This is the 1942 yearbook from the Temple University School of Medicine. The design of the embossed leather cover drives me wild. It's on eBay right now with a buy-it-now price of $1495.
Temple University School of Medicine Skull Yearbook

The Wall Street Journal's Phred Dvorak has a thought-provoking feature on the use of laptops and Internet services by homeless people, who, like everyone else, use them for civic engagement with politicians, social interaction, job hunting, and entrepreneurial pursuits.

Here's a prediction: in five years, a UN convention will enshrine network access as a human right (preemptive strike against naysayers: "Human rights" aren't only water, food and shelter, they include such "nonessentials" as free speech, education, and privacy). In ten years, we won't understand how anyone thought it wasn't a human right.

And even then, there will be destitute former music execs, living rough on the streets, using their laptops to argue that no, it's not a human right: you should be deprived of your Internet access if you're accused of copyright infringement, because the Internet is just a machine for making copies of trivial, copyrighted entertainment products.

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet..."

Shelter attendants say the number of laptop-toting overnight visitors, while small, is growing. SF Homeless, a two-year-old Internet forum, has 140 members. It posts schedules for public-housing meetings and news from similar groups in New Mexico, Arizona and Connecticut. And it has a blog with online polls about shelter life...

Aspiring computer programmer Paul Weston, 29, says his Macintosh PowerBook has been a "lifeboat" since he was laid off from his job as a hotel clerk in December and moved to a shelter. Sitting in a Whole Foods store with free wireless access, Mr. Weston searches for work and writes a computer program he hopes to sell eventually. He has emailed city officials to press for better shelter conditions...

Robert Livingston, 49, has carried his Asus netbook everywhere since losing his apartment in December. A meticulous man who spends some of his $59 monthly welfare check on haircuts, Mr. Livingston says he quit a security-guard job late last year, then couldn't find another when the economy tanked.

When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.

On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired (via Isen)

(Image: Brian L Frank for the Wall Street Journal)

Over on Offworld, our Brandon's spotted a stellar Team Fortress-themed mobile:

One of Valve's most renowned character design theories, evident in all recent multiplayer games from Team Fortress to Left 4 Dead, is in creating each figure as a shape so distinct that they're instantly recognizable from nearly any distance, in any light.

And, taking that idea to its logical extreme, Etsy seller SaltyandSweet has given life to the unofficial official Team Fortress 2 mobile, laser cut and "extremely lightweight [to stay] in motion with even the slightest breeze," and perfect for toddler-training tomorrow's jarate-tossing champs today.

If there's a Left 4 Dead one, I'm doomed -- it's all the wife can talk about these days; we'd end up with one in ever room, and Alice running around making pew-pew noises at them.

Shadowplay: SaltyandSweet's Team Fortress mobile

Discuss this on Offworld

Here are two videos of the amazing physicist Richard Feynman tearing it up on the bongos drums.

My friends from Youth Radio were at the Maker Faire Bay Area today, creating a live soundscape. Students roamed the fairgrounds collecting audio samples on flash recorders. As the roving reporters brought back their "tape" to the Youth Radio booth, others used Peak and Reason software to cut-up, loop, and collage the audio into a sick soundscape. The young people on the scene were Kenyon Colvin-Williams, Skyler Brynat, Luis Florez, Derrick Underwood, Khadejhia Kassenbrock, and Austin DeRubira. Production support came from Ben Frost, Charlie Foster, and Rachel Krantz.

Mixing Maker Faire

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

Looking back over the advance of physics over the last two hundred years, it's staggering to realize how much our world view has changed. As a science fiction writer, I'm always trying to imagine how much more things might change in the coming two centuries. The really hard thing to anticipate is the completely game-changing advances that occur every so often.

My sense is that, for one thing, we won't be using chip-based computers in two hundred years---any more than we use mechanical calculators now. That's why, in my recent novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, I've been speculating about a world in which our computations escape from our machines and filter into our ordinary matter.

Nick Herbert is one of my favorite offbeat physicists. One of his papers in particular is something I've thought about a lot over the years: "Holistic Physics, or, An Introduction to Quantum Tantra." Here Nick argues that our conscious minds display some of the same features as quantum mechanics. When we're not thinking about anything in particular, our thoughts evolve in a continuous, multi-universe kind of way---but when we focus on something, we carry out something like the quantum collapse that characterizes the process of measurement.

[Brain models from the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University.]

As I've been saying, I think it's at least in principle possible that the quantum computations in ordinary matter might be capable of carrying out these same kinds of processes---which we normally associate with living, conscious minds. And Nick's paper helps you to think about this idea.

David Deutsch wrote a deep and technical paper about the topic of computation in arbitrary pieces of matter, called "Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer."

The basic idea is that quantum mechanical systems can act as universal computers, and it's generally believed that any universal computer can emulate a human mind (given the right program, and, aye, there's the rub).

One of our big problems is that we still have such an imperfect notion of how to build a software system that's like a human mind. The best idea along these lines that I've seen in the last few years is in the book On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.

Two more rich sources for futuristic ideas.

