Earlier today I wondered what the actual text is of H.R.1, the bill to authorize an $819 billion "stimulus package." Newspapers don't generally go into this kind of detail, perhaps fearing that it would bore their readers, so I visited the very usefulOpen Congress site to find out. As I read the bill, two things caught my eye.
The first should have been obvious: The money will be mostly distributed among existing federal agencies. To spend huge sums of money, the government simply has to channel it through the system that already exists to allocate and track it. Unfortunately, some of these agencies are not widely known for timely and efficient behavior.
The second lesson is a corollary of the first and could be described as "no agency left behind." Naturally when you suddenly have more than $800 billion floating around, everyone wants a piece of it. Thus we find that very substantial sums are being allocated for purposes such as assisting local law enforcement (the war on drugs, no doubt), housing soldiers, and (of course) increasing homeland security.
Here are some random items that I copied and pasted. For more details, check the link above.
Law Enforcement
$3 billion for state and local law enforcement assistance.
$1 billion for community policing services.
Department of Defense
$4.5 billion to modernize and repair Army barracks and other defense facilities.
General Services Administration
$6 billion for construction and repair of federal buildings.
$1 billion for immigration facilities at ports of entry.
Homeland Security
$250 million for salaries and construction at ports of entry.
$500 million for purchase and installation of explosive detection systems.
$150 million for alteration or removal of obstructive bridges.
The last item is amusing in a grim way. I thought this bill was largely intended to restore "crumbling infrastructure" but apparently $150 million will be spent partly on tearing it down.
Avi sez, "Nassim Nicholas Taleb, gadfly author of The Black Swan, gives his 10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world with dignity."
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act – if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride – and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error – by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
British science fiction writer Paul McAuley spotted this instant corner shop created by plunking a storage container down on a tiny bit of front garden and flinging wide the doors. Instant architecture indeed -- a sign of the times, and more to come no doubt.
Bruce Sterling's lead editorial in SEED Magazine's feature on the 21st century enumerates the disastrous contradictions and changes in the shifting global mindset, and scathingly demands that we fix them. This is inflaming, heady stuff:
7. Science. To be a creationist president is not a problem. A suicide cult is the most effective political actor in the world today. Clearly the millions of people embracing fundamentalism like to make up their own facts.
Standards of scientific proof and evidence no longer compel political and social allegiance. This is not a return to the bedrock of faith — it's an algorithm for ontological anarchy. By attacking empiricism, the world is discarding all of the good reasons to believe that anything is real.
If science is discredited, why should mere politics have any intellectual rigor? Just cobble together a crazy-quilt mix-and-match ideology, like Venezuelan Bolivarism or Russia's peculiar mix of spies, oil, and Orthodoxy. Go from the gut — all tactics, no strategy — making up the state of the world as you go along! Stampede wildly from one panic crisis to the next. Believe whatever is whispered. Hide and conceal whatever you can. Spy on the phone calls, emails, and web browsing of those who might actually know something.
If that leads you to a miserable end-state, huddling with the children in a fall-out shelter clutching silver bullion, then you can congratulate yourself as the vanguard of civilization.
Glyn sez, "The UK Government today published it Digital Britain interim report and not surprisingly, are proving controversial. The Open Rights Group have already stated:
We are looking at the report in detail, but we are extremely concerned that the voice of consumers and citizens is being marginalised.
We are concerned that there is no suggestion that consumers and citizens should be represented on the proposed copyright 'Rights Agency'. Without our voices, such an agency could easily be dominated by industry's concerns at the expense of civil rights. Consumer would be very likely to get a bad deal.
"We are concerned at the government's proposals for technical 'solutions' for rights enforcement - technical 'solutions' to social issues tend to be expensive and fail."
"One by one digital music providers like iTunes and Amazon are moving away from DRM, and trusting their customers. This is a much better example for industry and government to follow."
"We also intend to look closely at proposals for recording and reporting alleged rights infringers. While we welcome the proposal to ask the courts before taking action, we are concerned at the potential for further erosion of privacy online."
"Part of the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham speech showed a clear lack of understanding that alleged behaviour does not equals unlawful:
"We will only maintain our creative strength if we find new ways of paying for and sustaining creative content in the online age. We therefore explore the potential for a new rights agency to be established and following a consultation on how to tackle unlawful file sharing we propose to legislate to require internet service providers to notify alleged significant infringers that their conduct is unlawful."
