Jason Brammer's hand-painted eyeball matrioshka, "The Watchers," is a fine addition to the genre of crazy-awesome stuff you can do with blank nested dolls.

"The Watchers" (via Craft)

Dutch animator Sjors Vervoort created this fantastic stop-motion animation as a graduation project. Steven Aert did the sound design. (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Jessica Polka is a crocheter of curiosities who was inspired by the fantastic tome, Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. You can see Polka's work on her Wunderkammer blog or buy some specimens in her Etsy shop. She's also published a book of Wunderkammer crochet patterns, including "instructions to make your own crocheted squid, octopus, red coral and white blooming coral." The book is $12 from, where else, the Curiosity Shoppe.
Wunderkammer Crochet Patterns

Above is the only film footage of Anne Frank, the inspirational 13-year-old diarist who hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic before finally dying in a concentration camp. The brief clip shows Frank, then 12, looking out of her window during her neighbor's wedding on July 22, 1941, one year before her family went into hiding. The film was made available on a YouTube channel just launched by the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. From CNN:

Other videos show the chestnut tree that Anne saw every day from her window and the church bells that rang while she was in hiding. She mentions both of these in her diary.

Otto Frank can be heard on the site, talking about his daughter's diaries in a video excerpt made in the late 1960s before his death. He said she talked about and criticized many things, but he learned her real feelings only by reading her diary.

"I was very much surprised about deep thoughts Anne had, a seriousness, especially her self-criticism. It was quite a different Anne I had known as my daughter. She never really showed this kind of inner feeling," Otto Frank said.

"Anne Frank has channel on YouTube" (CNN)
Anne Frank Museum Amsterdam

UPDATE: Apparently, I missed that Xeni and BoingBoing Video had done this already back in April. You can check out that video, and get more information on the experiment, as performed by Popular Science columnist Theo Gray.

Saturday Morning Science Experiment continues on the vague food theme from last week, this time with a video demonstrating the energy (i.e. calories) stored in gas station-quality snack sausages. Naturally, eye protection is needed.

Tip of the hat to Ian Simmons, of the UK's Life Science Center, for suggesting this video! If you've got suggestions for upcoming Saturday Morning Science Experiment videos, send them my way!

Thumbnail photo courtesy Flickr user stallio, via CC. My apologies to readers outside the US, who may or may not get the reference.

Adrienne from the Henrico County, Virginia Public Library sez, "Every year we participate in National Banned Book Week, a week that celebrates the written word and the free exchange of ideas, as outlined in the First Amendment to our Constitution. We invite you to volunteer as a reader of a banned or challenged book. This is our way of celebrating that our community has the right to read freely. The Banned Book Reading Room will be open for three weeks (September 26--October 17, 2009), longer than the National Banned Book Week, because last year's Room was so popular! Ever since the written word has existed there have been those who would prevent others from reading material considered "objectionable" -- everything from the Harry Potter series to the American Heritage Dictionary. Join us as a volunteer reader! Call 364-1400 x5 for more information."

The Banned Book Reading Room at Twin Hickory Library! (Thanks, Adrienne!)

From Topatco, this delightful, XKCD-esque "Grapathy" shirt, illustrating inflection point for comedy graphs.

Grapathy Shirt (via Torrez)

In the New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs," Ellis Weiner writes up a pitch-perfect parody of a certain kind of manic social-media-expert publishing marketdroid (thankfully, not any of the absolutely wonderful marketing people at my publishers are like this!):

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I'll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I'll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

Subject: Our Marketing Plan (via Making Light)

Brandon Hardesty is filled with wide-eyed comical amazement at the killer soap bubbles he's able to blow after filling his mouth with -- yeccch -- baby shampoo. He does it so we don't have to.

I've Discovered Something Amazing! (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(NSFW: sites linked in this post contain sexually explicit material).

Required weekend reading: "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?," Susannah Breslin's bold and ambitious photo-essay on the recession's impact in "porn valley," the epicenter of the adult entertainment biz.

"Originally, I wrote it for a publication, but subsequently pulled it," says Breslin. "When no other publication expressed an interest in publishing it, I decided to self-publish."

