Pablo from Tor has the details on a cool new promo they're doing to promote my next book, Makers, which'll be published in the fall (HarperCollins UK will publish it in the UK, Australia, NZ, and other parts of the commonwealth). Makers tells the story of a group of hardware hackers who fall in with microfinancing venture capitalists and reinvent the American economy after a total economic collapse, and who find themselves swimming with sharks, fighting with gangsters, and leading a band of global techno-revolutionaries. The first 50,000 words of Makers were serialized on Salon some years ago under the title Themepunks.

Starting today around noon (Eastern Standard Tribe, of course), and throughout the rest of the year, Tor.com will be serializing Makers, Cory Doctorow's upcoming novel, which goes on sale from Tor Books in October. We'll be serializing the entirety of the novel, with a new installment every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, until the whole thing is finished, sometime in January 2010. Each installment of Makers will be accompanied by a new illustration by Idiots'Books (idiotsbooks.com), which will interconnect with the other illustrations in the series, and offer limitless possibilities for mixing and matching the illustrations in the series. In a week or so, after we've posted a number of tiles, we'll release a Flash game in which users will be able to re-arrange the illustration tiles on a grid and create their own combination of layouts.

I'm planning on repeating the tribute to booksellers I made with the free release of Little Brother, introducing every section of the serial with a little hymn to some bookstore or other; booksellers are clearly on the side of the angels (I speak as a former bookseller!).

However, I'm doing this one a little differently; rather than write up my favorite booksellers, I'm asking for your favorite bookstores -- in the comments for each section of the serial, I'd like you to write up testimonials for your favorite stores. I'll pick three every week to add to that week's installments, by way of spreading the love around.

Announcing Cory Doctorow's Makers on Tor.com

Cory Doctorow's Makers, Part 1 (of 81)

(Thanks, Pablo!)

Recently on Offworld we found a rapid-fire set of developments to kick off a long weekend, including the launch of TweetCraft which is, as you might imagine, World of Warcraft's first in-game Twitter client (above), and which ensures that you'll never have to leave the comfort and still irresistible allure of Azeroth.

We also watched the first 17 minutes of Double Fine's hard metal adventure Brutal Legend, as narrated by LucasArts legend Tim Schafer, and saw indie devs Polytron finally officially announce that their debut game Fez is headed to Xbox Live Arcade in early 2010.

We also found two pair of custom Legend of Zelda low-top sneakers, Donkey Kong played on the side of a building in Post-Its, a website completely devoted to the mis-uses of trains in games (!), an upcoming unmissable chiptune showcase in Montreal, and finally understood the gnawing wolf-at-the-door drama of spending $17,500 on a single NES game.

And finally, our themed 'one shots' for the day: Wii Fit as an Atari 2600 game, and, even more wonderfully, an Atari 2600 version of A Clockwork Orange (and Dostoevsky and Kant and Proust [!]).

Michael Geist sez,

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission hosts long-awaited network management hearings this week, pitting Canada's telecom and cable companies against a broad range of consumer, creator, and technology groups in a fight that may help clarify whether Canada has - or should have - net neutrality laws.

My weekly column notes that as the Commission weighs the various claims, it would do well to consider the testimony it heard just a few months ago during the February new media hearings.

For example, Shaw Communications's network management submission states "traffic management is necessary to ensure that Shaw's customers continue to have access to fast, reliable and affordable service." It adds the "traffic shaping process uses deep packet inspection (DPI) technology to identify packets that are associated with P2P file-sharing applications and to slow those packets down, limiting the amount of available capacity P2P traffic consumes."

Yet when CEO Jim Shaw was asked about the prospect of identifying traffic during the new media hearings, he told the Commission, "we can only tell you how many bits are coming in or out. We don't know what kind of bit it is. It could be anything from an e-mail to a porno. We don't know that. We spend no time trying to figure out what bits are going to your house. We just don't know."

Perhaps foreshadowing the outcome of the net neutrality hearing, MTS Allstream acknowledged "when a commercial interest attempts to violate the principle of openness, as it is defined by the open culture movement, there tends to be a very dramatic and forceful rebuking."

CRTC Net Neutrality Hearings Open Amid ISPs' Conflicting Claims (Thanks, Michael!)

