The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Velvet Underground vs. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell
• What's up on the Internet: Yaka-wow!
• Volcano science update: Two surprising reasons to go boom
• Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are planning to have the Pope arrested in the UK
• Mother explains why she gives pot to her 9-year-old autistic son
• Chimerical Avatars and Other Identity Experiments from Prof. Fox Harrell
• PlayPen: an open-ended adventure game made of Wiki
• SIDTube: Watch Sleep Is Death stories, play online
• Just look at this bad-ass volcano
• Cookbook typo: "salt and freshly ground black people"
• Venus flytraps in the wild, and in danger
• Creepy disembodied robot mouth
• Compilation of people on YouTube "Hey, Guys"
• Crayon rockets
• The Alot, an imaginary mammal
• Amazon's plans to kill book publishers thwarted by Apple
• Daniel Rubin's celebrity caricatures
• Cocaine smuggler's bestiality farm
• Sly Stone at Coachella defies understanding
• Lib Dems soar in UK polls after debate
• Adam Savage's speech to the Harvard humanists
• iPhone 4G details emerge
• The Asian Art Museum does Shanghai: opium hulks, Communist propaganda, and neon brush strokes
• GoogleSharing: blending your net-activity with others to trick Google
• TOR for Android: anonymize your phone's data-connection
• George Washington owes $100K in library fines

Velvet Underground vs. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell Posted: 19 Apr 2010 09:00 PM PDT My pal Tara over at Dangerous Minds found this mashup of Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell doing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." As someone who considers VU one of the greatest bands of all time, and also has a lifelong love of old soul, I was expecting the worst but hoped for the strange. On that, I think it delivers.

What's up on the Internet: Yaka-wow! Posted: 19 Apr 2010 05:16 PM PDT Are you a breezy person who goes, "Yaka-wow!"? Maybe you already were, and just didn't know it. Alice Bell, science communication lecturer at Imperial College, London, explains: The main reason we've all been saying yakawow is simply because it's a cool word. It should be used more. Try saying it yourself out loud - yakawow, yaka-wow. Doesn't it just make your mouth happy? More specifically, yaka-wow is the accidental brainchild of British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield. In the UK, Greenfield is known for holding the rather controversial position that use of computers and video games irreparably damages children's brains—unless, of course, said children are using her computer games, in which case they will become smarter. You see the problem. Last Thursday, Greenfield gave an interview to the London Times, which led to this fabulous exchange: She doesn't think computer games are life-threatening, like smoking, but she says that they are as much of a risk to mankind as climate change. [...] She is concerned that those who live only in the present, online, don't allow their malleable brains to develop properly. "It's not going to destroy the planet but is it going to be a planet worth living in if you have a load of breezy people who go around saying yaka-wow. Is that the society we want?" Within hours, yaka-wow had inspired a Twitter stream, poster, T-shirt and burgeoning personal philosophy. But why yaka-wow? Bell says it's probably a fortuitous typo: As it turns out, Greenfield wasn't just making up an odd phrase. It seems to be a transcription error of "yuck and wow", a phrase Greenfield has often used to describe the way people act online, running quickly from one sensation to another. Greenfield famously refereed to the banality of twitter as, "Marginally reminiscent of a small child saying, 'Look at me, look at me mummy! Now I've put my sock on. Now I've got my other sock on.'" Naturally, that quote inspired mathematician Matt Parker to thoroughly wow the web by pulling both his socks on at the same time. Image courtesy the brilliant mind of Adam Rutherford.

