Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Recently at BBG

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 07:48 PM PDT

SRG45.jpg BBG dedicated a series of posts to explore various aspects, gear, and ideas specific "climbing." Here's what went down:

• We examined three types of artificial rock climbing walls.

• Want to climb a tree, like, for real? Here's the pro gear you need.

• Want to climb a mountain instead? Go for this gear.

• HOWTO: overcome common climbing phobias.

• We tested an ultra-light pack stove from Primus.

• We revisited the DIY ice mountain constructed in Alaska.

• What's the best food to take on a climbing/camping expedition? We tried to find out.

• We reviewed three pairs of climbing shoes. Which ones ruled? Also at BBG:

• We put out mitts all over the HP's latest MediaSmart media server.

• We reviewed the GP2X Wiz, a handheld gaming console we learned is AWESOME.

• Could Apple's long-awaited touch tablet be due in September?

• Advisor: Why GPS is Bad for Lisa's Brain.

• Is AT&T astroturfing on Twitter?

Giant linocut type-map of Paris

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 03:29 AM PDT


Marilyn sez, ""Around eight months ago, Mark Webber began work on his latest project, which he is very nearly ready to print. It's a typographic map of Paris. It's in French (naturally) and, being a linocut, Webber has had to carve out every single street and area name he's included, in reverse. Oh and it's 1.8 metres across..."

Man seeks massive printer (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Canadian copyright collecting agency subverting open debate on copyright

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 03:18 AM PDT

Access Copyright, the Canadian author's collecting society (a group that collects money from libraries for book lending and gives it to authors) is using its members' money to sabotage an enormously popular consultation on the future of Canadian copyright.

Previous to this consultation, the Canadian government twice tried to ram through restrictive, US-style copyright rules, refusing to meet with Canadian creators, net-users, libraries, educators, publishers or musicians. Now, after hundreds of thousands of Canadians came forward demanding public consultations and a balanced, made-in-Canada answer to copyright in the information age, Access Copyright has responded with an hysterical, dishonest call to its members to condemn the consultation and any notion of protecting privacy, access, fair dealing and other public rights in copyright.

The broadside includes this remarkable condemnation of "users" of information -- that is, readers, writers, teachers, scholars, fans, government, students -- "It's a simple fact that users outnumber us. But Canadian users involved in the online debate are so adept at leveraging the Internet and social networks to their advantage, there's a danger that your voices as Canadian creators and publishers will be drowned out by the chatter. Your interests need to be expressed as forcefully as possible, and it's up to you to get involved to make that happen."

These are the same people who launched the ill-starred "Captain Copyright" campaign, using writers' money to produce embarrassing, half-witted comic books that were meant to indoctrinate children, inculcating them with fear of using authors' works in their own creations.

After the Captain Copyright fiasco, it seemed that Access Copyright would settle down and look at a balanced approach. But recent times have seen an upswing in loony, toxic copyright maximalism from the organization, including a recent bid to collect money for out-of-copyright public domain materials.

As Michael Geist says, "So AC claims that the public is trying to deprive them of their livelihood, while they actually try to get the public to support their livelihood by charging for things that doesn't even belong in their repertoire. Hard to believe that users are now characterized as powerful and adept at controlling the debate. All the more reason to encourage people to use Speakoutoncopyright.ca and make their voice heard."

As a Canadian author, Access Copyright is supposed to represent my interests in the Canadian copyright debate. Instead, they are setting out to undermine the first glimmer of sanity in Canadian copyright policy in three governments -- and using my money to do it. For shame.

Copyright Debate Takes Aim at Your Livelihood

Previously:


Bug-eyed steampunk monster mask

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 02:57 AM PDT

US border station scraps sign that says "United States" because terrorists might attack it

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 02:54 AM PDT

A handsome, welcoming new border crossing has had its 21-foot-high yellow "United States" letters scrapped because crazy border people are afraid that the words "United States" will serve as an irresistible temptation for terrorists.
Four years ago, when the federal General Services Administration unveiled its plans for a new border-crossing station here in northeastern New York State, the design was presented as part of the agency's campaign to raise the dismal standards of government architecture. Even many in the famously fractious architectural community celebrated the complex -- particularly its main building, emblazoned with glossy yellow, 21-foot-high letters spelling "United States" -- as a rare project the government could point to with pride...

