(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

All on their own, ordinary processes can make incredibly convoluted shapes. Consider, for instance the field lines of some magnets moving around each other, as shown in this video by Daniel Piker, who has a great blog of computational gnarl called Space Symmetry Structure.

William Rood has created a somewhat inscrutable---but mind-boggling---gnarl investigating page, just click on the screen-captured image below. It's like flying an alien spaceship, with control buttons that you don't understand. No matter, keep on clicking and gaze your fill.

Owen Maresh, another young investigator, is posting some exceedingly gnarly videos on his YouTube site. Here's one that starts out calm---like an egg---but then goes ape via some folds through the subdimensions.

And finally, how about an explanation from the old Professor himself. Here's my dada video: "What is Gnarl?" (with a narration that's partly in imaginary Norwegian).

You just don't get this kind of information anywhere except on BoingBoing!

Growing up, my best friend's parents had an Eames Lounge in their family room and I always loved it. Unlike most iconic modern furniture, it's actually super-comfortable. I was checking our their pricing online (too rich for my blood, sadly) and came across this terrific 1956 video of Charles and Ray Eames first introducing the chair on the Arlene Francis "Home" Show. From Wikipedia:

The backrest and headrest are screwed together by a pair of aluminum supports. This unit is suspended on the seat via two connection points in the armrests. The armrests are screwed to shock mounts on the interior of the backrest shell, allowing the backrest and headrest to flex when the chair is in use. This is part of the chair's unusual design, as well as one of its biggest flaws. The rubber washers are solidly glued to the plywood shells, but have been known to tear free when excessive weight is applied, or when the rubber becomes old and brittle.

Other creative uses of materials include the seat cushions - which eschew standard stapled or nailed upholstery. Instead the cushions are sewn with a zipper around the outer edge that connects them to a stiff plastic backing. The backing affixes to the plywood shells with a series of hidden clips and rings. This design, along with the hidden shock mounts in the armrest allow the outside veneer of the chair to be unmarred by screws or bolts. The chair has a low seat which is permanently fixed at a recline. The seat of the chair swivels on a cast aluminum base, with glides that are threaded so that the chair may remain level.

...When it was first made Ray Eames remarked in a letter to Charles that the chair looked "comfortable and un-designy" (sic). Charles's vision was for a chair with "the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman's mitt.

Doran sez, "The San Diego Union Tribune was recently purchased by Platinum Equity, which in turn has a $30-million investment from the pension fund of Los Angeles cops and firefighters, along with other public employee pension funds. Now the President of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union which represents L.A. cops, wants the editorial board of the paper to be fired because they don't like what has been written about them."

"Since the very public employees they continually criticize are now their owners, we strongly believe that those who currently run the editorial pages should be replaced," Weber wrote in a March 26 letter to Platinum CEO Tom Gores.

Weber, in an interview, emphasized that the League is not demanding changes in the paper's news coverage of the issue or in its staff of reporters. "It's just these people on the opinion side. There is not even an attempt to be even-handed. They're one step away from saying, 'these public employees are parasites,' " Weber said.

L.A. police union wants San Diego newspaper writers fired (Thanks, Doran!)

Taras sez, "British local authorities are queuing up to connect their CCTV cameras to a national system which tracks cars by their registration plates. Any camera, if high enough resolution, can be adapted to work with the software. The Information Commissioner is concerned, as ever, but under-resourced and basically powerless. People who have taken part in anti-war rallies are already having their cars stopped by Anti-Terror Units for no good reason and being questioned under threat of arrest."

John Catt found himself on the wrong side of the ANPR system. He regularly attends anti-war demonstrations outside a factory in Brighton, his home town.

It was at one of these protests that Sussex police put a "marker" on his car. That meant he was added to a "hotlist".

This is a system meant for criminals but John Catt has not been convicted of anything and on a trip to London, the pensioner found himself pulled over by an anti-terror unit.

"I was threatened under the Terrorist Act. I had to answer every question they put to me, and if there were any questions I would refuse to answer, I would be arrested. I thought to myself, what kind of world are we living in?"

Camera grid to log number plates (Thanks, Taras!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Steven reviews the MyPressi TWIST, a portable espresso maker powered by nitrous oxide cannisters.

A typical regulator might be two inches in diameter. Much too large for the TWIST. The task of shrinking the apparatus down without losing efficiency and safety went to Gecko, a firm that collaborated on the Herman Miller Leaf Lamp and has built pneumatic devices on cruise control missiles for defense industry contractors (really).

Their creation: a regulator that's about the size of half a grown man's pinky nail. Once the pod develops its own pressure, the regulator in the handle shuts off the pressure. And there's also a secondary safety valve, in case you put in too much coffee. In time, too, their small, main regulator could be applied or licensed out to other hardware.

For now, O'Brien is focused on the TWIST. And as we continue to chat, all I'm focused on is the taste. He takes a preloaded cup, gets some hot water from the cafe, puts in 3.5 oz., pulls the trigger to release the gas (it's cold, but expands rapidly from the hot water), and begins the pour...