Volcano science update: Two surprising reasons to go boom Posted: 19 Apr 2010 05:44 PM PDT Geologic wonder and part-time smoke bomb, Eyjafjallajokull, was still burping out ash clouds today, though experts say the eruption is showing signs of slowing down. Our thoughts are with all the stranded travelers and the tongue-tied TV journalists forced to go on trying to pronounce the volcano's name. On the plus side, the Eyjafjallajokull eruption has become a bright and shiny news hook for all sorts of interesting volcano science stories. First fun fact:One volcanic eruption can trigger a blast in a nearby volcano You may have heard that eruptions of Eyjafjallajokull have, in the past, been followed by eruptions at nearby, easier-to-pronounce Mt. Katla. There's not enough data to know whether that connection is more than coincidence, but there is a scientific basis behind the speculation. Volcanoes explode because the pressure of the magma building up in the chamber forces it out, which then relieves the stress in the chamber; but what relieves stress in the one chamber could increase stress in a neighboring chamber. Next up: Some recent research suggests that climate change could trigger more frequent eruptions in Iceland How's that supposed to work? Like linking individual volcanoes, it's all about pressure. As glaciers and ice caps melt—which they are—there's less pressure on the crust of the Earth below. Relieving that weight makes it easier for subsurface rock to become magma. Increased levels of magma mean the volcanoes that pop up out of the ice cap are likely to erupt more frequently—say, a 30-year gap between eruptions, rather than a 58-year gap. That effect could carry over to other volcano-prone places that are suffering from a lot of ice melt. Alaska, for instance.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are planning to have the Pope arrested in the UK Posted: 19 Apr 2010 03:37 PM PDT It's a buddy-cop movie plot for the new millennium: Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are teaming up to arrest the Pope when he comes to Britain in September. Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: "This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence." Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment." Richard Dawkins calls for arrest of Pope Benedict XVI

Mother explains why she gives pot to her 9-year-old autistic son Posted: 19 Apr 2010 03:30 PM PDT Marie Myung-Ok Lee wrote a great piece for Slate about giving cannabis to her 9-year-old autistic son. Last summer, we reached the six-month mark in our cannabis experiment. We'd been using medical marijuana to help quell our autistic son's gut pain and anxiety, and we were seeing some huge changes in his behavior and, presumably, his happiness. J was smiling, interacting (one of home-based therapists said she'd never encountered such an affectionate autistic child), even putting his dirty dishes in the dishwasher—rinsing and everything!—not only without being told, but without ever having been asked to do such a thing. The more I'd been reading, along with J's doctor, about the effects of cannabis—analgesic, anti-anxiety, safe—the more it seemed a logical choice. I've also heard from other parents who've decided to try cannabis for their children. One of the kids has Smith-Magenis, a genetic disorder that includes autismlike behavioral symptoms including self-injury. Another is an autistic child who'd refused to eat and was near death. Post-marijuana, he is thriving. The Smith-Magenis boy, who'd been about to start court-ordered medication, is also doing well. Why I Give My 9-Year-Old Pot

