UK to punish "publishing police info" with 10 years in jail

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Ken sez,
Indymedia UK has info on an update to Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This amendment will make it an offence, punishable by up to ten years imprisonment, to publish or elicit information about any police constable "of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".

Given the overreach of basically all legislation having to do with the Global War on Nouns, there's fear in blogging, independent journalism, and activist communities that this could make publishing information that the police finds disconcerting, embarrassing, or troublesome problematic (to say the least).

The amendment also apparently applies to internet service providers and web hosting services...no safe harbor there. Hopefully enough of an outcry will be heard to get some realistic analysis brought to bear!

We will not be intimidated – Mass resistance to new offence of publishing inform (Thanks, Ken!)

Steampunk sewing machine

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


Becky Stern's Steampunk Sewing Machine still functions as a sewing machine -- and the superfluous propellor spins when the drive-wheel moves! "I got an old sewing machine at goodwill and steamed it up with brassy bits!"

Steampunk Sewing Machine (via Make)

Dentata photoshopping contest

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


Today's Worth1000 photoshopping contest is Om Nom Nom Nom, "Inanimate objects eating people and stuff." Pictured here, "banana eat banana !!!!" There's some great dentatae here!

Om Nom Nom Nom

Why Candyland doesn't suck

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

The latest installment in Greg Costikyan's indespensible game-review site, Play This Thing!, is a long, serious, thoughtful look at Candy Land, the game everyone loves to hate. Not so fast, says Greg, there's plenty of juice in that orange. Pieces like this are why Greg's one of my top five games-writers of all time.

To begin with, let us view Candy Land as a mathematical entity. It is very nearly a Markov chain, a stochastic process in which, given the current state, future states are independent of past states. (It would be a pure Markov chain if the deck were shuffled after each play; instead, it is a crippled Markov chain coupled to a push-pop stack.) As such, it is a metaphorical representation of the fundamental ideology of the United States; the past is no constraint on the future, and each individual should strive resolutely for personal advance despite whatever the past may hold. The child born in a log cabin may achieve the presidency, an immigrant boy who grows up in the slums of Brooklyn may become a real-estate magnate, an Ivy-educated scion of wealth may wind up on a bread line, and a double green will speed you to the fore. Though there are winners and losers, initial conditions are no determinant of outcome in the freedom of America. The subtext, of course, may be that success and failure is entirely random and has nothing to do with individual initiative and hard work, a concept alien to the Platonic ideal of the American dream, but perhaps a more accurate representation of reality than the Horatio Alger myth.

Next, let us consider the role of Candy Land in the acculturation of the American child. The characters represented in the game, through whose desmenses the players pass, are all representations of sickly, in many cases objectively repulsive, sweets: Princess Frostine, the Gingerbread People, Mr. Mint, Gkoppy the Chocolate (formerly Molasses) Monster. There's a clear message to the American child here, one our business establishment is at pains to transmit through all forms of media -- most importantly, of course, through the thundering waterfall of commercial blandishment none of us is permitted to escape, whatever media we peruse. That message is, of course: CONSUME. Consume candy. Consume everything. But for children, candy above all; the natural childish instinct to like what in more mature mouths is repulsively lachrymose is the key, the first way in for inculcation of the consumer instinct. Candy good. Consume candy. Whine at your parent until she, or as it may be, he, buys you the packet of Lifesavers. St. Francis Xavier, founder of the Jesuits, said "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man," meaning, of course, that if you brainwash small children with any idiot set of beliefs (like, say, the virgin birth, divinity of Christ, necessity for ritual cannibalism, and triune nature of the Godhead), you'll have them by the frontal lobes of the brain for the rest of their lives. They will never escape it. Thus, while Abbot no doubt had no such intention for her game, Candy Land also serves as an important element in the indoctrination of American youth in the cult of excessive consumption and extravagant and unnecessary use of resources, the fundament of our society and economic growth since the end of the Second World War.

