The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Lawyer asks judge to force rival to wear nicer shoes
- Pages Books in Toronto to close
- French hackers unveil the HADOPI router: cracks nearby WiFi and makes your traffic traceable to your neighbors
- Transformer Chewy
- Dozens of US Military personnel spotted on Nazi networking site
- Uighur crisis in Xinjiang: an overview
- Mutton Busting: children riding terrified sheep.
- Behind the Scenes at le Bernardin: blacklight for crabshell
- Dushechka, or how I learned to love baseball and bluegrass
- Creative Commons comes to Google Image Search
- Bruce Sterling's closing talk at Reboot -- life in the next decade
- Amazon Kindle contract sucks
- Oh, beautiful for Palin's lies
- Digital Open youth innovation expo: submit early and maybe win a Flip
- Stella Im Hultberg's Memento Mori gallery show in LA
- Johnny Ryan's Exorcist print
- Computer learns sign language
- Citizen Engineer: open source hardware comic and kits
- Genome wager between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake
- An interview with Sarah May Scott
- Recently on Offworld: hyper-scale war, experimental gameplay, WoW Peggle
- Charlie Stross's autobiography
- Charles Babbage comic
- China Mieville talks about his new hard-boiled/fantastic novel
| Lawyer asks judge to force rival to wear nicer shoes Posted: 10 Jul 2009 04:45 AM PDT A lawyer in Florida filed a motion to force his rival to upgrade to newer shoes, on the grounds that his homely old hush puppies gave him an unfair advantage by projecting an air of unsophisticated honesty to the jury. Motion to Compel Defense Counsel To Wear Appropriate Shoes (Image: funeral for a pair of shoes 2, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from marco annunziata's Flickr stream) |
| Pages Books in Toronto to close Posted: 10 Jul 2009 04:40 AM PDT Toronto's Pages bookstore, one of my favorites in the world, is set to close after a rent-hike left it unable to remain in its 30 year Queen Street location. I worked at Bakka, the science fiction bookstore, when it was just a few doors down from Pages (which has a phenomenal periodicals and underground, design, art, and culture book sections, as well as some of the friendliest, most knowledgeable staff you could hope to meet), and I remember when we lost our lease after a rent hike. The store eventually landed back on Queen Street after being acquired by a new owner, but it was touch and go for years. Apparently Pages can't find anywhere else to go and will be shuttering. I'm gutted -- Pages was always one of the highlights of my trips back home to Toronto. The article goes on to mention that another great Toronto bookstore, This Ain't the Rosedale Library, rescued itself by moving to Kensington Market from Church Street. I've been to the new location and it's fantastic -- a great store for a great neighborhood. Visitors to Toronto, take note. (Image: Matthew Kim) |
| Posted: 10 Jul 2009 04:33 AM PDT French hackers claim to have sabotaged Internet forensics by creating a firmware for routers that cracks nearby WiFi networks and routes your traffic through them at random, creating false trails leading to your neighbors instead of you. They're calling it the HADOPI Router, in honor of Nicolas Sarkozy's crazy Internet law of the same name. HADOPI originally required ISPs to disconnect users after three unsubstantiated claims of copyright infringement (Princeton's Ed Felten compared this to giving publishers the power to take away all the printed matter in your household if you were accused of committing three acts of illegal photocopying or cut-and-paste). The law was initially defeated in the French parliament, then it passed on reintroduction, only to be struck down by France's high court on the grounds that it violated human rights. Undaunted, Sarkozy has reintroduced the bill, on a fast track, with a provision that creates a five-minute judicial review prior to account termination, fines and imprisonment for those accused of illegal file-sharing. The French HADOPI Router hackers created their technology to highlight the unreliability of network forensics under the best of circumstances, and to create a veneer of plausible deniability for any accused: "Your honor, I must have been the victim of a neighbor with a HADOPI router." A hacker known only as 'N' says he has developed some software known as 'Hadopi Router', a term first penned by bloggers who devised the concept. 'N', who is said to have previously worked manufacturing routers, says he and a few friends wrote 'Hadopi Router' in order to prove that the evidence gathered by the Hadopi agency is unreliable.Hackers Undermine Piracy Evidence With Hadopi Router Previously:
