A reader writes,

Back in the day before ARIN, I obtained a class C license (255 IP numbers) for a network of servers running in my garage. This block hasn't been in official routing for several years. As you well know, class C licenses are in rather short supply.

This is a unique situation. I was talking couple of years ago about this with Clay Shirky, who suggested I crowdsource the question, so here goes:

What's the most creative use that you could imagine for an IP v4 class C license?

Little Red Light's kids have produced a followup Doctor Who fan video as a sequel to last summer's lovely effort, this one focused on Torchwood.

UNIT-Torchwood Upgraded: Part 1 (Thanks, littleredlight!)

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Last January, I tried using fundable.com to raise money to replace my computer. At the time, their rating online looked good and I didn't see anything to suggest they were a scam. They'd been covered by BBC and Marketplace, so seemed legit. Seven months and $1450 later, I'm ready to say that yes, yes they are a scam."

I've since challenged them for my paypal payment and got that money back. But My dad still hasn't gotten back the $700 he pledged and other people are waiting for theirs. I think they are still holding some $1410. It pisses me off no end. Oh, and yes, Rob and I wound up going into a bit of debt because I'd ordered the computer when the fundraiser completed. Funny thing, I started the fundraiser because we couldn't afford a new computer on our own.

My very bad experience with Fundable.com (Thanks, Mary!)

Update: The negative attention from Mary's post and the followups elsewhere have attracted Fundable's attention and they promise to fix things. Finally.

• Lisa told about her favorite sport headphones for running with.

• Steven got hands-on with HTC's MyTouch.

• Rob offered a compendium of disturbing British public information films.

• Justin Timberlake's new fragrance looks a lot like a music player.

• Apple is so inundated with AppStore submissions that its review teams have only minutes to examine each one.

BudgetTravel has a slide show of what they've deemed the "World's Weirdest Hotels." No Madonna Inn, but more interesting to me than theme rooms anyway are places where the entire hotel structure is an oddity. Top, the Hotel Costa Verde near Quepos, Costa Rica. Left, at the Capsule Hotel in Den Haag, Netherlands, you can sleep in an escape pod from a 1970s oil rig.
"World's Weirdest Hotels, Part Deux"

(Ed. Note: The Boing Boing Video site includes a guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. We'll post roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Snip from LA Times article: "Vowing "never to stop pushing" for condom use in porn, AIDS Healthcare Foundation officials said Wednesday that they plan to file complaints today with state officials against 16 California-based production companies they say have violated workplace safety laws." (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

Nothing new in here for slow/sustainable food junkies, but it's wonderful to see this discussion expand beyond alt.food.michael.pollan. Noteworthy in that it's an easy item to forward to friends and relatives who won't have the patience or inclination to read through a dozen Boing Boing posts on the matter, or subscribe to Ethicurean. Snip:

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon -- circa 2009.

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food (TIME, via Wayne's Friends List)

08.21.09 : playing games zen
funny farm
memory game
xwung
time warp
shift
effing hail
golden republic

previously on web zen:
mind games zen

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Image courtesy Eric Curry. Thanks Frank!)

Gilad sez,

ReTweet Revolution is a visual exploration of the most popular conversation threads that were passed amongst Twitter users at the time of the events following the recent Iranian elections earlier in June of 2009. The applet displays 372 of the most popular threads extracted from a pool of over 230,000 messages posted on Twitter between June 14th and June 24th, polled from the public timeline at regular intervals.

By clicking on a specific topical thread, it is possible to view its network structure: how the message was ReTweeted from one user to another and how its content changed as it was passed along. It is also possible to see posts that were obviously "retweets" but with no attribution to the original source.

ReTweet Revolution (Thanks, Gilad!)

More than 600 "private emails" from the National Socialist Movement, aka NSM88, basically the reincarnation of the American Nazi party, managed to find their way into the hands of the folks who maintain Wikileaks. These don't look so much like "private emails" as the contents of an opt-in email mailing list maintained by the group, but I'm still trying to confirm their origin.

Anyway, Wikileaks has published them all, and you can browse through chronologically, or by author, or download the whole lot of 'em for fun weekend reading. Yeah, there's a lot of what you'd expect in here. The one funny light spot was finding utterly banal spam for Bing.com, and "back-to-school specials" and ancestry.com promotions mixed in with the more sobering stuff like this:

This email is not a calling for a putsch, revolution, or violence of any type, those types of actions will not be necessary; nonetheless, certain events will naturally occur and will need to be taken advantage of by all of us. (...)

Gentlemen, for too long only one race has made gains in their freedom and survival. That race has not been ours. If you look at things objectively, you will see that all of you have been fighting a good fight but our race is losing ground at a very fast rate; Obama running for President is evidence of that. We have a great opportunity in front of us and we need to ensure it is recognized for what it is and can be. The Fuhrer made great strides by knowing when and where to put his foot down, what moves to make and we need to follow his example.

