Richard "God Delusion" Dawkins' foundation has helped fund an atheist/sceptic summer camp that teaches 8-17 year olds how to think critically about the world:

Alongside the more traditional activities of tug-of-war, swimming and canoeing, children at the five-day camp in Somerset will learn about rational scepticism, moral philosophy, ethics and evolution.

Camp-goers aged eight to 17 will also be taught how to disprove phenomena such as crop circles and telepathy. In the Invisible Unicorn Challenge, any child who can prove that unicorns do not exist will win a £10 note - which features an image of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory - signed by Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist.

Dawkins funds atheist summer camp (via Wonderland)

My latest Guardian column, "When I'm dead, how will my loved ones break my password?" describes the process my wife and I went through when we drew up our wills and realized that our encrypted hard-drives and our network passwords would go with us if we died or were incapacitated, and how important it was for us to have a secure, long-term solution for decrypting our data if we croak.

I don't want to simply hand the passphrase over to my wife, or my lawyer. Partly that's because the secrecy of a passphrase known only to one person and never written down is vastly superior to the secrecy of a passphrase that has been written down and stored in more than one place. Further, many countries's laws make it difficult or impossible for a court to order you to turn over your keys; once the passphrase is known by a third party, its security from legal attack is greatly undermined, as the law generally protects your knowledge of someone else's keys to a lesser extent than it protects your own.

I discarded any solution based on putting my keys in trust with a service that sends out an email unless you tell it not to every week - these "dead man's switch" services are far less deserving of my trust than, say, my wife or my solicitor.

I rejected a safe-deposit box because of all the horror stories I've heard of banks that refuse to allow access to boxes until the will is probated, and the data necessary to probate the will is in the box.

I pondered using something called Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a fiendishly clever crypto scheme that allows you to split a key into several pieces, in such a way that only a few of those pieces are needed to unlock the data. For example, you might split the key into 10 pieces and give them to 10 people such that any five of them can pool their pieces and gain access to your crypto-protected data. But I rejected this, too - too complicated to explain to civilians, and what's more, if the key could be recovered by five people getting together, I now had to trust that no five out of 10 people would act in concert against me. And I'd have to keep track of those 10 people for the rest of my life, ensuring that the key is always in a position to be recovered. Too many moving parts - literally.

When I'm dead, how will my loved ones break my password?

The EU has mandated that, effective from today, European mobile carriers will have to offer a single rate for all of the EU, setting a maximum on the blisteringly high roaming charges. It's a cop-out, though: Orange and T-Mobile and Vodaphone and others have this legal fiction that Orange France and Orange UK are different companies and that an Orange UK customer should pay a premium to connect to Orange France's network. But in reality, Orange is perfectly capable of acting like a single company when it is in their interest. The Commission has set rates at about 10X what I pay for domestic use in the UK (still 60% less than I presently pay to roam) and says it will consider forcing lower rates in future.

"The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end," said EU telecommunications commissioner Viviane Reding in a statement. "Expect the new roaming rules to make it much cheaper to surf the web on your mobile while abroad in the EU."

After years of experiencing high prices for making phone calls abroad - or receiving them - the new tariffs are radically lower: sending a text message, for example, will drop from an average of 28 Euro cents to just 11 cents. The move should end the well-worn fear of opening a huge phone bill when returning from holiday or business abroad.

The new tariffs include the following maximum costs:

- making a call while abroad will cost 37p per minute
- receiving calls will cost a maximum of 17p per minute
- sending a text message from another country inside the EU will cost 10p
- Data transfers will also fall dramatically, with a megabyte of data costing 85p

Mobile roaming charges drop across Europe

Wataru Itou created an immense and breathtaking paper castle, currently exhibited at Uminohotaru in Tokyo. It took Itou, an art student, four years to complete. The pictures are a must-see, do click through.

A Paper Craft Castle On the Ocean

海の上のお城

(via Paper Forest)

Victor sez, "Our documentary on virtual worlds, Second Skin, which premiered at SXSW last year, will finally be coming out in theaters and DVD in August. I produced it with my friend Peter Brauer and it was directed by my brother Juan Carlos. The three of us spent two years racing around the world following gamers who had fallen in love, become addicted, formed enormous guilds, or made their living playing MMOs like World of Warcraft, Everquest and Second Life. From gold farmers to disabled gamers, we tried to get a sense of how integral virtual worlds are to the fabric of life these days. We'd love you to check it out- the first five minutes are available on Current TV- here. The movie's coming to NYC, LA, Austin and Boston in mid-August, and DVD everywhere on August 25th."

