Jennifer Abel of Tara Books send me a PDF version of Fingerprint, by Andrea Anastasio.

When designer and artist Andrea Anastasio visited the US some years ago, he was fingerprinted (like everyone else) by the airport immigration authorities. This moment -- both banal and ominous -- stayed with him until it worked its way into his art. The result is Fingerprint, a playful and provoking tale that celebrates resistance to state surveillance and control. The artist's fingerprints, letter-pressed onto the pages of a book, create progressively complex patterns and sequences, transporting the fingerprint from the world of forensics and law into the freeing world of art and imagination.

This is a timely and many-layered visual tale that is both a work of art and a political communiqué. An accompanying essay by historian and political activist V. Geetha points to those suggestive instances when people across cultures and nations have resisted fingerprinting, asserting their right to existence while fighting all attempts to foreclose their identities. And each copy is an original letterpressed handmade edition - thereby preserving the originality of both the fingerprints and printing method itself.

Fingerprint, by Andrea Anastasio

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

"Why have we not developed an aesthetic of the inside of the body?," wonders one of the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. He speaks for Cronenberg, who took up the thread in an interview he and I conducted. "We have contests in which we decide who is the most beautiful woman in the world," said Cronenberg, "and yet, if you were to show the inside of that woman's body, you would have a lot of grossed-out people. Why is that? We should be able to have a World's Most Perfect Kidney contest, where women or men unzip to show their kidneys. We can't become integral creatures until we come to terms with our bodies and we haven't come remotely close to that. We're incredibly schizophrenic."

Cronenberg's visceral aesthetic is bodied forth (so to speak) in La Specola, an 18th century anatomical museum at the University of Florence. It's fitting that the name, from the Latin for mirror (the museum is housed in a former observatory), is close etymological kin to speculum, an instrument used, as every woman knows, to dilate the opening of a body cavity for examination. La Specola is home to a collection of visible women and men, medical teaching aids that comprise some of the finest examples of ceroplasty, the art of modeling anatomical specimens in wax.

Xtools are a fine-looking line of marine tools; as the ISDA blog says, "The rust-resistant tools feature tungsten-carbide cutting blades (for cutting braided wire) and foamy, soft-grip ergonomic handles that float. The loud colors help you find the suckers if you knock them off the boat as you reach for your beverage."

Xtools (via IDSA Materials and Process Selection)

Carl Malamud sez,

Earlier this year, 20 million pages of the U.S. Federal Court's PACER database were downloaded, audited for privacy violations, and submitted as evidence to the Judicial Conference, the policy-making body of the courts. That incident led to a Senate investigation, clean-up by 30 district courts, and PACER now requires each lawyer to click at each login that they understand their privacy requirements. (Scribd, PDF )

When public data is locked up behind a cash register, nobody has an incentive to fix privacy problems. Only when the public got access to the data did privacy problems begin to be fixed. When public data becomes public, we also start to see real innovation.

A great example is today's release by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy of RECAP, a Firefox plugin. RECAP is a public domain proxy that allows professional PACER users--lawyers, journalists, and law students--to save money on access charges and at the same time create a public domain archive. RECAP lets lawyers do good by doing good.

Here's how it works. The 20 million pages harvested earlier this year have been unfolded into the Internet Archive by the Princeton team in a format that includes extras like metadata and SHA1 hashes. When you use the RECAP plugin to access uscourts.gov, if somebody already grabbed this doc, you get it for free. If not, you pay $0.08/page, but the doc gets recycled so the next user gets it free.

Better Access to Public Court Records

Previously on Boing Boing:

• Carl Malamud, rogue archivist, in Wired
• California construction codes liberated
• US Judiciary opts to spend millions on accessing its own records, which are now available on the Web for free
• Did the US gov't sell exclusive access to its legislative history to Thomson West?
• Loads more US caselaw online for free

Carl sez, "'Domain Tasters' who grab a domain name for a few days and then return it before having to pay have been thwarted by a new ICANN policy that charges for excessive returns. Monthly returned domains have dropped 99.7% from a year ago."

Domain tasters managed to make money with the practice, which essentially cost them nothing, in several ways. By registering variants of some domain name in bulk, it would be possible to direct them all to a simple webpage that harvested revenue from advertising services (Google, for example, acted to block the practice around the same time ICANN did). These could be used to quickly grab users looking for something related to a current event, or to sample a wide range of typos for a popular site; any names with staying power could be kept, while the rest could be discarded after a few days at no cost.

An alternate approach was to track users as they searched for the availability of different domain names, then register anything they considered. If the user ultimately tried to register one, the domain taster could offer to part with the one they'd registered at an inflated price; if nothing happened in a few days, the name was returned.

"Domain tasters" bitter as new fees put an end to their games (Thanks, Carl!)

Mathematicians at the University of Ottawa, Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad and Robert J. Smith, have published "When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of a Zombie Outbreak!" It's a serious look at the mathematical epidemiology of zombiism, published in "Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress."