Candy Land

Chainsaw "bayonet" mounted on rifle

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


In this short but riveting video, YouTube's Pfcthiel demonstrates a chainsaw "bayonet" he mounted on an assault rifle (he'll make you one for $300). As Neatorama points out, this may just be the world's greatest anti-zombie weapon. Also handy for loggers who fear attack-squirrels.

Chainsaw Bayonet (via Neatorama)

Canned Libraries: the 1936 version of "universal access to all human knowledge"

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

In this 1936 Modern Mechanix article, a fantasy about shrinking the Library of Congress to fit "in a few small filing cabinets" on microfiche/film. Once this is done, copies of the great library will be distributed to worthy institutions all over the world.

This is one of the Ur-dreams of librarianship, what Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive calls "universal access to all human knowledge." Today's Internet was shaped by people who share the dream. It's a beautiful one.

Each volume so reduced in size is housed in a sealed cartridge not much larger than a 12-gauge shotgun shell. When desired for reading, it is inserted in a small cabinet, the light turned on, and the copy is projected upon a screen, enlarged to comfortable reading size and unaccompanied by glare...

One of the greatest advantages of film books is that small schools and libraries with limited space and money can afford to have all the material which is now available only in the large cities. Files of perishable newspapers can be photographed and thus preserved indefinitely. The cost of making film books will be much below that of printing regular books and their small size also eliminates the storage problem.

Canned Libraries Open New Vistas To Readers (Aug, 1936)

Neil Gaiman explains why he opposes laws banning speech he disagrees with

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

In response to a reader who asked him why he was sticking up for a manga collector whose comics included depictions of underage sex, Neil Gaiman responds with a reasoned, intelligent, and convincing article about the problems of legal limits on speech. First they came for the manga -- what's next?
So when Mike Diana was prosecuted -- and found guilty -- of obscenity for the comics in his Zine "Boiled Angel", and sentenced to a host of things, including (if memory serves) a three year suspended prison sentence, a three thousand dollar fine, not being allowed to be in the same room as anyone under eighteen, over a thousand hours of community service, and was forbidden to draw anything else obscene, with the local police ordered to make 24 hour unannounced spot checks to make sure Mike wasn't secretly committing Art in the small hours of the morning... that was the point I decided that I knew what was obscene, and it was prosecuting artists for having ideas and making lines on paper, and that I was going to do everything I could to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Whether I liked or approved of what Mike Diana did was utterly irrelevant. (For the record, I didn't like the text parts of Boiled Angel, but did like the comics, which were personal and had a raw power to them. And somewhere in the sprawling basement magazine collection I have Boiled Angel 7 and 8, which I read back then to find out what was being prosecuted, and for owning which I could, I assume, now be arrested...)

...You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.

Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.

Why defend freedom of icky speech? (Thanks, Neil!)

Downwind faster than the wind, part 2

mark frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.


Over a year ago on Boing Boing, I linked to this video from a guy who made a propeller-powered vehicle that he claimed could travel downwind faster than the wind. Some people think it was a hoax, and some don't.

In Make Vol. 11, Charles Platt made a miniature model of the vehicle and came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a wind-powered vehicle that can travel faster than the speed of the wind.

Now there's a new video on YouTube (above) that claims it is possible to sail directly downwind faster than the wind (aka DDFTTW). You can read heated discussions about the video and its claims at Makezine, the Mythbusters Fan Club discussion board, and Randi.org. The creator of the video, spork33, hopes that the Mythbusters folks will attempt to replicate the experiment.

I admit that I don't understand the physics involved, so I don't really know whether DDFTTW is possible, but I am siding with Charles on this because I've never known him to be wrong when it comes to math, physics, or electricity.

UPDATE: Charles says: "You might make it clear to readers that the argument is strictly confined to the behavior of vehicles in a direct tail wind. A cross wind can indeed create a force-multiplying effect when it blows against an angled sail."