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| Posted: 10 Jul 2009 03:30 AM PDT Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry. An MTV International promotional spot created by Universal Everything starring a Mister Furry with whom I would like to cuddle. (Via Copyranter) |
| Dozens of US Military personnel spotted on Nazi networking site Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:58 PM PDT  The Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-group watchdog organization based in Alabama, will present documentation to Congress on Friday about the presence of active duty military personnel on the white supremacist social networking site newsaxon.org. On that website, SLPC spotted 40 users who claim to be serving in the military, an apparent violation of Pentagon regulations prohibiting racist extremism in the ranks. Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a magazine produced at the law center, [said] "The Pentagon really has shrugged this off and refused to look at this in any serious way."Watchdog group: Dozens of active-duty troops found on neo-Nazi site (Stripes.com, via Wired.com Danger Room) Screengrab: In his "about me" section, newsaxon.org user "SoldatAMG" describes himself as a "Sergeant in USMC stationed at Camp Lejeune (...) recently returned from my 3rd trip to Iraq. I fight every day to stem the tide of multicultturalism and to ensure that my children have a better world. SIEG HEIL!" |
| Uighur crisis in Xinjiang: an overview Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:48 PM PDT  (Image: "Karakorum Highway, Xinjiang" by flickr user pmorgan.) For folks struggling to understand the current explosion of ethnic unrest in what the government of China officially refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, this Far East Economic Review essay by Calla Weimer may be helpful reading. Snip: What makes Xinjiang so volatile is a simmering resentment by the native Uighur people against repression by the Han majority. Uighurs in many respects are denied the opportunity to live the life they desire. They are inhibited in the practice of their Islamic faith. They are limited in their access to economic opportunity. And, not unlike their Han Chinese counterparts, they are denied basic freedoms of expression and assembly.All Eyes on Xinjiang (FEER, via @rmack) |
| Mutton Busting: children riding terrified sheep. Posted: 09 Jul 2009 05:09 PM PDT Urlesque has posted a collection of videos that document a sport I wish did not exist: "Mutton Busting." And while 'mutton busting' sounds categorically filthy, it is, in fact, merely the act of a child riding a hyper sheep bareback.I'm of the mind that it's, ah, not a good thing for the child or the sheep. But here I am, suggesting in muted horror from the safety of my desk that you watch the videos. Mutton Busting, In Which Parents Let Their Young Children Get Tossed From Sheep |
| Behind the Scenes at le Bernardin: blacklight for crabshell Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:21 PM PDT  From a photo-essay "narrated" by chef Eric Ripert with delicious little details about what goes on behind the scenes at the world-famous, Michelin 3-star NYC restaurant Le Bernadin: When serving crab, it is very important to get out each tiny piece of shell that might have been left behind and that is a difficult job. To make the task easier, we inspect the crabmeat under a black light. The shells glow under this light and they are easy to pick out.Behind the Scenes at Le Bernardin (aveceric.com, via @blam) |
| Dushechka, or how I learned to love baseball and bluegrass Posted: 09 Jul 2009 02:07 PM PDT  Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future.As my son gets ready to move out of the house to go to college, I've been thinking about another Russian writer who captures universal human themes that resonate over a hundred years later: Anton Checkhov. His story "Dushechka" or, in English translation, "The Darling," has many layers of meaning. Indeed, the Russian word Dushechka originates from the Russian word "dusha" or soul, and thus the title alone has multiple meanings -- soul mate, someone who is all soul, or has a great soul. I'm not going to do Dushechka justice in this post so please forgive me, dear Russian literature fanatics. The heroine of "The Darling" is a young woman, Olenka, who becomes passionate about whatever her loved ones are involved in. First she marries a theater owner and all she talks about is theater. She speaks with contempt of the public, of its indifference to the arts, of its boorishness and insensitivity. She weeps at unfavorable revues and argues with editors. When her husband dies, she marries a timber merchant. Suddenly, lumber