The story and images unfold over ten online sections. Here is a snip from the part devoted to shock auteur Jim Powers:

Fascinating, horrifying, and amusing--oftentimes all of those things at the same time--Powers' celluloid world is one populated by midgets, bald chicks, and crazed men outfitted with monster-sized papier-mâché phalluses which spew torrents of goo onto the naked bodies of supine women, movies in which everyone has sex all of the time, and in which, most of the time, no one appears to win.

Take, for example, "The Bride of Dong," in which two young, unsuspecting women "inadvertently unleash the power and massive cock of an ancient fertility god when they decide to house sit for the summer," the result of which is the "call[ing] forth an ancient being from another time and world who bridges the cosmos to shove his massive tool up their asses," and the true star of which is neither the decidedly comely Gia Paloma or Julie Night but a six-foot prosthetic penis that belongs to an onerous, fanged beast that emerges upon a full moon. (An online reviewer noted dutifully: "It's hard to possibly make anything of this, other than to say that it's vintage Jim Powers," adding, "I haven't seen a prosthetic dong this big since 'Boogie Nights.'")

To decry Powers-helmed series--like "Gag Factor," in which women, not infrequently, hang upside down and perform oral sex on male costars to the point of gagging and sometimes vomiting; "White Trash Whore," in which seemingly innocent Caucasian women are gangbanged by roving packs of African-American men, and for which the box cover copy reads, "Mom, Dad ... I hate you this much!"; and "Young and Anal," again, the title here is self-revelatory--as "misogynist" is almost beside the point.

Read it all: theyshootstars.com (Note: site designed by Chris Bishop of "Obama Rides a Unicorn" fame). Photo: a man preparing for a bukkake shoot, shot by Susannah Breslin.

the yes dance
symmetry explorer
i do believe i came with a hat
gawker (timelapse)
there i fixed it
vikings

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.

A lovely new video for Modest Mouse, by Bent Image Lab's Nando Costa. The video incorporates stop motion, visual effects, and motion graphics techniques, and tells the tale of an artist who enters his personal sanctuary and is "presented with a hand-crafted drawing tool that assists him in materializing his mental impressions."

Through drawing circular patterns, the machine discharges an endless web of yarn that guides him through his visual representations of his memories. The story progresses to reveal that he is divided between two worlds, one of dull reality and the second of warped memories. In the process of finding a way out of his consciousness, he is trapped between the two competing spaces, which eventually inflict lethal damage, acting as metaphors to self-destruction.

Super neat. More about the making of the video here. Stills from production here and here. "The Whale Song" appears on Modest Mouse's new EP No One's First, And You're Next." (Amazon)

The body of a 75-year-old LA area man who died Monday sat decomposing on his balcony for four days because his neighbors figured the corpse was part of a Halloween display. He died of a single gunshot wound to the eye.

Neighbors on the 13900 block of Bora Bora Way told Raishbrook that they noticed the body Monday "but didn't bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy," he said. "The body was in plain view of the entire apartment complex [and] they all didn't do anything," Raishbrook said. "It's very strange. It did look unreal, to be honest."

Dead man slumped on balcony mistaken for Halloween decoration (LA Times)

What is Google Wave good for? I don't know! I haven't used it. Above, two Google Wave demo-tainment videos you must watch. YouTube hacker/artist Joe "copyrighthater" Sabia has done it again. Two Google Wave experimental films, Pulp WAVE Fiction, and Good WAVE Hunting.

And, more soberly now: in an extensive feature-by-feature blog post, Daniel Tenner breaks down what purpose Google Wave serves, and why early detractors may be missing the point.

I believe this is partly Google's fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it's a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer. Google calls wave an "online tool for real-time communication and collaboration". The way Google should have advertised Wave is: "it solves the problems with email".

What problems does Google Wave solve? A matter of perspective. (danieltenner.com, via @carr2n)

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

In today's episode, you'll meet young Ms. Alexis McAdams, whose winning project was a concept for a kind of "living diorama," called "Dioractive." The idea: re-enact current events (say, the floods in the Phillippines, or the internally displaced refugees in Darfur) with human actors, to help people understand and empathize, and feel motivated to change the world.