Chimerical Avatars and Other Identity Experiments from Prof. Fox Harrell Posted: 19 Apr 2010 04:44 PM PDT After spending his youth happily playing computer and table-top role-playing games as pale-grey-skinned elves with long, straight, silver hair (usually over one eye), or "forcing African-coifed robot pilots into the anime world of Macross," Fox Harrel says he started wanting to play characters that expressed and presented themselves in ways that captured his real world cultural values, though still set in those same fantasy worlds. That hasn't always come easily. I asked Fox, a computer scientist and literary artist, for some examples. Fox: In terms of software, the systems for creating identities have never seemed adequate for my self-expression. Let's just take computer role-playing games for example: In Elder Scrolls III and IV: I wanted to create a character I could identify as African-inspired (the "Redguard race") but then was automatically made less intelligent. In Guild Wars: Nightfall, I could make an African-inspired character - but I wanted to both have [dread]locks and wear ornate masquerade-style clothing. I could not - locks were allowed for the earthy Ranger class, and the clothes only allowed with the illusion-casting Mesmer class - never to be combined. In Phantasy Star Online, I wanted to be elegant and clean-lined, and smartly-appointed. I could only be a female robot (called a Cast), males were always boxy and hulking. In Neverwinter Nights, I could actually make a character I was very happy with, but in Neverwinter Nights 2 the style was removed. In World of Warcraft, my first inclination was to play a spectral, Undead, ghostlike character - but the males all had poor posture, distended jaws, hulking shoulders, and silly hairstyles. In these games, your appearances, abilities, eventualities and more are all often tied in with categories for race, class (profession), gender, and more. Certainly, these limitations primarily are used for game-mechanical reasons - each player takes on a different, complimentary role (though primarily only for fighting). The limitations also lend a certain coherence to the fictitious worlds of the games. Yet, I often find that my own personal choices for self-expression are unsupported. It is not just well-known issues of race and gender. What if I simply want my character to be both rootsy and dainty? It all becomes more complicated when abilities are so closely tied with categories and appearances. Much more is at stake than just fun and games. Prejudice, bias, stereotyping, and stigma are built not only into many games, but other forms of identity representations in social networks, virtual worlds, and more. These have real world effects on how we see ourselves and each other. Even in systems that have very open identity creation options, like Second Life, there are still different valuations for skins, social groups and categories being formed, people playing out different personae...one realizes that identity is social matter, because even if one can create the perfect avatar, it does not mean that others will respond to it in the desired way that the person sees himself or herself. This means that even in social networking software, we create profiles that ostensibly represent our real selves, but they are limited by many of the same constraints as characters in games. Fox is a professor and director of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab/Studio at Georgia Tech. His research and software development are all about creating new opportunities for fluid, nuanced narratives, identities, and social categories to take shape--and shift shape--online. Shape-shifting poetics For example, one of Fox's artworks is an AI-based interactive narrative project called Loss, Undersea in which an avatar forms and morphs based on emotional tone ( demo video). Here's how Fox described it to me: Fox: The avatar starts as a human and is blended further and further with sea creatures. Artistically, it describes the poignant pathos of a civilization slipping into the sea, a transforming being losing more and more of herself or himself, mindless traveling through life as if on a moving platform. Such visions capture for me a sense of dissolution of joy, daily struggle for happiness, and the contrast between the rich mental lives of all individuals and narrow social prejudices that constrain people to discrete boxes. It also features poetry generated based on emotional tones selected by user actions. Profile pic as community-made metaphor Another project in the works at the ICE Lab/Studio is DefineMe: Chimera (beta-version), a Facebook app where users collectively determine their friends' identities. Fox: If I were to enter that "Lissa is courageous like a lion" and someone else enter that "Lissa is strong like a stegosaurus," the system would output a hybrid animal images as an avatar. The idea is to look at how people define each other socially, like the collective ratings of sellers on eBay, but through richer imagery and with more nuance. It is also about the difference between one's self-conception and how others might see her, an idea written about as long ago as W.E.B. DuBois's introduction of the term "Double Consciousness" in The Souls of Black Folk. In the end, I design these technologies for two reasons: (1) for users to represent identities in ways that are empowering and have the potential to increase their self-efficacy and agency in the real world, and (2) for artists to be able to use technologies to express, criticize, and change the ways that identities are used to oppress, discriminate, and otherwise disempower. Avatars may or may not be able to serve these needs, but basing such technologies on the best practices people use in the real world may be a step in enabling both of these directions. Conjuring social change through computation The young people I work with at Youth Radio-Youth Media International often write about their own shifting identities and question the social categories applied to them (see, for example, Mark Anthony Waters' story questioning solid gold masculinity). In light of all his work on technologies of identity, I asked Fox what he thinks young people need to know and be able to do if they're going to fully realize their own potentials and participate in the work and play that matters to them and their communities. Fox: I celebrate the skill and panache with which many young people can use media creatively and form new communities and practices. At the same time, I want them also to be able to create media themselves and not have to rely upon frameworks that others, who may not have their best interests at heart, create for them. This means that computational literacy is not just using computers, but it also is not just learning computer science. It also should mean being able to think critically about how data-structures and processes both operate and impact the world. But we should not even stop there! They need to learn to think critically about how these technologies empower or disempower them, and how such computational media might be taken up more imaginatively in order to conjure phantasms with the potential to change their world for the better. What's more... Though Fox's experiments let users re-imagine characters' outward appearances, what strikes me about his work is its appreciation of interiority, shifting and messy as it can be. It also gets me thinking about Henry Jenkins' idea that one of the hallmarks of digital media literacy is what he calls " distributed cognition," which holds that thought doesn't live inside an individual's brain. Cognition takes root and evolves across multiple minds, through social activities and connections. It seems to me Fox's DefineMe app pushes that thinking into a new realm: distributed identity formation. It's not that I want or need other people to tell me who I am. It's that I hope we can find and form communities that care enough to try.

PlayPen: an open-ended adventure game made of Wiki Posted: 19 Apr 2010 01:55 PM PDT In other free-form gaming developments, Farbs -- the mind behind local favorite 'Game To Get', Captain Forever -- has officially unveiled PlayPen, a community site that harnesses the scale and ease-of-use of wikis and morphs it into an open-ended lo-fi adventure game. Which makes it sound a bit more complicated than it actually is: in essence, PlayPen is a low-res pixel-art editor that allows anyone to branch or modify individual screens, hyperlinking them in as many varied directions as you or anyone could imagine. Is it chaos? It absolutely, beautifully is: even in the few short days that the public release has been open, it's already seen some 1500 new pages added, with paths laid down to meet pathetic gnome-centaurs while on mushroom-addled freakouts, or, uh, unmediated poetry discussions with Duck Harold Bloom, which is about all you could ask for -- and is yours for the modifying if it doesn't live up to your darkest desires. PlayPen [Farbs]

