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

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

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)

Bill Elkins is a pioneer of space suit design. He first entered the field in 1957, making "restraint couches" for astronauts. (And no, those aren't BDSM devices.) Air & Space spoke with Elkins, who is now 80 and still involved in R&D. From Air & Space:

Air & Space: How did the first astronaut restraint systems compare to jet pilot systems already in use?

Elkins: A jet pilot restraint system has a hard backpan and seat. It mainly is trying to contain the pilot in the seat, in a sitting position. In an astronaut couch you’re lying on your back. [In the late 1950s] they were planning a cast, form-fitting, backpan restraint couch for the astronauts. But in tests at high G it was causing substernal pain, where the sternum of the occupant would compress into the chest. I designed a sophisticated hammock supported by a tubular steel frame. It left your body in a more normal, natural form at high G.

A&S: What’s the biggest challenge in designing an effective space suit?

Elkins: Well, a big one is mobility, specifically the joints. If you look at the Apollo [suit] joints, the farther you bent them, the more effort it took and the harder it was to hold that position. Those suits were spring loaded to come back to the neutral position. So it took a constant force to keep them out of neutral, and that was very fatiguing. But when you move a constant volume joint to a new position, no further force is needed. When I left Litton and went to AiResearch, I invented the toroidal joint. Toroids maintain constant volume so long as the centerline remains constant. At AiResearch I designed the EX-1A [suit], the first prototype suit to use toroidal joints, in 1967. It was an outstanding suit.

"Space Suits Past and Future"

Here's the results from the first-ever survey of European fertility tourism:

Hundreds of women over the age of 40 are travelling to fertility clinics in Europe to try to get pregnant because NHS clinics in the UK will not take them, the first-ever Europe-wide study of fertility tourism shows.

The research shows considerable movement across Europe, with women seeking out procedures that are banned in their own country. Italian women are crossing the border in droves following tough legal restrictions on IVF imposed in 2004, while large numbers of gay French women bypass a ban by seeking treatment in Belgium.

NHS restrictions prompt fertility tourism boom

BBC Magazine gave 13-year-old Scott Campbell a gen-one Walkman in place of his MP3 player for a week, then gathered his impressions on the device:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman (Thanks, John!)

On Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's found this vacuum tube chess-set made by Paul Fryer: "Beautiful! Made of wood, glass and choobs, only seven sets exist."

Paul Fryer's Vacuum Tube chess board

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Recently on Offworld neo-retro nostalgia has ruled the roost, with things like a box-art tribute to the 8-bit Lost game that never was, the zen-like recursiveness of 'Playered' (above) from the creator of the 8-bit Keyboard Cat, the latest look at the building blocks of Fez, and the low-bit d-pad block-tracer insanity of the WiiWare's latest Bit.Trip game.

Even better, we got a patch that will replace the lead character in your standard Super Mario Bros game with American Elf comic artist James Kochalka, listened to the latest NES rom flyer for NYC's ongoing chiptune showcase Pulsewave, and, finally, stepped away into more polygonal territory to take a deeper look at how Hand Circus's upcoming iPhone platformer Rolando 2 is leading some of the smartest social gaming campaigns in the App Store.

• The new iPhone has been jailbroken. But not by you.

• Should a steampunk lightsaber have cogs? Dark forces want to know.

• Good Lord, they still make the Flowbee?

• Joel spotted an animatronic Luxo Jr.

• April Julian made a beautiful, delicious-looking iPod cake. Time-to-Portal-reference: 7 comments.

• Moritz Wolpert's synthesizer is not like yours.

• Behold! PSP Phone mockups.

• Sony released the Signature Vaio Collection. Among the wonders is the world's first $2,000 netbook. We invent a Sony drinking game.

• Palm's Pre takes a bite out of Apple in a new Sprint ad.

• A kid in England switched his iPod for an ancient Walkman.

• The Mac Mini, it rules.

• Steorn, hawkers of perpetual motion, follow up with a $400 wand that measures fluctuations in the woo.

• The Touch Book is a curious convertible netbook.

Jeremy Ettinghausen from Penguin sez,

We Make Stories is a unique suite of digital tools for children to create, print and share a variety of innovative story forms. Members will be able to create pop-up books, customise audiobooks, design their own comics, produce exciting treasure maps and learn how to create a variety of entertaining adventures. The site has been developed with a group of interaction designers and is aimed at 6-11 year olds.