Alexis told us she found out about the Digital Open by reading Boing Boing, and she's been a fan of our blog for some time (thanks, cool!). She says the idea for "Dioractive" came from varied sources of inspiration: LARPers (folks who do live-action roleplaying games), Civil War re-enactments (the real-life kind), history-based videogames (her brother's into these), and a diorama project she did in third grade. She digs theater, and learning foreign languages. All of this combined into an idea of how to place ourselves into the lives of the "other," and understand in a more personal way just how interconnected we all are.

Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners.

Sabotage...from the future?

That's the theory being put forward by two top physicists. Even they admit it's a little weird. The idea could be groundbreaking. Or, it could be a valuable lesson that even scientists can fall prey to the very human tendency to see patterns in actually random events.

Some people have this experience and come away believing in astrology. Instead, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have ended up with the theory that the Future is trying to stop us from creating a Higgs boson particle.

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle."
...While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

Above, a 1943 amphibious vehicle test in Detroit's Rouge River (Photo: Charles E. Steinheimer./Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images). Life's Ben Cosgrove emails:

As Time's site has it: "For the next year, Time Inc. journalists will cover all aspects of the Motor City. Because the future of Detroit affects all of us." I believe that. I've always liked Detroit -- my first visit to the amazing Detroit Institute of Arts remains one of the most wonderful cultural surprises of my life; I was a callow jerk, expecting little, and was utterly blown away by DIA's collection -- and I thought I knew a little bit about the city. But somehow I never knew anything about Detroit's central role in helping the Allies win WWII. Well, when I did finally hear about it, I thought a gallery was in order.

WWII: How Detroit Won The War

Over at the Artificial Infinite, old-school bOING bOING pal Alan Rapp posted a critical essay about the state of architectural photography. The provocative essay is accompanied by absolutely incredible images by Tim Griffith, an architectural photographer who I wasn't familiar with. His hazy, atmospheric images of our strange built environments are sure to turn up in my dreams. From Alan's essay:

...The current practice of architectural photography has in many ways evolved more toward art. Fairly conceptual photographers such as Iwan Baan and Frank van der Salm are regularly tapped by the titans of the architecture industry—OMA, Herzog & De Meuron—to create photographs of their projects that seem to violate most of Molitor’s tenets.

A brief exploration of the work of Tim Griffith provides further example of this new “artistic” approach to architectural imaging and the shifting state of architectural photography. Giffith’s work, recently included in the Ballarat International Foto Bienniale, depicts some of the most prominent architectural projects of our age. Australian-born and US-based, Griffith explores the parallels and tensions inherent in this yoking of architecture and photography; his work is formed by professional rigor yet inflected toward art, hypertechnological in subject and approach, yet suggestive of an already fading moment.

"Architectural Photography is Art Photography"

I'm posting geek "yo momma" jokes to my Twitter feed, and people who think that sort of nonsense is amusing have been replying with even funnier ones that I'm retweeting in an infinite circle of endless insult lulz. Here are a few selections.

• Yo momma so ugly, she make goatse cry for a unicorn chaser. (@xenijardin)
• Yo momma so fat THX can't even surround her. (@mustardhamsters)
• Yo momma so dumb, she went to the dentist and asked for a bluetooth.(@seanbonner)
• Yo momma so stupid, she thinks the Large Hadron Collider is a gay porn film.(@xenijardin)
• Yo momma's so big and ugly she lies dreaming in R'lyeh.(@Orlovsky)
• Yo momma so fat she doesn't just have a low center of gravity, she has an elliptical orbit.(@seanmoriva)
• Yo momma so old, she's an arguing point between Creationists and Evolutionists. (@Nightwyrm)
• Yo Momma so fat, even Ralph Lauren's Photoshop team can't help her ass. (@rawkreative)
• Yo momma so old she goes on carbon dates. (@sfslim)
• Yo momma so dense she got her own event horizon. (@sfslim)
• Yo momma so weak physicists have unified her with electromagnetism. (@sfslim)
• Your momma is so fat NASA shot a rocket into her ass looking for water. (@tbias)
• Yo momma so fat, she took geometry in high school just cause she heard there was gonna be some pi. (@MatthewMors)
• Yo mamma so fat, China uses her to block the internet. (@thelizupdate )

Follow me for more if you like. I promise not to tweet other crap at least for the rest of the day, so you can tune in to nothing but yo momma jokes without having to endure me talking about what I ate for lunch or what I'm the mayor of, or whatever.

