Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

Carnivorous plants have always held a special place in my heart. Watching a Venus Flytrap catch its dinner still fascinates me. Recently another type of plant that is just as strange and wonderful as the carnivores has caught my attention; Corpse Flowers.

You might imagine that smelling the world's largest flower would be a lovely experience. You would be very, very wrong.

The Rafflesia arnoldii, a rare and endangered plant known as the "giant panda of the plant world" bears the world's largest flower. A parasitic plant the Rafflesia lives most of its life within the roots of another plant. Eventually a blossom breaks through the root, grows up to three feet wide, and smells almost exactly like a dead body.

Known as a corpse flower or Carrion flower the Rafflesia releases a scent that smells like a rotting corpse, and the flowers petals bear a similar coloration to that of rotten meat. And while the flower smells terrible to humans, it smells like dinner to the carrion beetles and flesh flies which swarm all over the corpse flowers helping them to pollinate.

While the Rafflesia gets big, it has nothing on another corpse flower, the Amorphophallus titanum.

Translated from the greek Amorphophallus titanum means "giant misshapen penis," and while the Rafflesia has the world's largest flower, the titan lays claim to the largest unbranched cluster of flowers in the world. At full size the titan can reach 9 and a half feet tall and 10 feet in circumference. The titan also generates a great deal of heat, the tip reaching approximately human body temperature, which helps strengthen the illusion of rotting meat that attracts the meat eating insects. It, like the Rafflesia, smells terrible.

Link to the extraordinary flora category in the Atlas which is in desperate need of more plant wonders, a list of titans in cultivation, and to an online carnivorous plant museum. (Apparently some of my other boingboingers have a love of corpse flowers as well, previous boingboing mentions here, here, and here)

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

Before the telegraph, there was the optical telegraph, a chain of towers topped by large pivoting cross members, and spaced as far apart as the eye could see. Developed by the Frenchman Claude Chappe at the end of the 18th century, optical telegraph lines once stretched from Paris out to Dunkirk and Strasbourg, and were in service for more than half a century:

Chappe created a language of 9,999 words, each represented by a different position of the swinging arms. When operated by well-trained optical telegraphers, the system was extraordinarily quick. Messages could be transmitted up to 150 miles in two minutes.

Several optical telegraph relay stations are still around, including one in Saverne, France that was renovated in 1998.

The iPhone 3G S launched this morning (w00t!). Did BBG wake up at 4:45 a.m. and head to Apple's flagship store in San Francisco to: a) shoot video, b) purchase said gadget, c) make fun of fanboys, d) spend 2 hours dealing with AT&T, or e) all of the above* ?

• Video of an overeager fanboy charging the pearly gates and getting denied!

• Our first impressions of the iPhone 3G S [verdict: click here to find out]

• Will the new iPhone sell well? The line, frenzy at the SF Apple Store early this a.m. wasn't quite as large as previous launches.

• Would you pay $55 to tether your iPhone, or any handset for that matter?

• Should the 13" Mac Laptop be a "Pro"?

• Timbaland is getting sued for chiptune plagiarism (uh oh).

• An attractive, USB-powered laptop fan.

• We ran a contest for a set of magnetic BuckyBalls. Contest is over (bummer), but feel free to share your favorite Buckminster Fuller quote, or check some reader favorites, in the comments.

• Video of a homemade electric car that looks like a 1950s alien space ship.

• Looking for a Nintendo Entertainment System that's fit for a pimp?

• Popcorn Hour is launching a set-top box that supports Blu-ray... oh, and every video format.

• Why play Wii Bowling with a remote shaped like a stick of butter, when you can use a faux-bowling ball?

*The answer is d)

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

To follow up on Dylan's post about Ball's Pyramid, we've got a whole category of "Anomalous Islands" in the Atlas Obscura that is waiting to be filled out. One of my favorites is La Gomera, a small island in the Canaries, where people communicate with each other from miles apart using one of the most unusual languages in the world:

Known as Silbo, the whistling language of Gomera Island has a vocabulary of over 4,000 words, and is used by "Silbadors" to send messages across the island's high peaks and deep valleys.

Though Silbo was on the verge of extinction in the 1990s, the Gomerans have made a concerted effort to revive their language by adding it to the public school curriculum. Today 3,000 schoolchildren are in the process of learning it.

Here's a sampling of the language:

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

  

Ball's Pyramid is fairly amazing at first glance. However it wasn't until 2001 on a much closer inspection of the island, that scientists realized just how amazing the island, and its inhabits, really were

The remnants of a once massive volcano, Ball's Pyramid juts 1,843 feet out of the Pacific ocean. Discovered in 1788, the barren, rocky spire was thought to be devoid of life until 2001 when a group of scientists discovered what may be the world's rarest insect.

The Lord Howe Island stick insect (Dryococelus australis) had not been seen alive in over 70 years. Known as "land lobsters" or "walking sausages," the six inch long insects had once been common on the neighboring Lord Howe Island, but were assumed to have been eaten into extinction by black rats introduced when a supply ship ran aground in 1918.

Yet in 2001 the scientists found a colony of the huge Lord Howe Island stick insects living under a single bush, a hundred feet up the otherwise entirely infertile rock. Somehow a few of the wingless insects escaped and managed--by means still unknown--to traverse 23 kilometers of open ocean, land on Ball's Pyramid, and survive there. Just 27 of the insects have been found on the rocky spire. They are currently being bred in captivity.

Links to Ball's Pyramid on the Atlas and a link to the fact sheet on the Lord Howe Island stick insect.