is the most fascinating subject on earth as far as Olenka is concerned. She manages her husband's business affairs and dreams of boards, planks, beams, and joists. When the second husband dies, Olenka takes up with a veterinary surgeon. Her acquaintances find out about this simply because she suddenly becomes overwhelmingly concerned with the sanitary conditions of animals: "The health of domestic animals ought to be as well attended to as the health of human beings." And so it goes. It is hard to be a parent and completely avoid turning into a Dushechka just a bit, particularly in this day and age of high parental involvement. Whether we like it or not, we become engaged in our kids' passions and pursuits, and often absorb them as our own. That brings me to baseball and bluegrass. For years after coming to the US, I had absolutely no interest in baseball. In fact, I didn't get it at all -- there just wasn't enough action on the field as far as I was concerned. Once, someone invited me to a party in the box at San Francisco's Candlestick Park where many people watched the game on a TV screen. My reaction? "This would be great if you could only switch to a different channel." I was convinced that you had to be born in America to understand and appreciate baseball. This all changed when Greg, my son, joined his first T--ball team. I grew to love baseball as he moved from T-ball to Little League. We are now proud San Francisco Giants season ticket holders. My husband told me he knew I was fully on board when he heard me say after a pitch, "That was a mean slider!" Similarly, I found myself falling in love with the most American of music genre -- bluegrass. This happened when the building housing the music room in my son's school had to close for repairs, and the kids could not use their favorite electric instruments to play rock music. Instead, John Fuller, music teacher and bluegrass musician, brought out acoustic instruments outside--mandolin, guitars, upright base--and Greg, a 5th grader at the time, suddenly discovered bluegrass. Within a few months, he and his buddies had a bluegrass band and were playing at festivals and farmers' markets. And I, who was raised on Bach and The Beatles, suddenly found myself camping out at various bluegrass festivals, hanging out with bluegrass musicians, and learning to love Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, among others. As Greg gets ready to leave for college, the cautionary image of "Dushechka" looms big on my mind. I am going to a lot of ballgames and listening to a lot of bluegrass musicians, probably more than ever before. Am I trying to ensure that my adopted passions continue as Greg moves out, and that I don't turn into a Dushechka? If that is the case, thank you Chekhov for a cautionary tale. The Portable Chekhov (Amazon) Previously: |
| Creative Commons comes to Google Image Search Posted: 09 Jul 2009 12:53 PM PDT Fred sez, "Image search on Google has just become a bit easier and a little less scary: Google officially launched the ability to filter search results using Creative Commons licenses inside their Image Search tool. Searches are also capable of returning content under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or images that are in the public domain." Advanced image search page (Thanks, Fred!) |
| Bruce Sterling's closing talk at Reboot -- life in the next decade Posted: 09 Jul 2009 12:50 PM PDT " Mike sez, "In his closing talk from last month's Reboot conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling guesses at what it will be like to live through the next ten years: 'It is neither progress nor conservatism because there's nothing left to conserve and no direction in which to progress. So what you get is transition. Transition to nowhere.'" Bruce Sterling - reboot 11 closing talk (Thanks, Mike!) |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2009 12:47 PM PDT Courtesy of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Celia sends us "an annotated copy of the Kindle contract. Based on my decidedly non-lawyerish interpretation of this contract and the annotations, I think it says that Amazon now owns everything it wants to own, and you're out of luck if you don't like that." Publishing contracts are generally kind of bogus to begin with, but this is a real pinnacle of bogosity. Neither party may assign any of its rights or obligations under this Agreement, whether by operation of law or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the other, except that (i) Amazon may assign any of its rights and obligations under this Agreement without consent and (ii) you may assign all of you [sic: your] rights and obligations under this Agreement to any corporation or other entity domiciled in the United States without consent in connection with the sale of all or substantially all of the assets of a Title; provided that you shall give Amazon written notice of any such assignment no later than ten (10) business days following such assignment. Subject to the foregoing limitation, this Agreement will be binding upon, inure to the benefit of and be enforceable by the parties and their respective successors and assigns.Amazon Kindle Contract Review and Annotation (Thanks, Celia!) Previously:
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| Oh, beautiful for Palin's lies Posted: 09 Jul 2009 12:43 PM PDT Andrew Sullivan has rounded up all the documented major, easily verified lies of Sarah Palin. It's an impressive list, a kind of "portrait of the candidate as a frootbat." Palin lied when she said the dismissal of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, had nothing to do with his refusal to fire state trooper Mike Wooten; in fact, the Branchflower Report concluded that she repeatedly abused her power when dealing with both men.The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin: A Round-Up (via Making Light) Previously:
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| Digital Open youth innovation expo: submit early and maybe win a Flip Posted: 09 Jul 2009 10:52 AM PDT  Are you a young maker or know one? There is still a month to submit projects to The Digital Open, an online expo for open technology projects created by people aged 17 and under from around the world. The Digital Open is a project of the Institute for the Future in partnership with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing. The deadline for submissions is August 15 but if you enter your project (even if it's not finalized) by July 24, you may win one of five Flip Ultra Camcorders. Grand prizes in the Digital Open include laptops running OpenSolaris and other fun gear. Entries will be judged by Eric Wilhelm of Instructables, Dale Dougherty of MAKE, Kati London of Area/Code, Graham Hill of Treehugger, Linda Rogers of Sun, Nick Bilton of the New York Times, Lawrence Lessig, our own Xeni Jardin, and many other interesting folks. The Digital Open Previously: |
| Stella Im Hultberg's Memento Mori gallery show in LA Posted: 09 Jul 2009 10:54 AM PDT  One of my favorite painters, Brooklyn artist Stella Im Hultberg, has a solo show of new work opening Friday, July 10, at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles. Along with work on paper, canvas, and wood panel, she's also showing a series of small painted wood figures. Seen here, "Penumbra" (oil on canvas, 12" x 14"). The works in the exhibition, titled Memento Mori, are also viewable online. Memento Mori Previously: |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2009 10:16 AM PDT  Love-him-or-hate-him comix artist Johnny Ryan just issued four new hand-screened prints in editions of 100. My favorite is Johnny's take on The Exorcist. The print is 11.5" x 16", six color, and just $30.Johnny Ryan prints |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2009 10:07 AM PDT Researchers made progress enabling a computer to teach itself British Sign Language by analyzing video footage. The scientists from the University of Oxford and University of Leeds first programmed a machine vision algorithm so the computer could identify the shapes of hands in the video. From New Scientist: Once the team were confident the computer could identify different signs in this way, they exposed it to around 10 hours of TV footage that was both signed and subtitled. They tasked the software with learning the signs for a mixture of 210 nouns and adjectives that appeared multiple times during the footage."Computer learns sign language by watching TV" Previously: |
| Citizen Engineer: open source hardware comic and kits Posted: 09 Jul 2009 09:55 AM PDT  Our pals at Adafruit Industries have launched a new series of kits that include a full color comic book/zine. The first volume of Citizen Engineer is all about SIM card hacking and has the parts to build your own SIM card reader/writer. Citizen Engineer (via MAKE:) |
| Genome wager between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake Posted: 03 Jul 2009 11:47 AM PDT I received the following press release on June 3 (forwarded to me by Douglas Rushkoff). I honored the embargo date of July 9. In the spirit of famous scientific wagers by notable scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, two leading biologists, Professor Lewis Wolpert and Dr Rupert Sheldrake, have set up a wager on the predictive value of the genome. Prof Wolpert and Dr Sheldrake agree that at present, given the genome of an egg, no one can predict the way an embryo will develop. The wager arose from a debate on the nature of life between Wolpert and Sheldrake at the 2009 Cambridge University Science Festival. |