I was traveling this week, which, in these days of the abomination that is HLN*, means I spend my hotel mornings watching random non-news cable networks. This time, the choice was HBO Comedy, which is how I ended up watching a great classroom-themed, comedic retelling of American history featuring Robert Wuhl.

I caught a couple of incorrect details here and there, but in general Wuhl was on track and worth watching...if only for his take on the ascendancy of Franklin Pierce and his (in my opinion) pretty insightful overarching lessons:

1) Our understanding of history is "based on a true story"

and

2) "We'll get through it" makes a pretty good philosophy from which to approach American politics.

UPDATE: I should note that there's swearing in these videos. So, play audio with caution in respect to bosses, small children and your own proclivities.

A four pound hunk of metal crashed through the roof of Peter and Mair Welton's home in Hull, UK. The Royal Air Force first thought the debris fell off an airplane but now they say it came from space. From the BBC News:

It was not known where the metal had come from but it seemed likely that it was "space debris", investigators said.

The RAF Flight Safety Branch said it was the only incident of this kind it had dealt with for five years.

Couple's home hit by space metal

Last Saturday, I brought you a video of horrible gummi bear torture. Now, I want to set the record straight. Some of my best friends were* gummi bears. I swear.

To make it up to the gummi bear community, I present to you, their life story: From the early days in Bonn, Germany, to being an inspiration for breast implants. Gummi bears have had a full and happy life before we get to them. And don't let PETA tell you otherwise.

Pictured: Stalwart, brave gummies save their comrades from what might otherwise have been a tragic mountaineering accident. Flickr user iwona_kellie captured the event on film. Used here via CC.

*Some friends are tastier than others.

Michael Geist sez,

C-27 is the Canadian anti-spam bill that comes out of committee on Monday. The opposition Liberals have proposed amendments which appear to have been drafted by copyright and telecom lobbyists. They would allow for surreptitious installation of computer programs and - even more outrageously - would allow copyright owners to secretly access information on users' computers.

The bill contains an anti-spyware provision, yet the Liberal motion would allow for the collection of personal information on a computer without authorization if the collection is related to a "investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada." Note that that is private sector surveillance, not the police.

On top of these provisions, the Liberals have also tabled motions to extend the exemptions for telecom providers including allow telecom providers to engage in a host of activities - right down to scanning for and removing computer programs - without permission.

With the hearing on Monday, it is critical for Canadians to speak out - yet again - to ensure that C-27 does not leave the door open to private surreptitious surveillance.

Michael has links to contact the relevant MPs with your comments. Yes, we have to keep doing this, because the second we stop, they'll break the goddamned Internet, put spyware on your computer, and start listening in on every click and email.

The Copyright Lobby's Secret Pressure On the Anti-Spam Bill

Last night, Federated Media's Neil Chase and I presented at my alma mater, the UC Berkeley Grad School of Journalism, about online publishing. The conversation was all about digital media, so afterwards I was delighted when a student there named Diana Jou came up to me wanting to talk about print 'zines! She has a blog, called Systems of Operation, where she (mostly) posts photos of 'zines, print ephemera, and artists books whose design she digs. Her taste seems to overlap with my own and I hope she starts updating her blog more frequently! The images above come from an instruction manual for an Olivetti typewriter and a booklet from the Society for Scientific Investigations of Anomalous Atmospherical and Radar Phenomena. Systems of Operation blog

Here's a complete run of National Lampoon covers from 1971 - 1998. The August 1971 cover depicts American war criminal William Calley as the imbecilic Alfred E. Neuman, painted by the inimitable science fiction illustrator Kelly Freas.

