Ethan Zuckerman sez,

Belarussian journalist Evgeny Morozov was getting sick of encountering the same stories about US politics on many of the blogs and news sites he frequents. So he decided to engineer some serendipity, building a new type of news aggregation site: Polymeme.

Polymeme relies on the wisdom of crowds in a very different way that sites like Reddit and Digg. For each of twenty core topics, the algorithms behind Polymeme monitor a small set of blogs, chosen because they focus on a specific topic, like evolution, education or economics. The algorithms look to see what stories - in mainstream press, alternative or citizen media - are being linked to and discussed in these "expert" blogs. Polymeme offers a link to the story being talked about, as well as to a selection of blogposts that address the story in question.

The site lets you encounter new ideas as a conversation between an original author and a set of bloggers engaging with the ideas. And the stories featured tend be both fascinating and not to be the ones getting lots of love on Digg and Reddit.

Of course, some things don't change no matter how wide a net you cast: according to the site's own statistics, the two people most often mentioned in the blogs tracked: Barack Obama and John McCain.

Polymeme (Thanks, Ethan!)

The call for proposals for O'Reilly Emerging Tech 2009 has just gone up: "Living, Reinvented." I was involved in every ETech from the first P2PCon in 1999 right up to last year (I'm taking a year or two off while I catch up on fatherhood and book-deadlines), and I have had some of my most mind-blowing, life-altering conversations and experiences at these events, which showcase the leading edge of (often impractical but never boring) experimentation, skunkworks, and passionate development. This year's theme sounds fantastic, too. Proposals are due Sept 17, and the event is next March 9-12 in San Diego San Jose.

# Nomadism & Shedworking: As cities and their suburbs rapidly increase their footprint, there are some who reject the crowded living conditions, but take advantage of the connectedness. They adopt a high-tech lifestyle within the constraints of a smaller space or take their posessions and their bits with them on the road, to the farthest reaches of the globe. How do they do this and what can we learn from them?

# Sustainable Life: The American lifestyle is unsustainable. How do we move to one-Earth economy? What are Europeans doing? Will Dubai be the trendsetter with its newest sustainable city? How will a renewed interest in environmental design affect us? Last year’s keynoter Alex Steffen posited that it would be technology driving the change, not a restriction of habits or an energy diet. Right now the abundant world is being changed by rising oil and medical costs, forcing change. What technology will break through?

# Life Hacking & Information Overload: We are bombarded with too much information, but at least some of it is relevant. What are the tools that we can use to process it? How can we identify the subset we actually care about? How do we identify the necessary bits of information that makes us more productive? Can we use cognitive science to help us deal with modern day living? What does neuroscience tell us about our brains and how we should handle learning and processing? Will ubicomp be able to help us stave off the overload or will it hasten our doom?

Link

A US appellate division court has thrown out a DMCA claim against the Air Force (a former soldier wrote some software on his own time for the USAF, added in a time-bomb that made it stop working, and quit and sold the software's copyrights to a company that sued the Air Force for defusing the time-bomb rather than buying a license) and has made it clear that the DMCA doesn't apply to the US government at all.

But the court also addressed the DMCA claims made by Blueport, and its decision here is quite striking. "The DMCA itself contains no express waiver of sovereign immunity," the judge wrote, "Indeed, the substantive prohibitions of the DMCA refer to individual persons, not the Government." Thus, because sovereign immunity is not explicitly eliminated, and the phrasing of the statute does not mention organizations, the DMCA cannot be applied to the US government, even in cases where the more general immunity to copyright claims does not apply.

It appears that Congress took a "do as we say, not as we need to do" approach to strengthening digital copyrights.

Link

Gene Hughes (aka Gene Costin), the radio monitoring expert who published the first "scanner-geek bible" Police Call some 40+ years ago, has died at 80 years of age. Photographer Steve Diet Goedde shot the portrait of this wireless master above for a 2005 profile in Wired News.

Kevin Poulsen, who wrote that profile, has a post up today on Wired.com about his passing.

[He] became a household word among geeks in the 1970s when he started cataloging the radio frequencies used by various police and fire departments and other agencies, giving hobbyists something to do with the first generation of programmable scanners then hitting the market.

