Monday, July 20, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Zydepunks' "Finisterre" -- a CD that's like Flogging Molly crossed with the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band performed in zydeco time

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 04:23 AM PDT

Last week's review of Top Shelf Jazz's new CD "Fast and Louche" sparked a suggestion in the comments from AnoniMouse to check out The Zydepunks, a band that bills itself as "New Orleans' Favorite Cajun Irish Jewish Punk band." The band were kind enough to send along the MP3s of their latest CD, the 2008 release "Finisterre" and it is some deeply kick-ass stuff.

Combining sweet, old-fashioned zydeco with Flogging-Molly-esque Celt-punk and upbeat klezmer is an improbable idea, but goddamn it works. Especially on uptempo tracks like "One More Chance," "Long Story Short" and "Papirossen In Gan Eden," (the last performed in Yiddish with some major Celtic and zydeco flavor) the Zydepunks make me want to get up on my chair and shout and wave my arms in the air. Thanks for the tip, AnoniMouse!

Finisterre (Amazon)

Zydepunks.com

Kathe Koja's BUDDHA BOY audiobook: bravery, bullying, complicity and opting-out

Posted: 19 Jul 2009 10:06 AM PDT


Last week, I reviewed the Full Cast Audio adaptation of Kathe Koja's wonderful YA novel "Kissing the Bee", and Full Cast were good enough to send me another of Kathe's books in audio form, the 2003 Buddha Boy. Buddha Boy is the story of Justin, a kid at a pricey, clique-riddled high-school who just goes along to get along -- until he meets Jinsen. Jinsen, a transfer student, is an otherworldly, shaven-headed, maddeningly calm and artistically gifted student whose bizarre behavior (trolling the lunch-room with a begging bowl) and strange appearance make him into a magnet for the school bullies.

As the story goes on, Justin has to come to grips with his complicity in the savage and cruel bullying that Jinsen is faced with, the complicity of the bystander who does nothing, even as his friend Jinsen shows him an entirely new way to deal with bullies: to simply refuse to join the narrative they're recruiting you for. This strategy is not without its consequences, but it is also so shocking and new that it forces Justin to reexamine his life from top to bottom, from his academic passions to his spirituality.

As with Kissing the Bee, the Full Cast Audio adaptation of Buddha Boy is skillfully acted and edited, bringing out nuances in the story with a cast of talented actors, including some very gifted young people in the principle roles. The story twists and turns, and never quite goes where you think it will -- and like all of Koja's YA novels, it contains an elegant and simple emotional truth at its core that will have you vowing to be a better person by the time it's done.

Buddha Boy (CD)

Buddha Boy (paperback)

Previously:


Evidence in support of UK DNA database is "most unclear and badly presented piece of research"

Posted: 18 Jul 2009 11:00 PM PDT

The British Home Office want to keep a huge DNA database of people who've been acquitted of crimes (or arrested and then released with charges dropped), saying that "innocent people who have been arrested are as likely to commit crimes in the future as guilty people." In support of this "controversial assertion" they cite a piece of research that Guardian science columnist Ben Goldacre calls "possibly the most unclear and badly presented piece of research I have ever seen."
On page 30 they explain their methods, haphazardly, scattered about in the text. They describe some people "sampled on 1st June 2004, 1st June 2005 and 1st June 2006". These dates are never mentioned again. I have no idea what their plan was there. They then leap to talking about Table 2. This contains data on people each from a "sample" in 1996, 1995, and 1994, followed up for 30 months, 42 months, and 54 months respectively. Are these anything to do with the people from 2004, 2005, and 2006? I have no idea.

In fact I have no idea what "sample" means, perhaps that was the date they were first arrested. I don't know why they were only followed up for 30, 42, and 54 months, instead of all the way to 2009. Crucially I also don't know what the numbers in the table mean, because they don't explain this properly. I think it is the number of people, from the original group, who have subsequently been arrested again.

Anyway. Then they start to discuss the results from this table. They say that these figures show that arrested non-convicted people are the same as convicted people. There are no statistics conducted on these figures, so there is absolutely no indication of how wide the error margins are, and whether these are chance findings. To give you a hint about the impact of noise on their data, more people are subsequently re-arrested over the 42 month period than over the 54 month period, which seems surprising, given that the people in the 54 month group had a much longer period of time over which to get arrested.