"The main recommendations that Boing Boing readers will be interested in are:
ACTION 11
By the time the final Digital Britain report is published the Government will have explored with interested parties the potential for a Rights Agency to bring industry together to agree how to provide incentives for legal use of copyright material; work together to prevent unlawful use by consumers which infringes civil copyright law; and enable technical copyright-support solutions that work for both consumers and content creators. The Government also welcomes other suggestions on how these objectives should be achieved.
ACTION 12
Before the full Digital Britain Report is published we will explore with both distributors and rights-holders their willingness to fund, through a modest and proportionate contribution, such a new approach to civil enforcement of copyright within the legal frameworks applying to electronic commerce, copyright, data protection and privacy to facilitate and co-ordinate an industry response to this challenge. It will be important to ensure that this approach covers the need for innovative legitimate services to meet consumer demand, and education and information activity to educate consumers in fair and appropriate uses of copyrighted material as well as enforcement and prevention work.
ACTION 13
Our response to the consultation on peer-to-peer file sharing sets out our intention to legislate, requiring ISPs to notify alleged infringers of rights (subject to reasonable levels of proof from rights- holders) that their conduct is unlawful. We also intend to require ISPs to collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers (derived from their notification activities), to be made available to rights-holders together with personal details on receipt of a court order. We intend to consult on this approach shortly, setting out our proposals in detail.
Gareth Branwyn has been dog-paddling the waters of sidestream culture, as a participant and chronicler, for his entire adult life. He's been involved in the commune movement, the DIY and zine scenes, cyberpunk, steampunk, punk-punk, and has written for bOING bOING (print), Mondo 2000, Wired, Esquire, Details, and numerous other magazines and dailies. He is the editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine's blog, and is currently editing a collection of his work: "Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems."
In their continuing efforts to battle the ever growing mounds of garbage polluting our oceans and coastlines, Surfrider Foundation joined forces with Saatchi & Saatchi LA to sponsor the aptly titled Catch of the Day guerrilla ad campaign. Trash was collected from beaches across the US, then sorted, packaged like seafood, and strategically placed around local farmers’ markets. Directly targeting seafood consumers, this creative campaign draws attention to the gross debris littering our oceans and highlights how this pollution affects the consumer directly through the food they eat. Even if you’re not partial to seafood, its hard to miss the message!
It's eco-guilt meets the Barbie Liberation Organization!
[Full Disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors of Provisions Learning Project]
Undeveloped land is still cheaply available in Northern Arizona, for anyone willing to live off the grid. This piece which I own, consisting of nearly 20 acres on top of a knoll, is just 15 minutes from the nearest town yet has unobstructed views extending at least 30 miles in every direction. The picture above was taken looking east; the picture below, slightly later on the same evening, looks west. Northern Arizona often enjoys dramatic sunsets during the monsoon season in late July through early September, when thunderstorms roll in.
Despite the seemingly remote location, I get 4 bars on my cell phone when I'm standing at the top of the knoll, since a cell tower is located within line-of-sight, 10 miles away. I love to visit the undeveloped land but after I finish enjoying the view and the solitude, I find myself faced with a question that is difficult to answer:
Here's a modular robot from the University of Pennsylvania that can reassemble itself after being kicked into pieces. This is the second video I've seen of a robot that responds in a surprising way to its master's kick. The first video was of the Big Dog pack robot.
These 3-D models of professor/computer graphic artist Yoichiro Kawaguchi's computer graphics are Woodring-esque mind blowers. According to Pink Tentacle, Kawaguchi and his team of researchers are "developing robots designed to imitate primitive life forms. Mockups have been put on display at a Shinto shrine in Tokyo, and working versions of the robots are scheduled for completion in two years."
I found these looping cacti in the botanical gardens in Phoenix, where exotic species display the most amazing attributes, all of which they developed to survive and compete in a very hostile climate. Arizona vegetation is tough and extremely well defended (as anyone knows who has brushed carelessly against a prickly-pear cactus). I admire those traits.
A friend of mine built this cabin by hand, using raw wood from a local saw mill and loose stone gathered on the 40 acres where the cabin is located at the end of a 10-mile dirt road. He lived here for a couple of years, mostly on canned food, before selling the place at a good profit during the real-estate bubble.
Since the water table is too deep to enable a well, water is mostly collected from the roof, into several buried barrels. A wood-burning stove is fuelled with juniper logs. The satellite TV is powered from one car battery through a small inverter.
