You can find a lot of crap on YouTube, but you know what? You can find gems like this, too. I don't know much about the origin of this video, but it's one in a series of three ten-minute chunks on YouTube -- rare color footage of Tibetan tantric masters meditating, in retreat. Looks a few decades old. Start at 0:39 and just zone out. According to the notes from the uploader, the last 3 faces you'll see in the video are:

1) His Holiness Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma lineage in India
2) Venerable Kalu Rinpoche, great realized master in the Kagyu lineage.
3) His Holiness, the 16th Karmapa Lama (...) head of the Karma Kagyu lineage.

Video: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

[Image: Koala, a CC-licensed photo by Mshai]

The Australian Koala Foundation reported this week that koala populations are declining because we humans continue to invade their habitats. Wildfires and global warming aren't helping, either. They could become extinct within a few decades. More: BBC, Reuters.

I've been wearing Vans slip-ons since I was a teenager. In recent years, Vans has made shoes featuring designs from pioneering underground artists I really dig like Robt. Williams and Rick Griffin. I was thrilled to find out that they recently added a series of shoes featuring the art of comix pioneer R. Crumb! Seen above are slip-ons emblazoned with Crumb's Fritz the Cat. They're $50. (Mr. Natural appears on a pair of high-tops.)

R. Crumb Slip-On Vans (Amazon)

[image above: Dan Hillier. Cory and Alice gave me this print for Christmas a few years back, and it hangs in my office!]

♦ dan hillier
♦ kaitlin beckett
♦ chad hagen
♦ peter jansen
♦ zimoun
♦ steve lambert
♦ josh gosfield

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.

The Ruben's Tube: Proving that basic science concepts are more fun to learn when you add open flames since 1904. Want to build your own? There's an Instructables for that.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user tom_adams, via CC.

Davesbit made his own globe using maps from the Generic Mapping Tools project; he used a beachball for a mold and cast the sphere with fiberglass and foam.

here is the plastic beach ball covered in paint for the inside of the sphere-half mold...

the stand was made from scraps of red oak from a computer table i built...

globe with stand (via Make)

The TSA says you can't carry a snow-globe onto a plane, even if it fits in your freedom baggie, because they can't measure how much liquid it contains, and therefore it must contain more than three oz of potential explosive, um, water.

TSA, meet Archimedes. He lived over 2,000 years ago and figured out how to calculate the volume of a object by measuring its displacement. If you actually believe that 3 oz is a magical high-danger threshold, please consider adding a delightful, hallucinatory element of science to your pseudoscience by putting an Archimedes tank at the checkpoint. It would be a lovely counterpoint to your other scientific tests, such as the ducking stool and the spirit-rattles.

"Snow globes are not permitted to be carried through security checkpoints," said Transportation Security Administration spokesman Dwayne Baird.

The reason is that the globes contain liquids, and TSA rules say that only liquids, gels or aerosols in containers of three ounces or less are allowed through security in carry-on bags...

"I would think they would just say 'no,' because they can't really determine how many ounces are in there," Baird said.

Snow globes? TSA will likely just say 'no' (via MeFi)

Ape Lad sez, "I've taken the shape of the default twitter avatar and adapted it to some non-bird characters. I still haven't figured out how to fit Galactus into that shape."

Twitter Avatars (Thanks, Adam!)

Image link. Devin McGrath. (via galadarling via Susannah Breslin)

The aim of Orgy, circa 1967, is to see how far you can pour "your favorite libation" into someone's mouth using the "beautiful hand-blown Porron." (i am bored via @fordradio)

Vice has an interview with b.a.n.g lab's Ricardo Dominguez about the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS device based on a cheap cell phone that will help Mexican immigrants safely cross the border."

For the past few years you've been working on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which sounds like it's really going to chafe the asses of millions of people--civilians and government entities alike. What was the impetus for this project?
My research lab at Calit2 is called BANG Lab, which stands for Bits, Atoms, Neurons, and Genes. One of the areas I've focused on since I've been in San Diego is developing what we call border-disturbance technologies.

What is the device, exactly?
We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compasslike navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway--things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border.

Are you worried that you're going to rile anti-immigration militias?
One of the first things we did at BANG Lab was to interfere with the Minuteman Project in 2005. They were quite angry because not only were we committing public actions against them, but Calit2 and the UCSD system were also supporting it. They're well aware of who we are and what we do. Once they get full knowledge of the Transborder Immigrant Tool--and we're very transparent about it--I'm sure they'll be quite critical.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool Helps Mexicans Cross Over Safely

URL shorteners like bit.ly present some profound problems for the health of the web: for one thing, they might vanish if they company that provides them goes bust (for some other things: it exposes your internet browsing to surveillance by random URL-shortening companies; it exposes you to malware and phishing attacks, and so on).