Is this a joke?

UK National Portrait Gallery threatens Wikipedia over scans of its public domain art

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 01:17 AM PDT

Britain's National Portrait Gallery is threatening to sue Wikipedia for including some of its high-rez scans of public domain portraits. In Britain, copyright law apparently gives a new copyright to someone who produces an image full of public domain material, effectively creating perpetual copyright for a museum that owns the original image, since they can decide who gets to copy it and then set terms on those copies that prevent them being treated as public domain.

The NPG, whose budget is almost entirely derived from public funds, supplements its income by licensing photos of its paintings to books and for the web. They are so protective of this small bit of income that they even prohibit photographs of their "no photography" signs (they argue that these signs are copyrighted).

They argue that they can service the public -- whose taxes sustain them -- by extracting additional rents from photos instead of seeing to it that they are widely distributed. This is an increasingly common argument by public institutions, for example, the BBC jealously guards its additional DVD income and shies away from any kind of public archive that might undermine it, saying that the five percent of its budget derived from commercial operations is so important that the material funded with the other 95 percent of its income -- which comes directly from the public -- should be locked up.

At the end of the day, you either buy this argument or you don't. I don't. If you take public money to buy art, you should make that art available to the public using the best, most efficient means possible. If you believe the public wants to subsidize the creation of commercial art-books, then get out of the art-gallery business, start a publisher and hit the government up for some free tax-money.

I don't really think that this has anything to do with income. I think it's the NPG's ingrained philosophical approach. A couple years ago, they had a show of pop-art portraits by the likes of Warhol, et al, and practically every single portrait represented some kind of copyright infringement. Seemingly without irony, the NPG prohibited photos of these infringing works "to protect their copyright." At the time, I asked whether they were celebrating the creativity of the pop arts, or eulogizing it. Today's Warhols have no friends at the NPG, who are only interested in celebrating fair dealing if it took place 30 years ago.

"It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopaedia serves any public interest whatsoever," he wrote.

He points out that two German photographic archives donated 350,000 copyrighted images for use on Wikipedia, and other institutions in the United States and the UK have seen benefits in making material available for use.

Another Wikipedia volunteer David Gerard has blogged about the row, claiming that the National Portrait Gallery makes only £10-15,000 a year from web licensing, less than it makes "selling food in the cafe".

Wikipedia painting row escalates (Thanks, Fee!)

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth full-cast audio drama

Posted: 19 Jul 2009 09:49 AM PDT

Sage Tyrtle and the QN Podcast team created a full-cast radio drama based on my apocalyptic, award-winning, Creative Commons licensed short story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. I had no idea they were working on it until they told me they'd completed it -- it blew me out of the water. What a fantastic piece of work -- and what a great surprise!

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

MP3 Link

Previously:


Learning makes your brain happy

Posted: 18 Jul 2009 07:45 AM PDT

Learning generates a brain reward:
This preference for knowledge about the future was intimately linked to the monkeys' desire for water. The same neurons in the middle of their brains signalled their expectations of both rewards - the watery prizes and knowledge about them.

All the neurons in question release the signalling chemical dopamine. While the monkeys were making their choices, Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka recorded the activity of 47 dopamine neurons in their midbrains. These neurons became very excited when the monkeys saw a symbol that predicted a large amount of water, while the symbol that cued a smaller drink inhibited the neurons. The same dopamine neurons were excited during trials where the monkey only saw the symbol that heralded forthcoming information, and they were inhibited if they monkey only saw the other non-informative symbol.

Why information is its own reward - same neurons signal thirst for water, knowledge (via Raph Koster)

Teenager with Asperger's hoaxes UK aviation industry with fake airline

Posted: 19 Jul 2009 09:43 AM PDT

Steve Silberman sez, "An 'enterprising and creative' 17-year-old with Asperger syndrome convinced British aviation officials that he was launching a new airline. Posing as a visionary global entrepreneur -- his email .sig files read 'American Global Group, 35 Countries, 22 Languages, One Team' -- he used phony websites and human engineering to arrange meetings with airport directors and book a local appearance for the 300-person US cast of 'High School Musical.' "
Tait, who said he was in his twenties, even flew to Jersey to attend a 1½-hour long meeting with the director of its airport. Their talks were considered promising enough for a further meeting to be arranged, which was due to be held next week.

