Teen net-researcher danah boyd (@zephoria) has been taking parental questions about teens' use of the net on Twitter and here are her responses:

@mirroredpool: What borders to teens place of social networking sites and education? How would they react to using an SNS to do class work?

@annejonas: i'm curious if they want schools involved in social networks or if they like it as a social space outside the realm of formal edu.

This is messy. Many teens have ZERO interest in interacting with teachers on social network sites, but there are also quite a few who are interested in interacting with SOME teachers there. Still, this is primarily a social space and their interactions with teachers are primarily to get more general advice and help. In some ways, its biggest asset in the classroom is the way in which its not a classroom tool and not loaded this way. Given that teens don't Friend all of their classmates, there are major issues in terms of using this for groupwork because of boundary issues.

@shcdean: What future do they see for FB or Twitter.

They don't use Twitter. When asked, teens always say that they'll use their preferred social network site (or social media service) FOREVER as a sign of their passion for it now. If they expect that they'll "grow out of it", it's a sign that the service is waning among that group at this very moment. So they're not a good predictor of their own future usage.

@lazygal: Do they really care about/use school library websites? Twitter? Pageflakes? Libguides? or only if teacher insists?

Nope, they don't. All but Twitter are categorized as school tools and are only used when absolutely necessary and Google won't suffice.

answers to questions from Twitter on teen practices

Jackie Flaten says

Backstory: A North Dakota State University student newspaper editor thought it would be funny to promote Zap, N.D., a teeny tiny town smack dab in the middle of nowhere, as an ideal alternative to the customary spring break site of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. When the AP picked up his article, things got out of hand - high school and college students descended en masse, beer flowed freely and things pretty much went downhill from there.

The "Zap-in" happened a couple months before Woodstock -- one of the originators mused, 15 years later, perhaps something was "in the air, calling the tribes..."

North Dakota native Chris Breitling produced a documentary while he was a film student -- the film, Zap Revisited, is now available for the first time on DVD in commemoration of the 40th anniversary.

The YouTube link shows a two-minute clip of the student documentary, Zap Revisited, which looks at this event, originators and small-town quirky ND.

From the Zap Revisited Web site:

In the spring of 1969 an estimated 3,000 young people descended on the tiny prairie town of Zap, N.D., for a spring break blow-out. What started as an off-beat idea for a party ended with National Guard troops expelling the revelers from Zap and the nearby towns of Beulah and Hazen, creating a national media sensation.

Zap Revisited, a documentary by West Fargo, N.D., native Chris Breitling recalls the strange-but-true story of the "Zip to Zap", aka the "Zap-In" through the memories of people who took part in this uniquely infamous episode of North Dakota history. Breitling produced Zap Revisited as a graduate film student while at Columbia College in the early 1990s.

In conjunction with the 40th anniversary, Outcast Studios is making this DVD available to anyone interested in this unlikely High Plains tale set in the tumultuous spring of 1969.

High times & hijinks on the High Plains circa 1969

This week's episode of Fretboard Journal's BlogTalkRadio show (a talk radio show for music and guitar geeks) has two of the Cheap Suit Serenaders .

This week's episode features two multi-instrumentalists from the acclaimed Cheap Suit Serenders, Al Dodge and Robert Armstrong. We hear about working with R. Crumb, the early days of the Cheap Suit Serenaders, just how they got started playing old-time music and their instrument collections.

Fretboard Journal Talk Radio: The Cheap Suit Serenaders

From The Guardian's Meg Pickard, a graph that "compares 'people talking about #topic' and 'people talking about talking about #topic'. Outside of Twitter, this applies to pretty much any popular newsworthy topic...the news quickly moves from 'we're telling you about Topic X' to media coverage of the media coverage of Topic X. See: Twitter's own coverage in the media currently." (Pithy description from Kottke)

Twitter trending topics

A Consumerist reader points out that you can save $300 on a $800 Virgin Atlantic fare from the US to the UK by booking it as a Continental codeshare. Consumerist explains how to search for deals like this:

So how do you find codeshares? First, find your desired flight number and punch it into a flight tracking service like Flight Stats. Look for a section breaking out specific codeshares and the flight numbers associated with the other airlines. Then, go to each airline listed and search for the codeshared flight number to compare the price. Once you've found the lowest fare, book it and start packing!

Use Codeshares To Find Cheap Summer Flights Abroad

Mike Dunford, a swim meet deck official, has some great advice for parents:

A personal best is always a major victory:
It doesn't matter if they finish first, third, ninth, thirty-eigth, or dead last. If they swam the event faster than they've ever swum the event before, it's a victory. This is still true if they've never swum it before.

Cheer for your children:
Do not yell at them. Do not tell them that they're swimming poorly. Never, ever, ever ask them what the hell they thought they were doing, particularly in the first ten seconds after they get out of the water. You're paying good money to put them on a swim team that has actual coaches who can handle all of the criticism (and who know more about how to swim and how to coach than you do). You're there to encourage them, not discourage them.

