The Bush Administration has finally filled the long-vacant "cyber-security czar" -- with a guy who has no experience with cyber-security (though he seems a decent sort).

By all accounts, Beckstrom is neither a cyber-security expert nor a Washington insider. But his private-sector background and published writings emphasize a decentralized approach to managing large organizations.

Link (via Schneier)

Los Angeles artist Amanda Visell released this gorgeous limited edition metal figure today. Its name is Axephunt. On the back, it says, "I will chop you." Indeed.
Link (Thanks, Gama-Go's Greg Long!)

The supremely talented Coop is working on a new painting, and he's letting his blog readers in on his work process and thoughts. Fascinating stuff. I wish more artists would do this.

This painting has been a particularly strange beast, fighting me every step of the way, and revealing itself in unexpected ways. It is now almost completely different in composition that the day I started to apply paint to canvas, one of the major surprises being the most recent step. The line art that first became a stencil, then this Napthol Crimson overlay, was not part of the original plan at all. Strangest of all, it wasn't until I drew the original drawing of "Lil' Mort," that I realized what the subject of the painting was in the first place. When I realized that it was what it was, everything else fell into place. I felt like a safe cracker, listening through a stethoscope as the tumblers fell behind the steel door, locks clanking open to reveal... what exactly? I still don't know. This painting isn't finished yet, though everyone who has seen it so far seems to think that it is complete. I still have at least two major steps to go, one of which will completely change the way the painting looks right now.

Weird, huh? Strange as it might sound, this is all part and parcel of the creative process, and after 20+ years of doing this for a living, it is the only part that still excites me.

Link

Here's a great, insider account of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's internal process leading up to their decision to put a high-quality torrent of the show Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister online:

Tessa later said that the approval process was like playing a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as one approval had been given the nod, the next obstacle would pop up. Still, there was broad acceptance to the idea and in the end the approvals were easier than anticipated. It may sound like a difficult process to an uploader, but on the other hand, the list is much shorter than one a private broadcaster would have to check off. As a public broadcaster, our mandate to “be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means” really helped the cause.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

I'm hoping to sneak away from Maker Faire preparations to watch This American Life Live in movie theaters on May 1st.

On Thursday, May 1st acclaimed radio and television host Ira Glass will bring the wildly popular show This American Life to the big screen for a one-night only event. Glass debuts never-before-seen extraordinary, funny and true stories from everyday life, shows outtakes, and answers audience questions. This exclusive theatre event will be broadcast LIVE from New York via satellite to select movie theatres nationwide. This one-night event features special guests and is presented in HD and Cinema Surround Sound. Tickets go on sale beginning April 4th. Don’t miss your chance to see “This American Life - Live!” on the big screen Thursday May 1, 2008 at 8PM EDT / 7 PM CDT / 6 PM MDT and time delayed to 8PM PDT.

Link

I like this clever print advertisement for Sony audio products.
Link (Thanks, Koshi!)

Design Indaba, a design conference taking place in Cape Town, South Africa, is sponsoring ten architects and designers to create a street of new homes in the poor, "informal settlement" of Mitchell's Plain. The Creative Review blog's Patrick Burgoyne was on-site as the first house, designed by Luyanda Mpahlwa with assistance from Kirsty Ronné, was constructed from sandbags. From the CR Blog:

Mpahlwa’s two-storey house uses a locally developed system called Ecobeams. Timber beams are linked by galvanized metal zig-zags, the space between which is in-filled with sand bags – a simple process that the house-owners themselves can carry out. The walls are then covered with mesh and plastered. These walls have much better thermal properties than breeze blocks, ensuring that occupants will be kept cool in summer and warm in winter. The system also has excellent sound absorbing properties which helps to provide a measure of privacy in close quarter living, while they are much heavier than brick and therefore wind resistant.

The sand bag construction resists water penetration due to the fact that the sand in the bags is a filter medium – any water penetrating the plaster will simply ‘filter’ down to the dampcourse and exit the wall to the outside. It’s also fire resistant and, pretty important in an area like Freedom Park, bullet-proof.

Furthermore, no electricity is required at the construction site and only minimal amounts of water and cement are required – just two bags for the whole house. This simple system relies mostly on unskilled labour – especially women in the community, who can be taught the basics in a few days. The whole house takes just over a week to build.

Link

36 years after he jumped from a hijacked plane with a bag containing $200,000 in ransom, D.B. Cooper's whereabouts remain unknown. But his parachute was discovered yesterday.

If it is Cooper's parachute, that will solve one mystery -- where he apparently landed -- but it will raise another, Carr said.