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

PDF: When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of a Zombie Outbreak! (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(Image: Zombies Swarm Apple Store, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Jayel Aheram's photostream)

(Video: Bob Dylan performing "Blowin' in the Wind," 1963, from No Direction Home.)

New Jersey police detained 68-year old American music star Bob Dylan recently, after a young officer failed to recognize him. A disheveled Dylan was wearing a hoodie, wandering around in the rain looking at a house for sale. The 24-year-old female officer was responding to a phone call from the occupants of a home that had a "For Sale" sign on it. The residents were called in with a report of an "eccentric-looking old man" in their yard

"We got a call for a suspicious person,'' Buble said. "It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale."

"I asked him what his name was and he said, 'Bob Dylan,' Buble said. "Now, I've seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn't look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

"So I said, 'OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?' He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I'm really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was. We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn't sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something," Buble said.

ABC News (via Eddie Codel)

Vesti la giubba! Spotted on YouTube by BB pal Drew Carey, this 1960s Rice Krispies commercial is an award winner. Simpsons fans may recall Krusty the Klown paying homage to it as well. (via @DrewFromTV)

The little fella sure does get around. Mashable has ten examples of "crasher squirrel as meme" photoshoppery right here, but I bet many more exist. Why don't you tell me about them in the comments.

Previously: Crashing Squirrel

Writing on behalf of the The Burning Man Organization (BMO), Andie Grace has issued a response to the EFF blog post which criticized the annual fest's photo policies as overly restrictive:

Believe me, I'd love to see a better solution than wading through piles of images to approve certain public uses (and turn down or enforce against others) every year, but after 10 years working with these licenses and observing their utility during the evolution of the digital age, the only thing I'm certain of is that the issue is not as simple as the EFF would like you to think.

Example: find me a participant who would vote "yes" on seeing a video or photo of the Man burning, or their own art car or sculpture, in a car commercial. You probably can't - but even the Creative Commons Noncommercial license wouldn't enable Burning Man itself to enforce against such use, nor the dozens of other similar violations it sees each year because the car company would claim (correctly) that Burning Man has no standing to enforce the Creative Commons license, only the photographer does -- and what if the photographer was the one who sold the image to the ad agency in the first place? What if we couldn't locate the photographer to join forces with us? A Creative Commons license simply does not provide Burning Man the direct ability to enforce against such use - something we've unfortunately run up against many times as we work to keep such commercialist wolves at bay.

"Snatching Digital Rights" or Protecting Our Culture? Burning Man and the EFF (blog.burningman.com)

(Livingbrush Woman Art by Scott Fray, Image by Bryce Hunt)

Here is YouTube ukulele star Julia Nunes doing a haunting but delightful version of "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys. And no, this isn't Mark posting under David's name.

Todd says:

Here's Robert trying to flatten a warped 78 record by heating it in the oven. It's a difficult process, and one that can easily destroy the record as well. His efforts were unsuccessful this time, and we're asking you for your help. Robert is looking for this 78 record by DOC HOPKINS — "OLD JOE CLARK" and "21 years". Released on Paramount 577. He needs a clean copy, Any leads would be appreciated.

R. Crumb tries to fix a warped 78 record by melting it flat in the oven

Our friend Paul Krassner wrote a piece for The Huffington Post about his Woodstock experience.

While The Who were performing, [Abbie Hoffman] went up on stage with the intention of informing the audience that John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and leader of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for the possession of two joints; that this was really the politics behind the music.  

Before Abbie could get his message across, Peter Townshend transformed his guitar into a tennis racket and smashed him on the head with a swift backhand.  Townshend had assumed that Abbie was just another crazed fan.  When The Who played at Fillmore East the previous week, a plainclothes cop rushed on stage and tried to grab the mike.  He intended to warn the audience that there was a fire next door and the theater had to be cleared, but he was able to do so only after Townshend kneed him in the balls.

On the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock

Fifty years ago this summer, Sir Christopher Cockerell publicly demonstrated the hovercraft. The black and white photo at the top shows the curious craft, called the SR-N1, on the Thames at Westminster, UK. Fortean Times celebrates the birth of the "flying saucer" and also its, er, human-powered descendent, the Steam Boat Willy. Watch the video above and give the Steam Boat Willy project an A+ for effort. Here's the project leader Chris Roper quoted in Fortean Times:

“You don’t need to be an athlete to hover it. Everyone who has tried has succeeded in becoming airborne under their own leg power in this craft. It’s still at the prototype stage, and the craft is currently being tested, developed and improved. It weighs in at 56lb [25kg] empty, and has carried a 58lb [26kg] girl as a passenger. Is it a boat, a bike, a plane or an ‘air-car’? It is an Unclassifiable Flying Object.”

"Unclassifiable Flying Objects"

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

In February, 2009, I approached Steven Pinker, a deep thinker about linguistics and cognitive science who fishes where the two streams flow together, with a request for an interview. I was on assignment for the cultural studies journal Cabinet, writing a personal essay that would intertwine my own fraught relationship to the notion of intelligence with a historically informed critique of the cultural politics of the IQ test, specifically the Stanford-Binet and its successor the Wechsler.

A professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT), Pinker has popularized his theories of language and cognition through articles in the popular press and via critically acclaimed books such as The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. The furthest thing from a vulgar Darwinian---he rejects the term "genetic determinism"as a social-constructionist slur---Pinker is nonetheless a vigorous opponent of what he contends is the ideologically inspired insistence (often from the academic left, he maintains, and typically from those in the humanities rather than the hard sciences) that we are exclusively products of cultural influences, rather than, as he puts it, "an evolutionarily shaped human nature."In his popular critique of this assumption, The Blank Slate, he takes up the sword for evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and cognitive science against social constructionism.

Exhaustively knowledgeable about the science of cognition, and a foeman who gives as good as he gets (if not better) in the nature-versus-nurture culture wars, Pinker seemed the perfect foil for some of my ideas about the IQ test. Thus, I was delighted when he agreed to an informal e-mail exchange that lasted through much of February and into early March. I was equally chagrined when I had to inform him that his thoughtfully considered, sharply argued quotes didn't make it into my published essay. Happily, my guestblogger stint offered the perfect solution: publish our spirited exchange as a Boing Boing exclusive. I owe Professor Pinker a debt of gratitude for allowing me to publish our interview on Boing Boing. I'm very much the beneficiary of his deeply insightful, eloquently argued ideas; the privilege of sharpening my ideas on the whetstone of his intellect is a rare one, and I'm delighted to share that opportunity with Boing Boing's readers...

Great 1953 video of Les Paul showing off his newfangled recording system to Alistair Cooke. (Via PCL LinkDump)

Carlos Ramos, a painter and animator who created Nickelodeon's Chalkzone and worked on Dexter's Laboratory, has a marvelous new show of paintings opening tomorrow evening, August 15, at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, Califoirnia. This majestic new body of work is focused on Indian iconography. All of the paintings are also viewable online. Carlos Ramos: India

Via Wired's Danger Room blog, word that one ought not fck with Egyptian fisherman if one is a Somali pirate:

A group of Egyptian fishermen apparently escaped from their high-seas captors the old-school way, overpowering the pirates and seizing their weapons. Reuters has the scoop on how it went down, plus a quote from "an associate of the pirates" (nice!) who told the agency the Egyptians made a run for it after seizing the pirates' weapons. "The two Egyptian ships sailed away after a fight with my friends," said the associate, who gave his name to Reuters as Farah.

Note to Pirates: Don't Mess with Egyptian Fishermen

Jonathan Haeber of Terrastories took these incredible photographs from inside an abandoned Titan I missile site. He writes,

On Memorial Day of 2007, and then again in December, I visited two separate Titan I missile sites. The first was quite the introduction. The second was mind-blowing. There are no words to describe being in what is perhaps the world's largest underground missile complex. In fact, I've tried more than once, and in my mind have not achieved an adequate description. Last month, I clicked on a random link and encountered the narrative of another man who had done the same. His words, and his story came much closer to describing the feeling in detail. Even better, this man knew all of the intricacies of the base. He was a true savant of Titan I - and probably the foremost non-military expert of these historic bases. I contacted him and asked if he would be willing to talk about his experience and he readily agreed.

Discovering the History of a Titan I Base (Terrastories)

Here is an extensive gallery of photographs: Various Trips to Titan Silos in California and Colorado

An anonymous poster to the Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede movie thread just made my day: turns out Bradley Denton has posted the entire book as a PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives download. You are in for some treat: I think that this is the great American comic science fiction novel, a book about the quest to exhume Buddy Holly's corpse from Lubbock, TX to prove that he can't possibly be broadcasting an all-powerful jamming signal from a hermetically sealed bubble on a distant, airless moon. Bradley Denton's homepage

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede PDFs: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede PDFs (Coral cache mirrors): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Alive and Well movie site

The follower of Charles Manson was convicted of trying to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975, at age 26. She is 60 years old, and left the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth this morning. AP via NYT

Geoff Ryman, author of the stellar novel The Child Garden (a book in which cancer is cured with the side effect of reducing human lifespan to 30 or so), needs your help:

I'm looking for a composer to collaborate on a podcast project, an audio version of my novel The Child Garden. The novel is in part about a musician who sets all of Dante's Divine Comedy to music. I'm hoping to provide excerpts from this fictional opera as part of the podcast, short interludes of contemporary classical music for orchestra and voice, to be sung in Italian. It would be used in key scenes and as signature music for the serial podcast.

How many such interludes and how long they are would be up to you as I can't pay anything. I'm hoping that the project would appeal to someone needing to compose music for a dissertation or doctorate. The music would of course remain your copyright; my site would link to yours, provide a biography and help to maximise publicity and PR value for you. The Child Garden won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the John W Campbell Award (first place) and an excerpt from it won the British Science Fiction Association Award.

I fell in love with this book when Jeff VanderMeer gave it to me for my birthday when we were both at Clarion in 1992. I've thought about it more or less constantly ever since. I only wish I was a musician so that I could work on this.

