The lobby for US-style copyrights in Canada has gone into overdrive, recruiting a powerful Member of Parliament and turning public forums on copyright into one-sided love-fests for restrictive copyright regimes that criminalize everyday Canadians.

Dan McTeague is the Liberal MP from Pickering-Scarborough East, and he's set to become the successor to Sam Bulte, the MP who lost her job for funding her campaign to get elected and appointed Heritage Minister by lining her pockets with massive donations from the very industries she would have ended up regulating. Reliable sources tell me that he's the guy who pushed for Canada signing onto the WIPO copyright treaty in the committee's anti-counterfeiting report last year, and that any time anyone in committee mentions fair dealing and user rights, he has a complete melt-down and shouts them down.

At a recent copyright panel in Toronto, McTeague essentially read out a list of record industry talking points about Canada's supposed status as a pirate nation, characterizing infringement as theft and refusing to acknowledge user rights; saying that Canada's international reputation had been tarnished by its soft copyright laws (the World Economic Forum says that Canada's copyright system is more advanced than Japan's and the US's). and, incredibly, proposed that we should pass a law making it illegal to use the Internet to "threaten" Members of Parliament with negative publicity if we don't like their political positions.

The supposedly non-partisan Public Policy Forum is holding a major, one-sided IP symposium on Monday. Invited are the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, former head of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry Association, and other big-stick-swingers for American-style copyright disasters. But when copyright lobbyists discovered that noted copyright scholar Howard Knopf would appear on just one of the panels, they went berserk and pushed successfully to have Knopf removed, ensuring that dissenting voices would be minimized on the day.

Science painter Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects and paints mutant bugs in the vicinity of irradiated wastelands like Chernorbyl, around nuclear plants, and nuclear refining sites. This handsome, lopsided li'l fella came from nearby the reactor at Gysinge, Sweden. Link (via Neatorama)

The fun-loving gamers at the Unreal Tournament forum have recreated Super Mario Bros as a rockin' UT2D level. Link

Bill sez "Curly, a blogger and photographer from South Shields (in NE England) was pursued by police after they received an emergency 999 call from someone who saw him taking photos in a funfair where children were present. He ended up showing his pics to a policeman in order to be allowed to leave."

“Is there something wrong with my car or my driving?”

“No, no sir, nothing like that at all, we are responding to an emergency call from someone in The Sundial who has reported you as taking pictures of children in the play park”

“Play park? I haven’t been near any play park! I’ve been on the beach and in the fairground, and I’ve never been anywhere near The Sundial either, surely you must have the wrong person?”

“Sorry sir, but we tracked you on the CCTV cameras, got your registration number and that’s why I need to talk to you, you are exactly as described”

Link (Thanks, Bill!)

I was delighted when I got home today and saw Mark's post about the injured turtle outfitted with a set of wheels (top right). I had just visited the amazing headquarters of designer toy firm STRANGEco where I scored a wonderful Turtlecamper figure (top left) by Jeremy Fish. Coincidence? Some might think so. Link (Thanks, Gregory Blum!)

Pietro Arosio's many-drawered chests come with small numbers on each drawer. The effect is curiously pleasing, and, one supposes, very handy. Link (via Cribcandy)

The Canadian indy band The Western Investor (formerly Feisty) have released their rare, out of print first EP as a remixable Creative Commons download (it's the band's tenth anniversary and they're celebrating). I've been listening to it for the past 20 minutes and there's plenty there to like -- some of these tracks appeared in the movie "Better Than Chocolate." Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Vint Cerf, an heroic pioneer of the Internet, tells Esquire what he's learned:

It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play World of Warcraft with your son. But you're actually interacting with each other. You're solving problems. They may seem like simple problems, but you're solving them. You're posed with challenges that you have to overcome. You're on a quest to gain certain capabilities. I haven't spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft, because my impression is that it takes a serious amount of time to play it well...

In Silicon Valley, failure is experience. Now, if you fail at everything, that's different. But a failure is a mark of experience more than anything else...

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Voluminous is a subscription-based public domain book delivery program. Once you buy the app, it'll let you know whenever likely books are scanned and put online; they also keep a bookmarkable library for you.

There are literally tens of thousands of books. Voluminous makes it faster and easier to find the ones you want. Would you rather waste your time hunting around for them, or have Voluminous do it for you?

