The Human Rights Tribune is reporting that the US has pulled out of the United Nations' Human Rights Council, "an international body within the United Nations System. Its stated purpose is to address human rights violations."

The news that the US has completely withdrawn from the Human Rights Council spread like wildfire Friday afternoon (June 6) through the corridors of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. There was general consternation amongst diplomats and NGOS. Reached by phone, the American mission in Geneva neither confirmed nor denied the report. Although unofficial, the news comes at a time of long opposition by the Bush administration to the reforms which created the Human Rights Council in June 2006. Washington announced from the beginning that the US would not be an active member but its observer status would mean that it could intervene during the sessions. To date even this has rarely happened.

Link (via Digg)

Here's a smart tip from Parenthacks: turn a wheeled under-bed storage box into a mobile, lidded sandbox that you can roll into the garage on rainy days and out into the yard on nice ones:

My husband came up with a great idea for a small sandbox: an under-the-bed storage container. This container has a hinged top but the hinge broke so I put it in the garage for another day. My husband filled it 1/2 way with play sand and our daughter loves it. We can play with sand in the garage (if it is raining outside), on the back porch or take it to Grandma's for the afternoon. When we are done we just put the top over it and slide it under the stand that holds the yard tools or under the workbench.

Link

Mike sez, "To show off the open-source animation program Blender, a small team just finished a great ten-minute cartoon, 'Big Buck Bunny.' They were funded by foundation support and pre-orders of the DVD by the Blender community. What's more, the whole thing is Creative Commons-licensed, and all the files for the animation are available. Here in Worcester MA, our local TV station took advantage of the licensing and broadcast the thing last night in prime time." Link (Thanks, Mike!)

JapanForum's group gallery of Harajuku fashion is gigantic, fantastic and mind-blowingly weird. William Gibson once described his "Sprawl" as being "designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button" -- Harajuku is like that, only more so. Link (via IZ Reloaded)

Flickr user and master cupcakist Hello Naomi (she of the fantastic Super Mario and Pac Man cupcakes) has outdone herself with these interchangeable robot cupcakes whose bodies, heads and legs can be swapped around. Deliciously awesome! Link (via IZ Reloaded)

As part of Bocchignano, Italy's group project "20 Eventi," Jan Vormann went around town and filled in all the cracks in the walls with painstakingly clicked-together patches made from legos. Link (via Cribcandy)

Michael sez, "I had this wacky idea a few days ago, about writing some Paul-Bunyan kinds of stories from the point of view of a post-Singularity storyteller. I always had a thing for tall tales."

I just LOVE these -- I mean, who wouldn't love stories called "Paul Bunyan and the Spambot," "Bruce Schneier and the King of the Crabs," and "Lord Cthulhu Walks the Desert"? The Spambot one is especially tasty. This deserves to be a meme -- and maybe a podcast!

Naturally, just getting Paul Bunyan online was already no mean feat. There was no broadband available in the remote areas of the woods where they'd been working, so the first thing he had to do was string optical cable from the nearest T1 line, which was clear down in St. Paul. For anybody but Paul Bunyan, that would have been near impossible, but ol' Paul just ordered a couple flatbeds of the finest glass windows Minnesota had to offer, chewed'em all up in a single mouthful, and drew'em out between his teeth to spin three hundred miles of perfect fiber optics. Then he just coiled it all up in a loop, and walked all the way into town, stringing that cable all the way. So getting online wasn't a real problem.

No, the real problem was using a computer built to the scale of a normal man! To Paul, the biggest font available was like microfiche, and he'd never been fond of reading much but lumber futures, anyway. And the largest screen they could find was no better than an old Nokia mobile phone for Paul.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Alex Holden made this stupendous steampunk* Dalek out of junk, shampoo bottles and paint.

The main body is made from a plastic Dalek bubble-bath bottle I bought very cheaply at Woolworth's in the post-Christmas sales. At the time I had no idea what I could use it for, but it looked too cool to pass up. I disassembled it and spray-painted the parts with a can of gold Plastikote paint after masking off the two silver arms on the front. The wheels, cylinders, chimney stack, and 'bumpers' came from a rather tacky brass model of Stephenson's Rocket I bought for £5 at a car boot sale. The brass brush on the end of the gun is the head of a rotary wire brush attachment that came with a mini-drill set. The pressure gauge, dome, whistle, safety valve, water level gauge, and valve are all bits and pieces I had lying around the workshop (I used to be into model engineering). All the brass parts were painstakingly cleaned and polished with Scotchbrite, Autosol, and Brasso. It is held together with a combination of screws, hot melt glue, and cyanoacrylate glue. I left the plastic bottle inside the body because the neck acts as the turret bearing - I haven't opened it so it must still be full of bubble-bath!

Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)

*STEAMPUNK! STEAMPUNK! STEAMPUNK! Isn't that the most lovely word you've ever heard? I just want to say it all day long! STEAAAAAAAAAAMPUNK!

Alarmed that Bell Canada is throttling and degrading P2P traffic, David Fewer and some of his friends have created a wiki to list "all of the legitimate things that P2P can and is doing. Kind of a one stop shop for evidence of how this technology has the capacity to change the world." The idea is that this can be used in regulatory proceedings and other policy fora to establish the legitimacy of P2P. They want your input!

Why peer-to-peer is efficient
When a user wishes to download a file from a website, the submit a HTTP GET request. This request for the file uses a single TCP socket, and communicates with a single server which transfers the entire file. By contrast, a P2P protocol creates TCP connections with multiple hosts and makes many small data requests to each. The P2P client then combines the chunks to recreate the file. A single file host will usually have limited upload capacity, but connecting to many servers simultaneously allows for higher file transfers, and disperses the costs associated with data transfers amongst many peers. Moreover, a client mid-way through downloading the file also acts as a server, hosting the bits to others which they have already downloaded. These differences from traditional HTTP GET requests allow for lower costs and higher redundancy since many people are sharing the files.

Link

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted me a few weeks back with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance.
I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device. It seems fitting to offer the first chapter of The Deal on the weekend before iPhone 2.0 is to be released.

We'll post a new chapter of The Deal every Friday.

Here's Joe's new introduction to the 2008 edition:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." --Alan Kay

I had the good luck to provide hands-on technical support and assistance to Alan Kay and his team during my time at Apple, from 1984 to 1988, when I worked as a technology advisor to then-Chairman and -CEO John Sculley.

Alan certainly invented the future: In the early '70s he created the computer language Smalltalk at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which is recognized as the inspiration and technical basis for the Macintosh and other windowing-based operating systems.

In 1979, 24-year-old Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was given an exclusive tour of PARC, which sparked the epiphany to create a Graphic User Interface (GUI) for the masses. The rest, as we all know, is history. (More on Alan: www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html.)

Alan's quote matters deeply to me because I invented my own version of the future when I began the earliest draft of this novel in 1988. After many rewrites, submissions, rejections, long hibernations, more rewrites, resubmissions, and publishing deals gone awry, I finally decided just to give the novel away as the e-book Undo on Project Gutenberg. With the giveaway I wrote a lengthy explanation of the long, strange trip of the novel's life (and my own). That was that, and I let go of the idea of ever seeing the novel published as a traditional book -- until, that is, Lisa Napoli, my longtime friend and former fellow Cyber-Times contributor to the New York Times, gave a copy of the manuscript to our ahead-of-his-time editor, Rob Fixmer. My pitch was to serialize a newly revised and updated version of the novel in the CyberTimes section of the New York Times website.

Rob said yes, and we struck a deal that would see a new chapter a week on the site, with a button to buy the eventual print edition from Amazon.com. This was around 1997, and, unfortunately, book publishers didn't at the time see much value in this new and unfamiliar thing known as the web. After many rejections, my agent said it was time to give up trying to get a book deal and move on. I followed his advice -- for a couple of months, anyway.

On a whim, I contacted an editor named Claire Eddy at Forge (an imprint of the huge sci-fi house Tor), gave her my pitch on the potential big-win that the New York Times serial would offer, and sent her the manuscript. A few days later she called to say she wanted the book. Yet even this wonderful coup, of the first-ever New York Times web serialization of a novel and link to buy the hardback, was not without still another unhappy ending. On the night the serial was to go live I hosted a champagne celebration party at a dear friend's home in San Francisco, everyone's eyes on the WebTV, waiting for the serial to begin.

It never happened.