The first problem -- URLs can vanish -- looks like it may be solved soon. Many URL shortening companies are escrowing their databases of shortened URLs with the Internet Archive, an honorable, established nonprofit. If the companies go bust, their URLs will be redirected to the Archive and thus persist.

The non-profit Internet Archive, a digital library with extensive text, audio, video and web collections, will administer 301Works.org as a project of the Internet Archive. "Short URL providers have in the space of eighteen months become a corner stone of the real time web -- 301Works.org was conceived to provide redundancy so that users and services could resolve a URL mapping regardless of availability. The Internet Archive is a perfect host organization to run and manage this for all providers," says Bit.ly CEO John Borthwick. "The Internet Archive is honored to play this role to help make the Web more robust," added Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

All participating companies are members of the 301Works.org Working Group, a technical and policy discussion group, but the Internet Archive will manage the over all initiative in a fashion consistent with its charter as a non-profit organization, and supporting the interests of the greater community ahead of those of the participating companies.

Participating companies will provide regular backups of their URL mappings to the 301Works.org service. In the event of the closure of a participating organization, technical control of the shortening service domain will be transferred to 301Works.org in order to continue redirecting existing shortened URLs to their intended destinations.

URL shorteners working with Internet Archive for long-term preservation (via Kottke)

So this is apparently real (?!): an eyeball removal tool for "Reborn" baby-dolls. Holy creepy.

BEST REBORN EYEBALL-REMOVING TOOL I'VE FOUND! (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Danny from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Copyright lobbyists often indulge in what's called "policy laundering" -- if you can't get an amendment to copyright in one country, just shop it around until you find somewhere that will take it. Keeping track of changes and variations in over 180 countries and dozens of international venues is a challenge, but necessary if we're going to stop ill-advised copyright law from taking hold and spreading. That's why EFF, librarians, and researchers all around the world have teamed up to start Copyright Watch. We've spent months pooling together every copy of every country's copyright law that we could find. From now on, Copyright Watch will be spotting new changes, identifying quirks and novelties in different laws, and keeping watch at the IP fronter -- wherever in the world that might be."

Copyright Watch collects and monitors copyright laws from all over the world. (Thanks, Danny!)

This is neat -- CharityBuzz is auctioning off a private tour of Griffith Observatory with Leonard Nimoy! The tour is for two people and the current high bid is $5,250. The proceeds will go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

Also in the auction block: A tour of Industrial Light and Magic with George Lucas. Max bid on this is $300.

In my spam: boner pill fantasy art. This is a real image that adorned a spam email message from a Chinese meds site.

The folks at Graffiti Research Lab, openFrameworks, The Fat Lab and The Ebeling Group have teamed up to create The EyeWriter, a "low-cost eye-tracking apparatus + custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes." Instructables has a post up. I'd love to witness this in action, up close, with someone who really needs to use it. I am personally familiar with ALS (a family member died of the disease). Any technology that helps people with ALS retain the ability to communicate sounds like a wonderful, wonderful thing to me. (Thanks, Christy Canida!)

Jeff Simmermon says:

I worked as an offsider (assistant) to a kangaroo shooter in the Australian Outback in early 2004. It was dirty, disgusting, blood-soaked work and it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my entire life. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of that experience in some way or another. It taught me a lot: I learned to get tough, how to do some hard, hard work, and how to put aside all my delicate city liberal ideas and face the realities of the food chain.

Kangaroos are pests in Australia, and people eat their meat all the time. And meat does not just cheerfully lie itself down on the burger bun, either. Kangaroo meat is as free-range and organic as it gets, but you’ve still got to do a fair bit of old-fashioned killing to make it happen — and the process is disturbing, gory, and pretty hideous. Not unlike the rest of nature, the parts they don’t show you on the television programs.

Roo Shooter

For survivors-to-be whose healing arsenal includes attitude. I dedicate this post, on this particular day, to Gloria Rosa Linda, who is going to beat the living shit out of breast cancer. Sewing kits range from $12 to $20, depending on what materials you'd like to include. Julie Jackson is the crafter behind them. See also these bracelets, too (those are not for sale) (subversivecrossstitch.com, via Fuzzy Gerdes)

Verdict: Horrid.

Over at the Imaginary Foundation blog, amazingly surreal photos by French artist Frédéric Lebain who superimposes his photographs on top of the real world.

