Sign of the times: Artist MATS!? has a new silk screen print for sale, called "News-Flash." It's 9 x 12 and costs $25. MATS!? "News-Flash" print

In 1988, Leon Lederman shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work to understand elementary particles called neutrinos. ScienCentral set Lederman up with a desk on a street corner and encouraged curious passersby to ask science questions. The two-part video was part of SciCentral's Web show series called "Street Corner Science." Lederman talked about time travel, nuclear power, and, particle physics. Street Corner Science with Leon Lederman (ScienCentral, via Eastern Blot)

Nestled in that Nation post Cory referred to earlier today was this gem: buymyshitpile.com.

With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their "distressed assets", i.e., assets that no one else wants to buy from them. We figured that instead of protesting this plan, we'd give regular Americans the same opportunity to sell their bad assets to the government. We need your help and you need the Government's help!

Use the form below to submit bad assets you'd like the government to take off your hands. And remember, when estimating the value of your 1997 limited edition Hanson single CD "MMMbop", it's not what you can sell these items for that matters, it's what you think they are worth. The fact that you think they are worth more than anyone will buy them for is what makes them bad assets.

The Dainty Squid's amazing sewing tattoo (which is not yet complete) was spotted in Craft magazine's Flickr pool. Crafty Tattoo

Gabriela sez,

Congress is moving rapidly to enact a gigantic taxpayer bailout of the financial sector, with a potential cost of $700 billion or more than $2,000 per American citizen. We believe, as Justice Brandeis said, that “Sunlight is the best of disinfectants,” and that all legislation ought to be open to public comment and consideration in real-time, not just after the fact.

So, as a public service, the Sunlight Foundation just posted the proposals that are receiving the most attention by Congress and the Administration - and by you, the people. We invite you to review the bills and share your knowledge online and show Congress what you really want to see in this vital legislation.

As we ponder the significance of the Internet this One Web Day, what better way to show how we can use this awesome medium for positive change by ending secret legislation in Washington? Public Markup (Thanks, Gabriela!)

Hal sends us this "brilliant satiric email phrasing Hank Paulson's giant Wall Street bailout as Nigerian spam."

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Bailout Satire (Thanks, Hal!)

Avi sez, "This mp3 of the rarely heard “But If Not” speech by MLK is crucial to grasp his soaring moral vision and deep intimacy with the Bible. Essential listening for our times. The following quote from the speech does it for me (speech begins at 32:32 into the track):"

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

“But If Not”: Dr. Martin Luther King Gives a Sermon On Civil Disobedience in a Rare Recording, Direct link to MP3 (Thanks, Avi!)

Over on Slashdot, a vigorous discussion of a new paper by business-school profs from Harvard and Stanford called "Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects," that takes it as read that businesspeople should want to clobber free and open source technology and replace it with proprietary lockware.

As if the proprietary software world needed any help, two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish 'Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects,' a research paper dedicated to helping business executives fight the onslaught of open source software. The professors advise 'the commercial vendor ... to bring its product to market first, to judiciously improve its product features, to keep its product "closed" so the open source product cannot tap into the network already built by the commercial product, and to segment the market so it can take advantage of a divide-and-conquer strategy.' The professors also suggest that 'embrace and extend' is a great model for when the open source product gets to market first. Glad to see that $48,921 that Stanford MBAs pay being put to good use. Having said that, such research is perhaps a great, market-driven indication that open source is having a serious effect on proprietary technology vendors.

Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we found a wonderful wooden Victoriana speaker clad entirely in tweed, reviewed a powerful miniature flashlight, and took a detailed look at the God of War plagiarism claims.

There was a high-performance therapeutic vibrator, the ultimate Lego Star Wars diorama; a recall on Apple's tiny iPhone 3g USB power adapters; and an Armani-branded phone to go with your Burberry-check baseball cap.

Joel gave his thoughts on Slotmusic, the new albums-on-microSD card dealie that weds music and flash memory; Apple's capricious treatment of iPhone developers; the Nite Ize figure 9 carabiner; and "Origami," a faintly unsettling baby stroller.