(1) The arXiv.org site---for instance look at their New Papers on Cosmology and Extragalactic Physics page. It blows my mind that you can so easily access all these wild new papers, easily readable in PDF form. Even if, for the average person, a lot of the writing is incomprehensible gibberish (like the backwards neon sign shown above), you can skate through and pick up some great concepts and buzzwords.

(2) The physicist John Baez's pages. Baez is a deep thinker and a gifted popularizer, adept at imparting the true strangeness of this world.

It's liberating to realize that, as always, we're very much on the edge of knowing what's really going on.

Patrick sez, "A Canadian cinema has been fined C$10,000 for invasion of privacy when it searched a mother and daughter's bags for video cameras, but instead pulled out birth control pills from the daughter's purse. The mother had no idea. She sued. She won."

Staff at the theatre were searching customers' bags for video equipment that could be used for movie piracy.

Security guards didn't find any video equipment in the family's bags, but did turn up a large selection of snack food, which they asked the family to take back to their vehicle, Lurie said.

"They did so willingly. But they continued the search of the bags and while searching they also uncovered some birth control pills belonging to the older daughter," Lurie said.

"Needless to say the mother was not pleased to find out in this manner that her daughter had those pills in her possession."

Cinema ordered to pay $10K in damages for search (Thanks, Patrick!)

This week on the most excellent Pseudopod horror podcast, David Nickle's fantastic story "The Inevitability of Earth," a tale about the ignobility of those who would fly:

When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimeter camera that wound up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate. Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly light-weight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like it weighed a ton. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it; the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value.

The movie was of Grandfather doing his flying thing -- flapping his arms with a slow grace as he shut his eyes and turned his long, beak-ish nose to the sky. Most of the movie was only that: a thin, middle-aged man, flapping his arms, shutting his eyes, craning his neck. Grandfather's apparent foolishness was compounded by the face of young Michael flashing in front of the lens; blocking the scene, and waving like an idiot himself. Then the camera moved, and Michael was gone -

And so was Grandfather.

Dave's got a new short story collection coming soon, available for pre-order: Monstrous Affections.

Pseudopod 144: The Inevitability of Earth

MP3 Link

Pseudopod podcast feed

The Great Frog's Michael Mouse Ring is a sweet chunk of chunky, infringing silver: a skull in Mickey ears.

Michael Mouse Ring

In this short video, sneering rappers from the young conservative movement bust rhymes about drilling in Alaska, forcing women to bear foetuses to term, eliminating social programs and merging Church and State. Lines include: "Three things taught me conservative love: Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged;" and "Everyone can succeed because our soldiers bleed."

It's (apparently) not a parody.

Why Conservatives Can't Dance

Among the free papercraft downloads at Canon's website is this beautiful model of the structure of the sun -- a perfect project for a sunny weekend!

Structure of the Sun (via Make)

A former FBI interrogator who successfully extracted secrets from senior Al Qaeda members using psychological tricks has gone public with his feelings on the ineffectiveness of torture. As he explained on CBC's As It Happens, torture is especially bad when you've got a "ticking bomb" situation, as a good psychological interrogator can establish rapport in hours, while torturing Al Quaeda suspects required dozens of sessions with waterboards and days of sleep deprivation to get any intelligence (and what it got, no one trusts):

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.

"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.

"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures..."

"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda -- including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers -- but the cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.

"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."

Cookies, not torture, convinced al Qaeda suspect to talk, FBI interrogator says (Thanks, Mark!)

Ben sez, "A film from the 1939 World's Fair showing a Chrysler being built in Stop Action animation. Originally filmed in 'Three-Dimensional Polaroid Film.'"

Man, this thing has got it all: golden age World's Fair, that fantastic chipper music, dancing brightly colored machine-parts... I want to crawl in and nestle among the sparkplugs.

Exclusive: Chrysler Builds a Car (Thanks, Ben!)

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

Sooo...it's Friday night again.

How about a playlist of thirty or so videos by Frank Zappa!

We miss you, Frank.

Over at Playboy.com, the inimitable Jack Boulware surveys the greatest of the military rock bands. Some are "official" while others, called "kix bands" by the Navy, are in it just for the, er, kicks. From Playboy.com:

Hang Ten aka US Navy Pacific Fleet Rock Band

Based at: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Members: Nine

Official Description: “An extensive repertoire encompassing popular music from the 1960's to today's latest hits…everything from rock and pop to disco and light jazz”

Playlist: Guns N’ Roses, Gwen Stefani, Bob Marley

Original Songs: None listed

Bonus: Navy publicity requested control and approval over this story!

"Battle of the Battle Bands"

05.29.09 : feline zen 2009

@hellobigfoot. Usually, him one does following, but now it is your turn.

If you don't have any of the books already, do yourself a favor. If nothing else, you can use one as a shield when he sneaks into your tent and tries to make off with all your granola and bullets. Here they are:
* In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot
* Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir
* Bigfoot: I Not Dead

(Thanks, Graham Roumieu, and thanks for turning me on to the books like 5 years ago, Susannah Breslin!)

