Watch this episode in Flash above, or download here: MP4 link.

BBtv WORLD is our recently-launched series on Boing Boing tv featuring first-person views of life around the globe. This third episode in our series is the last of a three-part report I filed from a K'iche Maya community in Guatemala.

Few foreigners come to this village at 10,000 feet in the highlands. Most glimpses we have of remote indigenous communities like this are through the lenses of outsiders -- like myself. But how better to see their story than through the eyes of the people themselves?

Before I left the US for this pueblo a few weeks ago, we asked two companies that produce small, inexpensive, USB camcorders -- Pure Digital (makers of the Flip) and RCA (makers of the Small Wonder) -- to donate a few devices. I brought them to the village, so that some of the adults and young people here could explore what is possible with the tools of video storytelling in their own hands.

Today's BBtv WORLD is the result: stories shot by the K'iche people in this village. The world they see around them, through their own eyes and in their own language.

Some of what the children shot really surprised me. They caught on right away, faster even than the adults, and quickly taught each other how to record and play back video. Some of them seemed to transform into instant YouTube stars -- new alter-egos showed up out of nowhere. One boy we'd come to know as quiet and well-mannered over the course of many previous visits here shot himself throwing gang signs against the sunlight, like shadow puppets, while he walked a path that leads to a Mayan altar. Another girl who was very shy with us in person recorded video of herself making outrageous silly faces, and speaking in a boisterous, confident voice to her new handheld lens.

When I downloaded the footage from their devices, I felt as if I were seeing this place, and these people, for the first time.

Previous BBtv WORLD episodes:

• BBtv WORLD: Migration, and a Mayan Sweat Bath. (Guatemala)
• BBtv debuts "BBtv World" series. Episode 1: El Molinero (Guatemala)

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Sponsorship note: The BBtv crew wishes to thank Microsoft for underwriting this episode, and generously supporting the launch of the "BBtv World" series. In this ongoing video series, we will be looking at the intersection of social causes & technology around the world from a number of perspectives. Through their new "i’m Initiative," Microsoft shares a portion of the program's advertising revenue with some of the world’s most important social causes when users email or IM with tools such as Windows Live™ Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail®. For more information, visit imtalkathon.com or im.live.com.

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Tor and Expanded Books have released part two of the video interview/book trailer they shot with me and John Scalzi, talking about our new young adult novels -- my Little Brother and John's Zoe's Tale, which comes out in three weeks. The Expanded People really cut nice stuff -- I laughed even harder watching the video than I did when we were shooting it! Sci-Fi Juggernauts Meet Up - Part 2

See also: Scalzi and I talk about our latest books -- video

Mother Jones Magazine has outed a private spy named Mary Lou Sapone AKA Mary Lou McFate, who infiltrated various gun-control groups on behalf of the NRA, posing as a fiery activist, spying on her friends, and writing reports on them so that the NRA could undermine their work.

Hohlt recalled several recent episodes in which McFate maneuvered to place herself in the middle of issues important to the NRA and others in the gun lobby. One occurred this spring, when the London-based International Action Network on Small Arms was trying to persuade American gun control groups to attend a July meeting at the United Nations on small-arms control. (A 2001 UN conference ended up establishing a program weaker than gun control advocates had desired, thanks to the intervention of the Bush administration, which had been lobbied by the NRA.) States United to Prevent Gun Violence had never before been involved with international gun control issues. And to participate in the UN meeting, it had to apply for credentials. Hohlt says McFate pushed her to file for them. Hohlt did so, and McFate ended up being able to learn what the anti-gun forces were planning for the UN session—including the delegates they intended to lobby, and the arguments they would highlight.

McFate also took a keen interest in a gun matter currently under consideration by the Department of the Interior, Hohlt says. At the urging of the gun lobby, the agency has been mulling whether to change its regulations to allow people to carry loaded and concealed guns into national parks under certain circumstances. (At the moment, a gun carried into a national park must be unloaded and kept apart from ammunition.) The National Parks Conservation Association and current and former National Park Service officials have been fighting the proposed rule change. "When Mary heard about this," Hohlt recalls, "she immediately asked to be on the email list [of the opponents] and she also got on the phone calls. So she now knows the strategy of the people trying to fight this." Similarly, when Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group organized by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, mounted a campaign against the NRA-backed Tiahrt amendment—legislation advanced by Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) and first passed by Congress in 2003 that prevents the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives from sharing gun-tracing data—McFate, according to Hohlt, made certain to participate in conference calls during which strategy for beating back the bill was discussed. "Whenever an issue comes up, she manages to get on the email list," Hohlt says.