Our pals at Sparkle Labs released a new kit designed to introduce you to the basics of hands-on electronics. The Discover Electronics Kit contains a slew of standard components like resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, potentiometers, LEDs, a timer integrated circuit, a breadboard to connect everything together, and of course an instruction manual with a variety of projects. It reminds me of those fun electronics kits with the onboard components and springy terminals that I played with as a kid! At $50, the Discovery Electronics Kit looks like a great gift for any aspiring hardware hacker.
Discover Electronics Kit

Diving hummingbirds experience g-forces in the range that could cause human stunt pilots to blackout. According to new UC Berkeley research, male Anna's hummingbirds fly 30 meters up and then dive down. As they pull up before smashing into the ground, they hit up to 9 Gs. The trick is all about impressing females. From Science news:

For a short period at their peak speed, the birds folded their wings and drilled down through the air at speeds up to 27.3 meters per second (61 miles per hour)...

Adjust for body length, and the world just got a new fastest bird, (integrative biology grad student Chris) Clark says. The hummingbirds’ speed reached 385 body lengths per second, easily beating the peregrine falcon’s recorded dives at 200 body lengths per second. (Though the falcon was diving at 70 meters per second.) A fighter jet with its afterburners on reaches 150 body lengths per second, and a space shuttle screaming down through the atmosphere hits 207 body lengths per second.

"Hummingbird pulls Top Gun stunts"

Here's a trailer for Prélude au sommeil (Prelude to Sleep), a new documentary about pioneering electronic musician Jean-Jacques Perrey. The film features appearances from Gershon Kingsley, Angelo Badalamenti, Michel Gondry, Air, and other contemporaries of Perrey and artists influenced by him. The film's director, Gilles Weinzaepflen, points us to a VOD site where you can view the full film in French or with English subtitles. Prélude au sommeil

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

Graham Burnett wrote a fascinating essay in Cabinet recently about otolithic organs, the pair of sensors in the inner ear that help us stay balanced and maintain inertia. "Grossly speaking," writes Burnett, the otolithic organs consist of "a bunch of tiny pebbles (of the white rock known as calcium carbonate) embedded in a gooey wad that sits atop a carpet of delicate hairs." In humans, those "pebbles" are practically microscopic, but in fish, they can be as large as marbles:

There are several thousand researchers around the world who spend their whole working day looking at fish otoliths. This has nothing to do with their physiological functions, however, and everything to do with their structure and the staggering amount of information they contain. In the first place, each species of fish has a unique otolith shape. Couple this with the fact that they are stone (and therefore comparatively resistant to decomposition), and their utility as a biological marker becomes clear. Interested in the food habits of bottlenose whales? Pump their stomachs and you will end up with relatively few bones but lots of otoliths. Find an otolith expert and he or she will be able to give you a menu...

But the true wonder of these peculiar pearls lies within. Should you have occasion to tonsure a snapper or sea-bass, slicing off the top of its skull just above the eyes, you might take a moment to remove the two largest otoliths (there are, as a rule, six in all, three on each side) from their velvet seats to the right and left of the brain stem. With the heel of a knife you should be able to snap one of them in two, and then, holding it to the light, you will discern a set of concentric bands. These are growth rings--annuli--which, properly counted, will give the age of your fish in years.

Audio embed, below: Merlin Mann, who participated in the recent MaxFunCon gathering, talks about "the process of doing creative work, and particularly how to abandon the quest for perfection, get off your butt and get started." more at maximumfun.org (thanks, Jesse Thorn).

The Sound of Young America

Photo: Rosie Hardy. About the image:

I got the idea for this a few days ago. I was setting up my camera in a car park near a supermarket in my town, because it had a wall I wanted to use in a 365, away from all the cars. I'd been there literally two minutes and I heard a man shout "Dissemble your camera NOW" behind me. He turned out to be from security, and told me to delete any photos I had taken infront of him so he could make sure there were none on my card. I asked him why after I had done so, and he told me that it was because of possible terrorist attacks. (...) Everywhere has gone completely public safety mad.

(Via Gordon Gould)

Pixar flew an employee with a DVD of the animated feature film "Up" (which is only in theaters right now) to the home of a terminally ill child for a private viewing. The girl passed away soon after fulfilling this last wish.

Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing - a movie. From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film. After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.

Pixar grants girl's dying wish to see 'Up' (thanks Virgilio Corrado)

Recently on Offworld, One More Go columnist Margaret Robertson claims Sega owe her £400 for all the money she's sunk in to Sega's maraca-based rhythm game Samba De Amigo over the years, only to get something always broken in return. But still, she says, the original 1998 Dreamcast version, for its motion control and party-based underpinning's, it's "the most prescient project in videogame history", and she keeps returning because it's one of the games that continually showers her in praise.

Elsewhere we rounded up some of the most recent iPhone developments (and wondered if we were over- or under-covering the platform): Steph Thirion's boldly original and relentlessly lovely Eliss gets a free Lite version for all to try, Mobigames' trademark-disputed futurist Edge makes a sudden and unexplained return to the App Store, and we watched with wonder the first two minutes of Rolando 2.

We also saw art/film schlock reimagined as 8-bit games, including Lars Von Trier's Dancer In The Dark, and then discovered that there really will be a Von Trier game, as his latest and most controversial film Antichrist gets adapted for the PC, and listened to Bit Shifter's March of the Nucleotides.

Finally, our 'one shot's for the day: the littlest big billboards in Union Square, and French guerrilla artist Space Invader does neoclassical artist Ingres in pixels (above).

The Open Video Conference kicks off today, and I'll be attending (and, tomorrow, speaking). There's a registration discount for Boing Boing readers. Details here, do come join us!

