Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

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Ancient Costa Rica Pt. 2: The narrow road to Guayabo

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:32 PM PST

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A thousand years ago, there wouldn't have been much jungle here, just terraced plots of maize and clear view off the mountain slopes to the valley far below. Visitors got a dizzying look at the drop from either side of a cobblestone road that lurched upward along the back of a steep ridge. At the edge of town, they'd find themselves funneled into a stairway shadowed on either side by stone walls and tall guard houses. Up the steps, a cobble-paved causeway stretched ahead, rising gradually, its edges lined with sculptures and the piked heads of conquered enemies. At the end, the chiefs' house stood on a tall stone foundation, its conical roof mirrored by the peak of the volcano in the distance.

The modern entrance to the ancient city of Guayabo is not nearly so dramatic. There's a pockmarked gravel road up a mountain, with chasms that threaten to swallow the front wheel of our boxy, little Honda. A wooden ticket booth, like a lemonade stand, marks the spot were you park the car on the roadside. Carefully maintained nature trails wind through rainforest less than a century old—this land was a dairy farm not so very long ago—and spit you out in the center of what was once a city of some 10,000 inhabitants.

Guayabo—pronounce it "Why-ahbo"—is one of many ancient cities in eastern and central Costa Rica that get overlooked by the general public, largely because their builders worked mostly with materials—wood, thatch, cane—that disintegrated in the tropical climate. The massive communal houses rotted away long ago. But the stone foundations, roads, tombs and aqueduct systems that remain are, in themselves, impressive enough to be named an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

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I travelled to Guayabo—about two-and-a-half hours east of the Costa Rican capital of San Jose—with Michael Snarskis, Ph.D., an archaeologist who has spent his career living and working in Costa Rica.

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Although Guayabo had been known (and looted) since the 1800s, true archaeology didn't begin there until the late 1960s. When Snarskis first visited the site in the 1970s, it was still mostly cow pasture. Today, though, the central part of the city has been cleared and a stretch of the main entry road painstakingly restored. At the city's heart is a piece of urban design that Snarskis said was as common to ancient Costa Rica as the grid-with-a-park-in-the-center is to small-town America.

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Diorama showing what the center of Guayabo probably looked like during its heyday.



"You had the main road that led into the city and ended at the stairway of the chiefs' house, after passing through a sunken plaza. The plaza is quite a bit lower actually, because it's the pit left behind by digging earth fill for the principal mounds. The caciques, Spanish for chiefs, would all have lived in the house on the tallest mound. And the adjacent secondary mound would have been for the wives and female slaves who took care of their domestic maintenance. The Spanish, when they first arrived, actually described this same basic design and the division of residence by sex at other places in Costa Rica, though they never made it to Guayabo," Snarskis said.



Around what Snarskis calls the "elite precinct"—think of it as Guayabo's gated community—are other, lower house mounds, plazas and pathways and the stone rings that once formed the foundations of commoners' houses.

Standing there today, the city seems too small to have packed in a peak population of 10,000, but, Snarskis points out, you have to remember that only 1/4 to a 1/3 of Guayabo is visible. The jungle on all sides is littered with house foundations and tombs, which have never been fully excavated. In a way, most of Guayabo is still a lost city, waiting to be discovered.

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Open tomb in the jungle surrounding Guayabo. The walls, floor and lids of these tombs were made from lajas—slabs of volcanic flagstone.

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This still-buried ring of stones marks the foundation of a small house.

All the remains are stone: Either car tire-sized river cobbles hauled up from far-flung valleys or massive lajas—slabs of volcanic flagstone, some as long as a human body. Simply getting these rocks to the city is a big deal. Snarskis said the river cobbles were probably hauled up the mountain one-by-one in slings thrown over the backs of workers and slaves. The flagstones would have been even more difficult to pry out of the ground and move—remember, there weren't any pack animals around to help out.

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Some of the principal mounds.