In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper's money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver. Some investigators believed it might have been washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Cooper landed near Amboy and stashed the money bag there, there's no way it could have naturally reached the Washougal.

"If this is D.B. Cooper's parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means," Carr said. "That whole theory is out the window."

Link (Via Reason)

This lovely photo depicts bicyclists in the 99th Milan-Sanremo race in Italy last week. They've all lined up to take a leak. My friend Jess Hemerly who sent the image says the scene, er, reminds her of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. Hit the link to see the full photo, taken by Roberto Bettini, as it appeared on Cyclingnews.com. Link

MAKE's Phil Torrone went to Japan to met with the folks at Gakken ("Sophisticated Science Kits for Adults") and shot this fun video of the Edison-Style cup phonograph kit.

From Gakken's Sophisticated Science Kit for Adults, this replica kit uses the same technology that Thomas Edison used, replacing Edison's waxed pipe and stylus, the kit uses a plastic cup and a needle, but the end results are the same! You record your own voice on a plastic cup -- and play it back! Here's how it works, your voice vibrates the air minutely when it gets into the horn. Then the vibration is conducted to the needle and is translated into a wavy movement of the needle and carves a groove onto the cup.

Link

UPDATE: Wired's Threat Level called ClearChannel, who said the Skullphone is not a hack, but a paid ad.

Laughing Squid reports: "An entity simply known as Skullphone has been altering Clear Channel digital billboards in Los Angeles, by hacking into the computer that runs the billboard and inserting the Skullphone image between the ads." Link

Eric Spiegelman says: "John Ford produced a pro-Vietnam [war] documentary on behalf of the US Government right before he died. The film was never released in the US, and very few people have seen it. I just put it online."

The last film ever produced by the legendary John Ford was a work of propaganda commissioned by the United States government in support of the Vietnam War. Production of the documentary, “Vietnam! Vietnam!,” began a few months after the Tet Offensive, and by the time the film was completed at the end of 1971, American policy toward the war shifted toward withdrawal and negotiation for peace. As such, the film’s message was obsolete and embarrassing the moment it was ready for distribution. It was never released.

Federal law at the time prohibited the domestic exhibition of any motion picture financed by the U.S. Information Agency, which included “Vietnam! Vietnam!.” Ford’s last documentary remained locked away in a vault for the next 27 years, when a change in the law allowed the National Archives to make it available to the public.

I learned about the existence of “Vietnam! Vietnam!” three years ago. Curiosity led me to pull the ancient reels from the National Archives and have them digitized. Years of neglect badly damaged the audio portion of the first half of the film, and my cousin painstakingly restored the soundtrack to the best of his ability.

The documentary is, actually, quite terrible. Nothing about it even approximates a John Ford masterpiece. Accounts vary as to the extent that Ford was actively involved in the production — he apparently spent time on location in Vietnam toward the beginning of the shoot, but his advanced age and poor health kept him home during almost all of the principal photography. According to Ford scholar Tag Gallagher, Ford supervised the editing of the film and rewrote it’s scenario. Regardless, John Ford clearly wanted his name associated with “Vietnam! Vietnam!” — it reflected his strong belief in the cause — and it is incontrovertibly part of his repertoire.

I offer the film here because it’s a little piece of American history that very few people have seen, and for that reason alone it belongs on the Internet.

Link

National Defense Magazine reports on a recent meeting of SIGMA, "a loosely affiliated group of science fiction writers who are offering pro bono advice to anyone in government who want their thoughts on how to protect the nation." They recently convened at a Department of Homeland Security science and technology conference, and author Larry Niven offered this grand piece of thinking:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

"The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway," Niven said.”

BB reader Margaret says: "From SF writer Larry Nivens’ magical, mystical fictional universe where hospitals don't have to treat rednecks who OD on meth, insurance companies aren’t inflating the cost of hospital care, under-regulated drug companies aren’t making massive profits, and uninsured children of hardworking parents don’t fall off skateboards." Link

Science fiction and folk music had a baby, and its name is filk. This little-known DIY music subculture involves songs composed and performed by sci-fi and fantasy fans, and revolves around fandom themes. Today on Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits the Consonance Filk Convention in the Bay Area, and learns that it is possible to combine vampires, computer virii, LOLcats, Tolkien slashfic, Battlestar Galactica, string theory, and World of Warcraft characters in a single Klingon lyric sung to the tune of "Kum Ba Ya."