The decision to pull the serial was made by an editor who'd temporarily been granted the reins of CyberTimes after Rob Fixmer had recently moved to the print edition of the paper. It was said deputy editor's opinion that fiction didn't belong on the technology section of the site. With the serialization shutdown the publisher changed the novel's huge first printing and cancelled a major promotional plan that (would have) included a full-page ad in USA Today and author tour.

(A story about the saga of The Deal can be read at www.joeygadget.com/about.)

As reviews began to appear another terrible twist occurred, when a mix-up with the publication date didn't see the actual book in stores until four to six weeks later.

All the same, it was wonderful to finally see the novel in print, and also as one of the first commercial e-books from Peanut Press, and also as an audiobook and, a year later, as a mass-market paperback.

So why re-release The Deal now?

Two reasons. First, the novel never got the chance it deserved to reach a wide audience. And second, readers may find it interesting that Alan's words ring true in several ways throughout the novel -- most notably in the finale, when the novel's protagonist, Peter Jones, unveils a device that not only bears more than a little resemblance to the iPhone but also closely mirrors Mr. Jobs's own words and actions when he unveiled the iPhone on stage at the Moscone Center on January 9, 2007.

Keep in mind, I wrote the final draft of my story nearly a decade before Jobs took to the stage.

Do I claim to have invented the iPhone? Of course not. But I did conceive of an all-in-one communication device that stows in the pocket. No, some of the technologies and features I envisioned have not come to bear, but then again, the new iPhone's openness to third-party applications could easily make those imaginings a reality.

Life imitates art?

That's for you to decide.

As for me, I'm happy to have regained the rights to this novel to see it serialized on the site BoingBoing.net (thanks to my one-time Wired editor and friend, Mark Frauenfelder), and as a trade paperback, for those who prefer their books in printed form.

Special thanks to all of my friends, my family, and the many smart and interesting people I've had the pleasure to know and work with over the years.

Joe Hutsko
Philadelphia
June 2008
joehutsko.com

Here's a link to Chapter 1 as a PDF or a text file. To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET

A price comparison website, www.moneysupermarket.com ran a experiment on the streets of London and Manchester:

[Representatives] wandered the streets this morning wearing sandwich boards offering a free £5 note to anyone who asked. Despite encountering over 1800 people, only 28 passers by bothered to take advantage of the offer.

The experiment also found a stark difference in the attitudes of men and women. On the streets of London and Manchester, all but 7 of the people who claimed the free cash were men and the research backed this up further. In a poll of 2000 people almost two thirds of women (64 per cent) said they would not claim the free fiver, compared to 41 per cent of money-shy men.

Link (via Arbroath)

Amy Crehore says: "My friend Mark Lowrie built this surreal train that runs under a table." Link

Steve Lodefink says: A lot of my favorite fringe/kook information sites are chattering about the Secret Bilderberg meeting that is going on in the D.C. suburbs this week. Here is what the History Channel says. This is Wikipedia on the topic. Here are the 2008 attendees. Link

Eric of Ramshackle Solid wrote about the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Members' Loan Service.

[T]he museum offers a lending library from their collection, ranging from plexiglas encased stuffed bobcats to a canine tooth of a saber-toothed cat.

If I had run across the Black-throated Mango hummingbird at the museum, I might have walked right past in my haste to see the giant T-Rex skeleton. But at home, on my bookshelf, the exhibit receives the attention and respect it deserves.

Link

Jeffrey Martin says:

I was on my way out of Zurich yesterday, and just had to make a panorama of this giant squad of footballers (some still with missing buttocks - don't worry there's another delivery truck on the way) but I got accosted and harassed by a couple of snivelling beastly rent-a-cops. They touched my camera, they started man-handling me, all of it was completely ridiculous. Any illegal activity was in fact being committed by them. In the name of who you might ask? Adidas, apparently, didn't want any photos of its masterpiece before the 10:00 press conference. Never mind the hundreds of mobile phone cameras snapping away for days, and at the same moment they were pushing me around.... Luckily some real cops came, found the situation to be quite silly, and allowed me to finally walk away without these mean guards putting their hands on me. Thank you, Swiss Police, for protecting me from the Zurich Main Station security guards!