Email Geoff

More on "brown fat" -- the fat that burns regular fat -- from the New Scientist. They say that 50g of brown fat in your body burns 500 calories a day, and hint that it's possible to lipo out your regular white fat and turn it into brown fat and re-implant it.

Brown fat's role in heat generation, also known as thermogenesis, has been extensively studied by animal physiologists. It turns out that brown fat cells have unusual mitochondria, the tiny structures found in almost all cells that release energy from food. In the vast majority of cells this energy is either stored or used to power cellular processes. The mitochondria in brown fat, however, contain a protein called thermogenin (or uncoupling protein 1), which causes energy to dissipate as heat. "This is a tissue whose sole purpose is burning energy," says Francesco Celi, a researcher at the US National Institutes of Health...

Kahn's team is focusing on a compound called bone morphogenetic protein 7, or BMP-7, also known as osteogenic protein 1. It is best known for promoting the formation of bone and cartilage, and a genetically engineered version is used in bone surgery. Last year, the group showed that if cells derived from mouse embryonic stem cells are treated with BMP-7 they turn into brown fat cells. When transplanted into a special breed of mouse that accepts tissue from unrelated individuals, they formed discrete islands of brown fat (Nature, vol 454, p 1000).

To test this approach in people, the team now plans to take white fat cells obtained through liposuction and treat them with BMP-7. The resulting brown fat cells could then be reimplanted into the original donor. "It's got a lot of potential," says Kahn.

The fat that makes you thin

(Image: Bacon Fat, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from kaktuslampa's photostream)

Food Face plates! I love food in face form. My wife gives me smiley-face porridge in bed every year on my birthday, and it's the highlight of the day.

Food Face Kid's Dinner Plates

Holy CRAP this is good news: Bradley Denton's incredible comic sf novel Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is being made into a movie directed and written by Robert Rugan.

Buddy Holly is the story of Oliver Vale, whose mother was obsessed with Buddy Holly, and who one day discovers that Buddy Holly is on the TV, on every TV, on every station, with a guitar around his neck, standing in a bubble on the surface of Ganymede, disoriented, musical, and periodically reading out a sign saying that further information is available from Oliver, and supplying his home address.

The entire world chases Oliver at this point: cops, radio cops, televangelists and their flocks, aliens -- you name it. And Oliver begins a road-trip across America to Lubbock, Texas, there to exhume Buddy Holly's corpse and verify for himself that the famous musician is not on a distant, airless moon.

When this book came out, I was a bookseller at Bakka in Toronto, the venerable science fiction bookstore. If you were a science fiction reader in Toronto in those days, it's a damned good bet I sold you a copy of it. I hand-sold about 750 copies of that book, and would have sold more. Will sell more.

Bradley Denton is a stone comic genius and no two of his books are alike, but this is the one I love -- I worship -- as the apotheosis of a certain kind of gonzo, brilliant, marvellous thing that is to American science fiction comedy what Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' series is to British sf comedy.

To see it come back and to the big screen, too -- marvellous. Congrats, Brad, and well-deserved.

Jon Heder to star in 'Buddy Holly' (via IO9)

Evgeny sez, "Authorities in Belarus, the last authoritarian regime in Europe, are considering introducing a new school uniform that would protect schoolchildren from electromagnetic radiation that comes from their mobile phones. The phones would be stored in a special pocket. The government is apparently very excited about it."

Belarus develops school uniform that makes tin foil hats obsolete (Thanks, Evgeny!)

(Image: Maker Faire 2007: Tinfoil Hat, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from r3v || cls' photostream)

Here in Los Angeles, local news channels have been locked on a chase and subsequent standoff between police and a mentally ill man accused of making threats on the White House. The LAPD have him cornered at the Federal Building. I was just in the area (for other reasons) -- traffic's a mess, streets are blocked off, law enforcement all over the place.

The LAPD bomb squad is using a remote-controlled robot to coax the suspect out of his Volkswagen beetle. This device is operated by a human, and is not autonomous -- sort of a humanoid drone, a machine proxy for a human negotiator. You can see it in the photo above, from the Daily Breeze. I wonder if anyone knows more about the particular robot/ROV/whatever they're using?

At least four police cruisers blocked the red Volkswagen Beetle in the driveway of a parking lot on Veteran Avenue just south of Wilshire Boulevard. Officers stood nearby with their guns pointed at the vehicle, and a police robot wheeled its way next to the driver's side door as the standoff continued. A military-style armored vehicle was also brought to the scene and was parked near the vehicle.

Update: Anonymous says,

That particular piece of equipment is a Remotec (a subsidiary of Northrop-Grumman) model F-6A by the looks of it. It has 3 cameras, a microphone and a speaker. It can be operated remotely by a fiber optic tether or by radio waves. It is used by Law enforcement and the Military typically in bomb disposal operations. The use in hostage situations is not unprecedented however.

Above, a photo of the Northrop-Grumman/Remotec ANDROS F6A with Window Breaker and Dual PAN Disrupter mount. On the product page, the manufacturer refers to it as a "robot," so all of you arguing in the comments that this is an improper term can simmer down now, please. More photos of an ANDROS equipped with a gun and window-basher, and live video stream of today's human/robot standoff, after the jump.

here's the Daily Breeze, here's KTLA, LA Times.

