The Latest from Boing Boing

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• A Tokyo photographer offers tips on taking pro shots with an iPhone 3GS
• Makers launch tonight in London, Forbidden Planet, 6-7
• Google Wave as an RPG environment
• Baby Star Trek Classic uniform onesies
• Celebrating obsolete library card-catalogs
• Weirdest Beatles cover ever by creepy Hungarian ventrilo-choir
• Bees That Drink Human Tears
• Goat rentals for clearing brush
• Gadget Reviews: Akai Miniak, Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ and more
• Creepy spidery candy-clutching pumpkinbot
• Couple survives car crash in their house
• Damning interview with Baby Einstein founder
• Documentary about crazy cat ladies
• Candy Corn traffic cones on DC streets for Halloween
• Civil War buff fires cannonball into neighbor's home
• Trailer for Collapse, a documentary about coming global meltdown
• Artist turns village into optical illusion
• Council bans parents from play areas
• Arnold Schwarzenegger's coded F-bomb in veto
• Sculptures made out of food packaging
• Urban archeology: Lost Underworld of Los Angeles
• Makers, my new novel: free downloads, donate to libraries and colleges, signings and tours
• Peter Sagal's Halloween Decorations
• William S. Pumpkin-Burroughs
• Tickling the Dragon: Nuclear accidents in the US and Russia
• Brit business secretary promises to punish accused file-sharers' families with Internet disconnection by 2011
• Thrashing, mad, metal: the art of Double Fine's Brütal Legend

A Tokyo photographer offers tips on taking pro shots with an iPhone 3GS Posted: 28 Oct 2009 09:37 AM PDT All images by Koichi Mitsui Koichi Mitsui is a professional photographer in Japan. When he's not on the job shooting for magazines and ads, he wanders around Tokyo taking pictures with his iPhone 3GS. "The iPhone has a single-focus lens with no zoom, and this simplicity keeps me devoted to only composition and the perfect photo opp," Mitsui says. Keep reading for a selection of his work with tips on how you can take amazing photos with your iPhone, too. I like to take photos of casual, unintentional scenes. That, or snapshots with an element of surprise. Always be on the lookout for change, whether that's lighting, or the movement of people, or just a slight difference in something ordinary. Walk a lot. The iPhone camera has a fixed focal length. Whether you enliven or kill this feature is up to your footwork. If you need a close up, get real close. If you need distance, you exaggerate that distance. You use your feet to find angles. It's also important to venture far away from your comfort zone to find good subjects to shoot. Don't just default to vertical shots; take some horizontal ones too. Change the composition little by little by finger-tapping to change the focal point. Take advantage of your favorite apps. New iPhone apps are being released all the time, but find the ones that fit your taste and learn to create pictures that look just the way you imagine. I snapped this photo of my friends picnicking at the Tama River right when the setting sun and the light from their lantern were in perfect balance, also using Photo fx and CameraKit. You can see more of his work on his web site, ">Sasurau.

Makers launch tonight in London, Forbidden Planet, 6-7 Posted: 23 Oct 2009 04:19 AM PDT Reminder! Tonight's the launch for my latest novel Makers at Forbidden Planet London from 6-7. Forbidden Planet's happy to take your pre-orders for inscribed copies if you can't make it, and they'll cheerfully ship 'em wherever you are. Forbidden Planet Megastore: Cory Doctorow signing Makers If you live in Canada or the US, click below for more info: I'll also be coming to Canada and the US next month for a quick book-tour, kicking off with a signing and reading at the Merril Collection in Toronto (Nov 12, 7pm, The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, 239 College Street, 3rd Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1R5, +1 416 393-7748), and Bakka Books, the bookseller, is also glad to take orders for inscribed copies beforehand. I'll sign them all for shipping on the day. After that, I'll be coming through NYC, NJ, Boston and Philadelphia -- details are still a little shaky, but if you drop me an email, I'll send you a mailout once I have them in hand. Here's a little more about Makers, courtesy of Publishers Weekly: "In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale. (starred review)" And, of course, I'll have a site up in a couple of days with free, CC-licensed downloads of the whole text.