Cheer for other people's children:
If you've got a pair of lungs that can rupture eardrums at fifty feet, why is it that I only hear you during a few heats? Your kid is on a team. Support the team. If you don't know anyone who is swimming in a heat, cheer for everyone. It's a hard sport, and a little support makes everyone feel better.

Be a role-model for sportsmanship:
And when I say that, I'm talking about the good kind of role-model. Most swim meets are like most cereal box contests: many will enter, few will win. Your kids are going to get a lot of practice at not winning events. Teach them to show as much grace and class when they don't win that they do when they win.

There's more, click through.

An Open Letter For the Parents of Swimmers

Here's the Kingston Trio performing "Zombie Jamboree," a favorite song around our place. I'm partial to Harry Belafonte's version, not to mention Noel Anthony's wicked calypso version.

File under "Music to play Left 4 Dead to."

The Kingston Trio: Zombie Jamboree (Thanks, Rebecca!)

A reader writes, "Patrick Costello - you have posted about his work as an open source banjo teacher several times - is having surgery this Thursday at Johns Hopkins to install a BAHA implant so he can continue teaching."

Patrick is the king of open-source banjo teaching, a public-spirited saint who teaches and produces teaching materials on a free/open basis. The BAHA is an implanted hearing aid that will be fitted as part of a surgery to relieve an excruciating bone infection.

Good luck, Patrick!

BAHA Implant Surgery On 5/21/09

Jim D sez, "Last week I worked on rebinding a 1518 printing of Ovid's "Metamorphoses". Since the client wanted to have it done in a limp vellum binding -- which I don't get to do that often -- and the book itself is significant, I thought I would take some photos of the process and write the whole thing up, and that this might be of interest to BB readers."

Rebinding a 1518 copy of Ovid. (Thanks, Jim!)

EMI has told Danger Mouse that his latest CD won't see the light of day due to "legal issues," so he's responding by releasing the disc as a blank CD-R in a jewel case with art and liner notes. Fans can just download the music off a P2P site and burn it to the CD-R.

Dark Night Of The Soul, a collaboration with rock group Sparklehorse, also features Iggy Pop and The Flaming Lips, along with artwork by David Lynch.

It has already been streamed online, but Billboard magazine said a "legal dispute" with EMI derailed the project...

"Danger Mouse remains hugely proud of Dark Night of the Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is."

He added that the album, which comes with a limited edition, "100+ page book" of David Lynch photographs inspired by the music "will now come with a blank, recordable CD-R".

"All copies will be clearly labelled: 'For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.'"

Danger Mouse to release blank CD

Hear The Entire Album: 'Dark Night Of The Soul'

(Image: Danger Mouse 2 - Gnarls Barkley, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from Staxnet's photostream)

Make Blog has a little piece on Jimmie's "uglified" camera: "He said that it was done in preparation for a trip overseas, where he wanted to make sure he kept his camera. After taping it up and otherwise camouflaging it, he developed a shooting technique where he folded our the screen, set the shots up, then held it up to his eye while shooting to make it look like a film camera. Film cameras, he figured would be of little or no interest to those with sticky fingers."

Jimmie's uglified camera

(Image: Jimmie's ugly camera, from connors934 on Flickr)

My Ugly Camera

Wikileaks has published a talking points memo from the Canadian Conservative Party, intended to form the standard stump speech/letter-to-the-editor/op-ed for the week:

Canadian Conservative Party May Constituency Week Caucus Pack, May 2009 (via Michael Geist)

The LSAC is a nonprofit corporation that oversees the LSAT, the test you need to take to get into law school. They charge $194 for every copy of the exam that's distributed, including the ones that are distributed as PDFs and printed by prep companies. As Lessig sez, "It would seem a nonprofit would be keen to find a better way to make access easier. As Schwartz suggests, the exams should be free, or at least, following iTunes, $.99."

Suggestions for LSAC on Restructuring LSAT PrepTest Sales (via Lessig)

Asaf sez, "After hanging on to my VHS tapes collection for about 15 years -schlepping them to every apartment I moved - I realized those movies are NEVER going to see the light of day or a screen, for that matter. So I decided to be kind AND rewind!"

Toploader VHS Table (Thanks, Asaf!)

The ladies of the Afternoon Club in Mersham, England, knitted this complete replica of their village over the course of 23 years. It's to be sold in pieces to benefit the local hall.

In pictures: Knitted village (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Jim from Rock Paper Shotgun sez, "We recently posted up this piece by upcoming games critic Lewis Denby. It's about Dear Esther a bizarre Half-Life 2 modification set on an abandoned island. The mod itself is fascinating because of the slow, poetic style and superb narration - the designer Dan Pinchbeck describes it as a "interactive ghost story" - and it's more like a piece of fiction read with a mouse and keyboard than any trad horror-game. But what's interesting to me is the way it provoked Denby to examine the response of gamers to the mod, and how it changed his personal comprehension of what games could or should be doing."