Cool video about the Hubble ultra deep field in 3D. A photo of utter blackness taken in "a patch of sky no bigger than a grain of sand held out out arm's length."

Too cute not to post: Melissa Brandts' photo, featured in NatGeo.

My husband and I were exploring Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park-Canada when we stopped for a timed picture of the two of us. We had our camera set up on some rocks and were getting ready to take the picture when this curious little ground squirrel appeared, became intriqued with the sound of the focusing camera and popped right into our shot! A once in a lifetime moment! We were laughing about this little guy for days!!

Squirrel Portrait, Banff (Via Andrew Hearst)

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

Part 2 of Boing Boing Video's interview series with Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, co-creators, writers, and stars of the "psychedelic comedy" series The Mighty Boosh. In this installment, Noel and Julian share insights into the role music plays in their TV show and live stage performances, and we also learn about "crimping" -- the nonsensical, nerdy, embarassingly British dork-raps you'll see often in their hit BBC program. Imagine these two grown men in crazy character costumes acting out nursery rhymes, and you've got the idea. Or, watch this episode, in which they perform a "Boing Boing" crimp. Yup.

BB caught up with the Boosh gang when they were touring the US to promote the stateside release of a three-season DVD set, also available on iTunes. Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" recently begain airing episodes in the US, too.

If you missed part 1 of our interview series with Noel and Julian, you'll find that here.

Did you know there's a supervillain made of bubblegum? Watch this episode 'til the very end, and feel his chewy justice.

Previously:

(Special thanks to Mark Kleiman and Stefanie Fletcher for their generous support of this Boing Boing Video interview series.)

The Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) is a small bird-sized aircraft that uses flapping wings to fly and hover. It was developed by UAV-pioneers Aeronvironment with funding from (you guessed it) the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA). Aeronvionment is now working to improve the robot so it can fly in outside winds. From New Scientist:

Aeronvironment's flapper appears to achieve propulsion, stabilisation and control all at once using its paired wings. Details of the technology are confidential, however, under the US ITAR arms control export restrictions...

DARPA has said it wants a 10-gram aircraft with a 7.5-centimetre wingspanMovie Camera that can explore caves and other hiding places, relaying GPS data and images to base. It will need to fly at 10 metres per second and withstand 2.5-metre-per-second gusts of wind.

That goal is a long way off, but DARPA programme manager Todd Hylton says Aeronvironment is on the right track. "Progress to date puts us on the path to such a vehicle," he says.

"Hover no bother for flapping 'nano' aircraft"

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

As its name suggests, the Brooklyn-based quarterly magazine Cabinet is a wunderkammer between two covers, a Baedeker for psychogeographers, a random walk through the postmodern baroque.

Although many of its contributors are card-carrying members of the professoriat, a significant number are artists and some are "independent scholars," a discreet euphemism for defrocked academics; trust-fund autodidacts who've disappeared down the rabbit hole of their obscure obsessions; intellectual omnivores with a magpie's eye and a hummingbird's attention span who Want to Know Everything About Everything (a cardinal sin in an age of intellectual niche marketing).

Here's a quick video snapshot I took over the weekend from one of my favorite local hikes here in Southern California: the Solstice Canyon trail above Malibu. The video's nothing special, but as I was shooting it (on my iPhone 3GS, with a twig for a tripod) I thought "this might be an inspiring little ambient morsel for BB readers to zone out to during their work day. So here it is. I mention the device used because I was pretty wowed by the video and audio quality. Here's my Flickr set of more video snapshots from the waterfall (others are higher-quality and less compressed than this).

There are some spots on the trail where you can look out over the Pacific, and if the season's right you may view a migrating gray whale or two. According to an LA Times article published in 1988 when this land became a state park,

[The site] was formerly used as a laboratory to test payloads for space shots for TRW Inc. and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. (...) [T]he aerospace firms picked the site because they needed a "non-magnetic setting," or an area far removed from telephone lines and electrical cables. One of the buildings had a removable roof so that heavy equipment could be lifted from the structure.

Near this 30-foot waterfall, there's an old stone cabin from the late 1800s, one of the oldest residences in the area. Also on this trail: the burnt-out remains of an amazing midcentury ranch mansion designed by African-American architect Paul Revere Williams. I love walking through those ruins. More on that after the jump.

A tweet from Quinn Norton reminded me of this very funny parody Instructable by jdibbell. In just seven unneccesarily complicated steps, you too can learn how to transform a "weightless virtual commodity into a lovingly handmade piece of artisanal craftwork fated to collapse into its own meta-indexical core like the semiotic black hole it is."