Sony has filed a patent for a system that allows any object, from a coffee mugs to a book, to be mapped and used as a controller in a video game. Rob has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets. "Sony files patent on any-object motion control"

Legendary Fortean author John Keel has died. A personal influence on my own interest in anomalies and fringe theories, Keel is best known for his 1976 book The Mothman Prophecies, an investigation into strange phenomena that reportedly occurred around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966-1967. Of course, that book was made into a Hollywood film in 2002. However, The Mothman Prophecies just scratched the surface of Keel's experiences in the realm of high weirdness. Keel's friend and fellow Fortean author Loren Coleman has written an obituary over at Cryptomundo. "John A. Keel has died"

Martin John Callanan, artist-in-residence at University College London's Environment Institute, used satellite data to create a small terrestrial globe depicting cloud coverage from a single second in time. He first showed the work, titled A Planetary Order, last week at an event also celebrating the publication of Extraordinary Clouds, a new book by the UCL Environment Institute's writer-in-residence, Richard Hamblyn. The cloud-themed projects are profiled in a short video from the university. "UCL writer and artist-in-residence look to the skies"

Recently, Smashing Guitar issued a limited commercial version of The Gristleizer, the custom audio effects unit that Throbbing Gristle used in the late 1970s to create uneasy listening music and define the industrial music genre. TG co-founder Chris Carter had made the first unit based on a design printed in Practical Electronics magazine. Now, Smashing Guitar has built a run of thirty Gristleizers in a stompbox form-factor. From the product description:

The pedal version, housed in a high-quality, heavy-duty Hammond 1590DD box, retains all the functionality of the tabletop design with the added convenience of footswitch operation. In essense, The Gristleizer is a synth module that works with any audio signal. The audio path is modulated by an LFO using four selectable waveforms (upslope, downslope, triangle, & square), functioning in one of two paths: VCA (voltage controlled amplifier) or VCF (voltage controlled filter). Ranging from light and sweet tremolo to extreme, raunchy ring mod, The Gristleizer is a 100% analog, hand-assembled unit built to last.

Gristelizer Stompbox

I just caught a demo of the Tactable multitouch surface, which grew out of an MIT Media Lab project. It's an impressive product, a mid-sized table with a sharp projector set underneath the glass. It uses an array of moderate-resolution optical sensors to tell where it's being touched, and the sensors have variable focus, so they can sense 3D gestures over the surface as well as contact with the surface itself. The projector's good and bright, and the picture looked good in a well-lit room (albeit a darker corner of same). And being optical, the sensors can also recognize objects laid on the surface, reading bar-codes, text, shapes, etc. It opens up a myriad of possibilities for game design, some kinds of creative workflow (sound and video editing) and other situations where novel UIs are apt to unveil new possibilities.

One thing I really liked about it all is that it's just a PC running a bunch of commodity hardware -- a projector, some sensors -- with cool software on the back-end. This is invention-by-recombination at its finest, and it means that the price and performance of the surfaces are tied to the broader markets for optical sensors, PCs and projectors, which points to a rosy future. The company's business model is building and selling the things, simple enough, so they don't make any pretense about top-s33kr1t stuff within.

Tactable

New research suggests that anxiety triggers the release of a scent that causes other humans who smell it to empathize with you. This may have evolved to help speed up spread of fear within a population so groups can get away quickly from dangerous situations. To run the experiment, University of Dusseldorf psychologist Bettina Pause and her colleagues had students undergoing brain scans sniff absorbent pads taken from the armpits of other students just before a final exam and, separately, while they were exercising. Pleasant.

None (of the sniffing students) perceived a difference between the two types of sweat, but the pre-exam sweat had a different effect on brain activity, lighting up areas that process social and emotional signals, as well as several areas thought to be involved in empathy...

A previous experiment found that sweat from skydivers activated anxiety circuits in sniffers' brains.

Fellow students smell your exam fear

Finding Oz by Evan I. Schwartz is a new book that tells the story behind the story of The Wizard of Oz and its creator L. Frank Baum. Smithsonian magazine gives a taste of the tale in a brief profile of Baum, who wrote his masterpiece in 1898, at the age of 40. Apparently, Baum was so convinced of his manuscript's magic that he framed the pencil he had used to write it. From Smithsonian:

With his skepticism toward God—or men posing as gods--Baum affirmed the idea of human fallibility, but also the idea of human divinity. The Wizard may be a huckster—a short bald man born in Omaha rather than an all-powerful being—but meek and mild Dorothy, also a mere mortal, has the power within herself to carry out her desires. The story, says Schwartz, is less a “coming-of-age story … and more a transformation of consciousness story.” With The Wizard of Oz, the power of self-reliance was colorfully illustrated.

