Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Legal blackmail: comprehensive look at tactics of copyright bounty-hunters

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 02:23 AM PDT


Earlier this month, a concerted denial of service attack by 4chan members against the UK law firm ACS:Law resulted in the disclosure of an enormous trove of internal emails from the firm. The mail archive was quickly packaged up and distributed online through sites like The Pirate Bay, and analyses of their contents have begun to show up online -- for example, UK ISP Sky Broadband was upset to discover that ACS:Law's leak included the personal information of 4,000 of its customers (Sky provided ACS with this information in response to paid requests that ACS made in order to send legal threats to Sky's customers). Sky says that it will no longer provide ACS with customer data.

This is the heart of the matter: ACS:Law is the last firm in the UK that is in the business of sending "legal blackmail" letters to accused copyright infringers, mostly on behalf of the pornography industry (the "legal blackmail" appellation comes directly from a House of Lords debate over ACS's tactics). And ACS is attempting to branch out into the USA, where statutory damages for copyright infringement open the doors to even more money.

The best analysis of the ACS emails to date comes from this long, investigative piece by Ars Technica's Nate Anderson, who assembles the huge corpus of emails into a coherent narrative explaining how ACS operates, with emphasis on the unethical behavior that made it the most hated law firm in the UK. If you only read one story about "anti-piracy" operations, read this one.

The Blackpool municipal government also objected to Crossley's tactics. ACS Law was contacted by Blackpool, which complained that local citizens "have been significantly distressed by your letter and feel compelled to pay. You say that your letters are not demands but compromise agreements, but any bundle of documents sent by a law 'firm' headed with the words 'Letter of claim; Infringement of Copyright' is likely to cause distress and mislead the consumer into making a transactional decision they would not otherwise make... None of the complainants have any recollection of having downloaded the tracks in dispute."

The Blackpool official then notes that under UK law, damages are fixed at "economic loss, either realised or potential." When it comes to music tracks, the loss equals "the approximate market value of the track as a single download--79p. Without further transparency as to the legal costs mentioned above, I would imagine that this would be sufficient to bring the matter to a close."

Indeed, the justice of this remark about damages haunts Crossley. One of his own legal advisors tells him that "establishing damages beyond the value of the gross profit of one copy of the work is problematic." In other words, a few pence for music. The advisor goes on to note that the one court case which would seem to prove the opposite "has, in my opinion, about as much legal force as a Sun newspaper headline regarding the licentious behaviour of a D list celebrity."

The "legal blackmail" business: inside a P2P settlement factory

(Image: Blackmail, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from joshpatten's photostream)



Working computer made out of Minecraft blocks

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 11:29 PM PDT

YouTube's TheInternetFTW shows off this arithmetic logic unit (ALU) that he's built out of blocks and chunks in the game Minecraft. It's part of a larger "Hack" computer (as described in Elements of Computing Systems).

So basically, this is a computer subcomponent that you can run around on, physically moving around and watching as it does its thing. It's the 21st century equivalent of the wonderful Bell Labs Cardiac Computer that I played with as a child -- a cardboard computer that got me interested in computing when I was six or seven. It is the virtual made visceral, an unpacked microscopic mystery. It is sheer genius, better than any ten boring lectures on ALUs, computing theory, Boolean math, etc. It's the kind of thing that makes me wish I was a kid today, and glad that I have a kid of my own.

16-bit ALU in minecraft (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)



NY town would dig up bodies of two local Muslims and shutter tiny cemetery

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 10:26 PM PDT

The "good people" of a the tiny upstate NY town of Sidney, Delaware County, are lobbying to dig up the bodies of two local Muslims buried in a Sufi cemetery that the town approved in 2005, much to the horror of the departeds' loved ones. Town supervisor Bob McCarthy cites a nonexistent law requiring permits for cemeteries on private land (although the town has, in fact, given this cemetery a permit). McCarthy also claims that the cemetery's owners "just came in and buried the bodies" -- despite the fact that the first burial involved a police motorcade.