National Lampoon cover gallery (Via Jack Shafer)

The Collectors Weekly published a fascinating interview with Scott Buckwald, the original prop master for Mad Men. Buckwald is a fascinating character and his work on Mad Men is obsessively awesome. For Mad Men, Buckwald and his team sought out vintage taxicab meters, constructed lipstick display cases, printed TV Guides of the era, reproduced a 1960 Sara Lee cherry cheesecake box, and even cooked hamburgers that matched the time period. From The Collectors Weekly:

Collectors Weekly: When it came to the Mad Men office scenes, did you have to get vintage typewriters and pencils and pens?

Buckwald: Well, pencils are pencils. There's no change in the pencils, and a lot of offices were using ballpoint pens. Fountain pens had largely disappeared. Certainly for formal use, the fountain pen was still there, but not as an everyday office tool.

I thought Mad Men made a big mistake on the typewriters. They knew what the right history was, but they ignored it. The secretaries at that advertising firm would have still been using vintage-style typewriters, but they used IBM Selectrics simply because the producer liked the way they looked and they made less noise on set. So we got many letters about how they were wrong, but, again, that's his call. And right or wrong, it's his show. He can do whatever he wants with it.

There was a typewriter repairman in North Hollywood, California. He couldn't believe it when all of a sudden someone deposited 24 vintage typewriters on his doorstep and said, "Make them look new." He probably hadn't had that much work in the last 25 years. He was probably just about ready to hang up the "Going out of business" sign and cursing the arrival of the laptop computer when all of a sudden here I come with 24 typewriters...

Behold the french fry coated hot dog, a Korean treat. (Via Kristie Lu Stout)

As if Vegas casinos don't already rake in enough money from suckers, now they are developing technology to automatically detect people who count cards.

The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual "count" of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much each player is betting on each hand, and it syncs up the two data points to look for patterns in the action. If a player is betting big when the count is indeed favorable, and keeping his chips to himself when it's not, he's fingered by the computer... and, in the real world, he'd probably receive a visit from a burly dude in a bad suit, too.

The system reportedly works even if the gambler intentionally attempts to mislead it with high bets at unfavorable times.

Computers to crack down on card counters

Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

According to Slashfood, an Australian brewery has reportedly set off the alarms in Disney's legal department with a Raspberry Ale ad campaign featuring Ho White, an "anything but sweet" character who blows smoke rings while reclined in bed with the seven dwarves.

Kicking off a new series of weekly round-ups of the most essential just-released games (spanning retail, indie, downloadable, iPhone, freeware, and all otherwise), this week takes us on a trip through heavy metal fantasy, jellybean puzzle solving, rusted robot worlds, and Indian-spiced psychadelic shooters.

Brutal Legend (Double Fine, PS3/Xbox 360)

Certainly one of the highest profile games of the season, Double Fine's Brutal Legend (at top) has been garnering all the media acclaim it richly deserves following its release earlier this week.

Created by former LucasArts adventure vet Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango) and starring Jack Black alongside a league of metal legends (Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, and, of course, Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne), the studio's open-world/driving/lite real-time-strategy opus is every medieval-apocalypse album cover brought to glorious life, finally fulfilling the wishes of two generations of disaffected patched-jean-jacketed and notebook-cover-doodling Hessians.

Monte Schulz's This Side of Jordan is the first volume of a jazz-age trilogy that was twelve years in the writing, produced in tribute to Schulz's father, the cartoonist Charles M Schulz. It is beautifully written and thoroughly researched, a veritable time-machine that whirled me through time to the dirty back roads of the American midwest in the year before the Depression.

This Side of Jordan is the story of Alvin Pendergast, a selfish, ignorant, bitter consumptive farm-boy who lights out across America with Chester Burke, a vicious gangster and serial killer. On their first job, they pick up Rascal, a mad dwarf who's been imprisoned by his aunt who hopes to steal his inheritance. The three set out on a series of violent, picaresque adventures as Chester drags them from one act of bloody, senseless criminality to the next.