It seems appropriate that a story with such mythical dimensions has inspired its own legends—the most enduring, perhaps, being that The Wizard of Oz was a parable for populism. In the 1960s, searching for a way to engage his students, a high-school teacher named Harry Littlefield, connected The Wizard of Oz to the late-19th-century political movement, with the Yellow Brick Road representing the gold standard—a false path to prosperity—and the book's silver slippers standing in for the introduction of silver—an alternate means to the desired destination. Years later, Littlefield would admit that he devised the theory to teach his students, and that there was no evidence that Baum was a populist, but the theory still sticks.

Frank Baum, the Man Behind the Curtain (Smithsonian)
Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story (Amazon)

Dustin sez, "Musician Guillaume Estace plays a rendition of the famous "Cantina Theme" from Star Wars IV on a Chapman Stick, a guitar-like instrument designed solely for finger-tapping. It's really cool the way it lets him play the bass and melody simultaneously - I want one!" This is my wife's ringtone (the original, not the Chapman Stick version) and so I hear it a lot; this guy does a GREAT job with it!

Star Wars "Cantina Band" on Chapman Stick (Thanks, Dustin!)

The Manchester International Festival is putting together a touring, educational steampunk show based on the difference engine, Charles Babbage's mechanical computer. Oh, to live in Manchester!

Travelling from past to future through a landscape of machines and ideas Walk the Plank and Thingumajig Theatre have created an interactive journey through the courtyard of Manchester's Town Hall. The audience will help inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage find the clues to repair his Difference Engine; solve the spider's riddles, hidden in the worldwide web; persuade the counting madman to open the gates to the Hall of Shadows...and discover the secret workings of the steampunk arcade.

Alongside the show, a programme of engagement with six local schools is being led by The Centre for Urban Education. As part of the Creative Partnerships 'Enquiry' programme, children, young people and their teachers are working with creative practitioners to explore their ideas. They will develop a new creative learning resource based on the themes of the performance and linked to the science, technology, history, engineering and maths curricula.

The Difference Engine...a steampunk adventure (Thanks, Ed!)

Clay Shirky sez, "While googling around for instructions on deleting my Facebook profile, I discovered a form of digital graffiti which is one part last-ditch strategy to three parts _cri de coeur_: accounts renamed by frustrated LinkedIn users desperate to get off the service. I have no idea how common this is, but in just two searches, I came across a Mr. Delete This Account from the San Francisco area, who turns out to have company, as there are three other Mr. Delete This Account's on the service (San Diego; Enid, OK; and Liege, Belgium). There are also two users named Delete My Profile, four named Delete This Profile, and no fewer than ten named Unsubscribe Unsubscribe (the Humbert Humbert of the 21c.) There is also some unintentional hilarity on individual profile pages -- one of the Unsubscribe Unsubscribes is a Relationship Manager, while a user with the first name of 'delete delete delete' and the last name of 'delete delete delete' is a Hospitality Professional in Australia. LinkedIn is very solicitous about asking "Would you like to add delete delete delete delete delete delete to your network?" Um, no."

This was how I got rid of my LinkedIn account in the end, and why I never signed back up again.

(Thanks, Clay!)

My new Locus column, "Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise," explores what it means for science fiction when the cost of knowing something falls to zero, and when the difference between knowing something can be done and doing it narrows away to nothing.

Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to find out how to do this, where to find the equipment to do it -- even the firms that specialize in doing it for you.

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.

This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery.

Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise

Tim O'Reilly predicts the imminent demise of the Kindle ebook reader unless it makes the move to open standards and abandons DRM and proprietary formats. I've been trying to get someone at Amazon to answer my basic questions about the "DRM-free" option for authors and publishers ("Does the EULA prohibit a reader from moving a DRM-free file to a non-Kindle?" "Is there a patent or other restriction that prevents competitors from making readers or converters for the DRM-free files?" and "Can DRM-free files be remotely downgraded, the way that the DRM'ed files have had their read-aloud functionality taken away after the fact?") and been totally stonewalled, as have O'Reilly.

Kudos to Tim for a great editorial and especially for the use of "strategy tax" -- what a great phrase!

So we sold GNN to America Online in June 1995. Big mistake. Despite telling us that they wanted to embrace the Web, they kept GNN as an "off brand," continuing to focus on their proprietary AOL platform and allowing Yahoo! ( YHOO - news - people ) to dominate the new online information platform.

So it was with a feeling of deja vu that I listened in mid-2007 to the promises of Amazon about the potential of its new proprietary e-book platform. While no payment is required to participate, there are clearly onerous restrictions that could limit the growth of the market: a proprietary file format, and the requirement that the e-books only be sold by Amazon.com.

