(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