Yet three weeks ago, less than a month after the station opened, workers began prying the big yellow letters off the building's facade on orders from Customs and Border Protection. The plan is to dismantle the rest of the sign this week...

"There were security concerns," said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. "The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid."

At a Border Crossing, Security Trumps Openness (via Schneier)

Associated Press claims to have discovered magic anti-news-copying beans

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 02:52 AM PDT

A lot of copyfighters were mystified by the Associated Press's recent announcement (complete with a bonkers diagram straight off a bottle of Dr. Bronner's) that they had spent millions of dollars on a DRM system for news that would limit how you could paste the text you copied from your browser window.

This is a seeming impossibility, and while there will always be DRM vendors with impossible magic beans to sell to any panicked goofball media dinosaur who'll buy them, it just seemed too weird to think that no one at the AP had said, "Wait, what? This is dumb."

Now Ed Felten has delved into the details that can be gleaned about these magic beans and concludes that AP has made up a bunch of fictional things that their reasonably neat content-management system and microformat can do.


As far as I can tell, the underlying technology is based on hNews, a microformat for news, shown in the AP diagram, that was announced by AP and the Media Standards Trust two weeks before the recent AP announcement.

Unfortunately for AP, the hNews spec bears little resemblance to AP's claims about it. hNews is a handy way of annotating news stories with information about the author, dateline, and so on. But it doesn't "encapsulate" anything in a "wrapper", nor does it do much of anything to facilitate metering, monitoring, or paywalls.

AP also says that hNews " includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online". This may sound like a restrictive DRM scheme, aimed at clawing back the rights copyright grants to users. But read the fine print. hNews does include a "rights" field that can be attached to an article, but the rights field uses ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, whose definition states unequivocally that it does not limit users' rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.

AP's DRM Announcement: Much Ado About Nothing
Previously:


Active kids sleep better

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 02:46 AM PDT

A paper in Archives of Disease in Children documents a New Zealand experiment in which children's sleep habits were tracked against their activity, as measured by an actigraph. The conclusion won't surprise many parents: kids who run around all day sleep more at night (and kids who sleep more at night are more apt to run around all day).
The study included 519 healthy 7-year-olds from New Zealand, who each wore a device called an actigraph for 24 hours. An actigraph records movement, providing an objective measure of a child's activity level and sleep time. Parents also noted when their child went to bed, which allowed researchers to calculate how long after bedtime children actually fell asleep.

The researchers found a wide variation in how quickly children fell asleep, with some taking as little as 13 minutes and others needing more than 40 minutes after going to bed. Within this range, there was a close relationship between the onset of sleep and daytime activity. On average, children took an extra three minutes to fall asleep for every hour they weren't moving about. Also, the children who fell asleep faster slept longer overall. On average, children got one extra hour of slumber for every 11-minute drop in how long they took to get to sleep.

Active days mean better bedtimes (via Consumerist)

Paul Carter's "The Enormous Absurdity of Nature": superb essay on space, the moon, religion, myth and science

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 02:39 AM PDT

Earlier in July, I attended the Kansas University Campbell Conference, the annual event at which the Campbell and Sturgeon Awards are given out (Little Brother was one of the Campbell winners this year). One of the honorees at the awards ceremony was Paul Carter, the historian and science fiction scholar. Paul was absolutely charming all weekend, a clever, twinkle-eyed presence in the room at all the various discussions, and then, at the very end of the event, he took the podium and delivered the closing lecture.

Called "The Enormous Absurdity of Nature," Carter's essay was one of the most beautiful, lyrical and thought-provoking pieces of writing I had encoutered; it examined the mythic, religious and scientific history of humanity's relationship to the Earth, to space, and to the moon. It epitomized everything great about scholarly writing -- the ability to show the unexpected connections between seemingly disparate subjects and to illuminate them in so doing.

Paul's son Bruce was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the manuscript for "The Enormous Absurdity of Nature" and to pass on Paul's consent to publish it here. I only regret that there isn't video of Paul's delivery, which was magnificent, practically a sermon (turns out Paul's father was a Methodist minister).