SIDTube: Watch Sleep Is Death stories, play online Posted: 19 Apr 2010 01:20 PM PDT Even though Jason Rohrer's mediated-multiplayer storytelling engine Sleep is Death -- first featured here on Boing Boing -- has only been in the hands of early buyers for just over a week (with a wider official release date due tomorrow), third parties have already jumped into the fray to support its fast-growing community of players. Chief among these is SIDTube, a low-res but highly-functional site featuring both matchmaking capabilities to host and play online with friends and strangers alike, and a gallery of completed stories that can be flipped through and rated. Above: The Machine, a Modern Times-ish slapstick story by one 'FranticPea', with plenty more available for your perusal. For more info on Sleep is Death and to get the game yourself, check Rohrer's official site. Previously: Caught Sleeping - Brandon Boyer vs. Jason Rohrer

Just look at this bad-ass volcano Posted: 19 Apr 2010 12:46 PM PDT Amazing volcano pictures. Boston.com's Big Picture has them all.

Cookbook typo: "salt and freshly ground black people" Posted: 19 Apr 2010 12:09 PM PDT Penguin Group Australia accidentally published copies of the Pasta Bible containing an unfortunate spell check error. A recipe calling for "salt and freshly ground black pepper" actually read "salt and freshly ground black people." The company is destroying and reprinting 7,000 copies of the book, but not recalling ones that have already hit bookstores. According to the company's head of publishing, Bob Sessions, it was an honest mistake. From The Age: "We're mortified that this has become an issue of any kind and why anyone would be offended, we don't know," he said... "In one particular recipe [a] misprint occurs which obviously came from a spellchecker. When it comes to the proofreader, of course they should have picked it up, but proofreading a cookbook is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable. "We've said to bookstores that if anyone is small-minded enough to complain about this ... silly mistake, we will happily replace [the book] for them." "Hot water over spell check" Previously: When spellcheckers attack: The Cupertino Effect Chinese restaurant called TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR Fun with punctuation

Venus flytraps in the wild, and in danger Posted: 19 Apr 2010 11:56 AM PDT The most famous of carnivorous plants, the Venus flytrap, is surprisingly rare in the wild. The plant is only found on the 100-mile-long wet pine savannas on the edge of South and North Carolina. And apparently, there are only 150,000 of them out there. And according to James Luken, a botanist at Coastal Carolina University, that population is in danger from development and poaching, among other threats. From Smithsonian (Wikimedia Commons image): In and around North Carolina's Green Swamp, poachers uproot them from protected areas as well as private lands, where they can be harvested only with an owner's permission. The plants have such shallow roots that some poachers dig them up with butcher knives or spoons, often while wearing camouflage and kneepads (the plants grow in such convenient clumps that flytrappers, as they're called, barely have to move). Each pilfered plant sells for about 25 cents. The thieves usually live nearby, though occasionally there's an international connection: customs agents at Baltimore-Washington International Airport once intercepted a suitcase containing 9,000 poached flytraps bound for the Netherlands, where they presumably would have been propagated or sold. The smuggler, a Dutchman, carried paperwork claiming the plants were Christmas ferns... There have been some victories: last winter, the Nature Conservancy replanted hundreds of confiscated flytraps in North Carolina's Green Swamp Preserve, and the state typically nabs about a dozen flytrappers per year. ("It's one of the most satisfying cases you can make," says Matthew Long of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, who keeps a sharp eye out for hikers with dirty hands.) Gadd and others are pushing for stronger statewide protections that would require collection and propagation permits. Though North Carolina has designated the flytrap as a "species of special concern," the plant doesn't enjoy the federal protections given to species classified as threatened or endangered... Recently, Luken and other scientists used a GPS device to check on wild flytrap populations that researchers had documented in the 1970s. "Instead of flytraps we'd find golf courses and parking lots," Luken says. "It was the most depressing thing I ever did in my life." Roughly 70 percent of the historic flytrap habitat is gone, they found. "The Venus Flytrap's Lethal Allure" Previously: Venus Fly trap time-lapse video Secrets of the Venus Flytrap Carnivorous plant photo gallery

