You know you've wanted to wear a tiara made of bacon all your life. Well, now's your chance, and here's your instruction manual, my little porkblossom. Honestly, though, my recommendation is to just read the howto and look at the jpegs and leave it at that. The text contains this ultra-toxic disclaimer of terror:
You are going to be working with an enzyme that bonds protein. You are made of protein. Unless you want to glue your lungs together or glue your eyelids to your eyeballs, you absolutely must follow these safety rules. We cannot be held accountable for any mishaps you might have while working with transglutaminase.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Corynne McSherry sez, "Judge Davis issued an order today rejecting the RIAA's effort to rewrite copyright law to include a form of 'attempted infringement.' Based on this order, the first p2p case ever to make it to a jury verdict is now headed for a *second* trial. Even more interesting, the Court devotes several paragraphs to a plea to Congress to lower penalties for noncommercial, individual infringers."
Joining the ranks of federal district judges in Arizona and Massachusetts, District of Minnesota Chief Judge Michael Davis today concluded [44-page PDF] that simply making a music file available in a shared file does not violate copyright law, and ordered a new trial in Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas.
The case made headlines last year as the first peer-to-peer file-sharing case to go all the way to trial. In October 2007, a jury held Thomas liable and awarded $222,000 in damages to the record companies, based in whole or in part (it wasn't clear) on an instruction that merely making a file available violates a copyright owner's distribution right. Earlier this year, Chief Judge Davis said he was concerned that he might have made a mistake with that instruction and asked for more briefing on whether Thomas deserved a new trial. EFF, joined by Public Knowledge, the United States Internet Industry Association, and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed an amicus brief urging the Court to reject the RIAA's making available theory.
Kathryn sez, "Wolfram Research has posted instructions on how to import polling data into Mathematica 6 and how to use an example from the Wolfram Demonstration Project to create your own Red State/Blue State map.
In principle, this allows Mathematica users to introduce their own assumptions into the mathematics."
Analyzing U.S. 2008 Elections with Mathematica
(Thanks, Kathryn!)
I just got an email from Christopher Lydon, with a link to his audio interview with Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian post-Marxist philosopher and Lacanian scholar whose monologues are as refreshing as they are exposing.
This is all just the same bullshit...The true message to Republican voters is: you have the right not to understand what is going on.
What fascinating me about Palin. Did you notice how until now feminist politicians played the phallic game. Up to and including Hillary Clinton. Here it's a different phenomenon. Sarah Palin proudly displays her femininity. She wins over men by mobilizing this typical feminine sarcastic undermining of male authority. Community organizers...ha ha ha.
After being pulled over for driving with his car's headlights off, the gentleman pictured here failed a sobriety test and was arrested for drunk driving.
While being booked at the police station "[Jose] Cruz then allegedly moved closer to one of the officers and passed gas, the station reported. In the complaint, the investigating officer wrote that police noticed a 'very strong' odor."
If I were ever invited to join a secret cabal of culturally wise writers - the kind of club where you'd find Erik Davis, Douglas Wolk, Jonathan Lethem, or Luc Sante all sipping absinthe while deconstructing reruns of Man From Uncle - I imagine it would also host the kinds of women who are writing the books that have ended up in my mailbox this month.
Jessica Helfand's Scrapbooks is a well-documented by highly visual history of the American scrapbook, using photos and scans from books by creative figures such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Anne Sexton, Hilda Doolittle, and Carl Van Vechten. The book is as informative as it is trippy, and chronicles an under-appreciated lineage of smart craft culture.
Columbia complit prof Jenny Davidson just wrote a young adult novel, The Explosionist, with a premise that I was going to use myself for a graphic novel: someone sets off a bomb at a boarding school. Now call it a guilty pleasure, but I like today's young adult novels better than most of what is passing for literary fiction these days. (Blake Nelson's Paranoid Park became a weird Gus Van Sant film, remember.) And in Davidson's hands, the genre transcends expectations for a safe read.
Dubravka Ugresic, the Yugoslavian exile, wrote a collection of essays I hadn't heard of before called Nobody's Home, translated recently from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac (and having nothing to do with the Avril Lavigne single of the same name). She's best known for her fiction, but this collection of essays puts her on par with Zizek or Baudrillard for observation and critique - and maybe a cut above for courage to speak the truth. There's something decidedly female about this writing as well, which exposes a bit of the bias of the rest of post-modernism.
Reason put together this excellent flow chart (beautifully illustrated by Suck.com alum Terry Colon!) that describes the various paths of the US immigration process.