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

The New York Times's Henry Alford prepared a gourmet meal for a dinner party using ingredients he bought at $0.99 stores:

The four friends I served dinner to included two who had shopped for food at 99-cent stores and two who had not. Guests were met with an antipasto tray — pepperoncini, olives, artichoke hearts, crackers, very greasy salami and a hockey puck of Brie that I had softened by baking.

Disparate nibbling yielded several polite, neutral comments. My guests stared off into the mid-distance as if in the throes of Art Appreciation. But the compliments started flying when I served my chilled pear soup — nothing more than a mixture of Goya and Kern’s pear nectars that I served in beautiful Chinese bowls with star anise floating on top. (Mark: “I feel like I’m at a chic restaurant.” Heather: “I’ve cleaned my bowl.”)

Our entree of penne with peas and turkey bacon in a light cream sauce gave way to much conversation about frozen peas. I explained that food luminaries like Marcella Hazan and the Silver Palate women approve of them. Heather told us how she had used bags of frozen peas to help soothe her mother after her hip replacement surgery.

The flourless pecan torte that I served for dessert met with approval, but nothing like the semiriotous adulation inspired by my subsequent offering of a 3.5-oz. Toblerone bar. (Scott: “Wow!” Heather: “Nice!” Greg: “Airport candy!”)

Link (via Kottke)

Supporters of the Zimbabwean opposition party Movement for Democratic Change were forced by Mugabe's intelligence offers to take down their party's campaign posters and then eat them.

According to Amnesty, the officials forced the opposition supporters to chew the posters and swallow them.

"We continue to receive reports of intimidation, harassment and violence against perceived supporters of opposition candidates - with many in rural regions fearful that there will be retribution after the elections," said Amnesty's Zimbabwe researcher, Simeon Mawanza, who has recently returned from the country.

Link

"Going For an English" is a classic sketch from the British variety show "Goodness Gracious Me," in which an Indian family goes out "for an English" after drinking too much, patronizing the waiter and demanding the blandest thing on the menu. It's some goddamned funny stuff. Link (Thanks, Neil and Farah!)

I love the abstracted butterfly and chickadee designs on these kids' ceramic plates from notNeutral. Link (via Babygadget)

In the violent tangle that is sex between giant squids, almost anything can happen, including accidentally injecting yourself with firehose-pressure blasts of sperm.

The report goes on: "Although mating has never been observed in giant squid, it is thought that what happens is that the male injects his sperm packages into the female's arms. The process is likely to be a fairly violent affair as the female is probably not that keen on being injected. This is a problem for the amorous male as females are normally a third bigger than they are.

"But males get round their inferior size by being endowed with a particularly long penis, which means they can inject the female without having to get too close to her chomping beak. The male's sexual organ is actually a bit like a high-pressure fire hose and is normally nearly as long as his body - excluding legs and head.

"But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that co-ordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body. And this does not seem to have been an isolated incident since two of the eight males that had stranded in the north-east Atlantic before had also accidentally inseminated themselves.

Link (via JWZ)

Bruce Sterling's "Revenge of the Slow" in this month's Metropolis Magazine is a thought-provoking history and analysis of the Slow Food movement, a massive, moneyed global phenomenon that aims to fight globalization by creating cachet for items that can't be scaled up to global prominence.

As a nonprofit heritage organization, the Slow Food empire retains a mere 150 full-time employees with a modest budget of $37 million a year. Yet Slow Food has invented the modern Italian food-heritage industry. Today it is a thriving ganglion of local chapters, called convivia, which number about 83,000 people in more than 100 countries. It’s also a publishing house specializing in tourist guidebooks, restaurant recipes, and heritage reprints.

The group is the suave host for massive international food events in Torino. Other Slow Food emanations include a hotel, various nonprofit foundations, and—in a particularly significant development—a private college. The University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded in 2004, is the training ground for 200-plus international Slow Food myrmidons per year, who are taught to infiltrate farms, groceries, heritage tourism, restaurants, commercial consortia, hotel chains, catering companies, product promotion, journalism, and government. These areas are, of course, where Slow Food already lives...

Slow Food deploys its convivia to serve as talent scouts for food rarities (such as Polish Mead, the Istrian Giant Ox, and the Tehuacan Amaranth). Candidate discoveries are passed to Slow Food’s International Ark Commission, which decides whether the foodstuff is worthy of inclusion. Its criteria are strict: (a) Is the product nonglobalized or, better yet, inherently nonglobalizable? (b) Is it artisanally made (so there’s no possibility of any industrial economies of scale)? (c) Is it high-quality (the consumer “wow” factor)? (d) Is it sustainably produced? (Not only is this politically pleasing, but it swiftly eliminates competition from most multinationals.) (e) Is this product likely to disappear from the planet otherwise? (Biodiversity must be served!)

