Jeff sez,

Recently announced at the media reform conference in Minneapolis, the full color media heroes trading cards recognize the accomplishments of twenty-one praiseworthy journalists, media activists, and educators. The fun and informative cards are a fantastic teaching tool for students, or an exciting gift for friends, family or budding media activists.

The Media heroes being honored include historical figures such as legendary anti-lynching reporter Ida B. Wells, Newspaper Guild founder Heywood Broun, and Elias Boudinot, founder/editor of the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. Also recognized are contemporary media movers and shakers, including intrepid PBS producer Bill Moyers, Paper Tiger TV co-founder DeeDee Halleck, Puerto Rican community activist Richie Perez, and others. Organizations or collaborations singled out for hero status include news program Democracy Now!, media watch group FAIR, and the Children's Television Workshop, creators of Sesame Street.

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Joi Ito points to this fan-remix of a photo he once took of George Lucas and JJ Abrams -- he's looking to contact whoever created it.

I'd like to contact the artist to ask for permission to use it and ask them to license it under a CC license. I'd also like to provide attribution. If you sent me the photo and are reading this, can you leave a comment or send me an email? If you know who did this, let me know too.

Photoshopped George Lucas and JJ Abrams photo [Joi Ito]

The BBC's Chris Vallance tells us,

We recorded a long interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, British personal computer pioneer (ZX80, ZX81, ZX spectrum) and we've just posted it, more or less unexpurgated, online. Many of your readers will have grown up playing games on one of Sir Clive's machines. In the interview he talks about everything from from flying electric cars to Eee PC's and and his thoughts on the modern computing industry.

Sir Clive Sinclair [ BBC iPM ]

As Congress prepares new guidelines for the NSA's domestic spying program, US lawmakers are leaving untouched a wide array of government programs which also perform surveillance on Americans:

These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns. Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency.

"There's virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn't in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. "We're operating in a brave new world."

Domestic spying quietly goes on [Baltimore Sun]

Bruce Conner, a pioneering collage filmmaker and Beat-era assemblage artist, died yesterday. He was 74. Conner is best known for his experimental cut-up films made from found footage and TV advertisements. In the decades since his first gallery shows in the 1950s, Conner collaborated with the likes of DEVO, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, and David Byrne. From Wikipedia:

Conner’s first and possibly most famous film, entitled A Movie (1958), combined his thrift store hunting process and his use of still photography. It is referred to as the piece that brought Conner to notoriety. In skillfully editing stock footage, Conner created abstract metaphors of mankind's violence. He subsequently made nearly two dozen non-narrative experimental films.

While Conner was living in Massachusetts in 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Conner filmed the television coverage of the event (near Kennedy's birthplace) and edited and re-edited the footage with stock footage into another meditation on violence which he titled Report. The film was issued several times as it was re-edited.

According to Conner's friend and fellow film-maker Stan Brakhage in his book Film at Wit's End, Conner was signed into a New York gallery contract in the early 1960s, which stipulated stylistic and personal restraint beyond Conner's freewheeling nature. Conner reacted by attending openings, only to move among the crowd wordlessly pinning buttons that read "I am Bruce Conner" or "I am not Bruce Conner" to their clothes. Many send-ups of artistic authorship followed, including a five page piece Conner had published in a major art publication in which Conner's making of a peanut butter, banana, bacon, lettuce, and Swiss cheese sandwich was reported step-by-step in great detail, with numerous photographs, as though it were a work of art.

Bruce Conner (Wikipedia), DEVO - Mongoloid: A film by Bruce Conner (YouTube), Prolific Beat era artist Bruce Conner dies (San Francisco Chronicle, thanks RU Sirius!)

Researchers from the Weymouth Sea Life Centre are providing octopuses with Rubik's cubes to determine whether the animals prefer one tentacle over another, or another, or another, etc. I bet they secretly hope that one of the animals will solve the puzzle. From Nature's The Great Beyond:

“Uniquely, octopuses have more than half their nerves in their arms and have been shown to partially think with their arms,” says Claire Little, of the Weymouth Sea Life Centre. “Many animals have been shown to favour a certain arm so we will see if octopuses can be added to that list.”

According to Little, the findings could help make life in captivity more pleasant for these intelligent, (and occasionally shark eating), animals. “They are very susceptible to stress, so if they do have a favourite side to be fed on, it could reduce risk to them,” she says.

Octupus and Rubik's Cube (Nature)

Aerospace engineer Robert Howard, 36, is designing lunar homes for future moon bases. He's the manager of NASA's "habitability design center" at the Johnson Space Center. From Smithsonian (photo by Robert Seale):

Howard says this is a heady time to be working at NASA. In 2004, President Bush set a goal of sending humans back to the moon by 2020 and eventually on to Mars. The lunar outpost would be a training ground and launchpad for trips to the red planet.

