My time is almost over and there's still gobs of stuff I wanted to share with you. So here's a brief list of things I would feel just terrible if I didn't let you know about.

1. Robots and Monsters: A Charitable Menagerie, is back. They launched in 2007 to fundraise for SF AIDS Foundation, and now they're relaunching to support the EFF. For fifty dollars, Joe Alterio or another fabulous artist will pen a custom robot or monster for you - defined by three words you supply - and send it to your door. You get a cool picture and the EFF gets fifty bucks to help keep the net a happy and good place.

2. Scott Draves Software Artworks, 1992-2008. This short film chronicles the work of software artist Scott Draves. And it's pretty cool. Dreams in High Fidelity.

3. Consumatron. Do you know this guy? He writes down and reviews everything he buys. It's kind of obsessive, but tells a story.

4. Trajal Harrell Dance Style is a totally different approach to dance - an effort to rewrite the language of dance by using real world movement (from fashion show walks to bar room swagger) instead of whatever that stuff is we usually think of as "dance." His performances are infrequent, but there's one coming up this month at DanceTheater Workshop and if you're near NYC I'd suggest you be there.

5. The Atheon: A Temple of Science for Rational Belief. If I were going to join a church, this would probably be it. It's like a church for brights, but it's not as serious or anti-God as Richard Dawkins. Just an effort to make faith rational - but still fun and inspiring.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

Rick Veitch is the comics writer and artist who got famous for the Swamp Thing issues he drew for Alan Moore, and is probably still best known for a later issue he planned (the infamous cancelled #88) in which Swamp Thing went back in time, met Jesus and served as the cross on which the messiah was crucified. Although Moore resurrected Swamp Thing, it was Veitch who wrote that story about a hippy actually eating one of the monster's tubers and tripping Veitch continued the series' psychedelic path and took it in some even more dangerous directions.

Veitch split from DC for many years, and became a sensation on his own, publishing extremely bizarre yet resonant psychedelic fables. Psychedelic being the operative word.

Now they're back - bigger and brighter than ever before. And in my experience, it's the first time a second dose has packed more wallop than the first. His seminal 1980's graphic novel Brat Pack which will finally be republished in a deluxe edition in spring 2009, read like Teen Titans on crank, and served as a template for those super-bad-ass do-gooders in The Boys, Authority, and Kick Ass. He's also reprinting very high quality editions of his classics The Maximortal (free preview) and my personal favorite, Heartburst (which includes a reprint of the almost forgotten “Mirror Of Love” with Alan Moore and S.R. Bissette).

Veitch also drew a story for Harvey Pekar in Smith's fabulous ongoing Next Door Neighbor series (disclosure, my wife has one coming up, as well), and is starting his second year of a disturbingly entertaining war comedy-horror series for Vertigo called Army @ Love.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

My pals Eric and Julia of Ramshackle Solid made acorn flour this year, and in their blog they showed how they did it.

Once the flour is dried out it may be a little coarse. You can put it in a cleaned out coffee grinder to get a finer texture. A good food processor also works and I am pretty sure they make attachable gadgets for mixers that really mill the flour if you get completely obsessed.

Our favorite use is acorn pancakes. Just mix the acorn flour 1/2 and 1/2 with wheat or other flour from your favorite recipe. I love the acorn flavor - slightly nutty, very hearty. If you make your own, let us know how it went.

I'm going over there uninvited for pancakes. Link

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 18 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.

A. Andrew Gonzalez' strikingly beautiful paintings have an uncanny 3D effect.

A. Andrew Gonzalez

Nick Reynolds of the Kingston Trio died yesterday at age 75. Kingston Trio's Nick Reynolds, 75, dies in San Diego

On a tip from Boing Boing reader JayHavvic, I checked out this 1924 recording of Will Rogers keynoting at an annual bankers' convention, giving them the gears with as much gusto as, say, Colbert gave GW Bush. It's a must-listen.

The audio comes from 78Records, an excellent site with serious bandwidth problems. So I've uploaded a copy to the Internet Archive for easier downloading. MP3: Will Rogers Talks to the Bankers, VICTOR_45374-A (1924) (Thanks, JayHavvic!)

The Smithsonian has flickred 39 high resolution, public-domain images from the Scopes "Monkey" trial, the first major US trial over the teaching of evolution. Dig that natty straw boater!

During 1925, Watson Davis (1896-1967), Science Service managing editor, took numerous photographs while covering the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes trial as a reporter. In what was dubbed "The Trial of the Century," Scopes was tried and convicted for violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. William Jennings Bryan served on the prosecution team, and Clarence Darrow defended Scopes. Almost eighty years later, the nitrate negatives, including portraits of trial participants, and images from the trial itself and significant places in Dayton, were discovered in archival material donated to the Smithsonian by Science Service in 1971.

Marcel C. LaFollette, an independent scholar, historian and Smithsonian volunteer uncovered these rare, previously unpublished photographs of the 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes "Monkey Trial" in the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). In 2005, SIA restored fifty-two of the negatives with funds granted by the Smithsonian Women's Committee. Included here are thirty-nine of the images.

Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes Trial Photographs (via Wendy Seltzer)

Summer's over and the output of my vegetable garden has ceased, save for a few late season tomatoes. It wasn't a great season for me, mainly because I don't know what I'm doing. My squash yield was only so-so, and the few watermelons and cantaloupes that appeared never made it past the ping pong ball stage. But I learned plenty of tips from new and old friends (and kind Boing Boing readers, too!), so maybe my fall/winter garden will be better.

My most successful crops were figs, cayenne peppers, and tomatoes. They came so quickly and in such abundance that we couldn't eat them fast enough. I gave a lot away to friends (except the figs, which are too delicious to share with anyone), and I dehydrated the rest using a Ronco food dehydrator. (The particular model I use is not available on Amazon any longer.)