If you're looking for fun, I've no idea why you're playing Dear Esther in the first place. This is fearless, classical tragedy. It ends with the sound of a heart monitor flatlining, for goodness' sake. Lead designer Dan Pinchbeck describes it as "an interactive ghost story," but the inevitable connotations of that are misleading. This isn't about bumps in the night or any other hackneyed horror archetypes. It's deep, heart-tugging, emotional trauma. Dear Esther is indeed ghostly and ethereal, but it's all thematic notation. Really, the only horror is in realising how truly heartbreaking this tale is.

Some people will tell you it's not a game. Depending on your definitions, maybe it isn't. You play as... well, that's never revealed, and since it's all in uninterrupted first-person, you've no way of finding out. During your time on what initially appears to be a remote Hebridean island, a disembodied voice will read fragments of a series of letters, written to a woman named Esther who we're never introduced to. And you'll explore, climbing higher and higher up the mountain in the centre, piecing together the proverbial puzzle and trying to establish, often in vain, just what this place is.

Touched By The Hand Of Mod: Dear Esther (Thanks, Jim!)

A Chicago Alderman decided he didn't like a public mural depicting Chicago PD CCTV cameras, so he had it painted over.

When Humberto Angeles woke up on Thursday morning, he heard a truck outside his Bridgeport apartment. He looked out the window and saw the city's graffiti blasters painting a brick wall across the street. They covered over a mural that Angeles says he rather liked.

ANGELES: What I got from it, it was just a mural for peace. That's what I got out of it. Peace.

The mural was a painting of three Chicago Police Department blue light camera's that you see on light posts in high crime areas. The Chicago Police logo is on the cameras but then the artist also painted Jesus on one post, a deer head on another, and a skull on the third camera. What the mural is supposed to mean is anyone's guess. Angeles agrees that it's a rather inscrutable work of art but he liked it and he says he feels bad for the artist...

Alderman Jim Balcer confirmed that he ordered the mural removed, saying some of his residents viewed the work as graffiti.

Alderman Destroys Public Art

Alderman says he had this mural destroyed

Here's a lovely, nearly-entirely-edible Dalek wedding cake -- we had a Portal cake at our wedding, but this is a close second:

The "tiers" (the base and the middle) are foam board wrapped in fondant, and were planned to be that way from the get-go to support the weight of the cake. The cake itself contains 5 chopsticks: two to support the second tier (holding the upper body) and one each for the core of the three arms. The lower half of the body is white cake frosted with vanilla buttercream and wrapped in coffee fondant. The copper balls are all fondant, and the piping is just royal icing. The upper half of the body is sculpted from Rice Krispie Treat that was then covered with fondtant and piped with details. The little armor plates and the accessories on the arms are made of sugar candy (gumpaste). The whole thing weighed about 10 pounds. Dassit.

Cakey bits (Thanks, Jeff!)

RJ sez, "Storks will choose the position for their nest for a variety of reasons and if that happens to be atop a man-made object, then so be it. Some are welcomed and encouraged, others not so. Yet their ability to build huge nests in precarious positions never fails to surprise. Here are some examples that may just take your breath away."

Although many Europeans encourage storks to nest on the roof of their home - it is supposed to increase the fecundity of the householders - many would gasp at the inherent danger that lies in building one's home on top of a deadly current of electricity. In Denmark, however, the stork is not a welcome guest and so this would be considered appropriate alternative housing. The Danish believe that if a stork builds a nest on top of your house then someone who lives there will die before the year ends. These parent storks, however, will not be on the nest for great periods of time. This stork in Hungary is flying back to the nest to feed its offspring. The visit will need to be fairly quick though - stork chicks can eat anything up to sixty percent of their body weight each day. That is quite a few fish and frogs.

Avian Architecture: The Precarious Nests of the Stork (Thanks, RJ!)

(Image: Stork's nest II, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from Tillwe's Flickr stream)

Worried about the free/open database MySQL now that Oracle owns Sun (who bought out MySQL)? So are a lot of open database hackers, who've formed the Open Database Alliance to create a community-run foundation to oversee free MySQL development and releases:

The intent of the Open Database Alliance is to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL. Still under development, the Open Database Alliance is open to all businesses, organizations and individuals interested in helping create a new, centralized resource for MySQL and to ensure that it remains a top quality, high performance open source database.

Monty Program Ab, founded by Monty Widenius, the "father" of the MySQL database, and Percona, established by MySQL expert Peter Zaitsev, are the founding members of the Open Database Alliance. Monty Program is currently the primary developer of MariaDB, a branch of the MySQL database that includes all major open source storage engines, including the Maria transactional storage engine.

Welcome to the Open Database Alliance.

Open Database Alliance hedges against Oracle plans for MySQL

Video Link (dialogue in Spanish). Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, the soft-spoken Guatemalan I.T. worker arrested for having "tweeted" a critical opinion about the assasination/bank corruption scandal that has shaken Guatemala this week, is released from jail.

In the video above, his pals -- including a few who've checked in here on Boing Boing -- set up a laptop in the jail holding area right after he's "checked out of his hotel suite," as @jeanfer puts it, and he makes his first "freed" post to Twitter.