US National Socialist Movement private emails ,until 15 Aug 2009 (Wikileaks)

Our friends at GOOD Magazine have posted a neat item here -- Curt Smith, best known as co-founder of the band Tears for Fears, but now an independent, solo artist with a new set of fans, talks about the "musical value of sharing." Great stuff. Snip:

I got my first record deal when I was 18 years old--next year that will be about 30 years ago, so I have been doing it for quite a while. The industry when I first started was very much one-sided in the sense that it favored the industry and not the musicians. We would sign deals when we were quite young that were pretty bad across the board: from record deals to publishing deals, even management deals and touring. You just didn't make as high of a percentage as you would now. But of course that has changed over the years, especially in the last few years with the internet and sharing your music with people.

Technology has changed so much that now, people are quite capable of making records themselves. It used to be a very expensive process, but its not anymore. In the past, the industry controlled how your music got out there, so if you didn't have a record deal it would never be on shelves; there was no Amazon, there was no iTunes. There was basically just radio, and the record companies controlled that as well. Now, with the freedom of the internet, people can go and discover your stuff.

The down side is that there is now so much music, some form of filtering tool is required.

Curt Smith on the Musical Value of Sharing (GOOD, as told to Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons)

Curt is fun to follow on Twitter. So is GOOD.

I really dig Curt's current solo work, but I have been looking for an excuse to embed the video above on Boing boing for a long time, so I will. It's my favorite Tears for Fears song, and sometimes when I play it in my car, and I'm driving along PCH, it still makes my eyes well up with emo. (link: Pale Shelter)

From FORA TV, this video of a presentation by George Kembel, co-founder of the Stanford d.school, about the "Embrace," an extremely low-cost incubator for premature newborns. The challenge: design better technology to help keep premature newborns alive. The reality: the most at-risk newborns are in rural areas, far away from hospitals where $25,000 incubators are housed. The solution: a $25 "incubator" with materials that can be heated up in a pot of boiling water.

Awakening Creativity / FORA (thanks, Blaise Zerega)

A few years ago, writer Jimmy Guterman produced The Sandinista Project, in which 36 performers each covered one song from the Clash's Sandinista! Jimmy writes to tell us he's doing something with it online today:

"It's Joe Strummer's birthday, a good day to give Clash fans a present. The Sandinista Project didn't set any sales record and of course the number of copies shared on the Net was greater than the number we sold. We didn't undertake the project to make ourselves any money (it was a charity record) so I didn't mind that it was available everywhere for free. But it did bother me that so many of the torrented versions sounded like crap.To rectify this situation, for one day only, we're offering, without charge,the full record in good quality, as well as one bonus cut and PDFs of the CD booklet and packaging. And hurry up: this is a 24-hour offer. At midnight Pacific Time tonight, it's gone."

The Sandinista Project: free for one day only!

• Failing retailer Circuit City made creepy inspirational videos for its workers as destiny loomed.
• Apple is, for reasons unknown, selling first-gen iPhones again.
• Plantronics' bluetooth headset is modeled an the window crank handle from a 1974 Lincoln Continental.
• There is the Benz of Bling.
• Steven reviewed the Chrome Warsaw bag.
• Kodak wants to call its next HD pocket camcorder something better than Zi10. You can help it.
• Behold! The most hideous cellphone in the universe!
• Urban Outfitters scored the last Polaroid film kits.
• Qclocktwo gives the time in plain English -- for $1,600.
• Apple analysts are at is again. Today's prediction: a television set!
• Stephen Fry has one of those wristphones from LG.
• Oscar Diaz's RGB Vases look like science fiction movie props, hold flowers.
• Behold! A Diplo-dock-us.
• Sony's WX1 point-and-shoot camera works great in low-light conditions.
• Need to fix a typewriter? Ask Andrew Leman if you can borrow his repair kit.
• Instructions were found on how to make a steampunk flash drive. Someone's already selling Terminator Skull ones.
• "This is going to be such a rad tweet!"

From The Economist, a chart showing "how long it takes a worker on the average net wage to earn the price of a Big Mac in 73 cities."

The more important question is how long you have to work to eat something less gross than a Big Mac, of course.

An alternative Big Mac Index (via Digg)

Alcatraz Island is one of those tourist traps that isn't a trap at all. It is that rare thing: a justifiably famous tourist attraction that lives up to its reputation and exceeds it. When I lived in San Francisco, I relished the chance to take out-of-towners there and re-visit it myself.

The site itself is exceptionally beautiful, a rugged wilderness island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay with unparalleled views of the city. The cellhouse audio tour -- a self-guided tour featuring the narration of former inmates and guards -- is brilliantly produced (I actually bought a copy on cassette years ago and listened to it at home). And the additional museum materials, including a moving film on the history of the Indian occupation, are also superb.

The Alcatraz website does a good job of conveying much of this, but you really have to go to experience it.

Alcatraz Island - Golden Gate National Recreation Area (Thanks, Ranger Craig!)