Other air industry bosses found themselves dealing by telephone or e-mail with Tait's fellow executives, David Rich and Anita Dash, who proposed to launch a cut-price Channel Islands-based airline servicing most of Europe...

"Some of the things he said were the sort of things that were indicative that there might have been some substance to his claims," said Coupar. "If they were real then there would have been opportunities for us to expand our business and that's not the sort of thing we are going to ignore."

Tait also made approaches, with varying levels of success, to other airlines, including Titan Airways and Aer Arann.

When he made contact with Jersey airport, his patter was convincing enough to effect a 90-minute face-to-face meeting with Julian Green, the airport's director, who said last night: "Jersey airport can confirm it has had discussions with Adam Tait over recent weeks about an ambitious network of services between Jersey, the UK and Europe.

Teenager wings it with a fake airline (Thanks, Steve!)

Amazon's Orwellian deletion of Kindle books

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 05:04 AM PDT

While I was off for my birthday weekend, Amazon gave me a little present: a ready-made object lesson in the dangers of digital rights management for ebooks. Hundreds of readers who'd bought the "Works of George Orwell" found that the books had become un-books, vanishing from their Kindles. The books' owners got a credit for the $5 purchase price and a note saying Amazon had had a dispute with the books' publisher and decided to take it away.

Orwell's works are in the public domain in many parts of the world, but not in the USA, which has an incredibly long term of copyright. A publisher specializing in bringing public domain books into print put its whole catalog on Amazon, who then got a copyright notice from the people who control the Orwell literary estate. Amazon decided to resolve the dispute by taking the Orwellian step of un-selling the books from its customers' devices, sending them down the memory hole.

There are some who'll argue that this was just what copyright law requires, but as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes,

if Amazon didn't have the rights to sell the e-books in the first place, the infringement happened when the books were sold. Remote deletion doesn't change that, and it's not an infringement for the Kindle owner simply to read the book. Can you imagine a brick-and-mortar bookstore chasing you home, entering your house, and pulling a book from your shelf after you paid good money for it? (Nor, for that matter, does Amazon reserve any "remote deletion" right the Kindle "terms of service".)
Indeed, this problem is endemic to DRM, because rightsholders have often argued for the right to revoke content or features (the Kindle's text-to-speech feature has already been revoked from hundreds of books after a rightsholder dispute) from devices. The problem is that device owners (that's you and me) aren't a party to these disputes or negotiations. When a rightsholder decides to brick your DVD recorder because some clever teenager figured out how to crack its DRM, you don't get a seat at the table where the MPAA and some DRM consortium are arguing about how long your device should be shut down for. When a rightsholder sends a nastygram to Amazon, you don't get a say in whether to treat the claim as valid or bogus.

Amazon claims that they won't do this again. But as every good novelist knows, "A gun on the mantlepiece in act one must go off by act three." Once it's possible for the mothership to remotely zap all our devices, the possibility exists that a hacker will attack them, or a courtroom will order an injunction against them (at one point, a US magistrate ordered ReplayTV to send out a firmware update that would brick its devices as part of the preliminaries to a court case), or the feature will go haywire, or the management of Amazon will change.

The most secure device spec for a device is one in which it is not designed to enforce policy against its owner, period. Devices might still be subverted into attacking their owners, but this will always be more likely to take place if the designers created a "feature" that is supposed to do this.

Ironically, this came after a rollicking debate on ebook DRM on Pan Macmillan (UK)'s The Digitalist blog, wherein publishers, technologists, writers, and readers all chimed in for a long, in depth discussion of the subject.

Mad Kane's got commentary in limerick form:

Have you noticed your e-book list dwindle?
You're probably using a Kindle.
A book that you bought
Has turned into naught --
Replaced with a refund. No swindle?

Yet the seller invaded your house.
And did it by clicking a mouse.
Something's there. Then it's not.
(An Orwellian plot?)
You're surely entitled to grouse.

Delete this book (Thanks, Johne!)