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The chiefs' house. Multiple male elites would have lived here. Snarskis thinks the grassy plaza at the base of the steps may have once been a reflecting pool that's now filled with silt.



The work that went into building Guayabo isn't just impressive, it's also important, because it proves the existence of a fairly complex political system. Leaders need a sophisticated power structure backing them up to get monuments like this built. Without it, orders like, "Hey, I really think you should carry that 200-pound rock uphill for several miles," tend to get ignored. No ancient Chibchan calendars or writing systems have been preserved, but Guayabo and its sister cities weren't the work of cultural pushovers.

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A carved stone, about the size of a large coffee table, found near Guayabo's center. Snarskis said that this side depicts a very stylized version of an alligator.

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The other side, he said, shows a picture of an upside-down jaguar.



Nor were the Chibchan people technologically deficient—in fact, they were excellent engineers. Guayabo sits between two streams, which the ancient inhabitants tapped to bring fresh water into the city center. Aqueducts criss-cross the city, both in exposed stone-lined trenches and under the cobblestone-paved streets, carrying water to collecting pools. Some of these have been running continuously since they were built a millennium ago.



"In fact, the entire site is tilted slightly, and that's on purpose," Snarskis said. "It ensured the constant flow and circulation of water from the stream at higher elevation, through the city, and out the stream at lower elevation."

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An aqueduct brings water from a nearby stream to fill this pool.

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An aqueduct flows below this street, taking water from the pool in the previous shot, to another one at slightly lower elevation.



So far, Guayabo is the only ancient city in Costa Rica open to tourists. But there are others out there. At one time, they were probably connected by networks of roads. Less than 50 miles north of Guayabo, archaeologist John Hoopes, Ph.D., is currently digging at a similar city. He compares the ancient Caribbean to the ancient Mediterranean—two similarly sized seas, ringed by a host of cultures that were all individually unique, but constantly in contact, each trading ideas and incorporating foreign elements into their own, distinct style. The Maya may have been Central America's answer to the ancient Greeks, but that doesn't mean Chibchan culture wasn't also important. The more we learn about sites like Guayabo, the more we'll understand about the ancient Costa Ricans and how they contributed to the overall Caribbean cultural network.

Previously:


UK "terrorism" stop-and-searches are illegal

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 03:32 AM PST

Mike sez, "'The use by police of terror laws to stop and search people without grounds for suspicion are illegal, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.' The article goes on to refer to Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which is what has been used for random stop and searches such as this one."
Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows the home secretary to authorise police to make random searches in certain circumstances.

But the European Court of Human Rights said the protesters' rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated.

The court said the stop and search powers were "not sufficiently circumscribed" and there were not "adequate legal safeguards against abuse".

Stop-and-search powers ruled illegal by European court (Thanks, Mike!)
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Bruce Sterling's state of the world, 2010 edition

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 02:54 AM PST

The WELL is conducting its annual Bruce Sterling "State of the World" public interview, in which Chairman Bruce holds forth on any subject the audience raises. Jon Lebkowski asked me for a question to kick it off, so I asked Bruce what I should do to be sure that I've provided for my daughter Poesy's future. His answer is very funny and provocative, though a simple "I don't know either" would have sufficed:

*Okay, you've treated your future as an "unpredictable lurching thing..." and now you're all morose about that... You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of "disruptive innovation," "disintermediation," "offshoring," "small pieces loosely joined," "de-monetization," "plug and play," "the network as a platform"? Of course you've heard of all that crap, because you've been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don't have any stability now! Much less guys like you, who move their fingers up and down on keyboards for a living.

*You want some security? Demand government housing subsidies and a guaranteed minimum income! They bailed out every broke mogul on the planet, they might as well bail out the civil population...

*"A coherent picture of where your future is heading." Okay, fine. Let's imagine you're three years old again. You want to give your Dad, back in 1974, a coherent picture of what 2010 looks like. You know, something very actionable, lucid and practical, where he can just slap the cash on the counter and everything works out great for the family. Okay: given what you know now about the present, tell me what you oughta tell him about 2010, back in 1974. Use words of one syllable, so he doesn't have a stroke.

Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
Previously:


Even Amazon can't keep its EULA story straight

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 03:00 AM PST

When Amazon "sells" you a Kindle ebook, they don't really sell it to you. If you read the fine-print, you'll see that they're waving their hands furiously and declaring that you aren't "buying" the book, but rather "taking a license to a limited set of uses" for the book. Whereas a book that you buy comes with all kinds of rights, such as the right to sell or give the book away (Jeff Bezos: "[W]hen someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.") a book that you license from Amazon comes with a very small subset of those rights, as defined by a lengthy and difficult-to-grasp "license agreement."

Despite all the fine print, most of us know that this is a scam. Declaring a sale to be a license is ridiculous on its face (imagine this: you finish a bowl of soup at the deli and when you get to the bottom of it, you find a EULA that says, "By eating this soup, you agree not to attempt to season your own soups in a similar fashion, nor to share this soup with any other person").

It's such a silly notion that even Amazon can't keep its story straight. Take this press-release in which Amazon trumpets that its "customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books." Purchased, not "licensed."

Or consider this ad (courtesy of Elix): "Kindle publications are sold by Amazon Digital Services, Inc." Again, sold, not "licensed."

(Yes, you can purchase a license. But that's not what the copy says. It doesn't say, "Amazon customers purchased limited licenses to more Kindle books...")

It's a rip-off, pure and simple. And Amazon's digital divisions won't let copyright owners get out from under it. When I tried to negotiate the distribution of the Random House Audio edition of my novel Makers through Amazon's Audible store, they refused to allow me to add legal text to the recording telling users that they could make any use of the audiobook that was permissible under copyright, negating their EULA. In other words, Amazon isn't doing this because the publishers insist on it: even when my publisher, Random House, the largest publisher in the world, told them that they didn't want the crazy EULA, Amazon insisted.

Don't get me wrong. Amazon's "hard goods" business is the best ecommerce system in the world. I did half my Christmas shopping there. I buy everything from books to box-files from them. They are customer-focused, efficient, and smart. But I won't buy any of Amazon's digital offerings until they clean up their act and deliver the same customer rights to e-goods buyers as they do to hard-goods buyers.

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My essay collection Content, free in Italian

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 02:18 AM PST

The Italian publisher Apogeo commissioned a professional Italian translation of my Creative Commons-licensed essay collection Content and released their edition as a free, noncommercial download!

Content: Selezione di saggi sulla tecnologia, la creatività, il copyright (Grazie, Fabio!)

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Fundraiser to put out more issues of awesome line-art collage zine CRAP HOUND

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:24 PM PST


Chloe, owner of Portland's brilliant zine store READING FRENZY and impressaria of the line-art zine CRAP HOUND writes, "Boing Boing and Cory in particular have always been very supportive and enthusiastic about Crap Hound -- the sporadically published vintage line art zine my friend Sean Tejaratchi edits and I publish. We have 3 issues slated for publication this year and are using Kickstarter to raise funds to get the first one to press. Our project is currently 17% funded with 35 days to go."

I just kicked in. I've loved Crap Hound since the first issue (and Sean and I apparently shared a passion for Local Hero, where the characters use the term as an epithet; I used it as the title for my first professionally published short story).

Crap Hound #4: Clowns, Devils & Bait! (Thanks, Chloe!)

Previously:


Grendel: free/open source software for protecting your cloud data

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:17 PM PST

Marc Hedlund sez, "Wesabe just open sourced a project called Grendel that makes it easy for web apps to encrypt data using the user's login password, and only decrypt that data when the user is logged in. Let's say you're using a word processing web app and don't want your documents stored plaintext -- the web app could use Grendel to easily encrypt your docs for you, using OpenPGP. Log in and you can edit; log out and only you can get at the data again (since only you have your password). There are some hooks for encrypting with multiple keys if you want to share docs with selected other users on the system. Since people are throwing a ton of sensitive data in web apps these days I think having some tools to help make that safer would be a good thing."