It took several attempts to learn the best way to prepare different fruits for drying. Figs are tastier when dried whole instead of cut in half, and tomatoes are better halved rather than sliced into disks. I dried the peppers whole until they were crunchy and ground them up in a food processor.

I put the tomatoes and peppers into my eggs every morning and I cut the figs up and sprinkle them on my nightly bowl of blueberries and cream.

Next summer, I'm thinking of making a solar dehydrator (the "Appalachian Dehydrator") like the one Kelly and Erik of The Urban Homestead made.

Eren Göksel provides a step-by-step for drawing this apple. How to Create a Delicious Green Apple Illustration

Update: Game's Over! Look for a transcript tomorrow! But we're all still chatting, so why not come in and say hi anyway?

It's been quite a while since we held our last IRC event, but with the solstice drawing the summer days to a wane, it's time once again to dust off the #boingboing IRC channel and spend a few hours in a rousing community game of an old favorite, Rule 34 Showdown.

Rule 34, as all men know, is the cosmic rule that demands that porn can be found on the Internet to fit any concept. The rules are simple: numerous times over the course of one hour, I will shout out a random Rule 34 Challenge.

"RULE 34: Obama French Kissing Joe Biden!" I might cry. The denizens of #boingboing will go scrambling to find a link that illicitly matches the challenge. The first three people to come up with separate links and images for the same concept will be awarded first, second and third place points of decreasing denominations. At the end of the hour, the person with the most points will be declared the official RULE 34 PORNOGRAPHER OF #BOING BOING! At least for the week. And to make it all timeless fun, we'll knock up all the links we accrue in the official transcript of the event, with the best images highlighted for fun.

This week's game will be held tonight at 4PM EDT / 1PM PDT / 9PM GMT. To play, simply come to the official #boingboing IRC channel on Freenode about 15 minutes before the game and /msg Brownlee that you'd like to play. Don't want to play? Come on by and watch.

If you've never used IRC before, you can find instructions on how to get to the channel here, or simply use the Java chat applet.

To discuss or ask questions, head on to the discussion thread over at Boing Boing Gadgets.

Discuss

Update: Sorry! Huge time mess up in the title. It's at 4PM EDT. See you then!

Clayton Cubitt blogs:

“Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin quoted an unidentified “writer” who extolled the virtues of small-town America: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” (9/3/08) The unidentified writer was Westbrook Pegler (1894-1969), the ultraconservative newspaper columnist whose widely syndicated columns (at its peak, 200 newspapers and 12 million readers) targeted the New Deal establishment, labor leaders, intellectuals, homosexuals, Jews, and poets.”

I disagree with him fully. Except for the poets. Fucking poets.

More on Pegler at TNR, here's Wikipedia. Here are a few other quotes Palin didn't use:

Jews, he said, could not be the victims of persecution because persecution “connotes injustice…They are, instead, enduring retaliation, or punishment.” (D. Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, Macmillan, 2002, p. 71.)

He advanced the theory that American Jews of Eastern European descent were “instinctively sympathetic to Communism, however outwardly respectable they appeared.” (The New York Times, Obituary: “Free-Swinging Critic,” June 25, 1969, p. 43).

He had a habit of calling Jews “geese” because they, in his words, hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake. (Diane McWhorter, “Revisiting the controversial career of Westbrook Pegler,” Slate, March 4 2004).

(...)In 1963, less than 3 months after Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” he wrote in a column, “[It is] clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry.” (D. Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, Macmillan, 2002, p. 71)

Update: Blogger and Boing Boing reader Karen says, "Robert Kennedy Jr. was rightfully outraged about this too. I blogged about it here."

by Aden Renkai, via Political Wire (thanks Teresa Nielsen Hayden!).

...with surprisingly enduring flavor.

I'm a slow reader so I particularly like books that read fast. Prose that "leans forward" in a way that makes it easy to keep going. Both of these books had that quality for me, yet manage to pull off some nice social commentary and human pathos at the same time.

Personal Days, by Ed Park, is a post-Dilbert, post-Microserfs look at office culture. It's like the show The Office, except populated by people who, for the most part, understand what is happening to them. What I like best about the book is Ed Park's use of cliché phrases. You know how that first song on Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom album (Beyond Belief) strings together known phrases into something entirely bigger? Or the way Delmore Schwartz would italicize a phrase as if to show it was a saying instead of just words? Know what I'm saying? Park does this throughout his text, creating a gentle, phantom hypertext that required no further explanation. And this black comedy about downsizing brings an almost Beckett-like sense of reduction to the dwindling office.

The Rules for Hearts, a family drama, by Flytrap comics writer Sara Ryan, reads a bit like one of those young adult novels I'm so very fond of, even though its characters experience some of the kinds of sex reversals and confusion usually postponed until one's late twenties or early thirties. I hate memoirs (just because) so I depend on short novels with characters I can relate to for that necessary shot of personal narrative. Sara Ryan isn't a totally new voice, but this, her third book, still reads with that freshness of someone's first novel.

The incomparable John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten) stars in a new television advertisement for Country Life butter. (via Laughing Squid)

Boing Boing tv is wrapping up the work week with a music feature on Broken Social Scene, a Canadian indie rock music collective with about 20 members. Like a giant litter of hipster kittens! Together, they create a sound best described as Baroque Pop. Each musician contributes their own unique style into an fusion of rhythm and ambience.

They’ve won two Juno Awards (sort of like Canada’s Grammys) for Alternative Album of the Year. BBtv's UK-based music correspondent Russell Porter caught up with Brendan Canning, one of the band’s founding members, at the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video and instructions on how to subscribe to the BBtv daily video podcast.