Michael Geist sez, "Science fiction author Karl Schroeder, Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, Wide Mouth Mason drummer Safwan Javed, Lulu.com's Bob Young, and Nettwerk music exec Terry McBride are among the people in this short video talking about copyright reform as Canadians have the chance for three more weeks to speak out on copyright." Speak Out On Copyright: The Video

Painter Travis Louie has a new show of his lovely phantasmagorical portraits opening tomorrow (Friday, August 21), at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery. Louie will be there signing copies of his new monograph, Curiosities. The entire show is also viewable online. You can also purchase the book (unsigned) on Amazon now for $20. Above left, "The Strangler" (24" x 18"); above right, "Chauncey" (20" x 14"). I would love to have an original Louie someday -- it would certainly turn any wall into a wunderkammer.
Travis Louie (Roq La Rue)
Curiosities (Amazon)

David Kravets at Wired Threat Level blog reports that Hal Turner, a notorious shitbag "hate blogger" in New Jersey who was charged two months ago with threatening to kill judges and lawmakers, was secretly an FBI "agent provocateur" paid tens of thousands of dollars by our government to broadcast white supremacist rhetoric. Snip:

Hal Turner, the blogger and radio personality, remains jailed pending charges over his recent online rants, which prosecutors claim amounted to an invitation for someone to kill Connecticut lawmakers and Chicago federal appeals court judges. But behind the scenes the reformed white supremacist was holding clandestine meetings with FBI agents who taught him how to spew hate "without crossing the line," according to his lawyer, Michael Orozco.

"Almost everything was at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Orozco said in a 45-minute telephone interview from New Jersey. "Their job was to pick up information on the responses of what he was saying and see where that led them. It was an interesting dynamic on what he was being asked to do."

Lawyer: FBI Paid Right-Wing Blogger Charged With Threats (wired.com, via Oxblood Ruffin)

Los del Dramatica have a lot to say about this. May he serve 420 years in jail.

The Southern Poverty Law Center saw this one coming. Did COINTELPRO ever really end?

Snip from a news item posted to the EFF's Deep Links blog by Richard Esguerra:

In February, opponents of REAL ID were given a bit of hope when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that she wanted to repeal the REAL ID Act, the federal government's failed plan to impose a national identification card through state driver's licenses. But what has taken place since is no return to sanity, as political machi nations have produced a cosmetic makeover called "PASS ID" that has revived the push for a national identification card.

The PASS ID Act (S. 1261) seeks to make many of the same ineffectual, dangerous changes the REAL ID Act attempted to impose. Fundamentally, PASS ID operates on the same flawed premise of REAL ID -- that requiring various "identity documents" (and storing that information in databases for later access) will magically make state drivers' licenses more legitimate, which will in turn improve national security.

PASS ID: REAL ID Reanimated (EFF Deep Links)

Some helpful background on REAL ID in the Wikipedia subject entry.

In 2004, the CIA hired Blackwater USA contractors as part of a covert program to find and kill top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to statements from current and former US officials.

Snip from New York Times story:

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.'s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

C.I.A. Sought Blackwater's Help to Kill Jihadists (NYT via Mitch Kapor)

A related news article, just out today: The Rise and Fall of the Mercenary Formerly Known as Blackwater (Newsweek)

Oh, and by the way, Blackwater has changed its name to "Xe," which I'm none too happy about for personal reasons (cough).

"No fish can escape mercury pollution" is the bottom line in a federal study of mercury contamination that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the United States. Link to AP article.

Over at Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger says, "I like how the AP writer tries valiantly to put a positive spin on this. It may well be that 100% of all fish in America has some level of mercury contamination, but only one fish in four has dangerously high levels. Dude, we are so screwed..."

Image: "Don't eat an entire fish at once," from mrjoro's CC-licensed Flickr stream.

A report published in the August edition of the European Respiratory Society Journal points to a link between exposure to nanoparticles and severe illnesses suffered by seven factory workers in China who worked with them. One of the workers died. "These cases arouse concern that long-term exposure to some nanoparticles without protective measures may be related to serious damage to human lungs."

Exposure to nanoparticles is related to pleural effusion, pulmonary fibrosis and granuloma (ERS Journal, via Maggie Koerth-Baker)

Related: Deaths, lung damage linked to nanoparticles in China (Reuters)

The Bang Bang Club is the title of a documentary film currently in production that examines South Africa during the last days of apartheid, and the impact that violence had on four photojournalists covering the conflict.

The movie is based on The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (2000), a book documenting the lives of those four photogs: Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva. The book was written by Marinovich and Silva, the two of that group who survived.

The New York Times photojournalism blog is running a series of photo/audio slideshows with the work and voices of those photographers. Today, Joao Silva retells the story of what was happening outside and within when he shot the photograph above -- a man being hacked to death by an angry mob.

Snip from series introduction:

Their bond was formed in the field, where injustice and death lurked. It was a camaraderie that came from the constant experience of mortal danger -- Mr. Oosterbroek was killed during a gun battle in April 1994. They also shared a mutual understanding of how important it was to document the tumultuous events unfolding in front of them as apartheid gave way and South Africans struggled to form a new government. It was a battle most brutally waged in townships populated mainly by poor blacks.