Today on Offworld

brandonnn

Just trying to live a wild, pure, simple life.

worldofgoo.gif
Today on Offworld we got a deep look inside the mechanics of World of Goo, one of our top picks for independent game of the year, as well as a first look at how one of the earliest computer games ever made translates to the iPhone. We also found an exhaustive list of games using the ubiquitous Wilhelm Scream, and noted an upcoming book that charts the history of LucasArts games (a division of the same company that made the Scream famous). We also saw that Bullfrog's classic Dungeon Keeper PC game is getting revived as an Asian MMO, listened to Morricone-by-way-of-Street-Fighter, saw new Tetris and Breakout tabletop games doubling as piggy banks, watched the first video of a jaw-dropping fan-remake of the original Half-Life, and examined why Left 4 Dead has the best tutorial ever... and why you never noticed it had one to begin with.

Thief gets his own billboard after robbing advertising agency

mark frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.

200812011428

Someone stole 15 transformers from a billboard advertising company in New Zealand. The transformers are worth $5000, but the thief probably wanted them for the $150 worth of copper they contain.

The billboard company responded by placing a security photo of the suspected thief on its own billboards. The company is offering a $500 reward.

Thief gets his own billboard after robbing advertising agency

Imprisoned former Daily Telegraph publisher says US justice and prison systems are flawed

mark frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.

Now that Lord Conrad Black (former Daily Telegraph proprietor) is in prison, he has come to the conclusion that the US justice and prison systems (and the "war on drugs") are flawed.
The system is based on the plea bargain: the barefaced exchange of incriminating testimony for immunity or a reduced sentence. It is intimidation and suborned or extorted perjury, an outright rape of any plausible definition of justice.

The US is now a carceral state that imprisons eight to 12 times more people (2.5m) per capita than the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan. US justice has become a command economy based on the avarice of private prison companies, a gigantic prison service industry and politically influential correctional officers’ unions that agitate for an unlimited increase in the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences. The entire “war on drugs”, by contrast, is a classic illustration of supply-side economics: a trillion taxpayers’ dollars squandered and 1m small fry imprisoned at a cost of $50 billion a year; as supply of and demand for illegal drugs have increased, prices have fallen and product quality has improved.

From my cell I scent the reeking soul of US justice

Boing Boing posts on GOOD!

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

We at Boing Boing are all big fans of GOOD. For those of you haven't checked it out, in print or online, GOOD creates media "for people who give a damn." That's something we can get behind. We've linked to their fantastic articles and data visualizations frequently in the past. So we were delighted when the good people at GOOD approached us about collaborating in some way. Our first dance together is "Boing Boing on GOOD," wherein each week Mark, Xeni, Joel, or I will post a short essay or article to the GOOD blog. We'll take those opportunities to delve a bit deeper into our current fixations and fascinations and connect the dots between groups of posts we've made here. "Boing Boing on GOOD" promises to be a fun experiment and we hope you'll join the conversation! Mark wrote the first piece and it's a doozy, about the science fiction horrors of Botox. Apparently, Botox injections may prevent "people from responding with appropriate anger to things that aren’t good for them." From Mark's essay, titled "I Have No Wrinkles And I Must Scream":
 Wp-Content Uploads 2008 12 1939826469 4412C30Fcb I enjoy studying my five-year-old daughter’s facial expressions, because they’re such immediate and sensitive indicators of her emotional state. This morning, when I told Jane there was a stack of hot pancakes on the table, her face lit up with glee. In the afternoon, when she found out her older sister had given our pet chickens names without first consulting her, a dark cloud of anger and disappointment crossed her face. (She got over it in forty-five seconds.)

It goes without saying that our internal emotional states drive our outward behavior and emotional expressions. What’s not as obvious is that the path runs in both directions – that is, our actions and facial expressions tell us how to feel, just as our emotions tell us how to act. This effect is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Charles Darwin, who wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, understood that an action can cause the experience of a feeling. As William James said of the phenomenon: “We don’t run because we are scared; we are scared because we run.”
"I Have No Wrinkles And I Must Scream" (GOOD)

Merriam-Webster's 2008 Word of the Year

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

Merriam-Webster has announced its 2008 "Word of the Year." The winner? "Disemvowel" "Bailout," which "received the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online over the shortest period of time." And the next four in the Top Ten list:
2. vet
3. socialism
4. maverick
5. bipartisan
#1 Word of the Year for 2008 (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)

Where's Sock Puppet's Bailout?

mark frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.