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: Slow Food Vancouver Potluck May 10, 2005 - 4, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Roland's Flickr stream)

MIT students honored the dear departed geek hero Gary Gygax (creator of Dungeons and Dragons) by fabricating a gigantic D20 and rolling it into the notorious prank zone Killian Court. Eric Schmiedl's got a gallery of great photos of the natural 20 in all its glory. Link (via Laughing Squid)

See also: Dungeons & Dragons Creator Gary Gygax Passes Away; Interview on Gadgets

Techeblog has a nice roundup of old game consoles modded into working guitars. The Sega Genesis axe takes the cake, especially for the look of quiet pride on the maker's face as he proffers it to the camera. Go Nigel go! Link

Craftster user Kaby made this magnificent knitted Wonder Woman sweater and has graciously provided a tutorial for making your own:

It took me 14 months to make, using 4ply wool, 3mm needles, a plain jumper pattern from the seventies, a ton of graph paper and pictures of Wonder Woman, and about a million bobbins for the intarsia.

Link (via Neatorama)

The June, 1930 issue of Modern Mechanix carried this short article on a "reducing" machine for doggies. It claims to "save wear on husbands."

The contraption, which was first exhibited at the Los Angeles Dog Show, permits the dog to run for an hour without getting anywhere, and the proud owner may be sure that Fido will not get lost. If a rabbit passes by the dog has a good run while bunny stands around nibbling clover. A flywheel supplies momentum.

Link

This June, 1930 Modern Mechanix article on the cheats used in carny midway games is great -- it's amazing how many of these cons are still in use today.

Ever play the bucket game? The idea is to throw balls into the bucket in so many attempts. Try and do it! Every bucket has a turn screw on the bottom, adjusted so that it will positively throw out the ball with which the game is played. Of course, the “capper” is allowed to win and occasionally the operator gets generous enough to allow some outside person a fair chance of “winning. There are many varieties of this swindle. One uses but a single bucket mounted in the center of a closely-woven net. The tautness of the net makes it impossible to pocket the ball. In another type the bottoms are hinged so that they can be deflected upwards and downwards. With the bottoms flat, the player has no chance whatsoever, but by pressing a lever, the “barker” can deflect the bottoms slightly, causing the ball to strike the inside on the rebound and then stay put.

Link

See also:
Rigged carny game
Rigged carny game -- secret revealed! (with videos)
HOWTO beat carny games

Google's email and collaboration tools are facing legal problems outside of the USA, thanks to the USA Patriot Act spying bill. Google offers universities, hospitals and companies Gmail, calendar and document collaboration tools, but all the material hosted on Google's servers can be legally spied upon by the US government under the loosest of controls, thanks to the USA Patriot Act.

But many countries' laws impose a duty of care upon companies to protect their customers' or stakeholders' information from interception. By using Gmail and related services, these companies arguably break their countries' privacy laws, because they can't be sure that their customers' info isn't being slurped up by the US government's Soviet-style information hoover.

At Lakehead, the deal with Google sparked a backlash. "The [university] did this on the cheap. By getting this free from Google, they gave away our rights," said Tom Puk, past president of Lakehead's faculty association, which filed a grievance against Lakehead administration that's still in arbitration.

Professors say the Google deal broke terms of their collective agreement that guarantees members the right to private communications. Mr. Puk says teachers want an in-house system that doesn't let third parties see their e-mails.

Some other organizations are banning Google's innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures.

Link (via /.)

Bell Canada, the national Canadian telcom, has been caught filtering P2P connections initiated by customers of its reseller ISPs -- that means that if you start a funky little ISP in Toronto and buy a giant fat industrial pipe from Bell to serve it, Bell will secretly throw away your customers' packets.

The apologists for ISP filtering often say that it's unreasonable to hold ISPs to delivering unlimited service on the unlimited lines they sell, and if we want real unlimited service, then we should go out and buy commercial-grade connections. Well, that's exactly what these lines are: enormous pipes sold to ferchrissakes ISPs for subsequent public use.

Bell Canada's position is that the Canadian Internet belongs to it, and that it has the right and duty to simply toss out packets based on which protocol they're running on, in order to maximize profits. This is the opposite of how the Internet works, and it's a disaster. No one had to get permission from all the worlds' phone companies in order to invent the Web, or Skype, or BitTorrent. But Bell Canada's logic is that they should have the ability to reach into the stream of packets and secretly and discriminatorily chuck out packets that it has some prejudice against.