An email forwarded to a Huffington Post reporter purportedly from McCarthy to another party cites phone conversations with someone with Tea Party affiliation who "...wanted to know how he could help with 'the Muslims.'"


And there's certainly nothing illegal about it as far as the State Troopers are concerned. "We looked into the cemetery and it was determined what they were doing is lawful," says Captain James Barnes of the New York State Police, Troop "C," based in Sidney.

This apparently isn't stopping the town board. Town attorney Joseph Ermeti wouldn't speak with us, but two other town officers indicated that in the absence of specific laws forbidding the cemetery, the town may try for a court order to force the Muslims to dig up the graves, based on a New York law against cemeteries on mortgaged land -- a technicality that covers the Muslim site, sitting in a hillside glade no larger than a Manhattan studio apartment.

Tiny Upstate New York Town Wants Local Muslims to Dig Up Their Cemetery (via Reddit)

HOWTO make a meat-head

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 10:10 PM PDT


From the pages of Make's Hallowe'en issue, Andy Oakland's simple and clever recipe for making a meat-head, sure to be the smash hit at your fete (this was first seen here on BB in 2001!). For the veggies, I imagine you could make a soy-meat-head, but be sure to clearly label them.

Meat Head



Ancient American calculating engine

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 10:06 PM PDT


An early example of the proud, short-lived lineage of American-made computing machines. Fully electric, a mere 8 lbs, and able to work with sums up to 999,999.99.

Smith-Corona Figurematic



Dinky Toy ad, 1940

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 10:03 PM PDT


Ripped from the pages of a long-departed July 1940 Meccano Magazine, this Dinky Toys ad exudes the desiderata pheromone in great, powerful gusts. Just looking at it makes me tremble with the need to paint a lead miniature and start building terrain out of papier mache.

DINKY TOYS



Cool art prints at Thumbtack Press

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 05:30 PM PDT

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Thumbtack Press, which sells art prints of contemporary artists has been sold to a new owner and redesigned. They do great quality work and sell a bunch of my art. Check out all the great work on the site!

Mark's art on Thumbtack Press

Hacking Work, a new book by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 04:07 PM PDT

Josh Klein -- the fellow who trained crows to collect quarters and wrote an article for MAKE on how to toilet train your cat -- and Bill Jensen wrote a new book called Hacking Work -- an "instruction manual for getting your work done faster, more efficiently, and with more fun no matter what your company manual says." It came out last week and Josh and Bill wrote the following essay for Boing Boing:
201009281549 Rules are made to be broken. But these days it seems like rules are made to prevent good work from being done. As a result, happy mutants everywhere are busting the crap out of them just to do their jobs. To wit:

• One guy we interviewed sat in the lobby of a potential client and emailed the CEO a list of his customer records - including credit card #'s - from the CEO's own email account to demonstrate how insecure his technology was. He got the account.

• A woman who was ordered not to bring up unhappy customer reports snuck filmed testimonials on to YouTube. The public outcry was huge, and the problems got fixed.

• Someone working at Apple couldn't get anyone to own up to changing faulty product documentation, so he cc'd Steve Jobs. Within minutes there was a stampede of people rushing to correct the error.

• A recent college graduate working for a yacht company starting providing free problem-solving on a public message board to their clients. When he was forced to stop or lose his job, those same clients held their contracts ransom until the company agreed to employ him as their head of customer service.

These are all examples of what we're calling Work Hacks - messing with corporate systems and breaking the rules to get good work done. For hundreds of years we've needed bureaucracies to gather, process, and disseminate information and provide us with the tools we need to do our jobs. But nowadays information can be gathered, processed, and disseminated at scale by anyone with a net connection, and the tools we can get for free online often outstrip those our companies provide for us by a huge margin.

The result? Employees are more partners than serfs, and increasingly they know it. Companies need to start treating them as such and support them in building innovative solutions to the company's problems before they out-produce, out-maneuver, and out-innovate them at their own markets.