I would love to see an entire book of flowcharts like this, explaining everything from how the Federal Reserve works to how tritium zipper pulls are made.
An article in The Independent reports on a new scientific discovery that massive amounts of a greenhouse gas are spewing into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic sea. Over at WorldChanging, Alex Steffen puts it into context, opening with the line that this discovery, if confirmed, "is really, really, really bad news." "An Arctic Sea 'Foaming' with Methane: What Now?"(WorldChanging),
Exclusive: The Methane Timebomb(The Independent)
Design firm PostlerFerguson built this 1:1 model of a Concorde Olympus engine out of styrofoam, paper, and glue. Their reference was a maintenance manual they snagged on eBay. It's on display in the window of Selfridges & Co department store in London. Model Concorde engine(Creative Review)
When stuff gets complicated, I rely on profanity-spewing stick figures to explain it to me in terms I can understand. This 45-page online comic explains the subprime mortgage mess in about 2 minutes. The Subprime Primer
10 Zen Monkeys has compiled a good set of quotes about the Wall Street Bailout :
No 'cash for trash.' -- Dennis Kucinich, proposing Americans should also take partial ownership of any institutions receiving bailout money.
This is scare tactics to try to do something that's in the private but not the public interest. It's terrible. -- Allan Meltzer, former economic adviser to President Reagan and Carnegie Mellon professor of political economy, quoted in the New York Times
Watching Washington rush to throw taxpayer money at Wall Street has been sobering and a little frightening. -- Newt Gingrich
Today BB Gadgets showed a video ad for a bike riding robot. Weirdly, the commercial doesn't show the robot riding a bike (perhaps the same agency that made the Seinfeld Microsoft commercials is responsible). Here's a video of the Murata Boy earnestly pedaling around in an empty room. It's like an outtake from Spielberg's AI.
Picklefest 2008 was a huge success. Held at Machine Project in LA, the public was invited to bring their produce (grown in their garden, or purchased at farmers' markets or a supermarket) and pickle it using the lacto-fermentation process.
The event was expertly conducted by Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, who are the authors of The Urban Homestead (my pick for book of the year) and the founders of the Homegrown Evolution blog.
Back before the advent of canning and freezing, folks preserved their vegetable harvest via lacto-fermentation. This process, once commonplace, survives today mostly in the form of sauerkraut and kim-chi. These days, almost all store bought pickles and contemporary pickle recipes are vinegar-based. Lacto-fermented pickles contain no vinegar at all.
In lacto-fermentation, salt is added to vegetables, either by covering them in salty water or by mixing them with salt to draw out their own juices. Either way, the vegetable ends up stewing in salty liquid. Lactic microbial organisms (the same beasties that spoil milk) take hold in this environment and make it so acidic that bacteria that cause food to spoil can’t live there. The result is a pickled food that will keep without canning or refrigeration.
Lacto-fermented pickles are also full of beneficial bacteria that, like the bacteria in yogurt, are good for your gut and make food more digestible.
This fan-made video of Japan's new prime minister should have Chuck Norris shaking in his boots. The guy's a bad ass. And, as evidenced by this photo taken when he was on the Japanese shooting team in the 1976 Olympics, he would have been a more handsome action hero than Norris, too. (Via Japan Probe)
Cultural critic Mark Dery, whose provocative work we've featured on BB, took a break from ruminating on bottom-feeder weirdness to write an equally insightful piece for Print magazine about copyright law and the Orphan Works Act. Mark wrote me, "Nothing says 'pulse-pounding, bubbles-in-your-blood, white-knuckled excitement' like copyright law." Seriously though, as Cory has posted before, the Orphan Works legislation is very, very important. From Dery's Print article, titled "Does the Orphan Works Bill Mean Copyright Chaos?":
Swimming beneath the surface of the copyright debate is the shadow of something more profound: our cultural shift from an understanding of creativity as something indelibly individual—a notion that held sway from the Romantic 19th century through the Modernist 20th—to the post-modern sense of a more collective creativity, one that expresses itself through his-torical allusion, cultural quotation, and aesthetic appropriation. When Holland says that “creators who use orphan works are usually remix artists, who can’t create without appropriating the work of others,” he’s implying that works inspired by other works are somehow more exalted than works composed of other works.
By contrast, advocates of radically deregulated copyright such as Lawrence Lessig, the author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, argue for what they call “remix culture.” In a 2001 article in Wired magazine, Lessig wrote, “Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse.” Of course, Holland points out, there’s a difference between inspiration and appropriation.