Of course, data on web sites is usually shared with at least some other people in some way. Sometimes a user might want to share their information with the web site support staff, so the staff can help solve a problem or fix a bug. Or, the user might want to share their sensitive data with selected other users on the site, such as coworkers or family members. Grendel allows this, letting you encrypt data with multiple keys so that more than one user's password can gain access.

It's very easy to screw up when building a cryptography system -- check out Nate Lawson's excellent Google Tech Talk on common crypto flaws, or Matasano's Socratic dialog on similar topics, for a map of the pitfalls available to you, and us. We've been fortunate at Wesabe to have a number of people who think very carefully about security, and they've put a lot of effort into designing and building Grendel. That said, we have two goals in open sourcing Grendel: first, to make a tool available to others that could help make "cloud" applications in general much safer for everyone, and second, to open up what we've built so others can review and help us improve it. We would love comments on any aspect of Grendel, security or otherwise.

Protecting "Cloud" Secrets with Grendel (Thanks, Marc!)

(Disclosure: I am proud to serve on Wesabe's advisory board)

Previously:


Close enough for rock 'n' roll: how the Internet makes the cheap, dirty and experimental possible

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:04 PM PST

My latest Locus column, "Close Enough for Rock 'n' Roll," discusses the way that the net makes it possible to do something almost as good as its offline equivalent for a fraction of the cost, and how that changes everything:
In other words, rock 'n' roll is cheap, experimental and fluid, and devotes most of its energy into the production of music. Orchestral music is expensive, formal and majestic, but tithes a large portion of its effort to coordination and overheads and maintenance.

If the Internet has a motif, it is rock 'n' roll's Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock 'n' roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build.

The interesting bit isn't what it costs to replicate some big, pre-Internet business or project.

The interesting bit is what it costs to do something half as well as some big, pre-Internet business or project.

Cory Doctorow: Close Enough for Rock 'n' Roll

(Image: Rock-n-Roll Adventure Kids, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Invisible Hour's photostream)

Tintin copyrights go to war against Tintin fans

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:38 PM PST

The British lawyer who married the widow of Tintin creator Hergé has successfully sued Bob Garcia ("a detective novelist, jazz musician and Tintin aficionado") for £35,000 for printing five short essays in appreciation of Tintin, two of which were illustrated with brief clips from the comic. The essays were distributed for free, and the two pamphlets with Tintin illustrations were printed about 500 times each.

Nick Rodwell, the plaintiff, was accused by Garcia of "a ruthless drive to kill off their harmless and not-for-profit passion in his bid to keep exclusive control of the Tintin brand."

Britain's "fair dealing" offers less protection to fans and scholars than does the US's "fair use" (itself a complicated doctrine). Combined with a litigious copyright owner, it's a recipe for disaster when it comes to free speech, scholarship, and fan activity.

Hundreds of Tintin fans have already backed Mr Garcia, who on Thursday called for a boycott of the film and claimed that many supporters were heeding his demand. More than 500 people have joined his page on the Facebook website which expresses "anger and disgust" over the issue. More supporters have also backed his cause on other websites.

Mr Garcia said: "We have nothing against Mr Spielberg even if there is a boycott threat against his film ... but are asking him to intervene in favour of not just me but all people who are being prevented from sharing their passion for Tintin..."

Stéphane Steeman, who ran the Hergé Friendship Club for 25 years, has just released a book in which he castigates Mr Rodwell for trying to kill off his organisation, called The Escalation.

He recounts how Mr Rodwell in his blog implies that two Belgian journalists criticised him because they could not pass on their passion for Tintin to their children as they were autistic.

Pierre Assouline, Hergé's French biographer, wrote that he "knows only too well" the "methods" of Mr Rodwell with his "victims".

Tintin film boycott threat over row with Hergé widow's British husband (Thanks, Will!)
Previously:


The upside of Somali pirate activity? For Kenyan fisherman: more fish.