Hands-On With A Whippit-Powered Travel Espresso Maker

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

British Airways is eliminating the First Class cabin on its new plane. I'm not surprised. First Class costs thousands of pounds more than business class, and the only substantial difference between the two services is that First comes with a free pair of cheap pyjamas and a lobster salad. You can buy the same jammies at Heathrow and pick up a lobster salad at Pret on your way onto the plane and save a mint.

"The long-haul aircraft that we take delivery of this year will not have any first class cabins in them," said Willie Walsh, BA's chief executive. He insisted there was no direct link to the recession, but he added: "Longer term we will review the configuration of [all] new aircraft." BA is also launching a service this year from Heathrow to Las Vegas, a prime destination for high-rollers, with no first class option.

First class is the last remnant of the more romantic days of air travel when BA's predecessor, British Overseas Airways Corporation, offered first class tickets alongside the more down-at-heel tourist or economy cabins. Its upmarket reputation has become even more rarefied over the years following the introduction of slightly less luxurious business class seats in the late 1970s, and cut-throat competition on the transatlantic market.

British Airways ditch first class in new planes as age of austerity bites

My appearance on the Martha Stewart show on Monday is now online at MarthaStewart.com. To see my segments click on Inventions, 1 and Inventions, 2 on the page.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

Guestblog brings you a special Friday evening music treat!

A playlist of NOFX videos! Yaaaar.

Best album of late? Easy. It's NOFX and Rancid, BYO Split Series Vol III. My two favorite punk bands playing each other's songs!

This video of a man driving a car through Wichita's City Hall would be funny if not for the fact that he may have hurt someone.

Authorities said Johnson became angered when a police officer told him to turn down the music in his car while he was parked at a south Wichita convenience store early on the morning of Jan. 7, 2008.

Johnson drove downtown, turned onto Main and then drove up a ramp into City Hall at an estimated 45 miles an hour.

OK, it is funny.

Man who drove into City Hall gets 10-year sentence

Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen is revealed to have an enlightened attitude about marijuana in this exchange with drug war dinosaur Robert Mueller. The tired-looking FBI director seems to be reciting his false arguments like a pull-string puppet. (Via The Agitator)

Retired Catholic Archbishop Rembert G Weakland, who has been accused of covering up widespread child rape by priests in Milwaukee, has a forthcoming memoir in which he wrote the following bits of wisdom:

"We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature."

Weakland, who retired in 2002 after it became known that he paid $450,000 in 1998 to a man who had accused him of date rape years earlier, said he initially "accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’."

"We did not know that child abuse was a crime," says retired Catholic archbishop

"Mighty Uke is a feature documentary that travels the world to discover why so many people of different nations, cultures, ages and musical tastes are turning to the ukulele to express themselves, connect with the past, and with each other. From the Redwoods of California through the gritty streets of New York, from swinging London through Tokyos highrise canyons to Hawaii, ukers tell the story of the peoples instrument: The Mighty Uke."

All 12 of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels and 20 short stories are included in a single bound volume. Price is £1000.

With 252, 16-page hand-sewn sections, the production values of this limited edition are amazing and the attention to detail is remarkable. Bound by Cedric & Chivers Period Bookbinding, cased in Winters Wintan leather, blocked in gold on the front and spine, with head and tail bands, four silk ribbon markers to keep your place, and with only 500 made, this special limited edition is for fans and collectors alike.

4,032 page Agatha Christie book is over one-foot-thick (Via Orange Crate Art)

Over at Dinosaurs and Robots, Todd Lappin writes about finding "a mysterious time capsule sitting curbside on a street in San Francisco: One (1) Milton Bradley Bump Ball, circa 1969, complete in original box."

From a Houston Press page that has information about this nubby toy:

Apparently, the idea was to toss the ball in the air and keep it from hitting the ground by pressing it between you and the nearest hot chick while gyrating to the Bump Ball theme song. A 45 of the song was included with every ball. "It's time the boys got closer to the girls," the album cover continues. The concept had everything. Dancing. Sex. Balls. Rock n' roll. How could the Bump Ball fail?

If anyone knows where a link to this song is, please post it in the comments.

Bump Ball

As part of the Tate Modern's forthcoming exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World, the London museum is recreating a 1992 performance/installation. Identical twins will sit for the entire exhibition, October 1, 2009 to January 17, 2010, below a pair of identical Hirst "spot" paintings. That's a long time, so the Tate Modern is seeking twins to sign up.
"Take Part In A Damien Hirst Performance"

Etsy user WINDY54M sells toilet seats decorated with hand-carved leather. From his listing:

This is real vegetable tanned leather.I carved it in my shop at my workbench.Once carved it is then dyed/stained then a top finish is applied to seal it. Then I use adhesive to attach it the Oak toilet seat.Then I use real HEMP rope to decrotate the edge.