Note that he is twittering while still handcuffed.

He is now sentenced to house arrest.

@jeanfer's employer put up a loan for the $6500 fine ordered by a Guatemalan judge. Supporters are collecting PayPal donations to repay it. (via Oscar Mota)

Meanwhile, massive protests are planned this weekend in response to the assassination of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg, who blamed Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom for his own anticipated murder in a posthumously released YouTube video.

In interviews today, Colom blamed powerful enemies for the scandal about claims he ordered Rosenberg's murder, as his administration cracks down on military abuses and drug gangs.

And meanwhile, we presume that José Encarnación Leiva Marroquín, the street vendor arrested for selling bootlegged DVDs of the Rosenberg YouTube video, is still in prison -- with no internet-connected pals to help rally for his release.

Update: Word on Twitter is that the video vendor has since been released, and charges dropped by the judge (via surizar).

Irwin Chusid wrote to let me know that he has teamed up with Barbara Economon and Drew Friedman to begin offering Drew's art in the form of high quality prints. Drew is one of our favorite artists so this is great news!

Look at this gorgeous rendition of Tiny Tim, the late ukulele player and respectable historian of early 20th century music.

Launched in June 2009 by Irwin Chusid and Barbara Economon in collaboration with the artist, DrewFriedman.net is the exclusive source of fine art prints featuring the works of the iconic illustrator. All prints are personally approved and hand-signed by the artist.

Prints are offered as limited editions in archival-quality formats at affordable prices. All prints are priced in the $150-$200 range upon first release. However, as editions sell down, prices for remaining prints will increase.

Drew Friedman fine art prints

These commemorative Obama Shoes can be yours for just $39.99. They're "easily an $80 value," according to the TV commercial. (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Reid Gershbein says:

Thanks to you posting about my Tilt-Shift Flip video and the amazing response it got.

I was inspired to continue the path and did an entire feature film (Here. My Explosion...) using that technique and released it today online under a Creative Commons license.

Here. My Explosion...

Moleitau took this photo of a "Get Excited and Make Things" shirt at Howies, Carnaby St. London.

High voltage hackers ArcAttack of Austin, Texas, are known to BB readers for their Singing Tesla Coils that they use to perform music. For example, here, a pair of coils delight us with an, er, energized rendition of the Doctor Who theme. Sadly, it's unlikely that most of us will get a chance to try our hand at conducting this Tesla orchestra so ArcAttack has enhanced their Web site with a simple yet fantastically fun Tesla Coil Emulator. My first number was the familiar tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What song would you like to hear the coils sing? From the ArcAttack site:

ArcAttack employs a unique DJ set up of their own creation (an HVDJ set up) to generate an 'electrifying' audio visual performance. The HVDJ pumps music through a PA System while two specially designed DRSSTC's (Dual-Resonant Solid State Tesla Coils) act as separate synchronized instruments.

These high tech machines produce an electrical arc similar to a continuous lightning bolt which put out a crisply distorted square wave sound reminiscent of the early days of synthesizers. The music consists of original highly dance-able electronic compositions that sometimes incorporates themes or dub of popular songs.

Joe DiPrima and Oliver Greaves are the masterminds behind the design and construction of the Tesla Coils while the music is developed by John DiPrima and Tony Smith.

Tesla Coil Emulator

Very Short List recommended this blog entry featuring Chicago street gang cards from the days of yore.

The We Are Supervision blog has a wild collection of the business cards that Chicago’s gangs printed up in the seventies and eighties and used to make friends and intimidate people.

You’ll see groups like the Stooge Bros. (whose members included Bubbles, Giggles, and Sweet Pea) and Thee Almighty Hells Devils (whose members included Sico, Satan, and Skull).

The above card looks like one that Luther ("Warriors, come out to play-ay-ay"), warlord of The Rogues, would have had.

Street gang calling cards from the 1970s and 1980s

Vanity Fair has a gallery of Ed Sorel's illustrations of Dick Cheney and his unsavory ilk.

No one is safe under the brush of Vanity Fair contributing artist Edward Sorel, whose watercolors expose the pathology of power and the fatuousness of fame. VF.com presents a gallery of Sorel’s rogues.

Illustration above from “Inside Bush’s Bunker,” by Todd S. Purdum (October 2007).

Over on BBG, our Joel's spotted this visionary statement from one of our would-be masters of technology:

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period."

Quote: Sony Pictures CEO on the value of the internet

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

(Photo: Anders Krusberg/The Martha Stewart Show)

On Monday, May 18, I'll be on The Martha Stewart show. I'm going to demonstrate bunch of different projects from the pages of MAKE, and I'll also show Martha how to build a vibrobot. Martha is one of my heroes, so it was a thrill to be on her show!

Above: Martha Stewart is enjoying a Maker-made cup of coffee. The coffee roaster on the left was designed by Larry Cotton and was featured in Make Vol 8. The hydraulic espresso tamper was designed and built by John Edgar Park and appears in Make Vol 12. And that's my espresso machine that I modded with a PID temperature control kit from espressoparts.com.