Voluminous also:

* Will tell you when new books are available
* Keeps automatic bookmarks for each book in your personal library. If you read a book on a webpage, your web browser will only bookmark that web page (typically, the start of the book), not where you've read to.
* Tracks which books you're currently reading, for quick access
* Takes "plain text" and turns it into a beautifully laid-out book in the style you choose
* Offers full-screen mode for distraction-free reading
* Has tools to share interesting books with friends

These are just some of the advantages of using Voluminous.

Link (via Wonderland)

This week's installment of The Command Line podcast is a recording from a panel on Secure Computing Environments with Vernor Vinge, held last weekend at Penguicon, the free software/science fiction convention in Novi Troy, MI. The panel's really fascinating and far-ranging, covering the nitty-gritty of how trusted computing is -- and might be -- implemented, to the policy, surveillance, and activist possibilities opened up by a universally available secure computing platform. Link

In this episode of Make's Weekend Project, Kipkap shows how to build a mousetrap-powered car.

Today on BoingBoing gadgets, we poured ourself one from the firehose, studied from the codex of lilliputian laptops and, still thirsty, drank some vitamin water, which, in defiance of physics, mixes just fine with snake oil. Rob set about building a MAME machine inside the joystick, while John asked if anyone cared about MP3s killing off the LP. As for me, I relaxed under a fake skylight.. We wondered at yet another tiny computer; burned effigies of a disgraced tech CEO; looked at the future of prosthetic fingers; sniffed at some tasteless telephones; learned to play Beer Pong; and checked out the modern take on cheap, obnoxious electronic doorbells. Tonight, we'll be relaxing in the world's first LED spa before destroying worlds with new DARPA superweapons—all from the safety of electric unicycle-back. And, finally, a strange cigarette helps us off to the land of nod.

Here's a neat poster to help you visualize all of the top-level domains in the world...

At the end of every URL and email address is a top-level domain (TLD). Although .com is the world’s most popular TLD, it is far from alone. There are more than 260 TLDs in use around the world, most of which are country code top-level domains (ccTLDs).

The Country Codes of the World map includes 245 country codes, which encompasses all United Nations countries as well as numerous islands and territories. Each two-digit code is aligned over the country it represents and is color coded with the legend below for quick and easy reference.

Link, they're $30 each plus shipping. (via Kevin Kelly)

I don't know about you, but this sign makes me awful hungry for rabbit meat. Link (via Vegan.com)

Jim Lee is a contributor to MAKE magazine, and is interested in turtles and bamboo. He built a set of wheels for an injured box turtle, shown here.

Little Bit, a young Eastern Box Turtle was hit by a car in September of 2000. Her shell was crushed and she was left partially paralyzed. There was no way she would ever be released to the wild as happens with most successful rehabs. I repaired her shell using velcro strips epoxied to anchor points on her carapace. After some weeks Little Bit seemed to have made a full recovery except for the use of her hind legs. So some wheels seemed to be the way to go. Some lightweight model airplane wheels on a wire frame did the trick. The removable wheels were secured by a velcro strip epoxied to her plastron. The velcro strips on the carapace were removed after four months. She was eating, drinking, and exploring all the rooms of my house. Eventually she was able to move around outside as well. She lived until early in 2002 when she died unexpectedly (and suddenly). After all she had been through I did not have the heart to order any kind of post mortem from the local vet school. I simply said goodbye and thanked her for what she had shared with me and others who met her.

Link

Nature has a good article about the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), an ionospheric heater that became fully operational last July.

The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) has been entwined with controversy since its birth. Originally envisioned as a way to facilitate communications with nuclear-armed submarines, HAARP took almost two decades to build and has incurred around US$250 million in construction and operating costs. It consists of 360 radio transmitters and 180 antennas, and covers some 14 hectares near the town of Gakona about 250 kilometres northeast of Anchorage.

With 3.6 megawatts of power at its command, HAARP is the most powerful ionospheric heater in the world. At its heart is a phased-array radar that emits radio waves that are partially absorbed between 100 kilometres and 350 kilometres in altitude, accelerating electrons there and 'heating' the ionosphere (see graphic, right). In effect, HAARP allows scientists to turn the ionosphere, the uppermost and one of the least understood regions of the atmosphere, into a natural laboratory.