(...) Mr. Marinovich was fairly new to photojournalism in 1991 when he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of photographs of supporters of South Africa's African National Congress burning alive a man they believed to be a Zulu spy. "I had been too scared to say anything to try to stop it," Mr. Marinovich said, "and so that really disturbed me about myself and who I thought I was at the moment."

Showcase: The Bang Bang Club (Part 1 of 2) (New York Times, Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl)

As part of the American Chemical Society's big meeting last week, they hosted a chemistry-themed barbecue reception. Science News reports on the geek cook-out, including some news-you-can-use from two food chemists. From Science News (photo from Wikimedia Commons):

"Unfortunately, if you ask the [food] safety people they'll tell you to cremate everything," said Shirley Corriher, a food chemist and cookbook author from Atlanta. Meats should be cooked long enough to kill bacteria, she noted, but they don't need to be cooked beyond medium to be truly safe. For one thing, carcinogenic chemicals called heterocyclic amines form when creatine -- a substance found in muscle tissue -- reacts at high temperatures with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The amount of HCAs formed in grilled meats typically triples if meats are cooked well done rather than medium well, she noted.

Other research-proven tricks for reducing HCAs, as noted in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, include using marinades, garlic and onion, said Risch. A marinade of red wine, for instance, can reduce the formation of HCAs by 88 percent, she noted. Although scientists aren't sure exactly how these techniques work, moisture from marinades may ensure that the meat directly in contact with the grill remains at a relatively low temperature, she said.

"Better BBQ Through Chemistry"

Italian banks may soon accept high-end prosciutto and wine as collateral for loans. The Italian agriculture minister is into the idea. Apparently, it's not as far-fetched as it sounds. From The Guardian:

The Italian bank Credito Emiliano has long stored hundreds of thousands of parmesan wheels, worth about 300 (euros) each, in warehouses as collateral while they age. Since the bank can sell the cheese if creditors default, it can afford to offer low interest rates to an industry which is suffering from recession and supermarket discounting. Legs of cured ham, or prosciutto crudo, weighing about 10kg, can sell for hundreds of euros after months of curing in controlled conditions, while bottles of Brunello di Montalcino are regularly snapped up for the same amount. "We may start off with accepting wine as collateral, but I would prefer the Italian banking association to launch an industry-wide scheme which involves a range of products," said Zonin. "This will help producers in times of crisis as well as when the economy picks up."

"Italian banks may take ham and wine as collateral" (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

The Neuro Revolution is a new book by Zack Lynch that looks at how our increasing knowledge about how the brain works will impact everything from economics and politics to religion and, of course, marketing. h+ recently interviewed Lynch about how neuroscience may someday be applied to our daily lives. From h+:

h+: Supercomputers are now faster at leveraging trading positions than humans (this is creating a quite a controversy on Wall Street). What role do you see for human neurofinance and neuroeconomics in the financial markets as artificial intelligence continues to gain more sophistication?

ZL: The technology of each previous revolution is required for the succeeding revolution. We couldn't have had the industrial revolution without the agricultural revolution, because we wouldn't have had the specialization of labor that was required for humans to have the wealth and time to be able to develop industrial technologies. We couldn't have had information technologies prior to industrial technology. In the same way, we couldn't have had neurotechnology without the development of information technology – and without its continued development. These are enabling technologies that will continue to develop, and that will support the evolution of more sophisticated neurotechnologies. If we're talking about specific technologies that will be available to financial traders, one will be neurosoftware applications that will help retrain the brain of financial traders to reduce the human tendency to overestimate. That will require a quite sophisticated understanding of the human neurobiology of decision making. That -- in and of itself --will require computational models that are just beginning to be worked out.

This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology (h+)
The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (Amazon)

The science journal Nature published a fascinating essay about the weaponization of chemical agents that affect the brain. Of course, that was the US and UK military's goal when they ran their own "acid tests" in the 1950s and 1960s. (See the video above.) Research on more advanced chemicals continues though. In his nature piece, Malcolm Dando, professor of International Security in the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, UK, surveys some of the newest developments and possibilities, and argues that the Chemical Weapons Convention, an arms control agreement, needs to be modified sooner rather than later. From Nature:

For example, in 2006, the US National Academies produced a report called Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences. The authors argued that recent advances in our understanding of how bioregulatory compounds work, of signalling processes and of the regulation of human gene expression — combined with developments in chemistry, synthetic biology and in technologies such as nanotechnology — have "opened up new and exceedingly challenging frontiers of concern".

More recently, a 2008 US National Academies report entitled Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies, similarly argued that in cases in which 'agonists' of a particular system have been found to enhance some cognitive trait, an 'antagonist' might be developed that could reduce it and vice versa. If dopamine agonists enhance attention, say, so dopamine antagonists might disrupt it. They also warned, among other things, that nanotechnologies could overcome the blood–brain barrier and "exploit existing transport mechanisms to transmit substances into the brain in analogy with the Trojan horse".