Just in time for the Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, my Institute for the Future colleague Alex Pang wrote a fascinating essay about tinkering. I love the word "tinker." Back in Cincinnati, my oldest brother Mark, a lifelong maker who is now a research scientist and physician, spent his teen years digging around in an electronics hobbyist supply shop called The Tinker where resistors and capacitors were sold by the pound. From Vodafone Receiver:

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

What is tinkering? Discovering that certain snack tins can be used to make an antenna that extends the range of your wi-fi network, using electric toothbrush motors to power small robots, building a high-altitude balloon that takes video of the edge of space, are all examples of tinkering. It is technical work and a cultural attitude. Tinkering is customizing software and stuff; making new combinations of things that work better than their parts; and discovering new capabilities in or uses for existing products. Despite its fascination with things and bits, it is resolutely human-focused: you don't make things 'better' in some dry technical sense, you make them work better for you. Tinkerers modify everything from cars, computers, and cellphones, to virtual worlds and computer code. They are driven by a desire to experiment, to make existing technologies more useful, and to customize them to better suit users' needs.

According to MIT professor Mitch Resnick, tinkering might look at first like traditional engineering, but it is very different. Both are about designing and making things; but engineering tends to be top-down, linear, structured, abstract and rules-based - a highly formal, organized activity, meant to be carried out in (and in the service of) large organizations. Tinkering, in contrast, is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, practical and improvisational: informal and disorganized, accessible to anyone who is willing to learn (and fail) and it doesn't follow any plan too closely.

"Tinkering to the future"

Sorry I'm Late is a fantastic stop-motion short film by Tomas Mankovsky. It was shot from above using a still camera. (Thanks, Carrie!)

Pick The Perp is a fun site where the aim is pick the perpetrator of a crime from a line up.

"Booking mug shots and related information is gathered from arrest records from open sheriff's web sites in the United States of America. Those appearing here have not been convicted of the arrest charge and are presumed innocent. Do not rely on this site to determine any person's actual criminal record. "

Pick The Perp (Thanks, Steven Leckart!)

My mom (who has a Ph.D. in early childhood education) sez, "What does teaching and learning look like in the 21st Century? What about 21st Century learning spaces? How can Bloom's Taxonomy be applied to the Digital world? Check out Andrew Churches' wiki where 21st educators are invited to share in this emerging conversation."

Educational Origami (Thanks, Mom!)

Glyn sez, "If you're in Europe you may be considering who you should vote for in the up coming European elections. To help you the Open Rights Group sent a questionnaire to UK MEP candidates, asking them where they stand on digital rights issues."

Does your privacy, fair copyright, data retention and keeping the internet open matter to your MEP candidates? We've asked the main candidates what they think about four issues ORG campaigns on. You can see how the parties have done - both how many have responded, and what they have said. You can then judge for yourself who deserves your vote. You can also help by asking candidates who haven't responded to give us an answer, which we will then display on the website. All the candidate details are publicly available from party or campaign websites, and where we have found them, we have also added these to our site. If you do contact a candidate, please remember to be polite and helpful.

Do Your MEP Candidates Agree with ORG? (Thanks, Glyn!)

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

Recently my jeweler daughter, Isabel, made me a great “Swiss Writing Knife” with symbols of seven of the things I’m interested in: A Zhabotinsky scroll (for cellular automata), the Mandelbrot set (for fractals), a robot, A Square (for the fourth dimension), Infinity, a UFO, a Cone Shell (for diving, cellular automata, universal automatism, and SF). It’s gold-colored metal and the little “blades” swing in and out, with the icons in silver-colored metal riveted on.

I tend to adjust the knife according to what kind of story or novel I'm working on, and I keep it by my keyboard as a good luck amulet, or an embodied muse.

Isabel's business, Isabel Jewelry is in Pinedale, Wyoming, and she makes most of her sales over the web. One of her customers was in fact Boing's own Cory Doctorow, who had her custom-make a pair of crypto-device wedding rings.

As a sometime zinester, Isabel has a cool drawings site as well---check out her "Get Back" story about thongs. Isabel's graphic novel, "Unfurling: The World's Longest Comic Strip," will be on display this November at the SOMArts Gallery in San Francisco, all four hundred or so feet of it!

Recently on Offworld we took a longer look at Bonsai Barber, the WiiWare debut game from Martin Hollis (former project lead on the Nintendo 64's GoldenEye 007) and his team at Zoonami. It's precisely what it sounds like: a mashup of zen-gardening and that traditional daily social life revolving around the barbershop, and smarter than you might think -- truly one of WiiWare's finest.

Elsewhere we dug up a fantastic iTunes visualizer based on DS favorite music game Rhythm Heaven, heard the first details of what Id has in store for its multiplayer-enabled iPhone version of Doom, saw the ghost-trapping abilities of the DSi's first augmented reality game, and saw World of Goo creators 2D Boy releasing their open-source rapid prototyping framework into the wild for other indie game creators.