The file format was a problem for us from the get-go: Amazon's Kindle file format doesn't provide support for tables or for so-called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our line of technical books. And there is a viable alternative: Epub, the open format from the International Digital Publishing Forum, is based on the Web's native format, HTML, and provides full table and font support. This is the first "strategy tax" paid by those who embrace proprietary platforms: They can't support the needs of every niche and must prioritize their support for mainstream needs.

Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book (via /.)

Chris Anderson's stirring Wired editorial "Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity" accompanies the launch of his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, asking technologists to consider what it means to manage abundant hard drives, networks, and processors, rather than scarce ones. (You can also get a free downloadable audiobook from the link)

Perhaps the best example of a glorious embrace of waste is YouTube. I often hear people complain that YouTube is no threat to television because it's "full of crap"--which is, I suppose, true. The problem is that no one agrees on what the crap is. You may be looking for funny cat videos and think my favorite soldering tutorials are of no interest. I want to see funny videogame stunts and couldn't care less about your cooking tutorials. And clips of our own charming family members are of course delightful to us and totally boring to everyone else. Crap is in the eye of the beholder.

Even the most popular YouTube clips may totally fail in the standard Hollywood definition of production quality, in that the video is low-resolution and badly lit, the sound quality awful, and the plots nonexistent. But none of that matters, because the most important thing is relevance. We'll always choose a "low-quality" video of something we actually want over a "high-quality" video of something we don't.

A few months ago it was time for my kids to choose how to spend the two hours of "screen time" they're allowed on weekends. I suggested Star Wars and gave them a choice: They could watch any of the six movies in hi-def on a huge projection screen with surround sound audio and popcorn. Or they could go on YouTube and watch stop-motion Lego animations of Star Wars scenes created by 9-year-olds. It was no contest--they raced for the computer.

It turns out that my kids, and many like them, aren't really that interested in Star Wars as created by George Lucas. They're more interested in Star Wars as created by their peers, never mind the shaky cameras and fingers in the frame. When I was growing up, there were many clever products designed to extend the Star Wars franchise to kids, from toys to lunch boxes, but as far as I know nobody thought of stop-motion Lego animation created by children.

Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity

(Image: Rodrigo Corral)

The medical marijuana card belonging to bOING bOING patron saint Robert Anton Wilson (RIP) is up for auction on eBay. It's one of many of RAW's personal items that his daugther, Christina, is auctioning to help pay off her father's large debts. From the medical marijuana card auction listing:

As we all know (or should) RAW was a great champion of decriminalizing marijuana. In his late sixties, when his post-polio syndrome started getting bad, he really found great relief and was a staunch supporter of WAMM. WAMM is Wo/Man's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, located in Santa Cruz. His doctor gave him the necessary paperwork and here is his official WAMM card granting him the right to use marijuana medicinally. He is of course, patient # 2323. There is no signature, but his picture is emblazoned on the front with a twinkle in his eye...

Robert Anton Wilson's Medical Marijuana Card

This Cincinnati gentleman was charged with criminal damaging after taking a permanent marker to a $1600 plasma TV at Sears. According to WCPO, Jordan Puckett, 20, was caught on surveillance video drawing a one foot penis on the screen. "A motive is not yet know."

Man's Alleged Organ Artistry On TV Brings Charge (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Wonkette has a post up about @AKGovSarahPalin's crazy late-night twitter bender. She's gonna have to give up that handle, no? Anyway, after you slog through all the crazy ungrammatical Palinglish rambling, the point seems to be that a "higher calling" has directed her to file anti-defamation lawsuits against a number of news websites for having reported the news that she quit her post as governor of Alaska (her "news conference" to that effect is embedded above). From Wonkette:

[A]fter crazily quitting her elected position as governor of Alaska, via an alarming backyard last-minute press conference void of any explanation , at the classic 4 p.m. hour of the Friday-Holiday news dump, Sarah Palin is now twatting on the twitter about how her Anchorage attorneys are going to SUE THE AMERICAN MEDIA, for saying "WTF?" Honestly, this is what Sarah Palin twatted on Saturday Night, July 4th, Independence Day, in America.

Her link goes to (of course) Scientologist nut and sub-literate weirdo Greta Van Susteren's blog on FoxNews.com, where Greta has helpfully (?) posted seven pages of legal threats from Palin's lawyers, although you can't actually read beyond the first vague page of whining bullshit, because Greta/Fox can't figure out how to operate the Internet.