Hand Carved Leather Toilet Seats (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Students at Davenant Foundation School in Loughton, Essex, UK walked out of classrooms that had been equipped with CCTV cameras and refused to attend classes for three weeks until their civil liberties were respected. Students from the school are hashing over the issues in the comment area for the local news report, in incredibly intelligent, reasonable fashion. These kids give me hope for the future. I wonder if I can send Poesy there once she's old enough.

It meant they missed three weeks of studies and led to the drafting of a petition signed by about 150 of their peers.

A father, whose son took part in the walk-out, said the school was wrong not to consult parents about the use of technology which "threatened our children's civil liberties"...

Epping Forest MP Eleanor Laing, who has written to the school on behalf of concerned parents, and is due to meet the Information Commissioner to discuss the case, said: "We need to find out if the pupils are happy to be filmed but there are two valid sides to this argument, and I am trying to get to the bottom of it."

LOUGHTON: Pupils walk out of lessons in protest against Big Brother cameras (Thanks, @davidgerard!)

An incredibly lifelike advanced Obamabot is ready to be installed in the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents. It's traditional for the current president's robot to give a little speech at the end of the show. Presumably, Obamabot will explain how the reasonable middle-ground demands suspending habeas corpus, covering up war crimes, and blocking the prosecution of participants in illegal wiretapping programs.

The Obama figure is the result of attention to minute details by Disney sculptors, animators, engineers and even anatomists who pored over presidential photographs and video of him and then drew on the latest advances in robotic technology.

Thus the audio-animatronic Obama purses its lips to pronounce its b's and p's in a way frighteningly evocative of the real one, and raises its hands, open-palmed, while shrugging its shoulders, in a way that can only be described as Obamaesque. Even the president's wedding ring, with its braided design, has been recreated.

Animatronic Obama Going to Disney World With High-Tech Style (Thanks, Eloisa!)

Rachel Maddow points out that in Obama's national security speech yesterday, he proposes to replace Guantanamo-style detention without trial with his own detention without trial, a system he calls "Indefinite Preventative Detention" through which people who are believed to be likely to commit a crime at some point in the future can be locked up forever without charge, trial, jury or appeal.

Change I don't believe in.

Obama proposes Indefinite Preventive Detention without trial (Thanks, Zack!)

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

I was happy to see a lot of response to my BoingBoing post of a few days ago, "Everything is Alive." Let me throw a little more fuel on the fire.

[A flowering plant eats a signpost!]

There's actually two different words we can play with here. "Hylozoism" is the doctrine that everything is alive, while "Panpsychism" is the belief that everything is conscious. These are close in meaning but not quite identical, although I'm comfortable with believing both.

Panpsychism is by no means a wacky new-age concept, it's been around since the dawn of philosophy. David Skrbina's fascinating study, Panpsychism in the West, (MIT Press, 2005) maps out the whole history. Here's a link to a page of Skrbina's book where he's discussing one of my favorite panpsychic philosophers, Gustav Theodor Fechner...more about him below.

One funny line from Skrbina, quoting the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: "what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hide-bound with habits."

In discussing hylozoism and panpsychism, we're not talking about the notion that the universe as a whole is alive and conscious. We're concerned with viewing individual object, even atoms, as being alive and conscious---although there's nothing wrong with adding on the quite reasonable belief that the universe as whole is alive as well.

Here's a short essay of mine called "Mind is a Universally Distributed Quality" which I wrote for John Brockman's annual Big Question page at his Edge site. The Big Question was, "What is your dangerous idea?"

[The Mad Professor cover art and design is by Georgia Rucker Design.]

A point discussed in Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West is that if you’re not careful, advocating panpsychism becomes simply a matter of watering down your notion of "mind" to apply to objects. But, with Skrbina, I want to claim that it’s a real sensual mind that you’re talking about in that rock, that pen, that finger, that dust mote, that hair, that napkin torn in half (two minds now). A materialist might say, hah, there’s no content to such a claim, but I feel that I demonstrated how it really would feel to talk to objects in my science-fiction story, “Panpsychism Proved” which appeared in no less august a journal than Nature magazine. And to think they dared call me mad! Oh, by the way, my story also appears in my anthology, Mad Professor. Here's a free PDF of the story ---I put it online for you just now.

[Goosie the finger-puppet is alive.]

The scientist-philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner was a fascinating guy. He liked to talk about the daylight view versus the nighttime view. In the daylight view of the world, everything is flooded with soul and life. In the nighttime view, the world is dead, dark, inhospitable, and we sentient and living beings are but tiny firefly sparks. Not too many of his books have been translated into English, but here's one of them that I found online, On Life After Death, from Google Books.

[This Big Sur tree is conscious.]

Finally, here's a quote from the philosopher William James's Pluralistic Universe online , describing Fechner's work:

For him the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious... The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a thin nest of abstractions.