Today my friend is prospecting for mineral deposits in an arid wasteland just south of the Hoover Dam. As an expert on mining and minerals, he likes to remind me that almost every single product around us is derived ultimately from raw materials that were dug out of the ground, or from things that grew in the ground. Our civilization depends entirely on activities such as mining, drilling, and logging, and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.
Gareth Branwyn has been dog-paddling the waters of sidestream culture, as a participant and chronicler, for his entire adult life. He's been involved in the commune movement, the DIY and zine scenes, cyberpunk, steampunk, punk-punk, and has written for bOING bOING (print), Mondo 2000, Wired, Esquire, Details, and numerous other magazines and dailies. He is the editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine's blog, and is currently editing a collection of his work: "Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems."
Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.
I'm a firm believer in clinging to as much childlike wonder as possible. I love it when people take it upon themselves to inject a little magic and whimsy into the human herd. A few examples, one from my past that's stayed with me, one a recent discovery.
Years ago, I was living in a group house. A woman came to visit, an artist and crafter who specialized in miniatures and dioramas. Her work, which she shared with us via a slideshow, was breathtaking – these pristine little dioramas, frozen scenes from some alternative kidverse of talking-animal storybook characters and various human strangelings, all going about their daily Lilliputian lives inside her little black boxes. She stayed for a few more days, and after she left, life on the commune moved on.
We had a tree in our front yard which was itself something out of storybook, a big ol' gnarly tree with a humongous rotted knothole on one side. One day, I was doing some work in the yard, likely grumbling over the heat and the generalized ick of a Virginian late-summer afternoon. As I passed the tree, something caught my eye, something in the knothole. I peered in, and for a triple-take moment, all of the wistful fantasies of childhood overtook my adult reality.
There, inside the dank hole, was a tiny overstuffed chair sitting on a braided rug, and next to it stood a floor lamp. Tiny pictures hung on even tinier nails on the inside walls of the knothole. A family portrait. Reclining in the chair, watching the TV inside the hole, sat a little rabbit-man. I think he had on overalls. And he may have been drinking something. A can of carrot juice? Honestly, I don't remember the details, and I'm sure time and memory have exaggerated them.
But I honestly remember the impact. It was a simple reality hack with extraordinary impact, a rare moment when magic existed in the world. It worked me on so many levels – the fact that she never said anything to us about it, the amount of thought and work she'd put into it (all in secret), my chance discovery of it days after she'd gone, and that brief, delicious blurring of the mundane and the fantastic – a gift given only to those who happened upon it.
This is all a very long-winded way of introducing my most recent encounter with someone doing the work of the fairy. Lea Redmond calls it the World's Smallest Postal Service. She writes little tiny letters on little tiny stationary and seals them with wax inside a little tiny stamped and canceled envelope. The letter is then placed by an official World's Smallest Postal Service employee (er... Lea) inside a little tiny blue post box.
Then our ham-handed land of the giants reality takes over and the little magic letter is prepared for real-world mailing. It is put into a slide mount-like viewing envelope and then inside of a larger glassine envelope with a magnifying glass thoughtfully included so that the recipient can actually read it. You can order the letters online or you can check the calendar to see where the World's Smallest Postal Service will be setting up shop in the Bay Area. Online, you fill out a form with what you want your letter to say (up to 12 lines!) and where you want it sent. Each letter cost a measly $8. I bought a bunch of them for family and friends over the holidays and everyone seemed genuinely enchanted by the whole enterprise.
Be sure to check out the rest of Lea's site. There's more clever whimsy to be had: matchbox theater, recipe dice, conceptual knitting patterns, earrings with flower seeds in 'em, and lots more awesomeness,
If you ask me, we need a lot more surprise knothole dioramas and little tiny wax-sealed letters in this-here junkyard world. Are ya with me, people?
EFF filed a really well-done brief today in support of Professor Nesson and Harvard's Berkman Center and their quest to provide a live webcast of the defense they providing to students against the RIAA.
Public.Resource.Org and the Internet Archive have offered to host the video. We've previous worked with the provider here, Courtroom View Network, to put the Nifong disbarment trial on-line
(link). All that video is hi-res with no restrictions on re-use.
Media Access Project, Free Press, and the California First Amendment Coalition, and even attorney Ben Sheffner have joined this call to open up the court proceedings.