But, from other websites, we gather Palin's lawyers plan lawsuits against MSNBC, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, individual bloggers in Alaska, and other such anti-Palin forces such as "rain on your wedding day" and static cling.

Related reading: Anchorage Daily News article, hilarious. Vanity Fair article: It Came from Wasilla (and "Don't Blame Us"). (via @Andrew Baron)

On his excellent "nedslist" mailing list, Ned Sublette wrote this concise and spot-on appreciation of the official text of Palin's goodbye speech:

[W]hat Roland Barthes would have called the pleasure of this text has to be savored in full to draw out its pure nuttiness. It's hard to know what to appreciate more: the all-caps prepositions; the sentence fragments that begin the fifth and sixth paragraphs, the run-on sentences, the frequent exclamation points!, the quotation from her parents' refrigerator magnet, the basketball analogy, the proposed logic of quitting so as not to be a quitter, or the grammatically incorrect final sentence framing the misattributed punchline, which was actually said not by General Douglas MacArthur but by General Oliver P. Smith. I especially like the capital O of "Outside" in "Outside special interests," which reminds us that the world consists of two parts: Alaska, and Outside.

But what I most enjoy is the authenticity of this text; there can be no question that Governor You Betcha wrote it herself {wink}.

Eric sez, "The operator of a monorail at Walt Disney World died Sunday morning when two monorails crashed. About five or six guests were on the monorail at the time of the accident, but they are not seriously injured." It happened at the Ticket and Transportation Center station.

A person who was on the scene reported to the news stations that they head a loud explosion and saw the mangled trains in the station. They tried to run to get people out of the front of the crashed train. They saw a family make it out, but the driver [ed: news report cuts off here]

The monorails involved were the pink and purple trains, according to Local 6 in Orlando; pink was moving and hit purple, which was stationary.

Breaking news: Two monorails crash at Disney World overnight, one Cast Member dead (Thanks, Eric and John!)

Tim sez, "This is the pre-launch page for the Bayer 'Didget', a blood glucose meter which plugs in to the DS / DS Lite's Slot-2. Consistent glucose testing by the diabetic child (or adult, presumably) is rewarded with points in a game that can be used to buy items or unlock levels. As with the the 'iPlayer' hardware video decoder for the DS which Cory recently posted, the downside is that the new DSi doesn't have a Slot-2.

Bayer's DIDGET meter was developed in conjunction with Paul Wessel -- the parent of a child with type 1 diabetes. Paul noticed that although his son Luke was constantly losing his blood glucose meter, he could always find his Nintendo Game Boy. It was this observation that inspired Paul and Bayer to work together to develop the first and only blood glucose meter that connects to the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite gaming systems to reward children for good testing habits.

Bayer's DIDGET Blood Glucose Meter (Thanks, Tim!)

"

Here's my friend and neighbour Matt Webb (part of the Schulze and Webb design consultancy) addressing Copenhagen's Reboot conference on what the role of a designer was and is in the 21st century. It's a great Webbrant, thought-provoking, learned, wide-ranging, weird and great.

Reboot (via Warren Ellis)

The latest cheap trick from Can-rockers Cheap Trick is an album released on an 8-track tape. Bah! My album will be released in the form of incidental grooving on the side of a thrown pot made in the style of ancient Greek potters!

As you might imagine, finding a manufacturer today for the 8-track version of Cheap Trick's The Latest wasn't easy. "There was a lot of looking under rocks," admits Frey, who finally found a small plant in Dallas, Tex., for the retro-fit. "They're expensive to make, and they don't make very many at a time," he says of the cartridge which will sell to the public for something close to $30.

The new album, issued on Cheap Trick's own label, is comprised of 12 songs broken into four sets of three songs each - suites that unfortunately don't fit nicely into the four 10-minute programs of standard 8-tracks, but which may be available at some point as a three-for-the-price-of-one deal on iTunes. As Frey explains the discount, "We're kind of more worried about being ignored than being ripped off."

Cheap Trick brings back the 8-track

A reader writes, "Take one part Threadless shirt design and one part cake mix, add in some fondant and frosting and you have Threadcakes: An online cake contest based on transforming Threadless designs into cakes."

Threadcakes Gallery! :: Threadcakes: A Threadless Cake

Behold the awesome suction power of the airplane toilet, capable of slurping up an entire roll of toilet paper in one go. Don't clog the tank, though, or chunks of shit-ice will start to fall off the undercarriage, killing people with icy B.M.s (pun courtesy of Mr Spider Robinson).

