The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on YouTube
- Musiques Traditionelles du Burundi
- Pirate Radio documentary
- Homebrew Turing Machine
- Austrian Alpine Aquaculture
- Cantos De Aves Do Brasil
- OMG Cat cannot unsee the horror: Kill Bill remix
- Metzger's Q&A with Cusack on "Hot Tub Time Machine"
- A look at the Comic Zeal comic book reader on iPad
- Nerd vs. Dork vs. Geek: The Venn Diagram
- Former militiaman unapologetic for calls to vandalize offices over health care
- Tiger Lillies creepy cabaret punk
- Art of the Toilet Seat
- Rare 78's Heaven Part 2: Excavated Shellac
- Miro, the free video player, goes 3.0
- Museum acquires the @ symbol for its collection
- Cocaine and Grand Theft Auto
- 19th century political cartoons reveal timeless scumbaggery of US senators
- Rejected poster art for Broadway revival of "La Cage aux Folles"
- Consumer rights briefing on UK Digital Economy Bill for MPs
- Invasive species befuddles authorities, wins adoring fans
- Discarded photocopier hard drives stuffed full of corporate secrets
- The ongoing mis-adventures of Thomas A. Edison
- Internet censorship harms schools
- Secret copyright treaty will sideline the UN and replace it with private club of rich countries
| Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on YouTube Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:33 PM PDT  Sony Entertainment has shut down Beyonce's official YouTube site. Congrats to Sony Entertainment for wisely spending its legal dollars and working on behalf of its artists. Truly, you deserve many laws and secret treaties passed to protect your "business model" (how else could such a delicate flower survive the harsh realities of the real world?). YouTube - beyonce's Channel (via Motherboard) Previously:
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| Musiques Traditionelles du Burundi Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:44 PM PDT  This album from the legenday Ocora label is really one of my favorites on the planet. When I first heard these two girls sing I had to be actively convinced it wasn't just pieces of a tape recording that had been spliced together! (Ocora co-founder Pierre Schaeffer also pioneered the early tape-splicing music movement known as Musique Concrete, so I wasn't totally nuts): I just wrote about the amazing ability of some birds to sing multiple notes at once. This woman's ability to switch rapidly between her head and chest voice is totally daring anyone to say humans couldn't defy all odds and learn to do it too: The liner notes for these songs say that this woman is using her lips as a reed. If you listen carefully, you can hear the switch over to her normal voice. It's a traditional kind of song for mourning: Unfortunately, like many on Ocora, this album is exceedingly rare. Let this be another call for re-issues! The cover of the Musiques du Cameroun album is worth tracking down all on its own... This post is part of a series about music that disorients the senses. I've found that some of the most amazing and jarring auditory illusions are not the usual scientifically distilled or synthesized ones, they're often found in folk music and made by people's voices. Of course, in a way, it makes perfect sense - the vocal chords are some of the most complex and advanced musical instruments in existence. They are ubiquitously available, and we've been experimenting with them for longer than any other sound-making implement. |
| Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:25 PM PDT Matt "Pirate's Dilemma" Mason teamed up with VICE/Palladium to shoot a short documentary on the current state of pirate radio in London (with an excursion to an old sea fort). Lots of climbing on roofs, setting up bootleg electronics in parking garages, loud music, and running away from radio cops. Nice work. Exploration #6 - London Pirate Radio (Thanks, Matt!) Previously: |
| Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:16 PM PDT Mike Davey, a maker from Wisconsin, built a classic Turing Machine with a 1000 foot instruction tape that holds up to 10k. Though Turing's machine was just a thought experiment, the paper in which it is described has enough detail to create it in real life. The machining is absolutely lovely, and when it's in motion, it's a thing of beauty. DIY Turing Machine (IEEE Spectrum)) (Thanks, Erico!) Previously: |
| Posted: 26 Mar 2010 10:22 PM PDT There's been a lot of press about Aquaponics and sustainable fish farming cropping up lately, so I wanted to share this astonishingly beautiful example: Sepp Holzer lives on a mountaintop in Austria, where he casually but thoughtfully manages a fish farm that provides all of his food, clean water, income, and electricity through nothing but a series of carefully placed pond systems. Gravity pulls the water from pond to pond, and little micro-organism-eating fish are gradually replaced by bigger and bigger predatory fish until he has clean water and full-sized trout! It's so simple it might seem like magic, but it's actually cooler than that.
