Tom sez, "An international protest against undue surveillance is being held next month on the 11th of October. It is 'a broad movement of campaigners and organizations is calling on everybody to join action against excessive surveillance by governments and businesses'. We need to get this on the radar for the elections in the USA this year, the EU parliamentary elections next year and many more."

Surveillance mania is spreading. Governments and businesses register, monitor and control our behaviour ever more thoroughly. No matter what we do, who we phone and talk to, where we go, whom we are friends with, what our interests are, which groups we participate in - "big brother" government and "little brothers" in business know it more and more thoroughly. The resulting lack of privacy and confidentiality is putting at risk the freedom of confession, the freedom of speech as well as the work of doctors, helplines, lawyers and journalists.

The manifold agenda of security sector reform encompasses the convergence of police, intelligence agencies and the military, threatening to melt down the division and balance of powers. Using methods of mass surveillance, the borderless cooperation of the military, intelligence services and police authorities is leading towards the construction of "Fortresses" in Europe and on other continents, directed against refugees and different-looking people but also affecting, for example, political activists, the poor and under-priviledged, and sports fans.

People who constantly feel watched and under surveillance cannot freely and courageously stand up for their rights and for a just society. Mass surveillance is thereby threatening the fabric of a democratic and open society. Mass surveillance is also endangering the work and commitment of civil society organizations.

International Action Day "Freedom not fear - Stop the surveillance mania!" on 11 October 2008 (Thanks, Tom!)

Artist Beverly St. Clair uses quilts to encode genetic information: it's beautiful and comfy!

My idea for genome quilts grew from the juxtaposition of two experiences at Wesleyan University in November 2001. First I viewed an exhibit of work by Anni Albers, an artist I have admired for many years. The show included her serigraphs of triangles arranged in a grid. I was struck by their similarity to quilt patterns. The next day I attended a lecture about the Human Genome Project and was impressed by the beautiful shapes of the proteins illustrated and the interesting patterns made by the microarrays. I realized that I could use a simple quilt block to represent each of the four bases in DNA: cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. A square bisected into a light and dark triangle is rotated in four orientations to resemble the letters C, G, A, and T. These blocks are placed in sequences determined by the base sequence, so one can read the genetic code by looking at the quilt. The color and fabric choices influence the overall design. The quilts are visually pleasing, with their strong colors and seemingly traditional design, but they hide and reveal an entirely other construct of information.

Genome Quilts (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Designer Laura Cahill wanted to make art without wasting new material. She did a bunch of research, and found out that used books are the most common unwanted objects; they're also notoriously hard to recycle because of the kind of glue bookbinders used to use. So she took her second-hand book collection and turned it into beautiful pieces of furniture.

The bench is pretty self-explanatory, but for flower vases and lamp posts, Cahill uses a band saw to cut the books into desired shapes and sizes, and then wraps the spines around test tubes to make the cylindrical core. It's such a cool, eco-friendly concept.

via Dezeen

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Google is really watching now. John Battelle blogs:

Not content to lease data from others who have satellites, Google today launched its own satellite into space. (Via BeetTv, thanks Andy.) Talk about web meets world....this is yet another indicator of the integration of virtual and physical. And it brings Google one step closer to what I think could be the company's Waterloo - a viral meme that Google is sensing too much, knows too much, and is too powerful. It may not be rational, but no one ever accused humans of being entirely rational.

And via the linked AP article:

A Delta 2 rocket carrying the GeoEye-1 satellite lifted off at 11:50 a.m. Saturday. Video on the GeoEye Web site showed the satellite separating from the rocket moments later on its way to an eventual polar orbit. The satellite makers say GeoEye-1 has the highest resolution of any commercial imaging system. It can collect images from orbit with enough detail to show home plate on a baseball diamond.

And snip from a related article by Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides on Wired News:

In a speech last month to a security conference in the UK, Stoica explained that by using shadows you can read the length and rhythm of someone's gait and do an identification, even from above. He has written software that isolates the shadow from video, and adjusts for time of day and camera angle to deal with elongated and foreshortened shadows. Stoica shot video from the top of a six story building to test out his software and was able to get usable gait data on his subjects.

Now going from six stories to satellites in low Earth orbit is probably a stretch. The best commercial low Earth orbit satellite (GeoEye- launching this Sunday to power better Google Maps) will have 41 cm resolution. The best known military spy sat can see at least down to 10 cm (though who knows what classified hardware can do). GeoEye is also only taking stills as it flies over, not the kinds of video footage that Stoica was using. To do that, you might need to go up to geostationary orbit which is much farther out and according to one expert, just wouldn't have the resolution. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying overhead, on the other hand, might work just fine for this.