Steve sez, "Warning sign du jour: 'Do Not Board the Elevator with the Robot.'"

After finishing my doctoral work, I returned to Stanford Medical School to finish up the MD part of my MD/PhD. During one of my last clinical rotations, I stopped to take an elevator up to a surgical unit. While waiting for the elevator, a large washing-machine-sized robot--a unit that had then been recently introduced at Stanford Hospital to pick up and deliver x-ray films--pulled up along side me. After waiting patiently together, we both entered the elevator. As the door closed, the robot began to whir and then quite rapidly spun around 180 degrees to re-orient itself for exiting.

The large spinning robot nearly knocked me down in the elevator. It was somewhat frightening to be trapped in an elevator with little clearance for a massive spinning robot.

I recall being somewhat concerned about what might happen if a fragile patient, walking along with an intravenous pump, or a medical team with a patient on a gurney, entered the elevator with the robot.

Please Do Not Board the Elevator with the Robot

(Thanks, Steve!)

Recently on Offworld, One More Go columnist took a longer look at Jason Rohrer's famed five-minute memento mori art game Passage (above), to get "ammunition needed to convince yet another friendly, clever, skeptical non-gamer about the potential of the medium."

We also saw the first stirring of an El Lissitzky-inspired grainy constructivist 2D platformer (!), found out that Left 4 Dead's Francis hates everything that everybody on Twitter hates, saw Street Fighter deconstructed, and spotted LucasArts vet/Double Fine founder Tim Schafer putting in another tour de force acting performance alongside Jack Black.

Finally, we spotted Super Mario Bros 2 in horrible hyper-real life, watched a long preview of the upcoming labor struggles in Minotaur China Shop creators' next game, Crane Wars, and watched two brilliant short films made in 50x50 pixels, and saw the Famous Monsters of LittleBig-land.

A 62-year-old man had a mental breakdown and ran off after grabbing several bottles of pills from his house. The cops asked Verizon to help trace the man using his cellphone, but Verizon refused, saying that they couldn't turn on his phone because he had an unpaid $20 bill. After an 11-hour search (during which time the sheriff's department was trying to figure out how to pay the bill), the man was found, unconscious.

Two K-9 units, several fire departments and 100 individuals on foot also were involved in the search for the man, who Sheriff Dale Williams said fled his residence on Kensington Rd. after a domestic disturbance call to deputies...

Williams said he attempted to use the man's cell phone signal to locate him, but the man was behind on his phone bill and the Verizon operator refused to connect the signal unless the sheriff's department agreed to pay the overdue bill. After some disagreement, Williams agreed to pay $20 on the phone bill in order to find the man. But deputies discovered the man just as Williams was preparing to make arrangements for the payment.

Unconscious Carroll man found after 11-hour search (via Consumerist)

On Cool Tools, Zarko Vujovic talks about Ikea's adjunct to a tack-hammer, a free gizmo that does the trick:

I am an engineer, so I admire the way Ikea consistently uses a small set of fastening systems, all suitable for untrained labor. Ikea has even invented this tiny plastic device to protect customers from smashing their fingers with tack hammers.

A pinch of the clever friction-grips opens a small crevice in this utensil, and it neatly grips any small nail. Place it against a wall, tap the nailhead, and the nail goes in quite straight. Remove it and you are ready to safely hang a picture. The ergonomics are brilliant, the understanding of process is good, the operative results are excellent, and many innocent fingers go unsmashed. A real triumph of Swedish design!

Ikea Nail-Driving Utensil

French copyfighter Jeremie Zimmermann sez,

Folks from La Quadrature du Net (big up to Peter K!) have translated the French HADOPI law [ed: the new French copyright law, rammed through by Sarko over howls of public protest], which includes the absurd "three strikes" scheme [ed: if you are accused of infringement three times, you lose your Internet access -- no proof needed, no trial, no judge, no jury], bound to fail and utterly dangerous.

Curious archeo-legalists will enjoy its exotic stupidity, so impractical that everybody in France laughs at it with shame, including the members of Sarkozy's locked-down majority party who didn't dare to vote against it.

Pay particular attention to article 5 - subsection 3 where the "riposte graduee" is described, along with article 11 (obligation of "securing" one's internet access against it being used for counterfeiting, a complete technical nonsense that is the cornerstone of the whole thing).

Article 10 is also an incredible model of the worst you shall not write into the law if you want to prove that you understand what Internet is about, and how its growth and innovation worked so far:

"Art. L. 336-2. In the presence of infringement of a right of authorship or a similar right within the contents of a public on line communication service, the Superior Court, decreeing as required on the form of the hearing, may order at the request of the owners of protected works and objects, of the holders of their rights, of societies for the management of rights set forth in article L. 321-1 or professional organizations set forth in article L. 331-1, all measures needed to prevent or halt such damage to a right of authorship or a similar right, against any entity able to help remedy it. "

Enjoy it while it lasts, as it may soon be completely invalidated or neutralized by the Constitutional Court, or later on by the European courts... Yet Sarkozy's will of controlling the Internet doesn't seem to be stopped by such tiny details as constitutionality or rationality.