Oh, they're livestreaming video of the proceedings, too. Check it out.

A large collection of links to videos of people in trance states. Above, practitioners of the African-origin spiritual tradition of Candomblé, in Brazil.

Civilization by Marco Brambilla from CRUSH on Vimeo.

Above: "Civilization," a video installation by artist/director Marco Brambilla for the elevators in the Standard Hotel in NYC.

It's comprised of over 400 video clips and it takes elevator passengers on a trip from hell to heaven as they go up or from heaven to hell as they go down. Pictures of the installation and Q&A with Brambilla and Crush are posted here.

(Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

Following up on Dylan's post about the Electrum, the world's largest Tesla Coil, I'd like to mention my own favorite super-sized scientific instrument: the Jantar Mantar astronomical complex in Jaipur, India. Constructed almost three centuries ago, its 73-foot-tall sundial is the largest in the world:

In 1728, Sawai Jai Singh II, rajah of Jaipur, dispatched his emissaries across the globe to gather the most accurate astronomical data possible. When they returned, Jai Singh ordered the construction of the Jantar Mantar complex, a monumental astronomical observatory constructed entirely out of stone and based on the astronomical tables of the French mathematician Phillipe de la Hire. Among the stone instruments Jai Singh constructed was the Samrat Yantra, a 73-foot tall sundial which remains the largest ever built. Though indistinguishable in design from other dials of the day, it was far and away the most accurate. Its two-second interval markings are more precise than even la Hire's table.

UPDATE: Uh oh. The picture above is of the Jantar Mantar complex in Delhi. Here's a photo of the one in Jaipur:

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Oy. That second picture, which I nabbed off Wikipedia, may still not be the right Jantar Mantar. This one, I am confident, is definitely the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur. Sorry for the confusion.

Cyrus Farivar says:

I guess folks over at Google and Facebook have been reading my Twitter messages and my blog — or more likely, simply sped up processes that were already in motion.

Google announced about 90 minutes ago that it had added Persian to Google Translate, while Facebook is about to launch its Persian-language version of the social networking software.

In my brief test, it seems like the “alpha” moniker is quite valid. While Google Translate was able to handle the Persian phrase: سلام، اسم من سیروس است

and accurately translate it as:

Hello, my name is Cyrus.

Google adds Persian translation, Facebook adds Persian version

The inimitable comic book genius Grant Morrison is coming to Meltdown in Los Angeles to speak and sign copies of his latest hardcover book, Final Crises on Wednesday, July 1st. Clive Barker will be there to have a conversation with Morrison.

It is time to weave wonder and leave mouths agape in the wake of impenetrable accents and extraordinary ideas! It is time for YOU to return to MELTDOWN, because the Scottish swami Grant Morrison is returning to grace us with his presence and give us mere cave dwellers our first bouts of intellectual fire!

Are you going to allow the microphone to be dominated with the weeping milk-tears of egg-handed fools who will simply rehash old discussions of the Talmud of Mr. Tawky Tawny or shall we look towards a brighter day to come and inquire after new scripts, songs, fashions and fabulations?

If you consider yourself a worthwhile nerd, a good geek, a fascinating fan of freak fiction, then do us a favor and start formulating your questions now so that we can extract as much information about our favorite characters and series, old and new, and even if for a moment transcend our mortal coil to a dream world of comical capes and quizzical chimpanzees.

Come complete the circle and revel in the impossible.

CLIVE BARKER will hold a brief conversation with GRANT MORRISON before the signing. Copies of Mr. Morrison’s latest literary luncheons, Final Crisis HC + Batman and Robin #1, will be on sale. That same day is the release of Batman and Robin # 2. Buy one (or 3) of these 3 books and get into the event in the Meltdown Gallery.

Sadly, no outside items will be allowed due to time constrain on the talent. But don’t despair! Refreshments and music will also be provided.

Grant Morrison book signing at Meltdown in LA

City workers in Brooksville, Florida have been handed a new set of workplace rules. Now, they must wear underwear, use deodorant, and cover their open wounds.

There's your new tourism slogan: "Come to Brooksville: We've Covered Our Wounds!"

Fighting for the great American tradition of going commando at work was the city mayor, Joe Bernardini, who was the only member of the council to vote against underwear. He expressed concern over how the new code could be enforced, while also getting a headstart on being charged with harassment: "They said you had to wear undergarments," the mayor was quoted as saying, "but who's going to be the judge of that? Sometimes when it comes to certain people going bra-less, it's obvious. [Emphasis added.] But who's staring to see if that person doesn't have underwear on?"

City Workers Ordered to Wear Underwear

Patricia sez,

I am fortunate enough to teach children who have a variety of disabilities, ranging from Autism, Mild Mental Retardation, to Specific Learning Disabilities. Many of my students come from low income households where even items as simple as crayons are not easily attainable. It is rare that special education students get what they truly need in a system where budget cuts take away the most basic tools for these wonderful children.

Last year Cory adopted my class through Adopt a Classroom and I'd like to make Boing Boing Readers aware of this wonderful website.

Whether you choose my class or another, 100% of your tax deductible donation (as little as $25) goes directly to the teacher and you are informed of every item purchased. The budget cuts are worse than ever this year, but I know there are people out there willing to help.

I hope this doesn't sound like an advertisement. I am a teacher, with 2 California Teaching Credentials and a Master's Degree. I work for LAUSD, one of the largest school districts in the country. Yet, if I don't get donations or use my own money, my class doesn't get things as simple as printer ink and crayons.

I also always make sure to thank my donors personally from all the kids!