Link (via the day they tried to kill me)

Gus and Fin perform Blitzkrieg Bop on ukulele. (And here are the Ramones doing it, live.) (via Otomano)

Wired defense technology blogger Noah Shachtman says,

Smoking weed can improve your performance in all sorts of activities -- from playing reggae music to watching Battlestar Galactica to writing blog posts.

If you're an already ill-trained, semi-motivated soldier in the Afghan Army, however, spliffs are a particularly poor way to prepare for battle, as this little clip illustrates..

Link to post, which includes more happy fun stoner warfare video goodness. Hey, how do you say, "Duuuuuude... what?" in Pashto? Your answers welcomed in the comments.

Snip from a New York Times piece by John Schwartz on a new online archive of stereoscopic human anatomy images, produced in the early 1960s:

[David L. Bassett] was an expert in anatomy and dissection at the University of Washington. For more than 17 years, he was engaged in creating what has been called the most painstaking and detailed set of images of the human body, inside and out, ever produced. In 3-D.

Working closely with William Gruber, the inventor of the View-Master, the three-dimensional viewing system that GAF Corporation popularized as a toy in the 1960s, Dr. Bassett created the 25-volume “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy” in 1962. It included some 1,500 pairs of slides, along with line drawings that made the details more discernible. The paired slides could be examined with a View-Master, making the chest cavity look cavernous, and making details of structure and tissue stand out unforgettably.

The atlas was an immediate success and the images became an important resource for medical students, even more so as schools have de-emphasized gross anatomy and cadaver work. But the atlas eventually went out of publication in the 1960s.

Thanks to Stanford University’s school of medicine, however, the work will soon be available to the world. The school is bringing the images online, (See a sampling.).

Link to full text of story, here's a cool slideshow. Images shown here courtesy of Stanford, and Gruber's family.

A months' worth of web access to the "head and neck collection" is eight bucks; so far, all the other body parts are not yet online. I don't understand the pricing structure, or why they bother charging for access at all -- but, (shrugs), the content sure is wonderful.

Previously on BB:
• Incredible human dissection photos on Flickr Link

Snip from news item:

"China's torch has arrived in Australia amid protests in Sydney and Canberra. Four Tibet activists were arrested after unfurling a large banner on a prominent Coke billboard in Kings Cross protesting Coke's sponsorship of China's tainted torch relay. "

"Enjoy Compassion," the banner reads. (courtesy SFT, thanks Oxblood).

Sneak peek at a show opening at New York's Adam Baumgold Gallery on May 1 -- "Alphaville," by Scott Teplin, features meticulously rendered pen and ink and watercolor drawings inspired in part by Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film (which happens to be my favorite movie, ever, period). Snip from the show description:

Teplin has filtered the city of Alphaville through his own imagination and drawn a world devoid of people - only evidence of their domestic and work environments remain for exploration.

Godard filmed Alphaville when computers were in their infancy and not well understood by the public. As a result the film is haunted by Alpha 60 - a dictatorial talking computer that rules the city and forbids the concept of free individuals. Teplin's recreated Alphaville takes place in the present, where computers are not much more than an occasional laptop on a table and a few rooms set up for surveillance of other rooms in secret. Humor is always a prevalent thread in Teplin's work and he has used Lemmy Caution's name as an inspiration for weirdly overgrown indoor potted lemon trees that seem to devour the very wall that contains them - in the title piece of the show. Also featured in the exhibition are individually, vividly watercolored pen and ink drawings of each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, whose surreal rooms and environments follow the deductive structure of the letters. Another set of drawings focus on words and letters such as SLUMBER LORD and GRACIOUS HOST that become Teplin's eccentric, isometrically spaced rooms.

The exhibition highlights Scott Teplin's artist book(s) "Sinker Down and Out," (2007) a Kafkaesque journey of a donut's travels through the digestive path. "Sinker Down and Out" is a hand-drawn 'editioned' artist book. The first part is simply an artist book, similar to other tightly engineered volumes Teplin has created in the past, including maddeningly detailed pen drawings accompanied with strategically placed, scalpel-incised holes. Because artist books are notoriously difficult to exhibit, the second part of this project was born. It consists of one fully-bound book, identical to the original master copy, for each of the 21 page spreads in that master.

Link to gallery website, and here is the artist's site (thanks, Coop!).