(please note that the translation is a work in progress that probably contains translation errors, with no legal value, and that only the original in French, blahblah, insert proper disclaimer here.)

HADOPI full translation (Thanks, JZ!)

Jake von Slatt sez, "Holy Mother of Zod! My arch nemesis Jake-of-All-Trades Hildebrandt has created what has to be the most definitively Steampunk casemod EVAH! Behold the Telecalculograph, Mk. II!"

It's a promo for the forthcoming game Damnation, and you can win it! Be sure to check out the "making of" video for lots of sweet little notes, like the spring-loaded tug-knob that works like a pinball launcher, which turns on the machine and spins up a flywheel, making the whole thing feel mechanical rather than electric.

Damnation Hildebrandt!

Making Of video

Eric Stephenson Greg Pattillo is a beatboxing flautist (if you got it, flaut it), shown here performing a stirring rendition of the Super Mario theme.

beatboxing flute super mario brothers theme

Apple has rejected Eucalyptus, an ebook reader that facilitates downloading public domain books from Project Gutenberg, because some Victorian books mention sex (many of these same books can be bought as ebooks through the iPhone Kindle reader or purchased as audiobooks from the iTunes store). It's amazing to think that in 2009 a phone manufacturer wants to dictate which literature its customers should be allowed to download and read on their devices.

Thank you for submitting Eucalyptus -- classic books, to go. to the App Store. We've reviewed Eucalyptus -- classic books, to go. and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains inappropriate sexual content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."

Please view the attached screenshot for further information.

Remember, Apple is also petitioning the government to make it illegal to install any application on your phone that they haven't approved.

Whither Eucalyptus?

Jim Ottaviani's new science history graphic novel, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, is a fast-paced, informative recounting of the events beginning with the launch of Sputnik, the first human-made satellite on Oct 4, 1957, to the first human landing on the moon on July 20, 1969.

I know Ottaviani's work through his much older book Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists, which is one of my favorite comic history books, a vivid retelling of the lives of some of science's most inspiring women.

With T-Minus Ottaviani once again brings the human side of science to life, conveying the passion, the wonder, and the frustrations of the scientists and engineers who "fought" the space race on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Superbly researched, T-Minus never lets go of the story, but still finds many sneaky ways of inserting the hard data about the rockets, their capabilities, and the scientists who worked on them into the book.

Intended for young adults, this title was incredibly satisfying to me, an adult-adult (which is as it should be). I could also appreciate how a younger me would have revelled in the frequent sidebars giving diagrams and statistics for each rocket launched in the race, and both of us appreciated the lovely attention to the human details in the lives of the people in the story, like the cosmonaut whose father thinks "sitting on a rocket is no work for a grown man," the sheer wonder conveyed in the real-life words of the first people to do spacewalks, the Gulag-haunted Russian scientist Sergei Pavlovich's chronic (and eventually fatal) injuries from his prison term, and many other gracenotes.

As a history book or a diverting and inspiring story, T-Minus gets the job done.

T-Minus: The Race to the Moon

The wonderful, historical, underfunded Bletchley Park site shows no sign of being funded as a public museum by the British Government. Bletchley was the site of the effort to crack Axis codes during WWII and is the birthplace of modern computing and cryptography. It is the nerd equivalent of the pyramids at Giza or Stonehenge, and it's falling apart.

"We have no plans at present to associate it with the Imperial War Museum," Lord Davies said. "The House is all too well aware of the significance of designating any area in association with a museum of that rank, but I want to give an assurance that Bletchley Park will continue to develop under the resources made available to it."

Bletchley Park, home to UK code-breakers such as Alan Turing is being preserved as a museum, but has been facing a funding crises of late. It was recently awarded around £600,000 by Milton Keynes Council and English Heritage, as well as a further £100,000 by IBM and PGP...

"My Lords, I declare an indirect interest in that my father was a beneficiary of the Ultra intelligence derived from the work done by the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, and others," the Viscount said. "To go a bit further than what other noble Lords have proposed, does the noble Lord not think that Bletchley Park should be turned into a full-scale national museum on the same terms as the Imperial War Museum or many of our other national museums?"

UK Snubs Support For Home of WWII Enigma (via /.)

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald's documentary about sleazy unionbusting at Starbucks debuted the same day as Starbucks new Twitter campaign, so he hijacked the campaign to spread information about Starbucks' bad labor practices.

On a blog post published at the anti-Starbucks website Brave New Films created, people were encouraged to take pictures of themselves in front of Starbucks stores holding signs targeted at the company's "anti-labor practices." These users are then told to upload these photos onto Twitpic and tweet them out to their followers using the hashtags #top3percent and #starbucks. According to the post, these are the official hashtags that were designated by Starbucks itself for those who wanted to enter its contest. Within hours, several people had followed these guidelines and there were dozens of Twitpics in front of stores across the country.