Jason Bradbury, author of Dot Robot and presenter of the Gadget Show has played with the site and says; "I am constantly playing with technology and stories - this site brings the two together in a blissfully easy to use and engrossing interface." Membership of the site will cost £5.99/$9.99 for individuals and £49.99/$74.99 for a schools licence (up to 15 users).

We Make Stories (Thanks, jeremyet!)

Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physicist who's got a good rep with her local news media, describes the process she went through to calculate the sound-bites explaining how a styrofoam soda-cup thrown from an oncoming car managed to smash the windscreen of the car it hit.

The reporter for Channel 8 asked me what the force actually meant. The best way to describe it would be that a scale placed on the windshield would register between 20 and 120 lbs when the cup hit. That quick calculation convinced me that it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that a drink cup could actually break a windshield. If the cup were thrown, even a pretty bad arm could give it an additional 30-40 mph, so the force could have been much larger.

When we taped my interview for Channel 8, the reporter asked if it mattered how the cup was oriented when it hit. It does. Brandon - who is just a joy to work with - had pitched them the idea of taping the segment in front of a car using a Sonic cup as a prop, so I had the cup right there. This was a question that just came up, so I hadn't had a lot of time to think about it. That always makes me nervous because the last think you want is to be captured on tape saying something wrong. Sonic_CupShape

It does make a difference. Compare what happens when a cup hits bottom first or side first, as I've tried to illustrate to the right. The bottom of the cup is really rigid, so there isn't going to be a lot of give. If it hits side first, the cup is going to give. If you've ever grabbed a flimsy drink cup and it squished and the lid came off, that's exactly what would happen. This is the exact same principle the SAFER barriers use for racetracks. Deforming the wall increases the time it takes for a car to come to a stop, and that decreases the force the driver feels. If the cup hit side first, it wouldn't create as much force as if it hit end first.

And, of course, I wasn't mentally or numerically agile enough to think to calculate the kinetic energy during the taping. A 2 lb cup of soda going 130 mph would have the same kinetic energy as a baseball thrown at 150 mph, or the same energy you get from exploding a half gram of TNT. (Total tangent: A 44 oz Coke contains 371 kilocalories of energy, which is equal to the kinetic energy of a passenger car going 86 mph.)

dial-a-scientist

Former cigarette retailer Nexicon has a new shakedown racket: they automatically detect things that look like copyright infringement on the net, automatically find people who look like they're responsible for it, then automatically send a dire legal threat demanding cash to go away. Mostly, they work for pornographers, and the estate of Frank Zappa.

The process is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other filesharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share the work of their clients. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer...

In their email they write that "it may be beneficial to settle this matter without the need of costly and time-consuming litigation."

If you don't settle they are "prepared to pursue every available remedy including damages, recovery of attorney's fees, costs and any and all other claims that may be available to it in a lawsuit filed against you." To make it even more scary, they point out that ISPs might cut your Internet connection if you don't comply.

In the FAQ on the VPA website it is noted that consulting a lawyers is an option, but it would be a rather silly thing to do since it will cost more than the settlement itself. "It is likely that the cost incurred to retain a lawyer will exceed the settlement amount offered." [Ed: it's cheaper to pay us than it is to ask a professional whether to pay us].

Automated Legal Threats Turn Piracy Into Profit (via Digg)

The Rubber Room is the name for the places where New York City teachers who are under disciplinary investigation are sent to await their. For months -- sometimes years, and sometimes decades, these teachers go to "work" every day in a mostly bare room, and wait, and wait, and wait. Even if exonerated, many of these teachers are so stigmatized that they have to switch careers. Sounds like something out of Sartre or Kafka, but it's just New York.

Here's a documentary on the Rubber Room, made by an ex-teacher who was sentenced to it.

RubberRoomMovie.com (via DNTO)

After the Swedish Pirate Party (devoted to copyright liberalization and Internet freedom) took a seat* in the last EU election, new local Pirate Parties have launched in France (where a series of restrictive Internet laws have been proposed by Sarkozy) and the Czech Republic.

The Czech party has collected 2,500 electronic signatures to date and hopes to compete in October elections. It was just certified as an official political party by the Czech Interior Ministry under the name "Českou pirátskou stranu" (ČPS).

"We do not want any political posts," spokesperson Ondrej Profant told Czech news agency CTK. "If we managed to implement our program exclusively on the level of thinking, which means that large parties would embrace it as their own we would be satisfied."