Patty's class

Adopt a Classroom (Thank, Patricia!)

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

Riffing off of Xeni's excellent post about Omega Recoil I wanted to bring your attention to the Electrum, the world's largest Tesla Coil.

"Known as Electrum, the four-story (38-ft) Tesla coil was commissioned by a prominent New Zealand art patron Alan Gibbs, and set up on on his farm outside of Auckland, New Zealand in April 1998. Built by artist Eric Orr and high voltage engineer Greg Leyh, the enormous coil puts out over 3 million volts.

A particular delight of the Electrum Coil is the hollow spherical cage on top, where Greg Leyh would often sit during shows. While Leyh is safe within the Faraday cage created by the sphere, if he were to put his hand through the cage, he would be instantly electrocuted."

As interesting as the coil itself is Alan Gibbs, the art patron who commissioned it. Gibbs is one of New Zealand's wealthiest residents and is worth a third of a billion dollars. Called a "James Bond in Jandals" Gibbs has dabbled in everything from cars to telecoms, however the Bond reputation comes from Gibbs' recent project, the Aquada. The Aquada is an amphibious car that travels at over a 100km/h on land and smoothly transitions to 30km/h in water. Along with his other hobbies Gibbs owns what he calls "The Farm," an area rural in New Zealand where he collects and privately displays massive works of art such as the Electrum and Neil Dawson's "Horizons" pictured below.

There is more info on the Electrum on the Atlas, this is an interesting article about the Aquada, and a link to more pictures of the enormous art on found on Gibb's Farm.

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

My wife and I are in the process of relocating from Brooklyn to New Haven. So far, the most tedious part of the move has been packing up the collection of death masks we acquired once upon a time in a fortuitous eBay bonanza:

The majority of these heads are gazillionth-order plaster cast reproductions (knock-offs of knock-offs of knock-offs) of originals held in the Laurence Hutton Collection at Princeton. Several are actually life masks, originally cast by sculptors.

In roughly bottom-to-top, left-to-right order, the faces in this photo belong to:

On the ledge: Abraham Lincoln, Laurence Barrett, Sir Richard Owen, Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun, William Tecumseh Sherman

The bottom six hanging on the wall: Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonio Canova, John Keats, Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith, Jean-Paul Marat

The next highest six: Franz Liszt, Napoleon Bonaparte (well, maybe), Frederick the Great, George Washington, William Blake, Oliver Cromwell

The next highest five: Jeremy Bentham, Aaron Burr, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Kean, Ulysses S. Grant

And the top row: Jonathan Swift, Maria Malibran, David Garrick, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Moore.

On another wall not pictured we've got: Robespierre, another Abe Lincoln, Frederic Chopin, Pope Pius IX, Benjamin Disraeli, Benjamin Franklin, and John Dilinger. Plus there are a few more whose names I've forgotten in storage.

If there's one death mask I wish we had, it would be the Inconnue de la Seine.

Etsy seller VonErickson offers this coffin couch for $3500. It's available in purple, red, or black velvet. The lid closes too. Coffin Couch (Thanks, Patty Trujillo!)

Boing Boing former guestblogger and bOING bOING editor Gareth Branwyn is on a magickal, mystery tour through London to attend an occult conference, conduct research for his novel, and find the ghost of William Blake. Gar writes:

People here must think I'm a crazy man, as it's hard for me not to walk around London mumbling William Blake poetry; it just sorta burbles out of me as I walk by, for instance, the Gothic church only blocks away from where he used to live on South Molton Street. I'm actually staying across from that dingy church, at another poet's house, a B&B in what used to be the home of Edward Lear. Blake likely would have walked past this church, maybe even sketched it.

But I can guarantee you that he never walked these streets in William Gibson's shoes! But I am! I'm sporting a baby-shit brown pair of William Gibson sneakers, with chocolate-brown leather accents and rubber sidewalls. I wanted the black pair, something Bill, the latter, would certainly appreciate, but they were out. I was lucky to get any pair. I only found out about them days before I left for my trip. I couldn't believe it. Gibson designing sneakers? And shoulder bags? And bomber jackets? It seemed too good to be true – trucking into some weirdo occult music and arts festival, being held on the very alchemical-sounding Red Lion Square, wearing a pair of Gibsonian sneakers? I had to have me some of that pregnant symbo!

I had a devil of a time tracking down a pair. The only place that had 'em in the US was Self Edge in San Francisco. And they had precious-few pairs left, and only in brown. Not sure if they'll get more. I think it was a limited edition sorta deal. Self Edge does carry some other Buzz Rickson William Gibson merch, such as the shoulder bags.

The sneakers are great looking, sorta tweaked-up Chucks. Several people commented on them at the Festival and it was a howl to say: “Guess what brand they are?” “These are Gibsonian sneakers, dude!” Nobody believes you (the only Bill branding is under the tongue). The style of the shoe is great, the packaging is worthy, but the quality of the material and the work seems a tad chincy for the $170. Not sure how long they'll last, but I'm still glad I got them.

My Gibsonian sneakers have taken me far and wide as I've tried to map Blakean space here in London. Trying to find overt evidence of dear William, the former, is sadly difficult. Besides the building on Molton Street, now in a posh shopping area, there's little else. As the Blake Society website puts it: “His birthplace, on the corner of Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) & Marshall Street, was demolished in 1965. The hideous block of flats built on the site is named William Blake House.” If you go to Wren’s St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, you can see the font in which he was baptized. The only other building he lived in that still stands is the cottage on the Sussex coast where he and his wife lived for three years at the beginning of the 19th century (that I did NOT see).