The examples above show you don't have to be a computer wiz to hack work; anyone can do it if you know which rules are really bendable and which ones to break. Hacking Work describes an attitude towards owning your own career -- it's taking the hacker ethos of the joy of learning and applying it to whatever systems your employment is mired in to make things better.

We recognize that this book is a big thumb in the eye of most corporate cultures -- which is completely fine with us. It's broken. Let's start fixing it.

Hacking Work site | Buy on Amazon

San Francisco's North Beach: a short film

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 02:40 PM PDT


Spots Unknown has a short film about John Mola and his relationship with North Beach, an Italian neighborhood in San Francisco. He talks a little about the way Chinatown businesses have moved into some of the old Italian owned businesses. (I thought it was ironic that the T-shirt Mola wears while talking about this trend appears to have Chinese on it!)

For me, the best reason for watching this video starts at 5:15, when Mola makes gnocchi and sauce. I just ate lunch and I'm hungry again.

Presented through the eyes and hands of local North Beach resident, John Mola, a former poverty lawyer and Old World Italy aficionado, this video first touches on Chinatown's growth into previous North Beach territory, then presents some restaurants that are part of what Mola sees as a trend of Italian immigrants coming back into North Beach. It finishes with him sourcing and making a gnocchi dish from scratch. Do not watch this video hungry!

Music tracks: "Scalinatella" and "Campagna d'ro" by Roberto Murolo

San Francisco's North Beach Old and New



Hells Angels photos from unpublished LIFE story in 1965

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 01:51 PM PDT

Ben Cosgrove of LIFE says: "Our gallery of unpublished photos of the Hells Angels from 1965, along with the incredible story of the writer and photographer who worked on the original article (which was unceremoniously spiked by the editors of LIFE) is now live."

1965-Angles

Bill Ray (with camera), Bakersfield, California, 1965. Of this photo, Ray says: "I got along with the Angels. I got to like some of them very much, and I think they liked me. I accepted them as they were, and they accepted me. You know, by their standards, I looked pretty funny. Just look at this picture -- I can't believe I looked like that, either. That's some kind of a plaid shirt I've got on," he says, incredulity mixing with amusement, "but that was the best I could do to try to fit in!"

Never-Seen: Hells Angels, 1965



Maker Faire UK call for participation

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 01:38 PM PDT

David sez, "Maker Faire UK (Newcastle) is coming back for its third year. Over 150 Makers came earlier this year to show their creations. We had everything from arachnid robots, lollipop pies, mechanical horses and musical Tesla coils. This year we are looking for more creative makers, talented tinkerers, nifty knitters, boffin bakers, hardware hackers and ingenious engineers. Embracing all aspects of DIY creativity, the makersare invited to share their creations at Maker Faire Newcastle 2011, part of the Newcastle Science Fest (March 12th-13th , 2011). Anybody with a Maker project to show off should get themselves to www.makerfaireuk.com before November 26th to register."

Leaf-carving: complicated, high-skill kitsch

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 01:33 PM PDT


Leaf-carving is one of those art-forms that looks like something cool the wacky kids at Adafruit Industries decided to try on their laser-cutter, but is actually painstakingly hand-crafted with clever little knives. Unfortunately, most of the subject matter seems to be somewhere on the kitsch scale between sheet-cake inkjet printing and airbrush van-art.

Leaf Carving Art (via Neatorama)



What Internet activism looks like

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 01:22 PM PDT

Anil Dash hits one so far out of the park it attains orbit in this response to a silly Malcolm Gladwell column that decried Internet activism as incapable of achieving meaningful change. It's all must-read stuff, but here's the bit that made me want to stand up and salute:
Today, Dale Dougherty and the dozens of others who have led Maker Faire, and the culture of "making", are in front of a movement of millions who are proactive about challenging the constrictions that law and corporations are trying to place on how they communicate, create and live. The lesson that simply making things is a radical political act has enormous precedence in political history; I learned it well as a child when my own family's conversation after a screening of Gandhi turned to the salt protests in India, which were first catalyzed in my family's home state of Orissa, and led to my great-grandfather walking alongside Gandhi and others in the salt marches to come. Today's American Tea Partiers see even the original "tea party" largely as a metaphor, but the salt marches were a declaration of self-determination as expressed through manufacturing that took the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party and made it part of everyday life.