The Airplane Toilet Paper Experiment (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(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.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Flickr user scrumptiousdelight created this Sarlaac monster in pillow form for Stitch Wars, a Star Wars crafting show. Note all the little details, like the Boba Fett helmet on one of the tentacles.

saarlac pitlow monster (via Wonderland)

Harry sez, "Computers weren't portable in 1968 (they tended to fill entire rooms), but even then, the yen for portable computing was there. In 1968, Computerworld reported on a carrying case that turned a Teletype machine into a 75-pound mobile terminal--wheels were optional." The Laptop, Circa 1968 (Thanks, Harry!)

The Weather Channel will no longer have a "smooth jazz" soundtrack behind its "Local On the 8s" segments. Instead, they will play rock. Fortunately, you can still turn down the TV volume and crank your CD of "The Weather Channel Presents Smooth Jazz," which actually hit #1 on the Billboard's Current Contemporary Jazz Album Chart. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

“I think we’ve been doing an injustice to our viewers playing, for the lack of a better word, elevator music on the segments for all these years,” said Geoffrey Darby, the cable network’s new executive vice president of programming, Thursday.

“People would have it on but they wouldn’t be watching and they wouldn’t be listening,” said Darby, who pushed for the change after joining the network in February. “We wanted music that would get their attention —- and this has.”

Weather Channel turns to rock

Drew Friedman continues his new series of portraits depicting legendary circus and carnie sideshow freaks. The paintings are for a private collector, who I wish was me. Fortunately, Drew says they'll eventually be collected in a book. Seen here is Julia Pastrana Percilla Lauther aka "Percilla The Monkey Girl." Her story is strange, tragic, and also quite touching. From J. Tithonus Pednaud's fantastic site, The Human Marvels:

In the late 1930’s, while performing with the Johnny J. Jones Exposition, Percilla met fellow marvel Emmitt Bejano, the Alligator-Skinned Man. Despite her heavy beard and his ichthyosis a sweet romance blossomed between the unique couple. The pair saw past their physical differences. Emmitt was a man with calloused skin who spent performance intermissions submerged in vats of ice water because he could not sweat. Emmitt was quite literally ‘thick skinned’ and he had a ‘hard shell to crack’ but beneath he was a compassionate, gentle, charming and passionate man. Percilla, despite looking more beast than beauty, was elegant, eloquent and possessed and enchanting singing voice. Before long Percilla realized that the gentle Emmitt was the love of her life and the two eloped in 1938.

Percilla The Monkey Girl (Human Marvels)
Drew Friedman's The Monkey Girl (Drawger)

On Tuesday, Sean Stanley Smith, 19, ran around Lake Tahoe's casino arcade naked until police subdued him with a taser. They arrested him for indecent exposure. According to the Record Courier, "He reportedly told officers he had ingested marijuana and LSD, and was running naked because he thought he was 'the Terminator.'" He'll be back. "Naked 'Terminator' arrested at casino" (via Dose Nation)

Out of the Blue's "Dead Gnome" line features garden gnomes with pistols in their mouths, or holding up the dripping heads of decapitated brethren, industriously sawing their own hands off, hanging from a gibbet, grinning glassily at the arrow that's pierced their heads, and so on. It's the wet, happy grins that get me.

Dead Gnome (Thanks, Alice!)

A new Turkish game-show asks clerics to convert atheists and awards prizes for the most conversions; I think the atheists should get points for resisting the pitch, too -- it's only fair (and the atheists should win supreme if the cleric loses faith altogether!).

A new game show on Turkish television will pit a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, an imam and a Buddhist monk against one another in attempt to convert atheists to their respective religions.

In each episode of Penitents Compete, to be broadcast by Turkey's Kanal T television station in September, the four faith guides will try to persuade 10 atheists of the merits and truth of their creeds...

An eight-member team of theologians will vet contestants to ensure they really are atheists before deciding who will participate in the show.

Faiths compete on Turkish game show (via Derren Brown)

Marilyn sez, "Pretty cool photos from July National Geographic. These manta rays in the Maldives have a 12-ft-wingspan, and the photographer Thomas Peschak was right in among them during feeding frenzies to get these shots. I especially like the last one in this gallery, which shows them lining up one behind the other in chain feeding behavior before swirling into a spiral formation for cyclone feeding, a behavior rarely seen outside the Maldives."

Feeding Frenzy (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Bruce Schneier points out that keypad wear is a form of "information leakage": "There are 10,000 possible four-digit codes, but you only have to try 24 on these keypads. The first is most likely 1986 or 1968. The second is almost certainly 1234."