But the amazing thing to me, a huge revelation even, is how much his art was an expression of this city (among other things). I certainly thought I knew how much London meant to him, and how much of an important role it played in his mytho-poetic cosmology, but I never realized the extent to which that poetry was a psycho-geographic mapping of London until I walked its streets, in William Gibson's shoes, Blake's verse unwinding all around me like it's encoded in the odorous steam that swirls up from the underground.

I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

Mark Ryden's Tree Show Postcard Microportfolio is a delightful set of 15 souvenir postcards. Published by the good people at Last Gasp, the images are from Ryden's 2007 Los Angeles exhibition. At just $10 from Amazon, the Tree Show Postcard Microportfolio is a terrific and inexpensive objet d'art. I might put the postcards in little frames and make a nice wall collage.
Mark Ryden's Tree Show Postcard Set

Figure/Ground is Liao Yusheng's architecture and travel photography site. Gorgeous work. Yusheng's photography has appeared in various books and also New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and Time Asia. Above left, Verona. Above right, Yichang Airport. Click to see the full images. Figure/Ground (Thanks, Ari Pescovitz)

In 1913, Marcel Duchamp labeled everyday objects as art. Those "readymades" are now in museums. Now, artist Ji Lee has taken a classic Duchamp readymade and put it back into the everyday context of the street. Duchamp Reloaded

(Download / YouTube) Boing Boing Video today peeks inside the electrified world of Omega Recoil, a group of engineers and "makers" who craft giant Tesla Coils, and stage humorous and thrilling performances with those large electrical devices. What's a Tesla Coil? From the Tesla Society website:

[It] is one of Nikola Tesla's most famous inventions -- essentially a high-frequency air-core transformer. It takes the output from a 120vAC to several kilovolt transformer & driver circuit and steps it up to an extremely high voltage. Voltages can get to be well above 1,000,000 volts and are discharged in the form of electrical arcs. Tesla himself got arcs up to 100,000,000 volts (...) [They] are unique in the fact that they create extremely powerful electrical fields. Large coils have been known to wirelessly light up florescent lights up to 50 feet away, and because of the fact that it is an electric field that goes directly into the light and doesn't use the electrodes, even burned-out florescent lights will glow.

For viewers in San Francisco -- Omega Recoil members will be giving a talk at the 7th anniversary Dorkbot event, which features other cool "maker mutants" we've featured on Boing Boing Video before, like Jon Sarriugarte and the Boiler Bar folks. Organizer Karen Marcelo says,

...and to think this all started because i was bored seven years ago and decided to call Douglas and start the SF one in Marc Powell's garage! Pesco was a speaker at the first one! We had Brian Normanly talk about how to 'liberate' electricity from PG&E. I dont think anyone has the guts to do that now! :) Here's that first event from 2002.

More on Jon Sarriugarte's blog.

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Sponsor shout-out: This week's Boing Boing Video episodes are brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "will influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

A Tibetan exile group in Northern India (whose work I've reported on previously for Boing Boing, WIRED, and NPR) is seeking used voice recording gear for an upstart independent community radio station.

At left, a photo I shot of Phuntsok Dorjee with a fellow volunteer, setting up a wireless network relay point inside a tribal family's garage on the top of a mountain at the southern edge of the Himalayas. Goats and routers, under the same roof, not far from the Tibetan Government in Exile's home of Dharamsala, India.

Phuntsok says,

"We have 10 students in the radio team but have only 2 Sony IC voice recorders. A friend of the organization will be in San Francisco sometime in early July on his way to India and he can bring for us the voice recorder if we manage to get some."

Got any used voice recorders, or related gear you're not using? Email him at: phuntsok at tcv.org.in. These are good folks, doing innovative work without a lot of resources.

Related: A Wireless Network for 'Little Lhasa' (Xeni on NPR)

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

A friend of mine just returned to the US after a year spent teaching, spear fishing, and eating giant clams in the Marshall islands. The Marshall islands are most known for being home to Bikini Atoll site of the U.S. nuclear tests. (It is also home to the Cactus Dome, a gigantic concrete slab built to cover the enormous pile of radioactive dirt left behind.) One of the interesting things my friend told me is that the largest group of Marshallese living outside the islands can be found at the foothills of the Ozarks in Springfield Springdale, Arkansas.

The Marshallese diaspora can be traced to one man, a Marshallese man named John Moody who took a job at Tyson Chicken in the 1980s. When he returned home to the islands, he let everyone know that there were jobs available at Tyson and that he would help people get setup in Springdale. Unfortunately the Arkansas Marshallese diaspora hasn't been much of a boon to the islands, with most of the money going out of the islands and into Arkansas to help with the expenses of America. Today roughly 6,000-8,000 Marchellese live in Springdale, and at a given time fifty percent of Tyson Chicken's floor staff are from the Marshall islands. The Marshallese do not generally wear shoes inside, and work at Tyson barefoot with mesh booties covering their feet. You will also note a large number of CB antennas on cars in the area as the Marshallese tend to use CB radios, as they do on the islands, rather then cell phones to communicate.

This also reminded me of another unexpected diaspora I had read about, the large Mennonite community in Belize. Roughly 10,000 Russian Mennonites live in Belize, farming the land and living according to their religious beliefs. All of which leads me to the question, what are some other unexpected diasporas around the world? A good overview of the Marshallese in Arkansas can be found here

Michael Moorcock has answered the questions you put to him (see Michael Moorcock answers your questions!) as part of the promo for his new book, The Best of Michael Moorcock. Moorcock will choose the three lucky prizewinners later this week.