We also peeked into two developer studios with 2 Player Productions -- the company behind chiptune documentary Reformat the Planet -- visiting inFamous studio Sucker Punch, and Simon Parkin posting a photo set of his trip to Parappa the Rapper dev NanaOn-Sha, and saw the latest NES rom flier for NYC chiptune showcase Pulsewave.

And our 'one shot's for the day: Devo wards off space invaders, who then invade Madrid, LittleBigPlanet's 2000AD crossover has a trouser malfunction, a broken Konami Code leads to a life of smothering darkness, and the evolution of BioShock 2's Big Sisters.

(Download / Watch on YouTube) Today's Boing Boing Video episode is a special pre-Maker Faire warmup extravaganza: the oil-punk creations and sexy burlesque gyrations of the Boiler Bar. Creator and host Jon Sarriugarte (who I first met through SRL) explains:

Oilpunk: is Punk, Hot Rod, Geek, Blue Collar, and Maker Culture mixed together with the Petroleum Golden Age of the last century. It's the intersection of petroleum products, art, and science. It harkens back to a time when hard work, combustion engines and industry shaped us, yet it speaks to the future. It's taking the castoffs of modern industrial culture and objects from the last decade to reuse today. Dirty, greasy, sweaty, it's a work hard, play hard style.

The Boiler Bar is what blue collar out of work down on their luck Bay Area artist decided to do with their spare time and last dollar. Come by and share our delight of the sparkle in the dust of this golden age of petroleum. Drink our hooch and watch the girls sing and dance their way to you heart, then be dazzled by the labor of men spent in seconds in glorious aerial and earthly displays of plenty. And as always ravers and DJ's are welcome to talk.

They'll be at Maker Faire this weekend, and Dorkbot very soon. Here's the Golden mean fan club on facebook for our email list for upcoming shows.

Also in this episode: The snail car! a real-live blacksmith! Who also happens to be a chick! And the Neverwas Runabout, cousin to the giant Neverwas Haul! All of this and more awaits this weekend at Maker Faire Bay Area 2009. Image below courtesy dharmabum90: the Neverwas Haul, being towed by a 90-year-old steam-powered tractor.

Where to Find Boing Boing Video: 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.

(Thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic, and to Shannon O'Hare of the Neverwas and Jon Sarriugarte of Boiler Bar. And big thanks to BBV guest host Aaron Muszalski and our field producer and shooter Eddie Codel.)

Errol Morris' New York Times essays about film, art, and photography are always astounding. He just let me know that he's posted the first in a seven-part series about frauds and fakes for the New York Times' ZOOM blog. This one is about the Vermeers forger Han van Meegeren, who is the subject of two recent books: Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell and Jonathan Lopez’s The Man Who Made Vermeers.

Over two years after Van Meegeren’s arrest, he was put on trial in Amsterdam. On Oct. 29, 1947, The Times reported the following:

Hans van Meegeren (sic), the Dutch painter who shocked the art world by foisting a series of false Vermeers, Pieter de Hoghs and other old masters on experts, finally was placed on trial in District Court here today. He pleaded guilty and the state demanded a sentence of two years’ imprisonment. The charge on which Van Meegeren was arraigned specified that he sold works bearing the spurious signatures of famous artists. It was not a simple case of forgery, inasmuch as the defendant created the works after the style of the seventeenth century masters, without actually copying any of their canvases…

And then on Nov. 12, The Times reported that Van Meegeren had been sentenced to a year in prison. Asked outside the courtroom for his reaction to the sentence, Van Meegeren simply said, “I think I must take it as a good sport.”

(UPDATE: Part 2 is up, which is an interview with Edward Dolnick about how the "Uncanny Valley" applies to forgeries.)

Bamboozling Ourselves, Part 1, by Errol Morris

Last month, I discovered that underground grotesque comics virtuosoBasil Wolverton had produced a series of Biblical illustrations, collected by Fantagraphics in a volume called The Wolverton Bible. Fantagraphics were kind enough to send me a review copy of the book and all I can say is "Holy cats!"

Wolverton wasn't just a funnybooks illustrator: he was also a member of a millenarian evangelical church called the Worldwide Church of God, a sect that believed in obeying Old Testament lifestyle laws and the literal truth of Revelations. So it was natural that Wolverton ended up with a regular, paid gig illustrating a series of Bible stories for kids and adults published in the Church's magazines like Plain Truth and in booklets with titles like Prophecy and The Book of Revelations, overseen by Church leader Herbert Armstrong, who had converted Wolverton to his faith.

Wolverton appears to have had little trouble squaring his faith with his legendary grotesque drawings (his notorious Life Magazine spoof for MAD was so freaky it inspired legal threats) -- he felt that the secular was secular, and could be lighthearted and weird as you wanted -- but he was also clearly a believer in the gravitas of the faith, as can be seen from these drawings.

Wolverton and Armstrong wanted to create a set of illustrated Bible stories that went beyond the whitewashed, cheerful kids' books of the day, to show the Old Testament for what it is: a book full of blood, thunder and revenge. Accordingly, Wolverton's illustrations, done in the same unmistakable, stippled style that characterized his grotesqueries, show off the grim, the violent, and the destructive in the Old Testament, putting the blood and guts in the spotlight.