Pets.com's Sock Puppet asks Congress: "Why are you talking about bailing out the auto companies when you let all us tech companies just crash and burn?"

(Instead of giving taxpayer's money directly to the automakers, why not pass a law requiring every US citizen of driving age to buy a Hummer, Tahoe, or F250? Those unable to pay cash can get a pre-approved AIG-insured payment plan. That would keep Detroit busy, help the oil companies, and give AIG another excuse for a cash infusion down the road.)

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Where's Sock Puppet's Bailout?

Monster truck rally tilt shift video

mark frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.


Monster trucks look even cooler when they are miniaturized via tilt-shift videography. Metal Heart by Keith Loutit (Via Telstar Logistics)

Woman has perfect "episodic memory"

mark frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.

Der Spiegel profiles a 42-year-old woman who has perfect "episodic memory"
"People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory," she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. "But it's also agonizing."

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. "I don't look back at the past with any distance. It's more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It's like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there's no stop button."

She's constantly bombarded with fragments of memories, exposed to an automatic and uncontrollable process that behaves like an infinite loop in a computer. Sometimes there are external triggers, like a certain smell, song or word. But often her memories return by themselves. Beautiful, horrific, important or banal scenes rush across her wildly chaotic "internal monitor," sometimes displacing the present. "All of this is incredibly exhausting," says Price.

An Infinite Loop in the Brain (Via Mind Hacks)

Best book covers of 2008

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


The Book Design Review blog's top book covers for 2008 are up. This is one of my favorite annual features -- and this year's includes some drop-dead gorgeous designs. I'm insanely jealous of Austin Grossman for getting that brilliant cover for his excellent book Soon I Will Be Invincible. I've mentioned Jordan Crane's wonderful cover for Chabon's Maps and Legends and the new edition of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, but why did no one tell me about the beauty that is the cover for Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me

My Favorite Book Covers of 2008 (via Kottke)

Bizarre absence of acorns in parts of the United States

mark frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.

In some parts of the US, there's been reports that trees aren't bearing acorns this year. "We're talking zero. Not a single acorn. It's really bizarre," said Greg Zell, a naturalist at Long Branch Nature Center in Arlington.
Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.

But [field botanist Rod] Simmons really got spooked when he was teaching a class on identifying oak and hickory trees late last month. For 2 1/2 miles, Simmons and other naturalists hiked through Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests. They sifted through leaves on the ground, dug in the dirt and peered into the tree canopies. Nothing.

Simmons thinks the reason could be that the unusually heavy rainfall in the spring washed the pollen out of the air before it had time to pollinate the acorn blossoms. But Ed Zimmer, a regional forester for the Virginia Department of Forestry, doesn't think that's possible. So far, no one knows for sure what's going on.

Where'd all the acorns go? (Via Neatorama)

Norwegian Übër-Bläck-Mëtäl Devotees Captured In New Portrait Book

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.


( Image above by Peter Beste. You're welcome! ) The LA Weekly has a feature up about a new book with portraits of very serious Norwegian Black Metal dudes. In True Norwegian Black Metal, photographer Peter Beste captures the "blackest of the black: apolitical and anti-Christian separatist self-preservationists who’d sooner make a lampshade out of their own skin than to try to convert fans." Snip from Siran Babayan's piece:

Take, for example, Immortal singer-bassist Abbath strolling through the woods surrounded by moss-covered emerald trees (“That’s essentially his backyard”), or Gorgoroth singer Gaahl standing in front of a snow-capped log cabin. Every turn of the page is a moving postcard of brooks, lakes and forrests. Which begs the question: With all the serenity and breathtaking views, what’s to rebel against? Apparently, Mother Nature makes mean Vikings out of little boys. If Black Sabbath were a product of bleak, industrial Birmingham, it should be no surprise that music this extreme thrives in a country with such high precipitation and so many months of either uninterrupted daylight or darkness.