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:00 PM PST

Before the pirates took over, Illegal commercial trawlers parked off the coast of Somalia and scooped up all the critters in the sea. Not so anymore, say fishermen in neighboring Kenya: "There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates."

New advocacy group against cellphoning-while-driving

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 09:54 PM PST

A new advocacy group fashioned after MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) will work to spread awareness about the danger of driving while distracted by texting or talking on mobile devices. On Tuesday, the Department of Transportation and the nonprofit National Safety Council plan to launch FocusDriven, "Advocates for Cell-Free Driving."

Star Wars burlesque show (yes, even Jabba's in here)

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 09:05 PM PST

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Above, Stormtrooper striptease Courtney Cruz in a Star Wars-themed burlesque show at the Los Angeles club Bordello (a sexy bar which opened at the site of a notorious, historic LA whorehouse). Liz Ohanesian has a post up at LA Weekly with more about the performance. Lots of great photos by Shannon Cottrell, who shot the image above. I did not post Sexy Jabba the Hutt, and you can thank me for it later. (thanks, Isaac B2)

Facebook blocks "Web 2.0 Suicide Machine," now a cease-and-desist reported

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 09:25 PM PST

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Boing Boing reader John says,

The folks at the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine are looking for feedback on how to respond to a recent cease & desist letter. While they reside in the Netherlands, and cease & desist letters are not equivalent to litigation and in fact do not always have a legal leg to stand on, it still seems important to consider the implications. This comes after suicidemachine.org's IP was blocked by Facebook. Similar service/software art Seppukoo, who were similarly issued a cease & desist and have issued this response.

From the nettime announcement by Florian Cramer:

"On behalf of Facebook, the law firm Perkins Coie has sent a Cease and Desist letter to Mike van Gaasbeek from WORM , the Rotterdam-based experimental arts center of which MODDR_labs , creators of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine , are a part of.

Suggestions for competent legal defendants for WORM/MODDR would be welcome. As a non-profit organization with roots in improvised and electronic music and avant-garde filmmaking, WORM encounters this situation for the first time. (Other media arts institutions wouldn't have legal defense strategies ready in their desk drawers either.)"

BB reader John asks, "Can either of these services be subjected to the contracts that bind users and developers who use the Connect API from scraping data?"

More about the Suicide Machine, and Facebook's efforts to block it: NPR, WSJ.

Interview with Facebook employee will not make you feel better about privacy issues

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 08:44 PM PST

If you're already rethinking your participation in Facebook after the recent privacy dust-ups, you will not feel better after reading this interview with a person identified as an unnamed Facebook employee. (via @mackreed)

Have a Coke and a coliform!

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 08:39 PM PST

Ewww: "Nearly half of the 90 beverages from soda fountain machines in one area in Virginia tested positive for coliform bacteria -- which could indicate possible fecal contamination, according to a study published in the January issue of International Journal of Food Microbiology."

Death Metal Rooster

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 08:25 PM PST

Wikileaks is holding a fundraiser

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:07 PM PST

Wikileaks is raising funds to cover operating costs in 2010. I believe they provide an important service. I'll be donating, and encourage you to do the same.

Anne Frank protector who hid diary dies at 100 years of age

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:00 PM PST

Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank's diary after the teen was arrested by Nazis, has died at age 100. Gies' website says she was among a group of Dutch citizens who hid the Frank family of four and four others in a secret annex in Amsterdam, Netherlands, during World War II.

Snow Monkeys at a Japanese hot spring: this photo needs a caption

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 06:37 PM PST

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Hiroko Yoda of AltJapan and Photoshelter shot this amazing photograph of two snow monkeys in Japan for her CNNGo article "Bathing apes: Jigokudani's snow monkey onsen." I wonder what clever caption Boing Boing readers might dream up? You should view the whole photo gallery, and don't miss the funny (work-safe!) photo of Hiroko in the girls-only tub, being visited by a female monkey. I am told that the monkey are kind of smelly. (photo courtesy Hiroko Yoda and CNNGo / thanks, Matt)

TSA lied: naked-scanners can store and transmit images

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 02:59 PM PST

You know those airport scanners that can see through your clothes, offering an intimate look at your junk and your lovehandles and every other part of you that you keep between you, your spouse, your doctor and the bathroom mirror? You know how the TSA swore up and down that these machines didn't store and couldn't transmit the compromising photos of your buck-naked self?