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Note: this episode, and other BBtv music features this month, are sponsored by the Crowdfire live music social media project. You can find images, video, and audio about the band featured in today's show at Crowdfire -- here's the search link for fan-uploads related to Broken Social Scene.

Related Boing Boing tv episodes from Outside Lands:
* Galactic's "Modern New Orleans Funk" with Xeni and Russell (music)
* Interview with Cold War Kids frontman Nathan Willett (music)
* Andy Gould, rock band manager, dances on the labels' graves.
* Primus: Xeni interviews Les and Ler (music)
* Kaki King, guitar hero: performance, interview with Xeni (music)
* BB Gadgets' Joel at Outside Lands: Crowdfire deconstructed
* Carney at Outside Lands - a "Boing Boing tv Bus Session." (music)
* Steel Pulse founder David Hinds at Outside Lands (music)
* Boing Boing tv backstage at Outside Lands: (Xeni + Russell Porter)

At the recent Paralympics 2008, Wojtek Czyz jumped 6.50 meters, setting a new world record. He made jump on a prosthetic leg equipped with a bracket made from materials developed by the European Space Agency for the International Space Station. From the ESA Portal:

"The objective was to see how to improve his performance, and we found the most important problem was related to a connection angle, the so-called L-bracket, between the knee joint and the foot module," explains Dr Werner Dupont, MST Aerospace Managing Director.

Czyz testing space tech prosthesis "In collaboration with the German company ISATEC, we developed a new L-bracket using materials originating from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), an instrument that will be mounted on the International Space Station to study extraterrestrial anti-matter, matter and missing matter."

The advantage of these space materials is that they are extremely strong and at the same time lighter than conventional products available, both important advantages for top athletes’ performance. The problem with Czyz’ previous prosthesis was that it tended to break when he performed to the maximum of his capacity.

Space tech helps to reach long-jump world record

Several weeks ago, I posted about a fantastic radio documentary on the RAND Corporation by my friend Ken Hollings, a UK journalist and chronicler of outré culture. Two years ago, Ken presented a radio series called Welcome To Mars, his reflections on the "fantasy of science in the early years of the American Century." In this unscripted, engaging, and mind-bending series Ken connects the dots between nuclear war, LSD, flying saucers, the occult, weird science, B movies, and the birth of the space age. Ken's words are supported by an incredible outer space score prdocued by Simon James. I can't recommend it highly enough. Hollings' book based on the radio series, Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science In The American Century 1947-1959, will be published in the UK later this month by Strange Attractor Press.
Welcome To Mars podcast

Previously on BB:
• Radio documentary on RAND Corporation

I've just read (finally!) Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, the classic 1989 memoir of life at Salomon Brothers investment bank in the run-up to the Wall Street crash of 1987. Lewis was hired to trade mortgage bonds (yes, the mortgage bonds that precipitated the crash of 2008) fresh from the London School of Economics, dispatched to Salomon's legendary training program in NYC, then shipped back to London.

Lewis was a gifted salesman who made millions for the firm, but he was also deeply skeptical of the whole enterprise. This is an unbeatable combination, as it situated him perfectly to critically examine the culture, economics and ethics of the overheated bubble as it expanded, expanded, and, finally burst.

It doesn't hurt that Lewis is a fantastic writer with a particular talent for explaining the minutae of investment banking without making you want to gouge your own eyes out. Through vivid portraits of the movers and shakers on Wall Street, Lewis recounts the origin stories of junk-bonds, corporate raiding, mortgage bonds, the S&L crisis, and the founding of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac (both founded at the behest of Salomon in order to backstop the mortgage bond market).

It's been 20 years since this was published, but there's never been a better time to read it. The hairy-knuckled, hyper-competitive, pirahnoid Wall Street and City traders he describes here could be the same hedge fundies who're poised over the tub with razors at their wrists today. Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

The 1908 presidential campaign was the first time that the candidates, William Jennings Bryan and William Howard Taft, recorded their voices for voters to hear. The recordings on early phonographs were used to rally support, or simply demonstrate the technology, at political gatherings, concert halls, and even shops selling the Edison phonographs. Science News has a fascinating history of the "first sound bites," including audio samples. From Science News:

“Mr. Bryan seemed a little nervous when he first started, much more so, he said, than he ever felt in facing an audience of ten thousand people,” Harold Voorhis recalled. Voorhis, an agent for the National Phonograph Company, was partly responsible for the candidate’s discomfort: He had brought a phonograph into the library of Bryan’s house in Lincoln, Neb., to record some of his speeches, old and current. “Considering that his words were to be reproduced all over the world in perhaps a million homes, … I thought he showed remarkable composure,” Voorhis wrote in the July 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly.

Whether for profit or prestige, the 1908 campaign was the first in which presidential candidates recorded their own voices for the mass market. “We now have Records by Mr. Bryan and Mr. Taft, so that no matter how the November election may result, we shall have Records by the next President,” an advertisement in the September 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly exclaimed. “Now, for the first time, one can introduce the rival candidates for the Presidency in one’s own home, can listen to their political views, expressed in their real voices, and make comparisons.” In New York City, an enterprising businessman set up a penny arcade featuring a Bryan-Taft “debate.” Mannequins stood before a phonograph that spouted the candidates’ voices...

“You could draw a genealogy from the televised presidential debates of today straight back to these” recordings, says record historian Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in Bloomington. “An awful lot of political speechmaking nowadays is mediated; the idea of someone simply addressing a live audience [as] the target audience …really doesn’t seem to pertain much anymore.” The 1908 recordings “are really the first step in that direction.”