Materials:

* one literary property (written but not owned by you)
* one arguably enforceable end-user license agreement (can be custom-ordered from an intellectual-property law firm or cribbed from software packaging and/or online terms-of-service agreements)
* one Second Life user account
* one United States Federal Reserve note or other tangible piece of currency (optional)
* basic bookbinding materials (available at most art-supply stores)

How to Handcraft an Achingly Self-Referential Virtual Commodity Fetish Object (For Fun and Profit!) (instructables.com)

I recently had lunch with Erik Davis, whose riffs and insights on the intersection of technology, mysticism, and high weirdness have always inspired me. We talked about one of my favorite head trips, the idea that we're living in a simulation or control system of some kind. Decades before The Matrix, folks like Jacques Vallee, John Keel, Stephen Wolfram, Rudy Rucker, and Hans Moravec explored this notion. And of course it's also been the subject of countless science fiction novels. Recently, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom developed a mathematical argument to support the mind-bending theory. But Erik turned me on to Ed Fredkin, a computer scientist whose name I knew but had somehow missed in the context of the Simulation Argument. A pioneer of "digital physics," Fredkin worked with Richard Feynman, made a ton of money in various tech businesses, and is currently a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. He is also convinced that the universe is a computer. Robert Wright's 1988 book Three Scientists And Their Gods includes a profile of Fredkin. When the book came out, the section on Fredkin was excerpted in The Atlantic. The piece really gives me a sense of the scientist and also does a great job explaining his theories in simple terms. From The Atlantic:

Fredkin works in a twilight zone of modern science—the interface of computer science and physics. Here two concepts that traditionally have ranked among science's most fundamental—matter and energy—keep bumping into a third: information. The exact relationship among the three is a question without a clear answer, a question vague enough, and basic enough, to have inspired a wide variety of opinions. Some scientists have settled for modest and sober answers. Information, they will tell you, is just one of many forms of matter and energy; it is embodied in things like a computer's electrons and a brain's neural firings, things like newsprint and radio waves, and that is that. Others talk in grander terms, suggesting that information deserves full equality with matter and energy, that it should join them in some sort of scientific trinity, that these three things are the main ingredients of reality.

Fredkin goes further still. According to his theory of digital physics, information is more fundamental than matter and energy. He believes that atoms, electrons, and quarks consist ultimately of bits—binary units of information, like those that are the currency of computation in a personal computer or a pocket calculator. And he believes that the behavior of those bits, and thus of the entire universe, is governed by a single programming rule. This rule, Fredkin says, is something fairly simple, something vastly less arcane than the mathematical constructs that conventional physicists use to explain the dynamics of physical reality. Yet through ceaseless repetition—by tirelessly taking information it has just transformed and transforming it further—it has generated pervasive complexity. Fredkin calls this rule, with discernible reverence, "the cause and prime mover of everything."

Did The Universe Just Happen?

UPDATE: Kevin Kelly also points me to his excellent meditation on digital physics and the all stars of the field that appeared in a 2002 issue of Wired. The piece is aptly titled "God Is The Machine."

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

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More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

(Image: Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times)

Happy mutant architect Wilfred J.O. Armster designed this fabulous spaceship/boat/floating orb residence from steel, copper and concrete. One of the factors that influenced the design of this building was the need to fit it within a very narrow site. The home was even featured in a 2002 Zippy the Pinhead strip. Snip from NYT profile of the man and his house, by Penelope Green:

"Monstrous," is how a few described the project in an article in The New Haven Register. In the local public school, an eighth-grade teacher held up the article, which was accompanied by a picture of the building's design, and proclaimed, "This is the kind of building that should not be built here." What the teacher didn't know was the name of the architect -- perhaps she hadn't read the article carefully -- so she was unaware that his daughter, Nicola, was in the classroom. "Nicola stood up and debated her," Mr. Armster said proudly.

The public hearing to approve the project has become a local legend, said Mr. Portly, the engineer, who remembered it vividly.

Guilford residents packed the town hall, and stood up one by one to announce their objections: that the structure wasn't Colonial enough, that it didn't fit into the town's heritage, that building it was a kind of heresy. One woman said it would ruin her view as she sailed on the sound. When the litany of complaints had finished, Mr. Armster began to speak.

"I said something like: 'I know you're all Republicans and businessman and I know you think I'm a communist or a socialist. But it seems to me that you are objecting to this building because you don't like the way it looks.' "

The Spaceship Down the Street (New York Times)

A mouse was found living inside an Oregon gas station's ATM. It had made a nest out of more than a dozen $20 bills. Sadly, no photos. From the AP:

The bank replaced all the money that wasn't extensively damaged, and the ATM has continued to work just fine. The mouse also got a reprieve: He was evicted from his nest but set free outside the station.

"Mouse builds nest in ATM with $20 bills"

Tonight VH1 is airing a Timothy Leary documentary as part of its "Lords of the Revolution" series. Here's an excerpt from the show featuring our pal, R.U. Sirius (Ken Goffman). Our friend Michael Horowitz was also interviewed for the program.

VH1 documentary on Timothy Leary

In Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, author Ellen Ruppel Shell asks, "What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible?" Her answer: a low-quality food supply, a ruined economy, a polluted environment, low wages, a shoddy educational system, deserted town centers, ballooning personal debt, and the loss of craftsmanship.