Link

For part of his final thesis at Bauhaus-University in Weimar, German, Martin Lihs built the Wiispray, a reconstructed Wiimote controller hacked into a spray-paint can -- graffiti-games ahoy!

Although still early in the development process, it suggests another type of game platform and a fresh twist on the tired “art” app. The success of custom controllers for specific titles suggests that gamers are interested in a more realistic interaction than permitted by a standard joypad. Lihs plans to integrate a communal wall for collaborative graffiti in the eventual software title, that would allow ‘players’ to work on the same art project.

Link (via Engadget!)

Audrey Mast, a consultant to Chicago Public Radio, says:

I've noticed that you've linked to the Prelinger Library and related projects before, and wanted to let you know about the latest project from the Third Coast Audio Festival.

Third Coast is teaming with the Prelinger Library for its 2008 "audio challenge," called "Radio Ephemera," which invites the public to produce short audio stories inspired by some of the delightfully weird old books from the Prelinger collection, which are gorgeously digitized on the Radio Ephemera site for easy browsing and inspiration.

There are just less than two months left for people to produce an audio piece and submit it to the contest.

Link

A striking photo from Brazil by Luiz Vasconcelos. Click for bigger.

“An indigenous woman holds her child while trying to resist the advance of Amazonas state policemen who were expelling the woman and some 200 other members of the Landless Movement from a privately-owned tract of land on the outskirts of Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon March 11, 2008. The landless peasants tried in vain to resist the eviction with bows and arrows against police using tear gas and trained dogs. REUTERS/Luiz Vasconcelos-A Critica/AE (BRAZIL)”.

Link (Thanks, Enochrewt!)

Here's a video of Nathan Myhrvold's absolutely terrific March 2007 presentation at TED.

Nathan Myhrvold talks about a few of his latest fascinations -- animal photography, archeology, BBQ and generally being an eccentric genius multimillionaire. Listen for wild stories from the (somewhat raunchy) edge of the animal world.

Link

LA Weekly has an article about Devo frontman Mark Mothers­baugh’s print-to-order wallpaper designs.

Mark Mothersbaugh wants to put snakes on your wall. Now that the Devo lead singer and composer of film, television and commercial soundtracks has conquered the world of fine rugs, he’s set his designs, literally, on wallpaper. One pattern he’s calling “Black Forest” is a mutated collage of a 19th-century image of a bird. Those who recoil at the idea of reptiles splayed 24/7 across the walls of their kitchen should steer clear of “Snakes in a Tree,” a pattern of snakes, in trees. The unenlightened might find this one creepy, but Mothersbaugh’s wife, Anita, pictures it in a kids’ playroom, to enhance a safari-adventure theme. On the other hand, “Don’t Be Koi,” with its cheerful orange fish patterns, would be lovely even in Martha Stewart’s bathroom.

...

“I used to hate wallpaper,” Mothersbaugh is saying. “I was a maintenance man for an apartment building in downtown Akron, Ohio, and it was so hard to remove. The wallpaper needed to be changed every so often, and peeling it away unleashed the aromas of the decades — as well as the styles. It was like peeling layers off an onion.”

Link

MattW sez, "The Online Photographer has a great clip of Fox News reporters talking to the head spokesman of Amtrak at DC's Union Station about how photography in public is completely allowed. While they're shooting, a security guard comes up and tells them to turn the camera off." Don't miss Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes's reaction interview in which she says, in no uncertain terms, that Union Station is public property and photography is unequivocally permitted there! Link (Thanks, Mattw!)

Here are two fun how-to projects. From CRAFT, how to incorporate LEDs into embroidery, and from MAKE, how to make your own iodine from potassium iodide.

Architecture firm Triptyque designed this gracefully curved, apartment wide bookcase for a client in Sao Paolo. I have major bookcase envy.

I love these shelves that Brazilian design firm Triptyque created for a private apartment in Sao Paulo. They look perfect for lining the walls of spaceships, or as bulkheads. In fact, they are pretty much serving the function of bulkheads in this apartment, since the shelf winds all the way through the whole place, and serves as entertainment system, bookshelf, and cubbyhole warren. Above, you can see it with all the little cabinet doors closed. See below for what it looks like with them open, and also to see the rest of its sections.

Link to IO9 (no direct link for Triptyque: like most architects, they have a goofy website with bizarre navigation and no way to directly link to anything) (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Warning: obscure technical questions ahead!