Elric c'est moi, is the short answer. I've written about this in the introductions to the new Del Rey editions of the Elric stories. Elric was the 'me' I was as a late teenager -- like many teenagers -- angsty, self-blaming, feeling I was doing harm to others around me and so on. Unlike many of my characters (Moonglum, E's sidekick, for instance) Elric wasn't based on a real person, apart from myself, but on a sort of melange of fictitious characters. Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin's great Gothic character, is the most obvious. I read a lot of Romantic and Gothic literature in my teens, as well as various mythologies, and the notion of the doomed character, who must find another to carry his burden, appealed to me. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress had a great influence on me as a lad, too! It was the first book I bought with my own money (though coming from what was essentially a secular home) and of course I was attracted to the pictures. The Doré illustrated Milton was another book I bought early. I suppose all those characters have to be aspects of myself, at different stages of my life, but weren't influenced by fiction the way parts of Elric were. His basic character and appearance were based on Zenith the Albino, a hero-villain who fought Sexton Blake, an English pulp detective whom I enjoyed (especially in his 1920s and 30s adventures) and who I came to, by strange chance, through my early enjoyment of P.G.Wodehouse! A Blake writer, Edwy Searles Brooks, tended to write in imitation of Wodehouse so when I ran out of Psmith and Jeeves I found something almost as good in Brooks (who, I discovered, was a near neighbour of mine as a boy). ERB and ESB could be called my twin literary midwives.

The Readers of Boing Boing interview Michael Moorcock

Rebecca MacKinnon writes about news that China may be backing down from publicly announced plans to install Green Dam internet filtering software on all Chinese computers.

It would be naïve to think that scrapping the Green Dam mandate means the end of headaches for computer- and device-makers world-wide. More and more governments -- including democracies like Britain, Australia and Germany -- are trying to control public behavior online, especially by exerting pressure on Internet service providers. Green Dam has only exposed the next frontier in these efforts: the personal computer.

First, some context: China currently has the world's most sophisticated and multi-layered system of Internet censorship. Objectionable content on domestic Web sites is deleted or prevented from being published, and access to a large number of overseas Web sites is blocked or "filtered." Decisions about what to censor are based on the Chinese Communist Party's desire to maintain power and legitimacy. There is no transparency or accountability in the censorship system, no public consultation in developing block lists or censorship criteria, and no way to appeal the blockage or removal of Web content.

Green Dam purports to take censorship to a whole new level. A report by the Open Net Initiative, an academic consortium dedicated to the study of censorship and surveillance, finds the Chinese government's mandate of censoring software at the PC-level "unprecedented." Companies installing the software risk becoming part of the existing opaque extension of regime power, at the other end of the chain that already includes Internet service providers, Web hosts and Web content companies.

The Green Dam Phenomenon: Governments everywhere are treading on Web freedom (Wall Street Journal).

I've got a new feature up on Internet Evolution today, a piece called "Internet ©rapshoot: How Internet Gatekeepers Stifle Progress," about how everybody wants to be a gatekeeper -- the studios and publishers, the bookstores and online retailers and theaters, the "creators rights' groups" and how that ends up screwing everyone:

So, how do you use copyright to ensure that the future is more competitive and thus more favorable to creators and copyright industries?

It's pretty easy, really: Use your copyrights to lower the cost of entering the market instead of raising it.

What if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had started out by offering MP3 licenses on fair terms to any wholesaler who wanted to open a retailer (online or offline), so that the cost of starting a Web music store was a known quantity, rather than a potentially limitless litigation quagmire?

What if the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the North American Broadcasters Association made their streams available to anyone who paid a portion of their advertising revenue (with a guaranteed minimum), allowing 10 million video-on-demand systems to spring up from every garage in the world?

What if the Authors Guild had offered to stop suing Google for notional copyright violations in exchange for Google contributing its scans to a common pool of indexable books available to all search-engines, ensuring that book search was as competitive as Web search?

Copyright is a powerful weapon, and it grows more powerful every day, as lawmakers extend its reach and strength. Funny thing about powerful weapons, though: Unless you know how to use them, they make lousy equalizers. As they say in self-defense courses, "Any weapon you don't know how to use belongs to your opponent."

Recording artists get an extra 45 years of copyright, and it's promptly taken from them by the all-powerful record labels, who then use it to strengthen their power by extending their grasp over distribution channels. Authors are given the right to control indexing of their works, and it's promptly scooped up by Google, who can use it to prevent competitors from giving authors a better deal.

Internet ©rapshoot: How Internet Gatekeepers Stifle Progress

Continuing her remarkable series of reviews of older sf novels on Tor.com, Jo Walton today looks at Heinlein's Starman Jones (one of my favorite Heinlein juveniles. and his juveniles are my favorite Heinlein altogether!), in a review entitled "Starman Jones, or how Robert A. Heinlein did plot on a good day."

It's easy to see the overview as a set of adventures, leaving Earth and going to other planets, getting promoted, but it all has one goal: getting to that position where Max's freak talent is the only thing that can save them, where he becomes captain and astrogates them home. Everything leads to that. It's climactic. You couldn't predict that is where it would end up (I think, I don't know, I first read this when I was twelve), but there aren't any false leads. And beyond that, the real story is Max learning lessons--from Sam, from Eldreth, from his experiences--and ending up back on that hillside with a job to go to. Both stories end up at the same point, and everything reinforces the theme not just of Max growing up but of him learning what it is to grow up and what he actually values. At the beginning he's a kid with a freak talent, at the end he's a man who has lied, told the truth, seen a friend die and brought his ship home. There are no false moves, everything goes towards that. And it's a great end. All his juveniles have great ends.