Boing Boing tv visits New York Comic Con, the largest comics convention on the Eastern seaboard, and we find games, geeks, and graphic novels galore. Our guide through the event's board game realms is Dr. Gregory Wilson, author and fantasy fiction professor at St. John's University of New York, who teaches us little-known tools for game quality evaluation. "You can tell this one is awesome because of the weight of the box -- it's probably about 15 pounds," he says as we pass one title. "This one takes two hours just to set up! Clear evidence that it, too, is awesome."

Part two of today's episode is a little alternate reality game of our own design -- we like to call it "Count the Cosplayer."

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

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BONUS AWESOMENESS: In related news, Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City blog says: "I set up a small online quiz asking people to label unidentified visitors as either art fair or comic-con attendees. There are a few surprises in there, which keeps it interesting."

Woohoo! I'm on the Locus Award ballot -- twice! Once for Best Novella for my story After the Siege and again for Best Collection for my book Overclocked. Thanks to everyone who voted for me! I'm in damned good company too -- if you're looking for a masterclass in contemporary sf, this would be the place to start:

SF NOVEL
The Accidental Time Machine, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
Brasyl, Ian McDonald (Pyr)
Halting State, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Spook Country, William Gibson (Putnam; Viking UK)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

FANTASY NOVEL
Endless Things, John Crowley (Small Beer Press; Overlook)
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)
Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
Territory, Emma Bull (Tor)
Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada; Roc)

Link

Instructables have just published their latest installment in their series of HOWTOs inspired by my forthcoming novel Little Brother, a young adult book about kids who use technology to wrest liberty from the Department of Homeland Security. This week, it's HOWTO block or kill an RFID chip.

-The easiest way to kill an RFID, and be sure that it is dead, is to throw it in the microwave for 5 seconds. Doing this will literally melt the chip and antenna making it impossible for the chip to ever be read again. Unfortunately this method has a certain fire risk associated with it. Killing an RFID chip this way will also leave visible evidence that it has been tampered with, making it an unsuitable method for killing the RFID tag in passports. Doing this to a credit card will probably also screw with the magnetic strip on the back making it un-swipeable.

-The second, slightly more convert and less damaging, way to kill an RFID tag is by piercing the chip with a knife or other sharp object. This can only be done if you know exactly where the chip is located within the tag. This method also leaves visible evidence of intentional damage done to the chip, so it is unsuitable for passports.

-The third method is cutting the antenna very close to the chip. By doing this the chip will have no way of receiving electricity, or transmitting its signal back to the reader. This technique also leaves minimal signs of damage, so it would probably not be a good idea to use this on a passport.

-The last (and most covert) method for destroying a RFID tag is to hit it with a hammer. Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks. This will destroy the chip, and leave no evidence that the tag has been tampered with. This method is suitable for destroying the tags in passports, because there will be no proof that you intentionally destroyed the chip.

Link, Link to RSS feed for Little Brother Instructables

See also: HOWTO Screen-print a tee

Ape Lad sez, "Every time I see this it makes me smile: ballet dancers performing to the Pixies' 'Where is my mind.'" Link (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

A Denver TSA employee who brought a handgun to the airport and passed it around the metal detector is still on the job. The TSA won't say if he's been disciplined -- or how -- for doing this stupid thing that would land any of the rest of us in Gitmo for a decade's worth of stress-positioning. Of course, we can't expect TSA screeners to be held to the same legal standard as the rest of us -- since they work for the security administration, then everything they do, by definition, must be good for security.

Airport documents show that the security office suspended Crabtree’s badge for 30 days as a result of the incident, but a TSA spokeswoman cited privacy rules when asked if Crabtree received any formal punishment.

Link

Liliputing has done a fantastic roundup of the existing and forthcoming micro-notebooks, the Eee and its successors and competitors. There's a lot of interest in these things in my household -- we're all sick of shlepping around shoulder-tearing laptops and the idea of a 2.5 Lb, sold-state submicro tablet is pretty attractive all 'round, especially if it goes for a couple hundred bucks. Link (via Gizmodo)

Heather sez, "A new painting & print from the fabulous Suzanne R Forbes is on Etsy. $10 of each print purchase goes to the EFF. "

Miss Eva G posed for me in her SOMA loft, dressed in her own fabulous steampunk finery, with an antique crossbow she brought back from China. The painting took several sittings with Miss E and then many hours of work painting in the detailed background. She is defending early implements of the computer revolution, Jacquard punch cards and IBM cards, a CDV of Ada Byron, and Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2. An apple core represents Turing, eaten up by the intolerance of his era. Also prominently displayed are so

me wonderful modern creations- The Steampunk Laptop by Datamancer and the Steampunk Flatpanel and Keyboard by Jake Von Slatt- who were kind enough to allow me use their work in the painting. The packet-sniffing rat under the desk is a nod to the EFF’s most recent victory; the EFF logo appears among the luggage stickers on the trunk. I added the bullet shells at the last minute when I learned that Miss E. is a crack shot.