Like many of the other European pirate parties, the Czechs lack a broad political program; they care only about intellectual property issues and hope to partner with other parties in a coalition.

The French pirates have little more than a Facebook group and a Wordpress blog at the moment, but they too hope to shape policy in the aftermath of the Swedish Pirate Party's win. France might seen like fertile soil for such a party to flourish, since the government has been pushing a tough "three strikes" law. To date, the group has 1,600 members of a Facebook group.

Pirate parties parade through Prague, Paris

*Two seats, if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified

The 2009 Locus Award winners for best science fiction and related books published in 08, as voted by the general public, have been announced. A good place to start your reading if you want to read some of the best stuff out there.

Science Fiction Novel: Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
Fantasy Novel: Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)
First Novel: Singularity's Ring, Paul Melko (Tor)
Young-Adult Book: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, Bloomsbury)
Novella: "Pretty Monsters", Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters)
Novelette: "Pump Six", Paolo Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories)
Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Anthology: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
Collection: Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)
Non-Fiction/Art Book: P. Craig Russell, Coraline: The Graphic Novel, Neil Gaiman, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins)
Editor: Ellen Datlow
Artist: Michael Whelan
Magazine: F&SF
Publisher: Tor

2009 Locus Award Winners

Honduras has undergone a military coup, with left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya being sent into exile by the Army after proposing a referendum on a constitutional change that would have let him run for a third second term in office. This is the first successful Latin American military coup since the end of the Cold War (though Honduras has a large English-speaking native minority, so "Latin American" may not be the right word here). Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a close ally, has warned that any moves on the Venezuelan embassy will be treated as an act of war.

We honeymooned on Roatan, one of Honduras' Bay Islands, and it was not without its political problems. Indeed, martial law was briefly declared on Roatan during our two week stay, after a series of blockades and sabotage in protest of massive rate-hikes from the newly privatized power company. Zelaya's personal handling of that problem was less than perfect. But as developing nations' governments go, Honduras had a pretty stable, relatively non-corrupt government and administration. Certainly, a military coup is less democratic than a leader seeking a mandate to try for a constitutional reform.

U.S. President Barack Obama and the European Union expressed deep concern after troops came for Zelaya, an ally of socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, around dawn and took him away from his residence. He was whisked away to Costa Rica.

Zelaya, who took office in 2006 and is limited by the constitution to a four-year term that ends in early 2010, had angered the army, courts and Congress by pushing for an unofficial public vote on Sunday to gauge support for his plan to hold a November referendum on allowing presidential re-election.

Army overthrows Honduras president

Update: Xeni adds, "Regarding the notion that Honduras isn't all that corrupt -- I have some experience with the country, not in resort areas but in the poor/average areas, and it's bad. Wealth highly inequally distributed, but more importantly to the point of your statement, there is extreme and widespread corruption. So much so that Honduras placed WORSE than both Nigeria and Rwanda in transparency.org's list of corruption by country. They're worse than Nigeria and Rwanda. That's terrible. "

Lenovo's new laptop keyboards have bigger Del and Esc keys, which sounds right to me. I love the Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards more than any other keyboard I've tried. I recently switched away from Thinkpads for a season and then switched back and I could almost hear my fingertips sighing in relief as they touched down on the clacky, springy, responsive X200 keyboard. What a treat.

After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have installed larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range...

The change is based on testing users on which keys they use the most. On average, they used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys, that hadn't been made bigger.

Lenovo decided to make these two keys about twice as long in the vertical direction to fit the way people reach up for them.

Apparently the next keyboard evolution could be the death of the caps lock. It comes from the days when you wrote headings in capitals but these days exists only to be accidently pressed, stuff up passwords, or make you shout online.

Lenovo increases size of panic buttons (via /.)

Yishay sends us Persepolis 2.0, "a mini graphic novel telling the story of the last two weeks in Iran, in the style of Marjane Satrapi, by two Iranians living in Shanghai"

Persepolis 2.0 (Thanks, Yishay!)

Emma sez,

"Snitchtown: the photo essay" is a book of photographs of a (very small) subset of the 4.2 million CCTV in Britain. These have been put together with Cory Doctorow's essay on ubiquitous CCTV coverage, "Snitchtown" as part of the SoFoBoMo event, in which photographers work to put together a solo project in book form in one month.