Now Heinlein, from what he said about how he worked, did all that entirely on instinct, sitting down and writing one word after another and doing what happens and where it's going purely by gut-feel. When he gave Eldreth the spider-monkey, he wasn't thinking "and later, it can rescue them from aliens" because he had no idea at that point that they'd get lost and end up on an alien planet. But when they got to the alien planet, he knew what he had and what he wanted to do because of the way it flowed. But it works like wyrd, where the beginning is wide open and it narrows in and in so that at the end there's only one place for it to go.

Starman Jones, or how Robert A. Heinlein did plot on a good day

Starman Jones (Amazon)

Flickr user What Makes The Pie Shops Tick? has posted a complete, high-rez) scan of the 1964 Frederick's of Hollywood catalog!

1964 Frederick's of Hollywood Catalog (Thanks, copyranter!)

Shiv Sena, the ultra-right Hindu nationalist party in India, has launched a global brand of snack food called the Shiv Vada -- a sandwich containing deep-fried potato ball. They want to make it as popular as hamburgers.

The initiative is being seen as an attempt by the saffron party, which popularised the 'vada pav', staple diet of many a Mumbaikar, four decades ago, to establish rapport with the 'Marathi manoos', whose tilt in favour of Sena offshoot MNS, cost the party dearly in recent Lok Sabha polls.

"In foreign countries, burger is available 24-hours. Why can't vada pav be also available similarly," Uddhav said. The party, which has started a cooperative to encourage Marathi entrepreneurs, showcases 'Shiv Vada' as its first project under the new initiative, sources said. "To begin with, 25 Shiv Vada stalls would be operational in the city," they said.

Shiv Sena launches 'Shiv Vada'; to take it global

(Image: Jumbo Vada Pav.jpg, CC-BY, Wikimedia Commons)

Canadian copyfighting attorney Howard Knopf has written a great response to the Canadian Record Industry Association's letter to the Toronto Star, in which they claimed that Michael Geist column, "Time to slay Canadian file-sharing myths" was incorrect. Yes, it's truths about myths about myths about file sharing!

A levy-free terabyte external hard drive that now sells for less than CDN $200 can hold about 250,000 songs downloaded via P2P. The fact that this is apparently legal in Canada is the direct consequence of the private copying levy scheme that Mr. Pfohl's employer, the Canadian Recording Media Association ("CRIA"), so enthusiastically and effectively lobbied for and was given in the 1997 amendments to the Copyright Act. CRIA was short sighted. Mass access to the internet was already in full flight and the concept of the "celestial juke box" was already old news at that time. The Canadian levy scheme has now generated more than a quarter billion dollars. CRIA members whine about the consequences of their legislation all the way to the bank (and indeed incessantly afterwords), but keep on cashing the cheques.

As CRIA must constantly be reminded, "be careful what you wish for." And hopefully, Government officials, MPs and Ministers will be careful about who they listens to when it comes to Canadian copyright law and sound public policy. CRIA and some of those who speak for it it, have a poor record for foresight, wisdom, credibility and even basic accuracy in these matters.

More Myths about Myths about File Sharing (via Michael Geist)

Recently on Offworld we saw indie devs Flashbang return with Crane Wars -- hands down their best game since Minotaur China Shop and likely to be the best indie game of the month -- which sees your staunchly union construction lot pitted against the loathsome scabs next door. It's very polished, very funny, and very well balanced between careful construction and wanton destruction as you fling flaming rubble into the scab lot to stymie their progress.

Elsewhere we also took a belated look at Fret Nice (above) -- a former Indie Games Fest finalist platformer played entirely with a Guitar Hero guitar -- which Tecmo has picked up for Xbox 360 and PS3 release, and saw how the 3.0 firmware has officially unlocked the iPhone's future of connected, social gaming.

We also read about the etymology of a seemingly endless list of video game characters, saw the fanciest new LED-lit Metroid figurine, and saw LittleBigPlanet go Druidistic, and had a lazyweb bullseye as we asked (and received!) a translation for this ultra-dryly funny and massively adorable Japanese 8-bit meme crossover.

And our 'one shot's for the day: Portal's Aperture Science vehicles spotted on the roads of Sweden (!), and Skinny Ships' fantastic work-in-progress retro-Zelda illustration.

Trepanation, the ancient practice of drilling a hole in your skull to relieve pressure on the brain, is now being studied as a possible treatment for dementia. The effort is being led by Russian neurophysiologist Yuri Moskalenko, now at the Beckley Foundation in Oxford. Apparently, dementia may be correlated with cranial compliance, a measure of how cerebrospinal fluid circulates around the brain. If that system gets mucked up, the brain doesn't function well. From New Scientist (image from Wikimedia Commons):

Moskalenko studied 15 people who had undergone (trepanation) following head injuries. He found that their cranial compliance was around 20 per cent higher than the average for their age. Based on this, he calculates that a 4-square-centimetre hole increases cerebral blood flow by between 8 and 10 per cent, which is equivalent to 0.8 millilitres more blood per heartbeat (Human Physiology, vol 34, p 299). This, he says, shows that trepanation could be an effective treatment for Alzheimer's, and he even goes so far as to suggest that it might provide a "significant" improvement in the mental functions of anyone from their mid-40s, when cranial compliance starts to decline.