There's Something About Mary: Unmasking a Gun Lobby Mole (via Beyond the Beyond)

The good folks at Public Knowledge have produced a fantastic video explaining the MPAA's "Selectable Output Control" proposal -- the idea that a TV show should be able to disable parts of your home theater (for example, if MTV is worried that your Dolby sound outputs might be used to record the audio portion of music videos, they could shut down those outputs and only allow you to hear sound via the speakers in your TV).

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to engage in “selective output control” (SOC). If the FCC agrees, the MPAA and the movie studios it represents (Paramount, Sony, Fox, Universal, Disney, and Warner Brothers) would be able to “turn off” any output plug they choose, like those on the back of consumer electronics devices of an entertainment system, during special video-on-demand movies on cable television. Public Knowledge opposes SOC and along with Consumer Federation of America, Digital Freedom Campaign, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, and U.S. PIRG, has filed comments urging the FCC to deny the MPAA’s request.

Selectable Output Control (via Lawgeek)

Jake von Slatt sez, "I am fortunate to work with someone who has been involved with ReaderCon, the annual literary science fiction convention in Massachusetts, and when he mentioned that there would be a Steampunk panel I begged for audio! The podcast adds up to fifty minutes of intense, fun engagement with the movement."

Readercon is an annual, literary science fiction convention in Burlington, Massachusetts. This year, it included a panel on steampunk, recorded for podcast here.

The four panelists were:

Mary Robinette Kowal - a professional puppeteer who moonlights as a writer
Holly Black -- a bestselling author of contemporary fantasy novels for teens and children,
Liz Gorinsky - an editor at Tor Books
Sarah Micklem - a graphic designer and writer.

The description of their panel read:

Steampunk and Beyond: What Would a "Gibson Chair" Look Like? Steampunk, originally just an SF subgenre, is now also a burgeoning underground design movement. There's precedent for this: modernism was not only a literary movement, but had artistic, musical, architectural, and design wings as well.

Is the steampunk design movement an essentially fluky outgrowth of our fascination with all things retro? Or could other F&SF subgenres sprout their own design branches as well? Could the creation of actual, useful, physical objects lead to better-imagined literary art? How close is the relationship between the visually striking artifacts of steampunk and the literature that spawned them, anyway?)

However, in the usual way at Readercon, their fascinating discussion ranged far beyond the specific questions asked, touching on steampunk's predecessors and many aspects of its own past, present, and future. The audience asked many informed questions.

Podcast: Steampunk Panel at ReaderCon (Thanks, Jake!)

Bonnie sez, "When you’re at San Diego Comic-Con, it’s nearly impossible to walk more than a few feet and not run into a fan in costume. Every year the convention center is flooded with various versions of superheroes, video game characters, horror film icons, pirates, steampunk kids, vampires, werewolves, manga and anime favorites, food mascots and of course lots and lots of Star Wars characters. Even though it seemed the Joker costumes dominated the con, the 501st and Rebel Legion were out in full force, as were fans dressed as Yoda, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, Jedi and even a couple of TIE Fighters. Here’s a recap of some of the best costumes we spotted." Comic-Con: Best Star Wars Costumes (Thanks, Bonnie!)

BrookynTwang sez, "Check out this video for the Large Hadron Rap, by far the greatest physics rap of all time. The flow is halfway decent, and it accurately covers a lot of knowledge related to particle physics and the LHC. Its by AlpineKat, alter-ego of a science writer currently working at the LHC."

Oh that's fantastic! I got to tour Cern and the LHC last week and got a ton of great pics, and came away with the impression that if this thing causes the universe to wink out of existence, it'll have been worth it. Large Hadron Rap, My photos from Cern

David Rees's Get Your War On -- absolutely my favorite political comic -- has been animated by 23/6, and it's an incredibly successful adaptation, keeping the low-fi look and feel while still doing more than presenting the individual panels as slides in an animated PowerPoint. This is the first episode, but they promise a series. Oh yes, thank you very much! Link (Thanks, Ben!)

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we wondered at new MacBook features, loved on Dell's Studio Hybrid mini PC, and listened to a HP support horror story for the ages.

Joel got himself a jetpack, John wired up an Atom-powere WiBrain handheld PC, and Rob welcomed Sylvania to the cheapo subnote party.

Check out our interview with Esquire, in which hackers are invited to do their stuff on its forthcoming e-ink cover; thoughts on the latest T-Mobile sidekick; and an ATM for your living room.

Today we also saw an electronic shifting system for bikes; a diamond-studded iPhone; some modern chopsticks; speakers you can slap on any wall; the shape of Psystar's legal strategy against Apple; and cute robot hamsters.

Tomorrow, however, is a new day — a day that will see a milquetoast reckoning for bandwidth throttler-in-chief Comcast.

NASA confirms, beyond any earthly doubt, that water really really really does exist on Mars.