Previously:


Publishers' shibboleths vs the future of publishing

Posted: 18 Jul 2009 07:33 AM PDT

Paul Di Filippo sent me this editorial by Richard Nash, founder of Soft Skull Press (publishers of the Get Your War on books): "Why Publishing Cannot Be Saved (As It Is)." It's a ass-kicking take on the hackneyed cliches of those who discuss the future of the publishing industry ("Twitter/DRM/Facebook/copyright law will save us!") and is worth reading for this incredibly smart thing alone: "books are orders of magnitude more demanding of our minds than any other media."
The question increasingly arises in today's media: can publishing be saved? No. It cannot and should not. There are plenty of non-profit publishers that exist to create and distribute the un-economic content. For-profit publishing should not be saved -- it should figure out new business models, ones that offer services that both readers and writers want and are happy to pay for. We cannot wait for a deus ex machina to descend. (In other words, neither MySpace, nor Twitter, nor price-fixing, nor some new piracy-inducing extension of copyright law will save publishing -- we simply need to start doing business better.)

What are those services? It's premature to state definitively, but we need to start with the conversation, so that we can listen to what the readers want. Clearly the reading group is the best thing that happened to publishing in the past 30 years -- while reading is solitary, talking about books is social. Given that books are orders of magnitude more demanding of our minds than any other media, they are commensurately better reflections of our minds and identities than other media. We publishers should be servicing readers' desire to communicate about themselves with peers, offering books as the basis for connecting.

We're also going to have to recognize that reading increasingly is writing -- readers are writing back in all sorts of ways, commenting on books, re-mixing books as in fan fiction, or creating from scratch, and publishers, rather than barring this activity, or hiding from it, need to embrace it and find ways to serve it.

Why Publishing Cannot Be Saved (As It Is)

Bioastronautics Data Book

Posted: 20 Jul 2009 01:13 AM PDT

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture, that he hopes you'll want to buy.He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

As I'm sure you're all aware, today is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I adore pretty much everything about manned space exploration, so to commemorate this hallowed date I'd like to share a fascinating piece of Apollo-era NASA history: the Bioastronautics Data Book. jdt_bdb_cover3.jpg The Bioastronautics Data Book is a reference for people who design manned spacecraft. It's essentially an amazingly detailed description of the peculiarities of the particular cargo they're designing for: people. You see, as contents of a spaceship, people are probably some of the messiest, drippiest, most fragile, and out-gassingest things you can possibly imagine. Luckily, you don't have to imagine, as the researchers of this book break down every single thing a person can possibly ooze, excrete, pass, spit, fart, hack up, you name it.

It's absolutely fascinating. Ever wonder what's in a fart? It's all here. How about the tolerances of people to g-forces, or temperature, or vacuum?

Many of the charts are quite funny in their scientific detachment. The chart that basically describes all the ways you can be broken and crushed by large falls or crashes is called "Impact Experience." There's a chart labeled "Radiation Damage to Male Gonads."

It's easy to picture some harried, nervous, dead-eyed young intern that they've been using for these tests. There's cold exposure charts with "pain zone" clearly delineated, a carbon dioxide effects chart with 4 zones: No effect, minor perceptive changes, distracting discomfort, and dizziness, stupor, unconsciousness. Even seemingly simple tests like saliva generation have the faint hint of a sadist at the helm: to get more saliva, they mention using "Paraffin-activated" collection. It would have killed them to give out gum?

This book is fascinating from both a perspective of appreciating how truly daunting the task of making workable spaceships really was, and as an owner and operator of a human body, it's like finally finding the factory shop manual. Special thanks also goes out to T.Mike, who is my man in the field for finding good crap.

Hi-rez lunar astronaut portrait scans

Posted: 18 Jul 2009 08:18 AM PDT


Avi sez, "The Air & Space Museum in DC now hosts a comprehensive exhibition of Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean's artistic record of the Moon voyages. The museum has released high resolutions scans of two of Bean's amazing portraits of Armstrong and Aldrin."

Armstrong portrait

Aldrin portrait (Thanks, Avi!)

Designer axes

Posted: 18 Jul 2009 08:16 AM PDT


Best Made Axes are designer axes made to last lifetimes, and to look good in "every high-rise condo, luxury office, executive suite, ranch house, and farmstead."

Best Made Axe (via Cribcandy)

Ink Calendar: paper that uses capillary action to fill in one day's number at a time

Posted: 18 Jul 2009 08:14 AM PDT


Oscar Diaz's Ink Calendar uses capillary action to suck ink across the numbers embossed on the page, one day at a time, gradually coloring itself in over the month. So cool.

Ink Calendar by Oscar Diaz (via Cribcandy)

Instant Color Scheme: which colors are most associated with your search terms?