Some researchers are actively facilitating the development of new chemical weapons. For example, a research group from Pennsylvania State University in University Park has identified several drug classes as potential non-lethal agents or 'calmatives'3, including benzodiazepines and 2-adrenoreceptor agonists, as well as individual drugs such as diazepam and dexmedetomidine. Some researchers are actively facilitating the development of new chemical weapons. Similarly, at the 4th European Symposium on Non-Lethal Weapons in 2007, researchers from the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Charles University in Prague described the effects on macaque monkeys of combinations of drugs that produce a rapid loss of aggressive behaviour4. They argued that the drugs could be "used to pacify aggressive people during ... terrorist attacks". The same researchers have also investigated methods of aerosol delivery to human volunteers.

"Biologists napping while work militarized"

Could the Left 4 Dead and Half-Life universes ever converge into one uber-Valve-geography? In Jim Rossignol's latest Ragdoll Metaphysics column, Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek has said the idea's at least been internally bandied about, as part of a wide, wide ranging interview that also covers the mixed messages and missed opportunities that spawned the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott, and why AI constructs make him depressed.

Elsewhere on Offworld we saw even more newly announced games coming out of the ongoing GamesCom conference: Lionhead returning with Fable III, top-down zombie shooter Dead Nation, which will apparently have individual countries competing to fully eliminate the undead virus, more of Sony's PSP cult cute platformer Loco Roco, and Hudson's The Tower of Shadow, in which you play as the shadow.

We also saw a fantastically unlikely official new contest to create the best Elvis techno cover/remix on your DS, listened to Metroid metal cover album Varia Suite, played the latest NES demoscene ROM, and saw both Alice's Adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom, and Spider creators Tiger Style showing us tomorrow's game development studio, today.

Nina Paley, creator of the wonderful and copyright-fraught animation Sita Sings the Blues writes, "All the Flash authoring (.fla) files I used to make Sita Sings the Blues have just been posted on archive.org, under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Want to know how I got a certain animated effect in Sita Sings the Blues? Open up the .fla files and find out. Want to put flying eyeballs and demons in your next music video? Now you can. Want to make a 'Sita Sings the Blues' video game using all the assets? Go for it. (But I strongly suggest you negotiate my endorsement if you want to actually market the end product.)"

"Sita" Source Files now on Archive.org (Thanks, Nina!)

Dan sez, "Its been 40 years since the Grim Grinning Ghosts first opened their doors and invited guests into the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. Take a look back to the beginning with Walt and the Imagineers who created the beloved attraction. From stretching rooms to hitch hiking ghosts the 999 Happy Haunts never disappoint and always invite guests to hurry back!"

Haunted Mansion Celebrates 40 Years of Happy Haunts! (Thanks, Dan!)

Matt sez, "Sasha Pohflepp created a wonderful counter-factual history of a USA where Carter beat Reagan and created a 'space-race' for renewable energy and planetary engineering. Regine from We-Make-Money-Not-Art has the story..."

The project asks how visions like these are being created in the public imagination but also how they are being reflected by the economy and by individuals. In the case of weather modification, people are modifying their cars into lightning harvesters to participate in the experiments, both scientifically and commercially. The car presented in the model below is a modified Chevrolet El Camino that has been fitted with a lightning rod and various electrical equipment like variable resistors and capacitor banks to store the electricity from a lightning strike. Drivers are then able to sell the stored electricity at any one of the drive-through energy exchanges, which have opened around the zone.

The Golden Institute found a way to modify freeways and harness the energy which would otherwise be lost through braking when a vehicle exits the freeway at a velocity of about 55 miles per hour. Now, vehicles are equipped with magnets. As they exit the freeway at high-speed, the cars are gradually slowed down employing the Lorentz force as they pass through a series of induction-coils. The coils are typically operated by a franchise like Chuck's Café and if used effectively can get the driver a discount on a cup of coffee.

The Golden Institute (Thanks, Matt!)

John Scalzi's list of bad design decisions in the Star Wars universe had me LOLing when I should have been working:

C-3PO
Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.

Lightsabers
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.

John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design

Home Movies At DisneyLand - 1956 from Jeff Altman on Vimeo.

Here's some recently unearthed home movie footage of Disneyland in 1956, the year after it opened. The footage was shot by Jeff Altman's grandfather using a Bell & Howell Filmo and 16mm Kodachrome film stock and includes a scene of his grandmother meeting Walt Disney. John Frost of The Disney Blog calls it "One the best videos of early Disneyland I've seen."

Home Movies At DisneyLand - 1956 (via The Disney Blog)

I've been reading Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books since I was a boy, and nothing pleases me more than discovering a new one on the shelf, as I did this week, picking up the paperback of Jhegaala, the eleventh volume in the series.

For the uninitiated, Vlad Taltos is a human assassin in a strange world where humans occupy the eastern kingdoms and the rest is run by the Dragaereans, a long-lived elfin race whose sorcery is far more formalized than humanity's witchcraft (the human culture on Dragaera is based loosely on ancient Hungarian culture, and the magic is derived somewhat from Hungarian animist mysticism). Vlad lives among the Dragaera, pledged to the house of Jhereg, a mongrel house that you can buy your way into (the others are hereditary), whence come all the crime lords and assassins. In Vlad's storied, ten-volume adventures, he goes from street-punk to crime-boss to lordling to political operative, embroiled in a magnificently realized fantasy world that leaps off the page with a fascinating poleconomy, literary tradition, spirituality and history ancient and modern.