Laboratory tests aboard NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander's robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies vapors produced by the heating of samples.

"We have water," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted."

NASA Spacecraft Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended (nasa.gov).

I've also been enjoying the cheerful tweets of the Mars Rover, where I first heard this news. The future is pretty terrific, you know? And it's here.

A retrospective art exhibition featuring art from BLAB! is opening tomorrow, August 1, at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art on the campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. I wrote an essay for the show's catalogue about BLAB!'s creator, Monte Beauchamp.

The exhibition, organized by the Beach Museum of Art, will be on view through November 2, 2008. It is the first American museum exhibition devoted to the work of BLAB!, Monte Beauchamp’s periodic anthology of sequential and comic art, illustration, painting, and printmaking. The exhibition, which focuses on BLAB! #8-18 (1995-2007), features the work of forty-six artists and includes 150 objects from thirty-nine collections. All of the work in the exhibition has appeared in BLAB!.

Artists in the exhibition: Michael Bartalos, Gary Baseman, Richard Beards, Tim Biskup, Stéphane Blanquet, Calef Brown, Greg Clarke, The Clayton Brothers, Sue Coe, Don Colley, Brian Cronin, Nicolas Debon, Douglas Fraser, Charles Paul Freund, Drew Friedman, Geoffrey Grahn, Steven Guarnaccia, Ryan Heshka, Peter Hoey, Tom Huck, Teresa James, Jeffrey Kamberos, Nora Krug, Peter Kuper, Mark Landman, Laura Levine, MATS!? [Mats Stromberg], Walter Minus, Christian Northeast, John Pound, Archer Prewitt, Chris Pyle, Helge Reumann, Xavier Robel, Jonathon Rosen, Marc Rosenthal, Sergio Ruzzier, David Sandlin, Spain, Bob Staake, Fred Stonehouse, Mark Todd, Chris Ware, and Esther Pearl Watson.

The accompanying 128-page, full-color catalogue was designed by Monte Beauchamp and contains contributions by David A. Beronä, Mark Frauenfelder, Matt Dukes Jordan, and Bill North.

BLAB! retrospective art exhibition

The Ridemaster Pro is a £40,000 rocking horse. Sold by Racewood Simulators, the Ridemaster Pro is equipped with sensors, mechanics, and a display for virtual outdoor rides. From The Telegraph:

(Racewood Simulators) designer and company managing director Bill Greenwood said: "Private individuals buy them who don't have space for a horse in central London.

"With one of our simulators you can ride at any time of day in a centrally heated or air-conditioned environment.

"You don't need the space or a dressage arena because it's not physically going anywhere - you can put it in a small room or in a garden shed.

Horseback riding simulator (The Telegraph, thanks Lyn Jeffery!)

I went to Machine Project's fruit jam last year and it was a blast.

Sunday August 3rd from 12-3pm brings the return of our favorite summer ritual, jam making with Fallen Fruit. Jams will be based on the fruit that the participants provide. The fruit can be fresh or frozen. Fallen Fruit will bring public fruit. We are looking for radical and experimental jams as well, like basil guava or lemon pepper jelly. We'll discuss the basics of jam and jelly making, pectin and bindings, the aesthetics of sweetness, as well as the communal power of shared food and the liberation of public fruit. When the jam is done, it is spooned into small, hopefully recycled jars, and the participants take some of their own, leave some for others, and perhaps take a jar of another team's jam. Bring fruit, small glass jars, a willingness to share the goods and an enthusiasm for delicious jam chaos. Free.

Public Fruit Jam 2008 (Machine Project)

Here's a 1969 video of Smith (with lead singer Gayle McCormick) performing a great version of The Shirelles' 1961 hit "Baby It's You." (The Beatles did it in 1963). (via Save vs. Death)

In 1990, Rosalind Williams, MIT professor of history of science and technology, published a book titled Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. The book explores both real and imaginary undergrounds, from the building of sewers and subways to archaeological digs to the writings of Jules Verne and HG Wells. This year, MIT Press has published a revised edition of Notes On The Underground. In honor of that, Cabinet magazine ran a fascinating interview with Williams about the meaning of "underground" and how it relates to science and culture. From Cabinet:

What is your definition of the underground in the book?

In the beginning, I had a straightforward definition: it was a mine, or a pit dug into the earth, or a subway, or a tunnel. As I was writing, however, I realized that one of the most interesting aspects of the world that humans have constructed on the surface of the earth is the creation of mock or artificial underworlds in the sense of places that are meant to exclude organic life, where everything is meant to be a creation of human artifice rather than given from the larger universe. A shopping mall, for example, can serve as a model of a technological environment (a term Mumford didn’t use, but that I find useful) even if it isn’t literally underground.