So don’t let the scenery fool you. These are some disturbed and disturbing fuckers, whether it’s guitarist Ymon of Perished with his arms covered in branding marks, or Nattefrost of Carpathian Forest smoking heroin off tin foil or a nude female model being painted in cow’s blood before she’s about to be hung from a cross for a Gorgoroth show in Krakow. Nearly everyone is wearing a scowl, corpse paint and spikes. And Beste’s grossest moment has him shooting Nattefrost smeared in his own shit.

Of all the bands featured, Beste focuses on the Tolkien-inspired Gorgoroth and its lead troublemaker Gaahl, who’s been arrested twice for alleged assault and torture, and whose face, with its sunken cheeks, looks even creepier without makeup. And that Krakow gig in 2004 not only included human crucifixes but sheep heads mounted on sticks. (Dude, one photo of decapitated sheep heads would’ve been enough.)

Images of Satan (LA Weekly), and there's a terrific slideshow here (NSFW). Here's the Amazon link if you'd like to buy the book. (Thanks Richard Metzger)

Gamer's guide to the Wilhelm Scream

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

 Oimages Wilhelm We've posted before about the "Wilhelm scream," the singular screech heard in hundreds of movies and TV shows since it was recorded in 1951. Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon notes the scream's transition into the video game world.
"The gamer's guide to the Wilhelm Scream"

Vietnam's amazing phone-unlockers

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John links to a fantastic Crave piece about master Vietnamese phone-unlockers, virtuosos of desoldering who manage the painstaking business of unlocking your iPhone so that you can choose which network you run it on.

First, a technician opened up the phone and stripped it to the motherboard. In his skillful hands, the device seemed much easier to dismantle than I expected.

The technician then extracted the baseband chip, the component that controls the connection between the phone and the mobile network, from the motherboard. (This is a painstaking task as the chip is strongly glued to the phone's motherboard. A mistake during this process could brick the phone completely.)

Once the chip was extracted, it was Tuan Anh's turn. He used a chip reader to read information into a file. He then used a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the file, and after that, the chip got reprogrammed with the newly altered file. Now it was no longer programmed to work with only a specific provider.

The chip then got reassembled into the motherboard, another painstaking process.

As a last step, the technician put the phone back together, and it looked like nothing had been done to it.

Unlocking an iPhone 3G the Vietnamese way Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Portraits from Iran: "Pictures of You"

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.


Over at the parsarts.com blog, Sepideh Saremi* has a post up about Colorado-based artist Tom Loughlin. His portraits of Iranians inside Iran are featured in an installation project currently traveling across the US, "Pictures of You: Images from Iran." Snip:

PA: The photos in Pictures of You are printed on translucent silk. You’ve written that the silk is intended to allow viewers to see each other as well as the photographs, and to remind them that “something beautiful is in jeopardy.” How have viewers reacted to Pictures of You?

TL: There have been a wide variety of reactions. In fact, the one commonality seems to be that no one is indifferent. Everyone seems to have a powerful response to the show.

So far, the overwhelming majority of responses have been positive. Viewers thank us for putting a human face on Iran, and many of them have powerful emotional responses. It’s quite amazing for me as an artist to see people emerging from the installation in tears, or emptying their pockets into our donation boxes because they want to see the show travel to other venues.

We have had a variety of negative responses as well. At our installation in Denver, we were picketed by a Christian group that wanted to express the view that Muslims were going to hell. Interestingly, they all agreed that the subjects of my photographs looked like very nice people. At the same installation, we had a visitor tell us that he wanted to go and get dynamite and destroy the artwork. One of our staff members engaged him in conversation about the show, and within ten minutes he had changed his mind completely.

Pictures of You: Images from Iran (Pars Arts)

* Diclosure: By day, Sepideh works with DECA, the company with whom Boing Boing partnered to launch Boing Boing tv.

Ukulele cover of Styx

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.



I love the band Styx in a non-ironic way. That's why I was delighted to stumble upon this curious ukulele cover of Styx's "Come Sail Away" by Uke enthusiast Sirant who lives in China. He looks like quite a character.