Either way, you may want to practice skipping from place to place when it is sunny out.

Spy Software Could ID You By Your Shadow (Wired Science)

Clarification, 725pm PT: One anonymous BB commenter was among several who took issue with the implication that Google actually owned the satellite, the launch vehicle, or exclusive usage rights to all resulting data. That's not accurate. In the discussion thread for this BB post, "anonymous #27" said:

Google is the "exclusive online mapping site" customer for GeoEye-1 data; it is not the exclusive customer for the imagery. Many other customers, including and especially the NGA, will be using GeoEye-1 data. Also, the Google logo was on the launch vehicle, not the spacecraft, and Google did not pay for the placement.

This Reuters item released a few hours ago covers those ownership/exclusivity matters, and is a helpful read. Here's a press release from GeoEye about the launch, also released this afternoon.

And in related news, Google is evidently planning offshore data barges, to avoid property taxes and keep hard-workin' servers cool with the power of the ocean. (via Tim O'Reilly/Twitter)

I can't quite put into words why these two YouTube videos of a high-drama moment with Tyra Banks are so fun to watch over and over and over again. Maybe you can figure it out. Top: slow-mo rage-out. Bottom: Chipmunk version of same. Serving suggestion: watch them both at the same time and flip out. (via clayton cubitt)

I'm reading and re-reading a NYT Magazine piece that explores ambient telepresence, as made mundane by Twitter, Facebook, AIM, and the like. The writer, Clive Thompson, has riffed on this before in Wired. In both, he really nails a number of things I've been struggling to put into words for years. It's a terrific read.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy (NYT)

Mad Magazine has leaked its satirical Sarah Palin spread to the HuffPo -- a good 'un, too. Exclusive: MAD Magazine's Election Coverage, Sarah Palin Edition

The Twice as Nice Double Timer is a great-looking and practical little gizmo:

Now, were you supposed to boil the pasta for 10 minutes and simmer the sauce for 30? Or was it the other way around? Keep track of all the dishes in your kitchen with this handy timer that lets you time two dishes at once. With a wonderful retro look, these standing timers can be set for up to 55 minutes. Available in mint or red.

Twice As Nice (via Cribcandy)

Glyn sez, "In response to a consultation on the European Commission's proposal to almost double the term of copyright protection on sound recordings, the Open Rights Group have responded that for the vast majority of performers the projected extra sales income resulting from term extension is likely to be meagre: from as little as 50¢ each year in the first ten years, to as "much" as €26.79 each year. That's because most of the gains (89.5%) will go to the top 20% of recording artists. Meanwhile the major labels will be dividing up millions in extra handouts every year."

Our submission shows that for the vast majority of performers the projected extra sales income resulting from term extension is likely to be meagre: from as little as 50¢ each year in the first ten years, to as “much” as €26.79 each year. That’s because most of the gains (89.5%) will go to the top 20% of recording artists. Meanwhile the major labels will be dividing up millions in extra handouts every year.

What’s more, performing artists will make no extra revenue from radio airplay and other income streams arising from so-called “secondary remuneration rights”, and may even make less. The Commission assumes that fees paid by users of recordings, e.g. broadcasters, will remain constant. That means the amount of earnings available to performers will not be any bigger - it will just be sliced more thinly and distributed longer to more rightsholders. Performers will not earn any more over their life time, and are likely to earn less, as money will be transferred from the living to the estates of the dead.

Performers likely to get as little as 50¢ a year from increased term of copyright (Thanks, Glyn!)

Fraske Design's got a great, simple tutorial for making your own Tetris brownies for hours of fun and pounds of flab:

Since I made these brownies thinner than normal, I also cut down the baking time. The baking process would have normally taken around 30 minutes, but this batch only took 10. I just kept an eye on the pan and took it out when it looked about right. The trick is to not let them bake too long.

Next, while the brownies were cooling, I mixed up my tetris color frostings into seven separate bowls. It turns out that Tetris colors have varied over the years, so I settled on matching the colors to the tetrads in the Free Tetris game online. My colors included yellow, orange, red, magenta, cyan, blue, and green. I achieved these colors mixing white vanilla frosting and food coloring accordingly.

How to Make Tetris Brownies (or Tetris Cookies) (via Craft)

Today on TokyoMango, I wrote about a newly found stack of Occupation-era letters written by an American woman in 1940s Japan; a robot that will help you find cool t-shirts at Uniqlo; and a guitarist from a famous heavy metal band who now lives in Japan. I also celebrated my blog's two-year anniversary and revisited some of my first blog posts ever.