But most of all I try to expand the concept of the underground from the earth to the sky. I end the book by comparing environmental consciousness with subterranean consciousness, pointing out that the real surface of the planet is the upper edge of the atmosphere. Our earthly home is everything below the frigid and uninhabitable realm of outer space, and so in a sense we have always lived below the surface of the planet, in a closed, finite environment.

Underworld: An Interview With Rosalind Williams (Cabinet), Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Amazon)

Loren says: "The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that their former MNDoT emergency response executive, who was fired for hanging out with her boyfriend in NYC instead of coming back to Minneapolis to deal with the 35W bridge collapse, has been hired by the TSA."

Sonia Pitt, the MnDOT emergency response executive fired for taking an unauthorized, state-paid trip to Washington during the Interstate 35W bridge disaster, is now working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Pitt, 44, of Red Wing, confirmed Wednesday that she is working for Homeland Security's Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) at its headquarters in Arlington, Va. Her job title is "Transportation Security Specialist." Pitt declined to discuss her job responsibilities, her length of employment with the federal agency or her salary.

"All inquiries go through my attorney, same as always," Pitt said.

Fired emergency repsonse exec now at Homeland Security (Star Tribune)

Annelle of Big Think says:

We recently interviewed Columbia professor of environmental health sciences and microbiology Dickson Despommier, the pioneering researcher responsible for bringing national attention to the idea of vertical farming. In light of your recent article on Professor Despommier's critical work on BoingBoing on July 15, ("Lettuce in the sky, with diamonds") I thought that you might be interested in his interview.

Hear him describe the logistics of vertical farming.

Hear his prophesy for the "Third Green Revolution"

Select other subjects from his full interview.

As well as appearing on BoingBoing, Professor Despommier was recently featured in the New York Times, CNN, and The Colbert Report to name a few.

Logistics of vertical farming (Big Think)

Klaus Pierre, a French/German actor-waiter-whatever, aspires against all odds to become America's next great action hero. In today's episode, he attempts to conquer the greatest challenge ever -- his first big Hollywood party. Drinks, hijinks, and embarassing dance moves ensue.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions on how to subscribe to the BBtv video podcast.

Previous Klaus Pierre episodes on BBtv:

• Klaus Pierre: Super Pretty Action Hero Star
• Klaus Pierre: The Beach
• Klaus Pierre: Red Carpet Botox Dreams
• Klaus Pierre: Pirate Musical of Epic Fail
• Klaus Pierre: Savate
• Klaus Pierre: Coffee Shop.
• Klaus Pierre: Swordfighting
• Point Break and heartbreak

Jasmina Tešanović:
Dragan Dabic Defeats Radovan Karadzic
Belgrade: July 29, 2008
photo: Bruce Sterling

Despite wise warnings from the American embassy to avoid all large, possibly violent Serbian demonstrations, I was there today in Belgrade's Republic Square.

My American friend and I were sipping two beers to pay for our cafe table. I also noticed some lone men alertly drinking coffee there: they were undercover Belgrade police. Standing outside the cafe were strong, heavily armored lines of hyper-geared riot policemen. There were even riot policewomen on duty.

Last night I spoke to Dejan Anastasijevic, an expert on internal issues and a witness in Hague trial against Milosevic. We concluded that this grand public event was the swan song for the Radical Party, and for Radovan Karadzic, one of its founders: for the Radicals, tonight was now or never.

Well: the verdict is never. The ethnic holy-warrior Radovan Karadzic has lost out to the New Age guru Dabic: his other Jeckyll-and-Hyde personality for the last 13 years. Maybe 16,000 people trickled into Republic Square, a good-sized crowd for downtown Belgrade, but a fragment of the three million Radical voters, a full third of the Serbian population. Two months ago the Radicals were gleefully smashing foreign embassies over the Kosovo issue; today they are bewildered and crestfallen.

This image (three combined frames) shows the last total solar eclipse, March 29, 2006. The next one takes place tomorrow. The Exploratorium will Webcast the event live from China. From Science News:

This particular eclipse will sweep across the planet in a slim path that begins in Nunavut, a northern province of Canada, and ends in northern China. So people in parts of Canada, northern Greenland, the Arctic, central Russia, Mongolia and China will be able to witness the seconds-long blackout.

When the moon totally obscures the sun — the moment of totality — the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the solar corona, becomes visible. The solar corona reaches temperatures higher than a million degrees Celsius and extends farther than 620,000 miles from the star’s surface. Because the sun’s surface is brighter than its corona, a solar eclipse is the only opportunity to see the corona with the naked eye.