I saw Second Skin at the Toronto Film Festival and was blown away -- by turns touching and funny, and always fascinating, this is a loving but clear-eyed look at the relationship of gamers to their games.

Second Skin (Thanks, Victor!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Steven's found this delightful old Byte cover, celebrating the release of the Smalltalk programming language; it's part of BBG's tribute to Xerox PARC, the legendary R&D center that invented everything and commercialized practically nothing.

This special issue of Byte Magazine was dedicated entirely to Smalltalk. The image is based on the actual balloon launch at PARC that celebrated the release of Smalltalk.

Byte Magazine, August 1981

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The iPlayer is a hardware video-decoder for your Nintendo DS. It plugs into your cartridge slot, and uses its on-board processor to send video in a variety of formats (avi, mov, RealPlayer, wmv, DivX, Flash, 3GP, asf, mpeg) to the screen and speakers. You load the video through a MicroSD card. Haven't tried it, got no idea if it's any good, but the premise is delightful.

iPlayer (via Red Ferret)

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

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More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Some of the results are in for the Alpha-test Meatcard Challenge, and they are terrific. The rules were to photographically recreate one of several famous Frank Frazetta paintings (without using Photoshop or the like). The winners get business cards made from laser etched beef jerky.

Frazetta Meatcard challenge results

A girl discovers an overheated bear in the forest. She helps him by shaving his fur in hard-to-reach places. Says Japan Probe: "This commercial is apparently an advertisement showing how Nisshinbo cares about global warming and the environment."

If you see Kogoro Kurata's Fiat 500 bulldozer coming down the road, get ready to jump out of the way. With a top speed of 3 kilometers per hour, it's not stopping for nobody. (Via Pink Tentacle)

Human ingenuity (and a touch of foolishness) on parade at thereifixedit.com (Thanks, Coop!)

The Evil Mad Scientists are rightfully fascinated with Sichuan peppercorns.

Sichuan peppercorns, oh yeah! Raven of Made with Molecules after eating them wrote, "There's a war in my mouth." They create a riot of numbing and tingling sensations, particularly if you can get relatively fresh ones (i.e. not stale from sitting around in a Whole Foods bulk bin). Raven links to an abstract about the particular anesthetic-sensitive potassium channels inhibited by hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, one of the components of sichuan peppercorns that make them so exciting.

Sichuan peppercorns

Michigan public librarians Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner have a blog featuring awful library books. The book above, Those Amazing Leeches, is a prime example of an awful library book. Awful Library Books (Via Hang Fire Books)

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we paid homage to the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, the amazing research facility responsible for hundreds of patents and myriad innovations in technology. Steven and Lisa visited the facility in May and got a behind-the-scenes look at several of their newest innovations. As a result, we have:

&bull pictures and diagrams of the first Ethernet cable in the world;

&bull the carpet on which graphic user interfaces were invented;

&bull a smart mirror that helps indecisive shoppers compare outfits;

&bull a gallery of caution signs seen along PARC's many corridors;

&bull a contest in which you could win an Alto user handbook or a Smalltalk instruction manual;

&bull an interview with PARC employees about how they geek out and party and eat good food;

&bull an explanation of the MrTaggy search engine;

&bull pretty photos of flexible electronics;

&bull and the mystery of Alan Kay's office.

On the non-PARC-related front, we have Rob's review of the Fit PC2; Jonathan Harris' new Sputnik project; and Dell's ultra-mobile audiovisual presentation platform. Enjoy!

Podcast author-legend JC Hutchins sez,

My book, "Personal Effects: Dark Art," came out earlier this month. To introduce readers to that world, I'm rolling out a podcast-exclusive prequel novella called "Personal Effects: Sword of Blood" -- the story features a lost sword mystically possessed by the blood of a dangerous, supernatural creature.

The premise of "Personal Effects" is to blur the line between fiction and reality (it features a cool Alternate Reality Game component), and that's what I'm doing with this promo. I'm actually giving away a real, battle-ready 40"-long sword, a replica of the iconic weapon used by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain, back in the 1500s. It was crafted by the same dudes who made swords for the "Highlander" TV show.

Giving away a sword wasn't enough: Written on its blade will be a "Personal Effects" flash fiction story written by myself and fellow CC-rockin' new media thriller novelist Matt Wallace, who donated the sword to the cause. And we're signing our collaboration, on the blade, *in our own blood* -- making this a "real" Sword of Blood.

Yes, we were inspired by the KISS comic book. :)

Participating in the giveaway is easy-peasy; folks simply need to evangelize the release of "Personal Effects: Dark Art" to friends or co-workers.