Link (Thanks, Heather!)

In the current New Yorker, anthropologist Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, looks at the vengeance practices of tribal societies in New Guinea. While Diamond was conducting field work in the New Guinea Highlands, he was driven around by a young man named Daniel Wemp of the Handa clan. The two got to talking and Daniel recounted how he avenged the death of his uncle who had been killed by the neighboring Ombal clan. The tale is amazing, insightful, and gets you thinking about our own, er, taste for revenge. From the New Yorker article, titled "Vengeance Is Ours":

The war between the Handa clan and the Ombal clan began many years ago; how many, Daniel didn’t say, and perhaps didn’t know. It could easily have been several decades ago, or even in an earlier generation. Among Highland clans, each killing demands a revenge killing, so that a war goes on and on, unless political considerations cause it to be settled, or unless one clan is wiped out or flees. When I asked Daniel how the war that claimed his uncle’s life began, he answered, “The original cause of the wars between the Handa and Ombal clans was a pig that ruined a garden.” Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeperlying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig. Any Westerner who knows the story of Helen and the Trojan War will not be surprised to hear women named as a casus belli, but the equal importance of pigs is less obvious. However, New Guinea Highlanders, whose main food staples are starchy root crops like sweet potato and taro, are chronically starved for protein, of which the island’s dark, bristly pigs traditionally furnished the only large source. As a result, pigs are prized symbols of prestige and wealth. Peaceful competition and ostentatious displays involve pigs, and they are also used as currency for buying women. Pigs are individually owned and named, and, as piglets, they are sometimes nursed at one breast by a woman nursing an infant at her other breast.

A typical Highland village is a cluster of huts housing between a few dozen and a few hundred people plus their pigs, traditionally surrounded by a fence, and situated a mile or a few miles from the next village. A village’s pigs are taken out to forage during the day, and are prone then to wander into people’s vegetable gardens, breaking down or digging under fences erected to keep them out. A single pig can root up and ruin an entire garden in a few hours. If the intrusion happens at night, or if the offending pig is not caught in the act, it is virtually impossible to prove which particular pig was responsible.

That was how the Handa-Ombal war began. An Ombal man found that his garden had been wrecked by a pig. He claimed that the offending pig belonged to a certain Handa man, who denied it. The Ombal man became angry, demanded compensation, and assaulted the Handa pig owner when he refused. Relatives of both parties then joined in the dispute, and soon the entire membership of both clans—between four and six thousand people—was dragged into a war that had now raged for longer than Daniel could remember. He told me that, in the four years of fighting leading up to Soll’s death, seventeen other men had been killed.

Link

My old pal Rodney Ascher has curated a show in Los Angeles of strange, provocative, creepy, and downright freaked-out narrative photography. For example, Rodney created "The Fumigator Series" (above left), which he describes as "a rightwing fantasy inspired by vigilante movies of the 70's and 80's and action/adventure paperbacks like The Executioner, the Enforcer, The Death Merchant, and the Penetrator." Others shot fake movie stills and dramatic tableaus, like the one seen here above right created by The Blacksmoke Organization. The exhibition, Photo Fictions, runs until May 17 at the Show Cave. Link

The Red Ferret's had a little experiment with a dual-SIM conversion kit for GSM phones -- pop it into one of the many compatible handsets and you can flip back and forth between two different carriers. I have a British and a US SIM that I switch between, depending on which continent I'm on, so this could be pretty handy.

The only thing I’ve noticed so far is that the offline mode doesn’t seem to be really offline with this thing in, because my battery now runs down a lot faster in offline mode than it used to. It’s no biggie, I’ll just switch the phone off or take out the twin SIM on flights, but it’s something to watch out for. It may just be a peculiarity of my setup, of course.