We've posted before about Dock Ellis. He was the baseball player who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping balls on LSD. Ellis died last year. In his honor, James Blagden and Chris Isenberg animated Ellis's retelling of his acid adventure on the mound. "Dock Ellis's Legendary LSD No-Hitter animation" (Dangerous Minds)

BB's favorite robot painter, er rather... painter of robots Brian Despain has a show of new paintings opening tonight, November 13, at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery. Above, "The Prodigal Son" (oil on panel, 15" x 19").Also showing is John Brophy, whose paintings mixes up iconography from various cultures and religions in a bowl of consumer culture. The full show is viewable online. Brian Despain and John Brophy

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

Today's is my last guest post here. I want to take this opportunity to thank Pesco and Boing Boing for inviting me here and giving me the latitude to say whatever I wanted to about whatever crossed my mind. I'm especially grateful to everyone who took the time to comment on my posts, whether you agreed with them or not. You're an amazingly thoughtful, opinionated, funny, articulate, out-of-the-box bunch, and for the most part admirably civil. The reservoir of wit, knowledge and intellectual firepower that Boing Boing has on tap is truly astonishing. As I'm sure I've said before, I don't write because I know so much--I write because it gives me an opportunity to learn. And you've all taught me a great deal. I hope I can come back and contribute to Boing Boing again; in the meantime, you're all welcome to drop by my own blog any time.

I began last Monday with my lucubrations about Orly Taitz and the birther movement. For the sake of symmetry, I will close out with some remarks about another woman of the right, Alaska's ex-governor Sarah Palin.

I recently talked to Sony's Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader. Named the "Daily Edition," it hits stores next month. Notwithstanding differences between each manufacturer's respective libraries, it offers all the best features of its main rival, the Kindle. But Sony says it offers one thing that Amazon won't: actual ownership of your books.

Look at this kick-ass anatomical ad for the International Vegetarian Union.

Vegetables are all your body needs (via Street Anatomy)

In 1890, a group of eminent musicians (including Peter Tchaikovsky!) got together to screw around and experiment with what was then a wacky novelty. On this early Edison Phonograph recording, the group alternately showboats, teases each other and generally pokes the new technology with a stick. This is basically the audio equivalent of how you (meaning me) used to spend entirely too much time playing with the system preference settings on the school library computer back in 1993.

Recording quality (and the fact that everybody is speaking Russian) makes it difficult to understand what's going on. Luckily, there's a translation after the cut...

Psystar, the company that makes and sells Mac clones, is the subject of a piece in SF Weekly. It talked to the young brothers behind the firm and asked them why they've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting Apple.

The boys loved to tinker. Robert vividly remembers his mom's fury when she came home to find the parts of a brand-new remote-control car spread across the living room floor. It had been disassembled down to the tiny plastic screws. "I've always liked understanding how things work, I guess," Robert says, smiling, "even if I couldn't put it back together again afterward."

Some people write about Psystar as if it were an offense to nature—even to the point of defending EULAs, the one-sided and adhesive contracts we "agree" to when installing software. Other nuggets in the story include Psystar's claim that their work is original and different to that of other hackers ("The first thing you have to do is unlearn everything you've read online about how to make this work, because it's all wrong.") and an unusual response from an Apple spokesperson. Worms in the Apple [SFWeekly]

The Roomba Pac Man uses indoor location sensors and Unmanned Aerial System software to create a playable (albeit slow) PacMan built on repurposed autonomous vacuum cleaners.

Roomba Pac-Man (via Wonderland)

The Times Labs blog takes a hard look at the data on music sales and live performances and concludes that while the labels' profits might be falling, artists are taking in more money, thanks to the booming growth of live shows. The Times says that they'd like more granular data about who's making all the money from concerts -- is there a category of act that's a real winner here? -- but the trend seems clear. The 21st century music scene is the best world ever for some musicians and music-industry businesses, and the worst for others. Which raises the question: is it really copyright law's job to make sure that last years winners keep on winning? Or is it enough to ensure that there will always be winners?

Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data - compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI - make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.

(It's often claimed that live revenues are only/mostly benefitting so-called 'heritage acts'. Unfortunately, the data doesn't shed any light on this because live revenues are not broken down by type of act, gig size or ticket price.)..

It's interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period - though admittedly not by much - which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much 'the music industry' has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered.

The graph the record industry doesn't want you to see (via We Make Money Not Art)

When a block of IP addresses or a collection of domain names becomes associated with bad action -- spamming, jabbering, denial-of-servicing -- various ad-hoc Internet groups will add it to a blacklist of "rogue IPs" or "badware domains" that are blocked at a very low level in the network.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any way to readily diffuse an "all clear" signal to everyone who follows along with this block, which means that gradually, the net is acquiring "slums" -- blocks of useful space that can't be occupied by legitimate users because someone bad once lived there and now no one will accept their traffic.