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Here's an update on the strange story of the Gulfstream II jet filled with 3.7 tons of cocaine that crashed in the Yucatan last year. The Mexico City newspaper El Universal reports that European Parliament was investigating the circumstances surrounding the plane, which had previously been used by the CIA for "extraordinary rendition" flights.

The daily said it had obtained documents from the United States and the European Parliament which "show that that plane flew several times to Guantanamo, Cuba, presumably to transfer terrorism suspects." It said the European Parliament was investigating the private Grumman Gulfstream II, registered by the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, for suspected use in CIA "rendition" flights in which prisoners are covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.

Last October, the Austin American Statesman reported the plane had previously flown to Guantanamo Bay.

Here's a Chicago Public Radio story from October 31, 2007 about the crashed CIA drug plane.

The crashed drug plane also has been linked to a Bush fundraiser.

Mad Cow Morning news has been covering stories about the CIA and drug smuggling. The plane was owned by Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc.

Mad Cow visited Donna Blue's offices and took photos of what appears to be a sham company. Here's a photo of some unmarked police cars parked in front Donna Blue Aircraft's empty suite:

Drug plane used for US rendition flights

Is this a video of the plane? (from this German website)

Do you feel like biology and physics have done more for you than Allah or Jesus? Observing that "the essence of religion is stained glass and song," San Francisco-based artist Jonathon Keats is transforming a two-story Berkeley building into a makeshift temple for people who worship science called the Atheon.

Instead of telling the story of baby Jesus, the Atheon's stained glass windows will show cosmic microwave background radiation made from NASA satellite data. And since the interior of the building is still under construction, templer-goers will have to either pray from the sidewalk or in front of a glowing web site from their computers at home. Keats even made a song of worship; he collaborated with Virginia astronomer Mark Whittle to come up with a canon of sounds from three hypothetical universes called Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? They won't be playing it live at the temple, but you can listen to it on your cell phone by calling a special phone number. Church service starts on September 27.

Listen to Keats' scientific hymn
The Magnes Museum main page (Thanks, Mark R!)

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Ed Rondthaler, age 102, gives a very cool lesson about how odd the written English language is. Andy Cruz of House Industries says:

We had the privilege to spend a day filming Ed Rondthaler, the founder of Photo-Lettering, Inc., former president of the American Literacy Council and author of The Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling. Another living legend, writer/director Erich Weiss, is in the process of editing down all of the film we shot. Click here for the “trailer” he put together for us.

Ed Rondthaler

In Japan, when you want to get off a bus, you press a little button with the words "will stop next" on it. The button lights up, a beep goes off, and a robotic woman's voice says: "We will stop next." Mr. Bus is a quirky guy who dedicates all his free time to collecting these bus buzzers. He started 25 years ago and now has over 200 different ones, some of which he has wired into this giant billboard so he can light them up. He finds them at bus depots and by scavenging through discarded vehicles at dumpsters.

"It's a very Japanese thing, the polite exchange between passenger saying 'I pushed it' and the bus buzzer saying 'I have received your request,'" he says. "It's such a thoughtful invention."

Mr. Bus' web site (via The Almanac of Weird Hobbies)

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Wired magazine went around to interview the founders of Wired. Here's Kevin Kelly talking about Wired and HotWired. (In this video, you can see the back of my head at 1:32. Boing Boing manager John Battelle is in the blue t-shirt across from me.)

To celebrate its 15th anniversary, Wired sent a film crew around to some of its former co-founders so we could reminence on tape. They came to my studio this spring and I talked about why the magazine was started and why I still read it and write for it. They edited the footage as a commercial for their ad sales efforts. I just noticed it was up on YouTube. (Louis Rossetto's is here.) Naturally they cut out the interesting stuff, but I did enjoy the little fragments and glimpses of the early Wired days.

History of Wired

(Click image for full size)

The preview images for the new Blab! show at Copro-Nason in Los Angeles are up. I'm fascinated by Ryan Heshka's work (he has 19 pieces in the show, including the one shown here), which borrows themes from old science fiction pulps and takes them in new direction. Link

(click image for full size)

The publisher of Baby Tattoo art books is holding its second weekend retreat in Southern California with many of our favorite artists. I heard that the first one was tremendously fun.