Google Wave as an RPG environment Posted: 28 Oct 2009 11:09 PM PDT Ars Technica reports on the nascent Google Wave RPG scene, in which wavesters are amusing themselves by using Google's collaboration tool s a surprisingly effective (for some games) means of keeping track of the action in game: The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ("table talk"), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them. The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM. Unfortunately for those of us who are more into the tactical side of RPGs, it isn't yet well-suited to a game that involves either a lot of dice rolling or careful tracking of player and NPC positions. Right now, Wave bots are hard to get working reliably and widgets are scarce, which means that if you don't want to use the standard dice bot that Wave debuted with (dice bots are an old IRC favorite) then there isn't really another convenient option; rolls are either made with real dice and then posted on the honor system, or they're posted in batches and a GM then uses them in sequence. Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D (via Futurismic) Previously: RPG monsters designed by fifth graders - Boing Boing Weight Watchers is an RPG - Boing Boing Karl Schroeder: Show me your Virga RPG maps! - Boing Boing Polyhedral dice cake - Boing Boing Lexicon: CC-licensed RPG based on compiling fictional encyclopedia ... Boing Boing: Another RPG publisher who uses DRM-free PDFs Boing Boing: Farming RPG Catalog of RPG plots - Boing Boing

Baby Star Trek Classic uniform onesies Posted: 28 Oct 2009 11:04 PM PDT ThinkGeek's Star Trek onesies are a great change from the boring old Bob the Builder and Disney Princess junk you'll get heaped on you the second your kid emerges. I love that they have a redshirt version (for expendable babies!). USS Warehouse Captain in Training (via Wonderland)

Celebrating obsolete library card-catalogs Posted: 28 Oct 2009 11:02 PM PDT USC's "It's All in the Cards" feature is a Flash widget that celebrates a different card-catalog card every day. I remember the first time I was exposed to my school library's subject index and practically falling over at the thought that there was a way to find all the books in the school (which I assumed were all the books in the world) on any subject that mattered to me. I could look at these things all day. Maybe I should find a surplus mountain of these things and tile a room with them. It's All in the Cards (via Resource Shelf)

Weirdest Beatles cover ever by creepy Hungarian ventrilo-choir Posted: 28 Oct 2009 04:37 PM PDT Worst and weirdest Beatles cover ever. A choir of ventriloquistic monstrosity, from Hungary. Nabbed from Robert Popper's newfangled webble-site.

Bees That Drink Human Tears Posted: 28 Oct 2009 03:43 PM PDT This is, I kid you not, the actual title of a paper published in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society. I love it, because it sounds like it could just as easily be the fan-encyclopedia description of some minor creature from a Lovecraft story. The bees in question are workers from three species, Lisotrigona cacciae, L. furva and Pariotrigona klossi, and were studied--going about their tear-drinking business--in Thailand. From the paper... ...workers drank lachrymation (tears) from human eyes in more than 262 naturally-occurred cases at 10 sites in N and S Thailand during all months of the year. A few visits were also seen to eyes of zebu and dog, indicating a probable broad mammalian host range. On man the bees were relatively gentle visitors, mostly landing on the lower eyelashes from where they imbibed tears for 0.5-2.5 min, often singly but occasionally in congregations of 5-7 specimens per eye. The authors think the bees have adapted to drink tears as a way to get some protein in their diet and may, possibly, drink tears in lieu of feeding on pollen at all. That's pretty nifty, if a bit creep-tastic. Image shows a Thai bee, though I'm not sure if it's actually one of the species studied in this paper. From Flickr user travlinman43, via CC.

Goat rentals for clearing brush Posted: 28 Oct 2009 01:51 PM PDT GOOD reports on the Seattle-based Rent-a-Ruminant organization that hires out goats to people who want to clear brush on their property. [R]ather than spending tons of money and time on diesel-powered machines, filing the proper permits, and administering dangerous herbicides, the Seattle-based Rent-a-Ruminant organization will loan your a team of 100 goats for all your brush-clearing needs--all at a very modest rates. As Serious Eats explains, the benefits of goats are numerous: they eat just about anything, they can work on uneven ground, you don't need permits to use them, and they can clear a quarter-acre in about three days. Rental Goats Clear Brush Better, Beat Cosmonauts in Space Race