MAKE Editor Mark Frauenfelder on The Martha Stewart Show this Monday

Geoff sez, "Games critic Jim Rossignol, from Rock Paper Shotgun and This Gaming Life, has guest-posted on BLDGBLOG about the design of 'evil lairs' in contemporary videogames - from World of Warcraft to System Shock to Shadow of the Colossus. It's a great post, actually - asking what evil is and why we insist on representing it in certain ways, architecturally."

...perhaps the most extraordinary and unearthly of evil videogame architectures are the wandering colossi of Shadow of the Colossus. Great, living structures, lonely behemoths, that stride magnificently across the game world. These sad, shaggy giants of stone and moss must be climbed and slain by the hero, often via use of the surrounding environment of ancient ruins and meticulously designed geological formations. Lairs within lairs.

Of course, monsters are presumably evil, but the reality of the colossi remains ambiguous for much of the game. When the game is up, the player-character suffers a terrible price for destroying these strange, animate monuments. It is one of the few videogames in which the protagonist dies â€" horribly and permanently â€" when the game is over. It is a game where destroying the evil lair might well have been the wrong thing to do. And yet it is all you can do.

Such is the inexorable, linear fate of the videogame avatar.

Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds (Thanks, Geoff!)

A quick recap of updates this morning on the political crisis in Guatemala follows. Previous posts linked at the bottom.

* Yesterday, Guatemalan I.T. worker and Twitter user Jean Anleu (shown above / photo: Surizar) was raided by police, arrested, charged with inciting "financial panic," fined US $6500 (more than the average Guatemalan makes in a year), and sentenced to detention to be followed by house arrest. Supporters created a blog with information about his case, and are continuing what some describe as a "Twitterevolution" in Guatemala, using the hashtag #escandalogt and raising money by PayPal for his release. Anleu's case is the first of its kind in Central American history.

* One of Jean Anleu's Twitter (and real-life) geek friends, "Manolo," says,

Fundraising from abroad to secure his release is being received in my personal PayPal account (manolo@manoloweb.net) For people in Guatemala we have an accout of a Jean's relative G&T Bank, account # 39-4478-4 (Jhenny Gonzalez). We are going out to the courthouse in Guatemala City right now, since the family got a loan from Jean's employers for the rest of the required amount, so, we are planning to release him within hours. I'll keep Boing Boing updated on this. More here.

UPDATE, May 15, 12pm PT: Manolo emails us:

The good news is that @jeanfer is about to be free. He and his family now have to pay back the money, but he'll be released in a few hours. He was able to post a tweet from my PC before leaving for the detention center, where he has to do some paperwork and wait till tonight to be released.

Below, @jeanfer's "freedom tweet," sent about an hour ago from @manolo's computer.

* Guatemalan photojournalist James Rodriguez has published a photo-essay documenting protests in Guatemala calling for president Álvaro Colom to resign in the wake of accusations he ordered the assastination of Rodrigo Rosenberg.

Those accusations came in the form of a posthumoustly-released YouTube video recorded by the whistleblower attorney before his murder on Mother's Day. Protests continue today in Guatemala City over Rosenberg's murder, and the fact that, as one Guatemalan Twitter user wrote, "Some guy on Twitter is in jail for one 96-character tweet, while assassins roam free." A large protest is planned for Sunday in the capital, with some participants planning to wear white, tape their mouths shut, and carry placards reading "I DON'T TALK, I TWITTER / WE ARE ALL @JEANFER."

* Street vendors are selling bootleg DVDs of Rosenberg's "death message" video (screengrab at left) which has spread virally on YouTube. One of these street vendors, José Encarnación Leiva Marroquín, was arrested by the Guatemalan police. For the act of distributing bootlegged YouTube videos, this man, who also works as a "chicken bus" driver's assistant, has been charged with "inciting sedition, revolution, or overthrow of the state.." Here's a PDF link. Update: Word on Twitter is that he has since been released, and charges dropped by the judge.

(Download MP4, or watch on YouTube)

Today's Boing Boing Video episode is an ambient animated short by filmmaker Bob Jaroc and the band Plaid (Warp Records). Best enjoyed with stereophonic supersonic headphones, so you can appreciate the shift from one channel to another, while you watch thousands of starlings take flight in a burnt sunset sky.

Bob Jaroc explains how this lovely, evocative avian work took form:

They were real starlings, not digitally-generated. They were filmed over a few winters here in Brighton. I was lucky enough to have access to the then-abandoned and now destroyed West Pier, and got them down on tape as they were coming in to roost. I then extracted them from the background and edited them to the track, often going back and trying to capture a certain motion to go with a certain bit of audio.

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RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic)

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Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

I just raced through two novels - not because I had to finish them quickly, but because they moved so quickly.