Creepy disembodied robot mouth Posted: 19 Apr 2010 11:08 AM PDT Robotic mouth recites vowels, but doesn't seem too happy about it. (Via Robert Popper)

Compilation of people on YouTube "Hey, Guys" Posted: 19 Apr 2010 10:59 AM PDT Needs tighter editing, but it's still a little mind bending. (Via Zany Pickle)

Crayon rockets Posted: 19 Apr 2010 11:08 AM PDT Rocketry hobbyist John Coker created an 8-pack of rockets, designed and painted to mimic those crayon packs your folks used to buy you back in grade school. They were first launched back in 2004. On Coker's site, you can see all kinds of neat design notes that take you through the process of creating a novelty projectile. It's not quite a how-to, but it's still pretty nifty. (Via Jack Schofield) Previously: Video rocketeers enlist Gumby to pilot giant flying crayon - Boing ...

The Alot, an imaginary mammal Posted: 19 Apr 2010 10:24 AM PDT Behold the Alot, a large, shaggy beast found principally in internets. [Hyperbole and a Half via Ectomo]

Amazon's plans to kill book publishers thwarted by Apple Posted: 19 Apr 2010 10:04 AM PDT The New Yorker's Ken Auletta has a feature about the current power struggle between Apple, Amazon, and Google for the ebook market. "By the end of last year, Amazon accounted for an estimated eighty per cent of all electronic book sales, and $9.99 seemed established as the price of an e-book. Publishers were panicked," Auletta writes. After a confrontation with Amazon, five of the "big six" publishers have agreed to sell their e-books through Apple's iBooks store, where they will be allowed to set prices, to a certain extent. One Apple insider told Auletta, "Ultimately, Apple is in the device—not the content—business. Steve Jobs wants to make sure content people are his partner. Steve is in the I win/you win school. Jeff Bezos is in the I win/you lose school." Auletta's sources suggest that Amazon was making a bid to ramp up its publishing game. "What Amazon really wanted to do was make the price of e-books so low that people would no longer buy hardcover books. Then the next shoe to drop would be to cut publishers out and go right to authors," a close associate of Jeff Bezos told Auletta. "For the time being," Auletta writes, "Apple's interest in the book market has given publishers a reprieve. A close associate of Bezos said, 'Amazon was thinking of direct publishing—until the Apple thing happened.' " Publishers are also encouraged to know that Google will be opening Google Editions, an online e-books store, this summer. Dan Clancy, who will direct Google Editions, told Auletta that their store's e-books will be accessible to users of any device, and that Google Editions will let publishers set prices. "Having already digitized twelve million books," Auletta writes, "Google will have a far greater selection of books than Amazon or Apple. It will also make e-books available for bookstores to sell, giving 'the vast majority' of revenues to the store, Clancy said." Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business? (Illo by Paul Rogers)

Daniel Rubin's celebrity caricatures Posted: 19 Apr 2010 01:23 PM PDT Several years ago, I posted about a funny series of finance videos Daniel Rubin created for Motley Fool. Lately, Daniel has been drawing celebrity caricatures that remind me a bit of what a Hirschfeld/Savage Pencil collaboration might look like. And yes, I know that's a rather strange collaboration to imagine. Above left, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten; right, The Dude. Daniel Joshua Rubin (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

Cocaine smuggler's bestiality farm Posted: 19 Apr 2010 10:59 AM PDT Vann Hall writes: In Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale," a war breaks out between two NYC newspapers. One, the Sun, is a serious, NY Times-ish publication, while the other (the Ghost) is an over-the-top, Murdochian tabloid that often runs sensationalistic headlines that have nothing to do with the accompanying article -- assuming there even is an accompanying article. Hanging on the wall of the Sun's publisher is a framed copy of his favorite free-standing Ghost headline: "Dead Model Sues Race Horse." The headline from a recent Seattle Times Weekly blog entry is almost as good: "Douglas Spink, Ex-Cocaine Smuggler, Charged With Running Bestiality Farm for Tourists"

Sly Stone at Coachella defies understanding Posted: 19 Apr 2010 09:08 AM PDT Ben Greenman of The New Yorker says Sly Stone's exceedingly bizarre Coachella performance was an act of "obliterating rebellion."