In the introduction to her book, Shell admits that she used to be obsessed with bargain prices, but says a "boot incident" changed her. She went to a shoe "mini-outlet" to buy a pair of boots for a New Year's party, and asked for "something special." The clerk showed her a pair of "buttery" leather Italian boots, but they were too expensive so she bought cheap knockoff boots from China that cost one-quarter as much as the Italian boots. After wearing the boots just once, she decided that they were "clunky and so uncomfortable" that she threw them into the back of the closet with the "heap of other unwearable 'good deals' in bad colors or unflattering shapes: a bargain hunter's pile of shame."

Cheapness, argues Shell, has ruined just about everything. Main streets, with knowledgeable clerks and friendly service, have been decimated by discount stores like Wal-Mart staffed with ignorant employees who don't give a damn. Customer service has all but vanished (A sign on the entrance of IKEA stores reads, "No One Will Bother You"). Factory outlets have become the "fastest growing segment of not only the retail industry but also the travel industry." Jobs were lost when manufacturers moved their factories overseas and used cheap labor to produce mountains of cheap junk. Products now come in two categories: stratospherically priced luxury objects or slipshod discount crap, with few mid-priced, well-crafted objects available, because craftsmanship can't compete in the mass market. (As Roger Price, author of The Great Roob Revolution said "If everybody doesn't want it, nobody gets it.")

So, how do we get ourselves off the cheapness drug? In her concluding chapter, Shell says individuals have to shake the habit themselves: "We can set our own standard for quality and stick to it. We can demand to know the true costs of what we buy, and refuse to allow them to be externalized, We can enforce sustainability, minimize disposability, and insist on transparency. We can rekindle our acquaintance with craftsmanship. We can choose to buy or not, choose to bargain or not, and choose to follow our hearts or not, unencumbered by the anxiety of that someone somewhere is getting a 'better deal."

For the last couple of years, I've been practicing pretty much what Shell recommends here. When I start thinking I need to buy something I first ask myself if owning it will truly make my family's life better in some way -- Will it save us time, or consume time? Do I have to learn a new user-interface to use it? What am I going to get out of it? What would happen if I put off buying it for a year? What else could I spend the money on that might be a better choice? Is it something I can hand down to my kids or will it break? Can it be serviced and repaired at home? Will it make our household environment more pleasant, or less pleasant? Will it clutter the house? how much storage space will it consume? These are then kinds of questions I now ask myself before buying something. The one thing I don't consider is how "cheap" something is. As a result, I don't buy nearly as much stuff as I used to (it turns out that my decision not to be cheap has made me more frugal and thrifty) and the things I do buy more often end up being well-made and improve the quality of my family's life.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

Recently on Offworld we've had a good slate of indie devs giving us a deeper look into some of the games already high on our most-wanted lists: chief among them is Castle Crashers devs The Behemoth officially beginning to reveal the mechanics of their cutely chaotic party/arena game still known as Game 3, and art game champ Jason Rohrer showing off a paper prototype of his Angolan conflict diamond-based DS multiplayer game.

Elsewhere, we got the first shot of Die Gute Fabrik's gorgeously illustrated swamp-opera adventure Mutatione, Edmund McMillen & co. showed off the first video of their pathos puzzler Time Ufck, and Taito revealed the first video of dual control methods in their upcoming Puzzle Bobble iPhone port.

We also saw Nintendo plunging their toes further into the social media space with the U.S. release of their free web-sharable DS flipbook animation app FlipNote Studio, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner revealed the first draft script for a prequel to his PC adventure The Last Express, the EA Black Box team behind Skate gave us their top 10 user-made skate videos, and Team Fortress devs began dropping awesomely gentlemanly turn-of-the-century ephemera surrounding their latest game update.

Finally, our 'one shot's: the nostalgic simplicity of Six Flags' early-80s Pac-Man theme park, Metroid's Samus on a ZX Spectrum, 9 0 0 0 gives us a motivational ninja poster, and, as above, Brock Davis shows us the sobering tragedy of a Mushroom Kingdom hit and run.

Police in Brazil noticed that reporters for a TMZ-meets-COPS style TV show about murder in western Brazil kept managing to show up at murder scenes before they did. Authorities allege that's because the show's host Wallace Souza ordered at least five of the murders. Souza is a local lawmaker who loved to denounce crime during the program, but he is charged with dealing drugs and using the show to bump off his rivals. NPR Audio

Subculture photographer Kyle Cassidy has a great new project: "Where I Write: Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers in Their Creative Spaces." I love the shots of Michael Swanwick, but the killer one for me is Samuel R "Chip" Delaney (shown here).

Still, I gotta say that I am immensely happy in my little nest in London (below), as shot by the talented NK Guy.

Where I Write: Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers in Their Creative Spaces (Thanks, Michael!)

The Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign is a new British organisation devoted to helping photographers whom the authorities have busted or harassed for being potential terrorists, kidnapping innocent photons with deadly light-sensors.

They've got a "bust card" explaining your rights to you and the officers you interact with, as well as a sticker/poster design and a gallery of photographers holding "I'm a Photographer Not a Terrorist" signs.