To his last day, my great-grandfather wore khadi, the handspun clothing that didn't just represent independence from the British Raj in an abstract way, but made defiance of onerous British regulation as plain as the clothes on one's back. At Maker Faire this weekend, there were numerous examples of clothing that were made to defy laws about everything from spectrum to encryption law. It would have been only an afternoon's work to construct a t-shirt that broadcast CSS-descrambling code over unauthorized spectrum in defiance of the DMCA.

And if we put the making movement in the context of other social and political movements, it's had amazing success. In city after city, year after year, tens of thousands of people pay money to show up and learn about taking control of their media, learning, consumption and communications. In contrast to groups like the Tea Party, the crowd at Maker Faire is diverse, includes children and adults of all ages, and never finds itself in conflict with other groups based on identity or politics. More importantly, the jobs that many of us have in 2030 will be determined by young people who attended a Maker Faire, in industries that they've created. There is no other political movement in America today with a credible claim at creating the jobs of the future.

Make The Revolution



Pocket Radar

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 12:19 PM PDT

Hold this thing in your hand, aim it at a fast, moving object and it instantly gives you the speed of that object -- either coming or going. Not only big objects like cars, but little ones like golf balls, too. This little gizmo's accuracy matches that of police scans, so you can check for speeders on your block. The main use of the Pocket Radar is for sports, which is what we use it for -- measuring ball/running speeds for performance improvement. It's super easy to use. And it will pick up all kinds of things I had no idea radar detected. We were able to get accurate measurements on arrows in flight! Not everyone needs to measure speed, but for most who do, this pocket device is all you need. -- KK Pocket Radar, $199 Available from Amazon Manufactured by Pocket Radar
Comment on this at Cool Tools.

Wiretap charges dropped against motorcyclist who videotaped cop

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 12:01 PM PDT

An update on a story blogged earlier here on Boing Boing by Beschizza. BB reader Alex says,

A judge in Harford County, MD, threw out felony charges against motorcyclist Anthony Graber for taping a policeman who stopped him using a helmet-mounted camera. Graber admits he was speeding and may have been riding recklessly when an officer in plain clothes and an unmarked car pulled in front of him, drew a gun and ordered him off his bike before identifying himself as police. However, under Maryland's law which makes it illegal to videotape a police officer, he faced 16 years in prison.
Baltimore Sun coverage here. (via BB Submitterator, thanks Phyrkrakr, Cowicide, and AlexG55)

India: "Super Monkeys" defend Game Event

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 12:00 PM PDT


[ Image: Common Langur, a CC-licensed photo by Art G. ]

Authorities in Delhi have sought assistance from langur monkeys (a rather large species) to keep other animal pests away from the athletic venues at India's Commonwealth Games. This is no joke: wildlife in the area including other monkeys, dogs, and snakes, have caused big headaches for the beleaguered organizers of the sporting event, which critics say is rather a big mess.

The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has a regular team of 28 langurs which are used to scare away their weaker brethren in VIP areas of the city, but 10 more have been brought in from the neighbouring state of Rajasthan. Four of them will be posted outside the boxing complex with their handlers, while another four will patrol the hockey complex. Two have been kept in reserve to respond in the event of an emergency.

"They are there for the monkey problem. They will be moving outside the stadiums," Devender Prasad, an inspector from the enforcement department of the NDMC, told AFP.

Delhi deploys 'super monkeys' for Games security (Daily Nation, via BB Submitterator, thanks CJP!)

Rocketboom comes to Maker Faire NY

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 11:26 AM PDT


Molly from Rocketboom came to Maker Faire 2010. Here's her report.