You can watch another short profile about Holzer's paradise here, and go here to see Eco Film's entire series on Permaculture. |
| Posted: 26 Mar 2010 04:51 PM PDT  I recently learned that some birds have been found to be able to isolate and control different parts of their vocal tract independently, allowing them to sing simultaneous double tones or alternate between frequencies very rapidly. I'm not sure about the particular species below, but I think it's safe to say that numerous birds on this album are at least using similar 'mad avian skills' to sound like synthesizers. This album, recorded by celebrated ornithologist Johan Dalgas Frisch, (and first released on the Sabia label in 1961), was once in the Top 50 of Brasil's popular record sales. President João Goulart actually gave JFK a copy when he came to visit (click on thumbnail below for photographic evidence). Talk about a country with its musical priorities in the right place! This collection of recordings isn't readily available in the states, but if you can't track down a used LP or torrent, it looks like you can buy it from this site in Brasil. This post is a special 'avian edition' of a series about music that disorients the senses. I've found that some of the most amazing and jarring auditory illusions are not the usual scientifically distilled or synthesized ones, they're often found in folk music and made by people's voices. Of course, in a way, it makes perfect sense - the vocal chords are some of the most complex and advanced musical instruments in existence. They are ubiquitously available, and we've been experimenting with them for longer than any other sound-making implement. |
| OMG Cat cannot unsee the horror: Kill Bill remix Posted: 26 Mar 2010 07:07 PM PDT |
| Metzger's Q&A with Cusack on "Hot Tub Time Machine" Posted: 26 Mar 2010 01:57 PM PDT Over at the LA Times Brand X blog, Richard Metzger has a Q&A up with (future Boing Boing guestblogger) John Cusack on the '80s nostalgia-loaded Hot Tub Time Machine, which opens today in theaters nationwide. There are thumbs-up reviews in the LA Times and NY Times today too, and a fun NYT Q&A to boot. Here's a related Boing Boing post with trailer and discussion. |
| A look at the Comic Zeal comic book reader on iPad Posted: 26 Mar 2010 02:06 PM PDT  My preferred way of reading comic books is in print. I doubt that will change. (The smell of a comic book alone is reason enough. Whenever I take a deep whiff of my old comic books, the reward center of my brain blossoms.) That said, I'm really looking forward to reading old, previously rare comic books on an iPad. Lots of people scan out-of-print comics books and upload them to the Web, so a lifetime of free comic book reading awaits! Here are some notes on the upcoming iPad compatible version of the comic book reader Comic Zeal: Comic Zeal 4 is able to read CBZ,ZIP,CBR and RAR files natively. So you can just fire up SyncDocs on your PC or Mac, drag in a whole bunch of CBZ files and import them into Comic Zeal.Spilling the beans on Comic Zeal V4 |
| Nerd vs. Dork vs. Geek: The Venn Diagram Posted: 26 Mar 2010 01:05 PM PDT |
| Former militiaman unapologetic for calls to vandalize offices over health care Posted: 26 Mar 2010 01:00 PM PDT Smells like Tea Spirit: Mike Vanderboegh, the anti-health-care Libertarian blogger who urged people to vandalize Democratic offices around the country lives on federal government disability checks. Washington Post has the story. |
| Tiger Lillies creepy cabaret punk Posted: 26 Mar 2010 07:44 PM PDT Matt Groening is curating one of the All Tomorrow's Parties music festivals in Somerset, England this May, and the lineup is fantastic, featuring Iggy and the Stooges, Coco Rosie, Daniel Johnston, Joanna Newsom, and a bunch of other acts. Also playing is the surreal three-piece Tiger Lilies, whose spooky Brechtian cabaret style is sure to give you nightmares that will shock and entertain. For example, please to enjoy the wonderful video for Tiger Lillies' "Living Hell." It was directed by San Francisco photographer Mark Holthusen. Also worth noting is that in 2003, Tiger Lilies released a collaboration with Kronos Quartet and Edward Gorey in which they translated some of his unpublished stories into songs. The resulting CD, The Gorey End, was nominated for a Grammy. (Thanks, Chris Edmundson!) |
| Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:56 AM PDT  The Tattoo Factory in Chicago is featuring a show of paintings on toilet seats. It opens tonight! (Top left: Kirsten Easthope. Top right: Derek Yaniger. Bottom row: Mitch O'Connell).