EFF does such great work ... we're really proud to support their excellent brief.
Today's Boing Boing Video episode is the final installment of a series of conversations shot during a visit to Shepard Fairey's gallery in LA, as the work of legendary punk / hiphop / skate culture photographer Glen E. Friedman was going up on the gallery walls, for his first ever career retrospective "Idealist Propaganda."
TODAY: We explore Glen's work documenting hip-hop in the 1980s, and moments he captured with great artists like RUN DMC, Public Enemy, and Ice T, shown below.
Also in today's episode, Glen tells us about the Liberty Street Protest, a graphic statement against the Iraq war. This visual protest took place right across the street from the ruins of the World Trade Center site, destroyed in the 9/11 attacks.
As Glen explains, graphic images were hung in windows in a loft belonging to Def Jam mogul and hip-hop pioneer Russell Simmons, and the message was: "New Yorkers were right here when 9/11 happened, and we don't want this war in our names."
Big thanks to Boing Boing pal Sean Bonner, who coordinated this series of conversations. And very special thanks to Michael Donaldson, aka Q Burns Abstract Message, for generously allowing Boing Boing to use music from his Eighth Dimension label in this episode.
Below, a song from a Public Enemy record which featured Glen's photos on the cover. The track is "Rebel Without a Pause."
Today I’m going to include some photographs of Northern Arizona, the part of the United States which I find most visually, politically, and socially congenial. This view is from the balcony of a house where I once lived in a former mining town, perched on the side of a mountain about 30 miles from Sedona, which is somewhere amid the red rocks near the horizon.
If you bring a child to Britain from outside the EU, be prepared to have her fingerprinted, even if she's only six years old. That's because the British government now leads the world in undermining the civil liberties of children, beating the US-VISIT program by eight years (visitors to America are only fingerprinted if they're over 14). Most of the British government seems not to have realized that this was going on -- even though the UK's Members of European Parliament have been pushing to make this a requirement across the EU.
Remember when the head of Scotland Yard proposed taking DNA samples from five-year-olds who displayed criminal tendencies so that they could be rounded up for arrest later in life? Here again, we see the British government mistaking Nineteen Eighty-Four as a manual for statecraft.
In fact, no one has called the Borders Agency to account. Home Office officials I have talked to outside the agency were shocked that official government policy is now to fingerprint children.
When asked why (question 226407), the Home Office itself offers a much more solid defence: that the EU requires it. What it does not admit is that the British government is almost alone in pushing the EU to ensure that the age when fingerprinting can start is so low. Home Office officials pushed the EU to establish a standard age of six, despite opposition within other European governments. The next time you hear a government official support the EU, it is not just because it is a vehicle for "peace, prosperity and freedom", but also because it is a vehicle to push through policies that the UK government would prefer not to pursue through the legislature at home.
The Bush administration rejected the contemplation of fingerprinting children, even within the controversial US-VISIT program that fingerprints visitors to the United States. The Department of Homeland Security is prohibited from fingerprinting children under 14, though it may well consider lowering it.
Eircom, a major Irish ISP, will now disconnect its users from the Internet if they receive three unsubstantiated copyright infringement claims from the record labels. The record labels are vowing to hold other ISPs to the same deal, wh‎ich is part of a court settlement in a lawsuit against Eircom. The UK has just rejected this measure, and initiatives to spread this across the EU and the US have died as well. Good thing, too -- as I've written before, this is an insanely dangerous and disproportionate proposal.
After all, you don't hear the record labels offering to have their Internet connections cut off if they send out three false copyright accusations. The Internet's a single wire that delivers freedom of speech, of assembly and of the press -- it's a conduit for civic engagement, health care, employment, education, distant family, love and life. Disconnecting people from the Internet on the basis of an unsubstantiated accusation, without a court order, without a chance to defend yourself against your accusers, without a chance to see and challenge the evidence -- it's positively medieval. Shame on Ireland -- so much for their high-tech economic miracle.
As part of the settlement, the record companies will supply Eircom with the IP addresses of all persons who they detect illegally uploading or downloading copyright works.
Eircom will then contact the subscribers directly and either warn them or terminate their account.
Willie Kavanagh, chairman of EMI Records, said he was delighted with the outcome and commended Eircom’s far-seeing approach.
During the court case it was claimed music piracy is costing record companies here up to €14 million a year.