The 2nd annual Baby Tattooville provides a unique opportunity for a small group of celebrated artists and enthusiastic collectors to spend time together in a relaxed yet creatively stimulating environment. Without the time constraints of a typical personal appearance, or the crowd control issues of a standing-room-only event, artists and collectors will have a weekend-long opportunity to discuss and explore their mutual interests.

Original work will be created and celebrated around-the-clock. No one will leave empty handed. Only 18 out of 50 event packages are still available, and they are selling fast. The event takes place October 3-5, 2008 at Southern California's architectural masterpiece The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa. This year's Featured Artists are Ana Bagayan, Glenn Barr, Dave Cooper, Bob Dob, Joe Ledbetter, Brandi Milne, Daniel Peacock, Shag, Any Sol and Michael Whelan.

Baby Tattooville artist and collectors retreat, Oct. 3-5, 2008

Here's the latest episode of the funny (and educational!) You Suck at Photoshop. You Suck At Photoshop #16: Define Brush Preset

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted 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.

Here's a link to Chapter 14 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

I'm working on a series of short fiction stories/vignettes that explore real human issues through my dog Ruby, which I'm hoping will be fodder for my next book. I thought I'd share one with you guys before my two weeks as a Boinger are over. I actually wrote this one at San Francisco airport while waiting for a plane to Tokyo—Ruby was really barking like a maniac at a sleeping guy, and my imagination took it from there. Here goes:

Ruby Was Angry

Ruby was angry. She didn’t really understand why—but as she stared at the man sprawled out on the floor of the airport, next to the sign for Gate 82 United Flight 899 to Tokyo’s Narita Airport, she began to realize just how angry she really was.

It quickly became clear to her that this anger was not a temporary function of seeing the sleeping man, but the delayed manifestation of a much more profound and long-existing anger that she had kept buried deep in her soul for a very long time. It was hard to say how long exactly. Her eyes narrowed and she bore her teeth like a rabid pit bull about to take a plunge. The fearsome expression on her face looked oddly out of place paired with her pink braided necklace and silver heart-shaped pendant with “RUBY KEILANA” printed daintily on its curve. Her reddish-brown hair stood on its ends like a cat sprayed with water.

Then a strange thing happened. Random memories started to flash across her brain like a picture slide show on a computer screen. There was Dangercat, glaring down at her as she frolicked in his garden, daring her to come back up the stairs into his house, hissing under his breath, claws gleaming in the sunlight; her mom, picking up all her strategically positioned toys from around the house and throwing them ruthlessly in a trash bag; her friend Xica, her big black body pouncing mercilessly at Ruby as Ruby hid under the table, praying not to be crushed under Xica’s weight; the tall white man who called her a rat as she walked by him on Stanyan Street last week; all her so-called friends who once pretended to love her so much and then one day disappeared without a trace.

Throughout all this, Ruby had kept up her positive attitude, her sweet demeanor, and her unconditional forgiveness. But this time she had had enough!

BBtv's London-based music correspondent Russell Porter brings us a performance and interview from the Rumble Strips (website | MySpace | Wikipedia). They're currently on tour throughout the USA, and they're named after a UK-English term for the "small, continuous lines of bumps along the edge of a road." Their music is described as " Soul / Regional Mexican / Powerpop;" a fine, rockin' way to close out a short Labor Day work week. Previous BBtv music features with Russell Porter are here.

Absurdist art or TV commercial? Either way, I like it.

I hardly go out to see bands any more, but I'd pay a lot to attend a Sonseed concert.

♫ Once I tried to run, once I tried to hide, but Jesus found me and touched me deep down inside. ♫

"Jesus is My Friend" by Sonseed (Via Arbroath)

When my wife and I started to plan our wedding, we inevitably turned to the question of rings, and it was only a matter of time before we came to the idea of rings with little wheels on them that could be used as crypto devices, in the manner of super-duper Captain Midnight Decoder Badges.

So we asked Bruce Schneier for some advice and he suggested that we make each ring with one static band and two rotating ones, each inscribed with the alphabet. The first wheel has dots on the letters, alternating above, none, below. The second wheel has the repeating sequence of above, above, none, none, below, below. The third wheel has the repeating sequence of above, above, above, none, none, none, below, below, below (it sounds confusing, but you can see a chart here).

The rings were made in white gold by Isabel Rucker (daughter of master cyberpunk author Rudy Rucker -- and a fantastic jeweler in her own right) and they turned out great.

Now it's time that we turn to the Internet with a challenge: given these two matching rings, what crypto applications can you come up with? Could you use them to scramble passwords (possibly hashed with a key)? How about encoding messages for secret transmission? What additional common apparatus (say, different-sized coins) could you use to generate initialization vectors and increase the system's security?