So here it is; posting it here is one of my most exciting Boing Boing moments for the year. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

During the week in the hot summer of 1994 when we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first human visit to Earth's moon, broken chunks of Comet Shoemaker-Levy, carefully labeled from A to W by watchers on Earth, crashed into the back side of Jupiter. When the big planet rotated sufficiently to show Earth observers the extent of the damage, Jupiter quite to their surprise displayed visible blemishes, some of them more than Earth-sized, on its colorful cloud-banded face. They shared space with the long-extant Great Red Spot, which Jupiter watchers had had under continuous observation for two centuries and more.

Jupiter's diameter is ten times Earth's. A comet hurtling into that roiling gas ball, unless perchance it were to stir up organic processes out of that primal soup, must be less than a pinprick. But a similar solid body smiting the Earth would be quite another case. Conceivably it could send the current lord of creation, homo sapiens, to join his august predecessor the dinosaur.

Dinosaurs, from the innocuous children's purple friend Barney to the frightful raptors portrayed in Jurassic Park and its sequels, have in the modern imagination to a great extent displaced the dragon. What fascinates us about them is precisely that they came, lived, flourished and died without any human referent whatsoever. To one 19th century Victorian clerical gentleman, that utter absence of human context posed a troublesome question for traditional faith: "Who can think that a being of unbounded power, wisdom, and goodness should create a world

The Enormous Absurdity of Nature (PDF, scan of original typescript)

The Enormous Absurdity of Nature (HTML, OCR'ed from original typed manuscript)

(Thanks, Paul and Bruce!)

Free: a great book, but it's missing the truly free

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 02:29 AM PDT

Here's my Guardian review of Chris Anderson's excellent new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. As with The Long Tail, Free gave me lots to think about: it does a tremendous job of enumerating the economic and business opportunities derived from the net's capacity to deliver so much for free. However, I think that, as with The Long Tail, Free stops short of considering one of the most important aspects of the net: the extent to which purely non-economic, non-commercial activity is filling in niches that were formerly reserved for commercial undertakings, or were altogether invisible.
There's plenty in our world that lives outside of the marketplace: it's a rare family that uses spot-auctions to determine the dinner menu or where to go for holidays. Who gets which chair and desk at your office is more likely to be determined on the lines of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" than on the basis of the infallible wisdom of the marketplace. The internally socialistic, externally capitalistic character of most of our institutions tells us that there's something to the idea that markets may not be the solution to all our problems.

And here's where Free starts to trip up. Though Anderson celebrates the best of non-commercial and anti-commercial net-culture, from amateur creativity to Freecycle, he also goes through a series of tortured (and ultimately less than convincing) exercises to put a dollar value on this activity, to explain the monetary worth of Wikipedia, for example.

And there is certainly some portion of this "free" activity that was created in a bid to join the non-free economy: would-be Hollywood auteurs who hope to be discovered on YouTube, for example. There's also plenty of blended free and non-free activity

But for the sizeable fraction of this material - and it is sizeable - that was created with no expectation of joining the monetary economy, with no expectation of winning some future benefit for its author, that was created for joy, or love, or compulsion, or conversation, it is just wrong to say that the "price" of the material is "free".

Chris Anderson's Free adds much to The Long Tail, but falls short
Previously:


BB Video Notes: Mighty Boosh at Roxy (video stills)

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 02:12 AM PDT

The Mighty Boosh, Roxy, July 28 2009

Here's a hastily-uploaded set of video stills from the Boing Boing Video shoot of The Mighty Boosh (Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, Dave Brown, Michael Fielding, and Rich Fulcher) performing live at the Roxy on Sunset tonight. We'll be publishing a little mini-documentary about the Boosh's voyage to Hollywood next week, but I thought these quick snaps would be fun to share now. The show was a lot of fun, and all those trufans lined up for blocks, many in character costumes? Pretty amazing to witness. Related, from earlier today: Boing Boing Video shoot notes: The Mighty Boosh

The Mighty Boosh, Roxy, July 28 2009

The Mighty Boosh, Roxy, July 28 2009

Hidden Booze Treasure Ad Campaign

Posted: 29 Jul 2009 12:28 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. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

jdt_boozead1a.jpg I'm more used to being a critic of advertising, but I have to admit, I kind of like this old late 60s-early 70s ad campaign/stunt for Canadian Club whiskey. The idea is really simple: the company hid cases of the whiskey in remote locations throughout the world, and daring go-getter boozehounds with, I imagine, a good bit of disposable income, would go off in hunt of them. The ad I have here describes one at the bottom of Devil's Backbone Reef in the Bahamas. Here's an old article about it, too.