Posted: 18 Jul 2009 08:08 AM PDT


Instant Color Schemes uses Yahoo Images generate your colors: "Enter a word or phrase and I'll grab 5 related images from Yahoo Images, and get the 6 most prominent colors from each."

Instant Color Schemes (via Beyond the Beyond)

UK cops spot Facebook notice of "all night" party, scramble armed goons in a chopper to break up small, local BBQ

Posted: 18 Jul 2009 08:05 AM PDT

British cops spotted a Facebook message from a small-town guy who announced an "all-night" party at his house -- a BBQ to celebrate his birthday -- and so they scrambled an armed, helicopter-borne Delta force in body armor to break up the event under Britain's Draconian anti-rave laws. The party had 15 people at it, eating hamburgers. They hadn't put on any music. The police claim that sending out the chopper and the goon squad saved money, compared to what it would have cost to break it up if it had turned into a full-blown, multi-thousand person rave.
The event was closed down under section 63 of the Criminal justice and Public Order Act 1994.

"We were nowhere near anyone, we weren't even playing any music," he said. "What effectively the police did was come in and stop 15 people eating burgers..."

A police spokeswoman said the helicopter was deployed for less than 20 minutes at a cost of about £200...

"On this occasion, we were extremely concerned how the event had been advertised on the internet as an all-night party and it was therefore necessary to take the appropriate steps.

"Had it gone ahead, it is likely that far more of our resources would have been used to police the event and there would have been considerable disruption to neighbouring properties.

Police helicopter sent to 'rave' (via /.)

Shirt.woot featuring Adam Koford (Ape Lad)

Posted: 19 Jul 2009 10:56 PM PDT

200907192253

Adam Koford (real name: Ape Lad) has a terrific new shirt for sale on shirt.woot for $10. Adam was the curator/editor of series of shirts for sale this week on shirt.woot. He was also kind enough to ask me to contribute a design, which I'll post when it becomes available later this week.

The Evil That Men Do Except Instead Of Men It's A Kite

Guestbloggers: Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky

Posted: 19 Jul 2009 10:51 PM PDT

Jasontorchinsky Carriemclaren

Please welcome our guestbloggers for the next two weeks, the writing team of McLaren and Torchinsky!

I'm Jason Torchinsky, and I'm delighted to be guestblogging for the next two weeks with my writing partner Carrie McLaren. Carrie and I are co-editors of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. The book is an irreverent collection of new and previously published work from Stay Free!, the sadly defunct magazine Carrie founded. We're very proud of how it turned out, and we hope all of you in the Boing Boing-reading world will like it, too.

Carrie and I will be blogging about some of the infuriating, funny, gut-wrenching, and mildly interesting aspects of consumer culture, advertising, and its effect on our lives and minds. I'll also be doing lots of blogging on space travel, technological dead ends, dogs, robots, and the usual palette of dorky interests that make the web such a hit with the kids. I'm pretty sure Carrie will also be doing lots of blogging about apes and monkeys, too. She loves primates.

To give a bit more background on us, Carrie lives in Brooklyn with a husband and baby, and runs the great Adult Education lecture series in Brooklyn. I live in Los Angeles with an unofficial wife and a bunch of animals, and I write for the Onion News Network, and once made a giant Atari joystick.



Limited edition Robert J. Wiersema short story collection from spunky small press

Posted: 19 Jul 2009 09:57 PM PDT

Brett sez,

his is a link where fans of national bestseller Robert J. Wiersema (author of BEFORE I WAKE, Random House, 2006) can pick up his new novella, THE WORLD MORE FULL OF WEEPING, releasing September 15 through small press start-up ChiZine Publications. (Quite a coup for a little Canadian press like us!)

The signed, limited edition hardcover will be available for pre-order only until the end of August, then that's it -- however many are ordered is the number that will be printed.

We think BB readers will be interested in this because Rob's debut novel, BEFORE I WAKE, was a bestseller, and was named to many periodicals' top 100 lists for 2006. They'll also be interested because this will be Rob's only release until his second (gigantic doorstop of a) novel through Random House in 2010. So for those jonesing for new Wiersema, this haunting little novella will have to tide them over until late next year.

THE WORLD MORE FULL OF WEEPING by Robert J. Wiersema (Limited Edition) (Thanks, Brett!)
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