As of this writing, the anti-Starbucks YouTube video has amassed over 30,000 views and was featured on the front page of social news site Digg. Greenwald said that Brave New Films is not done with its offensive against the coffee company, but he was hesitant to reveal his next steps.

Anti-Starbucks filmmakers hijack the coffee company's own Twitter marketing campaign (Thanks, Simon!)

John Scalzi's run the inflation-adjusted box-office numbers for science fiction movies since 1931's Frankenstein and discovered that sf has always been in blockbuster territory:

On the Beach (1959)
One of earliest movies to use a science fiction premise (nuclear apolcalypse! Everybody dies!) without actually advertising itself as science fiction -- because Gregory Peck couldn't possibly be in a science fiction movie, you see. Be that as it may, not only was the picture lauded for its intelligent portrayal of people dealing with the end of life as we know it, it also brought in the equivalent of close to $140 million. It will be interesting to see if The Road, a similarly-themed post-apocalyptic flick also not advertising itself as science fiction, comes close to these numbers when it's released later this year.

Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Prior to Star Wars, this was science fiction's one-two punch at the box office, and it was a pretty hefty combination: Planet of the Apes, helped by the star power of Charlton Heston, brought in $32 million -- equivalent to $175 million today, and a sum no one would complain about. 2001, with its groundbreaking special effects and oh-so-serious weirdness, did even better: $56 million, or just over $300 million today, which would have put it at number four in last year's box office list, just below the latest Indiana Jones flick. The two movies in fact helped spur a series of largely dystopic, serious-minded science fiction flicks, such as Silent Running and Soylent Green (not to mention, in the case of Apes, a bunch of sequels).

John Scalzi - SciFi Movies Made Money Before Star Wars, Too

People outside of the UK might have missed the huge scandal over MPs' expenses -- basically, it turns out that Members of Parliament have been billing the public for all kinds of crazy things, including mortgages that they'd already paid off, maintenance on their moats (I shit you not) and pools, tampons (for male MPs), private security details, and so on. Most MPs have fallen over themselves to apologize for their unethical behavior.

Not Tory MP Anthony Steen.

Steen billed the taxpayer for maintenance of his 500-tree forest, upkeep of which was apparently necessary to the conducting of his duties at Parliament.

Steen says that constituents who resent their tax money going to pay for his forest are "just jealous."

After pondering the question of exactly why people were so angry over his claim for the treatment of 500 trees in the grounds of his house, he offered a succinct explanation today : "Jealousy".

Expenses row: MP who claimed for 500 trees accuses constituents of 'jealousy'

Instructables user FriendOfHumanity has a little HOWTO for installing a windowbox planter on the handlebars of your bike. I dunno, I'd be worried about doing a faceplant (worse yet, if you planted chickpeas, you might falafel your bike) (I did that once and I falafel about it).

Bicycle Window Box- For the transient gardener. (via Craft)

Jeremy Clarkson's review of the Honda Insight for the London Times made me grin, which is as close as I ever get to LOLing at something I read to myself.

The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).

It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.

And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

Honda Insight 1.3 IMA SE Hybrid

Over at the Quantified Self blog, Gary Wolf wrote a fascinating post about ex-Senator Bob Graham's 30-year-plus-habit of writing every aspect of his day-to-day life in little spiral notebooks. The press likes to make fun of his obsessive note taking (he's filled almost 4,000 to date), but it comes in handy:

The CIA claimed that Pelosi had been briefed in detail about the torture, and didn't make any objection until long afterward. Therefore, if there is to be any kind of sanction for torture, it should hit the top Democrat who approved it as well as members of the Republican administration who ordered it. Pelosi, though, denies having been briefed about the torture.

Well, it turns out that Bob Graham was also supposed to have been briefed on these topics, and the CIA forwarded to him the dates of the meetings he supposedly attended. But the CIA records were inaccurate, according to his own personal records. Such was the respect for Graham's notebooks, that this line of attack was closed within 48 hours.

This is interesting for several reasons. First, it's worth noting that one man's spiral bound notebooks were able to accumulate enough credibility to defeat the records of an organization whose very reason for existence is to collect information, communicate it to trusted members of government, and keep records of these communications. Anybody who has been following some of the controversy about patient records can add this strange example to their list of favorite anecdotes. Personal data, kept by a dedicated and interested party, even using yesterday's technology, will trump large scale collection systems managed by bureaucrats.

For some reason, it comforts me to think of the CIA as a bunch of bumblers.

Politican as self-tracker - Bob Graham's notebooks

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

How do you market a toy that does almost nothing? Build a gnarly web ad!

We're talking about the Yo Baby, which is a skateboard with no wheels!

The presence of the turtle in the Yo Baby ad reminds me of Douglas Coupland's novel, JPod, which is about, among other things, the use of turtles in marketing, and which also has an intricate web page.