Police Call Publisher Gene Hughes Dead at 80 (Wired.com Threat Level)

This still frame is from a purported promotional video extolling the cleanliness of Extended Stay America hotel rooms. It's quite provocative, but I doubt strongly that it was actually made by Extended Stay. Other clips in the same vein are available on, er, extstay.com, not extendedstayhotels.com, the company's regular home page. I wish it were a real marketing campaign, but I bet it's not. (For example, clicking links on the extstay.com site takes you to extendedstayhotels.com pages.) Alleged Extended Stay America "very clean" video (SLOG, thanks Jason Tester!)

I am such a watch overdrive sucker that I'm even jonesing for this monster, the Colosso, which features what Watchismo calls a "crystal pustule filled with a dimensional earth rotating for local or GMT time." A mere $550,000 (€3,21). On Top of the World with the Hysek COLOSSO

Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Brownlee visits the virtual Toaster Museum. International Online Toaster Museum (BB Gadgets)

Melbourne, Australia-based artist Mark Powell makes incredibly intricate and nightmarish dioramas. They remind me a bit of Frances Glessner Lee's dollhouse crime scenes featured in The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. You can see Powell's magnificent miniatures on his own site or his Flickr stream. Sculptures From Beyond The Gate (markpowellart.com), Mark Powell's photostream (Flickr, via Morbid Anatomy)

Previously on BB:
• Death in the dollhouse

This fantastic string telephone installation was spotted in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I wonder who was on the other end.
String telephone booth (Wooster Collective, via Laughing Squid)

UPDATE: In the comments, RUSHO18 writes, "There's another broken phone just around the corner that had a banana with googly eyes glued onto it hanging from a string. I got a picture of it off my cell phone, enjoy: banana phone"

Evolutionary biologist Blair Hedges has great luck with tiny herps. In 2001, he co-discovered the world's smallest lizard (above left) on an island off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Now, the Penn State evolutionary biologist has described what seems to be the world's tiniest species of snake (above right). Found in Barbados, the threadsnake averages just 100 millimeters long. From Science News:

Islands are often homes for very large or very small species. Some lineages on continents never make it out to islands, so island dwellers have opportunities to fill niches they wouldn’t on the mainland. Hence, when searching for an unusual form of an animal, such as minis or giants, islands make good places to start looking.

World's smallest snake (Science News)

Heramb Ashok Kumthekar, 22, of Goa, India, has twelve fingers and 14 toes. However, a technicality prevents him from holding the official Guinness World Record. From The Telegraph:

...Some of his fingers are technically attached, even though they have separate bones.

The official Guinness honour belongs to his fellow countryman Devendra Harne, a 13 year old boy from Kolkota, who has 12 fingers and 13 toes on his feet.

However, there is some consolation for Heramb as he is included in the Indian equivalent of the Guinness Book of Records, the Limca Book of Records.

Polydactylism (The Telegraph)

[ Editor's note: Actor James Doohan was best known in life for his role as "Scotty" on Star Trek. Since his passing, it seems he has been most often spoken of in the context of a planned "space funeral" he requested in his will. That wish has not yet been fulfilled, despite repeated attempts.

Doohan's family provided a portion of his ashes to Celestis, Inc., a subdivision of the Houston-based company Space Services which offers "post-cremation memorial spaceflights." This Saturday, August 2, 2008, those remains were part of the payload for a SpaceX rocket that didn't make it into orbit because of technical problems.

There have been previous attempts to send Doohan posthumously to the stars, one of which ended with the eventual recovery of the rocket's payload, including those ashes. The remains of astronaut Gordon Cooper were also destined for this same service. I understand that both Cooper and Doohan's surviving kin are receiving the memorial services as a gift, but the company has paying customers, too.

Space is tough. Of all the unusual and technically-specific ways to memorialize a loved one (morph their ash into a man-made diamond; mix it with concrete to seed a coral reef), ascending to orbit is probably the most complicated, and the most vulnerable to technical unknowns. The human remains, you could say, are just another payload. The odds for getting any new kind of craft into space are hard. Historically, there is much failure before there is success.

But families want honor and closure when a loved one passes on. One of James Doohan's seven children is a Boing Boing reader, and part of our extended community of friends and kindred happy mutants. I asked him if he would share his thoughts with us, and he very generously obliged. Below, his words. -- XJ ]

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FOR WANT OF A TRANSPORTER

My father loved engineering. Anything he could do to visit NASA, an aircraft carrier, a submarine, he'd do it. There was no end to the enjoyment he received when people would come up to him and say, "I'm an engineer because of you." So when a company in Texas offered to launch his remains into orbit, we could only accept.