Rob woke to a tantum-throwing alarm clock; praised Olympus' wisdom in reviving old-style designs for the newfangled 4/3 camera format; and saw Palm's dreams slip ever yon. He might like Starcom's new Knick phone, if it's as useful as it looks. Talk him out of buying yet another dreadful miniature QWERTY device.

John spotted an astonishingly weird clock, heard rumors of a 32GB iphone, and reported that the Hadron menace has subsided ... for now!

Don't miss the iYo concept design for a yo-yo based cell phone charger: more convincing thermodynamics are seen in Broseley's contemporary wood-burning stoves.

Leica announced a 37.5-megapixel camera. Panasonic announced the death of ugly television. In 1967.

BBtv's UK music correspondent Russell Porter interviews British modern "post-jazz" group Portico Quartet about the eclectic influences behind their sound -- and how it felt to be nominated for this year's Mercury Prize. Here are previous BBtv episodes with music features from Russell. Listen to Portico Quartet at Last.fm, and you can pick up their new album Knee Deep in the North Sea (just released a few weeks ago!) on iTunes or Amazon.

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video.

Scott Beale spotted this fashionable Google Goatse t-shirt, suitable for any activity where you're trying to keep up a professional image.
Google Goatse t-shirt (Laughing Squid)

This elegant plaster hand cast of "Little" Grady Stiles's deformed hand is up for auction on eBay. Little Grady is the son of infamous Lobster Boy Grady Stiles Jr., whose nasty, murderous side is revealed in the thrilling book Lobster Boy by Fred Rose. The eBay lot also includes a signed Lobster Boy show card and photo of the younger Stiles.
Lobster Boy auction (eBay, thanks Michael-Anne Rauback!)

It's a shame wonderful that tritium (a radioactive form of hydrogen that emits light) is illegal legal for some consumer products? in the US, because these zipper pulls are nifty. UPDATE: I'm not sure if these are legal or not. Tritium zipper pulls

I'll be making two kinds of posts over the next two weeks. The first are meant to explain the little introduction I wrote earlier today, and expand on the many worlds ready for advanced Boingage. The second will be examples of "wonderful things" I'm looking at that convey the spirit of the cyberpunk ethos or, to me, open source reality. This post is of the first kind.

Okay, so one area I've been looking at for a while as ripe for open-source intervention is Democracy.

Back when everyone was thinking about digital democracy as some sort of voting scheme or mass feedback polling operation, I wrote a short book called Open Source Democracy in an effort to extend people's thinking beyond elections to include participation in civics. Yes, we have representatives, but they're only good as their ability to respond to the needs that come from the bottom up.

Then, just this summer, I was invited to deliver an "opening invocation" at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC. And I took it as something of a challenge: how do we get people past the notion that blogging about a problem is the same as actually doing something about it?

Here's an excerpt from my notes:

To me, “Personal Democracy” is an oxymoron. Democracy may be a lot of things, but the last thing it should be is “personal.” I understand “personal responsibility,” such as a family having a recycling bin in which they put their glass and metal every week. But even then, a single recycling bin for a whole building or block would be more efficient and appropriate.

Democracy is not personal, because if it’s about anything, it’s not about the individual. Democracy is about others. It’s about transcending the self and acting collectively. Democracy is people, participating together to make the world a better place.

One of the essays in this conference’s proceedings – the book “Rebooting Democracy”- remarks snarkily, “It’s the network, stupid.” That may go over well with all of us digital folks, but it’s not true. It’s not the network at all; it’s the people. The network is the tool – the new medium that might help us get over the bias of our broadcasting technologies. All those technologies that keep us focused on ourselves as individuals, and away from our reality as a collective.

This focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality. Perspective painting celebrates the perspective of an individual on a scene. Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought. The printing press gave individuals the opportunity to read, alone, and cogitate. Individuals formed perspectives, made observations, and formed opinions.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle – independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

The Enlightenment – for all its greatness – was still oh, so personal in its conception. The reader alone in his study, contemplating how his vote matters. One man, one vote. We fight revolutions for our individual rights as we understood them. There were mass actions, but these were masses of individuals, fighting for their personal freedoms....