Here's the deal: Boing Boing has come into possession of some wicked footage of an anonymous Atari Computer Camp excursion that has everything you could ever want from grainy stock video: namely, yellowed and over-saturated money shots of retro-tech, and a bevy of over-eager and still-innocent pre-teens banging out BASIC to make crossword crosses out of the words Van Halen (no joke!) and gawping at the awesome limitless power and future of computers.

Here's the catch: neither of the videos -- the first clocking in at about seven minutes, and the second coming in at seven and a half -- have any sound at all.

And so: given Offworld/Boing Boing's sizable audience of chiptune/junk-tech musicians, we thought we'd throw the score open to you. If you're interested in submitting some of your music for the videos, which will be broadcast on BBtv at a later date, send an email to brandon@offworld.com with the subject line "Atari Computer Camp" and we'll dig through and select our favorites from there. Bonus points awarded for (but certainly not limited to) composing on actual 8-bit Atari tech.

See the original post on Offworld for more inspirational shots of the kids at work (and play).

RunPee is a website that tells you when the best time to leave a movie and run to the bathroom to pee is. It also tells you what you missed while you were draining off a quart or two of lime kool-aid.

RunPee (via Kottke)

The US chamber of commerce is leaning on trade representatives to make sure that poor countries have to pay to license patents on technologies that will reduce their carbon footprints and stave off global warming:

Developing countries such as Brazil, India and China have indicated that if - as expected in the next few years - they are going to have to make sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions, they should be able to license some of the most efficient available technologies for doing so.

Big business is worried about this, because they prefer that patent rights have absolute supremacy. They want to make sure that climate change talks don't erode the power that they have gained through the World Trade Organisation.

The WTO is widely misunderstood and misrepresented as an organisation designed to promote free trade. In fact, some of its most economically important rules promote the opposite: the costliest forms of protectionism in the world.

Green technology should be shared (Thanks, Owlswan!)

A couple in New Zealand found an extra NZ10,000,000 in their bank account, so they transferred it offshore and split:

The pair, named in media reports as Leo Gao and Cara Young, could hardly believe their luck when they checked their account at Westpac bank on 5 May, hoping to find their request for a NZ$10,900 (£4,000) overdraft had been accepted.

Instead, the bank had deposited 1,000 times that amount: NZ$10m, or around £4m. With so many borrowers around the world constantly being told "no" by their creditors, here, finally, was a bank that liked to say "yes".

Last night the accidental millionaires from Rotorua, a tourist city on the north island overlooking, appropriately enough, the Bay of Plenty, are on an Interpol wanted list after fleeing with the bulk of their windfall two weeks ago.

New Zealand couple flee after finding £4m in their bank account

Tiny Art Director is a site written by Bill Zeman, an artist whose daughter is four. The basic schtick is, she tells the Bill what to draw, he draws it, she critiques it (she's hard to please). It's hilarious and great -- and he's got a book-deal!.

The Brief: A dinosaur eating a R and an O and an S and a I and a E

The Critique: That's not what I want. That's a Brachiosaurus. I want a T Rex. He's supposed to have the other letters in his mouth too. See look! He's only eating that one. What letter is that?

Job Status: Rejected

Tiny Art Director (via Waxy!)

Stuart Candy of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies emailed me about their new alternate reality game, Coral Cross. Commissioned by the Hawaii Department of Health and bankrolled by the Center for Disease Control, the game is about... pandemic flu. Stuart says:

In late 02007, the Health Dept approached myself and Jake Dunagan (now my colleague at Institute for the Future -dp) after they noticed our independent FoundFutures exstallation in Chinatown, Honolulu, manifesting tangible scenario elements of a bird flu outbreak in the year 02016. A year later, by September 02008, they had won a federal grant to do a demonstration public engagement project about preparing for a possible flu pandemic scenario. Wearing our Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies hats, we pitched them on an Alternate Reality Game as a way of getting people into the mindset of what that could feel like. There had not been an actual pandemic in 40 years (Hong Kong flu, 01968) and enabling this type of engagement against a backdrop of indifference and invisibility would be our major challenge. The ARG idea came about because I was just gearing up to serve as Game Master on Superstruct at the time, so ARGs were in the air. Also, it seemed a way to scale up the narrative depth of the scenario, while building on the work of others in for example After Shock and World Without Oil, as well as on what we had learned from doing FoundFutures projects, futures artifacts etc.

Our design team worked intensively on the project in the early months of 02009, planning to launch in the last week of May to coincide with public meetings about pandemic preparedness that were being planned by the Health Dept. The narrative was set in Hawaii in 02012, and the vehicle for telling the story was a nonprofit, grassroots organisation called Coral Cross of Oahu, set up in September 02011 after a category 5 hurricane devastated the island. Each day of gameplay would represent one month of narrative, so in the space of two weeks, visitors to the in-world website would experience a calm leadup to the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Cyrus, followed by the sudden onset of a flu pandemic, and the tumultuous six-month wait for a vaccine to become available. In the context of this story, they would tell their own, discuss the implications of the sudden social, economic, and political changes wrought by the virus, and develop a better sense of how they and their communities could respond to pandemic conditions.