Incredibly, as improbable as it would seem that a company would be allowed to just leave around cases of alcohol in our modern, fussier time, it looks like the contest was revived, in 2004, but they were in U-Hauls, which makes it lots less fun.

Information about the event is a bit scant online, but I did find this one very, very informative comment:
In 1967, Hiram Walker and its advertising agency began hiding cases of Canadian Club Whiskey around the world. In all, 22 cases were hidden and 5 remain hidden to this day. The 5 remaining cases were hidden: 1) At the North Pole; 2) In Lake Placid, NY; 3) In The Yukon Territory of Canada; 4) On Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile; and 5) In Ujiji. Of the 5 remaining cases, those in Lake Placid, The Yukon, and Chile have clues which are at best vague. Those cases will most likely never be found. Of the 2 other cases, both the North Pole clues and the Ujiji clues were quite specific. The North Pole clues included Longitude and Latitude, Minutes and Seconds. Unfortunately, due to its location, it most likely sank into the snow long ago. The Ujiji case remains the strongest candidate as to its potential discovery. If anyone is interested in learning of the Ujiji hidden case of Canadian Club whiskey, contact me @ james.willhoft@gte.net


Wow! There's still 5 cases out there! I actually found a few other similar posts about the remaining 5 cases, signed by a "James W." Man, this guy really, really wants those weathered old cases of hooch. Maybe it's time to get up an expedition of discriminating drunks with lots of frequent flyer miles to burn, or willing to take up a collection and get poor, obsessed James a case of his own.



Cremation urns that look like the dear departed

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 05:40 PM PDT

200907281738

Cremation Solutions sells "personal urns" that look like the person whose ashes they hold.

Now we can create a custom urn in the image of your loved one or favorite Celebrity.

New advances in facial reconstruction and 3D printing have made it possible to have an urn made in the image of anyone from just a photograph.

Never forget a face. Personal Urns combine art and technology to create a family heirloom that will be cherished for generations.

Available in Two Sizes

• Full sized will hold all of the ashes of any adult

• Keepsake size is about 1/4 of the full sized and will hold about 25 cubic inches

Personal urns (Via Cynical-C)

Boing Boing Video shoot notes: The Mighty Boosh

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 05:21 PM PDT

Boing Boing Video shoot: The Mighty Boosh

A quick set of snaps from today's Boing Boing Video shoot in Hollywood with Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh.

We'll be bringing you the video interview soon, and it includes a spontaneous and very special Boing Boing crimp, courtesy of Messrs. Fielding and Barratt. But it was so much fun, I had to share the personal snaps now.

Our crew for this shoot: the lovely Tara McGinley (above, with me and los del Boosh), the inimitable Richard Metzger, Eric Mittleman, Señor Ehrich Blackhound, and Mr. David "Simpsons" Silverman.

Barratt and Fielding are visiting the US to promote the release of all three seasons of their hit BBC show on DVD (their show is also on Adult Swim now, in the asscrack timeslot of 1am on Sundays, which really ought to be corrected). They're playing an intimate gig tonight for some 500 fans at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. They are huge huge huge in the UK, and as a friend also said, I hope they find the audience they deserve here in the states. That seems inevitable, though, and well under way.

As I began this blog post, I started typing "I am their biggest fan in the world," but that's demonstrably not true. Let us say this: I am their biggest fan among the subset of fans who are not willing to dress up as Tony Harrison, don Bollo drag, or perform amateur crimping in public. Among the fans who will not attempt these things, yes, I am surely the most ardent.

Noel Fielding's reenactment of Joe Jackson's "Look Sharp" album cover.At left, from the shoot -- as Metzger put it: "Noel Fielding's reenactment of Joe Jackson's 'Look Sharp! ' album cover."

Boing Boing Video snaps: The Mighty Boosh (@ Flickr, mostly shot by Tara, special thanks to S. Weiner, A. Carlson, and @MightyBooshDVD.)