The other thing that’s not really clear from the site is the compatibility of handsets. The site has a long list of compatible handsets on it, which includes a lot of standard 3G and other phones, but even though the Nokia 6110 Navigator I upgraded wasn’t on the list, it still worked fine. So maybe it’s a matter of taking a gamble if your handset is not listed? Oh and remember you’ll need a phone with a back cover which bends enough, or has enough room to cope with the extra SIM.

Link

Listeners to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio program Search Engine, gathered the information necessary to allow the CBC's President to lobby the Chinese ambassador to Canada to have the service unblocked by the Great Firewall of China:

Thanks to their efforts our show broke this story, which was picked up throughout the country and resulted in the CBC's President appealing to the Chinese Ambassador to end the blockage at once. Today the news is out that the CBC, along with Wikipedia and the BBC, is back online.

This was a great display of citizen journalism in action. Our China-based listeners alerted us to the blockage, then confirmed it throughout China by working the message boards. We tapped other listeners in the area through our Facebook page, and every one of them responded, testing our sites and others. Through that we were able to establish that the blockage was limited to China and didn't occur in neighbouring countries, which helped rule out technical failure as a cause.

Several of the people who helped us have requested anonymity (one is an Olympic torch-bearer and wants to keep the job!). We've decided to keep all of you anonymous, but you know who you are, and we're appreciative. Thanks!

Link (Thanks, Philip!)

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

Gary Wolf wrote a terrific profile of Piotr Wozniak, creator of a memory program called SuperMemo, for Wired. I've been using SuperMemo (the Mac version, called Genius) to learn Spanish vocabulary and am really impressed with the results.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.

Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.

Link

Brian sez,

Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, is releasing a new license with the upcoming fourth edition of Dungeons of Dragons. Publishers can create compatible D&D products, but only if the companies no longer publish any games which are distributed via the Open Gaming License.

This would be like saying that developers could not run programs on Vista if they publish -any- programs under a GNU license. Keeping up with the D&D 4th edition "GSL" license situation might be important, because it could very well be a precedent.

Update: The license itself has not been released, but the linked article below contains links to message-board postings from senior Wizards of the Coast employees that seem to validate this view of the license.

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

Police in the Congo have arrested 13 individuals suspected of stealing, or shrinking, their victims' penises. It seems that the accused practitioners of black magic were nabbed for their own protection. A dozen years ago, mobs killed a group of men rumored to be penis snatchers. From Reuters:

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure...

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent, (said Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko.) To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Link

The infernal Joe Coleman has a show of his mind-blowing paintings opening next week, May 2, at the Dickinson gallery in New York City. Titled "Devotio Moderno," the exhibition also features works by the 15th century Northern Primitives, artists whose work directly inspires Coleman. Seen here, Coleman's "The Book of Revelations," 1999, Acrylic, fabric, paper, blood on panel, 62.2 x 77.5 cm. The show runs until June 15 and the art is viewable online too. From the press release:

(Coleman's) fascination with themes derived from religion and primitive painting, and his meticulous and detailed style of unabashed realism, have led to numerous comparisons between his art and the paintings of the northern renaissance. All his works are united by a very personal autobiographical theme, and in many ways relate to the early primitive devotional paintings. This exhibition allows admirers of Joe's work to see the imagery that influences him, and provides a unique opportunity to see masterpieces of the northern renaissance side by side with masterpieces by today's greatest "primitive" painter. Similarly, seeing works by Memling and his contemporaries in this setting, gives us an opportunity to truly appreciate their shameless realism, and the modernity of expression they gave to religious work of the 15th century still provides a resonant critique of the human condition today.

Link (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

A smartcard hacker says that he was paid large sums of cash by NewsCorp's satellite company (hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada no less!) to crack the DISH network smartcards in order to cost the competitor hundreds of millions:

Christopher Tarnovsky -- who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada -- testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp's NDS Group (NNDS.O: Quote, Profile, Research) by DISH Network Corp (DISH.O: Quote, Profile, Research)...

But lawyers for DISH Network claim Tarnovsky's mission was to hack into DISH's satellite network, steal the security code, then flood the market with pirated smart cards costing DISH $900 million in lost revenue and system-repair costs.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Here is an insanely comprehensive collection of "x does it with..." statements. It's funny, silly, sophomoric, and alphabetized! Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Grab your LED throwies and your laser tagging units, comrades, and join the revolution. Today on Boing Boing tv, a sneak peek at a new documentary film on the subversive public art collective known as Graffiti Research Lab, who develop and distribute "open source technologies for urban communication." The voices you'll hear in today's episode -- GRL founders James Powderly and Evan Roth.