Total solar eclipse (Science News), Total Solar Eclipse 200 Live from China (Exploratorium)

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in Spain is now hosting the first museum exhibition devoted to the incredible writer JG Ballard, author of such works as Crash, Empire of the Sun, and Concrete Island. According to the museum, "This exhibition offers an itinerary through Ballard's creative universe: his times and obsessions, his dissection of the secret keys of the contemporary, the traces of his own life in his fictional body of work, his artistic and literary referents, and his precise, disenchanted intuitions of a future life governed by the concepts of aseptic dystopia and disaster." The show is appropriately titled "JG Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium." Sadly, I can't make it to Barcelona to experience the show in person. But over at the excellent Ballardian site, Rick McGrath contributed a written "tour" and photos of the exhibition. JG Ballard exhibition review (Ballardian, thanks Simon Sellars!), JG Ballard exhibition page (CCCB)

Previously on BB:
• JG Ballard quotation book
• JG Ballard's autobiography and sad news of cancer
• JG Ballard on CSI
• JG Ballard: Interviews book
• JG Ballard on modern architecture

This tiny alien in a jar is on display in the lobby of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. (Click image to see the full picture.) OK, it's not really an extraterrestrial. It's a shaved monkey from a UFO hoax fifty years ago. Two barbers and a butcher eventually confessed to slicing off the dead monkey's tail, removing its hair, and giving it a greenish tint. From the Associated Press:

Then they left the primate on an isolated road north of Atlanta in the pre-dawn hours of July 8, 1953, burning a circle into the pavement with a blowtorch before a police officer came around the curve in his patrol car.

"If we had been five minutes earlier, we would have caught 'em in the act," said Sherley Brown, the officer who happened on the scene.

The barbers, Edward Watters and Tom Wilson, and the butcher, Arnold "Buddy" Payne, told the policeman they came upon a red, saucer-shaped object in the road that night. They said several 2-foot-tall creatures were scurrying about and the trio hit one with their pickup before the other creatures jumped back in the saucer and blasted skyward — leaving the highway scorched.

Alien in a jar (Yahoo! News)

I enjoyed the video, "Why America is Fucked," billed as "the expletive-filled new teaser from the upcoming Draplin Project," which is a documentary about genius graphic designer Aaron James Draplin.

America is Fucked (Jess Gibson. Thanks, Iowahawk!)

Here's a three-minute youtube of two guys in zombie outfits reciting haiku (about zombiism) and blowing artistic sax notes -- while, in the background, zombie apocalypse unfolds. Thank you, zombie guys, for productively filling three minutes of my life! Zombie Haiku (Thanks, Megan!)

Watch-Cufflinks is the webstore for Etsy seller Edmdesigns, whose work I've featured here before. There's some really lovely stuff here -- I'm partial to this wingéd watch movement badge. Makes me wish I had more shirts with French cuffs! Watch Cufflinks

See also: Clock-y, steam-y jewelry and such

The Guardian's just published my latest column, "Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry" about the insanity of the latest record-company salvo in the copyright wars, a cozy deal with British ISPs that will have them spying on and degrading the connections of subscribers accused of infringing downloading:

So no, I don't think this is going to have any appreciable effect on filesharing. However, it will succeed in driving music-swapping even further underground, to encrypted protocols and offline hard-drive parties and private swapping networks. These are every bit as efficient at getting music into the hands of kids, but they're a lot harder to monitor and charge money for.

The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter. After all, they had the fastest-growing technology in the history of the world at their disposal, 70 million internet users in 18 months, and they'd found that the average American user was willing to spend $15 a month for the service. The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead, and out of the ashes of Napster arose dozens of new networking technologies. Each one was more hardened against monitoring and disconnection than the last.

These days, if you wanted to charge a flat fee for access to all music (something that consumers all over the world would be eager to accept), you'd have to do stuff that's a lot more complicated and funky to get anything like the clean reports we'd have gotten off of Napster 1.0.

And yet that's just what we're going to end up doing. It's historically inevitable: whenever technology makes it impossible to police a class of copyright use, we've solved the problem by creating blanket licences.

Link

Raketentim sez, "The Halo Corpse Alphabet is a rather macabre project with the goal being to represent every letter of the alphabet by the twisted, curved, stretched, and otherwise dead Spartan and Elite bodies from Halo 3. The Halo community was clearly up for the challenge as they miraculously managed to capture every single letter, number, and even some punctuation in the form of screenshots." Halo Corpse Alphabet (Thanks, Raketentim!)

Some of Queen Victoria's giant and comical undergarments were up for auction, but we are not amused.

A pair of her bloomers, a chemise and a nightdress went under the hammer at Mackworth in Derby for 13,500 pounds ($27,000).