You can find the rest here. Or now in German, here.

(Douglas Rushkoff is a guestblogger)

I enjoy using my Rancilio Silvia to make espresso as much as I enjoy drinking espresso. I wish I could make a shot every couple of hours, but I can't tolerate more than 3 double-shots a day. And decaf seems to make me jittery without the good rush of caffeine so I rarely drink it.

I recently bought a bag of Red Espresso, which is rooibos tea ground for espresso makers. Rooibos has no caffeine, and has a strong toasty flavor. It's fun to make espresso-style and it even produces a crema-like substance. It's a wonderful before-bed treat. (This is an unsolicited endorsement. Boing Boing doesn't accept money for posts.)

Red Espresso Rooibos

John Glionna of the LA Times writes about the Berkeley Bowl supermarket. It's famous for three things: its varied and high quality produce section, the oddball customers it attracts, and its one-strike-and-you're-out-for-life policy against people who sample without buying.

The produce emporium -- one of the nation's most renowned retailers of exotic fruits and vegetables -- creates its own bad behavior. Kamikaze shoppers crash down crowded aisles without eye contact or apology for fender-benders. So many customers weren't waiting to pay before digging in that management imposed the ultimate deterrent: Those caught sampling without buying will be banned for life -- no reprieves, no excuses. (Not even "I forgot to take my medication.")

Raphael Breines, who was ejected last year for eating on the premises, said he couldn't decide between two types of apricots, so he sampled both. Security stopped him in the parking lot.

"They treated me like a thief," said the 37-year-old park planner, who was photographed and required to sign a no-trespass agreement. "Technically I was stealing, but I wasn't trying to hide anything. I was just deciding which type of apricot to buy."

Breines, a longtime customer, sent an apology letter, asking to be reinstated. His request was denied.

At the Berkeley Bowl, the nuts are off the shelf

Video Link. We do love us some Dave. Previously: Dave Hill is a very funny guy (videos)

Abu Ghraib Coffee Table, by Phillip Toledano, from "America: The Gift Shop." Moulded resin, plexiglass, 6', 2008. Related: the work of Allen Jones. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

I, Douglas Rushkoff, happily mutated in the late-1980's, do hereby report for duty.

I believe that the reality in which we live is largely if not entirely hackable. We have been fooled into believing that social conventions, law, economics, and nature are hardware - when they are actually software and open to modification. With a little more effort, we can refine the hardware as well.

The current culture wars, as I understand them, are between people who look at our circumstances as pre-existing conditions, and those who see them as largely of our own making. Those in the former camp prefer to see reality as confined by the operating system of a Creator, and the human role confined to behaving within the rule sets established by Him. Those in the latter camp recognize the function of evolution, and the opportunity (if not obligation) for human beings to participate in the ongoing construction of our world and its operating systems.

Some of this design activity is like software modification. We legislate for bike lanes, tax rebates for solar energy development, or freedom to grow plants. This should be the easy part, but - given the beliefs of those in the Creator camp (and the support they get from the most intransigent members of the corporate capitalist elite) - it's quite hard. It can even get depressing to argue against people who don't believe the rules of the game can or should ever be changed.

The other kinds of hacks - the physical hacks - are actually harder. It's hard to figure out how to make traffic flow in a city originally designed for cars, efficient storage for solar cells, or ways to grow organic food or herb on already polluted and demineralized topsoil. But these are the hacks at which Happy Mutants excel, and that are so regularly celebrated on this site.

For me, the physical hacks so often chronicled here serve not only as models or instructions for more hacking, but morale-boosting and solidarity-building reinforcements for the social and spiritual hacking required of activists living in a society hell-bent on corporo-fascism, self-destruction, and religious war. In a world governed largely by people who believe (or want their citizens to believe) that the world is going to end on schedule by decree of the Creator, it is imperative that mutants arise to the challenge of changing the landscape from under them.

But in order to do this successfully, these mutants must be happy. Uninformed by a spirit of underlying joy, the modifications we make to the core program will be no more enlightened than those of our predecessors.