They lied.

The documents, which include technical specifications and vendor contracts, indicate that the TSA requires vendors to provide equipment that can store and send images of screened passengers when in testing mode, according to CNN.

The TSA has stated publicly on its website, in videos and in statements to the press that images cannot be stored on the machines and that images are deleted from the scanners once an airport operator has examined them. The administration has also insisted that the machines are incapable of sending images.

Just more US government employees doing Al Qaeda's business: undermining the quality of life in the "free" world. Osama's still free, how about you?

Airport Scanners Can Store, Transmit Images (via Digg)

(Image: TSA)

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Boing Boing mobile edition live

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 02:59 PM PST

Cellphone users should now be served with a lite version of the site, hosted by Mobify. We'll be tweaking the look in the coming days, but it's already much faster to download on slow connections.

Aura you experienced? "Paranormal" portraiture

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 05:08 PM PST

Writer Jess Hemerly is currently a graduate student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. Photographer Jonathan Koshi is a designer in San Francisco.
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In 1992, a man named Guy Coggins combined Kirlian photography with biofeedback and introduced Aura Imaging photography. He began selling cameras through his Redwood City company, Progen, and according to the company's FAQ, there are only about 250 owners of these in the US. One of the owners is in San Francisco's Japantown. You'd miss it if you didn't know what to look for. It's a small gift shop called Sharaku across from the plaza, filled with Japanese textiles, figurines, and replica instruments. The only clue that something else goes on in this shop are yellowed, letter-sized, photocopied signs on the window advertising aura photography. But for $15 (plus tax) the old lady who runs the shop will reluctantly take you into the back, set up her Biofeedback Imaging Color Spectrometer 3000, and photograph your aura. And yes, that is quite a profit margin. According to the camera company's site, the cost per photo is about $3.30 (including film and "functional warranty replacement" charge).

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine decided that getting his aura photographed would be the perfect way to say goodbye to 2009 and invited my husband-to-be and I to join.

There were a couple tourists in the claustrophobic shop, browsing the racks and shelves of knickknacks, but when we asked to have our auras photographed she took us straight to the shop's back room. This is where the camera lives along with a microwave on a table, a heater, some boxes, and a bookshelf lined with what look like old Japanese serial novels.



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In front of a white background screen is a bench on which she set the biofeedback boxes and motioned for me to sit down. The camera she uses is a big rectangular box with a window on the front in which I could can see my reflection pretty clearly. I placed my hands on the metal finger guides and sat as still as possible. I made no effort to think anything other than trying not to look like I had a double chin -- my biggest fear in photographs. She made some adjustments with the camera and I half expected to feel something coming out of the metal under my hands, but after about 10 seconds she told me I was done.


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As she pulled the Fuji instant film out of the camera and set it next to the microwave, a dot matrix printer began to print an ASCII diagram of my aura and I - with @'s for eyes and letters representing the colors - and explanations of the dominant colors representing future (left side), experience (above), and expression (right). The blue above my head means I am best described by "depth-of-feeling," while the blue to my right means I "put calm into the world". My orange left side means I am coming into a period of creativity and sensuality. Not bad!



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After a few more minutes, she tore the plastic off the film and handed my aura photograph to me. The first thing I noticed was how colorful the image was. Then I noticed that the colors of my aura matched the colors of the hoodie I had on. Coincidence? Joe Nickell, Research Fellow at the Center for Skeptical Inquiry, wrote a piece for the Skeptical Inquirer in 2000 about his experience with aura photography, titled "Aura Photography: A Candid Shot." After having his first photo taken, Joe stepped away from the booth to talk to some students and decided to return and see if the photo came out the same. It didn't. In fact, far from it. The photographer suggested that he'd been "teaching" students between photos and that changed his aura. Joe was unconvinced, as I am not completely convinced that my aura wasn't based on my clothing.