Hey, Lazyweb, here's one for ya! I've got a 153-page PDF, made up mostly of high-rez raster images (8.5x11, 300DPI) with some vector text (page numbers a few blocks of text) here and there. I want to turn this into a .cbr file by bursting the PDF into individual PNGs or JPEGs and then RARing them, using Ubuntu and free tools. That's where you all come in: use the comments below to kibbitz -- I've been playing with ImageMagick's "convert" tool all day (using lines like "convert -geometry 4414x3123 -density 300x300 -quality 100 pdf:original.pdf[1-153] converted.png") with no success. Either it churns for hours and nothing happens (is there a verbose mode for "convert"?) or the output is really low-rez and crummy.

Some macho dudes at NYC clubs rub allegedly Preparation H on their torsos to temporarily shrink fat deposits and look buff. It's apparently an old competitive body-building trick. From ABC News:

"The bodybuilders I know use it on their obliques -- their love handles -- to take away any lingering water weight before shows," (club bouncer Rob) Fitzgerald told ABC News. "The guys in the clubs heard about this, and the use of it spread virally like some kind of Internet meme."

Preparation H contains a medication called phenylephrine HCL that -- when used for the drug's intended purpose -- will shrink the swollen tissues of hemorrhoids. It works by constricting the nearby blood vessels that feed blood and fluid to the area.

But the ingredient doesn't discriminate what kind of tissue it will shrink, hence the underground beauty tips of applying Preparation H under the eyes, on love handles or other places. None of which Wyeth, the makers of Preparation H, support.

Link (via Dose Nation)

Sock puppets (real, not metaphorical) deconstruct the symbolism of George Orwell's 1984 in the latest BBtv afterschool special from Austrian subversive art collective monochrom. Kiki and Bubu explore the age-old question of whether sexuality exists on the internet, and the soft-sculpture proletariat struggle continues.

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

Now is your chance to spur the comeback of Cosby sweaters with an authentic Bill Cosby sweater that he sported on The Cosby Show in the 1980s. Three handsome styles are currently up for auction on eBay with proceeds going to the Hello Friend/Ennis William Cosby Foundation. Starting bid is $5000.
Link (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)

This acrylic "Anatomica" heart necklace is just one of many lovely, woodcut-based acrylic pendants on offer at Paraphernalia.nu. Link (via Craft)

Modofly -- makers of laser-etched moleskine notebooks -- are now carrying gorgeous notebooks emblazoned with Dan Hillier's marvelous Cthuloid tentacled Victorian beauty-strosities. Link

See also: Engraved Victorian tentacle-horrors from Dan Hillier

It's the 75th anniversary of one of my favorite institutions, the drive-in movie theater, and to celebrate, Wired has a gallery of user-submitted photos of drive-ins around the country. Shown here, my favorite, "Apache Drive-In Theater" by R. Svirskas, "The Apache Drive-In Theater in Globe, Arizona. It's the last single-screen in the state." Link

Heal Emru sez, "An Owen Sound, Ontario waitress at Nathaniel's restaurant was laid off for the summer after she shaved her hair for a cancer fundraiser. I wonder if they would also turn away paying customers who were bald, especially if it was from chemo?"

Stacey Fearnall raised more than $2,700 for charity, but when she showed up for work and refused to sport a wig for her shift, her boss told her to take the summer off.

Her employer, Dan Hilliard, says his restaurant has certain standards prohibiting men from wearing earrings and requiring employees to keep their hair at a reasonable length...

He says he's already heard from some customers who agree with him and say they would have been "appalled" to have been served at Fearnall's table.

Link (Thanks, Heal Emru!)

A leaked report on British Telecom's spyware "Phorm" project -- eavesdropping software that the ISP secretly infected its customers' PCs with, in order to insert ads into their browsing sessions -- caused browser crashes, slowdowns and system instability.

The users were not informed they were being made guinea pigs for a new revenue system for BT and had no way to opt out of the system, according to the report. The JavaScript caused flickering problems for some users as the script reported back information about the content of the web page to a Phorm server. The script also crashed browsers that loaded a website that relied excessively on anchor tags. Additionally, the rogue JavaScript showed up unexpectedly in user's posts to some web forums.