First presidential "sound bites"

Today's Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article about "macks," tins of mackerel that are commonly used for bartering in prison. Macks took over around 2004 when smoking bans in federal prison knocked out the previous currency: packs of cigarettes. From the WSJ:

Unlike... more expensive delicacies, former prisoners say, the mack is a good stand-in for the greenback because each can (or pouch) costs about $1 and few -- other than weight-lifters craving protein -- want to eat it.

So inmates stash macks in lockers provided by the prison and use them to buy goods, including illicit ones such as stolen food and home-brewed "prison hooch," as well as services, such as shoeshines and cell cleaning...

There are other threats to the mackerel economy, says (Jon) Linder, of (supplier) Power Commissary. "There are shortages world-wide, in terms of the catch," he says. Combined with the weak dollar, that's led to a surging mack. Now, he says, a pouch of mackerel sells for more than $1 in most commissaries.

Another problem with mackerel is that once a prisoner's sentence is up, there's little to do with it -- the fish can't be redeemed for cash, and has little value on the outside. As a result, says Mr. Levine, prisoners approaching their release must either barter or give away their stockpiles.

Mackerel Economics in Prison Leads to Appreciation for Oily Fillets

Adrienne sez, "We've created a 'live' Banned Book Display at our library [Twin Hickory Public Library, Glen Allen, VA]. We have volunteer readers who sit in the display and read (silently) banned and challenged books. So far it's gotten a lot of attention – we hear a lot of 'Mom, what are those people doing in there?' The best part has been hearing parents explain to their kids what the display is all about which is exactly what we wanted to happen!" Twin Hickory Public Library, Glen Allen, VA (Thanks, Adrienne!)

Here's a great example of what we could easily call a "local currency" - that doesn't involve any of the bloody, anti-corporate revolution that detractors of this idea seem to think will attend any such effort.

A great, tiny organic cafe in my town, Comfort, decided to expand to a second, larger location last year. The owner, John Halko, has been renovating the new space for a year, and - thanks to the credit crisis - has been unable to raise the cash required to finish and finally open. With currency unavailable from traditional, centralized money-lending banks, Halko has turned instead to his community - to us - for support.

Granted, this is a small town. Pretty much everybody goes to Comfort - the only restaurant of its kind on the small strip - and we all have a stake in its success. Any extension of Comfort would bring more activity, vitality, and commerce to a tiny downtown (commercially devastated in the 1970s by the chain stores and strip malls of automobile-friendly Central Avenue).

So Halko's idea is to sell VIP cards. For every dollar a customer spends on a card, they receive the equivalent of $1.20 worth of credit at either restaurant. If I buy a thousand dollar card, I get twelve hundred dollars worth of food: a 20% rate of return on the investment of dollars. Halko gets the cash infusion he needs to build the new restaurant - and since he's paying for it in 20% tab adjustments, it just comes out of profits. He gets the money a lot cheaper than if he were borrowing it from the bank, paying back in cash over time. Meanwhile, customers get more food for less money.

But wait, there's more: the entire scheme refocuses a community's energy and cash on itself. Because our money goes further at our own restaurant than a restaurant somewhere else, we are biased towards eating locally. Since we have a stake in the success (and the non-failure) of the restaurant in whose food we have invested, we'll also be more likely to promote it to our friends. And since we have already spent a big chunk of money on Comfort's food, we're more likely go get food there than dish out more cash for a meal somewhere else.

When it gets really interesting is when other businesses begin to accept Comfort's VIP card and dollars for their services as well. But even in its current, limited incarnation, it's easy to see how the math of an extremely simple alternative currency works, why its existence gets cheaper money into the hands of people who need it, and how it circumvents centralized control over commerce.

Admittedly, this isn't a Boingworthy phenomenon in itself. It's simply not "scalable" the way Internet and tech things are. It's a local activity. But it can be modeled by other communities, and the Internet is a great way to share these experiments in social hacking, measure their results, and mutate them further.

MC Frontalot's new nerdcore album, Final Boss, is a perfect, catchy collection of raps and sketches about video-games, Japanese manga fandom, voting machines, and other important subjects. Of especial note is a completely, convulsively hilarious sketch with Wil Wheaton about Wil and Frontalot's respective career-choices. The CD's out in a month or so, but if you pre-order it now, you get immediate delivery of the CD in MP3 form, with a lyrics sheet and hi-rez versions of the art.

Now these are lyrics:

I’ve got a new dance called The Margaret Thatcher.
It’ll get in your pants, you’d better call the dispatche
r of deliverers of increased pants awesomeness.
Get the awesomest pants they offer.
Preposterous shoes are also required for the moves,
although sensible footwear or barefoot behooves
and all attire’s optional.
You only ever do it when there’s nobody watching you.

Do it. Do The Margaret Thatcher.
Just do it. Do The Margaret Thatcher, y’all.

Here’s a little something for the
wallflowers in the room,
all my people at the party for whom
the dance don’t come natural.
Enhance your stature. Fall
into the routine they call
The Margaret Thatcher, y’all.

Do The Margaret Thatcher.
Do The Margaret Thatcher, y’all.

Step One:
Wiggle, wobble, wriggle,
coddle your young,
intensify your ennui,
then before you get done,
put your left foot over to the left if you dare,
then pretend you got scared,
then point at your hair.

MC Frontalot's Final Boss (Thanks, Quinn!)

Gavin sez,

Kelly Link just released her second book, Magic for Beginners, online for a year under the Creative Commons license. 2 of the 9 stories aren't included due to contractual agreements but this is huge news because two giant companies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (who published it in paperback) and HarperPerennial (who published the UK edition) have agreed to take a chance and be a part of the CC movement.