Real aura or not, the pictures are far cooler than anything your mom made you have taken at Olan Mills.



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Gigantic-huge Diesel watch: "Super Bad Ass"

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 01:12 PM PST


Mitch at Watchismo writes in with news of the new honkin'-huge Diesel Super Bad Ass watches: "These monstrous timepieces epitomize this series with many functions in one big old timepiece. A chronograph, a second timezone and a compass all piled into this 55.5mm long block of metal!"

$250 isn't insane for a really nice watch, and this is, indeed, a really nice watch. If I hadn't just filled my second watch-box (to the horror of my wife), I'd be seriously tempted.

DZ1318 Bad Ass Gunmetal Compass -Diesel (Thanks, Mitch!)

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Perp caught through World of Warcraft

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 01:07 PM PST

Indiana cops caught a fugitive by getting Blizzard to turn over the IP address from which he was playing World of Warcraft:
Howard County, Indiana Sheriff Department Deputy Matt Roberson tracked down fugitive Alfred Hightower via the hugely popular massively multiplayer online game. Hightower was wanted on several counts of drug dealing but had fled the country to Canada.

After finding out Hightower was a WoW fan, Roberson sent a subpoena to the game's maker, Blizzard Entertainment. With the information they sent back, Roberson was able to pinpoint the perp's location.

WOW: Fugitive Caught via World of Warcraft (Thanks, Marilyn!)
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Burning the library in slow motion: how copyright extension has banished millions of books to the scrapheap of history

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 01:36 PM PST

Jamie "Public Domain" Boyle sez, "When Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic, Fahrenheit 451 was published, it was scheduled to enter the public domain this month -- January 1, 2010. But then we changed the law. And Bradbury's firemen look like pikers compared to the cultural conflagration that ensued. The works may not be physically destroyed -- although many of them are; disappearing, disintegrating, or simply getting lost in the vastly long period of copyright to which we have relegated them. But for the vast majority of works and the vast majority of citizens who do not have access to one of our great libraries, they are gone as thoroughly as if we had piled up the culture of the 20th century and simply set fire to it; and all this right at the moment when we could have used the Internet vastly to expand the scope of cultural access. Bradbury's firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason."

Remember folks, thanks to 11 copyright term extensions in the past 40-some years, more than 98% of all works in copyright are "orphaned" -- still in copyright, but no one knows to whom they belong.

But the legal changes introduced in the years after Fahrenheit 451 did more than just extend terms. Congress eliminated the benign practice of the renewal requirement (which had guaranteed that 85% of works and 93% of books entered the public domain after 28 years because the authors and publishers simply didn't want or need a second copyright term.) And copyright, which had been an opt-in system (you had to comply with some very minor formalities to get a copyright) became an opt out system (you got a copyright automatically when you "fixed" the work in material form, whether you wanted it or not.) Suddenly the entire world of informal and non commercial culture -- from home movies that provide a wonderful lens into the private life of an era, to essays, posters, locally produced teaching materials -- was swept into copyright. And kept there for the life of the author plus 70 years. The effects were culturally catastrophic. Copyright went from covering very little culture, and only covering it for a 28 year period during which it was commercially available, to covering all of culture, regardless of whether it was available -- often for over a century. Unlike Fahrenheit 451, the vast majority of the culture swept into this 20th century black hole was not commercially available and, in most cases, the authors are unknown. The works are locked up -- with no benefit to anyone -- and no one has the key that would unlock them. We have cut ourselves off from our own culture, left it to molder -- and in the case of nitrate film, literally disintegrate -- with no benefit to anyone. The works may not be physically destroyed -- although many of them are; disappearing, disintegrating, or simply getting lost in the vastly long period of copyright to which we have relegated them. But for the vast majority of works and the vast majority of citizens who do not have access to one of our great libraries, they are gone as thoroughly as if we had piled up the culture of the 20th century and simply set fire to it; and all this right at the moment when we could have used the Internet vastly to expand the scope of cultural access.
Fahrenheit 451... Book burning as done by lawyers (Thanks, Jamie!)