The result is like no illustrated Bible you've ever seen. Goliath is a horrific giant cyclops; the drowning sinners trying to claw their way onto Noah's Ark are caught in flashbulb moments of terror and agony; Saul's army rends the raw meat of their slaughter as they try to avoid starvation; the mutilated corpses of Baanah and Rechab dangle from nooses in Hebron; the boiled heads of donkeys emerge from the cooking pot as starving Israelites look on with hungry eyes; Daniel's horned beast crushes a mountain of screaming men and women as it stalks the land; and in Revelations, the rains of fire, floods and famine lay waste to cities as horribly burned famine victims scream and claw at their flesh.

And the Passover story, of course, gets its own grisly treatment. This isn't your grandfather's Haggadah, is what I'm trying to say.

This is a side of Wolverton I never suspected, but it is perfectly him, humorous, grisly, mad and wonderful.

The Wolverton Bible

Mad Prophet (blog post with nice scans from the book)

Rogue economist Max Keiser writes, "Max Keiser is on the edge of the financial news where future financial scandals, market crashes and monetary crises begin. Be there before it happens: On the Edge with Max Keiser. I've got Alex Jones lined up for next week - should be pretty interesting Anyone watching the show should get some psychic satisfaction as I symbolically water Timothy Geithner on the show this week. I used a doll dressed up like a pirate or 'banker' as pirates are called in the U.S. The emphasis on prosecuting the harshest criminals in America should really be focused on the Fed and the Treasury. Clearly, they have abandoned any pretense of any sort of system of checks and balances for the banking system and are simply aiding and abetting the continued fleecing of America in ways that Bin Laden could only dream about if he were still alive. "

On the Edge with Max Keiser - Bond crisis? IMF? China? . . . Tune in

Update: Victory! -- the treaty proposal survived this meeting and will be back on the agenda at the next one. We've got a couple months to lobby our governments and make sure that the next time they show up, they don't embarrass us by opposing this.

Right now, in Geneva, at the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, history is being made. For the first time in WIPO history, the body that creates the world's copyright treaties is attempting to write a copyright treaty dedicated to protecting the interests of copyright users, not just copyright owners.

At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages), introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay. This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn't want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it's possible for disabled people to get access to the written word?

The USA, that's who. The Obama administration's negotiators have joined with a rogue's gallery of rich country trade representatives to oppose protection for blind people. Other nations and regions opposing the rights of blind people include Canada and the EU.

Update: Also opposing rights for disabled people: Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway.

Update 2: Countries that are on the right side of this include, "Latin American and Caribbean region including (Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Jamaica) as well as Asia and Africa."

Update 3: Canada is upset with me. That's fine, I'm upset with Canada.

Activists at WIPO are desperate to get the word out. They're tweeting madly from the negotiation (technically called the 18th session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights) publishing editorials on the Huffington Post, etc.

Here's where you come in: this has to get wide exposure, to get cast as broadly as possible, so that it will find its way into the ears of the obscure power-brokers who control national trade-negotiators.

I don't often ask readers to do things like this, but please, forward this post to people you know in the US, Canada and the EU, and ask them to reblog, tweet, and spread the word, especially to government officials and activists who work on disabled rights. We know that WIPO negotiations can be overwhelmed by citizen activists -- that's how we killed the Broadcast Treaty negotiation a few years back -- and with your help, we can make history, and create a world where copyright law protects the public interest.

I am attending a meeting in Geneva of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This evening the United States government, in combination with other high income countries in "Group B" is seeking to block an agreement to discuss a treaty for persons who are blind or have other reading disabilities.

The proposal for a treaty is supported by a large number of civil society NGOs, the World Blind Union, the National Federation of the Blind in the US, the International DAISY Consortium, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D), Bookshare.Org, and groups representing persons with reading disabilities all around the world.

The main aim of the treaty is to allow the cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading disabilities, using special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type. These works, which are expensive to make, are typically created under national exceptions to copyright law that are specifically written to benefit persons with disabilities...

The opposition from the United States and other high income countries is due to intense lobbying from a large group of publishers that oppose a "paradigm shift," where treaties would protect consumer interests, rather than expand rights for copyright owners.

The Obama Administration was lobbied heavily on this issue, including meetings with high level White House officials. Assurances coming into the negotiations this week that things were going in the right direction have turned out to be false, as the United States delegation has basically read from a script written by lobbyists for publishers, extolling the virtues of market based solutions, ignoring mountains of evidence of a "book famine" and the insane legal barriers to share works.

Obama Joins Group to Block Treaty for Blind and Other Reading Disabilities

COPYRIGHT EXCEPTIONS AND LIMITATIONS

Twitter feed for #sccr18

PROPOSAL BY BRAZIL, ECUADOR AND PARAGUAY, RELATING TO LIMITATIONS AND EXCEPTIONS: TREATY PROPOSED BY THE WORLD BLIND UNION (WBU)

Pedro Paranaguá's notes in English and Brazilian Portuguese

Evil Mad Scientists Lab has a new iteration of their sugar-based 3D printer, the CandyFab 6000! This is my favorite 3D printing concept, bar none. Demented and sweet!