Opening Night Friday, March 26th 6pm - 11pm Art of the Toilet Seat |
| Rare 78's Heaven Part 2: Excavated Shellac Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:59 AM PDT  Yesterday I wrote about curator Ian Nagoski's wonderful 78's collection and I thought I'd share another phenomenal collector, Jonathan Ward of the prolific Excavated Shellac blog. Kr. Irama, by Moh. Sjah & Orkes Kerontjong M. Sagi This song from Indonesia is totally fantastic--I love the dizzying scales and intonation of the walking guitar in the background in contrast with the sailing violin and vocals. Jonathan says "Krontjong itself is a relatively new type of urban folk music, developing in Indonesian urban areas a little over 100 years ago, with Batavian, Portuguese, Malay, and even African influence". See the original post and many many more at Excavated Shellac. Another fav is this trio of songs "sung by the female duet of Tupou and Fakaua, two ladies-in-waiting of the Tongan queen Sālote Mafile'o Pilolevu Tupou III, who reigned from 1918 to 1965. The young duo were invited to the UK in 1954 and stayed sixteen days. They performed traditional songs for Queen Elizabeth, and recorded six sides for the company on their trip. " For those fortunates in the Los Angeles area, Jonathan will be DJing a set of rare 78's of music from Kurdistan to Madagascar this Sunday, March 28th. Show starts at 3PM at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park. More info here. |
| Miro, the free video player, goes 3.0 Posted: 26 Mar 2010 11:30 AM PDT  Miro (formerly Democracy Player) is a free/open video player that automates subscribing to feeds of videos that are fetched down using Bittorrent (meaning that the creators of videos don't have to have the money for bandwidth) and then played in a flexible player that supports practically every format. The effect is great: pick a channel of videos that you like, subscribe, and forget about it -- Miro downloads episodes as they're available and just plays 'em, no matter what file format they're in. Nicholas Reville from Miro sez, "In our relentless quest to make great free and open-source software and help decentralize media, we have just released Miro 3.0, a major update that adds support for subtitles. We're also releasing a brand new application called Miro Video Converter, which is a really easy way to convert any video to MP4 or devices, but more importantly is the only easy way to convert a video to patent-free OGG Theora using the latest high-quality encoding (which really does rival the quality of h.264). We created this converter because our campaign to get Video on Wikipedia was only practical if people had an easy way to make Ogg Theora videos." Miro 3: An amazing open-source, non-profit video player. (Disclosure: I have the honor to serve as a volunteer on Miro's Board of Directors) (Thanks, Nicholas!) |
| Museum acquires the @ symbol for its collection Posted: 26 Mar 2010 12:20 PM PDT The @ symbol is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. While it sounds like a Dadaist prank, the MoMA is very serious about this acquisition. That said, they're not blind to the conceptual artyness of the news. From the MoMA, where you can also read a fascinating history of the symbol: @ at MoMA (via Imaginary Foundation) |
| Posted: 26 Mar 2010 12:21 PM PDT  Tom Bissell is a young book author and contributor to The New Yorker and Harper's. He is also a cocaine addict and Grand Theft Auto enthusiast. In The Observer this week, he wrote a fascinating piece about the relationship between blow and gaming, and the impact of both on his life. From The Observer: In Vegas I had made a friend who shared my sacramental devotion to marijuana, my dilated obsession with gaming and my ballistic impatience to play GTA IV. When I was walking home from my neighbourhood game store with my reserved copy of GTA IV in hand, I called my friend to tell him. He let me know that, to celebrate the occasion, he was bringing over some "extra sweetener". My friend's taste in recreational drug abuse vastly exceeded my own, and this extra sweetener turned out to be an alarming quantity of cocaine, a substance with which I had one prior and unexpectedly amiable experience, though I had not seen a frangible white nugget of the stuff since.Video games: the addiction (Thanks, Lyn Jeffery!) |