This is an open competition to be judged by Bruce "Applied Cryptography" Schneier and me -- the winner gets a copy of Little Brother signed by both of us. Post your submissions to the comments or send them to cryptocontest@craphound.com before Oct 1, 2008. Crytpo Wedding Ring

Back in 1984, Japanese manga artist Mitsuru Sugaya wrote a fun comic book for kids about the birth of Apple. It was originally published as a two-part series in a popular manga compilation called Koro Koro Comics in May and June that year, but Sugaya published the story in its entirety on his blog on July 11th—iPhone launch day in Japan. "The year before I wrote this, I went to Silicon Valley and stopped by Apple HQ," he writes.

The opening scene shows a young, spiky-haired Steve Wozniak getting slapped in the head with a frying pan by his mom for spending too much time tinkering with gadgets. It then chronicles the naughty gadget-y tricks that gained him infamy in Cupertino, the visit to Lockheed Martin that introduced him to computers for the first time, his fateful encounter with Steve Jobs, and how the two went on to create and market Apple I and II.

The Apple II Story on Sugaya's blog (Japanese)

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

MAD About Star Wars is a lot more than your typical MAD magazine anthology. The author, Jonathan Bresman, was a Lucasfilm employee before he became a senior editor at MAD, so there's a really great sense of how Lucasfilm and George Lucas (a legendary MAD Magazine fan) reacted to each of the many spot-on, hold-your-gut parodies MAD ran over the years. The book is liberally sprinkled with sidebar anaecdotes telling stories of MAD and Lucas's relationship to each other (for example, the Lucasfilm legal department sent a threatening letter to MAD about one of their parodies; the same parody generated a personal fan-letter from George Lucas -- MAD simply sent copies of each letter to the other sender and the problem went away), including the many times a MAD parody about tatty Star Wars merch or franchising was outdone by actual licensed products and sequels. Bresman also pokes fun at MAD's own propensity for cheap shots, counting all the limp light-saber jokes and other repeated gags that show up in each new parody.

Thirty years of Star Wars generated thirty years of great material for MAD, and this volume collects the very best of it, annotating it with background and inside info. It's just the thing to remind yourself of why MAD rules -- or to turn on a young Star Wars fan to decades worth of loving lampoons. MAD About Star Wars

Update: Bonnie Burton sez, "We did a lot of interviews with the authors and the old MAD magazine crew: It's a MAD MAD MAD MAD Galaxy (Interviews with Mort Drucker and Dick DeBartolo); The Usual Gang of Jediots: MAD About Star Wars (Interviews with David Shayne and Jonathan Bresman)"

Painter Eric Joyner brings his delightful robots back to Culver City's Corey Helford Gallery for a new solo show opening tomorrow night, September 6. The new collection, titled Artificial Enlightenment, features the machines in their day-to-day lives involving donut factories, motorcycle rides, and steam train catastrophes. According to the gallery, Joyner is "inspired by science fiction, toys, and Brandywine artists and illustrators of the 1900’s." The full show is also viewable online.
Eric Joyner's Artificial Enlightenment, Corey Helford Gallery

With only a five-foot length of copper, it was possible for the farmer of 1931 to milk his cows by radio control!

THERE seems to be no end to the versatility of radio in these days of electrical and mechanical miracles—not even cows and street cars are immune to the influences of its radiations. As a curtain raiser at the annual radio show held recently in St. Louis, a street car was operated from a distance by a mere man with a radio transmitter in his hand, and a Holstein cow was made to dispense her milk by the medium of radio waves, whether she liked it or not.

The mechanism of the trolley car and the mechanism of the milking machine were hooked up to a specially constructed radio receiver using only a five-foot length of copper pipe as an antenna. At a distance stood the operator, holding a portable radio transmitter using a similar antenna, as shown in the accompanying photos. When the key was pressed at the transmitter, the distant receiver in both cases set the machines to operating.

Radio Milks Cows, Runs Street Cars (Feb, 1931)

The Bendiboard Retro is a flexible, machine-washable keyboard that comes embossed with Space Invaders (or, if you must, a Union Jack). Bendiboard Retro (via Wonderland)

Artist Demelza Hill created this model-car-kit-esque set of fine dining cutlery, intended to reinforce the "correct use of cutlery."

Snap and Dine is a single use three-course table setting that integrates disposable cutlery with traditional silverware. The portable lunch setting expands the possibilities of eating outdoors in style whilst reinforcing the correct use of cutlery, which has been lost over time. This is achieved through the decorative qualities and formal setting which both are a visual reference to fine dinning. This product is fun and interactive whilst raising the standards of current eating on the go habits.