The cotton bloomers are monogrammed with a VR (Victoria Regina) and attracted bids from as far as Brazil, Russia, Hong Kong and New York. They finally went to a lady from Canada for 4,500 pounds, according to auctioneer Charles Hanson.

A London collector snapped up Queen Victoria's chemise for 3,800 pounds. Her nightdress sold for 5,200 pounds to an American collector.

Link

Tim Wu's new NYT op-ed, "OPEC 2.0," explores the growing carteliztion of bandwidth and its consequences for America, where we already spend nearly as much on bandwidth as we do on heating oil. Tim's got a newish book out about this stuff called Who Controls the Internet?. I've only browsed it so far (way behind on my reading), but it looks like a classic to me.

Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.

Wired connections to the home — cable and telephone lines — are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments — similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.

But just as with oil, there are alternatives. Amsterdam and some cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a public utility. A future possibility is to buy your own fiber, the way you might buy a solar panel for your home.

Link (Thanks, Cat!)

Shane Glines found this funny and well-made chicken commercial on YouTube.

I was excited to find this rare commercial produced by José Luis Moro's "Estudios Moro". The studio, run by José and his brother Santiago from 1955 through 1970 produced many animated commercials in addition to the animated series The Cantinflas Show and La Familia Telerin.

What would Japan look like through the eyes of a drifter camped in a shantytown near one of Tokyo's trendiest zones?

Today on Boing Boing tv, we debut Dowa Mondai: Assimilation Issues, an experimental short film by Bob Jaroc which attempts to provide an answer. The director explains:

In the run up to the launch of the 2006 av album Greedy Baby, Plaid (Ed Handley) and myself were on tour in Japan. On a day off in Tokyo I visited a small shantytown in Shibuya I had seen from a train the day before, tucked away in a kids playground. My translator Nick Stone and myself introduced ourselves to a friendly group of people and negotiated permission to pry into their lives and film, in exchange for some food/ cigarettes and wine.

My intentions for the piece were to stay clear of making a patronizing "cry/be angry for the homeless people" thing or a romanticized view of that life. I wanted to distill the experiences of the people who took the time to talk to me and question myself why I ended up going there in search of something to film.

This was filmed on Kodak vision2 200 super 8 stock with a Beaulieu 6008pro. The neg was cut into 1000 strips and was given away with the 1st 1000 copies of Greedy Baby. Dowa Mondai: Assimilation Issues was made from those rushes/recordings.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion thread, more about this short, and downloadable video.

Mahdis Keshavarz was just on a boat trip in the Middle East. Whenever she returned to her room, the cleaners made amazing sculptures from sheets, towels, and pillows. Click the images to see them larger. (Thanks, Rachel Maguire!)

In October, Esquire will publish its 75th anniversary issue with a cover made from eInk's electronic paper. Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel interviews deputy editor Peter Griffin about the tech and its hackability. (Seen here, not the actual magazine but a BBG mock-up.) Esquire to geeks: hack our e-ink magazine cover (BB Gadgets)

This year's OSCON was treated to a chance to see the first RepRap "progeny." RepRap is a deluxe 3D printer that is capable of printing copies of itself.

On the way back, the TSA opened the case it was in and destroyed the printer.

On the return journey from OSCON, baggage handling found themselves outclassed. Instead of simply smacking the box around a few times as had happened on the outbound trip, the TSA dismantled the custom hard-case for the RepRap by removing the 16 bolts securing the top panel rather than undoing the 8 bolts marked "Open".

Unable to fit the panel back on again - it was not meant to come off so the nuts were not captive - they simply sent it on its way with the panel detached. I retrieved it from the conveyor - as opposed from the fragile/outsize section despite clear "Fragile" stickers on every face...

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

Jim Mullan's "reconfigured" antique decoy-birds have been painted and modded to make them into steampunk delights. These are just fabulous. The birds were left to the artist by his father, and this is all there are.

The vintage bird collection, designed by Jim Mullan, was inspired by his fascination with birds and antique objects. The crows were used as hunting decoys in the 30’s and 40’s and the smaller birds were carved in the 1950’s. The original decoys were passed on to Jim in 1991 and just recently he has turned each into an eclectic, one of a kind piece of art. You can see Jim’s lively sense of humor in each one of his creations.

Jim begins by hand painting each bird and then adds a variety of vintage pieces when creating his sculptures. The unusual relics he uses, such as croquet balls, binoculars and old toys give each inspiring bird his own personality. Objects that were cast aside as useless are used in his designs to demonstrate the fragile balance between nature and industry.

Mullanium (via Neatorama)

My friend Nick Bilton has a good question. If you have an answer, please post in the comments.