Lib Dems soar in UK polls after debate Posted: 19 Apr 2010 09:52 AM PDT Many U.S. voters were outraged in the 2000 presidential election when Bush Jr. won despite losing the popular vote. But Britain's electoral map is even weirder. After a spectacular TV debate performance by the leader of the Liberal Democrats--traditional also-rans in UK general elections--the three main parties are nearly tied in polling. And yet still the Lib Dems would win only half the seats in parliament scored by either of the other two parties; and Labour, behind the other two in the polls, would win by far the most. A Sun newspaper poll, carried out after the TV debate, suggests Labour are in third place on 28% (down 3%), with the Lib Dems on 30% (up 8%) and the Conservatives 33% (down 4%). Applying the figures from The Sun poll, which came from a YouGov survey of 1,290 people, to the BBC News website's election seat calculator, results in the following: Labour 276 seats; Conservatives 245 seats; Lib Dems 100 seats; Others 29 seats. The BBC has a neat web app that illustrates the problem. For example, for each of the three parties to win 207 seats in Parliament, the Lib Dems would have to get 37.4% of the vote, the Conservatives 30%, and Labour only 24.5%.

Adam Savage's speech to the Harvard humanists Posted: 19 Apr 2010 08:36 AM PDT Photo: Troy Holden Harvard Secular Society conferred lifetime achievement awards on MythBusters' Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman this weekend. Adam's splendid acceptance speech follows. Food for The Eagle - Adam Savage's speech to Harvard humanists

iPhone 4G details emerge Posted: 19 Apr 2010 08:10 AM PDT Engadget gets shots of the new iPhone. But is it real? Gizmodo confirms the curious new design: it has the actual thing in hand. Glass on both sides? Gruber finds the patent.

The Asian Art Museum does Shanghai: opium hulks, Communist propaganda, and neon brush strokes Posted: 12 Apr 2010 11:55 AM PDT It Often Begins with a Smile, 1930s. By Jin Meisheng (19021989). Chromolithograph on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum. The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco has a great exhibit right now called Shanghai. I was drawn to it because I really enjoy the visual evolution of cities, but also because my mother's side of the family is from Shanghai and many of my ancestral anecdotes originate there. Shanghai has gone through some incredibly eclectic, non-linear changes in the last century and a half, from the early days of Western influence through the Cultural Revolution to post-revolution renewal; this year, it celebrates how far it's come by hosting the World Expo. Dany Chan, the museum's assistant curator for Chinese art, took me on a tour of the galleries last week. View of the Shanghai Bund, approx. 1862-1865 China; Gouache on paper; Peabody Essex Museum, E82723 One of the first things we looked at was this beautiful gouache painting of the Shanghai bund. Many paintings like this one were created by Chinese artists trained by merchants from the West. While nobody knows exactly who these artists are, experts can tell the approximate date of the paintings by the buildings, the types of ships, and the flags. This one, called View of the Shanghai Bund, is believed to be from sometime between 1862 and 1865; indicators include the double-decker opium hulks in the middle and far right, the steamboat in the center, and an office tower that was built around this time. Wandering Eyes Giving Way to Wandering Thoughts, 1890s. By Wu Youru (18391893). Ink on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum. If you walk through the main gallery in a circle, you see the art work sorted roughly by date. If you make parallel lines, you see it divide by themes — the center divide, for one, is dedicated to a study of women in Shanghai art. Until the late 19th century, women were only drawn on small portrait-sized paper and depicted in private settings. This changed in the 1880 and 1890s; this piece by Wu Youru, called Wandering Eyes Giving Way to Wandering Thoughts, shows a woman peering out her balcony. There's an electric streetlamp outside, which was super high-tech for the era. A Prosperous City That Never Sleeps, 1930s. By Yuan Xiutang (dates unknown). Chromolithograph on paper. Collection of the Shanghai History Museum. Shanghai's golden era spanned from around 1912 to 1949. Pictured here is one of many "modern girl" icons that were created during this time — pretty girls in qipaos against a urban cityscape, or in a dancehall, or in a movie poster. The economy was booming, creative freedom of expression flourished, and independent art studios were everywhere. Mao Zedong, 1968. By Yu Yunjie (Chinese, 19171992). Oil on canvas. Collection of the Shanghai Art Museum. The next section of the exhibit is 1920-1976: Revolution. In contrast to the glorious upper-class economic boom-time drawings, woodcut artists — led by the famous thinker Lu Xun — created socially and politically themed images depicting the lower classes. And then there was, of course, Mao's Cultural Revolution. Shanghai Number One Department Store, 1955. By Chen Fei (Chinese, dates unknown), published by the Shanghai Picture Publishing House. Chromolithograph on paper. Private collection. During the Cultural Revolution, all the private art studios were shut down and replaced by the government-owned Shanghai Picture Publishing House, where old artists were reformed and new artists were trained to create propaganda posters and ads. This one, called Shanghai Number One Department Store, shows a busy lower class superstore. It was the easiest and most efficient way to sell people on an idea. Those who publicly opposed this type of art were persecuted and publicly humiliated. LandscapeCommemorating Huang BinhongScroll, 2007. By Shen Fan (b. 1952). Installation with lights and sound. Courtesy of the artist. Fast forward to the present day. Freedom of artistic expression took awhile to resurrect ("All of China was taking a breather after the destruction and horror," Chan says of decade after Mao's death), but by the early 90s people in Shanghai and beyond were back to experimenting with art. This installation, created by artist Shen Fan in 2007, is a giant neon wall that pays homage to the 19th century art scholar Huang Binhong. Each neon tube represents a brush stroke; it lights up one tube at a time over the course of an hour to the sound of a qinqin. You can catch Shanghai at the Asian Art Museum through September 5th.