In late April, however, reality overtook our alternate reality scenario. We watched in disbelief as, over two or three days, the swine flu epidemic in Mexico took hold, panic about it possibly going global began to spread, and the WHO and CDC raised their official alert levels. It was surreal. One day, we were filming a mock press conference set in 02012 and announcing the outbreak as part of our narrative introduction, and literally a day later, we were watching a real one on TV.

Our design team turned on a dime, proposing right away that, rather than being cancelled due to the early arrival of the future, the project be reoriented around current events. The result is that we maintained the late May launch date but over the last few weeks have completely reimagined the project as an Emergent Reality Game, the first of its kind. Rather than telling a story about a pandemic in the future, Coral Cross is now an experiment in using gaming mechanisms to support real-life pandemic preparedness today, and to try to outpace the flu with information that may help mitigate its spread. Players also have the opportunity to discuss the potential life-and-death questions of who should be prioritised in a vaccine queue for this or a future strain of influenza.

So, can information catch up to the virus? Let's hope so. People can follow the progress of the spread of our message at coralcross.org and sign up for notification when the full game goes live early next week.

Coral Cross

Buy 'em here. I'm traveling in Guatemala, so I'm a few days late blogging this, I hope there are some left!

(disclosure: I earned a few hundred bucks from this, which I plan to donate to a family-run nonprofit that does sustainable technology development work in indigenous communities here.)

MIT researchers are designing a futuristic bus stop called the EyeStop. A collaboration between architects and engineers in the SENSEable City Lab, the design calls for large multi-touch e-ink screens, ambient displays, and an array of environmental sensors. From MIT News:

Riders can plan a bus trip on an interactive map, surf the Web, monitor their real-time exposure to pollutants and use their mobile devices as an interface with the bus shelter. They can also post ads and community announcements to an electronic bulletin board at the bus stop, enhancing the EyeStop's functionality as a community gathering space.

“The EyeStop could change the whole experience of urban travel," said Carlo Ratti, Head of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT. "At the touch of a finger, passengers can get the shortest bus route to their destination or the position of all the buses in the city. The EyeStop will also glow at different levels of intensity to signal the distance of an approaching bus."

In addition to displaying information, the bus stop also acts as an active environmental sensing node, powering itself through sunlight and collecting real-time information about the surrounding environment.

“EyeStop is like an 'info-tape' that snakes through the city," said project leader Giovanni de Niederhousern. "It senses information about the environment and distributes it in a form accessible to all citizens.”

EyeStop

Etsy seller Digitalsoap's Space Invaders soaps are swell.

Space Invaders soap set (via Wonderland)

For about a year, New York City artists Justin Gignac and Christine Santora make paintings of things that they want and price them at exactly what it would cost to buy that item. Once they sell the painting, and buy the item, they take a photo of the item or experience and post it in their Flickr stream beside the painting. Top, plane trip from New York City. Below that, Nixon watch. Wants For Sale (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)

Crafster user 3RaysOfSunshine made this wonderful shark-attack hat for her son. I wish I had one to wear to my next court-appearance!

I made this hat for my son - he wanted a mean shark. I saw the dead fish hat pattern and loved the idea - I just varied the pattern quite a lot to make different looking species. And felted it so it looks like it jumped out of the water and landed on his head... I basically cast 90 stitches onto a size 9 circular needle and winged it from there. I used Patons wool and it felted great.

Shark Attack Hat

GlennF sez,

I came across this interesting profile of Heather Brooke, the UK-based reporter who tried to get Parliament to release expense records by using UK disclosure laws, and whose efforts clearly led to the leak that the Daily Telegraph got.

Brooke started her journalism career in Seattle at the University of Washington, and learned via a newspaper internship from an old-school editor how to dig up public records--expense records, in particular.

The profile is fascinating because it shows one of the key functions of newspapers and similar periodicals that's been ignored as the quality of such publications has dropped: investigation, and management that supports investigation.

We've been lucky in Seattle that both local papers (one remains in print, the other online only) were long interested in funding very long-form, very long-running investigations. Who will fund this kind of reporting in the future? What editor will teach a future Heather Brooke to dig behind the public statements and facile information at hand?

This isn't a tirade in defense of dinosaurs. Rather, I legitimately wonder where the funding comes that allows reporters to devote the time. Hyperlocal news is great, and so is citizen journalism. But Brooke spent five years (and was scooped in the end) on digging out these expense reports.

Former UW student shakes up British government (Thanks, Glenn!)

Designer Jas Bhachu created a "typographic font generator" from a Rubik's Cube outfitted with rubber stamps. Rob has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Rubik's Cube stamp can print any letter