Gadget Reviews: Akai Miniak, Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ and more Posted: 28 Oct 2009 03:18 PM PDT You are lost in a maze of twisty house patches, all alike. Akai's Miniak virtual analog synth is a blast, especially its combo of old-school vocoder, 37-key semi-weighted velocity-sensitive keyboard, and a goose-necked microphone. Capable and hefty, it could fit into a sports bag despite a full complement of features: 8 voices with three oscillators, hundreds of preset patches, and a (laborious) built-in sequencer and arpeggiator. I'll admit right now I fiddled with the editor for 10 minutes, broke down in frustration at the one-line display, then went to sit in a corner, sobbing and hugging Reason 4. Three 1/4" inputs slurp up external audio sources, to which the Miniak's filters and effects can also be applied. It's made in partnership with Alesis, whose mic-less and cheaper Micron is similar stuff. Note that there's no USB, meaning you'll need to get busy with MIDI hardware (cheap, good) if you want to hook it up to a computer. At $500, it's also a bit pricey for those just wanting an occasional bang on the ivory. If you are a one-man digital band, however, the only conceivable improvement would be ... a keytar edition. More info [Akai] — Product Page [Amazon] Seagate's FreeAgent Theater+ is perfect for the media library you already own. Eschewing elaborate home theater features, baked-in storage or the need for a LAN, you just plug a hard drive or thumbdrive full of stuff into it and hit play. 1080p output over HDMI fixes the flaws of the last model, and an ethernet port's now included if you already have your media networked. Codecs supported include MPEG4 (Divx/xVid), WMV9 and raw DVD rips. It's $150, or $300 with a 500GB drive that slides into its dock. Product Page [Seagate] Casio's Exilim EX-FC100 puts fancy features from the high-end EX-F1 into a pocket-friendly format. Able to record 1000 fps at 224x64, 420 fps at 224x168 and 210 fps at 480x360, it slows time at low resoltuion and with much noise in dim light. The 720p video is fantastic, however, and short 30fps bursts at even higher resolutions make it easy to capture the moment. The best thing is pricing, now it's been out a few months: at $250, it's hard to find a better deal that covers so many bases. Cherry on top: 5x optical zoom. Casio High-Speed Exilim EX-FC100[Amazon link] Ableplanet's Clear Harmony LINX audio headphones claim top-shelf noise reduction at an affordable price: $100. They worked great with the dull ambient hum of home, but not so much so out in the streets. Audio quality is decent, but if you're going to spend this much, why not get something even better? Product Page [Ableplanet]

Creepy spidery candy-clutching pumpkinbot Posted: 28 Oct 2009 01:37 PM PDT Trossen Robotics forum member WGhost9 says they designed, built and programmed this creepy candy crawler in just 3 weeks. It runs C on an Axon microcontroller. It uses all digital servos and can lift over twice its body weight. The software (soon to be given out open source) allows for 6 synchronous degrees of motion. Future additions will include foot sensors and a remote control option. [ via DIY Drones ]

Couple survives car crash in their house Posted: 28 Oct 2009 01:40 PM PDT A college couple in Nevada miraculously survived with minor injuries when a drunk driver drove a car right through the wall of their house and onto their bed last week. They lay pinned to their mattress for about an hour until emergency workers showed up with chainsaws and released them. The accused, Eric Cross, had mistaken their house for one belonging to his ex-girlfriend and her new mate. An excerpt from CNN: Initially, Woods struggled to comprehend what had happened to him after being abruptly torn from his slumber. "I thought the roof caved in from an earthquake because it's an old house," Woods said. Then, his girlfriend began screaming and parts of the car came into focus, helping Woods to groggily piece the scene together, "I could see the tire to the right side and I was like, there's a car on top of me right now," he said. "That was really hard to get through my head." Couple alive after car pins them to bed for almost an hour Image: Sparks Fire Department