But there are plenty of challenges to overcome first. To camp on the moon, astronauts need to be shielded from solar radiation. In a waterless environment every drop of H2O, including sweat and urine, must be recycled and purified. NASA engineers are sorting through dozens of possible models for the lunar outpost—from horizontal, aluminum cylinders to inflatable structures that are essentially giant, Kevlar-reinforced balloons.

Lunar Living (Smithsonian)

A University of Florida researcher is designing a flying saucer that uses plasma and surrounding air as its fuel to generate lift. The aircraft's skin will be studded with electrodes that ionize the air, converting it into plasma. Mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Royh hopes to have a six inch working prototype in the next year.

Using an onboard source of energy (such as a battery, ultracapacitor, solar panel or any combination thereof), the electrodes will send an electrical current into the plasma, causing the plasma to push against the neutral (noncharged) air surrounding the craft, theoretically generating enough force for liftoff and movement in different directions (depending on where on the craft's surface you direct the electrical current)...

Theoretically, Roy says, the flying saucer can be as large as anyone wants to build it, because the design gives the aircraft balance and stability. In other words, this type of aircraft could someday be built large enough to ferry around people. But, Roy says, "we need to walk before we can run, so we're starting small."

The biggest hurdle to building a WEAV large enough to carry passengers would be making the craft light, yet powerful enough to lift its cargo and energy source. Roy is not sure what kind of energy source he will use yet. He anticipates that the craft's body will be made from a material that is an insulator such as ceramic, which is light and a good conductor of electricity. "In theory you probably should be able to scale it up," says Anthony Colozza, a researcher with government contractor Analex Corporation who is stationed at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and helped Roy draw up the original plans for powering the saucer. The choice of a power source that is powerful, yet lightweight is "probably going to be the thing that makes or breaks it."

Flying saucer (Scientific American)

UPDATE: As several commenters point out, saying that the saucer uses air as fuel, as I did in my post based on the SciAm articl, isn't really correct.

Abbie Hawkins, 19, spent a half-day at work before noticing that a baby bat was hiding inside her bra. From The Telegraph:

Miss Hawkins said she got dressed at 7.30am and arrived for work at the Holiday Inn Norwich North, near Norwich International Airport without noticing anything unusual.

"When I was driving to work I felt a slight vibration but I thought it was just my mobile phone in my jacket pocket," she said.

It was not until her lunch break, at midday when she felt a strange movement inside her bra, which had been hanging on her washing line the previous night.

Bat in bra (The Telegraph, via Fortean Times)

John Rogers -- who wrote the superb pilot for the stillborn TV show based on Warren Ellis's excellent comic Global Frequency -- has a new TV show in the works, called Leverage. TNT has a little trailer available (see embedded video above) and I was able to see the whole thing via BitTorrent. On the strength of both, I'd say that Leverage has the potential to be the first new TV show in more than five years that I would actually put my butt on the couch for, every week, without fail.

Leverage is an hour-long tensely plotted, technologically literate heist/caper show whose likable, flawed, comedic foursome of infiltration specialists are well-cast, funny, and given some damned good lines. The direction and camerawork is distinctive and fearsomely great: this show feels like a graphic novel (in a good way) -- that fast-moving, highly visual, stylized thing that the Wachowskis got so right in the first Matrix movie. It's a really neat trick: it feels like a cinematic graphic novel, one of those graphic novels that appears to be setting up every panel like it was a camera-shot. But those novels always transcend what a mere camera could do (because the artist is more flexible than the lens), so it was freaky to see a camera mimicking the stuff that the notional "hypercamera" of graphic novels uses.

Rogers is also a comics writer (Blue Beetle, among other things) and has had a diverse history in the field. I've been lucky enough to hang out with him a couple of times, and he really feels like "one of us" -- a net-centric geek with a gigantic D&D collection, a nonstop sense of humor, and a lust for all things gadgety. Link

See also: Screenwriter of cancelled, leaked Warren Ellis pilot marvels at his fanbase

Mr Jalopy sez, "I bought a vintage Marantz quadraphonic sound amplifier at a garage sale and have drafted a black light tinged ode to the competing 4-channel formats that never really panned out. "

I am not audiophile and I do not have a golden ear, but I am extremely interested in the blunt force trauma of the awesome clarity and unambiguous nature of completely rocking out. There are tons of quadraphonic albums on eBay and it is only a matter of time until I find a quadraphonic 8-track player at a garage sale for $1. Besides, it turns out quad receivers are selling on eBay for less than two rolls of quarters, so from a cost of fun perspective, some quad audio experiments are a pretty good value.