Snap and Dine (via Make)

Starting in November, Amazon will sell the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, a marvel of engineering and pedagogy, on a "give one, get one" basis: every XO you buy will also pay for one to be given to a kid in the developing world:

This year, OLPC teamed up with a Web retailer instead of running the program itself, said Matt Keller, director of Europe, Middle East and Africa at OLPC.

Amazon.com will start selling XO laptops under the Give One, Get One program in late November. Sales will likely extend through the end of December.

Amazon to sell OLPC XO laptops in November

Michael Moore will make his next movie available as a free download at the same time as it is in cinemas. I downloaded Sicko free and then paid to see it at the Cinerama Dome in LA again. Smart. (Let's just hope that Moore's smart enough to dodge DRM and other evil crap in the download).

I've been trying to get a review copy of his next book out of his publishers, but no luck. Guess I'll just have to buy it when it hits shelves here in London.

The film, "Slacker Uprising," follows Moore's 62-city tour during the 2004 election to rally young voters. It will be available for three weeks as a free download to North American residents, beginning Sept. 23. An official announcement of the film is planned for Friday.

Moore said he considered releasing "Slacker Uprising" theatrically as "Michael Moore's big election year movie" as he did with 2004's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which was highly critical of President Bush.

Instead, Moore opted for a symbol of gratitude to his fans as he approaches the 20th anniversary of his first film, 1989's "Roger & Me."

"I thought it'd be a nice way to celebrate my 20th year of doing this," Moore said. "And also help get out the vote for November. I've been thinking about what I want to do to help with the election this year."

Michael Moore to release new film online for free (via The Long Tail)

Mythbusters' Adam Savage now says that credit-card companies and Texas Instruments didn't lean on him to kill a story about vulnerabilities in RFID cards:

"There's been a lot of talk about this RFID thing, and I have to admit that I got some of my facts wrong, as I wasn't on that story, and as I said on the video, I wasn't actually in on the call," Savage said in the statement. "Texas Instruments' account of their call with Grant and our producer is factually correct. If I went into the detail of exactly why this story didn't get filmed, it's so bizarre and convoluted that no one would believe me, but suffice to say...the decision not to continue on with the RFID story was made by our production company, Beyond Productions, and had nothing to do with Discovery, or their ad sales department."

'MythBusters' co-host backpedals on RFID kerfuffle

See also: Credit-card companies killed Mythbusters segment on RFID vulnerabilities

In case you're still worried that the universe will wink out of existence in 5 days when they turn on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, rest easy: a new report from the LHC Safety Assessment Group says it ain't gonna happen. Or, as one physicist told me when I asked about this last month while researching my Petacentres article for Nature, "Look, it's a 10^-19 chance, and you've got a 10^-11 chance of suddenly evaporating while shaving."

The report explains that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to exist, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth or other astronomical bodies.

a The Safety Assessment Group writes, “Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth – and the planet still exists.”

LHC Switch-on Fears Are Completely Unfounded

Last weekend I stopped by artist Dan Hillier's stall at the Brick Lane Upmarket in east London and was treated to these four eye-popping new prints. I've got the serpent man up in my office and he gets cooler every time I look at him. New Dan Hillier prints

See also:
* Engraved Victorian tentacle-horrors from Dan Hillier
* Dan Hillier's tentacle horrors -- now on moleskine notebooks!

My latest Locus Magazine column is live: "Macropayments" explains why I don't have a tipjar:

Two columns back, in "Think Like a Dandelion," I talked about the reproductive strategies employed in species where reproduction is cheap, like dandelions. Unlike humans, dandelions don’t worry about the disposition of each of their children — they only want to be sure that every opportunity for success is fulfilled, that every crack in every sidewalk has a dandelion growing out of it. It’s a damned successful strategy, for dandelions at least. You’d be hard pressed to find a lawn, no matter how carefully tended and how thoroughly poisoned, that doesn’t have a dandelion or two sprouting on it.

To concretize the metaphor: I don’t care about making sure that everyone who gets a copy of my books pays me for them — what I care about is ensuring that the everyone who would pay me decent money for a book has the opportunity to do so. I don’t want to hold 13-year-olds by the ankles and shake them until their allowance falls out of their pockets, but I do want to be sure that when their parents are thinking about a gift for them, the first thing that springs to mind is my latest $20-$25 hardcover.