Vlad is a hard-boiled, wise-ass hero, whose narration is part of what makes the series so irresistible, laden as it is with deadpan humor, great observation, wicked emotional truths, and a keen gourmet sensibility (seriously: the food and drink in this book are so well described that I spent the entire time while reading it yearning for one of the marvellous cups of coffee or the hearty bowls of stew that Vlad subsists on through much of the tale).

The other thing about Vlad is that he grows, from an immature punk in the first couple volumes -- books that captivated the teen me perfectly -- into the rapidly wisening exile that we meet in Jhegala. In this volume, Vlad is on the run, driven from home by a political struggle that demands that he choose a side even though he strenuously resists it.

Now Vlad has come to the eastern lands, the human kingdoms that his family hailed from, which he has never seen before. He comes to Burz, an industrial town barely held in the balance between the mercantalists and the manufacturers and the peasantry who still work the land. Vlad's arrival shatters the uneasy peace and sets off a chain of terrible massacres that leave him trying to solve the town's mysteries before he becomes one of them.

This is Steve Brust doing Hammett's Red Harvest, the classic hardboiled novel that is the epitome of the "someone comes to town" kind of story. Brust's take on it is a tour-de-force of subtle characterization, mystery, mayhem, and a rare grasp of the invisible economic forces that shape our lives. Brust is one of the few fantasy writers in the history of the genre whose worlds have all the moving parts necessary to actually exist as economic realities, and here his virtuosity is right at the fore.

There are some spoilers in this volume if you haven't read the previous ones (and if you haven't, you ought to), but I don't think they're deal-breakers if you wanted to start here. If you've never read Brust, you're in for a treat. If you already follow the series, then you know why this is such great news.

Jhegaala

All the Vlad Taltos books

This October, 1967 Playboy article on computers and their limitations features an all-hands computer debugging session in which the machine's minders grab their "trembling screwdrivers" and leap into the "machine's intestines."

Over the past ten years, it has been fashionable to call these great buzzing, clattering machines "brains." Science-fiction writers and Japanese moviemakers have had a lovely time with the idea. Superintelligent machines take over the world! Squish people with deadly squish rays! Hypnotize nubile girls with horrible mind rays, baby! It's all nonsense, of course. A computer is a machine like any other machine. It produces numbers on order. That's all it can do.

Yet computers have been crowned with a halo of exaggerated glamor, and the TV election-predicting circus is a classic example. The Columbia Broadcasting System got into this peculiar business back in 1952, using a Remington Rand Univac. The Univac did well. In 1956, for instance, with 1/27 of the popular vote in at 9:15 p.m., it predicted that Dwight Eisenhower would win with 56 percent of the votes. His actual share turned out to be 57.4 percent, and everybody said, "My, my, what a clever machine!" The Univac certainly was a nicely wrought piece of engineering, one of the two or three fastest and most reliable then existing. But the credit for insight belonged to the political experts and mathematicians who told the Univac what to do. It was they, not the machine, who estimated that if Swamp-water County went Democratic by X percent, the odds were Y over Z that the rest of the state would go Democratic by X-plus-N percent. The Univac only did the routine arithmetic.

Which escaped attention. By the 1960s, the U. S. public had the idea that some kind of arcane, unknowable, hyper-human magic was soldered into computers--that a computerized answer was categorically better than a hand-cranked answer. As the TV networks and hundreds of other businesses realized, computers could be used to impress people. A poll prediction looked much more accurate on computer print-out paper than in human handwriting. But, as became clear at least to a few in 1966, it's the input that counts. Honeywell programing expert Malcolm Smith says: "You feed guesswork into a computer, you get beautiful neat guesswork back out. The machine contains no Automatic Guess Rectifier or Factualizing Whatchamacallit."

COMPUTERS: THEIR BUILT-IN LIMITATIONS (Oct, 1967)

Aaron sez, "At a chemistry conference, nuclear scientists gave away some hilarious swag, including kitchen table place mats with facts about radiation exposure and playing cards with nuclear weapons trivia."

All is not Sturm und Drang among the WMD crowd. During the talk, with the help of other symposium participants, everyone in attendance received a set of RADACAD playing cards. The back of each card sports a picture of what appears to be a nuclear-explosion-triggered fireball that will grow into a mushroom. The face of each card provides a teaching moment. The four of diamonds, for example, lists eight radioactive isotopes used in industry that are of the greatest concern when it comes to dirty bombs. The joker cards show a cartoon character clad in a hazmat suit as he holds out what appears to be a tray bearing a picture of a nuclear explosion bomb, sort of like an offering of an hors d'oeuvres.

WMD Goodie Bag (Thanks, Aaron!)

The Robot Comics folks have been industriously converting my Creative Commons licensed IDW graphic novel, Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (which collects six of my short stories adapted to comics form by an array of talented writers and editors) to a multiplicity of mobile phone platforms. This is all under the auspices of the CC license and all the resulting comics are free -- there's stuff for Android, the Nintendo DSi, and the iPhone/iPod Touch (Apple finally caved and decided that the panel depicting an orc in a video-game being decapitated didn't disqualify the comic of Anda's Game from being included as a freebie in the iPhone store).

Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now reaches 60,000 downloads

The current ish of Entertainment Weekly has a tiny video screen embedded in a two-page CBS ad that auto-plays when you turn the page. The screen is controlled by a slim PCB sandwiched between the pages. As Wired's John C Abell says, "The audio quality is equally good (extremely poor video shot by this reporter notwithstanding), but beware: There are no volume controls, and in a quiet environment, it's quite loud. This is surely a intentional design feature, aimed at getting the attention of people nearby."

I wonder if the video screen is worth more than the newsstand price of the magazine, and if so, what makers could do with this subsidized video hardware?

CBS Embeds a Video Playing Ad in a Print Magazine

Fiji Water isn't just devastating to the environment of Fiji, the planet that endures the cost of shipping it, and the environments of the places where it is consumed. It is also the product of a brutal military regime that monitors all outgoing Internet traffic from the island for criticisms of the water business and immediately arrests people who transmit them, bringing them in for intensive questioning and the occasional prison-rape threat, as journalist Anna Lenzer discovered.

I sat down and sent out a few emails--filling friends in on my visit to the Fiji Water bottling plant, forwarding a story about foreign journalists being kicked off the island. Then my connection died. "It will just be a few minutes," one of the clerks said.

Moments later, a pair of police officers walked in. They headed for a woman at another terminal; I turned to my screen to compose a note about how cops were even showing up in the Internet cafés. Then I saw them coming toward me. "We're going to take you in for questioning about the emails you've been writing," they said.

What followed, in a windowless room at the main police station, felt like a bad cop movie. "Who are you really?" the bespectacled inspector wearing a khaki uniform and a smug grin asked me over and over, as if my passport, press credentials, and stacks of notes about Fiji Water weren't sufficient clues to my identity. (My iPod, he surmised tensely, was "good for transmitting information.") I asked him to call my editors, even a UN official who could vouch for me. "Shut up!" he snapped. He rifled through my bags, read my notebooks and emails. "I'd hate to see a young lady like you go into a jail full of men," he averred, smiling grimly. "You know what happened to women during the 2000 coup, don't you?"

Eventually, it dawned on me that his concern wasn't just with my potentially seditious emails; he was worried that my reporting would taint the Fiji Water brand. "Who do you work for, another water company? It would be good to come here and try to take away Fiji Water's business, wouldn't it?" Then he switched tacks and offered to protect me--from other Fijian officials, who he said would soon be after me--by letting me go so I could leave the country. I walked out into the muggy morning, hid in a stairwell, and called a Fijian friend. Within minutes, a US Embassy van was speeding toward me on the seawall.

Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle (via Kottke)

Update: Fiji's response and Mother Jones's rebuttal here.

(Image: Fiji Water, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from Jessica N. Diamond's Flickr stream)

Beloit College's annual "Mindset List" is a list of truisms about the historical context of the incoming freshman class -- all the things that have existed "forever" for them and all the things they never knew firsthand. It's a fast train to self-doubtsville for those of us who feel like we are still young and with it. Here's some I liked:

# Salsa has always outsold ketchup
# Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible.
# They have been preparing for the arrival of HDTV all their lives.
# The KGB has never officially existed.
# Babies have always had a Social Security Number.
# Women have always outnumbered men in college.
# We have always watched wars, coups, and police arrests unfold on television in real time.
# Britney Spears has always been heard on classic rock stations.

Beloit College Mindset List (via Charlie Stross)

Wow! From Coilhouse:

Helen Keller — inspiration to generations and inspiration for an entire genre of schoolyard humor — and her teacher and friend Anne Sullivan in a clip from 1930 in which they describe the way in which Helen learned how to speak ... It’s a fascinating little clip which pays homage to a woman who, even beyond her amazing circumstances, was a radical socialist, suffragist, and supporter of birth control, who was friends with the likes of Mark Twain and who worked tirelessly to champion the rights of both the downtrodden and the physically disabled.

(Via Richard Metzger)

BB reader Jeannine (@j9drost) tweets, "My brother helped illustrate a 25-page Afghan election manual. More civic education materials here."

Above, a detail from the Pashto version of "Your Voice. Your Vote. A 25-page manual designed for instructors teaching adult learners about issues, candidates, and appraisal of elected officials' performance." PDF Link. (Author: National Constitution Center, afghanelections.org)

This election is only the second to take place in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

I'm having fun going through old zines as part of my research for a book I'm writing on the DIY movement. Here's a page from Mike Gunderloy's zine-of-zines, Factsheet Five #33 (1989), which has an ad for bOING bOING. It also has a review of bOING bOING #1 on the previous page:

BOING BOING #1 ($4 CASH from Mark Frauenfelder, 712 Redacted St, Boulder, CO 80302): A delightful new zine for the neophiliac. Mark apparently was influenced by a lot of the same subversive literature that shaped my life, and now he's done something about it. The first issue features an interview with Robert Anton Wilson, book, zine and software reviews, wild predictions, comics, and much more. Nanotechnology, comics, libertarianism, drugs and sibling rivalry all play a part. An enjoyable romp through memespace.

