The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- The Biology of Music: Why we like what we like
- Guatemala: Fiesta de la Virgen de Guadalupe altar snapshots
- Fugitive hides from arrest warrant by working at the DHS
- WWIII propaganda posters for sale, 25% to EFF
- How Monsanto owns and manipulates the world's food supply
- Flying Spaghetti Monster holiday treats
- Open Colour Standard: free/open alternative to Pantone
- Adventures in Ex Ante Crowdfunded Securities Law
- AT&T is the best network in the US, say AT&T consultants
- Hundreds of billions in crime money knowingly laundered by banks during credit crunch
- They Came as Explorers: Listening to Omar Sosa's "Across the Divide"
- Santa Claus banned from visiting locked-up children in UK asylum detention centre
- Toddlers + Fisher Price + Twitter = Twoddler!
- Watch the 1967 Bob Hope special, save America's public domain videos
| The Biology of Music: Why we like what we like Posted: 14 Dec 2009 04:32 AM PST  As a rule, humans are very picky about their music. I don't mean stylistic choices. Whether you like country, western, or both is up to you. I'm talking about something more basic than that. A tone is a sound, like a note before it gets a specific name, and a scale is a collection of tones grouped in ascending or descending order. We are able to hear a huge number of tones and, theoretically, there's billions of ways to group them, but humans tend to focus on a very small number of scales, usually made up of either five or seven tones. The same scales are used over and over, throughout most of Western music and much of human music as a whole, said Dale Purves, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology at Duke University and director of the Duke-NUS Neuroscience Program in Singapore. In fact, even styles of music that sound completely different--say classical Chinese music vs. Western folk music--use the same scale, he said. They just use it differently. So why are we so drawn to certain tones and certain groups of tones? Purves' team thinks they have an answer--an explanation that links what humans like with who they are, biologically. The key, Purves said, lies in our evolutionary history.
The sounds humans make matter most, he said, because that's where we get information about our competitors and our potential mates--the things we need to know to be successful creatures. We developed an ear for the tones common in human vocalizations, the same way a sommelier might develop a taste for fine wines. Those are the tones we find most appealing and thus, the ones we made into our musical art. The basics of this idea are nothing new. It is, after all, pretty obvious that there's a connection between human voices and human music. But, when people have looked for links between musical scales and the natural changes in the pitch and rhythm of speech, they haven't been able to turn up any solid evidence of a causal relationship. Purves, along with Kamraan Gill, Ph.D., approached this in a different way, looking instead at similarities between scales and the spectrum of--or frequencies in--speech. Here, they hit paydirt. In fact, Purves and Gill found that you can correctly predict which scales are the most popular by how similar they are to the spectrum of human vocalizations. A great example of how this plays out: Rock 'n Roll
Read Dr. Purves and Dr. Gill's paper at the journal PLoS ONE. Image courtesy Flickr user shankar, shiv, via CC. |
| Guatemala: Fiesta de la Virgen de Guadalupe altar snapshots Posted: 14 Dec 2009 03:44 AM PST 
How do they celebrate this beloved Catholic/indigenous hybrid deity? A mezcla of circus, ceremony, and "get your picture taken with Santa" kiddie portrait dioramas (featuring altars for la Virgen instead of that fat, bearded gringo). What better way to honor a New World goddess than with food, flowers, chickens, ponies, crazy-dancing — and lots of homemade explosives.