It's a brand new CandyFab-- still in beta. A clean break, designed from the ground up with almost no parts in common with the original, the CandyFab 4000. All new mechanics. All new electronics. All new software. Smaller but still big: the build volume is more than 10 liters, but it's now small enough to fit on a desk top...

The new modular electronics control platform is called Zuccherino-- that's italian for "Sugar cube." One Arduino-compatible circuit board per axis. (Our prototype above shows X,Y,Z, Heat, and Air axes, plus a master board.)

It's an expandable system for all kinds of motion control projects, and we'll be making kit versions of all of the Zuccherino boards later this summer.

We've also got new cross platform control software -- called CandyFabulous underway, and it's looking sweet.

The CandyFab 6000 (via Make)

Here's a wonderfully goofy old British phone-company video on the future of the phone and teleworking!

The perils of futurology

Matt sez, "Got any questions for Michael Moorcock? Tachyon Publications just released a career spanning collection of this living legend's very best work, and to kick things off, we thought it would be fun to offer Boing Boing's readers a chance to interview the author. If you've ever wanted to ask him anything, now is your opportunity. Just leave your questions in this post's comments. Boing Boing's editors will then select the very best of the batch and forward them on to Moorcock. Just to make things fun, we'll give three lucky Boing Boing readers free copies of The Best of Michael Moorcock. "

The Best of Michael Moorcock (Thanks, Matt!)

Dead Air sez, "At the Science Fiction Message Board we're preparing for another of our semi-regular "Group Book Reads", which is due to start in just a few days now. For a little bit of fun, we're deviating from the harder SF this time for a bit of alternate history. We've decided to choose the 2008 Hugo Award-winning author Elizabeth Bear - and the book of hers we'll be perusing together is New Amsterdam, a series of linked stories: six novelettes and novellas about Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett and Don Sebastien de Ulloa, who are, respectively, a forensic sorcerer and an amateur detective in a turn of the century contrafactual history set (mostly) on the East Coast of North America. But let the publisher's blurb work its magic on you:"

Abigail Irene Garrett drinks too much. She makes scandalous liaisons with inappropriate men, and if in her youth she was a famous beauty, now she is both formidable--and notorious. She is a forensic sorceress, and a dedicated officer of a Crown that does not deserve her loyalty. She has nothing, but obligations.

Sebastien de Ulloa is the oldest creature he has ever known. He was no longer young at the Christian millennium, and that was nine hundred years ago. He has forgotten his birth-name, his birth-place, and even the year in which he was born, if he ever knew it. But he still remembers the woman who made him immortal. He has everything, but a reason to live.

In a world where the sun never set on the British Empire, where Holland finally ceded New Amsterdam to the English only during the Napoleonic wars, and where the expansion of the American colonies was halted by the war magic of the Iroquois, they are exiles in the new world--and its only hope for justice.

Summer 2009 Group Book Read: New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear (Thanks, Dead Air!)

PaulR sez, "Swedish, poet, novelist and scholar Lars Gustafsson blogged his reasons for voting for the Pirate Party in the next Swedish election to the European Parliament, to be held on 7 June 2009."

Intellectual and personal integrity for the citizens, briefly speaking an internet that has not been transformed into a government channel by lobby-marinated courts and EU politicians in leashes, is arguably more important than the needs of a primarily industrial scene of literature and music, which is rapidly crumbling away already within the lifetime of the authors. The need of being read, of influencing, to formulate one's times, may but does not need to get in conflict with the wish to sell many copies. When the both needs are getting in conflict, the industrial interest must be put aside and the great intellectual sphere of the arts must be defended against threats.

The essential interest of artists and authors, given that they are intellectually and morally serious in hat they are doing, must certainly be to get read, to let their voice become heard in their generation. How that goal is attained, that is, how to reach the readers, is in this perspective of secondary importance.

The growing defence of the internet's expanded freedom of speech, of the immaterial civil rights, that we are now witnessing in country after country, is the start of an - just as the last time in the early 18th century - liberalism that is carried by technology and therefore emancipated.

Therefore, my vote goes to the Pirate Party.

Lars Gustafsson: "Why my vote goes to the Pirate Party" (English translation of today's text (Thanks, PaulR!)

Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "EFF Board Chair Brad Templeton has made a brilliant Downfall remix. The video is interesting not just for being funny, but also for the troubles Brad had creating it. In order to avoid any DMCA violations, he had to make it without circumventing encryption, which naturally led to multiple headaches. We have a short post on the EFF blog about what this says about the need for DMCA exemptions for remix artists"

Unfortunately for Brad, he found in making his parody that creating a fair use like this -- and doing so legally -- is not as easy as it ought to be. As a high profile advocate for digital rights, Brad naturally wants to avoid breaking any laws. And while fair use protects his parody from charges of copyright infringement, he wanted to ensure that he didn't accidentally violate other laws -- in particular the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing encryption.