The first, by my best friend from college Walter Kirn, is an entertaining but (for me, anyway) nightmarish reminiscence on trying to make it through Princeton called Lost in the Meritocracy, based on this essay Kirn wrote for The Atlantic. Not the academics, but the culture itself. What self-conscious public school kids like Walter and me learned at Princeton was that there really super wealthy people who control a heck of a lot of the world, and that they have institutions like Princeton to help their kids find one another and then inherit their daddies' places. Yes, I know most of you already know that - but we didn't. It was a more innocent era, and these kind of things came as big, adolescent, crises of disillusionment that required ample self-medication. And Kirn's writing, if you haven't gotten to experience it before, is the most effortlessly engaging literary literature being written today.

The second is a book by novelist Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the acclaimed Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, then went ahead and won a MacArthur genius grant which made the rest of us really jealous. It's hard to be too jealous, though, because Jonathan is a totally sweet guy and he actually is the sort of genius writer for whom such prizes were created. And, most of all, he used the time and money to create his first true work of genius, Chronic City, which - like Kirn's novel - deconstructs the hyper-competitive social landscape of eastern urbanites in a fair but viciously accurate near-future parody of manners and hermeneutics.

Recently on Offworld, Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol used the occasion of Eidos Montreal taking the reigns of the Thief franchise to take a deeper look back at the legacy of the game and the legacy of the people who made it, and the remarkably high bar Eidos will have to reach.

We also looked at upcoming games: a nine minute walkthrough of BioShock 2, the coming storm of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima's next game, a next-gen Breakout-meets-shooter for PS3, the tiny planets and big chaos of Max Blastronaut, as well as more Noby Noby Boy culinary treats, and Rag Doll Kung Fu's PS3 remake gone free for a week.

More artful things: what happens when you tear videogame code like modern artist Lucio Fontana slashed his canvases, 8-bit game iconography meets ancient Andean textile art, the sexiest Space Invaders psych-pop ever created, Metal Gear meets Mary Blair, and swimming in a low-bit pixel pool.

And other odds and ends: a new Space In-vader shirt, a shirt to make you a Sackboy, a glitch-pop chiptune afterparty, Fable and Mario 64 in paper, and Super Smash Bros. meets Team Fortress 2.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

Although I begged them (and they agreed at the time) to change their name from Personal Democracy Forum to Participatory Democracy Forum, the name remains the same. But the purpose remains the same, too, so I'm glad I got invited to participate in the Forum's conference again this year in New York City on June 29 and 30.

The one thing that has changed, however, was my ability to negotiate a short-term discount of $100 for BoingBoing readers who want to go, by using the discount code "boingboingpdf". That's only going to work for the next 24 hours, but that's better than nothing. (They are pretty good about finding roles for interns, too, so try for that if the entry fee is still too high.)

On the brightest side, this year's confirmed participants include Danah Boyd, Clay Shirky, Frank Rich, Dan Gillmor, Jack Dorsey, Dave Troy, Baratune Thurston, Ana Marie Cox, Vivek Kundra, Amanda Rose, Tara Hunt, Nate Silver, Craig Newmark, Gina Bianchini, Beth Noveck, Jeff Jarvis, Scott Simon, Michael Wesch, Joe Rospars, David Weinberger, and Mark Pesce. And unlike a lot of conferences, these folks actually participate in the whole thing.

(Micah Sifry of PDF informs me that they tried to change the name to Participatory Democracy, but couldn't find an unused url for it.)

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

The "Index of Freedom," maintained by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. By measuring across a wide variety of policies and activities, the study concluded that New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota are the most free, while my own New York is - by significant margin - the least (due in part, no doubt, to the famously draconian drug laws implemented during the Rockefeller era and still not repealed). (Then again, as we look at the Mercatus Center funding, another picture emerges.)

State Policy Index

Earlier this week, I reviewed Daniel Pinkwater's wonderful homage to the Illiad, the Neddiad, and now I've had the distinct pleasure of reading the sequel, The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There, a tribute to (what else?) The Odyssey. The Yggyssey picks up a few years after the world-shaking final battle that concludes Neddiad, and switches POVs to Yggdrasil Birnbaum ("Iggy" for short), the tomboyish female lead of the Neddiad, daughter of the famed cowboy Captain Buffalo Birnbaum, a retired silent film-star.

Iggy discovers that the ghosts that habitually haunt the Hollywood residential hotel she lives in (along with Neddie and many of the other delightful Neddiad cast) are vanishing. Abandoning her semi-boyfriend (a bebop-obsessed thug who is the world's only hipster capable of drumming Beethoven symphonies), she recruits her friends for an adventure to the Underworld, where they seek to discover the mystery of the disappearing ghosts (first, though, they plan their adventure in a giant stucco theme-restaurant with "an indoor rainstorm every twenty minutes, you don't have to pay for your meal if you don't want to, and there are life-size dioramas of scenes from the life of Jesus in the basement").

Whereupon they contend with the normal Pinkwaterian array of society girl bullfighters, trained ducks named Lucifer, the ghosts of Ben Franklin, Jesse James, Eng and Chang, Lassie, John Philip Sousa (and others), fresh corn muffins, policemen shaped like giant Labrador retreivers, extreme urban free-climbing, allegorical twenty-first century New York City mayors, evil eel-sharks, hippies called Woovy Groovy, Wholewheatflower, Pop Daddy (and others), a shaman who reluctantly agrees to spoil the allegorical misery they undergo by telling them how to shake off a witch's curse ("You realize by accepting this easy expedient you're taking all the depth out of the whole story"), and talking bird Elvis impersonators (among others).