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| Fugitive hides from arrest warrant by working at the DHS Posted: 14 Dec 2009 02:01 AM PST Tahaya Buchanan, an American fugitive who'd been on the run for more than two years, dodging a national arrest warrant for insurance fraud, has spent her years underground gainfully employed by the Department of Homeland Security. Fugitive Located Inside Homeland Security Department Office Previously:
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| WWIII propaganda posters for sale, 25% to EFF Posted: 13 Dec 2009 10:26 PM PST  Brian sez, "Back in June, Boing Boing posted when I first made the digital versions of the WWIII Posters. Now three of them are on sale on my site (listed), with 25% of the proceeds going towards the EFF!" WWIII Propaganda Poster (Thanks Brian!) Previously:
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| How Monsanto owns and manipulates the world's food supply Posted: 13 Dec 2009 09:57 PM PST Steve Silberman sends us "A major AP expose of how Monsanto uses secret licensing agreements for its genetically manipulated crops to squeeze smaller seed companies, lock out competition, and keep food prices high.". AP INVESTIGATION: Monsanto seed biz role revealed (Thanks, Steve!) (Image: Monsanto == Satan, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from illustir's photostream) Previously:
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| Flying Spaghetti Monster holiday treats Posted: 13 Dec 2009 09:37 PM PST  Castewar sez, "A clever chap named Joel turned a batch of holiday cookie treats into a yummy celebration of all things spagehetti-y and monstery. Drool." Flying Spaghetti Monster holiday treats! (Thanks, Castewar!) Previously:
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| Open Colour Standard: free/open alternative to Pantone Posted: 13 Dec 2009 10:11 PM PST Ginger Coons writes in about the Open Colour Standard, "an effort to create a new colour standard to help free/open source graphics programs bridge the gap between screen and print." From the article: "What we have, then, is a venerable, widely supported, but largely inflexible and very expensive de facto standard. It has a huge impact on both print and digital media, not to mention the clothes you wear, the color you paint your living room, even the specific shades used to define healthy dirt or high-grade orange juice. It is, in short, a bloated monopoly eating up more and more of the color market... If [Open Colour Standard] works, this effort could open up spot color, make open-source software more viable for pre-press, and maybe even inspire a little kitchen table chemistry. Most importantly, it would take the cross-platform treatment of color out of the hands of a private company and put it where it belongs, with users." Open Color Standard (Thanks, Ginger!) (Image: untitled photo, licensed Creative Commons Attribution, from iboy_daniel's photostream) Previously:
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| Adventures in Ex Ante Crowdfunded Securities Law Posted: 13 Dec 2009 09:58 PM PST I'm thrilled at the success of Kickstarter and Spot.Us, which partly fulfill a longtime dream scheme of mine. These sites are primary sources of great stuff, and you should check them out if you aren't already familiar with them. The idea behind both is to help people raise funds for ideas that they want to pursue; Kickstarter is designed for any personal projects, and Spot.Us supports journalism. Donors can get a little something in return through these sites if the projects they fund come to fruition, like a signed copy of a book that's produced (Kickstarter), or reimbursement in credit if a news organization buys the story (Spot.Us). But what if a crowdfunding site could offer donors a piece of the action, not just some thank-you goodies? That's what I would want, and I don't think I'm alone. I want investors for my schemes, not patrons, and if people support me to do something that flies, it would only please me to give them a cut. Technically, launching something like this wouldn't be too difficult. The Spot.Us code, written in Ruby, is public domain and already uses an accounting system with a Paypal merchant account. The Spot.Us interface is close to what an investment-enabled version would need, and the main tough technical piece would be to add a digital signature scheme for the contracts. I met with Spot.Us founder David Cohn a few weeks ago, and he estimated that once the details about the user experience were all figured out, an appropriately-modified adaptation of the Spot.Us code could be up and running in a few months. But then I started talking about the scheme with lawyers, including Boingboing counsel Rob Rader, who has been extremely helpful. The legal terminology for my notion, it turns out, is "patronage-plus ex ante crowdfunding," at least in a recent article by Tim Kappel in the Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review The short answer is, such a site would probably be illegal under U.S. federal securities law. "Securities" are defined as any investment whose return is dependent upon the effort of others. It's a one paragraph definition, very broad, hard to get around, and there's no de minimis dollar cutoff below which the regulations stop. A lemonade stand venture could be subject to SEC regulation. Securities regulations don't apply if the investors are genuinely active in the day-to-day management of the venture-- but it isn't enough to just give them access to a project wiki and consider their suggestions; you must demonstrate that they are all critical to the venture's success. So much for that loophole. Another possibility is the SEC's "Private Placement Exemption" under Regulation D, which allows unregulated investments if the number of investors is limited. Specifically, you can sell shares to at most 35 regular individuals (and an unlimited number of accredited investors, i.e. various institutions, plus people who have a net worth exceeding $1 million, an annual income over $200K, or a personal trust exceeding $5 million). But Regulation D also prohibits any "general solicitation or general advertising" to let people know about the venture. The only published announcements of such investments are the cryptic "tombstone ads" that you sometimes see in the print versions of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times business section. These ads, which AFAIK have never been published online-only (although this might be possible) must be very limited in their disclosure. It might be OK to say "Paul Spinrad offers shares in a graphic novel based on the life of Elliot Smith" but that's about it. The announcement can't include anything that makes Kickstarter and Spot.Us so fun to browse through-- no details of the project, no wish lists, no video clips of people saying, "I'm so excited about this project-- it's got great indie film potential-- all I need is 4 months time and a round-trip ticket to Portland!" Another possible loophole is to keep offerings entirely intra-state, in which case the SEC lets a state's "blue sky" laws and regulatory apparatus control them. But this would just mean swapping the California Department of Corporations (for example) for the SEC, with similarly expensive legal and registration costs, and similar restrictions on disclosure. It doesn't make sense to have to spend $50,000 to be able to legally raise $5000. Attorney Jay Parkhill gets into some of these same issues in his 2007 blog post,"The World Isn't Ready For Crowdsourced Securities Offerings." Yet another approach, which no lawyer could ever condone, is to make the whole thing run under a honor system. This was the premise behind my 2003 website, Premises, Premises, which now lies on the vast dustheap of failed website experiments. Under this scenario, offerers would set their payback terms as a promise, but would be unfettered legally from just keeping all the money they might make using others' investments. The only "teeth" would be that everyone would know what they did, with an electronic trail to prove it, and would presumably consider them assholes until they made amends. Community reputation based enforcement has succeeded in resolving disputes outside of legal channels in the past. But such a system is unsuitable for serious investment. So my question now is, how can we make this legal? I want to pursue this. For example, how does one go about changing securities law to establish a de minimis exception for total offerings-- say, less than $10,000 and individual investment less than $100. This is chump change for the SEC, and they shouldn't waste their time worrying about activities at that level. Aren't there other laws that protect naive investors from being cheated out of their last $100? If I can Kickstart up the funding for some lawyer-time to draft a such a bill, who in Congress might sponsor it? The legislation would help artsy types and grassroots ventures, while also lifting financial regulations and oversight-- so it sounds like a candidate for bipartisan support! It's a stimulus bill, it's an investment in American ingenuity, it's "new thinking," it helps the little guy! Meanwhile, I can try to talk to people at the SEC-- I'm happy to just call their listed phone number and see if I can explain my way in to someone who might actually help, but does anyone in boingboing-land know someone who works at the SEC, who might be interested in this? If you want updates on this quest, please email me! I don't want to include my email address here, but it's pretty easy to find.