Link (Thanks, Robbo!)

Wikileaks has the full text of a memo concerning the dread Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a draft treaty that does away with those pesky public trade-negotiations at the United Nations (with participation from citizens' groups and public interest groups) in favor of secret, closed-door meetings where entertainment industry giants get to give marching orders to governments in private.

It's some pretty crazy reading -- among other things, ACTA will outlaw P2P (even when used to share works that are legally available, like my books), and crack down on things like region-free DVD players. All of this is taking place out of the public eye, presumably with the intention of presenting it as a fait accompli just as the ink is drying on the treaty.

Honestly, it's becoming clearer and clearer that the entertainment industry is an existential threat to the idea of free speech, open tools, and an open communications network.

Who is really behind ACTA? Follow the money:

Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)[4]

Top four campaign contributions for 2006:
Time Warner $21,000
News Corp $15,000
Sony Corp of America $14,000
Walt Disney Co $13,550

Top two Industries:
TV/Movies/Music $181,050
Lawyers/Law Firms $114,200

Other politicians listed also show significant contributions from IP industries.

Link (Thanks, Espen!)

See also: Anti-counterfeiting treaty turns into maximum copyright free-for-all

ABC News reports on the humorous story of Gaith Pharaon, a Saudi financier who is wanted by the FBI for alleged bank fraud that cost US taxpayer $1.7 billion. The funny part is that the US military just awarded him an $80 million contract to supply jet fuel to US military bases in Afghanistan.

The US military has awarded an $80 million contract to a prominent Saudi financier who has been indicted by the US Justice Department. The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.

As a purely coincidental aside: "Pharaon was also an investor in President George W. Bush's first business venture, Arbusto Energy."

Link (via Reason Hit & Run )

In the LA Times' Technology blog, Chris Gaither reports that the indictment against billionaire Broadcom founder Dr. Henry T. Nicholas III has gotten "jucier."

One of the two indictments against the Broadcom founder that were unsealed today alleged that Nicholas put Ecstasy in the drinks of unsuspecting high-tech executives, bought prostitutes for customers of the Irvine-based chip company and both used and distributed illicit drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamines.

...

For aficionados of rich-people-being-naughty stories, there's this delicious tidbit from the story by Scott Reckard and Kim Christensen: The pilot of a private plane taking Nicholas and guests from Orange County to Las Vegas had to put on an oxygen mask because they smoked so much marijuana.

The partying wasn't reserved for the air, the government says. According to the story, the indictment also lists a few properties allegedly used for nefarious purposes:

An equestrian estate in Laguna Hills, where Nicholas had constructed a warren of tunnels and underground rooms, including one that contractors alleged was intended to become a secret "sex lair."

The blog entry includes links to PDFs of the indictments. Link

John Woods visits Times Square and explores the advertising there.

The One Times Square building is empty. Why? Because the owner can afford it by selling ad space alone. It costs $300,000/month to advertise on that structure -- one of things you'll learn in this behind-the-LED-screens look at Times Square.

Link (Thanks Andrew!)

Garth Johnson of Extreme Craft says:

I thought I'd clue you in about my visit to the Albino Squirrel Heaven in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday. If you follow the link within Extreme Craft, you can find a whole gallery of the insane dioramas there. The whole thing is in the basement of a funeral home. Unfortunately, we didn't get to meet the creator, who is now getting on in years, but the place was amazing just the same.

Link

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets we started things off by comparing Heineken to a hobo's micturitions and then helped PR reps identify the optimal manner in which to booze and schmooze us. That accomplished, we felt pretty good about diving into the meatier posts of the day... but since we didn't have any of those, we instead posted about a cute transistor radio in the shape of an owl and some adorable Space Invaders lamps.

Joel's Lego-spelt-LEGO fixation continued as he openly pined for some LunaBlocks, giant LEGO-like furniture bricks. He also marveled at the incredible story of a Silicon Valley exec who maintained a warehouse full of ecstasy, cocaine and meth before being taken down by Robocop in a swirl of talc. Six cheap camcorders were also compared, despite the fact that none of the cheap tat cams work any better than a digicam.