Thus, we BoingBoing.

(Douglas Rushkoff is a guestblogger)

Glyn sez,

This Wednesday, MEPs will vote on the Telecoms package. Two amendments have been tabled which in particular will ensure the new telecoms regulations protect European citizens from unreasonable surveillance and censure. If you have half an hour why not write to to your MEPs and ask them to support these amendments?

Amendment 133 is an anti-filtering amendment, and will add the following text to the Directive: "Member States shall ensure that no technology may be mandated by competent authorities which would facilitate surveillance of internet users, such as technologies that mirror or monitor the user's actions and/or interfere with operations of the user's network activity for the benefit of a third party (known as 'filtering')."

Amendment 138 ensures that sanctions cannot be imposed on end-users without judicial oversight. It will add the following text to the Directive: "applying the principle that no restriction may be imposed on the rights and freedoms of end-users, notably in accordance with Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union on freedom of expression and information, without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities, except where dictated by force majeure or by the requirements of preserving network integrity and security, and subject to national provisions of criminal law imposed for reasons of public policy, public security or public morality."

To do this weekend: ask your MEPs to vote for Telecom package amendments 133 and 138 (Thanks, Glyn!)

September 21, 2008 marks exactly one year since the day on which 19-year-old MIT engineering student Star Simpson walked into Boston's Logan International Airport wearing a home-made light-up sweatshirt, and asked an airport worker for information about a friend's arriving flight.

Boston is the city from which two terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks departed in 2001. They boarded planes at Logan and flew them into the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York, destroying the buildings and killing nearly 3,000 people.

In January 2007, a false terrorism scare happened in Boston when a guerrilla marketing team working to promote Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force show placed LED signs around the city. Authorities mistook the colorfully lit boards for bombs.

Just eight months later, in a persisting environment of anxiety over terrorism, a Boston Logan Airport worker mistook Star Simpson's LED-adorned wearable tech garment for a suicide bomb. That airport worker phoned Boston police. A small misunderstanding over a hoodie quickly became a surreal debacle during which police said they came close to killing Ms. Simpson.

Last Friday, we aired an interview with Star Simpson -- her first public comments on the incident since that day -- in a ten-minute video feature on Boing Boing tv (here's the direct MP4 link).

Some viewers asked if we could publish a transcript of our entire 45-minute Skype video chat, and here it is. One year, countless court dates, and much media uproar later, Star's wry advice to other would-be wearable electronics makers? "Hide the batteries." Snip from the transcript:

XENI JARDIN: So what exactly happened? What was the moment that changed from you going to pick up your friend with this shirt and another device which you'll show us in a moment... when did everything switch.

STAR SIMPSON: The woman who made the call surprised me. I was asking an information woman for, 'has the flight come in, can you tell me which baggage claim to be at...' and she looked at my jacket and glazed over completely in fear. And I was very surprised by that, I didn't know what to say. That was how everything started. I tried my best to explain everything to her, and I turned the lights off the jacket. Nothing calmed her down. No words could convey anything calming to her. I thought maybe I could at least get out of her sphere of terror, whatever was causing her such anxiety, by maybe going somewhere else and trying to find my friend on my own. Then, I didn't expect that things would go so badly from there. After that I was trying to leave the airport, I was catching the shuttle bus to go home because I realized that I'd missed my friend and the next best thing I could to was find a phone. I was waiting on the traffic island for the next shuttle bus to get on the subway when all of a sudden my hands were grabbed from behind me.

XENI: Who was grabbing your hands?

STAR: It turned out to be the state police. They have this magic trick where 40 of them can appear all at once out of nowhere. I didn't see them coming ever. Just, all of a sudden my hands were wrenched up over my head and my stuff was thrown on the ground, and they're everywhere, and some of them were holding really big devices that I realized were machine guns, later. I was -- I couldn't identify them at the time, I thought maybe they were camera tripods. I had no idea what was going on.

Full text of the interview follows after the jump.

Irene sez, "Researchers from the U. of Florida found that men who believe in what they call 'traditional roles for women' (a woman's place is in the home, employing wives leads to more juvenile delinquency, etc.) earn more money than men who don't. The same is not true for women."