| An interview with Sarah May Scott Posted: 09 Jul 2009 08:10 AM PDT Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.  (Self-portrait by Sarah May Scott) At Mayday Productions, blogger Sarah Scott writes about life with a spinal cord injury. Her writing is searingly honest, brutally revealing, and wickedly self-aware. The after is where it really gets grand, gets epic, gets to where one memoir could never be enough. Truly epic shit doesn't start to go down until the very moment you decide to start living again, to start crawling your way back into the light and out of the darkness. I know enough to know now I'll never fully leave the darkness completely, but the reprieves at this point seem to be enough to keep me going for now. sometimes. But no one wants to hear about the after, because it doesn't arc as much as it shakes and shudders in fits and spurts until eventually you recognize an ersatz normalcy has filled the void you left somewhere in all the fallout. I interviewed her for Boing Boing about life in a wheelchair, if she considers herself a cyborg, and her plans on becoming a female Hardiman. SB: Tell me your story. SS: The story that everyone wants to know from the start is why I use a wheelchair. I was 29, one minute racing my road bike, and the next "tits up in a ditch" and a paraplegic. That was nearly four years ago. Prior to that, I was your basic hot mess, but that's a longer story than there is room for here. I will say that PTSD has figured in for a longer time than I ever realized until I was injured. For once in my life, and this always sounds crazy, but after everything I've been through I actually like who I am for the first time in my life, chair and all. I am a small-town girl from State College, PA, though I spent some time in NYC and Philadelphia before returning after my accident. These days I live in a very rural area with my crazy mutts. SB: Are you a cyborg? SS: I am not a cyborg, but I am getting closer and closer to being a terminator. My back is already full of titanium, and I've got a radio-controlled device in my abdomen that feeds medication into my spinal canal. If the trials go well, I hope to get my chance at being the female Hardiman with the ReWalk system. You can start calling me Ripley when that happens. In a sense, being in a chair is like being a cyborg/object to a lot of people, somehow not quite human. I think all women know what it is to feel like an object to a certain degree, but I found it to be much different when you're viewed as a asexual woman and a person of very vague use if any. It made me very early on understand that to survive I was going to have to change how my self-worth was measured. SB: Why do you blog? SS: I started blogging for a few reasons. I was desperately lonely and going through all these sort of insane experiences that no one could understand, and I was desperate to be able to explain them in such a way that people would be able to understand without reverting to all the chair stereotypes that I was just a bitter, mean, crazy person now. There were a lot of people in my life that didn't make the transition to be able to see me first and the chair second, and it was heartbreaking. I thought online I could control things in such a way that people would see me again. In the beginning, it was very much about control. As things have evolved, I started to ease up on that obsessive level of control and start showing the darkness too. It turned out to be hugely therapeutic for me, and I hope that it humanized me for a lot of people as well. More than anything, I want people to see me as a person and not as an object of pity or otherwise. My story is really about grief and catastrophic change, and I think most people at one time or another in their lives can relate to that.  Something that wasn't diagnosed early on was that I had a Traumatic Brain Injury during the accident, and my brain works a lot differently now. I can't remember shit, repeat myself constantly, fuck up words, and these creative floodgates opened up and haven't closed since. I see the world so differently, which I think is a big reason why I became so insanely drawn to photography and writing. I write and take pictures because I have to, it gives meaning to my life even if I forget from time to time that I have any. SB: What do people not understand? SS: Most people forget that I'm a very ordinary person living under extraordinary circumstances, and that I'm also incredibly shy to the point of near social phobia in some cases. The things that