| 19th century political cartoons reveal timeless scumbaggery of US senators Posted: 26 Mar 2010 10:37 AM PDT  Puck was a political satire magazine founded in New York in 1877. Each issue contained several beautifully-rendered cartoons. David Donihue of I.T.C.H. (International Team of Comics Historians) has a nice post about one of Puck's most well-known cartoonists, Joseph Keppler. By the early 1880s, Keppler was the most famous cartoonist in America. He and his team tackled a wide range of topics including political campaigns, religious hypocrisy, labor boycotts, international trade, immigration and more. One of their finest series focused on the growing economic and political threat of monopolies and the control they exerted on the media. Many of these cartoons ridiculed the men who became known as the robber barons. In 1882, Puck's editor, H.C. Brunner wrote, "There must be something wrong, either in the laws or social system, by which one man can acquire so much wealth and power to the detriment of other men."Caricature vs. the Corporation: The Garden Party of the Monopolists by Joseph Keppler |
| Rejected poster art for Broadway revival of "La Cage aux Folles" Posted: 26 Mar 2010 10:12 AM PDT  The New York Times has great audio/visual presentations. This one, featuring narration by Drew Hodges of the advertising agency Spotco, is especially good. Hodges comments on the rejected poster art for for the Broadway revival of La Cage aux Folles. On Dinosaurs and Robots, Mister Jalopy writes: The far lower right is the final decision and I understand their requirement of flexibility in being able to use the image in many sizes and formats but, my goodness, there were some beautiful rejects. I like the Liquid Sky-style poster in the bottom row, second from the left. The money spent on this many iterations is stunning. Big business!Ad Evolution: 'La Cage aux Folles' |
| Consumer rights briefing on UK Digital Economy Bill for MPs Posted: 26 Mar 2010 10:00 AM PDT Britain's Consumer Focus just sent a briefing on the dread Digital Economy Bill to every UK Member of Parliament. Parliament is preparing to pass the 24,000+ word legislation -- which includes the power to disconnect whole households from the internet if any family-members are accused of breaching copyright -- without a full debate. (Normally, legislation like this would go through 60 to 80 hours of line-by-line committee scrutiny). This is a great document, and it's a great primer on the Bill that you can crib from when you write to your MP about this. Consumer Focus is greatly concerned about the provisions for technical measures in the Bill, Clauses 10 to 13, the appeals process through which subscribers can appeal against copyright infringement notices issued by rights owners, Clause 14, and the so called website blocking amendment 120A, now Clause 18.Digital Economy Bill briefing (PDF 83 KB) (Thanks, Saskia!) Previously:
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| Invasive species befuddles authorities, wins adoring fans Posted: 26 Mar 2010 09:52 AM PDT "This monkey is not outsmarting us. This monkey is getting away based on its athletic ability developed over years and years of evolution." — Gary Morse of Florida's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, on the elusive Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay. For those keeping score at home, the Monkey now has more than 30,000 Facebook friends. |
| Discarded photocopier hard drives stuffed full of corporate secrets Posted: 26 Mar 2010 10:51 AM PDT Your office's high-end photocopier probably has a hard-drive used to store copies of documents that are scanned from the glass. Harvesting scanned documents from discarded office copiers (often returned at the end of a lease) yields a treasure-trove of fascinating corporate secrets. High-tech copy machines a gold mine for data thieves (via Schneier) (Image: keypad photocopier, a Creative Commons Attribution image from Mr Thinktank's photostream) Previously:
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| The ongoing mis-adventures of Thomas A. Edison Posted: 26 Mar 2010 08:58 AM PDT  Yesterday, Thomas Edison set W. H. Vanderbilt's house on fire. Today, America's most prolific inventor terrorizes the horses of New York City, and gets propositioned by unscrupulous businessmen. But first, background. I'm currently writing a book about the mix of energy technologies we're going to have to adopt over the next 20 years—in order to avoid some of the less-fun consequences of climate change—and how changing the way we use energy will change the way we live. As a reference, I'm taking a peek into the past, to see what happened the last time we radically altered our energy infrastructure. It's easy to forget, but electricity wasn't always the reliable, user-friendly energy source it is today. Once upon a time, it was just another unproven technology, with a lot of flabby bugs that needed a good working out. Hilarity, as they say, ensued. Like the time a faulty junction box turned a major New York City intersection into one giant joy buzzer. It happened shortly after Thomas Edison opened the world's first commercial electric plant, at 255 Pearl Street, in 1882.