Personal Effects: Sword of Blood

Personal Effects

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube / Watch it at boingboingvideo.com.)

Founders of The Pirate Bay have made a deal to sell off "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker" to a Swedish gaming company for about $7.8 million.

More than 20 million visitors use the site each month. This April, TPB's three founders and a representative of their ISP were sentenced to a year in prison and damages of about $4 million over allegations of copyright violation.

A week before the news was announced, I interviewed Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde at the Open Video Conference in New York City, about that lawsuit, and about their plans for the future. He mentioned that "huge, huge news" was coming up, but refused to disclose the news at that time. An edited version of our conversation above, including Peter's explanation of why he believes filesharing and anonymity are good for democracy, is above.

(Special thanks to OVC organizers Elizabeth Stark Dean Jansen, Eddie Codel, and Intelligent TV for production assistance).

Related: My former colleague Ben Fritz at the LA Times has this piece up about the sale, analyzing the news from Hollywood's perspective.

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

Britain's keeping mandatory, RFID-enabled biometric ID cards that can be read without your knowledge or permission for immigrants like me:

Foreign nationals from outside the European Economic Area would still be required to have ID cards with 50,000 already issued, he said.

The Conservatives said the decision was a retreat.

"They have spent millions on the scheme so far -- the Home Secretary thinks it has been a waste and wants to scrap it, but the prime minister won't let him," said the party's home affairs spokesman Chris Grayling.

"So we end up with an absurd fudge instead."

Britain drops plans to make ID cards compulsory (Thanks, Dickon!)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Lisa's got an historical look at the dawn of networking:

Behind an ordinary door in a nondescript room hosting several printers and copiers at PARC is the world's first Ethernet cable. In 1973, Bob Metcalfe sent an internal memo to his colleagues at Xerox proposing a local system of interacting workstations, files, and printers. The devices would all be linked by one coaxial cable, he said, and would run within a local area network. He called the system an Ether Network, or Ethernet. By 1976, there were over 100 devices linked into Metcalfe's local network, and it was even used to test out the world's first laser printer, which was being developed concurrently in another research facility within Xerox. Metcalfe and his assistant David Boggs published their findings in the Association for Computing Machinery later that year. The rest is history.

Photo and original diagram of the world's first ethernet cable

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Metaplace, a service that lets you design your own virtual worlds, has now launched embedding, so that you can stick your world (or your friends' worlds) on your website.

* You can use it as a gathering space for your community -- on forums, for example, or as this user has done, as a way to foster community for her comics shop.

* You can make it the central gathering spot for a Ning community, as 3DSquared has done for the Digital Workforce Intensives in Louisiana.

* If you're a musician, you can hold your live shows right there on your site, complete with streaming audio and an audience, as Grace McDunnough plans to do.

* Over time, crazier uses will come about, such as this experiment in using virtual worlds to annotate the real world by embedding a Metaplace world on a geolocation in Google Maps.

Embed virtual worlds anywhere

(Disclosure: I am an advisor to Metaplace)

(Image from Hang Fire Books Flickr stream)

Manybooks.net has pulp author Charles Willeford's noir novella Wild Wives available for free in a variety of ebook formats.

Willeford, along with Fredric Brown, is one of my favorite pulp crime fiction writers because his work transcends the genre. From Willeford's Wikipedia entry: "Steve Erickson suggests that Willeford's crime novels are the 'genre's equivalent of Philip K. Dick's best science fiction novels. They don't really fit into the genre.'" Wild Wives by Charles Willeford Buy on Amazon.

Here are some of my recent posts about money for credit.com.

People are Easily Manipulated by Price of Goods, Except When They're Not: When people are told that a $10 bottle of wine costs $90, they'll report that it tastes better. When they're told a painkiller (actually a placebo) costs $2.50 per pill, they'll report less pain from electrical shocks than people who are given the same placebo but are told it costs ten cents.

Alarming Dashboard View of U.S. Debt: Watching the U.S. national debt, credit card debt, medical debt, and various entitlement liabilities skyrocket, I envisioned Uncle Sam at the gas pump, pouring greenbacks into a tank that we'll never be able to pay for when the bill comes.

Robo-call Rip-Offs: Patricia Poole of Mineral City, Ohio paid $695 to Mutual Consolidated Savings, which promised to "work with Poole’s creditors to get her interest rates lowered or eliminated." But after she paid the money, Poole says she never heard from anyone at Mutual Consolidated Savings.