In other words, this is your typical Pinkwater novel: screamingly funny, unbelievably weird, and fantastically awesome.

The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

Matan sez, "We made a film about mass collaboration through the Web and how it is reshaping the future of government. "Us Now" features Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott and lots of other clever people. And we made it look pretty too! Better still, it's up for FREE online streaming!"

Us Now (Thanks, Matan!)

Stef sez, The British Chiropractic Association is using the libel laws to try and silence Simon Singh's discussion of some of the more, uh, unusual claims they make for Chiropractic treatments (such as curing Colic and Asthma). They've sued Simon for libel for describing such claims as 'bogus', and in a preliminary hearing a judge has chosen a somewhat odd, harder to defend, definition of the word, even though Simon clarified his precise meaning in the very same article. Dave Gorman has a good summary, and there's a lot more detail at Jack of Kent."

Two Things (Part B) (Thanks, Stef!)

Yesterday, I posted a link to my new column on self-serve commercial licensing, a "commercial commons" idea that would allow makers to commercially exploit your trademarks and copyrights in return for a fixed percentage of the money they earn off those products. I've gotten a ton of email about this, and there's an interesting thread of people with ideas for a logo to put on products licensed under self-serve. The logo above comes from the excellent Skennedy.

Here's another interesting proposal from Grant Robertson:

I don't know if you have a logo in mind for this license but how about this one:

*=$

It is very simple and can be typed on a regular keyboard. The asterics represents a gear which represents making things. It simply says, "If you make stuff from my work then you have to send me money." It could be made fancier with nice graphics for printing or posting on a web site. But by basing the fancy logo on something that can be easily typed on a keyboard, it will make it easier for people to discuss and adopt.

Perhaps it could be modified to indicate how much a crafter should pay:

*=15%

means, "If you make stuff from my work you have to pay me 15%."

I like the * as gear and * as wildcard crossover!

Do you have any good ideas for logos and license text? Hit the comments.

A new Scouting program teaches children to fight immigrants, Arab terrorists:

"United States Border Patrol! Put your hands up!" screams one in a voice cracking with adolescent determination as the suspect is subdued...

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence -- an intense ratcheting up of one of the group's longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters...

Their hearts pounding, Explorers moved down alleys where there were hidden paper targets of people pointing guns, and made split-second decisions about when to shoot. In rescuing hostages from a bus taken over by terrorists, a baby-faced young girl screamed, "Separate your feet!" as she moved to handcuff her suspect.

In a competition in Arizona that he did not oversee, Deputy Lowenthal said, one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. "If we're looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like," he said, "then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don't know, would you call that politically incorrect?"

Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More

(Image: Todd Krainin for The New York Times)

A reader writes, "The person who owned the domain CrackHo.com set it up to redirect to Sarah Palin's website on the Alaska state site. No one used the site, but apparently someone got upset: Palin's lawyers sent a cease & desist, claiming that it was misuse of the Alaskan seal and copyright infringement. Note, that CrackHo didn't copy anything or use any of the content. It was just a simple redirect to the Alaska website."

CrackHo.com: Sarah Palin's New Legal Foe

David sez, "My fiancee built these blinds out of old card catalog cards rescued from Columbia University."

Card Catalog Card Blinds (Thanks, David!)

A new study by University of British Columbia researchers, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that daydreaming is an extremely active, cognitively complex mental state:

"Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness," says lead author, Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. "But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream - much more active than when we focus on routine tasks."...

Until now, the brain's "default network" - which is linked to easy, routine mental activity and includes the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), the posterior cingulate cortex and the temporoparietal junction - was the only part of the brain thought to be active when our minds wander.

However, the study finds that the brain's "executive network" - associated with high-level, complex problem-solving and including the lateral PFC and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex - also becomes activated when we daydream.

Brain's Problem-solving Function At Work When We Daydream (via /.)

All around the world, cops and rent-a-cops are vigorously enforcing nonexistent anti-terrorist bans on photography in public places. If you're worried about being busted under an imaginary law, why not download these templates and print yourself an imaginary "Photography license" from the DHS? Who knows if it's legal to carry one of these -- probably about as legal as taking away your camera and erasing your memory card for snapping a pic on the subway.

In the event you're stopped by overzealous law enforcement or security officials attempting to enforce fictitious laws, I've designed these fictitious and official-looking Photographer's Licenses. If you have Adobe Illustrator, you can download the EPS vector art file and print your own. You'll need a photo of yourself, and OCR (or a similar font) to fill in your personal information.