This sort of thing kept happening until Edison and his men were able to get the current shut off, and the police were able to clear away the moderately sadistic crowd. (Were people really nicer to each other back in the good old days? I'm not so sure.) The next day, Edison got a visitor ...
Quoted text taken from Edison's autobiographical notes, recorded in "The Papers of Thomas A. Edison, Volume 6". Edited by Paul B. Israel, et. al. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2007. Image courtesy Flickr user B.Sandman, via CC |
| Internet censorship harms schools Posted: 26 Mar 2010 03:33 PM PDT MItch Wagner sez, "I've done a series of blog posts on the subject of how Internet censorship harms American schools, based on conversations with Craig Cunningham, an associate professor, in the Technology in Education Program at National-Louis University. The latest is 'How Internet censorship harms schools.' Readers asked for examples of how heavy-handed Internet filtering software hurts education. Here are a few, with pointers to more." Other blockages include Melville's Moby Dick. Every time I give a school talk, I ask teachers and students for examples of how blocking harms their education, and every teacher has a list of problems a mile long -- horror stories about setting up a lesson plan in the morning with links to videos and web-sites, only to discover by the afternoon that key URLs have been erroneously blocked. And yet, every group of students I speak to has no problem coming up with ways to evade censorware. Which means that we're not stopping kids from doing naughty things -- just driving them to keep their network activity hidden from the educators who are supposed to be helping them navigate the information age, while confounding their teachers' ability to use legitimate materials in the classroom. How Internet censorship harms schools (Thanks, Mitch!) Previously:
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| Secret copyright treaty will sideline the UN and replace it with private club of rich countries Posted: 26 Mar 2010 08:20 AM PDT Ever since the full text of the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) leaked earlier this week, scholars and activists have been poring over the document, finding the buried bodies. Today, Michael Geist discusses the way that ACTA makes the UN copyright agency, WIPO, irrelevant, replacing it with a private members' club composed of rich countries that get to dictate information policy to poor countries. For the past two years, most of the ACTA discussion has centered on two issues: (1) substantive concerns such as the possibility of three strikes and a renegotiation of the WIPO Internet treaties; and (2) transparency issues. The leak of the comprehensive ACTA text highlights the fact that a third issue should be part of the conversation. The text reveals that ACTA is far more than a simple trade agreement. Rather, it envisions the establishment of a super-structure that replicates many of the responsibilities currently assumed by the World Intellectual Property Organization. Given the public acknowledgement by negotiating countries that ACTA is a direct response to perceived gridlock at WIPO, some might wonder whether ACTA is ultimately designed to replace WIPO as the primary source of international IP law and policy making.Toward an ACTA Super-Structure: How ACTA May Replace WIPO Previously:
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The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that "cannot be had"--because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747's, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @--as art objects befitting MoMA's collection...
Of the dozens of multi-purpose copiers Beitner has cleaned out in the past two years, he has seen hundreds of scanned documents that would be considered confidential. As a personal policy, he never reads them, but can easily tell where they are by the file names and sizes. 
The Canadian National History Society was forced to change the name of its magazine, The Beaver, founded in 1920, because the name of the magazine caused it to be blocked by Internet filters. | You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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