Car Dealers' Tricks -- and How to Dodge Them: An especially dirty dealer trick is called "check ransoming." This is when a dealer asks you to write a check before a deal has been made to "prove to the manager you are serious." Then the check gets mysteriously "misplaced," putting you in an uncomfortable position that the dealer will use against you to close the deal against your better judgment.

Got a Plan to Reduce Your Credit Card Debt? Keep it to Yourself!: "Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed," writes Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby. "Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a 'premature sense of completeness.'"

Cheap, Good Food: Living on a budget sucks if you feel as though you are depriving yourself. The only way I'll be able to stick to a budget is if it's more fun than blowing the budget.

Executives at the New York Times managed to say they believed that publicity around the case of a journalist kidnapped in Afghanistan would make him more valuable to his captors, and increase odds that he would die in captivity. To this end, they worked with news organizations to enforce a news blackout on the case -- and they did the same with Wikipedia. Seriously, guys? There's a slippery slope for you.

A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia's page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing -- a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping. Even so, details of his capture cropped up time and again, however briefly, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet -- even a sentence or two about a person who is not especially famous. The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times.

Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia (NYT)

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

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More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Snip from a Harvard Business blog post by Umair Haque on the digital-age business lessons to be learned from Michael Jackson's death, and analysis of the purported revenue from his career over the last three decades:

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.

Let's use MJ's tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That's $12 million a year.

I'm deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels' pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that's how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

Wait a second — that sounds familiar. You can add back in the endorsements, etc. now — they only double the figure: to about $25 million.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something's very, very wrong. Where's the rest of the money? Why can't a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value?

Michael Jackson and the Zombieconomy (via Bob Lefsetz)

In the latest episode of the Canadian tech podcast Search Engine, Peter Van Loan, the new Public Safety minister, attempts to explain the Conservative government's approach to privacy on the internet. It's a remarkable piece of audio. It goes a little like this:

Search Engine: Here's some audio of your predecessor promising, on behalf of your party and your government, never to ever allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant.

Minister (as though he had been off on another planet): We never promised not to do that.

Search Engine: What about all the personal information that you guys are now proposing to give to the cops without a warrant?

Minister (tragically unclear on the subject): We're not requiring ISPs to give out any personal information without a warrant, just your real name, your home address, your IP address, your home and cell number...

Search Engine: Huh. Well there's this really critical, high profile court ruling that calls all that stuff private information?

Minister (pretending he didn't hear): The courts have ruled that this isn't private information. Canadians have no legitimate expectation of privacy when they use the Internet, not when it comes to your name, address, cell phone number, etc

Search Engine: Do the cops really need to get this information without a warrant?

Minister: Oh yes. There are MONSTROUS BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS WHO ADVERTISE THAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT A LIVE CHILD IN TEN MINUTES and we need to be able to run down their IPs without talking to a judge first.

Search Engine: But when a child is endangered, the law already allows you to get this information without a warrant, right?

Minister: Why are you still asking questions? Didn't you hear me? BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS! Surely that settles the matter.

Search Engine: Uh, I guess. Thanks anyway.

Search Engine: "No Expectation of Privacy"

MP3 link

Podcast feed

Disney's paying Hong Kong US$465M to expand the operations of the failing Hong Kong Disneyland, adding three new areas and 30 attractions (let's hope they finally add a Haunted Mansion!). I imagine the expansion will be on more "reclaimed" (e.g. landfill) territory.

As part of the deal announced Tuesday, the government plans to convert a substantial amount of existing loans to the park into equity, but won't invest any new capital. Its stake in the park will fall to 52%...

The physical size of the theme park, will increase by 23%, Lau said, with the new attractions aimed at broadening Disneyland's appeal to young adults...

In its first year of operations, visitors to Hong Kong Disneyland fell 400,000 short of the park's 5.6 million target. In its second year, attendance fell to just over 4 million visitors.

The park has also drawn criticism for lack of appeal to mainland Chinese tourists, who account for the bulk of its visitors, given their unfamiliarity with Disney stories and characters.

Disney said Tuesday the expansion will focus on "universally understood" stories, adding that many of the new attractions will be unique to the Hong Kong park.

Disney, Hong Kong Government Reach Deal To Expand Hong Kong Theme Park

(Image: 27601 - Hong Kong - Disneyland, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Xiquinhosilva's Flickr stream)

Kullin sez, "The publicly traded gaming company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) has issued a press statement this morning that they will purchase the website the Pirate Bay and the company Peeralism that 'develops peerialistic solutions to transport and store data on the Internet'. According to Svenska Dagbladet, GGF will purchase the Pirate Bay for 60 MSEK [Ed: about US$7.8 million] [Ed: E.g., peanuts], out of at least half in cash, and Peeralism for 100 MSEK, out of which at least half in cash."