Kelly's first collection, Stranger Things Happen, has been downloaded 60,000+ times since it was put online (and it still sells a couple of thousand copies a year) and the derivative works include audio versions, short movies, plays, and even a cello version of one of the stories...!

Kelly Link's stories are some of the smartest, weirdest, freshest material being written in any literary field. The title story is just about the perfect explication of why fandom is so totally satisfying. Two of these stories won a Nebula award in the year of publication -- that's half the short story awards to one writer's stories from one book.

This release coincides with the release of Kelly's new story collection, Pretty Monsters, which is every bit as good.

Magic for Beginners downloads, Buy Magic for Beginners on Amazon

See also:
Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners" - knockout short story collection
Kelly Link sweeps the Nebulas
Kelly Link's gorgeous short story collection now a CC download

Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez sez, "Just wrote up a piece on a pretty fascinating case, in which EFF filed an amicus brief, brought by Echostar under the DMCA against a maker of satellite receivers. Since DMCA makes liability turn on whether a device has a 'significant commercial purpose' that doesn't involve IP violation, Echostar had wanted to get the names of hundreds of thousands of people who'd bought receiver boxes. Also raises the troubling question of whether making an open/hackable device exposes you to liability if enough people misuse that device."

Privacy interests are typically afforded deference only to the extent that they implicate some tangible harm. The same standard generally obtains in privacy tort law, Lohmann told Ars, but here the court was prepared to afford the privacy claim added weight, because it was being invoked "as a shield, not a sword"—that is, to block future disclosure, not to win damages for past disclosure—on behalf of third parties not directly involved in the lawsuit.

Moreover, EFF's brief argued, Echostar's subpoenas were "especially troubling in light of past litigation" where another satellite TV provider, DirecTV, had similarly obtained customer information in the course of a civil suit against a device manufacturer. The company then sent out 170,000 letters pressuring customers to agree to a $3,500 "settlement" or face litigation. Attorneys for Echostar dismissed this as mere speculation, averring that the company had "no present intent to initiate additional lawsuits," but adding that "customers that are found to be engaged in satellite piracy should not be permitted to use so-called 'privacy rights' as a shield to avoid detection and civil liability."

Court: Echostar can't get Coolsat customer data in DMCA case (Thanks, Julian!)

Here's a mesmerizing ten-minute video from the Darwin@Home project (which harnesses idle computers to simulate evolution) that shows the different, bizarre randomly evolved walking-strategies that have emerged from the simulations. Darwin at Home in Ten Minutes (via Kottke)

This week's BusinessWeek Innovation of the Week podcast talks with Eyjolfur Guomundsson, the house economist for EVE Online, a massively multiplayer space game based on establishing and disrupting interplanetary trade. What's fascinating here is getting the perspective of an economist whose job is to design an economy that's "fun" -- or at least engrossing. It's not often that you get to hear economics described as an experimental science. An Economist on the Virtual Economy

Here's a fascinating analysis of the mechanics of Swoop, an online auction game (they call it "entertainment shopping") (!) that's designed to be a Skinner box for separating you from your money while confounding your judgement:

First I will lay out for you how the site works. It is a ‘auction’ site…sort of. Swoopo sells bids for $1. Each time you use a bid on an item the price is increased by $0.15 for that item. So here is an example:

Person A buys 5 bids from Swoopo for $5 total. Person A sees an auction for $1000 and places the first bid. The auction is now at $0.15. Person A now has a sunk cost of $1 (the cost of the bid they used). There is no way to get that dollar back, win or lose. If Person A wins they must pay the $0.15.

Person B also purchased $5 of bids. Person B sees the same auction and places the second bid. The auction price is now $0.30 (because each bid increases the cost by exactly 15 cents). Person B now has a sunk cost of $1. If Person B wins they must pay the $0.30. Swoopo now has $2 in the bank and the auction is at 30 cents.

This can happen with as many users as there are suckers to start accounts. Why are they suckers? Because everybody that does not have the top spot just loses the money they spent on bids. *Poof* Gone. If you think this sounds a little like gambling or a complete scam you are not alone. People get swept up into the auction and don’t want to get nothing for the money they spent on bids. I think you will understand it better if I show you an example of people getting ripped off on the site.

An auction for a laptop that says on the auction page, and I quote, “Worth up to $1,399.99″ The winning bidder, as stated on the site, placed 2020 bids. That is $2,020!! And the auction page proclaims “Savings: 0%” when it really should read negative! So Swoopo made like $600. BUT WAIT! The auction started at $0.00 and finished at $3,353.85. Now read that again. They were already up $600 from the winners bids alone. The winner sucker still had to pay $3,353.85 because that was the price of the auction. Okay, so Swoopo walks away with a cool $4,000 pure profit. (Like a bad TV commercial) BUT WITH THERE’S MORE! Remember that bids are placed in 15 cent increments. That means that if the auction finished for $3,353.85 you take that divided by $0.15 which equals $22,359 in bids!!!! That brings total profit to $22,359 (bids) + $3,353.85 (auction) -$1,399.99 (retail cost of laptop, probably not their cost) = $24,312.86

Pure Profit: A Look at Swoop (via Design with Intent)

Once again, it's time for Toronto's excellent Free Software and Open Source Symposium, where students are admitted for a mere $30 and others for $75:

October 23-24th, 2008 - Seneca@York Campus, Toronto Open source, open content, and open formats are changing the way we work, play, and learn. From software to the web to television and the media, the open source movement is spreading. Come see and hear the future in person: some of the most important thinkers in open technologies will be here at Seneca@York on Thursday October 23 & Friday October 24.