Clearly, the tangle of copyright law that constricts the public domain and criminalizes noncommercial remixing—that recut Star Wars video or music mash-up you just uploaded—needs detangling. But, just as clearly, we shouldn’t trample the rights of the individual creator in our rush to throw wide the gates of the creative commons. The right of copyright holders to determine how their works are used must be balanced with the right of fair use. The ability of the individual creator to profit from the sale of her work, free from infringement, is desperately important. But so is greater access to the orphaned works of artists lost in time.
Caroline Hayes, 64, claims that a giant, threatening pig is preventing her from leaving her house. The woman, a resident of Uki, New South Wales, Australia, had fed the 176 pound wild pig, named Bruce. But it's become very aggressive and when she opened the door to her home, "the pig pushed her back inside." It will eventually be taken to a piggery, but they have to nab it first. From BBC News:
Rangers from Murwillumbah Council tried to catch the large animal but the cage was too small...
Animal ranger Len Hing, who visited the scene, explained that Bruce's large size makes him difficult to control when hungry.
Fred sez, "Yesterday, the DoJ sent a letter to Senators Specter and Leahy blasting the new civil enforcement provisions in the latest "IP enforcement" legislation, S.3325, pending in the Senate. The letter is a hum-dinger, pointing out that the bill would turn taxpayer-supported DoJ civil servants into pro bono lawyers for Hollywood."
We strongly oppose Title I of the bill, which not only authorizes the Attorney General to pursue civil remedies for copyright infringement, but to secure "restitution" damages and remit them to the private owners of infringed copyrights. First, civil copyright enforcement has always been the responsibility and prerogative of private copyright holders, and U.S. law already provides them with effective legal tools to protect their rights....
Second, Title 1's departure from the settled framework above could result in Department of Justice prosecutors serving as pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources. In effect, taxpayer-supported Department lawyers would pursue lawsuits for copyright holders, with monetary recovery going to industry.
Third, the Department of Justice has limited resources to dedicate to particular issues, and civil enforcement actions would occur at the expense of criminal actions, which only the Department of Justice may bring. In an era of fiscal responsibility, the resources of the Department of Justice should be used for the public benefit, not on behalf of particular industries that can avail themselves of the existing civil enforcement provisions.
BB bosom buddies COOP and Ruth have launched a new merchandising juggernaut over at coopstuff.com. There's a ton of devilishly desirable stuff for sale, some of it cheep, some of it pricey. Apparently a handful of the limited-edition Boing Boing t-shirts, featuring the lovely Jackhammer Jill as intepreted by COOP, are still available too. COOP's merch(coopstuff.com)
The incomparable painter Mark Ryden and the Merry Karnowsky Gallery are offering this limited edition lithographic poster with all proceeds going to the Barack Obama Presidential Campaign. The artwork is titled "The Pumpkin President." There are only 500 posters available and they're $500 each. Mark Ryden's painting for Obama(markryden.com, thanks Kirsten Anderson!)
In this installment of Boing Boing tv's ongoing BBtv WORLD series, I travel to the West African nation of Benin to visit the Songhaï Center, a green tech project designed to develop a new generation of "agricultural entrepreneurs," and foster economic sustainability.
Benin is nestled between Ghana, Togo, and Nigeria along the continent's midwest coast -- this shore was historically known as the "Slave Coast," and Benin was a major center in export of slave labor to the Americas. Today, Benin's people are struggling with a cultural shift from a traditional, mostly agrarian society, to a more urban, industrialized economy -- and the largely impoverished country depends on foreign aid.
The Songhaï Center was founded in the mid-'80s by Father Godfrey Nzamujo, a Dominican priest and Nigerian native, on a few acres of swampland granted by Benin's former president. What began as an experiment in small-scale sustainable development to fight poverty has since become a popular institution, and a symbol of Africa's potential for self-determination and prosperity.
Aid creates dependence, but small businesses foster independence, the group's logic goes -- and unlike other anti-poverty projects, this one exports more than it imports: specialty food and beverage products produced here (cashew butter, cookies, fruit beverages) are sold and shipped to France and elsewhere around the world.
In this episode, we walk through the main Songhaï Center in Porto Novo, a coastal town near the Nigerian border, and we witness a variety of projects in action -- "integrated farming, biomass gasification, microenterprise and IT for rural communities." Here, agricultural and technical pursuits merge in uniquely African ways.
We see women hulling cashew nuts; mango soda whooshing into bottles in a soda bottling factory; barnyard critters (including the furry and tasty bush critters known as "sugar cane rats"); people sifting maize flour and baking fresh bread for sale; workers harvesting manioc, papayas, and giant mushrooms; and buzzing activity in the adjacent internet "telecentre."