Did I mention how good the writing is? The writing is excellent. The characters -- the unlikable, passive Alvin; the unlikable, psychotic Chester; the unlikable, compulsive liar Rascal -- are extremely well drawn. The setting is so vivid I felt like I could fall into the book and lose myself there, landing on some dusty road in a tourist camp where the hicks waited to be fleeced or killed by Chester.

In case you missed it, though, I should reiterate that I didn't like any of these characters. The most active character was a sociopath. The secondmost active character was a hopeless, compulsive liar. The point of view character never does a thing off his own bat, and is, instead, led through the action by the people around him.

But I kept reading. I couldn't stop. This book is a masterpiece of setting and storytelling, even if most of the dramatic tension came from waiting for someone who wasn't an utter fool or villain to do something, anything, to change the situation.

This Side of Jordan

"Lampreys don't charm most people," begins a pamphlet from the Minnesota Sea Grant.

Truer words, my environmental research friends, truer words.

Yes, it's hard out there for a lamprey. Already cursed with a face not even their mothers (who die shortly after spawning) could love, these fish were further saddled with 50 years of bad PR brought on when one invasive species, the sea lamprey, moved into the Great Lakes and wreaked a trail of parasitic havoc from New York to Minnesota. Lost in the shuffle were several native lamprey species, some of which aren't even parasitic. Despite living in the Great Lakes for 1000s of years in co-evolved cooperation with other fish, non-invasive lamprey have paid the price for their cousin's misdeeds.

The Science of Scams is a new project from Channel 4 and mentalist/magician Derren Brown that aims to debunk the paranormal industry's lucrative claims about ghosts, fortune-telling, telekinesis and other assorted woo woo. Brown and C4 produced seven videos purporting to show the kind of "paranormal" activity held up as evidence of the supernatural and released them on YouTube for several weeks, allowing people to make what they will of them. Now, they're revealing the hoax videos once per week, with accompanying videos that explain how the scam works. The show is presented by Kat the Scientist, who did postgrad research in Biological Anthropology and Pharmacology at Oxford.

I love this to pieces and I've been waiting to tell you about it for months -- you see, it was commissioned by my brilliant and talented wife Alice Taylor for Channel 4, as part of C4's educational/public service remit. And that, friends, is why my marriage kicks ass.

Science of Scams

The British ISP TalkTalk has produced a compelling case against the government's plans to disconnect whole households from the Internet if the copyright industry accuses them -- without proving anything in court -- of three acts of infringement. TalkTalk picked a random street in North London and showed that 23 of the households in that road were using WEP security to stop strangers from accessing their networks. WEP has been thoroughly broken for years, but many older games consoles, phones and other devices are only capable of using WEP to connect to WiFi networks. TalkTalk argues that householders who have done everything they can to secure their networks from people who want to use them for cover during illegal file-sharing are still vulnerable to being disconnected by record- and film-company execs.

Households that are subjected to this form of collective punishment -- "someone around here broke the law, so you'll all suffer" -- lose access to the net, and with it, connectivity related to their employment, education, family connections, health, and government. All on the unsubstantiated say-so of the same entertainment companies that have previously accused a laser-printer of illegally downloading an Indiana Jones movie, not to mention the small legion of dead people; ancient, non-computer-owning grannies; and other innocents who've been legally threatened by the music industry for alleged copyright infringement.

A rep from the record industry insists that he has bought some magic beans "robust" evidence-gathering software that will never, ever cut someone off from the Internet on false pretences, so we don't need judges or evidence or trials or any of that messy business. But, of course, if someone is hacking your WiFi without your knowledge, he's prepared to cut you off from the Internet, because "the responsibility for ensuring that an internet account shared throughout a household is not being used for illegal filesharing clearly lies with the account holder."

ISP in file-sharing wi-fi hack

Love this air-conditioner cover ("Tape & painted cardboard on window AC unit cover, Bushwick, Brooklyn NY") snapped by Flickr user Dbilly.