The researchers looked for gender role views as a predictor of a person's earnings - not surprisingly, they were able to find them. They controlled for job complexity, number of hours worked and education and their analyses concluded that men in the study who said they had more traditional gender role attitudes made an average of about $8,500 more annually than those who had less traditional attitudes.

For women, the situation was reversed. Women who held more traditional views about gender roles made an average of $1,500 less annually than the women with more egalitarian views. Put another way, if a married couple holds traditional gender role attitudes, the husband's earning advantage was predicted to be eight times greater than a married couple where the husband and wife have less traditional attitudes.

"These results show that changes in gender role attitudes have substantial effects on pay equity," Judge said. "When workers' attitudes become more traditional, women's earnings relative to men suffer greatly. When attitudes become more egalitarian, the pay gap nearly disappears."

Old-Fashioned Men Make More Money - Study (Thanks, Irene!)

John Grant's handsome little hardcover book "Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science," is an eye-popping tour through the history of bad (very, very bad) science, from eugenics to geocentrism to Lysenkoism. Grant -- whose stern historical tone is liberally relieved with bravura dry sarcasm -- approaches his topic from the general to the specific.

The book begins with a fine, brief history of fraudulent scientists, categorizing their frauds into self-deception, hoaxing, "cooking" (fudging research), and forging (a taxonomy from Charles Babbage's "Reflections on the Decline of Science in England"), and then ranges back and forth through history, revealing the minor and major frauds of respected figures like Newton, Galileo and Marco Polo to outright scoundrels like Ruth B Drown, who sold fake radio-based cancer cures to desperate, dying people for decades.

After this delightful and enervating overview, Grant moves on to different social causes of fraud: ideological scientists who fooled themselves (for example, the discoverers of "menstrual rays" and other improbable phenomena); then military fraud (CIA psi experiments, military waste on secret flying military bases that didn't, and, of course, Star Wars, junk Patriot Missiles and the Missile Defense Shield); religious fraud (bans on teaching evolution, intelligent design, und so weiter); then ideological attacks on science (the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the American Eugenics movement; anti-masturbation campaigns, young earth and New Age crackpots); and then finally onto the book's third act, a chilling exploration of the political curtailment of science.

Here, Grant begins with Nazi science, and not just the gruesome death-camp experiments we're all familiar with, but also the bizarre attacks on "Jewish" mathematics and physics and the effort to create "German" equivalents that adhered to the ideological tenets laid out by Hitler's regime. Of course, there's plenty here about junk genetics, weird theories about the origins of disease ("earth rays") (!), and then, finally, a stomach-turning look at the human subjects experiments undertaken in the death camps.

Next up is Stalinist Russia, and of course, that means Lysenkoism, an ideologically correct biology that led famines that killed millions. The social factors that brought Lysenko (and his contemporaries, including Lepeshinskaya, who advocated the idea of "spontaneous generation of life," despite this notion having gone out with Pasteur. Grant does a great job bringing these personalities to life, and giving a flavor of the reasons that some scientists were forced to toe the line while others (physicists -- vital to the nuclear arms race) were able to conduct their affairs with relatively little meddling. I was also fascinated by his description of the junk psychology that doomed political dissidents to a lifetime in mental institutions and the notion that some psychiatrists may have turned in their diagnoses in order to spare their patients the worse fate that awaited them in the Gulag.

Finally, Grant closes with the systematic attacks on science under the presidency of George W Bush, and makes a compelling case that the failure of countries that tried to constrain science in order to make it comply with ideology is a real possibility for the USA today. Grant's relentless account of the Bush administration's attacks on health science, environmental science, geoscience, evolutionary science, climate science and other critical disciplines is deeply chilling. The political hacks who censor NASA and EPA reports are clearly of a lineage with the commisars who doomed the Soviet Union by purging the bioscience that undermined their political philosophy.

Exhaustively researched and footnoted, Corrupted Science is excellent reading for anyone who believes that science is worth fighting for. Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science, Author's website