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| AT&T is the best network in the US, say AT&T consultants Posted: 13 Dec 2009 03:26 PM PST  Randall Stross writes that the iPhone itself is largely responsible for faults commonly blamed on AT&T's 3G network. The story, published by the New York Times, offers AT&T consultants as sources, and doesn't address the fact that only users in the U.S. (where AT&T is the sole carrier) report the chronic issues at hand. One could say that Gruber delivers a killing blow, but Stross' piece is quite daft, so it's more like a sanity insurance policy to ensure it never attains life. Photo: Mike Boylan. (via) |
| Hundreds of billions in crime money knowingly laundered by banks during credit crunch Posted: 13 Dec 2009 07:50 AM PST The Observer reports that an estimated $352bn of drug and mafia money was laundered by the major banks at the peak of the credit crunch, while regulators turned a blind eye, since the highly liquid criminal underworld was the only source of the cash necessary to keep the banks' doors open. As Charlie Stross notes, "A third of a trillion dollars is a lot of money; it's enough to fund the US military invading another country halfway around the world, or a manned Mars exploration program." Charlie goes on to mention that now that these narcobucks "aren't neatly bundled up inside the mattress any more; they're in the system," that there's $0.3 trillion sitting there, nice and legal, entering the investment world. Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor (Image: Money, Money, Money, a Creative Commons Attribution image from borman818's photostream) Previously:
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| They Came as Explorers: Listening to Omar Sosa's "Across the Divide" Posted: 13 Dec 2009 11:33 AM PST (Boing Boing guestblogger Ned Sublette is a writer, historian, photographer, and singer-songwriter based in New York.)
I heard some good records this year, but one stands out for the way it compelled me to listen over and over: Cuban pianist Omar Sosa's Across the Divide: A Tale of Rhythm & Ancestry. I don't listen to all that much recorded music, though you wouldn't know it from the way my apartment is bulging with recorded music in every format known to man or woman. About an hour a day, usually, not counting my work, which entails studying music. I prefer my music live, in the presence of other people hearing it with me. And if I play a recording, I listen to it. I don't play recorded music while I'm doing something else, unless it's a routine task. I must have thousands of CDs, but there are about thirty I play repeatedly--my comfort records, so to speak. By which I mean, when I want to relax with an old friend, I put this one on. My idiosyncratic, impulsively personal selection goes beyond the constant parade of r&b and salsa oldies on my computer to albums that have an arc, an identity, and a context of their own. João Bosco's Zona de Fronteira. Big Sam's Funky Nation. Lecuona plays Lecuona. Alicia de Larrocha plays Albéniz's Iberia, though I wish I could hear a ripping new interpretation of it with close miking. Everything by Dr. John, and Coco Robicheaux's Spiritland. Cash Money Greatest Hits. George Clinton's T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M (The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mother Ship), and another acronymic title, Miles Davis's E.S.P., King Tubby. Boukman Eksperyans's Kalfou Danjere. Terry Allen, Joe Ely. And my favorite Christmas record of all time (because it doesn't sound like a "Christmas record"), El Gran Combo's Nuestra Música. And, previously, one record by Omar Sosa, the elaborate, African-orchestral Afreecanos (2008). Sosa's Across the Divide was my only new comfort record this year. It's a powerful, spiritual record that features Tim Eriksen, who sings traditional Anglo-American ballads with musicality and soul, and plays a nice banjo too.