Stanley Donwood, Famed Creator of Radiohead Artwork, Starts a Record Label

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.


The man known most widely for his Radiohead-related artwork (album covers, posters, t-shirt and merch designs, stuff that lives on the web) is launching an independent record label. Stanley Donwood explains:

'SIX INCH RECORDS' is a project that may take a little explaining. The story begins around the time of Christmas 2006, when I drunkenly decided to become a record label boss. Every man needs a hobby, or so the cliché has it, and if I was going to make a late-stage attempt at normality then that was one of the things that I should do. So, still reeling from red wine, I typed out a email to three musicians that I knew, suggesting that I release their music on my as-yet-unnamed record label.
Do read the entirety of Donwood's own introduction. Like everything he does, the project sounds kinda complicated, a little crazy, most intricately conceived, and very interesting. I'm a big fan, and I can't wait to hear the music he's curated here. The Six Inch Records launch party takes place in London on January 30th; tickets are £6.66. LOL, Satan. (via the excellent Radiohead fan-blog GreenPlastic, and Rex -- thanks!)

Photobooth book from Musée Mécanique

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

 Images Lostandfoundposter-Lg  Images Larry
One of my favorite spots in San Francisco is the Musée Mécanique, a magnificent penny arcade filled with dozens of old timey arcade machines, mechanical music instruments, bizarre automatons, and, of course, a photobooth. It's a truly wonderful place to visit. Proprietor Dan Zelinsky is a terrific guy who restores and maintains the machines himself. The Musée's David Gallagher just emailed to update me that one of Dan's pet project, a book titled Lost And Found At The Musée Mécanique, is now complete:
Over the last 30 years Dan has been collecting and saving photobooth strips left around the Musee in hopes that the owner would try to retrieve them… of course the large majority of them (ok, all of them) never get picked up.

So in addition to the large collection of machines in the Musee, he’s a got a huge collection of orphaned photobooth strips, the best of which he’s collected into a book called “Lost and Found at the Musée Mécanique”. the book is pretty cool, the pages are the size of strips themselves and the whole thing is bound at one corner so it can be fanned out like a pinwheel.
Musée Mécanique's Lost And Found book

Yellow Fever / Levelload, directed by Babanuki (music video)

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.


A captivating, internet-inspired music video for "Yellow Fever," from the band Levelload. Directed by Babanuki ( = Tom Palliser and Ian Anderson). According to the YouTube summary, "Both song and video are about men who are obsessed with japanese/asian girls. The video also features robots, flamethrowers, credit verification systems & web browsing, all hand drawn." (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Digital embryos

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

 Aboutus News Press Press08 09Oct08 Press09Oct08 L
Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory have developed a novel microscopy technique to generate "digital embryos," 3D visualizations of early embryonic development down to the position of individual cells and the division of those cells. Their first big success, published recently in the journal Science, is a reconstruction of the first 24 hours of a Zebrafish embryo's development. The resulting movies are quite spectacular. From an EMBL press release:
Two newly developed technologies were key to the scientists' interdisciplinary approach to tracking a living zebrafish embryo from the single cell stage to 20,000 cells: a Digital Scanned Laser Light Sheet Microscope that scans a living organism with a sheet of light along many different directions so that the computer can assemble a complete 3D image, and a large-scale computing pipeline operated at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology...

"The digital embryo is like Google Earth for embryonic development. It gives an overview of everything that happens in the first 24 hours and allows you to zoom in on all cellular and even subcellular details," says Jochen Wittbrodt, who has recently moved from EMBL to the University of Heidelberg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
The Zebrafish digital embryo(European Molecular Biology Laboratory), "Digital zebrafish embryo" press release (EMBL), "Reconstruction of Zebrafish Early Embryonic Development by Scanned Light Sheet Microscopy" (Science, thanks Mark Pescovitz!)