Besides the aforementioned technical snafus, there will be the issue of availability of key releases as I imagine Iggy Pop's "Raw Power" is not available in quad. What about Ziggy Stardust? And Black Sabbath's "Paranoid?" Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, what if a friend excitedly brings over a quadraphonic Yes album and I am not able to keep from ripping it from the turntable to smash it to bits?

Link (Thanks, Mr Jalopy!)

Sardenta sez, "I know you're aware of the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. They've got an opening in their education department for an Education Coordinator. Here's a summary:"

This position supports the Manager of Interpretation and Educator resources by coordinating the training and efforts of the part-time gallery guides and floor volunteers. The guides and volunteers will provide excellent museum experiences for guided group visits to the exhibitions and interactive galleries such as Sound Lab; as well as visitors participating in public programs and All Access Nights. Working closely with other EMP|SFM staff, especially the Visitor Experience and Public Programming Managers, this position will coordinate recruiting, training, and the day-to-day supervision required to produce lively and engaging interpretive staff and knowledgeable floor volunteers.

Link (Thanks, Sardenta!)

UK-based Russell Porter chronicles alt music culture in the Porter Report with aggressive wit and offbeat charm.

Today, part two of his exclusive two-part interview for Boing Boing tv with the soulful Brit singer-songwriter Alice Russell, whose musical influences include Chaka Khan, Jill Scott, Aretha Franklin, and Minnie Riperton. Here's the Brighton beauty's Wikipedia entry (with a decent discography); here's her MySpace page with tons of music clips, and gig dates.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions for subscribing to the BBtv video podcast.

Previous PORTER REPORT episodes on BBtv:

Russell Porter with Alice Russell

Russell Porter and Cadence Weapon, pt. 1.

Russell Porter and Cadence Weapon, pt. 2.

Russell Porter with George Pringle

Russell Porter with The Young Knives pt 1

Russell Porter with The Young Knives pt 2

Russell Porter with The Futureheads

Russell Porter with The Guillotines

Russell Porter with Peggy Sue and the Pirates

Russell Porter with Dockers MC

Russell Porter with Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip

Reminder: I'm speaking tonight at the University Bookstore in Seattle as part of the Clarion West reading series -- hope to see you there!

Where: University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE in Seattle.
When: Jul 8 2008, 7PM

Link, Link to Clarion West events calendar

Michael Erard's Wired story on the ways that Chinglish is mutating into a full-fludged (and widespread) dialect poses some interesting possibilities for the language's future, in which tonal suffixes, borrowed vocabulary words, and streamlined grammar open up rich new expressive possibilities. I've always loved English's baking-soda-like capacity to absorb other languages' best features -- the Yiddish terminal "already" at sentences' end, the fantastic Gaelic-salted Irvine Welsh Scots dialect, the many glorious island formations from the Caribbean and South Seas. All my attempts to learn even a few words of comprehensible Chinese have been a disaster, so it's heartening to hear that Chinese may be coming to me, bridging the distance.

It's not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of "har-muh-nee," it's "har-moh-nee." And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced "tink," and theories is "tee-oh-rees."...

And it's possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve," maybe conservation isn't so necessary.

Link (via Futurismic)

This brass and leather Soviet gas-mask is the genuine article, not a steampunk fetish-fashion prop (though, of course, it could be both). Link (via Wired Gadget Lab)

Update: I take it back: it's a sculpture from the Ukraine, on sale on eBay

The Inbox Victory page collects photos of people pointing at their empty email inboxes, grinning madly before the next flood of emails pours in. I try very hard to be an inbox zero guy, but in practice I always end up with a couple hangovers in there -- usually related to scheduling meetings or calls with people, which is probably the most logistically difficult thing to do in my life.

Have you ever been in the situation where you spend days trying answer all of your email only to accomplish your goal and have no one to share in your victory? All you want is a high five, a pat on the back, and a “job well done soldier!”, and yet most likely all you are left with is an empty room and a cold cup of coffee. Inbox Victory is an initiative that says, “you deserve that high five!” And here is how you get it:

1) Get your email inbox down to zero. People have various methods for dealing with their email so ‘inbox 0′ is going to mean different things to different people. A basic rule of thumb, however, is getting it to a point where no further action can be taken.

2) Open up your webcam software and take a screenshot of yourself profiling in front of your defeated foe (See examples below)...

Link (via Kottke)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John's dug up this magnificent zombie lawn-sculpture by Alan Dickenson, available for a mere $90 -- think of the savings you'll realize by no longer having to pay someone to keep the kids off your lawn! Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

Shardcore sez, "I think I've just painted the geekiest picture ever. It's a portrait of my friend Richard, he's a sysadmin. I've painted him in a server room, with Marvin the Paranoid Android. Holding a ZX Spectrum. I think you'll agree it ticks all the boxes of English geeks of a certain age..." Link (Thanks, Shardcore!)