(Image: Burned Book a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from Paraflyer's photostream) (Thanks, Jamie!)

Previously:


Acid attacks continue in Hong Kong

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 12:16 PM PST

An individual or group is causing mayhem in Hong Kong by hurling plastic bottles filled with acid into busy shopping streets filled with pedestrians. It's happened six times in the last year, most recently over the weekend. From CNN:
Shopkeeper Khan Mohammed Bilal runs an electronics store, and he was working Saturday night when he heard the commotion. He stepped out into the intersection of Temple Street and Nanking Street and saw chaos.

Someone had just thrown two plastic bottles of acid into the intersection. He saw one person's red bag soaked with acid. He said he couldn't imagine what would've happened if the acid had splashed onto the person's head. He saw injured people crying.

"We do get nervous. We do feel scared. When this happens, it affects our business... I don't know the purpose of this, why this person is throwing this liquid."

"Acid attacks are 'easy' in Hong Kong"

Black Metal Theory Symposium audio

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 11:57 AM PST

Blackmetalsymmmmm
Hideous Gnosis was an academic-style symposium about black metal held last month in New York City. The lectures included the likes of 'Goatsteps behind my steps': Black Metal and Ritual Renewal," "Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration," and "'Remain true to the earth!': Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal." Audio recordings of select presentations are now available for download. I haven't listened to any, but I'm relieved that this documentation is available just in case I need it. Black Metal Theory Symposium 2009

Exploitation documentary about hippies

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 11:12 AM PST



"You know there's something happening, but you don't know what it is." Here's the trippy trailer for "The Hippie Revolt/Something's Happening," a 1967 mondo documentary on those far-out flower children. Something Weird Video offers a full download of the film for $6. (via Dose Nation)

Passport to Survival: Mormon survival manual

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 11:11 AM PST

201001111104

"Monday dinner: green drink #73, emergency stew #20, noodles #27, bread sticks #38, criss-cross cookies #91."

Homegrown Evolution looks at a 60s-era Mormon survival manual called Passport to Survival.

201001111101As far as I can tell, these tomes assume we're, "in the last days," a period for which the Latter Day Saints hierarchy suggests keeping a two year supply of food for your household. Having just seen the grim Cormac McCarthy/Viggo Mortensen vehicle The Road and not wanting to have to resort to cannibalism (those folks at the Wal-Mart sure don't look appetizing!), I cracked open my Mormon survival books starting with Esther Dickey's Passport to Survival.

The astonishing thing about the 110 recipes in Dickey's book is that they make use, almost exclusively, of only four ingredients: wheat, salt, honey and powdered milk. This makes Passport to Survival one of the most unusual cookbooks ever written.


Passport to Survival: Mormon survival manual

NY Times on urban "cavemen"

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 11:00 AM PST

The members of this paleo tribe in New York City eat lots of meat, fast frequently, donate blood to stress their systems, and exercise by "scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, [and] playing catch with stones."
NycpaleosMost of the cavemen at Mr. Durant's gatherings are lean and well-muscled, and have glowing skin. A few wear trim beards. Some claim that they no longer get sick. Several identify themselves as libertarians.

They regularly grumble about vegans, whom they regard as a misguided, rival tribe. But much of the conversation is spent parsing the law of the jungle. The most severe interpretations generally come from Vladimir Averbukh, a jaunty red-headed Web manager for the city who was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Upon visiting Mr. Durant's apartment for the first time, in August, Mr. Averbukh scowled at a tomato plant on his host's roof deck.

The New Age Cavemen and the City (Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)

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