Other ISPs contacted by The Irish Times last night could not confirm if they would implement the system. A spokeswoman for 3 Ireland, which has 130,000 mobile broadband customers, said it would be “happy to look into the matter”.
Ronan Lupton, chairman of Alto, which represents telecoms operators other than Eircom, said the agreement “is not one enforceable on the rest of the industry given the direct nature of the action against Eircom”.
Ryanair -- easily the worst non-Russian airline I've ever flown -- will now fine passengers 30 Euros if they're caught with overlarge carry-ons. This is against the backdrop of Ryanair's 10-20 Euro bagcheck fee, which has prompted many travellers to try to beat the system with carry-ons. Now, I hate selfish jerks who fill every compartment with their carry-ons as much as the next guy, but it's hard to imagine how giving Ryanair's already vicious flight attendants the power to issue on-the-spot fines and boot off passengers who won't pay will improve the situation much.
For context, the last time I flew Ryanair, it was from London Stansted to Berlin (supposedly). After keeping us on the ground for an hour, they boarded us, then announced that we were not going to Berlin, as we'd missed our landing window, and would instead land in a secondary airport near Munich, sometime after midnight, and that coaches would be by before 3AM for the three hour journey to Berlin. The return trip wasn't much better: Ryanair called us to the gate an hour early, then locked us in there with no toilets. After we boarded, I needed to tap a kidney, but the flight attendant said I'd have to wait another hour until we taxied, took off and attained altitude. When I argued, he threatened to have me arrested.
It's not really any wonder that this airline would start issuing "fines" to passengers -- they already treat them like prisoners.
Here's a gallery of stunning aerial night-photos of London from Jason Hawkes, who notes, "I often shoot tethered to my MacBook Pro to check the sharpness of the images whilst I shoot." He's taking questions on technique at Boston.com, too.
Just before I first moved to London, some well-meaning friends took me up on Primrose Hill at night to "see the London skyline." I didn't want to disappoint them, so I oohed and aahed, but to be frank, the skyline, as seen from the hills, isn't much of an advertisement for the city, in which the majority of buildings are old, squarish low-rises. But London from the sky -- that's something else entirely. Seen from that angle, London's purely magic. I'm convinced that the back-breaking queues for the Peter Pan ride at Disneyland are entirely driven by that opening trompe l'oieul flyover of London in miniature.
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's got word of these "Jeeves and Wooster" lampshades in the shape of a bowler and a silk topper. Old, much-loved, timeworn silk toppers and bowlers are actually surprisingly easy to pick up for a song on eBay, so the UKP450 asking price here could certainly be beat by a credit-crunch special remake.
Hidden Art's Jeeves and Wooster lamps, inspired by P.G. Wodehouse's novels, are jolly good. They are also jolly expensive: £450.
A forthcoming journal article in Psychological Science reports on the research of scientists from the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis into what brain activity takes place while we read narrative stories. The study concludes that our brains simulate the action in the story, echoing it as we read.
I've always assumed that this was the case -- especially when it comes to character motivations. When I hear the voice of a loved one in my head, cheering me on or disapproving, I know that this is my mental simulation of that person. When a character does something in a story and I feel for him, it's the same kind of simulation. And when I try to write a character doing something "wrong," I know that this, too, is part of the simulation, and the resistance I feel there is the same as the resistance I'd feel if I tried to imagine my mother committing an ax-murder.
Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.
"These results suggest that readers use perceptual and motor representations in the process of comprehending narrated activity, and these representations are dynamically updated at points where relevant aspects of the situation are changing," says Speer, now a research associate with The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) Mental Health Program in Boulder, Colo. "Readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change."
Sergei Larenkov has photoshopped together modern images of St Petersburg with photos taken during the brutal Siege of Leningrad during WWII (at least, I think these are Leningrad, from the translations -- can someone more familiar with the city and the language confirm?). The results are stunning. I walk through East London every morning to get to work, and sometimes you can see the terrors of war superimposed on the modern landscape -- the sawn-off stubs of the iron railings that were harvested "for the war effort" (and dumped in the Channel without being turned into munitions after all), the single handsome old building stuck like an old tooth in the gleaming modern denture-work of sterile, post-War neubauten. But to see these ghost-photos is to see the invisible craters and hear the inaudible screams.
Today's 
Hidden Art's Jeeves and Wooster lamps, inspired by P.G. Wodehouse's novels, are jolly good. They are also jolly expensive: £450.