Welcome to Free Software and Open Source Symposium 2008

Larry Flynt's at it again:

According to HUSTLER, “Nailin’ Paylin” is a “naughty adventure to the wild side of that sexy Alaska governor,” featuring “girl-on-girl lovin’,” “nailing the Russians, who come knocking on her back-door,” and a younger Palin getting seduced by her college creationist professor who “will explain a ‘big bang’ theory even she can’t deny!” Also included: a three-way hardcore sex scene starring Palin/Paylin, Hillary Clinton, and Condoleeza Rice.

TheFrisky.com Exclusive!: Details Of The Sarah Palin Spoof Adult Video (the Frisky, thanks Susannah Breslin)

More and more of Canada's electoral candidates are signing onto the Copyright Pledge, just one week after its release.

The initial reaction to the pledge has been very strong. I am pleased to advise that the Green Party (as a party) has agreed to the pledge. In addition, the following NDP MPs have added their names as supporters:

* Charlie Angus, New Democrat MP, Timmins-James Bay, ON
* Olivia Chow, New Democrat MP, Trinity-Spadina, ON
* Libby Davies, New Democrat MP, Vancouver East, BC
* Michael Byers, New Democrat Candidate, Vancouver Centre, BC
* Anne Lagacé Dowson, New Democrat Candidate, Westmount, QC
* Phil Brown, New Democrat Candidate, Nepean-Carleton, ON
* John Chan, New Democrat Candidate, Calgary Centre-North, AB
* Tyler Kinch, New Democrat Candidate, Calgary Centre, AB

...The pledge again: Will you commit to a balanced approach to copyright reform that reflects the views of all Canadians by pledging:

1. To respect the rights of creators and consumers.

2. Not to support any copyright bill that undermines or weakens the Copyright Act’s users rights.

3. To fully consult with Canadians before introducing any copyright reform bill and to conduct inclusive, national hearings on any tabled bill.

Read that pledge again -- can you believe that there are candidates in this election who can find something to object to in those three points? Copyright Pledge Gains Momentum - Green Party and NDP Candidates On Board

DailyKos's Ipsos has a great technical post on the logistics of sneaking an earpiece onto Sarah Palin at the debate, from the physics of spectrum use and antenna design to earpiece-hiding techniques and more:

3. Where do you put the person doing the cueing?

This one has me stumped, because you have two problems with mutually-exclusive solutions.

Ideally, you'd like the person whispering in Sarah's ear to be somewhere far away from the debate site. You don't want someone pulling back a curtain, Oz-style, and finding Randy Schuenemann hunched over a microphone muttering about the difference between Iran and Iraq.

A hotel room somewhere else, watching on TV? Perfect...except that there's a delay issue to contend with. All the digital links from debate site to satellite uplink to network headquarters to cable company mean that several seconds can elapse between the time the question is asked on stage in St. Louis and the time a viewer sitting somewhere else hears it. And you don't want Palin standing there looking silent while waiting for the cues to come back over her earpiece. (Well, we do, actually, but...)

Then you also have the challenge of getting the whisperer's audio from the hotel room into the arena to be broadcast to Palin's earpiece. Cellphone? Those get overloaded in a busy situation, can drop out, and introduce more delay. Wi-fi? Same problems, to a greater degree. (This is also why you don't just drop a tiny cellphone down Palin's back and connect it to a concealed earpiece - it solves the spectrum issue, but it's just not reliable enough when you need it to be.)

How they'd put a bug in Palin's ear tonight (Thanks, Bill!)

Lumnifer sez, "This clip of Harry Belafonte singing an extended political song, 'Don't Stop The Carnival,' with a green screen backdrop of footage from the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention, was originally meant to air as part of the season 3 premiere of the 1968 Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Many people would be surprised to know that both Belafonte and the Smothers Brothers were very political - in fact, the Smothers Brothers series was cancelled that season for being too overtly political, even going so far as to insult the president and criticize the war! *gasp*"

Doesn't surprise me in the least -- I think being political is what the Smothers Brothers are famous for, no? In any event, Belafonte and the Smothers are both gigantic personal favorites, and this (based, it seems on "Global Carnival?") is a great song. Harry Belafonte - Don't Stop The Carnival (Thanks, Luminifer!)

Yesterday, David and I enjoyed fine lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Urbana, Illinois. The experience was made even more pleasant because of this "wireless service bell button" at our table. Note its four buttons: Waiter, Drink, Money (bill), and Chopsticks (food). Each button produced a different tone, which emanated from a speaker in the kitchen. When I pressed the drink button, the waiter appeared in seconds holding a pitcher of ice water. When I pressed the Money button, he came right out with the check.

If Sarah Palin can promise in tonight's debate that -- if elected -- she'll sign legislation requiring all restaurants in the country to install tabletop wireless service bell button systems, she gets my vote.

Another winner from the fantabulous LP Cover Lover photoblog. Here, a woman is presented as a valve of some kind, and adorned with buttons emblazoned with double entendres, such as "I LIKE ACID!"

I only wish LP Cover Lover also had links to the music from the albums they feature.

And if yesterday's pick from LP Cover Lover didn't satisfy your quota for big-haired Christian women vocalist trios, this ought to hold you.

Music to Sell Valves By

My dear old friend Dan Kimball (we played in a band together in Colorado and London) has one of the best hairstyles I've had the pleasure to know. Over the years Dan has refined his pompadour to the point that it is now a flawless exemplar of rockabilly style.

When Dan talks about hair grease, you should pay attention. Recently, he stunned the readers of his blog by announcing he'd switched pomades.

After 12 years, I have made the switch from Fiber Grease to LayRite Super Hold. LayRite is "scientifically formulated" and also is "Hy-Sheen."

This is another big change in my life that I am now emotionally processing and getting used to. But I needed to get back to the original Hy-Sheen formula.