  Molly Goes to the Maker Faire



Here is a slide from my Keynote presentation at the MIMA summit today

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 11:37 AM PDT

I gave a talk at the MIMA Summit in Minneapolis today. The event has been a lot of fun, and included some creepy-weird cool science about "neuromarketing," and presentations by @garyvee and @baratunde. My presentation was, in large part, about Boing Boing. I thought you might enjoy a random slide with no context, no narrative, and no setup. You may now tweet amongst yourselves.

Star Trek pizza cutter

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 10:04 AM PDT

Startekpizzacutt
ThinkGeek is offering this fun Star Trek Enterprise pizza cutter. It's all-metal and features a 4" steel blade.



Obsessive ingredient photos for cookbook

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 09:37 AM PDT

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Look at these entrancing photos by Carl Kleiner's for Ikea's new cookbook, Hembakat är Bäst (Homemade Is Best).

Carl Kleiner's photography (Via Animal New York)



Incredibly depressing Mega Millions Lottery simulator

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 09:23 AM PDT

Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com created the "incredibly depressing Mega Millions Lottery simulator." He says, "You'll be able to try the same numbers over and over, simulating playing twice a week for a year or 10. You'll never win."
In the 191,904 times this simulation has run, players have won $19,126. And by won I mean they have won back $19,126 of the $191,904 they spent (9%).

I played 1040 games of Mega Millions. I spent $1040. I won $117.



Cool Tools and Boing Boing team up

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 09:58 AM PDT

Screen Shot 2010-09-28 At 8.55.34 Am

The following started out as an announcement of a new partnership between between Boing Boing and Cool Tools, which was founded by my friend Kevin Kelly. It turned out to be a much longer story about the origin of Boing Boing, Kevin's important role in it, and why it is only natural that we are going to start running Cool Tools reviews on Boing Boing.

"There are many ways to change the world but I think the most direct way ... is to adopt new tools." Kevin Kelly, The Whole Earth Review, Winter 2000

2008 marked the 40th anniversary of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. To commemorate the event, Stanford University held a panel with Brand and two former Whole Earth Review editors, Kevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold. Early in the session, the moderator asked Kevin to describe what the catalog had meant to him:

I was in high school and I was hitching around the summertime, and I was in a bookstore in Woodstock, New York, and I saw this thing. I can only recall the quote from Annie Dillard: 'I felt as if I was a bell that had been struck.' And this was the clapper that was ringing me. It was instant grokking because I was interested in science and art and making stuff, big things and little things and it seemed to be speaking directly to me. I got the implicit idea that I did not have to go to college -- and that changed my life.


Twenty years after Stewart Brand struck Kevin's bell, Kevin struck mine. He was the editor of the Whole Earth Review at the time and the Winter 1987 issue was themed "Signal," and I am certain that if I had not encountered that issue (a friend showed it to me when I went to his place for dinner), my life would be utterly different today. (You can read an electronic copy of the Signal issue here. Kevin's introduction to the issue, written years before the Internet became a household word, is stunningly prescient. It's easy to see how this issue of the Whole Earth Review, complete with the day-glo orange cover, was a big inspiration for Wired.)


The issue had articles about pirate radio, desktop publishing, MIT's Media Lab, "information highways," homegrown music, DIY TV, Xerox art, memetics, smart drugs, hypertext, bulletin boards, "the computer network as an electronic watering hole," software piracy, and more. But the clapper that really rang my bell was an article about the world of zines (self published magazines produced mainly by individuals using personal computers and the ubiquitous Kinko's copy shops).

The author of the zines article, Jeanne Carstsensen wrote:

201009231537 So start your own magazine. Engage the best writers and artists (you and your friends) and distribute it to the most influential opinion leaders (you and your friends). Exercise your right to rave. After all, that's what professional writers do. They just get paid for it. You can do it too. "'Zines" are wildly partisan small magazines of the fanatic, or devoted, depending on your view of the subject matter. They're unabashedly noncommercial - true labors of love and don't seem to conform to any standard of quality except their own. 'Zines rave about special interests: hobbies like play-by-mail games, science fiction, "fringe" political groups. punk bands, comics, mail and xerox art, underground cassette music distribution , or that most special of special interests - the writing and art of one editor/writer/artist/designer.