Information Leakage from Keypads

Video. Adolf Hitler is pretty pissed off to learn that Michael Jackson has died and won't be able to perform at his birthday party. Evidences the true marks of a great internet meme: infinite expandability, extremely bad taste in multiple respects, and an unfairly long lifespan. (via @andrewbaron)

djBC, consistently my favorite mashup producer/creator (he's the guy behind the Beasties/Beatles remix "The Beastles"), has released an entire album of remixes of Muppet music! He sez, "In honor of my daughter's first birthday- and one month late- I'm rolling out 'Muppet Mashup.' Ten mashups, remixes, and covers of music from The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. With the legendary McSleazy (of MTV Mash and GYBO), Dunproofin, ATOM, Martinn, Uncanny Valley and yours truly, dj BC. I'm particularly proud of my 'I'm Happy' track, which is built on Edwinn Starr loops, Muppet Show samples, and a fun, funky playground acapella from some little girls on Sesame Street."

I've just listened to this straight through, with the baby, and we were both captivated. Bravo!

Mashups, remixes, and covers of music from The Muppet Show and Sesame Street.

Coral Cache mirror of the entire album

This first-hand account of the construction of a clandestine shortwave radio by British POWs in a Japanese camp in Singapore really reminds me of James Clavell's magnificent novel King Rat, my all-time favorite war-novel, which revolves grippingly around the construction, discovery and consequences of a hidden shortwave in the Changi camp (both Clavell and Ronald "St Trinian's" Searle were interned in this camp).

BJ: Can I just ask you - the components for the low voltage battery cells that you produced, where did you get all the components from?

RGW: Well, zinc wasn't hard, there was some sheet zinc lying on the aerodrome and we pinched quite a bit of that because that would be eaten away during the use of the cells for the low voltage. I don't know what would have happened if that ran out. I think someone produced two lantern cells which did for a while, but it was mainly on this home-made cell system, which wasn't efficient but nowhere near as inefficient as the rectifier was. We must have been consuming... Ah Ping said he had to turn up a lot of power to keep the lights what they wanted. We were dispersing such an amount of power in this four test tube rectifier for the high tension.

A variable capacitor was another component we had to bring in. We couldn't make a variable capacitor, it was impossible. We had to take two plates off the one we had to get a high enough frequency. Yes, I can't remember why we didn't go up a bit in inductance; it was largely a trial and error business really. Except that in a regenerative receiver you had some idea when you were near a station because the receiver was so sensitive as all regenerative receivers are.

It had a piece of meat skewer type wood which I had a hole drilled in by a pen-knife, and we glued this in with some of our glue or something, into the capacitor shaft so that we could tune it by holding a little stick across it, fixing it at about six inches because one couldn't get one's hands any closer to the set because it was in a state of very near oscillation where the maximum sensitivity is, just before it bursts into oscillation. With a fairly clear HF band, it wasn't long before we knew roughly, by putting a couple of marks on the stick, where it was. We knew that the Voice of America was due for a transmission and I don't think we ever knew the frequencies because the BBC didn't announce frequencies, they just came on the air and broadcast.

Construction of Radio Equipment in a Japanese POW Camp (via Make)

Etsy seller Plastique's got laser-cut acrylic rings boasting pointy world monuments. As knuckledusters, they create the possibility of growling, "Right, mate, you're geography," before you bust your opponent in the chops.

world landmarks acrylic ring set (white) (via Neatorama)

"Homeopathic A&E," a sketch from the British comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look invites us to imagine an emergency room (A&E is British for Accidents and Emergencies, the UK equivalent of ER), as run by newage woo woos.

That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E (via White Coat Underground)

After 30 years, Compuserve is finally, totally, mostly dead (the email addresses still work). I was always a local BBS and GEnie guy, but there's no doubting the power and influence of Compuserve in introducing the idea of networked communications to a generation, and proving the business-case for commercial online activity:

The original CompuServe service, first offered in 1979, was shut down this past week by its current owner, AOL. The service, which provided its users with addresses such as 73402,3633 and was the first major online service, had seen the number of users dwindle in recent years. At its height, the service boasted about having over half a million users simultaneously on line. Many innovations we now take for granted, from online travel (Eaasy Sabre), online shopping, online stock quotations, and global weather forecasts, just to name a few, were standard fare on CompuServe in the 1980s.