Reprints of antique medical illustrations

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

Transmiatel I collect antique medical illustrations from the 18th and 19th century. My collection is small, mostly because the really beautiful pieces are usually quite pricey. For a more affordable option, Transmission Atelier is a fine art printer in Chicago that also reissues antique medical, religious, mythology, and natural history illustrations. They've picked some fantastic pieces to reprint. I haven't seen Transmission Atelier's work in person, but they describe their products as "extremely detailed limited edition digital pigment prints." Small prints (8" x 10") are $49.99 and the large ones (16" x 20") are $119.99.
Transmission Atelier Editions

Harvey Pekar audio interview

david pescovitz

Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.

 Common Uploads Pekar JBooks has an audio interview with pioneering underground comix writer Harvey Pekar, author of American Splendor. In discussion with Brown University cultural historian Paul Buhle, Pekar talks about being a secular Jew, speaking Yiddish, and Studs Terkel. Buhle is the editor of Jews And American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form, and is currently working on a biography of Pekar.
Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle in Conversation

Change.gov goes Creative Commons

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Obama's Change.gov site has dropped its "All Rights Reserved" notice and switched to the Creative Commons Attribution license, the most liberal of the CC licenses. change.gov set free (Thanks, Simon!)

Michael Geist's movie: "Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law"

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


Michael Geist sez,"One year after launching the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, I've just released a new film that explores why copyright emerged as such a high profile issue. Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law, which I produced together with Daniel Albahary, features a wide range of Canadian voices - artists like Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art; writers like award winning science fiction author Karl Schroeder; musicians like Wide Mouth Mason's Safwan Javed; business people like Nettwerk Record's Terry McBride, Lulu.com's Bob Young, and Skylink Technologies' Philip Tsui; government appointees like Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart and Ian E. Wilson, the Chief Librarian of Canada; and many, many more. Given the emphasis on the benefits of the Internet as a distribution channel for creators, the film is available in multiple ways online at newly designed page."

Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law (Thanks, Michael!)

Boing Boing's Holiday Gift Guide part six: DVDs and CDs

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Here's the final installment in this year's Boing Boing holiday gift guide: a compendium of the top sellers from the last year's reviews. Today we wrap up with DVDs and one CD.

Don't miss the previous installments: kids' stuff, fiction, gadgets, comics and nonfiction.

Freakazoid - The Complete First Season

The best TV cartoon since the Max Fleischer era, on DVD
Original Boing Boing post

Tekkon Kinkreet

Absolutely extraordinary comic fuses manga and French comics in a story of violence and lost boys in a surreal Japanese cityscape
Original Boing Boing post

DAVE MCKEAN'S KEANOSHOW

Surreal gorgeous short videos on DVD
Original Boing Boing post

Masters of Science Fiction: The Complete Series

Stephen Hawking hosts a science fiction TV show
Original Boing Boing post

Alphabutt
(Kimya Dawson)
Weird, jangly, hilarious awesome music for kids
Original Boing Boing post

Watchismo is giving a free LIP diode watch to a BB reader!

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)


Our pals at Watchismo have launched a new store to highlight their kick-ass line of reproductions of LIP diode watches -- replicas of Roger Tallon's 1973 timepieces that were among the first (and coolest) digital watches made. I bought my LIP back in September and I've been wearing it ever since.

Watchismo has offered to give away a LIP watch to one Boing Boing reader (and to offer a 20 percent discount to BB readers on the entire store, which includes dozens of superb vintage and new watches -- just use the discount code BBWATCHISMO) in a giveaway drawing that's scheduled for the 22nd of December.

I love watches -- my grandfather was a watchmaker and I grew up surrounded by them -- and I discovered Watchismo through a friend's recommendation. Since then, I've bought two watches from the site, and been given two more as gifts, and each one is an absolute treasure: beautiful, functional, and distinctive. There's an early digital that you adjust by rubbing a magnet (hidden in the bracelet) against the back of the case. There's another early digital whose numbers are actually printed in bright orange LED font on hidden cardboard wheels and then reflected on a disguised curved mirror that makes it appear that they are lit from within.

The craftsmanship and aesthetics of Watchismo's stocks really hit the sweet-spot for me: they're gizmos that are meant to last for the ages and be used every day.

Welcome to the BoingBoing LIP Diode Giveaway!