Televox (via Neatorama)

Flickr user Megpi made this beautiful "impressionist cake." ZOMG.

impressionist cake (via Craft)

Tor has updated the tile game that accompanies the ongoing serial of my forthcoming novel Makers, which comes out at the end of the month (and boy am I excited! Publishers Weekly called it "Brilliant" and a "Tour de force" and Library Journal called it "Enthusiastically recommended").

Each installment in the serial has been accompanied by a CC-licensed image from Idiots' Books, and the images tile, lining up with one another on all four sides. Tor is tossing these images into a Flash-toy that allows you to arrange and rotate these to your heart's content.

The serial is up to 44 parts now, and the first 36 illos have been combined into a new, expanded, 6X6 version of the tile game (we'll do the 7x7 soon, then the 8x8 and finish up with a 9x9 incorporating all 81!).

Makers Tile Game 6x6

Index of Makers installments

The mission of the Read-Along Adventures site is to assemble the audio and scanned pages from every Read-Along book ever created -- these were the short picture books that came with a 45RPM record that narrated them, with cues to turn the page as necessary. Where possible, the curator has recreated the Read-Alongs as Flash apps. There's even audio for the Haunted Mansion record. How lovely!

Read-Along Adventures (Thanks, TimK!)

Wired Science rounds up the winners of the past 35 years' worth of Nikon prizes for excellence in microscopic photography. These are just stunning. Shown here: 2001: Fresh water rotifer feeding among debris (200x), Darkfield. / Harold TaylorKensworth, UK.

35 Years of the World's Best Microscope Photography (Thanks, @timoreilly!)

Toyota marketing created some kind of ill-conceived alternate reality game whose premise was that you were being stalked by an unhinged criminal who sent you threatening emails saying that he was coming to your house, backstopped by things like MySpace profiles and even angry bills from hotels he trashed on the way, having given your name as the payment contact. A woman didn't realize that these were a marketing prank and thought she was being stalked, got scared, lived her life in fear, and then sued.

Toyota's defense? The woman had taken some online survey in which the fine print gave them permission to send her "marketing and other communications."

Duick's attorney said the marketing company went so far as to send Duick a bill for damages the fictitious man supposedly made to a hotel room...

The alleged harassment lasted five days, according to the suit, and frightened Duick so much she contacted neighbors, friends and family, and the occupant of her former home about the man she feared was coming to visit. Her attorney declined to comment as to whether or not she called the police. She even made her longtime boyfriend sleep with a club and mace next to the bed for protection...

It turns out the prank was actually part of a marketing effort executed by the Los Angeles division of global marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which created the campaign to promote the Toyota Matrix, a new model launched in 2008...

Tepper, Duick's attorney, said he discussed the campaign with Toyota's attorneys earlier this year, and they said the "opting in" Harp referred to was done when Duick's friend e-mailed her a "personality test" that contained a link to an "indecipherable" written statement that Toyota used as a form of consent from Duick.

Tepper, said that during those legal negotiations, Toyota's lawyers claimed Duick signed the written legal agreement, which they said amounts to "informed written consent."

Woman Sues Toyota Over 'Terrifying' Prank (via /.)

The Discovery store has these amazing wild animal hoodies (cobra, raptor, whale, shark) whose sleeves turn into huge fanged mouths when you cross your arms. I wish they didn't just have a boy modelling these -- they are definitely unisex.

Raptor Hoodie Shirt (via Geisha Asobi)

Update: The shirts come from Mouthman, and they're modelled by boys and girls on the site! Thanks to the anonymous commenter who alerted us to this!

In response to a post I wrote earlier about Maywa Denki president Nobumichi Tosa's depiction of Engadget Man, Boing Boing reader RogueModron has created a solder-gun-carrying, motor-oil-haired Makezine man.

But the real question is, can anybody accurately draw a Boing Boing Person?

A parish leader in Hammond, Louisiana is in the hot seat with the ACLU for refusing to grant a marriage license to a mixed race couple. Keith Bardwell of Tangipahoa Parish insists that he is not a racist, he's merely looking out for the well-being of the children that the couple might bear.

"I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house," Bardwell said. "My main concern is for the children."

...He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"I don't do interracial marriages because I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves," Bardwell said. "In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."