Each of those parts interlock to form a massive, carefully-engineered, green tech puzzle: scrap metal is welded into parts that would cost too much to buy from overseas. Insects grown on scraps from the restaurant feed fish cultivated in the aquaculture area; water hyacinths at the edge of those pools help filter "black water" in the sewage system; solar panels power the internet cafe; coconut husks discarded in food production serve as a base on which to cultivate giant mushrooms. One area's waste becomes another component's fuel input, and the resulting products cost less than they would through contemporary, Western means.
There are 6 Songhaï Centers throughout Benin, and plans for opening more tech/agriculture hubs in Nigeria, Gabon, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. They offer voice over internet and wifi at current sites in Benin, and plan to expand into rural telephone and ISP services, as the project grows.
-- Xeni Jardin
(Xeni shot the video footage, and the stills in this blog post; special thanks to Leonce Sessou, the center's head of technology.)
Here's an Instructable from user Daan for making giant meta-lamps out of Ikea's Lampan lamps. Man, Ikea is really poised to sit at the center of a global modder culture -- unlike Pringles cans, Monopoly sets, or other low-cost consumer goods, there's practically no localization in Ikea goods (hence the specialized heiroglyphics on the photocopied instruction sheets that accompany them), meaning that the lamp you mod in Mumbai is identical to the one I'm modding in Los Angeles.
This Instructable shows you how to build large spherical lamps out of Ikea lampan lamps ( $4.99 each ). The lamps are based on platonic solids. With this method I have built large spheres up to 32 lamps.
In the PDF below i included three templates: for the six, twelve and 32 lamp versions. These are all generated from a python script in the Maya software. I calculated that the largest sphere that could be build has about 120 lamps and i would love to build that one; but it will be heavy and bright and probably needs some serious thinking on the structural integrity.
China Tech News's story "CNNIC: China's Internet Will Be Short Of IP Addresses Soon" is the practically perfect 21st century story about China and all that makes the rest of the world anxious about it. It is one of those stories about the obliterating scale (real or perceived) of Mighty China, the imagination-boggling numbers that give China a middle class that is larger than the entire population of the US; that give China more English speakers (more or less) than any other country on earth, and so on. It's the epitome of stories about Chinese hunger for commodities leading to spikes in worldwide scrap prices and a global pandemic of sewer-cover thefts. It pokes at the western fear that the Chinese billions will demand refrigerators, cars, 24-hour electricity, and swamp the carefully restored ozone, the dwindling petrol reserves, the failing climate.
Except, of course, that IP addresses are nothing like oil, ozone, middle-classes or Anglophones. They're divisible. Just add NAT routers and turn every single IP into 255, and then turn all of those into more. It screws up Skype and messes with your ping-times, but sysadmins have been intelligently stretching their IPs for decades.
What's more, the real story here is that the Politburo is ramping up to order a switch to IPv6, the more modern successor to IPv4, with plenty of addresses to go around, about to accomplish by sheer force of will a demolition of legacy network stacks and a switchover to v6, a trick that network administrators have been trying to coax their users into for, well, decades.
It's interesting how a Party press-release intended to send sysadmins scurrying ends up, in the west, reading like a parable of Unstoppable Pac-China, Devourer of the Planet's Power-Pills.
The Internet in China may soon run out. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, under the current allocation speed, China's IPv4 address resources can only meet the demand of 830 more days and if no proper measures are taken by then, new Chinese netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet.
Li Kai, director in charge of the IP business for CNNIC's international department, says that if a netizen wants to get access to the Internet, an IP address will be necessary to analyze the domain name and view the pages. At present, most of the networks in China use IPv4 addresses. As a basic resource for the Internet, the IPv4 addresses are limited and 80% of the final allocation IP addresses have been used. By the current allocation speed, China's IPv4 address resource can only meet the demand of 830 more days. If there is no available new resource by then, new netizens will not be able to gain normal access to the Internet and the business expansion of network operators will be impossible.
"How Children Learn" was, most of all, an exuberant book, a celebration of the a-ha moments that Holt had been privileged to witness first hand and the lessons he'd learned about teaching. Even though it sometimes slipped into anger as Holt decried his own conceit and those of his peers in failing to get out of the way when kids want to learn, Learn is, first and foremost, a happy book.