Muni Don't Take My Kodachrome (via JWZ)

Here's a sweet little flashtoy (click through to see it in motion) that illustrates the optical illusion behind a curveball: "In baseball, a curveball creates a physical effect and a perceptual puzzle. The physical effect (the curve) arises because the ball's rotation leads to a deflection in the ball's path. The perceptual puzzle arises because the deflection is actually gradual but is often perceived as an abrupt change in direction (the break). Our illusions suggest that the perceived "break" may be caused by the transition from the central visual system to the peripheral visual system. Like a curveball, the spinning disks in the illusions appear to abruptly change direction when an observer switches from foveal to peripheral viewing."

The break of the curveball (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Update on the case of Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, aka "jeanfer" (shown handcuffed, above), the Guatemalan Twitter user arrested for a tweet related to the assassination of a whistleblower attorney who sought to expose corruption in a state-run bank (background).

* Today, Anleu was raided, arrested, sent before a judge, and sentenced. That's all in one day. Anleu's single, 96-character tweet resulted in a judge ordering detention and a $6,500 fine for inciting financial panic, which is a punishable offense in Guatemala. Until he can pay that sum -- more than most Guatemalans earn in a year -- he will be held at a detention center. He is sentenced to be held under house arrest after the fine is paid. I do not yet have copies of the sentencing documents, so I don't know for how long.

* Here is Juan Anleu's blog. He is a 37-year-old I.T. guy in Guatemala City who loves books and "geek stuff."

* VIDEO: Above, a Guatemalan newscast which implies that military police in Guatemala are seeking to arrest a second Twitter user who posted tweets about the Rodrigo Rosenberg murder, and the resulting crisis shaking Guatemala's political and financial systems.

* TIME has a story up about the Rosenberg assassination scandal that was the subject of Anleu's "criminal tweets." Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices also has a blog post up.

* News organizations in Central America are referring to "el efecto Streisand" in their accounts of the Twitter reaction to the Rosenberg case and @jeanfer's arrest. Here's what that means.

* Twitter traffic on the Rosenberg case, and on @jeanfer's arrest, is exploding. And with it, panic. A number of users are re-tweeting rumors that military police are hunting down other Twitterers, or that other arrests have already happened. Others are literally posting rallying cries, such as "Twitteros! Unidos! Jamas serán vencidos!" ("Twitterers! United! Never again will we be defeated!"). One such slogan in the banner at left (via).

* Some report that street vendors in Guatemala are selling DVD copies of Rosenberg's "pre-death tape" in which he accuses the Guatemalan president for his impending murder. Tonight, there is unconfirmed word (now reported on Guatevision) that one or more of the street vendors selling those DVDS have also been arrested for "inciting panic."

* Additional frequent retweets include observations like this one from @strgt: "If a tweet is enough to condemn someone for a crime, an 18 minute [YouTube] video should be enough to condemn [Guatemalan president Álvaro] Colom for ASSASINATION." Another wrote, "The death of attorney Rosenberg has returned [Guatemala] to life." Others have proposed "google-bombing" the Banrural website, or rallying to make #escandalogt a "trending topic" on the social network. Still others caution fellow Guatemalan Twitterers to watch what they tweet, presuming police are monitoring.

* Anleu's internet supporters are petitioning for charges to be dropped, and collecting funds via Paypal to pay his fine and legal fees. Details posted in the comments thread for this post. Anleu's supporters are also uploading TV reports about his case to YouTube, and dissecting inaccuracies in those reports with comment overlays. Guatemalan TV news organizations appear ill-informed about Twitter. One report I watched implied that he was a crazy provocateur who waged a mass email campaign of "financial terrorism." Not so. Mr. Anleu was arrested for having tweeted a single, 96-character thought.

* Libertopolis again live-streamed street protests today. This time, the protesters were out to support the arrested Twitterer.

* The "International Commission Against Impunity" in Guatemala has issued a list of persons who must not be allowed to leave Guatemala, pending investigation of Rosenberg's assasination.

* Someone has created a phony Banrural Twitter account.

* PHOTOS: At top, Jean Anleu as he is handcuffed and taken into jail. Below: Anleu's mother observing his sentencing today. Both images courtesy of Flickr user Surizar (cc), more in this photo set. Here is a more upbeat photo of Anleu, as he is met by Twitter friends at jail.

Yesterday, KALW Public Radio's Crosscurrents interviewed Boing Boing Gadgets' Steven Leckart! The fun segment is available online. From the episode description:

Whether you have a gizmo attached to your ear while you're driving, or a doodad that scrambles an egg inside its shell, or a thingamajig that plots your trajectory on a digital map, gadgets are more and more a part of our lives. And some of the first people to get their eager hands on the newest new thing are the bloggers at Boing Boing Gadgets. KALW's Roman Mars went to the San Francisco home of Steven Leckart, a contributing editor of Boing Boing Gadgets, to find the latest doohicky he can't possibly live without.

Gadgets You Can't Live Without

My 3-year-old son and I love watching the YouTube clip of 6-year-old guitarist Quinn Sullivan playing "Twist & Shout" on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Joel just pointed me to the above Ellen clip from this week featuring 9-year-old Yuto Miyazawa tearing up Ozzy's Crazy Train.