It's been just over 3 years since my dad, James Doohan, passed on. In that time, there have been many memorials, the most recent of which to commemorate Linlithgow, Scotland, as the future birthplace of Scotty. But his launch into space was the most publicized, and it was to be the most significant.

There have been many attempts to send my father on his way. On Saturday, the latest launch attempt by SpaceX, with a portion of my father's remains aboard, failed to achieve orbit. While there are many complicated reasons why this is a disappointment, mine is simple: I'd like to finish saying goodbye.

Every launch attempt is like reliving his funeral. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony, and a retelling of his deeds in life. But at the end of these funerals, something goes awry, the body doesn't get buried, and you know you're going to have to come back to do it over again.

I'm not laying blame on anyone for the delays. It's difficult, living on the cusp of technology. Where most of us lament the premature obsolescence of our cell phones, there are those few of us who've pinned the memories of our family members on a rocket, hoping it will touch the sky.

My dad believed in human ingenuity, and he believed in mankind's destiny beyond the exosphere. That it would take several attempts in these early stages to successfully achieve orbit would not have phased him. I can accept this, because of who he was, and because he knew it was all a part of progress.

For those reasons, I know that his spirit will persevere, and others will keep those launch attempts coming. The act of sending a loved one's remains into space will someday be commonplace, even if we have to book a space flight ourselves to make it happen. That's the kind of progress my father believed in.

But I'm not sure I can hang on until then. Grieving can't wait for the pace of progress, and I have to say goodbye now. So when news of the next launch rolls around, please don't ask me about it; I won't be paying attention.

If my father has anything to do with it, though, I'm sure that ship will get where it's going.

-- Ehrich Blackhound

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(Image: courtesy of Wende Doohan and the Doohan family. Thank you, Ehrich.)

UPDATE: John Schwartz has an update piece at the New York Times' LEDE blog which includes a comment from the folks at Celestis.

Boing Boing tv's UK-based music correspondent Russell Porter interviews the young experimental jazz band EMPIRICAL, from London. Today's episode includes an extended musical interlude, to ensure the mellowest possible Monday for all the peeps out there in BBtv-land. The band's "influences" roster says it the best:

Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Steve Coleman, Branford Marsalis, Ray Brown, Jimmy Garrison, Bob Hurst, Ron Carter, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Ben Riley, Thelonious Monk, Jason Moran, Wynton Kelly, Keith Jarrat, Herbie Hancock, Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare and to many others to list.

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Link to BBtv blog post with viewer discussion thread, downloadable video, and instructions on how to subscribe to our videos through iTunes and stuff.

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Previous PORTER REPORT episodes on BBtv:

Russell Porter: Hot 8 Brass Band of New Orleans, pt. 1

Hot 8 Brass Band, pt. 2

Russell Porter: Transgressive and rockfeedback.com, pt. 2

Russell Porter roundtable: Transgressive Records, rockfeedback.com, pt. 1

Russell Porter with Alice Russell, pt. 2

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

You too can own one of Tom Banwell's "Reefer Man Leather Mask." It's just $35 on Etsy. I hope the surreal disembodied head is included. Reefer Man leather mask (Etsy, thanks Tara McGinley!)

Several past U.S. presidents had vegetable gardens on the White House lawn. Eleanor Roosevelt started a victory garden on the White House lawn in 1943, which encouraged millions to do the same in their own front yards. When WWII ended, home gardeners were producing 40 percent of the United States' produce.

Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardens International (an organization that promotes kitchen gardening and home-cooking) hopes to convince the next US president to make a small vegetable garden on the 19 acres of grass surrounding the White House. His video about making a garden in the front yard of his own "white house" is entertaining and inspiring. This Lawn is Your Lawn

I gave a talk a couple weeks ago in Cambridge, UK, as part of the Cambridge Business Lectures, entitled, "Life in the Information Economy." Lots of folks asked about video for the talk -- and here it is! The (free) lecture series goes on -- the next speaker is John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, on Sept 12. Life in the Information Economy

Update: Thanks to Greg Young for producing this transcript of the talk!