My dilemma is that LayRite doesn't come in a 3 oz. canister, so it isn't able to go carry-on in planes. For travel I will still need to use Fiber Grease 3 oz. until LayRIght SuperHold comes in a 3 oz. option.

Me, I don't know pomade from pomegranate juice. But I find it interesting that both brands Dan writes about share the same label colors -- white, black, and yellow. I have made the switch from Fiber Grease to LayRite Super Hold.

From Orange Crate Art:

The best choice for watching a presidential or vice-presidential debate is C-SPAN. Why? C-SPAN's continuous split-screen lets you see both participants at all times, allowing for all sorts of observations about body language and facial expression.

Why C-Span is the best place to watch the debates

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, there was news of a long-life netbook battery for MSI's Wind, a debunking of yesterday's Mac Pro benzene claims, and yet another fake MacBook Pro rendering.

Big fish of the day is Nokia's latest cellphone, which loses its "Tube" rumor-name to become the Xpress Music 5880. Fujitsu thinks that multitouch laptop displays will prove unintuitive.

John found revolting gadget replicas made of meat, Joel gobbled up the random snack pieces of "Gamer Grub," and Rob spotted an amusingly dangerous light switch.

There was a chair modeled on sound waves, an alarm clock you have to pay to shut up, and a Zune for Gears of War fans. The Grenade Mouse is exactly what it sounds like, though what will become of trouble housewares brand Ronco, no-one knows.

Find out about Erik Ramsay, who can't move a muscle—but who can help develop a computerized thought-to-speech system. And find out about Victor Papagno, who could be off to prison after taking home office equipment valued at $120,000.

Sick of us talking about a certain company and its products? We've got a message for you.

An update on the item blogged here earlier today on Boing Boing:

Skype, the online text messaging and voice service, said Thursday it was "extremely concerned" by monitoring of Internet chat by its Chinese partner reported by Canadian researchers.

Skype said it learned just Wednesday that a previously disclosed text filter operated by TOM-Skype, a joint venture between Chinese mobile firm TOM Online and Skype, had been altered.

"Last night, we learned that this practice was changed without our knowledge or consent and we are extremely concerned," Skype, which is owned by US online auction house eBay, said. "We deeply apologise for the breach of privacy relating to chat messages on TOM's servers in China and we are urgently addressing this situation with TOM," the company said.

More here: Skype admits China privacy breach (AFP, Thanks, Oxblood!)

American Memory is a new and compelling DVD coming from extended Skinny Puppy posse members William Morrison and Justin Bennett later this year. It took me a while to figure out exactly what was going on (and exactly who was responsible), but that didn't detract from this hypnotic and ultimately forceful piece.

The voice in the clip on the DVD's trailer is that of former slave Alice Gaston, interviewed in her eighties for the Library of Congress in 1941. The actress is lip-synching to her dialogue. Videomaker William Morrison explains that the whole project works this way, using audio from the American Memory Archive along with new and processed footage. And, of course, delicious and eerie post-industrial music.

According to Morrison: "The theoretical context of the project is that some time in the very distance future, long after America is gone, some artists scouring the backwater of whatever the net has become discover the American Memory Archive. They have no context for it's meaning but are intrigued by the sights and sounds. They create surreal impressions of the material they find and broadcast it back through time. A quantum radio channel beamed into the sub conscious minds of the 21st century."

A few different permutations of the band will be playing a show on December 4 at the Gramercy in NYC, with special guests Doug Mesner and, if I can get my act and gear together, me.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

Today's Boing Boing tv is an installment of our ongoing BBtv WORLD series, in which we bring you first-person glimpses of life around the globe. Today: an ambient exploration of the creatures rustling around in a West African wildlife preserve at dawn.

I traveled to Benin not long ago, and I shot this video on a small handheld digital camcorder. This episode of our daily show is a little experiment in trying to convey what this place feels like, first-person, without too many words.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video and instructions on how to subscribe to the daily BBtv video podcast.

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The Pendjari Biosphere lies in Benin's remote rural northwest, along the border of Burkina Faso. Despite poaching and environmental damage, it's still home to a diverse number of species -- elephants, lions, monkeys, cheetah, and around 300 species of birds. We traveled here during the dry season, when animal spotting is easiest. Here is what we saw at dawn (the time of day when critters all come out to the watering holes and rivers).

Poaching is still a big problem in this area, and organized trophy hunting for foreign tourists is still legal and in demand here (mostly visitors from France; Benin is a former French colony and French is the official language). Lion hunts are a lucrative trade in this extremely poor region, where most people are subsistence farmers.

But eco-tourism and less-invasive safari experiences are becoming more important to the local economy here, and offer a more sustainable future.

Note: don't miss the epic baboon ball-grab at 0:35, and the mama elephant ripping tree branches off and getting ready to kill us around 1:50. We were too close to her kids, and we were having a hard time leaving quickly. Do not taunt happy-fun elephant.

Related BBtv WORLD episode:
BBtv World: Green tech and internet at the Songhai Center in Benin (Africa)

Michael Yon in Afghanistan:

If we’re going to win this war, we will have to win over the rural Afghans. One compound at a time. An old friend of mine has an airplane in Afghanistan, and I’ve hitched a few rides with him. On one trip, I took aerial photos of compounds in Helmand Province, between Camp Bastion and Lashkar Gah. Compounds vary in different regions, but many families and extended families live within compound walls. [Here are a series of photos documenting] large compounds in the seeming middle of nowhere.

Compounds (Michael Yon, thanks Wayne de Geere)

Larry Lessig recounts the story of a perfect example of the inadequacy of fair use: a political (anti-Obama) parody video was taken down on the basis of a ridiculous copyright claim. Like Lessig, I don't agree with the video, but I do agree with the right of the maker to post it, and I believe that if copyright can be used to suppress political remix in election seasons, it makes us all worse off.