Not so "How Children Fail" -- in this volume, Holt focuses the majority of his attention on the "I don't get it" moments that his students experience as he attempts to conform them to the curriculum and the lessons he's learned from these bad experiences. This is a much angrier book, though no less humane and caring, and it's equally important, even if there were fewer smiles per page. Here's some choice bits for your perusal:
...The valiant and resolute band of travelers I thought I was leading toward a much-hoped-for destination turned out instead to be more like convicts on a chain-gang, forced under threat of punishment to move along a rough path leading nobody knew where and down which they could see hardly more than a few steps ahead. School feels like this to children: it is a place where they make you go and where they tell you to do things and where they try to make your life unpleasant if you don't do them or don't do them right...
Many people seem to think that the way to take care of children is to ask in any situation what is the most stupid and dangerous thing the children could possibly do, and then act as if they were sure to do it....Little children are indeed very careful at first -- watch them on a stair or some steps, deciding whether to step down forwards or crawl down backwards. They are eager to try new things, but at the same time they have a remarkably accurate sense of what they can and cannot do, and as they grow older, their judgement about this improves...
So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."
It is the creed of the slave....
...Schools tend to mistake good behavior for good character. What they prize above all else is docility, suggestibility; the child who will do as he is told; or even better, the child who will do what is wanted without even having to be told. They value most in children what children least value in themselves.
So here's my first blatant personal plug: my first comic series, Testament, has just been fully collected in four trade paperback volumes by DC/Vertigo. It's as close to an exercise in "open source religion" as I could imagine.
I've talked a lot about it in interviews online. But what I didn't explain before is that I meant the series to model both an approach to religion and money. As many have explained in the comments sections of my economy posts over the past couple of days, money and faith are intertwined. When the US took the US dollar off the gold standard they began printing "In God We Trust" on the bills. Coincidence? (Not that gold has intrinsic value, either. It's scarce, yes, but how truly useful except as a reflection of faith?)
Anyway, the series gave me a way to share a lot of the Torah, history, and myth I had studied to write my book on Judaism, Nothing Sacred, while letting me apply some of that mythology to our current financial and technological challenges. It takes place in a near-future where a rather viral-nano global currency is transacted via rfid tag. Those who refuse to participate in the economy are hunted outlaws. Meanwhile, the characters keep appearing in flashbacks to Torah scenes that amplify the themes. Eventually, they come to understand they're living both stories at once.
Outside the panels, attempting to influence the story, are the 'gods' - whose very existence depends on belief. And the whole saga boils down to who controls the writing of the story.
The question I'm attempting to answer - or at least explore - is whether the Torah's myths invite people to participate in the ongoing creation of the human story, or whether they mean to create the sense that it is in God's control. Or some contract between both?
Ethan sez, "Timothy Hutchings's art work often references gamer culture. Particularly striking is his 900 square foot miniatures wargaming table. It starts out as a blank landscape. Over the course of the art show, it become populated by gallery goers playing with it."
The World's Largest Wargaming Table
(Thanks, Ethan!)
Last Sunday, my young adult novel Little Brother won the Emperor Norton Award (for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason" in San Francisco), presented at the 13th birthday party for Tachyon Books, at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco. I wasn't able to accept the award (I'm in India, researching my next novel), so I asked Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director, to accept on my behalf and say a few words about EFF's new lawsuit over NSA wiretapping, in which AG Alberto Gonzales, GW Bush, and Dick Cheney are all named as defendants. Tachyon's put the text of the speech online -- as ever, Cindy gave a hum-dinger:
And here’s where EFF comes in. Cory’s work and EFF’s mission have long been intertwined, not just because he was with us for so long and drank so much of our Kool-Aid, but even before that. And the same is true for Little Brother. While we thankfully haven’t yet had the next terrorist attack, the use of digital technology against ordinary people by an overreaching government is well underway. This week at EFF we filed a new lawsuit, called Jewel v. NSA, aimed at stopping one such invasion of our privacy, the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of all of us, especially those of us in San Francisco.
That’s because the strongest evidence in the case is about San Francisco, specifically the installation of a fiberoptic splitter in an AT&T facility on Folsom Street that is making copies of all of the internet traffic that goes through that facility and giving it to the NSA. Those of you who watch EFF know that we filed suit against AT&T with this same evidence in 2006, but in the last year AT&T and the Administration bullied Congress into passing something called “retroactive immunity” for the telecommunications companies, trying to let them off the hook. We’re fighting that immunity in court, but this week we opened a second front, suing the government and government officials directly. This includes Bush, Cheney, and the other architects of this dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans, you, me and Marcus Yallow alike.
Earlier this week, I blogged 
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