Damning interview with Baby Einstein founder Posted: 28 Oct 2009 01:29 PM PDT Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night. As a young entrepreneur years ago, I found this interview with Julie Aigner-Clark (founder of Baby Einstein, who sold her $20 million enterprise to Disney in 2001) to be pretty inspiring, but it's turned funny in light of last week's news about the big Baby Einstein refund -- what The New York Times says is "a tacit admission that [Baby Einstein products] did not increase infant intellect." No kidding. Here's a bit of that old Aigner-Clark interview: "I didn't have a video background, but my husband and I borrowed video equipment and started to shoot scenes on a tabletop in my basement. I put a puppet on my hand and plopped my cat down in front of the camera. My husband and I used our home computer to edit our first video... Everything I did in the first videos was based on my experience as a mom. I didn't do any research. I knew my baby. I knew what she liked to look at. I assumed that what my baby liked to look at, most other babies would, too." It's pretty clear that Baby Einstein was not rooted in cognitive research as they had boldly claimed and many parents believed. Worse yet, scientists at the University of Washington concluded that these videos actually hindered language development in infants. Lucky for me, I came across the interview before I my daughter was born so every time a friend offered us hand-me-down Baby Einstein products, I would immediately picture this woman wagging puppets in front of a Handycam in her basement and would politely decline.

Documentary about crazy cat ladies Posted: 28 Oct 2009 01:41 PM PDT Cat Ladies is a one-hour long documentary about women who are living examples of the "crazy cat lady" stereotype. It was directed by Christie Callan-Jones, and just showed at the San Francisco documentary film festival, which ends tomorrow.

Candy Corn traffic cones on DC streets for Halloween Posted: 28 Oct 2009 12:59 PM PDT Laughing Squid has photos of the "Candy Corn Cones" that street artist diabetik is plopping around in Washington, DC.

Civil War buff fires cannonball into neighbor's home Posted: 28 Oct 2009 01:02 PM PDT Boing Boing guestblogger Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night. Civil war enthusiast William Maser, 54, accidentally fired a cannonball into his neighbor's house and is now being charged with a felony count of discharging a firearm into an occupied structure. That's in addition to the charges of reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct that he was already facing for this incident. What I'm really curious about is Mr. Maser's first reaction to the effectiveness of his homemade cannon. Was it jubilation ("Holy sh*t, I did it!") or dismay ("Holy sh*t, now I've done it.")? Cannonball through House (via WinkNews). In other essential news: Ice skating bear kills Russian circus hand and Wheelchair user, 92, arrested for smuggling coke. Image courtesy of chadh via Flickr / CC 2.0

Trailer for Collapse, a documentary about coming global meltdown Posted: 28 Oct 2009 12:15 PM PDT Bradley Novicoff of Dangerous Minds writes about Collapse, a new documentary by Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) about impending global doom, which Variety called "an intellectual horror movie" that's "unnervingly persuasive much of the time, and merely riveting when it's not." From Apple's Trailer site: Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new President will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil, and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight.  American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and to hope for the best.  But is anyone prepared for the worst?  Michael Ruppert is a different kind of American.  He predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter "From the Wilderness" at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial. Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead.  He draws upon the same news reports and data available to any Internet user, but he applies a unique interpretation.  He is especially passionate over the issue of "peak oil," the concern raised by scientists since the 1970s that the world will eventually run out of fossil fuel.  While other experts debate this issue in measured tones, Ruppert doesn't hold back at sounding an alarm.  He portrays a future that resembles apocalyptic science fiction.  Listening to his rapid flow of opinions, the viewer is likely to question some of the rhetoric as paranoid or deluded; and to sway back and forth on what to make of the extremism.  Smith lets viewers form their own judgments. The Coming Collapse With Michael Ruppert

Artist turns village into optical illusion Posted: 28 Oct 2009 11:43 AM PDT Becky Stern of Make online says: The buildings in the town of Vercorin in the Swiss Alps contribute to an impressive piece by Felice Varini, called Cercle et suite d'éclats. The pattern was projected on the town from the vantage point, then traced and painted. Photographs from the same spot in daylight make the town look flat, almost like a postcard. Felice Varini's town-sized illusion

Council bans parents from play areas Posted: 28 Oct 2009 11:28 AM PDT Score one for Britain in its contest with the United States to create the stupidest fear-based society. The Watford Borough Council took the lead by banning parents from supervising their own kids in public playgrounds, "because they have not undergone criminal record checks." The only adults allowed to monitor the kids are idiocracy-vetted "play rangers." The children's parents must "watch from outside a perimeter fence." A council notice to parents explains that: "Safeguarding the children and young people who use the site is one of our top priorities. "Due to Ofsted regulations we have a responsibility to ensure that every authorised adult who enters our site is properly vetted and given a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check by Watford Borough Council." Council Mayor Dorothy Thornhill argued they are merely enforcing government policy at the play areas, in Vicarage Road and Leggatts Way. She said: "Sadly, in today's climate, you can't have adults walking around unchecked in a children's playground and the adventure playground is not a meeting place for adults. Right pillocks at Watford Borough Council ban parents from hanging out with kids at park (Thanks, Fee!)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's coded F-bomb in veto Posted: 28 Oct 2009 11:09 AM PDT Tim says: "Governator Arnold hides a colorful response in a carefully worded veto." Schwarzenegger's press secretary, Aaron McLear, insisted Tuesday it was simply a "weird coincidence." Can a statistician gives us the odds of this happening, please? Did Schwarzenegger drop 4-letter bomb in veto?