It's not a bunch of overdubs stacked up over programming. I saw Sosa's group in April, with Eriksen, and I'm here to tell you they played it live, including the Langston Hughes samples that Sosa triggered from the piano.
There's something going on here besides a Cuban piano virtuoso with a band to match. The music proposes the paradox of hemispheric history. Sosa is telling a story, or maybe it would be better to say he's exploring a question through music, not only across the divide of black and white, but also of two great musical-cultural regions of the New World - the former empires of England and Spain, with their distinct associated African legacies. Eriksen's banjo is in the "white" tradition, but the banjo is an African-descended instrument. The album's standout, "Gabriel's Trumpet," passes the goosebumps test. But more than that--it begins with just banjo and maraca. Which sounds good, but then you think: wait a minute, I've never heard these two instruments playing together before. And you haven't, because they come from different traditions. The banjo is as absent from the folk music of Cuba as the maraca is from black music in the United States. Moreover, they come from different parts of Africa (more about that in my book Cuba and Its Music.) Tonight, Omar Sosa is playing with his group in Nairobi. On December 16th, he'll be in Mauritius. Next time: Principles of Postmamboism, and continuing excerpts from The Year Before The Flood.
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| Santa Claus banned from visiting locked-up children in UK asylum detention centre Posted: 13 Dec 2009 07:24 AM PST Santa Claus was prevented from giving presents to the imprisoned children of asylum seekers at the notorious Yarl's Wood detention centre by private security guards. Yarl's Wood is a privately run prison whose inmates are UK immigrants who arrived seeking asylum, but whose claims have been denied. They are dragged out of bed in the dead of night and stuck in mesh-windowed vans without their belongings and without the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, and then detained in terrible conditions that have been decried by human rights advocates, doctors, psychiatrists and other experts. Their "crime" is trying to escape torture, privation, and disaster. The rent-a-cops at Yarl's Wood told the Anglican church's leading expert on Father Christmas (dressed in a Santa costume) that he couldn't enter the centre to give the children presents. They also blocked the canon theologian at Westminster Abbey. Then they cancelled a later scheduled visit with detained families at the centre. And the whole mess is on video. Anglican 'Santa' barred from giving gifts to children at detainee centre |
| Toddlers + Fisher Price + Twitter = Twoddler! Posted: 13 Dec 2009 07:00 AM PST A group of Belgian university students from the Expertise centre for Digital Media (EDM) at Hasselt University created the Twoddler: a Fisher-Price busy-board connected to an Arduino that transmits toddlers' play into reassuring tweets for their parents (it's a real project, but the idea is a gag, no one really thinks that parents need to have "Jimmy hit the red button" tweeted to them) (this last to pre-empt the inevitable humorless comments about how this is emblematic of some kind of crisis in parenting). Twoddler: Twittering Toddlers (Thanks, JP!) Previously: |
| Watch the 1967 Bob Hope special, save America's public domain videos Posted: 13 Dec 2009 06:19 AM PST Last week, I wrote about Carl Malamud's upcoming testimony on the need to free America's governmental video archives for public consumption. This material is all in the public domain, but the government sells it through retail partners, to the taxpayers who funded its production. Carl is trying to convince them to free the video you paid for for your use. He wants to go into his testimony with some impressive viewership numbers to demonstrate the lurking desire for this video. So Carl's pitch is simple: Watch some awesome public domain videos and do good for the world. Now, Carl Malamud sez, "In preparation for my testimony on the future of the National Archives before the House Oversight Committee, we forked out another $461 and uploaded 28 more government videos. I'm trying to show that people care about this stuff, so I'll report the total number of views to the Congress. This batch has some amazing stuff. In addition to the Bob Hope Christmas Special, there are documentaries about the Manhattan Rhythm Kings, the Cambodian Royal Ballet, and James Audubon. If you're into spooks, don't miss the CIA's True Stories, a special on Mind Control and Hallucination, and KGB Connections." Watch the public domain on YouTube. Watch the public domain on the Internet Archive. (Thanks, Carl!) Previously:
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Buchanan had been indicted in New Jersey for insurance fraud in 2007, and a warrant for her arrest was issued that December and was posted to the National Crime Information Center in January 2008. New Jersey prosecutor Michael Morris said they believed Buchanan had been working for Homeland Security in New Jersey in 2007, and might have been transferred to the department's immigration office in Georgia at some point during the investigation. 
Monsanto's methods are spelled out in a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, along with shorter supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments... 
It's like Pantone's spot colour standard [ed: a widely used proprietary system for describing "spot" colors -- that is, colors that need special inks to print. Pantone distributes both the inks and books of color swatches. Designers pick colors out of the book and the printer loads the extra ink into her apparatus at print time], but not necessarily in opposition to it. Just different. 
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result... 
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