The Washington Post's Security Fix visits this question -- it's a compelling problem when you think of it. Bad actors will continue to move from blocked IPs to fresh ones, and if we never release the blocked sections, eventually we'll have shut down a very large chunk of IP space indeed.

"The problem is once an address block gets so polluted and absorbed into all these blocklists, it's difficult to get off all of them because there is no central blocking authority," said Paul Ferguson, an advanced threat researcher at Trend Micro. "That space won't be toxic for all time to come, but certainly it is going to be tainted for whoever ends up with it..."

"What you'll find is some blacklists out there are derivatives of other lists, and it's hard to get those cleaned up," Bertier said, recalling a case last year in which a customer was given a swath of Internet addresses, only to find it was impossible to send e-mail from that space. "Typically in those cases, we'll work with the customers to get them new space and mark that allocation as something that really shouldn't be used for e-mail."

A year later: A look back at McColo (via /.)

[PHOTO: "Jessie," a CC-licensed image by LeTiger.]

A few weeks ago, I blogged a funny video created by a Canadian high-school student titled "Hiding Your Sexual Orientation From Your Parents 101." One of the many people who commented on that post was an anonymous commenter who wrote:

Ok, my parents found out i was gay by myspace (which i regret for putting my sexual orientation) and my parents will never accept cause my parents are really realigous for our christianity. They are so realigous, that i'm now homeschooled and going to a private school. Also i have no internet unless for emergencies, no friends houses, no phone, no boy friends til i'm 18. The only times i can get out is to christian youth groups so i have no life for the next 5 years ( cause i'm 13). Oh and my parents think all the wrong things in the world about gays, they even use the gay f word. I need help and i'm typing this from my PS3 cause they don't know it has internet. HELP!!! =O

It's hard for jaded internet people like me to know when someone's pulling your leg online, but I'll take this one at face value. Many other teens read Boing Boing, and perhaps one of them is in a similar predicament. So, Dear Anonymous:

Boy, that sucks. I don't have a way of contacting you privately, so I'll say it to the world. You are fine just as you are. There is nothing wrong with being gay, and everything right with being true to yourself, no matter who tries to tell you otherwise. But being gay and a teen is very hard when your family isn't cool with it. My friend Maggie suggests that you might want to check out these helplines and Web resources, so you can talk to someone who can help you sort stuff out:

♦ amplifyyourvoice.org (a teen LGBTQ site)
♦ billwilsoncenter.org (Web chat based teen counseling service)
♦ glnh.org (National LGBTQ help center, with phone counseling lines manned by other LGBTQ people. They've got a special youth line, online peer support and access to local services and organizations.)

If you are reading this post, Anonymous, I bet some other people will be writing suggestions for other good resources in the comments. Check them out. Good luck. There are many of us in the world who welcome you just as you are. Don't believe anyone who tells you that who you are is anything less than beautiful.

Keep your head held high, little happy mutant.

Rick sez, "SFFaudio has just announced their 4th Annual Make an Audiobook, Get an Audiobook Challenge. They have twenty Science Fiction and Fantasy titles of public domain and Creative Commons novels that they'd like to see freely available as audiobooks on the internet. They're looking for participants to commit to recording and editing the sound files and then making them available online. At that point they will get to choose a free audiobook for a prize. But the real prize is the satisfaction of creating a creative work that can be shared with all. Previous SFFaudio Challenges have generated some great audiobooks of classic and obscure titles that would otherwise be unavailable in audio. This year's challenges has a variety of authors including Jack London, Mack Reynolds, James E. Gunn and many others."

The 4th Annual SFFaudio Challenge (Thanks, Rick!)

My husband called me last night all a-twitter and once I got him talking slow enough to understand that he wasn't going on about "six pennies", I could sympathize with the high level of enthusiasm. Earlier this year, "Sixth Sense Technology" from MIT---basically, a visual interface system that allows you and the computer in your cell phone to communicate in some truly astounding ways---was a big hit at TED. This week, at TED India, inventor Pranav Mistry announced that the technology will be released as open source...in a matter of months.

"Rather than waiting for that time to come, I want people to make their own system. Why not?," Mistry says in an article on Rediff Business. "People will be able to make their own hardware. I will give them instructions how to make it. And also provide them key software...give them basic key software layers...they will be able to build their own applications. They will be able to modify base level and do anything".

Makers, start your engines.

Mistry to make digital "Sixth Sense" open source on Rediff Business
The importance of Sixth Sense going open source on zdnet

Sixth Sense augmented reality device goes open source on Singularity Hub (natch)