Sculptures made out of food packaging Posted: 28 Oct 2009 10:58 AM PDT According to the SPGRA Design Blog, a Japanese artist named Kazuma Takahashi made these amazing sculptures out of things like cigarette boxes, gum wrappers, and packaged food containers. Oddly, I wasn't able to find any information about the artist on the Japanese or English web, but many of the packaging used are from common Japanese supermarket snacks. SPRGA via NotCot

Urban archeology: Lost Underworld of Los Angeles Posted: 28 Oct 2009 10:00 AM PDT Gale Banks (legendary Southern California hotrodder and auto engineer) shares this photograph of the old Los Angeles Subway Terminal. This image of unknown date and origin is remarkable to me, as an LA resident, in part because our city is not thought of as a "subway city." Throughout the 20th century, the growth emphasis here was all about freeways and cars, and public transportation sucks. Gale's personal story about this "internet-found" photo follows... I actually broke into this terminal many floors below the Subway Terminal Building on Hill Street south of 4th, in 1962. The entry hall was boarded-up with plywood so it took a little covert effort. At the time this area was full of Civil Defense Jeeps and 6 by 6 trucks plus drums of water and crates of K-rations. Every thing was lit by a single overhead light bulb (probably signed by Thomas Edison) and the tires were flat on the vehicles. I walked all the way to the end of the tunnel (used as a set for the movie "MacArthur") near Belmont High, lots of vermin and dripping water...real nasty and quite a challenge for my 2 cell non Mag-lite. All the rails had been removed. When I was a kid I rode the street car out of this place to my uncles shop on Glendale Blvd. Check out the hi-tech control tower. I have no idea of the photo's origin, but it was probably shot in 1925-'26, as this is (I believe) when the whole thing was built. There are high rise building foundations now blocking the tunnel. The last train was in 1955.

Makers, my new novel: free downloads, donate to libraries and colleges, signings and tours Posted: 28 Oct 2009 09:34 AM PDT Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up. As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions. Here's how it works: this page has instructions for profs, librarians and similar worthies to list themselves as potential recipients for Makers (please pass this URL around to people who might want a copy!). If you've read the electronic text of Makers and want to reimburse me, but don't want a copy of the print book for yourself, you can buy a copy for the institution of your choice. Everybody wins: you get to settle your karma while supporting your favorite bookseller, a library or university gets a copy of the book without having to divert its budget, my publisher gets the sale and I get the royalty and the sales-figure. I've facilitated the donation of hundreds of books this way, and it works great. I'm launching Makers in the UK at Forbidden Planet in London tomorrow (Thursday) night at 6PM, and I'll be having the Toronto launch with Bakka Books at the Merril Collection on November 12. You can pre-order inscribed copies from either event, and they'll be shipped after I sign. (There's also a great indie bookseller near my office in London, Clerkenwell Tales, which will take your inscription mail-orders; I'll stop in a couple times a week to sign them for the duration). There's also a US east-coast tour with stops in NYC, New Jersey, Boston and Philly, but the details are still being finalized. If you think you can make it to any of those places and want to get an email once the details are fixed, drop me an email and I'll send you a note once I have them in hand. Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, this kick-ass Publishers Weekly starred review: In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale. Mighty is my w00t! Makers

Peter Sagal's Halloween Decorations Posted: 28 Oct 2009 10:11 AM PDT The host of NPR's awesome news quiz/comedy extravaganza, "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!", has put up his annual Halloween display. It is a nativity scene of evil. I heart it. Image via Peter Sagal's Twitter account. Which you should be following.