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

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From their statement, redacted by the "U.S. Dept. of Homeland Graffiti"...

From their origins in the trash room of a non-profit in Manhattan to their emergence as the instigators of an international art movement, Graffiti Research Lab: The Complete First Season documents the adventures of an architect and an engineer who quit their day jobs to develop high-tech tools for the art underground. The film follows the GRL and their network of graffiti artist collaborators (and commercial imitators) across four continents as they write on skyscrapers with lasers, mock advertisers with homemade tools, get in trouble with The Department of Homeland Security and make activism fun again. Primarily using video footage from point-and-shoot digital cameras (“The Pocket School”) and found-content on the web, the movie’s visual style draws as much from the art of the power point presentation and viral media as conventional documentary cinema.

Narrated by GRL co-founders, Roth and Powderly, The Complete First Season makes a humorous and insightful argument for free speech in public, open source in pop culture, the hacker spirit in graffiti and not asking for permission in general. The film was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. Available 24/7 on The Pirate Bay.

Part two of today's episode documents GRL's hijinks at Maker Faire 2007. That event's 2008 edition is coming up next week.

GRL was mistakenly credited with the Boston Mooninite LED Terror Freakout; while their work no doubt inspired the street marketing team responsible for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force debacle, Powderly told Boing Boing the day it happened that GRL was not involved.

Link to more info about the DVD and where you can download a torrent -- or, see it at the premiere, May 4, at New York's MOMA.

Matt sez, "Along the lines of the 'ghost' hotels in Egypt sitting incomplete, Disney World has had the Legendary Years section of Pop Century sitting incomplete for several years as well. " Link to YouTube video, Link to photo gallery (Thanks, Matt!)

Next Thursday, May 1, I'll be launching my next novel, Little Brother, at Toronto's Merril Collection, at 7PM. Little Brother's my first young adult novel, a book about young people who use technology to fight for the restoration of the Bill of Rights to American politics, setting them square in the crosshairs of the war on terror.

BakkaPhoenix books will be selling books at the event, and they're also happy to take pre-orders for custom inscriptions -- CDN$19.95 for the book, plus $9 and GST for shipping in Canada, $15 to the US, $20 to Europe, and $25 to the rest of the world (BakkaPhoenix: 416 963 9993, inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com). Link

Weighing in on JK Rowling and Warners' lawsuit against a fan-compiled concordance of the Harry Potterverse, Neil Gaiman (whose first two books were unauthorized nonfiction and relied heavily on fair use) describes the creative importance of the freedom of rip each other off in fantasy lit:

Back in November I was tracked down by a Scotsman journalist who had noticed the similarities between my Tim Hunter character and Harry Potter, and wanted a story. And I think I rather disappointed him by explaining that, no, I certainly *didn't* believe that Rowling had ripped off Books of Magic, that I doubted she'd read it and that it wouldn't matter if she had: I wasn't the first writer to create a young magician with potential, nor was Rowling the first to send one to school. It's not the ideas, it's what you do with them that matters.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

Link (via Copyfight)

Adam Sternbergh's long investigative New York Magazine piece, "You Walk Wrong," makes a compelling case for shoes as inherently damaging to your feet and spine. I have very flat feet, which has always meant problems with my hips, knees and back, and I've worn custom orthotic inserts since I was a teenage. Last year, I picked up a pair of Vibram Fivefingers "barefoot shoes" that do a pretty good job of simulating the experience of going barefoot without the tetanus and laceration risk, and I've done a lot of city and country walking in them, and I have to say, my back and knees and feet feel pretty damned good after a couple days in them.

At first glance, this seems like a sensible and obvious approach—to work with the foot, not against it. But it represents a fundamental break from the dominant philosophy of shoe design. For decades, the guiding principle of shoe design has been to compensate for the perceived deficiencies of the human foot. Since it hurts to strike your heel on the ground, nearly all shoes provide a structure to lift the heel. And because walking on hard surfaces can be painful, we wrap our feet in padding. Many people suffer from flat feet or fallen arches, so we wear shoes with built-in arch supports, to help hold our arches up...