OK, that's weird.

Following the completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site" said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

"The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers' need faster downloads and better quality" continues Hans Pandeya.

OK, that's kind of ominous and interesting.

Sounds more or less what the VCs who backed the original Napster were hoping for: buy the music industry's most hated, most successful enemy, then shop around to the industry and see if they'll give it a license and help it go legit. Ten years ago, the industry figured it would get a better deal by suing Napster into oblivion (they even tried to sue for the assets of the pension funds that backed the VCs that backed Napster!) and then buy it at firesale prices and run it themselves (except they ended up running it into obscurity by larding it with a bunch of junk that reflected wishful thinking about what the market would bear; meanwhile, competing rogue services took off and filled and expanded the niche Napster had occupied).

So here's the question: will Big Content learn from the Great Stupidity of 1999, or are they so emboldened by their domination of the legislative and judicial arms of the world's governments that they'll once again kill the most successful rogue operation and leave yet another niche for yet another group of even-less-cooperative rogues to fill?

Update:: Here's The Pirate Bay's Brokep on the subject:

TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it's value if the money would be the interesting part. It's not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site. As all of you know, there's not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It's the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn't evolve. We don't want that to happen.

We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And - you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat of us.

Listed company buys The Pirate Bay for 60 MSEK (Thanks, Kullin!)

My friend Bob Rossney has a wonderful piece about Michael Jackson's death, one that made me consider MJ's career in a new light.

The saddest thing about Jackson was not just that his fame ruined him, it's that it continued ruining him even after he was essentially finished as an artist. In the last decade of his life he was no longer a great singer or a talented composer or a brilliant choreographer; he was someone who had once been all those things and was now Michael Jackson. Here was a guy whose entire existence from early childhood had been wrapped up with what happened when he did things that made other people happy and excited. And that was unavailable to him. He still could make people happy and excited by showing up and having his picture taken, but that's all he had left.

Someone on the WELL used a word about Jackson's probable history as a child molester that made me stop and think: "unforgiveable." It strikes me that it never even occurred to me whether or not to forgive Michael Jackson. In my mind, he was so far away from normative that the question of forgiveness seems totally irrelevant. Not that his no longer really being human in any meaningful sense justified his actions, or mitigated the harm he did, but that it makes no more sense to judge the morality of his actions than it would to judge Henry Darger's. Their creepiness, sure. But this was a man (it's a mark of how profoundly damaged Michael Jackson was that it feels strange to call him "a man", just as it feels strange to recognize that when he died he was older than the President of the United States) who spent every day of his life embedded in a matrix of perverse incentives. The terrain of his personal landscape was unrecognizable. I can understand the choices that my cat makes more deeply than I could understand the ones Jackson made.

Some thoughts on Michael Jackson (via Making Light)

Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan's new anthology The New Space Opera 2 came out today, featuring all original stories by me, John Scalzi, Robert Charles Wilson, Jay Lake, Garth Nix, Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Moon, Justina Robson and many others. My story, "To Go Boldly," is a look at the LARPing ethic that lurks under the skin of any space navy.

The New Space Opera 2: All-new stories of science fiction adventure (via Scalzi)

QuarryGirl.com sent undercover agents to many of LA's vegan restaurants and ordered take-out food, spiriting it away on ice in sealed bags, then they conducted their own tests for trace amounts of animal products. Turns out that a lot of Thai vegan meat-substitutes are made with egg and other animal products (but seitan and tofu aren't). This kind of elaborate, science-based, complicated investigations into factual questions that matter intensely to small groups of people is one of the things that we mean when we say "citizen journalism."

Posing as owners of a new LA area vegetarian restaurant, we arrived at Bodhi and asked to speak with a customer service manager. We were quickly introduced to a helpful lady who was ready to advise us on what products to buy. She was either the manager or the owner, and most definitely the senior person on-premise at that time.

She showed us to a freezer of "veggie chicken", and we checked the ingredients on the label (all vegan). We asked her why some products have a better mouth texture than others, even though they have no eggs listed as ingredients, and after a long conversation and questions, she said the following:

"We buy most of this veggie meat from a manufacturer in Taiwan. It's produced for the Taiwanese and Chinese vegetarian market then re-labeled for export, often to the USA. I do know of times when things have been labelled incorrectly, but I do my best to make sure that what they send me is what they say it is."