William S. Pumpkin-Burroughs Posted: 28 Oct 2009 08:52 AM PDT Boing Boing reader Greg Zilm sent in this photograph of a fine pumpkin homage to William S. Burroughs.

Tickling the Dragon: Nuclear accidents in the US and Russia Posted: 28 Oct 2009 10:47 AM PDT Recreation of Louis Slotin's deadly hands-on experiment. Public domain government image, taken from Wikipedia. They might know the name, but nobody ever says, "I want to be like Louis Slotin when I grow up." And with good reason. Despite being fiercely intelligent, quick thinking and brave, Slotin is famous for something that nobody really wants to be famous for---namely, dying horribly. In May 1946, Slotin, a researcher on the Manhattan Project, became the second person in history to be killed by a criticality accident, the unintentional triggering of a nuclear chain reaction. Slotin's story made it to Hollywood, fictionalized in the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy". Not everyone got such a public legacy. As the cold war neared an end in the 1980s, scientists in the USSR began to share information with their American counterparts, and, for the first time, we learned about the Soviet Slotins. Now, their legacy will shape the way emergency personnel respond to nuclear accidents and terrorism and, hopefully, make it easier to save lives... "Criticality accident" is just a fancy way of saying "nuclear reaction happening where and when you don't want it to". It starts with fissile material--atoms whose nuclei have a tendency to split apart. Get these materials in the way of free neutrons and a neutron can enter the nucleus of an atom and rupture it. That fission releases energy, and neutrons, which cause more nuclear fissions in nearby atoms. The chain reaction keeps going and going. It will stop on its own, but only when it's good and ready---which is, to say, when a release of energy forces the fissile material apart (think: explosion), when enough of the material has been used up so that what's left no longer throws off enough neutrons to keep the reaction going, or when heat energy produced by the reaction builds up enough that it makes the atoms--which are most unstable at room temperature--less likely to split. It's a little scary, but these accidents are extremely rare. The Los Alamos National Laboratory Review of Criticality Accidents lists only 60, worldwide, since we started playing with this stuff in the 1940s. Most didn't kill anyone. And 38 of the 60 can't even be called completely unexpected, as they occurred in research reactors and during experiments where scientists were bringing fissile materials together to gauge the point at which criticality happens. In fact, that's what Louis Slotin was doing, slowly lowering the top half of a neutron-reflecting shell over a sphere of fissile plutonium. Today, nobody would attempt that experiment except from a safe distance. Slotin, however, was using his bare hands to hold the shell, and had a screwdriver propped in there to keep the two halves from touching. A crowd of seven colleagues was watching him work when the screwdriver slipped out, sealing the shell and launching a reaction. I call Slotin brave and quick-thinking because, instead of freaking and running, he pulled the shell apart, probably saving his coworkers' lives. He, however, died nine days later. Slotin's story is pretty well-known. But, in Russia, similar accidents were happening that nobody knew about for decades. Like Slotin's, some these stemmed from both unfortunate chance, and decisions by the researchers that, with 20/20 hindsight, look a little silly. Why would depend on a precariously placed screwdriver to save you from certain death? Why would you try to run through a criticality experiment after normal work hours, without key safety measures in place, and with the goal of trying to be done in time to make it to the theater that evening...as two unfortunate Russian scientists did in 1968. Other Russian accidents, though, had little to do with the people hurt--except in that those people simply didn't have enough training for the jobs they had. In 1953, two workers at Mayak, a factory that processed fissile material for experimental and military use, were exposed to a criticality accident. But neither knew enough about nuclear fission to realize that. They knew something weird had gone down, but didn't think it was a big deal. Instead, they fixed the problem and went back to work. They finished their shift and, because Mayak had no automatic criticality alarms, nobody knew anything had gone wrong at all until two days later when one of the men collapsed at work. He survived, but only after a long illness that involved the amputation of both his legs. Neil Wald, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh's department of Environmental and Occupational Health, was one of the first Americans to learn about this, and other accidents at Mayak. He studies the impact of radiation on human health and was part of a team that began working with Soviet counterparts in the 1980s to research the accidents and use them to better understand how to help people who've been exposed. "They actually did quite a good job of keeping the medical records," he told me. "They made the accidents state secrets, so they never threw anything away. Everything we saw, all the documents, were stamped on the back with a great big seal that said, 'State secret.'" The goal of this collaboration is to develop a way of quickly diagnosing radiation exposure, so that emergency personnel can show up at the scene of an accident and be able to tell who needs the most medical attention the fastest. Dr. Wald says the system could be used both at nuclear facilities, and by regular EMTs responding to situations where a dirty bomb has exploded, or some other intentional nuclear exposure might have happened. Coming Friday: Criticality Accidents Part II--The Blue Flash and the Origin of Super Hero Origins!