make healing the most difficult is all the shit I carried with me before the accident, things that become unavoidable after being catastrophically injured. I don't think I'll ever stop grieving, but I do know that everyday it gets a little less painful. SB: If we could open you up and look inside, what would we find? SS: Under all the armor, I'm someone who's been trying to survive one way or another my whole life, but never had a map or a guide to know how. My hope is that you'd find a lot of resilience and hopefully some beauty along with it. I like to think that I'm finally becoming on the outside the person who was hiding in there all along, but for many reasons wasn't able to be. I'm really, really hoping there's a photographer in there, but only time will tell. Sarah's blog, Tumblr, Flickr, Twitter, Etsy, and service dog training blog. |
| Recently on Offworld: hyper-scale war, experimental gameplay, WoW Peggle Posted: 09 Jul 2009 08:18 AM PDT  A game developer that's been tirelessly evolving what they hope to be the most all-encompassing soldier sim doesn't exactly sound like typical indie fare, argues columnist Jim Rossignol, but their indie-style ambition is there and is typified by their latest, Arma II. See as proof: the collection of videos Rossignol includes in his column, which may be some of the most spectacularly hyper-real Offworld has ever seen, with gratuitous 200 v. 200 plane low-flying dogfights, suicidal jet pilots, and tanks v. chicken battles. That indie spirit continues elsewhere as the creators of World of Goo and Henry Hatsworth return to their roots and re-launch the Experimental Gameplay Project with disco-dancing Robotron games (above) and surprisingly compelling generative evolutionary worm sims, with more new games to come every month. Elsewhere we saw, of course, the mind-blowing Portal in ASCII video, the upcoming European debut of chiptune showcase Blip Festival, watched German TV pair up a games design vet and a new champion of art gaming for a lengthy discussion, fan-made Chrono Trigger T-shirts, and upcoming shirts for indie favorite Cave Story. Finally we saw World of Warcraft-themed Peggle now downloadable as a free standalone game, and our usual 'one shots': Left 4 Dead via LittleBigPlanet, Hello Mario & Luigi, an awesome tribute to Monkey Island's Guybrush Threepwood, and Castle Crashers in Lego. |
| Charlie Stross's autobiography Posted: 09 Jul 2009 06:40 AM PDT Charlie Stross has just wrapped up a 12-part, 25,000-word autobiography explaining how he came to find himself writing some of the weirdest, freshest, wildest post-cyberpunk fiction in the field. How I got here in the end: my non-tech autobiography (Thanks, Charlie!) Previously:
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| Posted: 09 Jul 2009 06:19 AM PDT  Mark from the BBC sez, "Hello, we've got a fabulous short comic strip about Victorian genius and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was drawn by ace animator Sydney Padua. It's so good I thought it deserved a much bigger audience." Tech Lab: Sydney Padua (Thanks, Mark!) |
| China Mieville talks about his new hard-boiled/fantastic novel Posted: 09 Jul 2009 06:17 AM PDT  Rick Kleffel sez, "I've recently posted an interview with China Miéville about his new book, The City & The City -- certainly one of the most unusual books you could read this year. He talks about the challenges of working in two genres -- the fantastic and the hard-boiled mystery genre -- in one novel." A 2009 Interview with China Miéville (Thanks, Rick!) Previously: |
3. It is well known in the legal community that Michael Robb, Esquire, wears shoes with holes in the soles when he is in trial. 
I was stressed out for most of two years. I'm an alpha-type personality to begin with, but this wasn't funny. I was writing fiction (and articles for Computer Shopper) as a therapeutic distraction. Around the middle of 1998, I figured that the novel I'd written in 1995-96 Singularity Sky was about ready, and mailed it off in the direction of Tor in New York, where it sat on a certain editorial director's desk for the next eighteen months. I wrote and sold a couple of short stories, and began work on a project which I was workshopping with some other local writers; a strange humorous horror novel/spy thriller about a hapless geek who's fallen into a government department for dealing with ... look, you probably know where this is going, right?. This was strictly a weekend activity, to distract me from the weekday stress cycle: compartmentalising my life helped me deal with Datacash. But it probably didn't help enough. | You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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