Admittedly, there’s something counterintuitive about the idea that less padding on your foot equals less shock on your body. But that’s only if we continue to think of our feet as lifeless blocks of flesh that hold us upright. The sole of your foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on.

But (you might say) if you walk or run with no padding, it’s murder on your heels—which is precisely the point. Your heels hurt when you walk that way because you’re not supposed to walk that way. Wrapping your heels in padding so they don’t hurt is like stuffing a gag in someone’s mouth so they’ll stop screaming—you’re basically telling your heels to shut up.

And your heels aren’t just screaming; they’re trying to tell you something. In 2006, a group of rheumatologists at Chicago’s Rush Medical College studied the force of the “knee adduction moment”—basically, the force of torque on the medial chamber of the knee joint where arthritis occurs. For years, rheumatologists have advised patients with osteoarthritis of the knees to wear padded walking shoes, to reduce stress on their joints. As for the knee-adduction moment, they’ve attempted to address it with braces and orthotics that immobilize the knee, but with inconsistent results. So the researchers at Rush tried something different: They had people walk in their walking shoes, then barefoot, and each time measured the stress on their knees. They found, to their surprise, that the impact on the knees was 12 percent less when people walked barefoot than it was when people wore the padded shoes.

Link (via Futurismic)

Everything2's Mikebert has posted a leet-speak Lord's Prayer that begins, "Our sysadmin, who chills in Heaven, feared be thy name."

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Link (via Making Light)

The December, 1951 ish of Mechanix Illustrated promised a United Nations space police, in charge of keeping the world safe from high orbit:

But, given the go-ahead, it can be done and in a reasonable amount of time. Meanwhile, John Q. Public can only sit tight and hope that the first permanent space-buggy is a benign one, set whirling by the United Nations and carrying space cops to enforce peace on earth instead of war.

Link

In December 1938, Popular Science featured this fantastic, gigantic 12-ton "landing strip in a box" for converting cow-pastures to airstrips.

ROLLING swiftly down highways on ten oversize balloon tires, a revolutionary airport-in-miniature for use by passenger air lines and military air forces now provides quick and complete assistance to stranded airplanes. This curious “twelve-ton tool box” is the invention of Kibbey W. Couse, of East Orange, N. J. It is capable of turning any level cow pasture into an airport complete with machine shop, repair parts, floodlights, and radio.

Link

Michael built a Claude Shannon/Marvin Minsky "Ultimate Machine" -- flip a switch and a hand emerges and flips it off.

About 7 years ago I was reading an article on Claude Shannon and came across one of the funniest ideas I had ever heard. Claude, you see, was one of these incredibly brilliant engineers with an obviously great sense of humor. As I understand it, he, along with Marvin Minsky came up with an idea they called the "Ultimate Machine". Basically a plain box with a switch on the top. When you flip the switch, a hand comes out of the box and flips the switch off. Thats it.

Well, after reading the article, and laughing out loud, I decided that I HAD to build one of these boxes.

Link (via Make)

Seasonal Chef's farmers' market reports from across the USA come lavishly illustrated with beautiful photos of mouth-watering organic produce -- it's raw food porn!

It's still a little too early for strawberries, in my opinion. It's got to get hotter for them to sweeten up -- and that'll happen in about six weeks. But the price is coming down, so I figure it's time to try my first strawberries of the season. Blood oranges won't be around much longer. Time to buy a bunch, juice them, and boil the juice down to reduce it by half or more to make syrup for salad dressings that I'll freeze and use for months to come. Fava beans have been in the markets for some weeks now, but at $3 a pound unshelled, they're a pricy delicacy. They'll get cheaper until they vanish in about month. Today, I got these for $2 a pound -- a fair price for a fleeting springtime treat. Here are nine fava bean recipes that I like. The Catalan stew is time-consuming, but well worth it, once a year.

Link (via Waxy)

Cole sez, "Maureen F. McHugh's speculative fiction collection MOTHERS & OTHER MONSTERS has been released online by Small Beer Press as a free Creative Commons download."

Small Beer is knocking them out of the park with CC releases by some of science fiction's most talented, most brilliant short fiction writers. An entire Maureen McHugh collection online gratis is a watershed event. Link (Thanks, Cole!)

See also:
Kelly Link's gorgeous short story collection now a CC download
John Kessel's wonderful short story collection "The Baum Plan" free CC download