This meant that Brad couldn't just rip a copy from the his own legally purchased DVD. Instead, just to be safe, he would have to make a copy of the film using the "analog hole," a form of copying that has been recognized by the courts as legally permissible.

When Fair Use Is Fairly Difficult

Hitler tries a DMCA takedown

(Thanks, Hugh!)

A verb for the 21st century:

Re-nonymize, or renonymize, V,. To discover, using data from an "anonymized" data set (a data set from which the explicit identifying data has been removed) which specific individuals generated the data. Usage: ". . . companies claim they're releasing an anonymous dataset, only to discover later that it's not so difficult to re-nomynize it."

Word of the Day: renonymize

If you're in NYC next Saturday, Internet Week New York is hosting a global hackday around tangible interfaces. More info over at the Hackday site. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of this! From Hackday:

In an open hackday for coders and makers, we expand the notion of digital software interfaces into the three-dimensional physical world. Using tangible objects and webcam tracking, we’ll work with the open-source Trackmate project and LusidOSC framework developed by the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. We’ll experiment with new interfaces for music, live and interactive visuals, and the Web, as hackers attending try their own hardware and software projects. By the end of the day, we should have a collection of tangible interface projects. Participants should have a background in Java or Processing; for the complete project, check our site for a required bill of materials.

During the day, we’ll get together and make interfaces. Then, everyone will be welcome to come check out the results and learn how to make their own projects at a party in the evening. We’ll have live music and visual play with the new interfaces, plus a bit of Guitar Hero / music games to blow off steam.

Live global hacking: 11a-7p (arrive promptly for a quick mini-workshop / demo) Party: 7-9:30p

Hackday in NYC: Tangible Interfaces

These are the hands of a marmoset, genetically engineered to glow green under ultraviolet light. The transgenic marmosets aren't the first primates to glow but are apparently the first that pass the genetic modification down to their offspring. The green-glowing marmosets, and other transgenic animals that glow, are used by scientists to gain insight into genetic diseases. Of course, some people aren't too thrilled with this kind of genetic engineering. In fact, tech-artist Eduardo Kac explored some of these hot topics with Alba, his "GFP Bunny" created in 2000. From the BBC News:

Erika Sasaki of the Central Institute for Experimental Animals in Japan, and her colleagues, have introduced a gene into marmoset embryos that allows them to build green fluorescent protein (GFP) in their tissues.

The protein is so-called because it glows green in a process known as fluorescence.

GFP was originally isolated from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which glows green when exposed to blue light.

The protein has become a standard in biology and genetic engineering, and its discovery even warranted a Nobel prize.

From 91 embryos, a total of five GFP-enabled transgenic marmosets were born, including twins Kei and Kou ("keikou" is Japanese for "fluorescence").

Crucially, the team was able to show that their method is maintained in the family - or germline.

Glowing monkeys 'to aid research' (Thanks, Antinous!)

BB pal and Institute for the Future colleague Jess Hemerly sends the following note about the Digital Open, an IFTF project now underway in partnership with Sun and Boing Boing! Jess writes:

Last year, Institute for the Future took an in-depth look at DIY culture with the Future of Making project, led by David Pescovitz. Working under the header "The way things are made is being re-made," we explored a dramatic shift in manufacturing and innovation, where we are moving from top-down, proprietary models to bottom-up and open ones. The maker movement grows larger every year, and with MAKE Magazine's Maker Faire in its fourth year, the momentum continues to push society to take a closer look at all things DIY. With President Obama's recent call to re-make America, more people are beginning to think about how they, too, can help to make the future.

But it's not just tech savvy adults getting into the DIY world. It's young people too, young people who want to play an active role in making their future. Working with technology in particular to create, improve, explore, or contribute to the world around us is a fantastic way to learn about how the world works--and understand how we might be able to make something work better. Young people who take an active interest in technological innovation are the makers of a foundation for a better future.

That's why The Digital Open, an Institute for the Future project in partnership with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing, is looking to capture the spirit of the future makers. We're looking for youth ages 17 and younger who are working with technology to create, improve, explore, or contribute to their world by submitting free & open technology projects in 8 categories ranging from sustainability to gaming, from media to science and education. We want to provide a forum for these young makers to show off their innovations and to find other makers like them. The Digital Open is the maker community of the future.

If you are a young person who loves to create things with technology, whether for fun or with the hope of becoming an entrepreneur one day, maybe even tomorrow, we want you! Or if you are an adult fortunate enough to work with bright young innovators, please encourage them to join us. Sign up at digitalopen.org or email info [at] digitalopen [dot] org for more information on how you can get involved.

Digital Open: An Innovation Expo for Global Youth

The Museum of Flight has a page collecting dozens of airline logos, current and old. Fascinating diversity of designs. Above left, Executive Jet Aviation ; above right, Compagnie Corse Mediterianne. (via Colour Lovers, thanks Tara McGinley!)

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

I've been fascinated by cars with flames ever since I was a kid poring over my big brother's hot rod magazines.