Meanwhile, Brownlee — through an incredible series of events that quite frankly defies transcription — somehow discovered a Soviet synthesizer capable of playing the fabled 'brown note'. He also posted about a swank IBM Model M style pocket calculator, only to have ten thousand voices unite in the comments to point out that it's "actually more like an Apple keyboard, doof." They had a point.

Finally, the bread-and-butter stuff: it's looking good that the 3G iPhone will wirelessly sync and Dell's new mini-notebook gets some specs and probably Ubuntu. And there was much exasperation from Beschizza as he fired off a polite British philippic at a gadget industry that can't seem to tell the difference between a UMPC and a subnotebook.

Link

I love this 1979 Disco Handbook that was scanned to Scribd. Link

Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered serious flaws in the way that the copyright cartel's enforcers detect and complain about copyright infringement. The methods used by these enforcers are so sloppy that they sent a DMCA takedown notice to three campus laser-printers, alleging that the inanimate objects were downloading Iron Man and Indiana Jones.

And yet these companies expect universities to take their notices seriously and spend their operating capital chasing down every wild accusation they make.

In two separate studies in August of 2007 and May of this year, the researchers set out to examine who was participating in BitTorrent file-sharing networks and what they were sharing. The researchers introduced software agents into these networks to monitor their traffic. Even though those software agents did not download any files, the researchers say they received over 400 take-down requests accusing them of participating in the downloads.

The researchers concluded that enforcement agencies are looking only at I.P. addresses of participants on these peer-to-peer networks, and not what files are actually downloaded or uploaded—a more resource-intensive process that would nevertheless yield more conclusive information.

In their report, the researchers also demonstrate a way to manipulate I.P. addresses so that another user appears responsible for the file-sharing.

An inanimate object could also get the blame. The researchers rigged the software agents to implicate three laserjet printers, which were then accused in takedown letters by the M.P.A.A. of downloading copies of “Iron Man” and the latest Indiana Jones film.

Link (Thanks, Richard!)

A nursing home in Germany built an exact replica of a bus stop in front of the facility. The only difference is that buses never stop there.

“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

“We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later today and invite them in to the home for a coffee,” said Mr Neureither. “Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.”

Link | Photo of faux bus stop here (via Arbroath)

Billy, a 5-inch-long elephant beetle that arrived in London via a banana shipment from Costa Rica, is desperate to hook up with a female before he kicks the bucket. Elephant beetles live just four months and are endangered because of rainforest decimation.

Linton Zoo director Kim Simmons said: "Billy needs to mate.

"He is showing all the signs and keeps displaying. He bobs up and down on his branch and taps on the ground.

"He has been making the most of his new home and emits tiny mating calls. It's like he's saying 'here I am, come get me'."

Link (via Arbroath)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Meet the beetle
• Indian boy producing winged beetles in his urine
• 1.4 million beetles tile palace ceiling
• Republican Slime Mold Beetles
• Cross-stitch a dung-beetle!
• Beetle-inspired moisture control
• Creepy looking bug from Brazilian Boing Boing reader
• Ladybug group shot

I like this prankish pizza leaflet. Link

Dinosaurs and Robots guest blogger Robyn Miller (who created the Myst series of computer games with his brother, Rand), discovered this 1930s ad for Mickey Mouse tucked into a book in Paris.

This French Mickey seems to be flaunting the extra digit lacking in his US relative. Link

Iain sends word of the ParanoidLinux project, inspired by the Linux distro used by the freedom fighters in my novel, Little Brother:

Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack. ~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)

When those words were written, ParanoidLinux was just a fiction. It is our goal to make this a reality. The project officially started on May 14th, and has been growing ever since. We welcome your ideas, contributions, designs, or code. You can find us on freenode's irc server in the #paranoidlinux channel. Hope to see you there!

Link (Thanks, Iain!)

Janelia Farm is a research campus in northern Virgina where scientists are reverse engineering the brain of a fruit fly. At the facility, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a transdisciplinary team of biologists, neuroscientists, physicists, and engineers hope their studies of Drosophilia could one day enable them to generate a complete circuit diagram of the human brain. As part of IEEE Spectrum magazine's "Special Report: The Singularity," writer Sally Adee visited Janella Farm to see if the work there might even point toward a giant leap in artificial intelligence. From IEEE Spectrum:

Let's say all the engineering problems can be solved in the next five or 10 years. Could researchers then actually reverse engineer the human brain, creating its functional duplicate in silicon? Would consciousness and all its attendant joy, pain, insanity, and genius be freed from biological containment? Adler sees no reason why not. “The brain is the ultimate micromachine,” (researcher David Adler) insists. “The fact that it's made out of meat is a red herring.”