You really ought to buy the DVDs. Just trust me on this one:
* The Mighty Boosh: The Complete Season 1
* The Mighty Boosh: Season 2
* The Mighty Boosh: Season 3



The Black Widow

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 05:00 PM 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. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I've always been fond of VW Beetles, and any real Beetle lover should set aside a special place in their gas-fume-smelling heart for one particular Beetle, the Black Widow. The Black Widow started life as a 1955 oval-window Beetle, boasting a small stable of 36 horses for power. Then, the kooks over at Turbonique, makers of some truly bonkers small jet engines for daredevils and other fun-loving loons, put one of their engines in the Bug, along with the VW/jet engine transaxle they developed. The result was a Beetle that made about 850+hp and weighed about, oh, half of a modern Honda Civic.

jdt_blackwidow1.jpgjdt_blackwidow2.jpg The Black Widow was an absurdly fast car; and by the nature of the rocket-type engine used, it had no warm up at all-- one button push and you had full thrust, making it a real hit to drag-racing crowds. In one especially notable race, the Black Widow put Tommy Ivo's Showboat-- a similarly insane dragster with 4 Buick V8 engines-- over its rounded fenders and spanked it, but good; those are pictures of the race shown to the right here.

Like anything truly insane, the Black Widow's life was fast, wild, and short. Apparently, the stock 1955 Beetle's shape is only aerodynamically sound up to about 183 mph-- only about 110 or so mph more than the stock engine could ever push the car-- at which point it, full of false confidence, takes flight. Which the Black Widow did, but even then the fast little bug was put to good use, in this ad.

Upon rereading that ad, I realized that the Black Widow's driver, Roy Drew, must also have a great story. I mean, he's a drag racer with the nickname "Mr.Pitiful." It just doesn't get any better than that.

Savanna Snow's "Charming Cobras" paintings

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 12:37 PM PDT

Lakshmi Shine Khalsa Littlestudio 1
Phenomenal figure painter Korin Faught turned me on to the work of her pal Savanna Snow, a terrific Berkeley-based artist who has a solo show opening this Friday, July 31, in Los Angeles. The exhibition titled "Charming Cobras," is at the Reform School store/gallery. According to Snow, this lovely collection is "an exploration of Vedic text, pattern & the infinity of India. Savanna Snow's Charming Cobras (Thanks, Korin Faught!)

How a one-hour meeting can ruin a maker's day

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 11:14 AM PDT

Paul Graham has an interesting essay about the differences between a "maker's schedule" and a "manager's schedule" and how meetings affect makers' productivity.

Excerpts:

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

* * *

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

I've trained myself to make use of punctuated nuggets of time, but I do cherish appointment-free days.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (Thanks, Daniel!)

Ethics of robots that kill

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 11:08 AM PDT

h+ Magazine has a fascinating interview with Dr. Ronald Arkin, the director of Georgia Tech's Mobile Robot Lab who literally wrote the book on the ethics of robots that kill. The book, titled Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, lays out Arkin's research across law, philosophy, military ethics, and engineering to address dilemmas we'll face in the future as we build even more complex killing machines. From h+:
Images Book-Img Weblarge 9781420085945 h+: How does the process of introducing moral robots onto the battlefield get bootstrapped and field tested to avoid serious and potentially lethal "glitches" in the initial versions of the ethical governor? What safeguards should be in place to prevent accidental war?

RA: Verification and validation of software and systems is an integral part of any new battlefield system. It certainly must be adhered to for moral robots as well. What exactly the metrics are and how they can be measured for ethical interactions during the course of battle is no doubt challenging, but one I feel can be met if properly studied. It likely would involve the military's battle labs, field experiments, and force-on-force exercises to evaluate the effectiveness of the ethical constraints on these systems prior to their deployment, which is fairly standard practice. The goal is not to erode mission effectiveness, while reducing collateral damage.

A harder problem is managing the changes and tactics that an intelligent adaptive enemy would use in response to the development of these systems... to avoid spoofing and ruses that could take advantage of these ethical restraints in a range of situations. This can be minimized, I believe, by the use of bounded morality –- limiting their deployment to narrow, tightly prescribed situations, and not for the full spectrum of combat.
"Teaching Robots the Rules of War" (h+, thanks RU Sirius!)

Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (Amazon)

That's Incredible! Video Game Invitational (1983)

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 10:54 AM PDT



Along with Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, the early 1980s television show That's Incredible! had a big influence on me, with its coverage of an eclectic mix of curiosities, oddities, strange phenomena, stunts, and unusual people. Over at Dangerous Minds, Tara spotted this great moment from the "That's Incredible! Video Game Invitational." Tara says, "They're so serious!" Damn straight. "'That's Incredible' Broadcasts History's First Video Game World Championship (1983)"

Birther congresspeople run from Huffington Post video reporter

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 10:46 AM PDT


Funny video of congresspeople running away from a Huffington Post reporter because they don't want to answer the question, "Is Barack Obama is an American?" If they say yes, they will offend their birther wingnut base. If they say no, they will be seen as birther winguts. So, they run.

Only one, Trent Franks of Arizona, gives a correct and clear answer, but even he can't help himself from suggesting that Obama is facilitating Jihad and turning America into a socialist state.

Folks, this is what it has come to. The most powerful people in the world -- nationally elected legislators responsible for setting policy for the most powerful country on earth -- are lining up with cuckoo-bat-shit-crazy elements of the lunatic fringe.

And they have to. It's their base.

Elected Birthers on the Hill

Mystery crash in Ottawa River?

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 10:35 AM PDT

Last night, dozens of witnesses reported seeing lights and hearing an explosion as something crashed into the Ottawa River. Search-and-rescue crews from Ottawa and Gatineau showed up but so far, haven't found anything. Was it an airplane? According to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, no planes are missing. Maybe it was a meteorite? Or.. something else? (I'm kidding. Kinda.) From the Ottawa Citizen:
Dr. Dirk Keenan was sailing with some friends out of the Nepean Yacht Club when they saw the light of what looked like a small aircraft to the east, close to the Quebec shore.

"I noticed the light coming down. It was like a headlight, very bright," Keenan said Tuesday morning. "It descended very rapidly, levelled off, then disappeared."

Keenan, a student pilot himself, thought it looked like the pilot had lost control and gone into a dive, then briefly recovered before going down. Keenan steered his boat toward the position, but didn't dare get too close to the rapids in the dark. The lights appeared to vanish into the river or into the forest on the Quebec side.
"Search resumes for small plane feared crashed in river"

Eyeglass thief with spectacle fetish

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 10:22 AM PDT

Jerry Lowery, 38, of Illinois was charged with stealing more than 500 pairs of eyeglasses from suburban spectacle shops. Apparently he has a fetish. rom the Associated Press:
Prosecutors said Lowery walked into three shops between April and July and said he had a gun. They say he took more than 500 pairs of high-end glasses including Prada and Gucci brands, but didn't take cash.

The criminal complaint quotes Lowery as saying he "really likes to be around glasses." He told investigators he tries them on in front of a mirror and then discards them.
"Man with fetish charged with stealing eyeglasses"

Mick Jones of the Clash opens library

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 10:22 AM PDT

Mick Jones has opened a "library" of Clash ephemera and is encouraging visitors to scan the stickers, fliers, and other archival material in the library and copy them to memory sticks.
200907281016The Rock n Roll Public Library is Mick Jones's (The Clash, B.A.D, Carbon Silicon) direct artistic challenge to the likes of the corporate 02 British Music Experience. Rather than let his creative legacy atrophy Jones is transforming his own archive of nearly 10,000 artefacts into one unique "guerrilla-library." Set under the Westway motorway in 3000 sq.ft of former office space, Jones's five-week civic endeavour will also encourage visitors to enrol, interact with the archive-exhibition (Jones began collecting well before he formed The Clash in 1976 to eventual international success, as such it forms an invaluable guide to the influences that informed Jones as a pop-artist). Also uniquely by request users will be able to scan (courtesy Genus, U.K distributor of the Book2net Kiosk) certain objects and via memory stick carry them away. Please note visitors to the world's first, resolutely alternative, Rock n Roll Public Library shouldn't expect peace and quiet.

Mick Jones of the Clash opens library (Via Arbroath)

World War II poster "Use it up - Wear it out - Make it do!"

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 09:56 AM PDT

200907280949

Timeless advice from a World War II era poster.