Q. What natural food, other than eggs, turns from a liquid to solid, when heated?

The question only pertains to a natural food, no additional things added (so no water and sugar). Just a simple, single food. I've asked so many people and no one has an answer. I even asked friends at The Food Network and nothing. Joel's been trying to find out too and he's lost. Got any insight into this or know anyone that might? A lot of people have said blood, but that just evaporates and then changes, it doesn't actually change consistency.

Archie McPhee is selling original unicorn oil paintings by Ramirez. (David must be sad that he didn't get the Bigfoot UFO painting when it was available)

In his tireless pursuit of perfection, Ramirez would paint each painting hundreds, sometimes thousands of times. Limited quantities of these numbered original oil paintings are only available through Archie McPhee. Each painting is set in a 25" x 19" frame, signed and numbered by the artist, and is sure to be a great conversation piece for any room in your home or office.

Original unicorn oil paintings (Thanks, Rusty Stanberry!)

W. Kelley Lucas was my first friend who made it as a "professional" artist. When I lived in Miami, Florida in the early 1990s, Kelley and I hung out all the time and he turned me on to many lowbrow/pop surrealist artists that I've come to love. Eventually, Kelley's huge paintings hung in galleries beside work by the very artists he admired, like Mark Ryden, Glenn Barr, and Todd Schorr. Then, around 2002, Kelley stopped painting entirely. He was struggling with some very difficult personal issues and we lost touch. When I received the new issue of Hi-Fructose, I was completely surprised to see a small ad announcing Kelley's Web site. He is back in the studio, and I, for one, am thrilled. Kelley's posted his first five pieces in six years. Seen here, "Vespa Consonum," a portrait of the artist by Grady Clark, and "Filling Up The Hollow." If this work is a good hint of what's to come, don't take your eyes off this man. Kelley Lucas

The gentleman was arrested in a Fresno, California casino after he placed a bet with marijuana in a card game. He was arrested, even though he produced a "cannabis club" card purchased on the internet. (via Neatorama)

Mugabe should just print trillion dollar bills and sell them directly on eBay. This $100,000,000,000 note is up to AU$87 with eleven bids.

Zimbabwe Banknotes on eBay

The Antikythera Mechanism is a two-thousand year-old clock made in Greece that was discovered a century ago in a shipwreck. Two years ago, scientists studying the bits and pieces that survived under the sea were able to figure out that the device was used to calculate astronomical cycles. Now though, British mathematician Tony Freeth, part of the original research group, has determined that the Antikythera Mechanism also shows the timetables of the Olympic Games. Freeth and his colleagues published their findings in this week's issue of the science journal Nature. The magazine also posted a fascinating video telling the clock's story. It's a marvelous tale of technology, history, and curiosity. From Nature News:

The device had intermeshed toothed wheels that represent calendar cycles. By turning the wheels, a user could figure out the relationships between astronomical cycles to deduce the relative positions of the Sun and Moon and forecast eclipses.

But after two millennia under the sea off the island of Antikythera, near Crete, all that remains of the device are 82 fragments of flaking bronze, including parts of 30 gear-wheels2. The numbers of gear teeth are crucial, but must be inferred from the partial wheels that remain. And most of the inscriptions are hidden under corrosion and surface accretions. To read them, the researchers used a method called microfocus X-ray computed tomography, which provides X-ray images of slices through the sample, revealing inscriptions buried beneath the mechanism's surface.

Antikythera Mechanism video
"Complex clock combines calendars" Nature News article
"Calendars with Olympiad display and eclipse prediction on the Antikythera Mechanism" paper

The items show here are, according to the TSA web site, an "empty metal bottle and a home-made battery pack, consisting of 28 rechargeable batteries connected by multiple resistors and held together in two layers with a silicone-based adhesive."

Do you like the way the TSA put the wires from the battery pack under the empty water bottle and arranged the two separate items in such as way as to make them look more like a Hollywood version of a bomb?

The TSA website headline: "Explosive-Like Item Intercepted at Checkpoint"

Security expert Bruce Schneier's headline: "TSA Proud of Confiscating Non-Dangerous Item"

Here's an excerpt from the TSA report:

The passenger [at Jackson-Evers International Airport] was an engineer and said he built the battery to power his DVD player for the long flight to Hawaii. After recognizing that the item could be seen by other passengers as a threat, the man surrendered it to Supervisory TSO Raiford Patterson and was allowed to board the flight.

Here's an excerpt from Schneier's blog:

My guess is that if Kip Hawley [Administrator & Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for the Transportation Security Administration] were allowed to comment on my blog, he would say something like this: "It's not just bombs that are prohibited; it's things that look like bombs. This looks enough like a bomb to fool the other passengers, and that in itself is a threat."

Okay, that's fair. But the average person doesn't know what a bomb looks like; all he knows is what he sees on television and the movies. And this rule means that all homemade electronics are confiscated, because anything homemade with wires can look like a bomb to someone who doesn't know better. The rule just doesn't work.