GoogleSharing: blending your net-activity with others to trick Google Posted: 19 Apr 2010 06:50 AM PDT GoogleSharing is a pretty ingenious new plugin and service for mixing up your search and browsing history with other net users and transmitting it to Google, so that you are harder to track. I couldn't find an independent source-code audit (which would be reassuring) -- anyone want to conduct one? The GoogleSharing system consists of a custom proxy and a Firefox Addon. The proxy works by generating a pool of GoogleSharing "identities," each of which contains a cookie issued by Google and an arbitrary User-Agent for one of several popular browsers. The Firefox Addon watches for requests to Google services from your browser, and when enabled will transparently redirect all of them (except for things like Gmail) to a GoogleSharing proxy. There your request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity. This "GoogleShared" request is then forwarded on to Google, and the response is proxied back to you. Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By "sharing" these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze. The GoogleSharing proxy even constantly injects false but plausible search requests through all the identities. GoogleSharing (via MacWorld UK)

TOR for Android: anonymize your phone's data-connection Posted: 19 Apr 2010 06:50 AM PDT TOR (The Onion Router, a technology for bouncing your traffic all over the net so that your ISP can't spy on you) is now available for Android phones. Just take a picture of the QR code on the right with your Barcode Scanner or Goggles app to install it. Tor on Android (via O'Reilly Radar) Previously: HOWTO use TOR to enhance your privacy HOWTO Use TOR to protect yourself from censorship and snooping ... Intro to TOR: how you can be an anti-censorship activist in your ... EFF and TOR in Google's Summer of Code!

George Washington owes $100K in library fines Posted: 19 Apr 2010 05:43 AM PDT According to an old ledger book, George Washington (the George Washington) checked two books (one on international law, one a transcript of debates in the British House of Commons) from the New York Society Library in October, 1789 and never returned them. His inflation-adjusted fines are now more than $100,000. John Adams also failed to return one of the books he checked out. According to its website, the New York Society Library was formed in 1754, and served as the first Library of Congress when New York was the capital. The ledger from that time period was lost for many years, but was rediscovered in the 1930s. It shows that many "founding fathers" besides Washington used the Library at that time, including Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Aaron Burr. According to the ledger, they all got their books back on time, but not the Father-in-Chief. "We're not actively pursuing the overdue fines," said head librarian Mark Bartlett, "but we would be very happy if we were able to get the books back." Fat chance, given that Washington died in 1799 and so his family has almost certainly grabbed all the good stuff by now. And for those of you hoping that this might be a case of mistaken paperwork rather than a book-swiping chief executive, further evidence came to light just last week that the two books are actually gone. A librarian apparently stumbled upon the set of "Commons Debates" volumes, which it seems had been misplaced, and all 14 volumes were there -- except for Volume 12, the one Washington checked out. President Accused of Theft, Failing to Pay Massive Library Fines Previously: Judge orders woman to return two library books or go to jail ... Library celebrates Banned Books Week with window-display featuring ... Kid keeping a lending library of banned books in his her locker ... Man returns library book due in 1955 Burning the library in slow motion: how copyright extension has ... Children's book library from 1937: My Book House

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