Previously:


As expected, Ninja Assassin trailer looks awesome

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 08:17 AM PDT


Earlier this year, Boing Boing Video ran an interview I conducted with Academy Award-winning special effects designer John Gaeta (Matrix, Speed Racer) about the technology and the human talent behind the forthcoming movie Ninja Assassin, directed by James McTeigue. Gaeta served as visual consultant on the film. The trailer for Ninja Assassin is out now, and it's pretty great. (thanks, Wes Varghese!)

Previously:


Recently on Offworld: Time Donkeys, Sackboy Marvels, Dali games

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 08:28 AM PDT

lbpmarvel.jpgRecently on Offworld, it was a day of tributes: fans of cult hit RPG series Earthbound celebrated its 20th anniversary, home-crafters celebrated Hand Circus's iPhone platformer Rolando 2, and renowned papercrafter master Matt Hawkins celebrated the pursuits of Pac-Man for an upcoming gallery show. We also saw the first concept art of Minotaur China Shop creators Flashbang's next web-game, Time Donkey, in which players will cooperate with earlier iterations of themselves playing the game to reach their goal, and the first multiplayer video of Infinity Ward's upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, specifically the ability for players to take control of gunships to wreak distant havoc on the battlefield. Finally we saw Media Molecule and Marvel partner to bring comic book heroes to LittleBigPlanet (with cutely taped-on accessories, as above), a new game from Gish co-creator Edmund McMillen that cryptically promises to be "a 1+1=2 formula that will ask more from you after you leave it alone", and, best of all, new pixel art concepts of an imagined Salvador Dali Game Boy Advance game.

Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America

Posted: 16 Jul 2009 09:26 AM PDT

Kurt Anderson, the co-founder of Spy (one of my favorite magazines ever) and the host of the smart public radio program Studio 360, has written a pithy, inspired, and inspiring book called Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America.

In 96 pages, Anderson describes the United States' previous boom and bust cycles and explains why the bust cycles are essential for innovation and improvement of living standards for everyone. Times of crisis, he says, open new opportunities for making positive changes.

Excerpts:

200907160905 From the beginning of the 1980s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent paying off its mortgage and consumer debt increased by 35 percent. Back in 1982, the average American household saved 11 percent of its disposable income, but then the percentage steadily dropped, to less than 1 percent in 2007. 

Not coincidentally, it was during this same period that state-sanctioned and state-run gambling became ubiquitous in America. Until the late 1980s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now twelve states do, and forty-eight of the fifty have some form of legalized betting. It's as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun we ought to make them year-round ways of life. We started living large literally as well as figuratively. From the beginning to the end of the long boom, the size of the average new American house increased by half, even as the average family became smaller. During the two decades ending 2007, the average new American car got 29 percent heavier, 89 percent more powerful, and 2 percent less efficient. Meanwhile, the average American gained about a pound a year, so that an adult of a given age is now at least twenty pounds heavier than someone of the same age during the 1970s. Back in the late 1970s, 15 percent of Americans were obese; more than a third of us are now. 

...

It's as if the Roaring Twenties, instead of crashing to a halt in 1929, had lasted all the way until 1945, uninterrupted by a depression or world war. Despite the recession of 1990 . . . and the popped bubble in technology stocks in 2000 . . . and then another recession . . . and the terrorist attacks in 2001 . . . despite all of it, the 1980s spirit endured, like an awesome winning streak in Las Vegas or a multigenerational rave that went on and on and on. The Soviet Union collapsed: yes! American-style capitalism triumphed and spread: hooray! So what if every year since the turn of the twenty- first century the U.S. economy was growing much more slowly than the global economy? The (Chinese-made) stuff we were all buying at Walmart and Costco and H&M stayed supercheap-as did money itself, which our new best friends, the Chinese, obligingly supplied to us by the low-interest-rate trillion. The fresh technological miracles and wonders just kept on coming, reinforcing our sense that progress was on the march and magic was in the air. Even 9/11 and our resulting Iraqi debacle, after a while, came to seem like mere bumps in the road. 

Deep down we had an inkling at least that the spiral of over- leverage and overspending and the prices of stocks and houses bubbling ever higher were unsustainable, just as everyone figured that the unprecedented performances of baseball players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens couldn't be kosher, but . . . no one wanted to be a buzz kill. From 1982 until 2008, we partied like it was 1999. 

Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America

Previously:


When These Robots Enslave Us, It'll Be an Adorable Enslaving

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 08:55 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. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

jdt_hootbot.png As a kid, I remember that a suspicious number of my toy robots seemed to originate from Tomy, which I always pictured as a sophisticated Japanese concern, headquartered in a gleaming steel building on, probably, a hovering island off the coast of Hokkaido.

I thought this because, unlike most toy companies, Tomy seemed to secretly long to be a real robot company. Sure, they had the usual little wind-up and remote control robots (and the less usual, like the owl-bot pictured here), but they kept sneaking into their line more and more sophisticated ones. This site gives a great rundown of the whole 70s-90s era Tomy Robot Army, so you can know just who your cute new plastic master is.

Tibetan documentary filmmaker faces trial in eastern Tibet for "inciting separatism."

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 07:34 AM PDT


Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen, who directed and filmed the documentary "Leaving Fear Behind" (excerpt embedded above) has been charged with "inciting separatism" and is awaiting trial in Siling in eastern Tibet (Chinese: Xining, Qinghai Province). The Chinese government will not allow his lawyers to represent him, so there is not much hope for a fair trial.

Supporters are urging people to take action, by sending a letter to Wu Aiying, China's Minister of Justice and Zhang Yesui, China's Ambassador to the United Nations, demanding Dhondup Wangchen's immediate and unconditional release.

Dhondup Wangchen has been detained since March 2008 and has suffered torture and ill-treatement at the hands of the Chinese authorities. He is being targeted for simply exercising his right to freedom of expression, and the charges against him are part of the Chinese government's widespread campaign to punish and silence Tibetan voices of dissent.
(via Students for a Free Tibet)

Previously:


@BBVBOX: recent guest-tweeted web video picks (boingboingvideo.com)

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 07:21 PM PDT


(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.)

  • Xeni Jardin: Five-year-old singing Folsom "Pwison" Blues. Link "Aren't ya little young to be shooting men in Reno?" asks @maggiekb1.
  • Jesse Thorn: Classic Late Night: Conan helps writer Andy Blitz find a NYC apartment. Link
  • Jesse Thorn: Armand Iannucci aka @AIannucci, director of the spectacularly hilarious new film In the Loop, on Charlie Rose. Link
  • Susannah Breslin: Mirrors soothe phantom limb pain: Link
  • Richard Metzger: The Turkey Revolution Will Not Be Televised Link
  • Andrea James: Groovy 1979 news brief and program promos: Link
  • Sean Bonner: I have this Slap Chop remix song stuck in my head. Can't decide if that is a WIN or FAIL Link
  • Sean Bonner: Joy Division as covered by a Caribbean steal drum band: Link
  • Sean Bonner: This may or may not be SFW, it's definitely not safe for people with vision. Drunk tits. Link
  • Sean Bonner: Wu-Tang's Mystery of Chessboxing, in LEGO! Link
  • Sean Bonner: Dogs love jazz. Seriously. Here's proof: Link
  • Richard Metzger: Freaky Manimal dude (is this a sexual thing? I can't tell) Link
  • Richard Metzger: Famous People on Drugs: Dylan vs Lennon Link
  • Jesse Thorn: The great @robcorddry only does hard sci-fi. R-rated trailer for his new project: "Hot Tub Time Machine." Link
  • Susannah Breslin: Lissy Trullie, "Ready for the Floor," Richard Kern: Link
  • Andrea James: It just keeps getting better each year. Ultimate tractor square dancing: Link


More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Somali Pirate talks about how to negotiate ransom, when to kill captives.

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 06:40 AM PDT


WIRED contributing editor Scott Carney interviewed a Somali pirate for his story in Wired about pirate economics, and Wired.com is running an excerpt of that interview.

What was your job before you start this one or what forced you to become a pirate?

Every government in the world is off our coasts. What is left for us? Nine years ago everyone in this town was stable and earn[ed] enough income from fishing. Now there is nothing. We have no way to make a living. We had to defend ourselves. We became watchmen of our coasts and took up our duty to protect the country. Don't call us pirates. We are protectors.

How do you pirates decide on what ransom to ask for? What makes them negotiate downwards?

Once you have a ship, it's a win-win situation. We attack many ships everyday, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or then its like winning a lottery jackpot. We begin asking a high price and then go down until we agree on a price.

Exclusive Interview: Pirate on When to Negotiate, Kill Hostages (Danger Room)
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