And in today's passengers-fight-back world, do you think anyone is going to successfully do anything with a fake bomb?

Did he get to keep the water bottle?

Russ Kick's Memory Hole is back with a special treat for fans of government intelligence agency arcana:

Via a Freedom of Information Act request (which involved paying $700 and waiting almost 4 years), The Memory Hole has obtained blank copies of most forms used by the National Security Agency).

In response to a prior request, the NSA had sent a supposedly complete listing of forms that they use. (That list is located here.) I then requested a blank copy of each one. The NSA responded by sending a copy of more than 400 forms totaling 687 separate pages. (They also withheld 24 forms totaling 31 pages.)

I scanned the forms in the order (basically alphabetical) in which they appeared in the parcel. Some of them are standard Defense Department forms, but most originate within the NSA and have never been seen outside the agency. They range from the exotic to the pedestrian, but even the most prosaic form shines some light into the workings of No Such Agency.

Over 400 forms used by the National Security Agency (The Memory Hole)

These Angry Youth Comix dolls, modeled exactly from the characters in Johnny Ryan's comic of the same name, would make a welcome addition to any rejuvenile's curio shelf.

The Toxic Waste variants are especially appealing.

Angry Youth Comix dolls

MIT mathematicians have learned more about how insects breathe underwater by trapping a layer of air around their bodies. The scientists determined that insects can dive as deep as 30 meters without the bubbles bursting. (Seen here, a Notonecta covered with a respiratory bubble.) From MIT News Office:

The air bubble's stability is maintained by hairs on the insects' abdomen, which help repel water from the surface. The hairs, along with a waxy surface coating, prevent water from flooding the spiracles--tiny breathing holes on the abdomen.

The spacing of these hairs is critically important: The closer together the hairs, the greater the mechanical stability and the more pressure the bubble can withstand before collapsing.

However, mechanical stability comes at a cost. If the hairs are too close together, there is not enough surface area through which to breathe....

"Because the bubble acts as an external lung, its surface area must be sufficiently large to facilitate the exchange of gases," said (study co-author Morris) Flynn, who is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Alberta. Other researchers have explored systems that could replicate the external lung on a larger scale, for possible use by diving humans. A team at Nottingham Trent University showed that a porous cavity surrounded by water-repellent material is supplied with oxygen by the thin air layer on its surface. The surface area required to support human respiration is impractically large, in excess of 100 square meters; however, other avenues for technological application exist. For example, such a device could supply the oxygen needed by fuel cells to power small autonomous underwater vehicles.

Insects breathing underwater (MIT News Office)

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman had a backroom tour of the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, Alberta where he perused a natural history collection of nearly 70,000 items donated by a generous oilman and lawyer. Loren posted snapshots of his tour over at Cryptomundo. From Loren's post:

Walls were covered with trophy heads and taxidermy items were on several rows of shelves. Over in the corner, one might find a huge Galapagos tortoise. Turn around, look under a sheet of plastic, and there’s a baby musk ox.

Backrooms of the Royal Alberta Museum (Cryptomundo)

Previously on BB:
• Richard Banres's "Animal Logic" photography
• Justine Cooper's photos of the American Museum of Natural History

Wal-mart stores are depicted as disease-green blobs in this neat animation of the retail giant's spread across the US.

Nathan says: "This is similar to the Walmart infection video you put up a while back, but this one is *interactive* - and a bit sexier."

Walmart Infection - Interactive Edition

Mark Statford says:

Justin Parpan and Josh Parpan run a little store called Goblin Fish Press that's chock full of great kids toys, prints and shirts. All with a sort of monster theme.

I like the Insectoids from Mars T-shirt, on sale for $10!

Goblin-Fish Press

This giant tree in Limpopo, South Africa is home to a tavern, the Big Baobab Pub. The 6,000-year-old baobab tree, on Sunland Farm, has a 155 foot circumference and walls 6.5 feet thick. Click the photo snips to see the entire images. From Life In The Fast Lane:

The tree has its own cellar, with natural ventilation to keep the beer cold...

More than 7,000 visitors come from all over the world to see the grandiose Baobab every year and have a drink in its pub, which has 13 foot (4 meter) high ceilings and comfortably seats up to 15 people.

“One year we had a party and squashed 54 people inside, but I wouldn’t recommend that.” said (proprietor Heather) van Heerden.

Bar inside tree (Life In The Fast Lane, via Fortean Times)

Avi Solomon says: "Peter Ward, paleontologist, dives at night to meet the Nautilus, a wondrous creature which has survived for 500 million years."

Peter Ward dives to meet a wild Nautilus