Macropayments

Nathan sez, "Story from Reuters explains how an elephant was controlled by poachers using heroin-laced bananas. Echoes the drug-controlled dolphin 'Jones' in William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic."

After police arrested the traders and freed Xiguang a few months later, the elephant was confirmed to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms and sent to a wild animal protection center in Hainan for rehab, Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.

A year of methadone injections at five times the human dosage had helped wean Xiguang off his addiction.

Drug-addicted elephant kicks heroin habit (THanks, Nathan!)

Today on TokyoMango, I wrote about musical instrument cell phones; an eraser with 28 corners; a bikini model who wore her swimsuit backwards; and a woman who is obsessed with making weird faces out of ice cream.

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

Mats!? says:

Here's a small preview of the Art show "Horror Vacuium" opening this Friday, Sept. 5th at Wellspace Gallery 4233 Telegraph ave. Oakland, CA 6-10PM.

The entire show will feature close to 100 freshly minted Paintings, many of them collaborations.

Horror Vacuuim

In high school, I knew a guy who wired a dashboard switch to his car's license plate light so that he could turn it off during nighttime "getaways" when he was out causing trouble. That's not as tricky as Orlando Payano, who the Transit Authority of New York and New Jersey accuse of rigging his tractor-trailer's license plate so that it flipped up when he sped through camera-equipped toll plazas without paying. Payano, charged with toll evasion and "license plate destruction," denies the allegations. From the Associated Press:

The Port Authority said driver Orlando Payano ran a cable from the license plate to the dashboard cigarette lighter inside the cab of the vehicle.

Pulling on the lighter flipped the plate under the truck.

Disappearing license plate (Yahoo! News)

Over at Instructables, user Zim started a series on how to live in a schoolbus. The first installment is about how to get the bus, make it road legal, and gut it for interior construction. Zim also links to Skoolie, an interesting online community devoted to school bus conversion. From Instructables:

A few years back, I got tired of living the American Dream and struggling to keep up with a horrendous mortgage and rising credit card debt. I know there's really only two ways to balance a budget, spend less or earn more, and I didn't see a huge wage increase in the future. Also, I have always been interested in unusual homes and can't pass a two or three hundred square foot enclosure without wondering what interesting living space could be made there. Less space, less stuff, less consumed, less owed. It sounded like where I wanted to be.

Then, I got a call from a buddy that purchased a pair of used school buses from the Texas A&M surplus property auction. He knew I had been interested in one and was willing to hold on to it until I could head out to pick it up. I got myself to College Station, spent a few days changing fluids, ripping out the seats and doing general preventative maintenance. Then, for about $1400 for the bus and another $600 in diesel (probably twice that, now), I headed back to Florida with the beast. Two years later, I've got a fully functional, comfortable, clean living space for about $12,000 and my monthly housing and utility costs are less than $400/month.

While my expenses have been drastically reduced and I am finally moving towards a more sustainable lifestyle, this probably isn't for everyone. For a single guy that wants to do something about waste and consumption, however, I can't think of a better place. Maybe something like this won't get you to move into a bus, but if it gets you to think about alternatives, then I'm glad I could share.

Re-use a Schoolbus for Cheap Housing (Instructables)

The most recent episode of Mad Men showed a bit of an old television sign-off, called "High Flight." I have dim memories of watching it as a kid, and I wanted to see the whole thing, so I started looking for it. It turns out there are a bunch of versions using different aircraft and different narrators reciting John Gillespie Magee, Jr.'s poem "High Flight." The one above is in color. I'm not sure if it's the original, which appeared in black and white. Maybe it was in color -- our family had a black and white set.

Here's another version, recorded from a 1982 sign-off on KABC 7 in Los Angeles:

And here's another from KCRA 3 Sacramento, with Moog music:

(Photo of Mister Jalopy's dog, Coco, who apparently owns the store Mister Jalopy manages.)

The very handy Mister Jalopy was profiled by AP reporter John Rogers today.

Deep in the bowels of his musty gadget workshop, he is surrounded by shelves filled with literally tens of thousands of nuts, bolts, washers, springs, hand tools and seemingly every other gizmo imaginable, in seemingly every size and shape ever made.

He needs them all, he says, for everything from his repair jobs to his more esoteric projects, such as the drive-in movie theater projector he built out of a light bulb, old bookshelves, some junked electrical parts and a kitchen table he found abandoned by the side of a road.

He mounted the finished product onto the back of an adult-sized tricycle, and now when he's in the mood for a movie, he can simply pedal the thing up to a building and project his film onto the wall.