Upon further questioning, she kindly gave us the email address of her contact in Taiwan. She specifically asked that we didn't mention Bodhi Vegetarian Supply when we contacted them, and so we're not disclosing the name of the manufacturer here.

laboratory tests of vegan restaurants in la (via Waxy)

Want to do something more meaningful for Iran's dissidents than turning your Twitter avatar green? EFF would like you to run a TOR bridge or relay, which will allow Iranians, and others around the world, to communicate with enhanced privacy and secrecy.

More sophisticated users can skip this paragraph, but for the rest, here's the basic outline. Tor (an acronym of "The Onion Router") is free and open source software that helps users remain anonymous on the Internet. Normally, when accessing websites, your computer asks for and receives a webpage out in the open, a process that exposes your IP address, the URL of the website, and the contents of the site, among other information to third parties. When accessing websites while using Tor, your computer essentially whispers its requests for a website, to another computer, which passes the request on to another computer, which passes it on to another computer, which passes it onto the computer where the website is hosted; the reply returns in the same, chain-message manner. The whispers are encrypted, so that neither outside authorities, nor the computers in the middle of the chain, can tell what is being said, and to whom. And the website itself does not have your IP address either.

Internet users in Iran are using Tor to both (a) circumvent censorship systems and (b) remain anonymous while reading and writing on the Internet. Both are critically important to the safety of protesters, many of whom fear retaliation from the government. Preliminary reports indicate that use of the Tor client in Iran has increased in the days after the contested election.

Whatever you think of Mousavi, I suspect that we all agree that Iranian citizens should be allowed to communicate without being spied upon by their governments (if only Americans enjoyed this right!).

Help Protesters in Iran: Run a Tor Bridge or a Tor Relay

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's spotted "Tourist Remover," a service that takes the stray tourists out of your shots of famous landmarks.

"Tourist Removed" is a web app that will remove other tourists from the photos you took of landmarks while on vacation as a tourist. All you have to do is take multiple shots of the same location, and Tourist Remover will only keep the bits that stay the same. It's like diff for photos!

"Tourist Remover" cleans up your vacation photos

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The Chinese government has banned all forms of exchange between game economies and cash economies, including the extremely popular Chinese online games that involve buying and selling virtual goods with cash, as well as the infamous practice of gold farming (creating in-game wealth that is sold on to rich foreign players), a practice that is said to employ 400,000 people in China.

I've spoken to gold farm researchers in China, the UK and the US, and many believe that the gold farming industry is controlled by Chinese cartels that use language barriers to exclude others from the internal exchanges where gold from one server of a given game is exchanged for gold on another server. Of course, many people who speak Chinese live outside of the Great Firewall, but still, this might the chance that Indonesia and Vietnam (already outsource destinations for Chinese gold farming operations) as well as Eastern Europe to launch their own competing gold farming sector.

The ruling is likely to affect many of the more than 300 million Internet users in China, as well as those in other countries involved in virtual currency trading. In the context of online role playing games like World of Warcraft, virtual currency trading is often called gold farming.

The most popular form of virtual currency in China is called "QQ coins," a form of virtual credit issued by Tencent.com.

Tencent.com, which has about 220 million registered users -- about as many as Facebook -- is quoted in the Chinese government news release as "resolutely" supporting the new rule. The government justifies its ban on virtual currency trading as a way to curtail gambling and other illegal online activities.

The extent to which the Chinese government will apply its virtual currency rule to online role playing games remains unclear. A report in the English-language China Daily says that in-game gear is not considered virtual currency, so selling virtual items may be allowed to continue.

The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester.

China Bans Gold Farming

The DM of the Rings is a webcomic that retells The Lord of the Rings as a D&D campaign played by a group of impatient, juvenile (and hilarious) gamers.

The DM of the Rings (via Neatorama)

Michael Hickox's Lego Arcade stop motion animations are fantastic. Check the video at Boing Boing Offworld. "Video: 8-bit arcade classics are back, in Lego form"

Spotted over at Laughing Squid, this early 1980s D&D commercial featuring Jamie "Square Pegs" Gertz and Alan "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" Ruck.

Flickr user rbreve has a CC-licensed set of snapshots that document the military coup in Honduras that occurred over the weekend. (via Ethan Zuckerman)

In March I pointed to an LA Times story about people in Colorado who were breaking the law by collecting and saving rainwater from their roofs to water their gardens during dry spells.

Holstrom's violation is the fancifully painted 55-gallon buckets underneath the gutters of her farmhouse on a mesa 15 miles from the resort town of Telluride. The barrels catch rain and snowmelt, which Holstrom uses to irrigate the small vegetable garden she and her husband maintain.