Meanwhile, the yet-to-be-married couple, 30-year old Beth Humphrey and 32-year old Terence McKay, are looking to file a discrimination complaint with the Justice Department, and the ACLU is asking the Louisiana Supreme Court to investigate. Just for the record, it is illegal for a parish leader to refuse to marry a couple on the basis of their race.

Interracial couple denied marriage license in La.

Falcon Heene, a six-year-old boy from Colorado is missing after an experimental balloon crash landed. The boy's brother said he saw Falcon get in the balloon before it went into the air. It rose to about 11,000 feet before returning to the ground near Denver.

Police are looking for the boy. Some say he may have fallen from the balloon and others think he never got in the balloon but is hiding because he doesn't want to get into trouble.

It doesn't look to me like a helium-filled balloon this small could carry a kid aloft.

No sign of boy said to have floated off on balloon

Update: He was hiding in a cardboard box in the garage all along! [CNN]

Swedish designers get commuters off the escalator by making the stairs more fun. It's awesome. And, yet, part of me wonders how creepy this would be if you were descending into the subway alone late at night. Plink...plink....plink...

Painter and photographer Laura Levine is one of several photographers whose work is on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum's Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present. She says: "The exhibition and companion book include two of my favorite portraits, of Bjork and R.E.M. To mark this event, I am making signed fine art prints of both these images available through a special offer."

UPDATE: Here's a link to a many more rock and roll photographs by Laura. They include interesting background stories.

Laura Levine fine art and photography prints

Oh, how I love fightorflight from Metafilter's checklist on why your plan to save journalism won't work. Top marks!

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) No one will be able to find the guy
(X) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
(X) It tries to prop up a fundamentally broken business model
(X) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) Print readers will not put up with it
( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Readers' unwillingness to pay for just news
( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
(X) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
( ) Sources' proven unwillingness to "go direct"
( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
(X) The high cost of investigative journalism
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
( ) Legal liability of "citizen journalism"
( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist
(X) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football
( ) The necessity of the editing process
(X) Americans' huge distrust of professional journalism
( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything
( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income
( ) Rupert Murdoch
( ) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) The tragedy of the commons
( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
(X) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites

Problem with your plan to save media: the checklist (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

In today's episode, you'll meet Brennon Williams, a teen from Hillsborough, CA, who created an online robotics store for beginners:

The BW Science Labs Store is an idea I've had for a while now, but it has taken a lot of work to get it up and running. There is currently 1 kit available, the Vivus the Robot kit. I"ve seen a lot of those really low-quality $20 robots where you clap your hands and they twitch, and I've seen $400 robots with a great deal of functionality. I wanted to make something in between, and that's exactly what Vivus is. During prototyping I wanted to make a "real robot", one that was autonomous and could truly act on its own, while trying to keep the cost down as well. 

Brennon cited Maker Faire and Make Magazine as inspirations for his work, and you can see why! Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners.

Princeton's David Tank just published a paper in Nature describing how he used the open-source Quake 2 engine to power a VR maze that he ran mice through in order to study their neurons while they moved. My wife, who played Quake on the British national team, wants to teach the mouse to rocket-jump.

Tank's team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball's movement as the mouse runs.

Those readings were the input for the researchers' virtual reality software -- a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it "a mini-IMAX theater." Mice in the study ran through a virtual maze designed in the open source Quake game editor, but rather than earning points or power-ups, they were rewarded with sips of water from a head-side nozzle.

Into the hippocampus of each mouse the researchers inserted a glass capillary just one micron wide at its tip and filled with salt water. Known as a whole-cell patch recorder, it detects electrical currents as they pulse through individual cells.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding how the dynamics of electrical activity within single neurons is related to firing patterns among collections of neurons that accompany the performance of complex tasks," wrote Douglas Nitz, a University of California at San Diego cognitive scientist, in a commentary accompanying the findings.

Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing Quake

Artist Chris O'Shea ran an installation on the BBC's Big Screens in which he composited in a "hand of God" on live footage of the street so that "unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity." Creative Review has details on the tech behind the prankish miracle. "The hand from above"