His vision is a Google map of the human brain that incorporates not just Janelia's circuit diagrams but also other work in neuroscience. Adler cites the work of Stanford neuroscientist Stephen Smith as “the first steps to finding the soul.” At Harvard's Center for Brain Science, neuro-scientist Jeff Lichtman mapped mouse neurons by “painting” them with fluorescent proteins. Rubin believes he'll live long enough to see an MRI-like device that measures function with such high-resolution output that neurons in fruit flies, mice, or even humans can be observed taking in and processing information in real time.

How would all these different systems work together to show us how the brain does what it does? With his 10- billion- pixel-per-second microscope, Adler is confident he'll be able to produce brain-topography images like Google's satellite views, resolving fine details in sharp focus. Smith's cartography, on the other hand, he compares with Google's map views, including street names. Rubin's fMRI data would be like real-time traffic data. Layering these different maps atop each other, says Adler, could lead to a hybrid comparable to a Google map.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Coloring the brain's wiring Link

The trailer for Gonzo, the new documentary about the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, looks incredible. The film was directed by Alex Gibney and narrated by Hunter's friend Johnny Depp. (Screenshot from the trailer: photo (c) 1977 lynn goldsmith/corbis.) Hunter has been gone for three years now. I miss him. The trailer alone reminds me why. Link (Thanks, Gabe "Tune Up Media" Adiv!)

Yesterday, my pal Jess Hemerly happened upon Idlewild Books, a new travel bookstore in Manhattan with a terrific organizational scheme. It shelves guidebooks with travel literature related to that place. "So the Ireland section has a bunch of Ireland-related travel guides plus Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Jess says. I found a Publishers Weekly article about the opening of IdleWild six weeks ago:

“I was in a chain bookstore and realized I would have to go to five different sections to get what I needed—a travel guide, a map, a language book, a novel,” (owner David Del Vecchio) noted. “At Idlewild, everything will be shelved by country, and in the case of the United States, by state—that way people will be able to browse according to the place of their interest.”

Del Vecchio emphasized that he believes literature about a country—be it a novel or a political biography—can be just as useful as a guidebook. His product mix will be at least 40% armchair travel titles: “Guidebooks you really can buy almost anywhere,” he explained, “but books on politics and culture are often much harder to find. Our section on Turkey might have guides, maps, a history of the Blue Mosque, a biography of Ataturk, and novels by Pamuk and others.” Graham Greene’s novels won’t be shelved in the U.K. section, said Del Vecchio, but in Cuba and Mexico, where the books are set.

Link to Idlewild Books, Link to Publishers Weekly article

You've Been Left Behind is a company that stores electronic documents for later delivery to your heathen loved ones after you get swept off to heaven during the Rapture. The idea is that there will still be time to save them too. The company claims to provide secure storage, but Bruce Schneier is suspicious.) From You've Been Left Behind:

We have set up a system to send documents by the email, to the addresses you provide, 6 days after the "Rapture" of the Church. This occurs when 3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S fail to log in over a 3 day period. Another 3 days are given to fail safe any false triggering of the system.

And another section that seems to have been removed from the site since yesterday but is still in the Google cache:

You will also be able to give them some help in living out their remaining time. In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys' (you won't be needing them any more, and the gift will drive home the message of love). There won't be any bodies, so probate court will take 7 years to clear your assets to your next of Kin. 7 years of course is all the time that will be left. So, basically the Government of the AntiChrist gets your stuff, unless you make it available in another way.

Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Drank is a new "anti-energy drink," designed to, er, "slow your roll." The grape-flavored drink is fortified with melatonin, valerian root, and rose hips. Based on the color and the name of the beverage, I'd venture to say that they're playing off the popular underground libation Purple Drank. This Village Voice quotes the following from a press release:

From design to production, every aspect of this calming drink was inspired by today’s popular hip hop artists who embrace the much sought-after hip hop lifestyle that encourages people to capture a stress-free state of mind.

Link (Thanks, Alex Codlin!)