But according to the state of Colorado, the rain that falls on Holstrom's property is not hers to keep. It should be allowed to fall to the ground and flow unimpeded into surrounding creeks and streams, the law states, to become the property of farmers, ranchers, developers and water agencies that have bought the rights to those waterways.

But the NY Times reports that Colorado passed a couple of laws to make this practice legal.

A study in 2007 proved crucial to convincing Colorado lawmakers that rain catching would not rob water owners of their rights. It found that in an average year, 97 percent of the precipitation that fell in Douglas County, near Denver, never got anywhere near a stream. The water evaporated or was used by plants.

But the deeper questions about rain are what really gnawed at rain harvesters like Todd S. Anderson, a small-scale farmer just east of Durango. Mr. Anderson said catching rain was not just thrifty — he is so water conscious that he has not washed his truck in five years — but also morally correct because it used water that would otherwise be pumped from the ground.

It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado

Even with the 20% discount Amazon has for R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions, I can't afford it. Retail price is $700.

Randy Robert: Crumb's secret fantasies revealed

They have little to do with the standard procreative urge, Mr. Crumb admits. He has also said he finds nothing more boring than someone else's sexual obsessions, and yet through his long career the world's most famous underground cartoonist has felt compelled to include his own sex fantasies in his art. He explains it as a compulsive catharsis, while fans call R. Crumb's erotic fantasies the Master at his best. Now Crumb has selected his most intimately revealing comic strips and single page drawings to create a 256 page encyclopedic trip through his sexual psyche. All images were created between 1980 and 2006, and all strips are colored for a lush vibrancy never seen in his comic books. In total the book features 14 complete stories, including My Troubles With Women II, If I Were a King, A Bitchin' Bod and How To Have Fun With a Strong Girl, as well as 62 single page drawings.

This signed, slipcased, limited edition of 1,000 copies is a work of art in itself, with every part of the book--case, front and back covers, spine, introduction and pre-introduction pages--created for this project by Robert Crumb. Each book also comes with a print on mould-made age-resistant hahnemuehle paper pulled from an original watercolor by Robert Crumb.

The artist admits it's a little scary to see his most fevered obsessions collected and to end like this, but fans will find R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions a fascinating peek inside an often tortured, always brilliantly talented mind, as well as an unparalleled collector's item.

R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions

The two bats above are, er, making love. More interestingly is that each is about the size of a moth and weighs less than 5 grams. Scientists recently discovered the small bat species, called an Aellen's long-fingered bat, in a lava tunnel on an island in Africa's Comoros chain. From National Geographic:

DNA analysis... confirmed the bat as a unique species.

Subsequent genetic tests revealed that the bat is also found on the west coast of the island of Madagascar, said study team member Manuel Ruedi, a curator at the Natural History Museum in Geneva, Switzerland.

"Thumb-Size Bat Found in Lava Tunnel"

Here is a video montage of some of the fantastic dancers that clearly inspired Michael Jackson. (Thanks, Gil Kaufman via Daily Swarm)

Andy Freeberg created a fantastic series of photographs of the female "Guardians of Russian Art Museums." From his artist statement:

I found the guards as intriguing to observe as the pieces they watch over. In conversation they told me how much they like being among Russia’s great art. A woman in Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery Museum said she often returns there on her day off to sit in front of a painting that reminds her of her childhood home. Another guard travels three hours each way to work, since at home she would just sit on her porch and complain about her illnesses, “as old women do.”

Guardians of Russian Art Museums (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Mexico's Isla De Las Muñecas (Island of the Dolls) near Mexico City looks to be a dark and curious place, filled with old doll parts placed there over 50 years by Don Julián Santana, a hermit who died in 2001. Above is a short video about the place. More from Bizarre:

...The Island Of The Dolls is a shrine to a dead girl who was said to haunt (Santan), and in whose honour he collected dolls, to calm her restless spirit.

“There are many stories about why the dolls are here,” says Don Julián’s cousin, Anastasio, one of several family members who now curate the island, welcome visitors, and charge a token fee to take photos.

“Some people claim Don Julián was mad, and that he’d fish dolls out of the canal believing they were real children, and that he could nurse them back to life. But the real story is that, soon after Don Julián arrived on the island, he came to believe this place was haunted by the spirit of a poor young girl who drowned in the canal. So when he saw a doll floating past he took it and put it on a tree, both to protect himself from evil and make the dead girl happy. But one doll wasn’t enough; soon Don Julián had made the entire island into a shrine.”