CompuServe users will be able to use their existing CompuServe Classic (as the service was renamed) addresses at no charge via a new e-mail system, but the software that the service was built on, along with all the features supported by that software, from forums for virtually every topic and profession known to man to members' Ourworld Web pages, has been shut down. Indeed, the current version of the service's client software, CompuServe for Windows NT 4.0.2, dates back to 1999.

CompuServe Requiem (via Beyond the Beyond)

The chairman of the virtual bank in EVE Online, a space-trading/piracy game, absconded with billions of virtual credits, swapping them for $5,000 in cash to make a house payment. The embezzlement caused a run on the bank and has rocked the economy of EVE.

The run on the bank has come to about 600 billion ISK, which has been withdrawn. However, we have a very big group of excellent supporters, who have deposited about 105 billion ISK sitting in Sweep to keep us liquid. We are extremely grateful for this. Currently the run seems to be mostly over with only a slightly higher withdrawal rate still, than deposit rate. That's to be expected, and in-line with EBANK's strategy to shrink to a more managable level.

EBANK has always been extremely sound, due to our massive reserves. Our checks and balances have proven themselves to work as a mitigation device and by having the reserves spread out over several directors, the embezzlement was kept to a minimum. However, the run on the bank had the potential to do great damage to EBANK as people frantically made withdrawals to ensure they would not be caught if the bank ran short.

We have also had several offers from very large entities, regarding big loans, should we need to cover any insolvency. Frankly, this has yet to be needed. But we are grateful for the support.

Billions stolen in online robbery

New perspective on EVE Online's latest bank embezzlement (via /.)

Stephen Worth says:

When I was very small, I had one of those horses on springs. I would jump on it and bounce around furiously while my Dad would urge me on, calling out to me to "Ride that horse down the bumpy road to Bodie!"

Before I was born, my family had taken a trip to the High Sierras and my Dad and Mom never forgot the potholes they had to navigate their 56 Chevy station wagon over. It was a memory they spoke of often. When I got a little older, I got a chance to visit Bodie with them, navigating a slightly more modern Chevy station wagon over those same potholes. Bodie became a lasting part of my consciousness as well.

On my personal blog, Late Night Coffee Shops, I just posted a documentary on Bodie (and its nine inhabitants) from the mid-1950s. If you love the otherworldly feeling of stillness in places like this as much as I do, this video will make your day and fill your dreams with the beautiful sound of wind blowing through sun bleached boards.

Ghost Town: The Bumpy Road To Bodie

Richard Metzger pointed me to the Don Martin Dictionary. Martin was one of my favorite Mad cartoonists. His sophisticated absurdism was the opposite of Dave Berg's middlebrow sitcom humor (but I liked him, too). The Don Martin Dictionary

Higher Mammals made a song and video to accompany Radiolab's recent show about stochasticity. If you don't already know about Radiolab, it's a terrific science podcast produced for WYNC public radio.

Radiolab Stochasticity Bonus Video!

This week, Cory posted a Talking Heads video and I followed up with a Laurie Anderson clip. For the trifecta of posts related to NYC's downtown scene in the 1980s, here is a video of Andy Warhol painting Debbie Harry on an Amiga computer at a Commodore press event in 1985.

While BB Gadgets' Rob is fond of Bughouse's Album Side Table made from old LP jackets, I prefer the Hypolux Chandelier, constructed from plexiglass plates, commercial syringes, and a ballchain suspension.

Make: Online has published a number of cool projects recently.

Sew a cute Morse code key leg strap

Diana Eng's frilly and fashion-forward Morse code key. Diana Eng (best known from Project Runway and her book Fashion Geek) is our current guest author. Besides being a geek-chic fashion maven, Diana is also a ham operator and on a mission to introduce a new generation of hobbyists (especially women) to ham radio. In this project, she makes a sexy garter strap to hold her new Morse key.

Shrinky Dink gaming minis

Sean Ragan shows you how to make some sweet home-baked gaming components using Shrinky Dink plastic and binder clips.

More on making Light Bricks

As a follow-up piece to Alden Hart's LED Light Brick project in MAKE, Volume 18, the atuhor shares more ideas for molding and casting the acrylic bricks to house your LED board, including using machinable wax to create a life-mask face to house your array. Disco face, baby!

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back its first photos of the moon. The photo above was taken near the moon's Mare Nubium region. The man in the moon is just outside the frame. From NASA:

Older craters have softened edges, while younger craters appear crisp. (The image) shows a region 1,400 meters (0.87 miles) wide, and features as small as 3 meters (9.8 feet) wide can be discerned. The bottom (faces) lunar north.

LRO's First Moon Images