine with this. Link (via Geekologie)

The current group show at Los Angeles' Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight is a tribute to comics mastermind Stan Lee. The show, "Under The Influence," features work by Travis Louie, Chris Reccardi (top left), Amanda Visell, Monster Factory (top middle), Mark Bodnar, Brandi Milne (top right), and dozens of others. Link

Inspired by Philip K. Dick's alternate history novel The Man In The High Castle, Alejandro Zamudio and his cohorts made an "electroluminescent shirt" that displays hexagrams from the I Ching. To cast a hexagram, the wearer shakes his sleeve. Dave Gill's Total Dick-Head blog has more. (In related news, Gill will be speaking on a panel about "The Multiple Myths of Philip K. Dick" at Harvard's Vericon convention on Saturday, January 26.) Link

My pal Jeff VanderMeer was tapped to write the new Predator novel and what with one thing and another, he found himself with only two months to produce a final draft. He's written up a detailed set of notes from the process explaining how he did it.

I wrote the first draft of Little Brother, the young adult novel I've got coming out in May, in eight weeks exactly, from the day I got the idea to the day I wrote the last word. I was pulling a minimum of 2,000 words a day and had a couple of 10,000 word days (the book is a little over 100,000 words long). It was weird -- the book just wanted to get out -- sometimes, it felt like I was passing a bowling ball. It was exhilarating, but I wouldn't want to write them all that way. I finished the book at 5AM in Rome, while on holiday for my anniversary, having snuck out of bed at 4AM to write. Again: wouldn't wanna write them all that way.

Note that some of this advice adds up to "Write some other novels first so you can do your two-month novel in a measured and confident manner."

(1) Make sure your initial synopsis is detailed enough that you can divide it into chapters when you start the actual writing, and, if possible, make sure at that point that you have a one- or two-line description of the action for a particular chapter or scene. Know going into the writing for a week exactly what each scene is supposed to do and why. If you know that, you will find it is still possible to be highly creative and surprise yourself in the individual scenes. If you don't know that, you will spend most of your creative energy just trying to figure out what should be happening. (UPDATE: Jay Lake notes that if he he knew "exactly what what each scene is supposed to do and why" it wouldn't work for him, so your mileage may vary. Perhaps I should clarify in that I just needed to know the action that would occur, more than anything else.)

(2) Make sure you know what kind of novel you're writing. I know this sounds basic, but be able to say to yourself something along the lines of "I'm writing a relatively fast-paced action-adventure story with a subplot involving espionage and a tragic love relationship." More or less a mission statement. You may vary from it, but being able to on the macro level tell yourself what it is you're trying to do is very useful. You'll note my example did not read "I'm writing a multi-generational saga about a powerful crime family." There are some kinds of novels you cannot write in two months.

(3) Make sure you are using a relatively transparent style. I don't believe it's possible to write a good novel in this limited amount of time if you're using a more baroque, layered style (and by that, I mean styles like the ones I used in the stories in City of Saints). This doesn't mean that you can't have complexity of character and complexity of style, but it has to be a more invisible complexity. The layering process, otherwise, will take too much time. In this case, writing a Predator novel, this would've been my approach anyway.

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Vienna-based art-pranksters monochrom teach us how to "hack the urban context" with campfires, sausages, beer, and an elderly Austrian gentleman who speaks LOL. In the second segment of today's episode, someone constructs a campfire, complete with beer bottles and half-cooked links, right in the middle of the Vienna airport. American kids, don't try this at home unless you want a one-way to Camp X-Ray.

Link to BBtv post with video and comments.

Previously on Boing Boing tv:

Falco Stairs/Fuji Apple

Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial

Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor

Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

In Sept, 1956, Mechanix Illustrated featured these hulking steel shields meant to be deployed to Detroit's riot squad:

WHEELED SHIELD (below) for Detroit cops protects men in blue against rioters and gunmen. Police fire through the portholes.

FLATFOOT VERSION of 65-lb. armored plate protector has spotlight on top, leggings. Portholes are made of bulletproof glass.

Link

Thomas Jaillot, a designer in Paris, is about to launch these "Silver Scissor Cuffs" -- a bracelet that also functions as an eccentrically elliptical pair of scissors. Link (Thanks, San!)