This could be the beginning of the end of the Internet. If the world's telcos are in charge of what you're allowed to do on the Internet, the innovation stops here. From here on in, every new feature you want to add to the Internet depends on your capacity to send guys in suits to meetings with all the world's telcos and convince them that your idea won't hurt them. These are the companies that charge extra for caller ID -- according to that logic, you should have to pay extra to see the "From:" line on your inbound emails, too.

Details of Bell Canada's implementation remain scarce or contradictory, but the timing of the news is interesting, coming as it does just days after the CBC announced its own plans to use BitTorrent to distribute Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. Given P2P's obvious (and growing) legal uses, transparency is going to be an important part of any throttling scheme. If a network operator makes clear that BitTorrent speed is reduced after 30GB a month, for instance, that's one thing; if the throttling remains mysterious and arbitrary, that's another.

Link

Tom sez, "Emru Townsend, a well-known animation writer and blogger is in need of a bone marrow transplant." You can help.

In mid-December, Emru was diagnosed with leukemia, and a condition called monosomy 7. Due to the monosomy 7, he has an increased risk of the leukemia coming back, no matter how successful chemotherapy is. This is where you can help save his life.

Emru needs a bone marrow transplant. This kind of therapy is administered through a transplant of bone marrow stem cells from a matching donor. The highest chances for a match are from siblings, but his only sister is not a match. As a result, he must to turn to national and international bone marrow registries to find a compatible donor. There are 11 million donors worldwide, but there is still no guarantee that he will find a match: The chances of matching another person can be as high 1 in 450 or lower than 1 in 750,000. Time is of the essence as the optimal window of opportunity is in the first few months after remission.

Hell, even if you don't care about this one case, being on the marrow donor registry is just a Good Thing. The next person it saves could be you. Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Jamin sez, "This is the safety message stamped on a plastic shield we bought at Target. I have to admit that I'm a little freaked out by it. It appears to be a warning FROM THE FUTURE! It reads in part, "The simulated protective device was not safety device and offered no protection." It's also sort of reminiscent of an Edward Gorey caption." Link

Nathan sez,

In the early morning of March 21, JJ Adams, assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction asked some "con-loving web savvy fan" to build a convention finder that allowed people to find nearby conventions when searching by zipcode...

By 10:23PM of the same day I submitted this, to his general approval: Convention Finder

Now, it has to be filled with conventions. Spread the word to your various fan groups and/or, if you know of a convention that's coming up in your area that would be of interest to geeks in general, please feel free to submit it yourself to the convention finder (just make sure that you have the venue's zip code).

Link (Thanks, Nathan!)

Brent sez, "I'm starting a new non-profit network of consumers called Carrotmob. We want to use our collective buying power as a bargaining tool in order to make corporations do environmentally friendly things. Our first 'experimental' campaign is this Saturday. We're going to get hundreds of people to show up at a liquor store in SF at 1pm and buy the place out. The store is spending 22% (they won a bidding war) of the revenue we bring in on environmental improvements to their store. Afterparty with free concert in Dolores Park. Please post or pass along if you like it..."

What sort of things are they going to spend this 22% on?

Well I assembled a team of energy experts, and we decided to go through the SF Energy Watch program. Their people are doing audits of the lighting and refrigeration systems at K & D to come up with a list of all the improvements they could make, as well as the likely cost of those improvements. Once we calculate how much cash we've brought in, they will choose which changes they want to make based on how much money they have to work with.

Link (Thanks, Brent!)

Kathryn sez,

In 1993 the People's Republic of China opened a park just south of Orlando, FL featuring over 60 handcrafted replicas of China's architectural, cultural and historical landmarks. Throughout Splendid China's 10 years of operation, the it was plagued by low attendance, frequent protests against the idyllic depictions of China the park provided, and financial mismanagement. The park was closed in 2003.

This past weekend two friends and I did a little urban exploring of the park, and took a lot of pictures. I was very surprised at how quickly the park has fallen into disrepair since its closing five years ago. It seems that vandals have stolen just about anything that wasn't bolted down (and lots of things that were). Most of the ceramic figurines have been smashed, which made for interesting photos at least.

Link to gallery one, Link to gallery two (Thanks, Kathryn!)

FoxClocks is a fantastic Firefox plugin that gives you a little toolbar showing the current time in various cities around the world (you choose). Since the US rejigged its Daylight Savings Time start-date, I keep getting caught out on scheduled phone-calls, assuming that California is eight hours behind me when it's really only seven. Link (Thanks, Sarah!)