[Photo by Don Marritz]

In 1973 I had a fairly generic white Ford that I painted flames on my myself. Here's a picture of me with the car and my daughter, Georgia, who's now a graphic designer of such books as the best-selling Twilight Movie Companion.

I did a hand-painted, amateur job on my flames--- not at all the way the pros do it---but it was fun. And, despite the dire warnings of my friends, I was still able to sell the car when I moved.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Show and Go car show in Riverside, California, which got me excited about flames all over again.

I found a quintessential flame-car photo on the web today, it's this Merc Lead Sled shot, and it appears on John Filiss's "Serious Wheels" site, among other gems in the "Mercury Custom" section...just look under "M".

Today I finished a painting on this theme, "Man in Flame Car." It's hard to pin down the guy's mood. (More info on my paintings page.)

Our pal Gareth Branwyn says:

Anybody who's been a captive audience of mine for more than a few minutes recently probably knows that I'm writing a novel. I've also mentioned it here on Boing Boing and elsewhere. It explores occult themes and has a main character who's obsessed with the idea of using modern multimedia technologies and ancient ritual techniques to create a theater experience that seriously alters the consciousness of her audience members. She was inspired by Aleister Crowley's attempt at doing ceremonial magick in a theatrical context in his 1910 Rites of Eleusis performances. As part of my research, I've looked at what other people have done in this area of mixing music, theater, ritual and magick. Sadly, most of it is horrible. Cringeworthy. Over time, certain people have captured and sustained my interest, people who seem to be exploring these ideas with a certain degree of rigor, and ya know, talent. And to my surprise and delight, it looks like they've all been rounded up and invited to The Equinox Festival in London the second weekend in June.

One of the multimedia artists working in this realm of ritual performance art and film is Raymond Salvatore Harmon. He can soon add festival organizing to his resume, as he's the man behind the Festival (along with Simon Kane, co-curator of The Salon performance events (with Jack Sargeant), and Andrew Hartwell, proprietor of Aurora Borealis records). Although it's a full-featured occult conference/festival, with an impressive roster of speakers, because it's organized by a multimedia artist, it's the music, film and performances that are unique and most interesting. Any of these program tracks would be worth the price of admission as far as I'm concerned. And as you'd expect, all of the performers concern themselves with occult/spiritual themes in their work. Some of the music includes: John Zorn, Z'ev, Burial Hex, TAGC (with Clock DVA's Adi Newton) and Æthenor. The festival will also see the return of the highly influential British prog folk group Comus, regrouping after a 37 year absence. They'll be performing their album "First Utterance" in its entirety. Closing the festival with be Peter Christopherson, of Throbbing Gristle and Coil, performing under his new moniker, Threshold House Boys Choir. The film track of the festival includes showings of Craig Baldwin's Mock Up On Mu, Paola Igliori's American Magus and The Seed of Joy, Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic, Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Ira Cohen's Kings with Straw Mats and Raymond's film YHVH.Speakers at the event include Boing Boing pal Erik Davis, psychedelics pioneer Ralph Metzner, chaos magician Philip Farber, Voudon Gnosis author David Beth, and Aaron Gach who readers of Arthur magazine will recognize as one of the lovable weirdos behind the Center for Tactical Magic.

One of the other things that first caught my eye about this festival was the name Equinox, the subtitle, "A Festival of Scientific Illuminism," and its motto: "The Method of Science, The Aim of Religion." These are all Crowley references. The name of his magazine was The Equinox and it was subtitled "The Review of Scientific Illuminism" and that was its motto. It was this attempt at bringing even a moderate veneer of scientific rigor to spiritual investigation that first attracted me to Crowley (and to subsequent "followers" of his work, such as Robert Anton Wilson). I'm very anxious to see how much of that is in evidence here. It's certainly refreshing and different to at least see a summer music and arts festival that's not just about getting fucked up and flopping around in the mud (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you).

The Equinox Festival runs from June 12, 13, 14 and will be held at Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London. The Friday night opening event will be at Camden Centre, Bidborough Street. I'll be doing several dispatches for Boing Boing from the Festival, and look forward to talking to Raymond and some of the other artists, speakers and attendees. So, stay tuned...

I'm also going to London to see a once-in-a-lifetime William Blake exhibit. The Tate is recreating his 1809 one-man show, mounted exactly 200 years ago. They've reunited all of the paintings that Blake had in the show. The show was a disaster and got savaged in the only review he received; the show was basically ignored by the public. The whole experience embittered Blake even more and made him withdraw further from public life. In my piece about Blake in MAKE, Volume 17, I talked about his invention of "illuminated printing," a then-radical technique for freeform relief-etching. This show features work done using another technique he invented which was far less successful, called "fresco painting," created with a mixture of tempera paint and carpenter's glue. Tragically, the materials used did not age well and those paintings that have survived are cracked and darkened. It'll be interesting to see the paintings done in this method up close and personal.

The shot that changed German politics in 1967 was fired by an East German Stasi spy:

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today...

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.

Spy Fired Shot That Changed West Germany (Thanks, Bill