I was inspired by some of the things that Cory said at an Open Rights Group debate. Not least of these was the fact that his daughter's pocket money was tied, in part, to her spotting the CCTV cameras on the way to school. This sounded so damned transgressive, and I realised how much we've been trained to pay no attention to the cameras that record our daily lives (I counted 21 on my exit from the tube station this evening alone.)

The book needed some words to explain why I wanted turn the lens back onto the CCTV cameras. I started by using some extracts from "Snitchtown", along with quotes from the press, and from CCTV manufacturers' catalogues. I quickly realised that none of these told the story as cogently as the original essay does. The upshot is a creative commons licensed collection of photographs, a creative commons licensed book (PDF only at the present time, but I plan to put it on a print on demand server.)

I'm very new to photography and I know of many people that could have done a much better job, but I wanted to stand under these cameras and document them. Doing so has made me much more aware of just how ubiquitous they are. I hope the photographs will help others to do likewise.

This is, I believe, my absolute favorite CC adaptation of my work to date; in that it's the first adaptation that I prefer to my original. Great work, Emma!

Snitchtown

Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras are guest bloggers on Boing Boing. They are co-founders of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.

Many thanks to David, Mark, Xeni, Cory, the Boing Boing team, and all of Boing Boing's readers for making these two weeks of guest blogging so terrific. We were thrilled to be able to introduce the Atlas Obscura to the world on Boing Boing.

One of the best parts of this experience has been following the thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion thread comments. We're awed by the responsiveness of BB's readers, and by the generosity with which you all have shared your knowledge and opinions.

We especially want to thank everyone who has taken time to add places to the Atlas Obscura. Over the last two weeks, the site has already grown to be more than just a collection of "wondrous, curious, and esoteric" places. Your contributions and comments are starting to turn it into a community. We hope you'll continue to share your knowledge of obscure places, so that we can continue to build the site into a truly awesome resource.

Please stay in touch with any thoughts, critiques, or suggestions that come to mind. Thanks again!

All Best,

Josh and Dylan

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

I ought to leave the Minnesota curiosities to Dylan, since that's his home turf, but I was just poking around the Atlas and stumbled on a mysterious waterfall called the "Devil's Kettle," recently added by a user named nursecarman. I realized I'd never seen anything quite like it before.

There is a mysterious waterfall in Judge Magney State Park in Minnesota. Half of the water drops 50 feet into the Brule river; the other half falls into a cauldron and disappears! Dyes and ping pong balls have been dropped into the pothole in an attempt to trace its route and find its outlet--presumably the water winds its way underground to Lake Superior a mile away--but the other end of the Devil's Kettle has yet to be found.

Anyone know of any other disappearing waterfalls like this? I'm guessing there must be others.

The developers behind the Pirate Bay team have been developing a video streaming site for the past two years, and an "extreme beta" version of the project is available (meaning, in their words, "Don't expect anything to work at all"). Users can share video clips here without having to fear concerns they may be removed over copyright claims, as with the current dominant video-sharing service, YouTube. Snip from an item on Torrentfreak:

However, as with most of their projects it can take a while before the public can catch a glimpse of what they are working on. The Video Bay - as the project is named - opened up to the public with a very early test version a few weeks ago. Initially, users were able to browse though the videos but this has been disabled now. What is left is an announcement that the site will be launched somewhere in the future.(...)

Pirate Bay Spokesman Peter Sunde agreed that it might take a while before the site goes live and told us that "it will be done when it's done, in the future, in like a year or five."

The Video Bay.

The part that starts right about 5 minutes in is utterly terrifying and sad. Watch the whole thing from the top, though. "God Hates the World," brought to you by Westboro Baptist Church who previously became internet-famous for "God Hates Fags" and "God Hates America." Incidentally, the song and lyrics of which this is a remake were co-created by none other than the recently departed Michael Jackson. (Uh, thanks Richard Metzger).

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

Riffing off David's recent post about stoned wallabies making crop circles, here is yet another set of "crop circles," made this time not by marsupials but by the gravesites of prehistoric man. From National Geographic

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

Discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage, the U.K. government's historic-preservation agency, the "crop circles" are the results of buried archaeological structures interfering with plant growth.

Link to the National Geographic article

Bill Massiola, who adapted my novel Little Brother for a critically acclaimed stage-play running in Chicago right now at the Griffin Theatre Company performing at the Athenaeum Theatre, sent me these three video clips from the production. I'm coming through Chicago on July 9 to see the play (it runs until July 19); based on these clips I'm incredibly excited to see more!

Little Brother stage play