The Return of Trepanation

Danish designer Sebastian Campion put 300 t-shirts for sale at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Denmark. Each shirt in the Social Souvenir project has a different snip of text from an artist whose work is featured in the museum. When you buy one of the shirts, you provide your name and address to place you (and the shirt) on a Google Map. Above are my three favorites, with text by Brion Gysin, Laurie Anderson, and Yoko Ono. Social Souvenir

Markus sez, "300 people gathered today in Berlin to demonstrate against the German net censorship law. The Deutsche Bunestag (German parliament) will vote on that law today. Lots of banners with slogans like 'New Berlin Wall?', 'IT-Courses for politicians' and 'Don't worry, we're from the internets' showed a colourful protest in front of the Brandenburger Gate close to the Reichstag."

Demonstration against Censhorship in Berlin (Thanks, Markus!)

• Jay-Z vs. Auto-Tunes Part II: the rapper's anti-Auto-Tunes track gets remixed by an artist that puts Hova's vocals through Auto-Tunes.

• The iPhone 3.0 OS has released (yay!). But it's temporarily bricking phones (boo!).

• A massive touchscreen wall that can handle multiple touches/users. Oh, and did we mention it's HUGE?

• Fujifilm is supplying Matt Sharp of the bands Weezer and The Rentals with black and white Neopan film for a special project.

• Photos of little tiny wire creatures (aka Automata).

• A video of an RGB table that changes colors. It is beautiful.

• Verizon and AT&T continue to defend SMS price hikes.

• Could the Cideko Air Keyboard be the perfect device for couch surfing?

• A reminiscence about primitive graphics hardware and "Super Reality" architecture.

• Beware of "Troogle"! (if you have no idea what that is, you could Google it or simply click here)

Barry Ritholz sez,

It is exceedingly difficult to convey exactly how much we are spending o bailouts. Start talking trillions (versus mere billions) and you get puzzled looks from people. Humans have a hard time conceptualizing any number that large. I wanted a graphic way to clearly show how astonishingly ginormous the amounts involved were.

This Bailout Nation graphic shows the the total costs to the taxpayer of all the monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed. It is nothing short of astonishing. In one short year the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one-time expenditure of the USA, including WW2, the moon shot, the New Deal, Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars -- COMBINED. 206 years versus 12 months.

Bailout Costs vs Big Historical Events (Thanks, Barry!)

Cliff sez, "Bozeman City, Montana now asks all applicants for jobs to 'Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.,' the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords."

The anonymous viewer emailed the news station recently to express concern with a component of the city's background check policy, which states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate.

The requirement is included on a waiver statement applicants must sign, giving the City permission to conduct an investigation into the person's "background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records."

Bozeman City job requirement raises privacy concerns (Thanks, Cliff!)

This 1965 NatGeo ad for GM's "Tomorrow-Land" exhibit at the 1964 World's Fair makes me go all dribbly for a time-machine: "You can look over GM's exciting 'idea' cars -- Firebird IV with television, stereo, game table, refrigerator; GM-X with jet aircraft cockpit and controls--fascinating design and engineering innovations right out of tomorrow. You'll take a ride that is wrapped in wonders . . . through the metropolis of the future, over Antarctic wastes, into tropical jungles, along the ocean floor."

TOMORROW-LAND (Apr, 1965)

George W. Hart's Frabjous is a 3D sculpture you can print and assemble yourself with some cardboard and glue and patience. It's named for a line from Jabberwocky, my favorite poem (it was what we had at our wedding, in lieu of a service).

Frabjous (via Evil Mad Scientist Labs)

Alys sez, "A new bill is due to be introduced Thursday in the Canadian House of Commons that will give police the ability to eavesdrop on online communications. This legislation would apparently allow them to force ISPs to allow the police to tap into their systems to obtain information. Naturally, this comes about with the spectres of 'gangsters, sexual predators and terrorists.'"

They forgot pirates. The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse are gangsters, child pornographers, terrorists and pirates. As a Pirate-Canadian, I am deeply insulted.

The proposed legislation would force Internet service providers to allow law enforcement to tap into their systems to obtain information about users and their digital conversations...

Privacy advocates and civil libertarians, however, have vocally opposed the prospect of giving police "lawful access" to the digital conversations of Canadians by being able to access such things as their text messages, e-mails, web surfing habits and Internet phone lines.

Feds to give cops Internet-snooping powers (Thanks, Alys!)

Vancouver, site of an upcoming Olympic games, has just announced a policy prohibiting cops from taking away your camera or making you erase your photos.

It's always been policy but now it will be enforced. Vancouver police are not allowed to seize cameras or cell phones from anyone, unless they have consent, a warrant, or the person has been lawfully arrested.

Constable Lindsay Houghton tells the Province newspaper the policy has always been there, but it's now in writing and updated in their official regulations manual.

Vancouver police update camera/cell phone seizure policy

Scott DeathBoy sez, "Blog post about a photographer's interaction with a police officer, who wrongly tried to have him delete the photo of their van in a disabled bay (referencing terrorism). The photographer held their ground and the policewoman backed down after checking her facts."

As soon as I had taken a shot, PC Smith (40144) came out from the train station and asked to speak with me. She asked why I'd taken a photo of her van. I told her that it was parked in a disabled bay. She told me that she'd been called because a woman was self-harming on the station and that was the only place she could park...

I asked her why she wanted the photo to be deleted, she told me that "in the current climate" the police had been asked to stop people from taking photos of sensitive buildings and of the police.

That isn't true - and I told her so.

She was told by her superior that she could take down a description of me. I told her that asking to delete photos was silly because they can be easily undeleted. I also thanked her for not escalating the situation. I left. As I left, I allowed my phone to post the photo I'd taken to twitpic.

Police, Camera, Action... (Thanks, Scott Deathboy!)