For decades, Don Julián amassed a huge collection of dolls that had been rejected by their owners, either plucking them out of the canal as they bobbed past, or scavenging toys from rubbish heaps on rare excursions from his secluded home.

In later years, locals began to trade old dolls with Don Julián in return for home-grown vegetables, and before his death the hermit’s cadaverous collection covered every inch of the island – each unloved toy receiving a second lease of life as part of his surreal shrine.

"Mexico's Island of the Dolls"

Operation Midnight Climax is "a new fictional web series about the true story of the CIA using hookers to test LSD on American Citizens."

The year is 1953 and the CIA has just been formed. We meet Jake Kowalski (Quinton Flynn) and his Army buddy Reed Spencer (Todd Cahoon) in an undisclosed location where Jake, now a CIA spook, tells Reed about the government's MKULTRA campaign and the covert plans to administor LSD to unsuspecting brothel patrons while they are "filmed for research purposes," behind two-way mirrors.

Reluctantly, Reed follows orders and recruits four lovely lieutenants to help him run the government sponsored brothel: Millie (Meredith Salenger), June (Stephanie Lemelin), Ethel (Jessica Myerson) and Bea (Vernetra Gavin) all must decide if they are good patriots. Is everybody in?

Episode 1 is above. Here's the trailer.

Wikipedia article about Operation Midnight Climax here.

Artist Kevin Dart kicked off the summer with the trailer for A Kiss From Tokyo starring his sexy female superspy, Yuki 7. Now the much-anticipated book, Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7, will be launched this Friday at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, CA.

The latest release from indie-art house Fleet Street Scandal chronicles the production of this imaginary 1960's spy film franchise. On display will be original Yuki 7 artwork from Kevin Dart, Chris Turnham, Scott Morse, Megan Brain, Don Shank, Elizabeth Ito, Bill Presing, and many more illustrious talents from the animation and fine art communities. The swinging soiree will include the authors, artists, and fans.

To celebrate, Fleet Street Scandal has reserved some special treats for a few lucky Boing Boing readers. Enter to win by tweeting the title of your own dream movie and tagging it #yuki7. One grand prize winner will receive a Collector's Edition of the book from a limited run of just 100 copies, which includes a set of 4 exclusive mini prints and a custom slipcase. A second prize winner will receive a signed copy of the book, and a third prize winner will receive a Yuki 7 t-shirt. Contest ends July 4th.

Order Fleet Street Scandal's Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7

The International Space Station will get a new picture window early next year. Called the "Cupola," the new observation platform will be a control point for the space station's robotic arm. It will also serve as the ultimate chill-out room. From NASA:

"Crews tell us that Earth gazing is important to them," says Julie Robinson, the ISS Program Scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "The astronauts work hard up there and are away from their families for a long time. Observing the Earth and the stars helps relax and inspire them."

Until now, space station astronauts have been confined to looking out small portholes or at best the 20-inch window in the US Destiny Laboratory. The Cupola will dramatically expand their view.

"The Cupola's 80-cm diameter circular top window is the largest window ever built for space," says Robinson. "Rather than peering through a little porthole, the Cupola will allow a stunning look at the cosmos and unprecedented panoramic views of Earth. Astronauts will share these views with the world through photographs taken through the windows and posted online."

Space Station Room With a View

My novel Little Brother has won the Campbell Award for best sf novel of the year (sharing the award with Ian MacLeod's "Song of Time"). The award's given out over the July 9 weekend at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, and includes free events that are open to the public. Also in attendance will be Ian MacLeod and James Allan Gardner, whose "The Ray Gun: A Love Story" won the Sturgeon award for best short story.

(Funny thing: there's another Campbell award, given out with the Hugo Awards, for best new sf writer. I won it in 2000, and as near as anyone can work out, I'm the only writer to have won both!).

Hope to see you in Lawrence on July 11/12!

James Gunn, director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, has announced winners of the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel of the year and the 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Award for the best short science fiction of the year.

The Campbell award is shared by Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" (Tor Books) and Ian MacLeod's "Song of Time" (PS Publishing). James Alan Gardner's "The Ray Gun: A Love Story" won the Sturgeon award. The authors will accept their awards July 10 at KU and will be featured at the Campbell Conference on Saturday, July 11, and Sunday, July 12.

The Campbell Conference will discuss "What's Old, What's New: The New Space Opera, the New Hard SF, the New Weird." In the afternoon session the three winners will open a discussion on what's new in publishing and its effect on writing and reading.

Science fiction writers earn awards for best novels, short story of the year

I enjoyed this short, creative BBC video that tells the story of the Mexican jumping bean. (Via Bits and Pieces)