Photography is under attack. Across the country it that seems anyone with a camera is being targeted as a potential terrorist, whether amateur or professional, whether landscape, architectural or street photographer.

Not only is it corrosive of press freedom but creation of the collective visual history of our country is extinguished by anti-terrorist legislation designed to protect the heritage it prevents us recording.

This campaign is for everyone who values visual imagery, not only photographers.

The campaign is run by a collection of concerned individuals and owes no allegiance to any single organisation.

We must work together now to stop this before photography becomes a part of history rather than a way of recording it.

I'm a Photographer, not a Terrorist (Thanks, Glyn!)

Toronto street artist PosterChild has an ongoing, extensive project to convert flier and newspaper boxes into guerilla gardening boxes.

FlyerPlanterboxes! (via Beyond the Beyond)

The September issue of Bazaar features photos of several top supermodels (super powers unspecified) without their makeup, looking substantially more human (and better, IMO) than they usually do.

Keep It Real (via Kottke)

I'm very fond of this steampunk butterfly by DeviantArt's Ursulav, who writes, "Have finally succeeded in sketching one of the clockwork insects present at this location. It appears at a distance to be a common skipper butterfly, but upon closer examination, it became apparent that there had been extensive technological modifications to the creature. Contrary to my initial expectations, the creature clearly possesses organic traits, and is not merely a clever mimic. Whether the technological additions were impressed upon the developing chrysalis, or were grafted upon an adult specimen is one of many mysteries that I hope to uncover in time."

Steampunk Skipper (Thanks, Andrew!)

(Image by Xeni Jardin, shot at Burning Man 2003. The photographer was wearing pants.)

The annual Burning Man fest takes place at the end of this month in Nevada's Black Rock desert. El wire, fake fur, exposed titties, fire art, pill popping, light shows, bad techno, art cars, dudes with no pants, platform combat boots, utilikilts, on and on and on -- if you're reading Boing Boing you probably know what Burning Man is (and if not, read the prior BB posts linked at the bottom of this one).

So, for many years now, the organization behind the event has enforced a highly restrictive set of policies around photography and video out on the playa. The argument for these restrictions involves protecting attendees' privacy rights. People do wacky stuff out there, in various states of undress and sobriety, and nobody wants their naked DMT yoga falafel rave dance routine to end up on some sleazy "Girls Gone Wild" DVD, right? But here's a snip from a commentary by Corynne McSherry on the EFF Deep Links blog which argues these policies go too far:

Most attendees have the entirely reasonable expectation that they will own and control what is likely the largest number of creative works generated on the Playa: the photos they take to document their creations and experiences. That's because they haven't read the Burning Man Terms and Conditions.

Those Terms and Conditions include a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand: as soon as "any third party displays or disseminates" your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn't like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO. This "we automatically own all your stuff" magic appears to be creative lawyering intended to allow the BMO to use the streamlined "notice and takedown" process enshrined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to quickly remove photos from the Internet.

The BMO also limits your own rights to use your own photos and videos on any public websites, (1) obliging you to take down any photos to which BMO objects, for any reason; and (2) forbidding you from allowing anyone else to reuse your photos (i.e., no licensing your work no matter what is depicted, including Creative Commons licensing, and no option to donate your work to the public domain).

Snatching rights on the playa (deeplinks via Wayneco)

My friend (and MAKE managing editor) Shawn Connally posted a chart about what kinds of moldy foods are safe to eat, and which ones are dangerous.

My husband and I have battled continuously for years about whether scraping the mold off the top of -- well, anything -- makes it OK to eat, or if once a spot of green invades the top of a barely used jar of jam we've got to call it a loss and toss it out. I'm always willing to scrape off the top, cut off the moldy crusts, etc., and carry on with the meal. My husband, not so much.

Well, turns out the USDA has weighed in on the argument with interesting findings. My favorite part of the Safe Food Handling fact sheets is this chart on how to handle moldy foods (very, very carefully is not one of the answers).

Do you eat the moldy stuff?

NPR's Morning Edition did a great segment on the privacy concerns raised by Google's deal with publishers and authors to make books available as search-results. I love the idea in principle, but I'm really worried that Google won't put a decent privacy policy in writing -- for example, they won't promise to keep your reading history (which potentially includes the search terms you used, the pages you viewed, etc) secret from warrantless police requests.

EFF legal director Cindy Cohn and author Johnathan Lethem do a fine job of explaining why this matters and what we'd like from Google in order to withdraw our legal objection to the settlement.

Lethem is one of several authors -- including Michael Chabon and Cory Doctorow -- who have signed on to a campaign to pressure Google Books to offer greater privacy guarantees for its readers. The effort was organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"They know which books you search for," says Cindy Cohn, legal director for the foundation. "They know which books you browse through; they know how long you spend on each page."

It's the same kind of information that's produced by someone surfing the Web. But Cohn believes books should enjoy greater privacy.

The EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California want Google to keep reader data for less time than normal Web searches. Ideally, they say, the data should be deleted after a month.

Google Deal With Publishers Raises Privacy Concerns (Thanks, Hugh!)