"Rather than moan and groan about the death of the drive-in movie theater, I decided to build my own," he says with a shrug and a sly smile.

Link (Thanks, Gary61!)

The Daily Show has a segment with video clips of Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, and others complaining about the media's unfair treatment of Sarah Palin, along with earlier video clips of these folks dishing out the same garbage about other women, including Hillary Clinton. (Thanks, Kirk!)

The Large Helical Device: a scientific instrument that straddles the line between beauty and function:

The Large Helical Device (LHD) project involves construction of the world's largest superconducting helical device, which employs a heliotron magnetic field originally developed in Japan. The objectives are to conduct fusion-plasma confinement research in a steady-state machine and to elucidate important research issues in physics and engineering for helical plasma reactors.

Large Helical Device Project (via JWZ)

Salim sez, "Ask Metafilter tackles the important question: 'How would you dispose of the body without getting caught?' - the asker insists that he is not a murderer, nor does he have any intent to murder... but I'm not sure about the responses. One for lovers of crime-fiction." From June, 2004 -- wonder how much of this is different today? "

First, be smart from the very beginning. Pulverize all teeth, burn off fingerprints, and disfigure the face. Forcing a DNA test to establish identity (if it ever comes to that) might introduce the legal/forensic hurdle that saves your ass down the line. An unidentifiable body can, in a pinch, be dressed in thrift store clothes and dropped in a bad part of town where the police are less likely to question it. I don't reommend that disposal method, I'm just saying an easily identifiable body is an even bigger threat than the opposite.

Assuming you have it inside a house where you can work on it a bit, the first thing you want to do is drain it of fluids. This will make it easier to cut up, and slow decomposition a little bit. The best way to do this quick and dirty is to perforate the body with a pointed knife, and then perform CPR on it. Cut the fronts of the thighs deep, diagonally, to slit the femoral arteries. Then pump the chest. The valves in the heart will still work when dead, and the springback of the ribcage can put apply a fair amount of suction to the artria. Do this in a tub. Plug the drain, and mingle lots of bleach with the bodily fluids before unplugging the drain to empty the tub. This should help control the stench of death, which would otherwise reek from your gutter gratings. Do everything you can to control odors. Plug in an ionizer, burn candles, leave bowls of baking soda everywhere. Ventilate the room in the middle of the night, but otherwise keep it closed. Keep the body under a plastic sheet while it's in the tub.

Suppose you killed somebody... (Thanks, Salim!)

Waterproof cameras are no big deal these days, but in the 1930s, Bruce Mozert was the only person in the world who had one. Mozert pioneered underwater photography in Silver Springs, Florida. He had stopped there en route to a shoot in Miami in 1938 when he'd heard that his favorite actor, Johnny Weissmuller, was filming Tarzan there; he ended up staying for the rest of his life (he still lives nearby). Mozert wanted the world to know how amazingly clear the water in Silver Springs was. So he built a giant waterproof housing for his camera, put on some scuba gear, and—for the next 45 years—created memorable underwater scenes of everyday American life. He did fun things like use dry ice to make bubbles and cans of condensed milk to create smoke.

Silver Springs: The Underwater Photography of Bruce Mozert (Amazon)
The Life Aquatic with Bruce Mozert (The Smithsonian)

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)

In last month's Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens considers the importance of urban "Bohemias" and why the ultimate demolishment/development of New York's Greenwich Village is a very, very sad thing. From the essay:

It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach still gives continuity with the past.

In aspect and design, New York’s West Village is the opposite of Soho in London in that it began its existence before the famous evolution of Manhattan as a grid had taken shape. As Malcolm Cowley phrased it, evoking the Village just after the First World War, “Most of us drifted to Manhattan to the crooked streets south of Fourteenth, where you could rent a furnished hall-bedroom for two or three dollars weekly.… We came to the Village … because living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already … because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could be published.” Trying to sum up the ethos, Cowley wrote that for his generation the Village was something more than “a place, a mood, a way of life: Like all bohemias, it was also a doctrine.”

Last Call, Bohemia (Vanity Fair, thanks Jess Hemerly!)

My mom just sent me this delightful little Japanese book called The Almanac of Weird Hobbies, which I first read about on my friend Ichiru's blog a couple of weeks ago. It's a great collection of quirky Japanese people who have totally off-the-wall hobbies, like playing two recorders simultaneously with both nostrils and turning PCs into miniature greenhouses. Not surprisingly, extreme ironing and bedhead documentation were also featured in this book. There are some other great examples, some of which I hope to post here or on TokyoMango over the next couple of days.

( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)