Brit business secretary promises to punish accused file-sharers' families with Internet disconnection by 2011 Posted: 28 Oct 2009 07:21 AM PDT Lord Mandelson, Britain's business secretary, has promised to create a system of collective punishment without judicial review for people accused -- but not convicted -- of illegal file-sharing. Under Mandelson's proposal, anyone living in the same house as someone who has been accused of three acts of infringement will be denied access to the Internet (at the expense of their education, employment, and access to government, health information, distant relatives, etc) even though no judge has reviewed any evidence or wrongdoing, let alone entering a judgement. Hilariously, Mandelson expects that this will work to reduce file-sharing. Similar measures -- removing websites without judicial oversight, mass lawsuits, even industry-wide prohibitions on whole classes of legitimate technology -- have totally failed to reduce infringement in the 14 years since the first WIPO Copyright Treaty. Indeed, these increasingly Draconian measures have merely deepened the alienation that the public feels from copyright -- to the detriment of all rightsholders. But, for unspecified reasons, Mandelson believes that cutting whole families off from the information society on the strength of unsubstantiated accusations will cause them to embrace the copyright industries and buy their products. "It must become clear that the days of consequence-free widespread online infringement are over," Mandelson said. "Technical measures will be a last resort and I have no expectation of mass suspensions resulting." The legislation is expected to come into force in April next year. The effectiveness of the warning letters to persistent illegal filesharers will be monitored for the first 12 months. If illegal filesharing has not dropped by 70% by April 2011, then cutting off people's internet connections could be introduced three months later, from the summer of that year. Lord Mandelson sets date for blocking filesharers' internet connections (Thanks, Brady!) Previously: Brits: sign petitition to kill proposal to disconnect accused ... Open Rights Group forum on proposal to cut British households off ... UK govt proposes idiotic two-strikes-and-you're-out Internet ... European Internet sinking fast under 3-strikes proposals - Boing Boing France's three-strikes copyright rule is unconstitutional and ... French "three-strikes" copyright law passes -- but may be dead ... New Zealand ready to reintroduce "three strikes" copyright rule ... Three strikes proposal for print - Boing Boing France adopts law that lets entertainment goons take your family ... South Korea prepares to nuke its technological competitiveness ...

Thrashing, mad, metal: the art of Double Fine's Brütal Legend Posted: 28 Oct 2009 02:39 PM PDT Though it's nearly impossible to find a tidy way to sum the work of LucasArts adventure vet and Double Fine head Tim Schafer -- with a catalog that ranges from de los Muertos noir to deep-psyche introspec-/explora-tion and now to a heavy metal heaven/hell (depending on your attitudes toward the genre's aesthetic) -- one undeniable trait rings consistently true through all. Schafer and his stellar team of artists and writers know character, and put character above all, a philosophy that lets players navigate some of gaming's most preposterous landscapes and peculiar conceits always feeling entirely grounded by the essential humanity around them. Nowhere is that more evident than in the ancient Rock realm to which you travel in Brütal Legend: an epically monumental world inspired by the stormily apocalyptic vistas of classic metal album covers, now fully explorable and brought fantastically to life by the Bay Area studio. And so, following the short trailer below that gives you a taste of how Legends's world would eventually form: a look at the original conceptual design behind those vistas, and especially the characters that inhabit them -- every bit as instantly recognizable (in their leather and spikes, worn-through denim and low-top All Stars) as they are awesomely ridiculous -- from Double Fine artists Scott C, Peter Chan, Nathan Stapley, Levi Ryken, Razmig Mavlian, and Mark Hamer. The characters: The vehicles: The environments: And finally, how it all comes together: Previously: Like Ghibli Barfing Rainbows: the Art and Motion of Capybara's ... Everything but the Game: Behind the Sketchpad of Amanita's point ... Everything but the Game: the Art and Motion of The Beatles: Rock ...

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