It sure was fun poring over Factsheet Five with a highlighter. I'd order at least 30 different zines each time a new issue arrived.

Peter Steinkamp, who makes neat little walker devices, sent me this 1945 patent for a one-legged hopping tank. Imagine a battlefield full of these things bouncing around.

One of the objects of this invention is to provide a tank having an extensible leg capable of imparting a series of vertical oscillations to the tank, and having means to vary the angle of inclination of the leg to obtain directional movement of the tank.

Another of the objects of the invention is to provide a tank which is adapted to traverse difficult terrain.

Yet another object of the invention is to provide a tank which is propelled in such a manner that its progress is intermittent, thereby rendering it a difficult target. Still another object is to provide a tank provided with means whereby the direction of its course may be rapidly changed, thereby rendering it a difficult target.

Amanda Visell says:

Hello friends and weirdos. Holy crap, I'm going to some places! I'll be showing up at some Kidrobot stores to release my newest vinyl toy with them, the 8-inch Wood Donkey Dunny. He is here to chop you and make friends!

Kidrobot Los Angeles Tuesday August 18 6-8pm 7972 Melrose ave

Kidrobot San Francisco Wednesday August 19 6-8pm 1512 Haight st

Kidrobot Dallas Thursday August 20 6-8pm 5307 e Mockingbird ln

Kidrobot New York Friday August 21 6-8pm 118 Prince st

The Wood Donkey Dunny will be released in stores at 6pm on the day of that store's signing and Thursday August 20 at 11am EST at Kidrobot.com. (You have to contact Kidrobot for one of these, not me. Sorry!)

As part of a campaign for Kodak, we're writing short pieces for their product site about creative things to do with media players in general. (Note: the post you're reading now wasn't paid for by Kodak or required by the campaign.) I like the way my essays turned out and hope you dig them. The ideas may be harder than I think to implement, but they're fun to imagine anyway. The first is titled "Reframing Art In A Digital Home" (illustration by the talented Rob Beschizza):

In 1989, Bill Gates founded a company called Interactive Home Systems, which changed its name a year later to Corbis. Now, Corbis owns one of the largest collection of stock images in the world: more than 100 million shots. A slew of those images are safely stored deep underground in a former limestone mine in Pennsylvania. If you want to use the photo of, say, Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, Corbis will sell you a digital copy and sell you some rights. That wasn’t Gates’s big vision though. His forecast was that huge screens would hang throughout our homes, rotating through a global collection of photos and artwork. The future isn’t quite here yet though, and Corbis’s business is about supplying newspapers, magazines, and ad agencies. That’s all well and good and makes people money, but twenty years later, I still find Gates’s vision compelling. And it seems easy to turn your home into a digital art gallery using a home network, media players, and inexpensive LCD TVs. The art is also free, although I always recommend supporting artists whose work you dig...

"Reframing Art In A Digital Home"

My second article was about pirate TV and starting your own "Local Area (TV) Network." Here's a chunk:

In the 1980s guerilla media scene that birthed Boing Boing, the proliferation of pirate TV was a holy grail for culture jammers. Proto-cyberpunk television series Max Headroom featured a character who ran a pirate TV station out of a converted bus, and rumors of late-night anonymous signals floating in the ether fueled our Videodrome-inspired fantasies. And it wasn’t all wishful thinking that individuals with a bit of tech know-how could take back the TV airwaves, much like operators of pirate radio stations had done since the 1960s. Famously, during one weekend in 1978, a pirate TV station called Lucky Seven reached viewers in Syracuse, NY. The station, hosted by an anonymous announcer wearing a gas mask, mostly aired Star Trek and Twilight Zone episodes — geek programming to be sure. And in 1987, a TV pirate sporting a Max Headroom mask broke into the broadcast of a Dr. Who episode on WTTW Chicago. Decades later, the proliferation of wireless networking and media players could bring “pirate TV” out of the shadows, enabling anyone to curate and stream video programming to a nearby niche audience — college dorm, apartment complex, or even city block...

"Start Your Own Local Area (TV) Network"

Here is a fascinating slideshow of cabinet cards, postcards, or cartes de visite from 1900 Germany. The collection appears to be mostly circus performers, escape artists, sideshow freaks, and other curious humans. If you speak German, please summarize the text in the comments! Freakshow 1900 (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

In the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the French scientist character Claude LaCombe (François Truffaut) was based on my friend Jacques Vallée. Whenever I see the movie, which is one of my favorites of all time, I get a kick out of LaCombe insisting to the military man that the UFO phenomenon "is an event sociologique!" That's totally Jacques speaking. Jacques just pointed me to this deleted scene from Close Encounters that I didn't know existed. It shows an alternate first meeting between LaCombe and his translator David Laughlin (Bob Balaban). As Jacques says, the scene really gets at the emotionality of the story that Spielberg was trying to achieve along with telling a great weird tale.