That it was suppressed, however, is a feature/bug of current copyright law. The video is making a powerful (if wrong, imho) argument about the source of responsibility for this financial mess. It uses text (sparsely placed, as is my own style too, though the author needs a better font), images of newspaper articles, pictures of the candidates, and clips from television, all to the end of making the political argument.

That part's relatively easy from a fair use perspective. What isn't is the music. As is increasingly the style for amateur (in the good sense of the word -- people who do what they do for the love of what they do and not for the money) remix: music is attached to parts of the video to give it a special boost in social meaning, or significance. The cultural reference enhances the political. It becomes part of the story.

So, for example. when describing how Fannie and Freddie gave low interest and no interest loans, the music is Dire Straits "Money for Nothing." And when talking about the speculation, Talking Head's "Burning down the house." When talking about the influence of money inside the campaigns, AcDc "Money Talks." And when talking about how "it ends now" if (as the author but not this author hopes) Obama is defeated, the music is "Survivor - Eye of the Tiger." In each case, the music amplifies the message in powerfully and socially relevant way.

A lesson in the failures of "fair use"

The "Condomovil," an HIV/AIDS awareness vehicle, has been stolen in Mexico City. The truck's cargo included 5,000 condoms, 800 HIV tests, and a 22-foot inflatable rubber. From the Associated Press:

The co-ordinator of an HIV/Aids awareness tour, Polo Gomez, said on Wednesday that the "Condomovil" was parked in front of a friend's house in Mexico City when it disappeared on Sunday evening...

The truck should be easy to spot. It features painted images of a peeled banana, the exposed part shaped like a condom, and a shirtless man saying: "I protect myself. Do you?"

Stolen: condom mobile (via Fortean Times)

UPDATE: Commenter DIEGOV notes that the Condomovil has just been located, sans condoms and other gear.

Gabriel Delahaye at Videogum has come to the conclusion that we may have already seen the golden age of internet viral videos, like the epic weirdo tour de force embedded above. "It was in 2006, and it was great," he says, "But it's all downhill from here on out" From his blog post:

In a recent post, I made a throwaway joke about how sometimes the internet works really hard to provide us with something new, and sometimes it just lays some Sarah Palin audio on top of some Miss South Carolina footage and calls it a day. As an example of a viral video in which the internet surprised us with its cleverness and ingenuity, I linked to the "Valentine for a Perfect Stranger" video. If you haven't seen it, it's one of the funniest and also weirdest viral videos in the short but storied history of viral videos. In fact, I would be hard pressed to think of another viral video that is as uniquely odd and wonderful.

In that same recent post, I linked to a few viral videos as examples of the internet's ingenuity. They were just the videos that stood out in my mind as being exceptional. You know, the viral video that is more than just some kid farting a powder cloud or a kitten that is also a ninja. The one you talk to your friends about. And what I discovered is that all of them were posted to YouTube in 2006. Begging the question, has the golden age of viral video already passed? Are we now living in its decline?

Observe...

Was 2006 The Golden Age Of Viral Videos? (Videogum)

Robert Pearlman, editor of the Houston-based space history and artifacts project collectSPACE, says:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA as it is more commonly referred to today, began operations 50 years ago on Oct. 1, 1958. Charged with leading the nation's civilian research into air travel and space exploration, it was the latter that caught the public's imagination, which in turn led to a wide desire for commemorative and actual pieces of NASA's exploits in outer space.

In honor of NASA's anniversary, collectSPACE offers a tour through the agency's first 50 years as guided by the space collectibles it inspired. Each item pictured is contemporary to the milestone it was selected to portray.

Fifty Years of Space Collectibles

Gus Harper is an L.A./NYC artist who creates pop paintings of ordinary objects on large grids. This time-lapse video of Harper painting roses is quite entrancing. Gus Harper: Grid Painting video (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!)

Ron Deibert of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab says,

The first Information Warfare Monitor/ONI Asia major investigative report has been released -- Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's TOM-Skype platform, written by Nart Villeneuve, Psiphon Fellow, the Citizen Lab, at the Munk Centre for International Studies, the University of Toronto.

John Markoff of the New York Times has just released a story about the report: Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China.

Major Findings of this report are as follows:

* The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.

* These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data.

* The captured messages contain specific keywords relating to sensitive political topics such as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party of China.

* Our analysis suggests that the surveillance is not solely keyword-driven. Many of the captured messages contain words that are too common for extensive logging, suggesting that there may be criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are captured by the system.

As my colleague Rafal Rohozinski and I say in the foreword to the report, "If there was any doubt that your electronic communications -- even secure chat -- can leave a trace, Breaching Trust will put that case to rest. This is a wake up call to everyone who has ever put their (blind) faith in the assurances offered up by network intermediaries like Skype. Declarations and privacy policies are no substitute for the type of due diligence that the research put forth here represents."

(Thanks, Oxblood!)

UPDATE: Skype admits the breach and apologizes.

The Asia-Pacific Space Agency continues to grow,, combining the spacefaring ambitions of China, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia and others:

"Given China's diplomatic use of space, there is a very good chance they would be taking somebody from a new country," Cheng said.

China has spearheaded the founding of the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, a group intended to promote space cooperation between Asian nations. Cheng pointed out that both Iran and Pakistan are members of the group, and could be potential clients for Chinese space transport.

"I would strongly suspect that at this point in time the U.S. is probably unlikely to be taking any Iranian citizens into space," Cheng said. "But China has had successful sales of satellites to Nigeria and Venezuela, both of which are oil-producing countries, which would make Iran a candidate as someone who might send an astronaut up."

SPACE.com -- After Shenzhou Success, China Looks to the Future