I was living in Santa Clara, working as an engineer at Memorex at the time. I didn't like my job -- designing components for mainframe-size hard disk drives -- and I read the article and studied the photographs of the different zines reviewed in that issue with rapt attention. The prospect of self-producing a periodical was more exciting to me than just about anything I could think of.

It didn't take long for me to come up with a zine of my own. After a couple of false starts (two issues of a mini-comic called Toilet Devil and a zine about fringe science called The Important Science Journal), my wife Carla and I started putting together a zine about comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, unusual travel experiences, true-life stories, consciousness altering technologies, and interviews with our favorite authors. We called it bOING bOING, because we wanted to convey the idea of bouncing from one interesting idea to another. Much of the contents and format were influenced by the Whole Earth Review and Kevin's brand of relentless curiosity.

We made the first issue of bOING bOING using crude desktop publishing software and lots of rubber cement. The photocopied print run for the first issue was 100. I sent in a copy to Factsheet Five, a zine that reviewed zines (it was like the Google of zines). Publisher Mike Gunderloy reviewed it in issue #33 (1989):


Bb01

BOING BOING #1

A delightful new zine for the neophiliac. Mark apparently was influenced by a lot of the same subversive literature that shaped my life, and now he's done something about it. The first issue features an interview with Robert Anton Wilson, book, zine and software reviews, wild predictions, comics, and much more. Nanotechnology, comics, libertarianism, drugs and sibling rivalry all play a part. An enjoyable romp through memespace.


Thanks to this review the issue sold out in a couple of weeks. An independent magazine distributor in New York wrote and asked to carry bOING bOING. For the second issue, we photocopied 200 copies. It, too, sold out. I was hooked on do-it-yourself media. I loved every step of the process -- writing the articles, drawing the illustrations, using the desktop publishing software, pasting up the camera-ready pages, photocopying the print run, and using a long-reach stapler to bind each copy, and sending them out to people who sent in their $3 cash. As the print run continued to grow (it was about 500 copies for issue number 4), I had to stop photocopying the issues and used a printshop instead.

I had been sending issues to Kevin Kelly all along, and after a couple of issues, he asked if I'd like to trade subscriptions. I was thrilled at this.

The same year that the first issue of bOING bOING was published, I joined The Well, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, a national online bulletin board system co-founded by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985. Users accessed The Well (based in Sausalito, California) by using dial-up modems. Once online, they could participate in a large number of conferences on different subjects: science, politics, drugs, music, art, technology, etc. Kevin and Howard and a number of other authors and Whole Earth Review folks I admired were active on The Well, and I quickly dove in and joined lots of conversations.

8Balldood It wasn't long before I started a conference about bOING bOING, where modem-owning subscribers and contributors could hang out, discuss articles in the magazine, and submit ideas for future issues. The combination of the print zine and the Well worked together in a positive way, and set me going in a direction I've moved in for the last 20 years. By 1991, bOING bOING circulation was about 5,000 or so. While it was barely making any money, it was growing fast enough to give me the courage to quit my engineering job, sell our house, and move to Los Angeles, where Carla and I set up headquarters.

In 1992 Kevin left Whole Earth Review and became a co-founder of Wired. He called me and asked if I would be interested in working there. So in 1993 Carla and I moved back to northern California, and Kevin put me to work as the editor of Street Cred, the reviews section of Wired, which had a distinct Whole Earth flavor. It was great fun working on the section and Kevin and I became friends.

Kevin and I no longer work at Wired, but we stay in touch and talk to each other about the things we are working on and thinking about. I'm actually surprised that we hadn't thought of joining forces with Boing Boing and Cool Tools earlier, but here we are, teaming up again. As Kevin wrote in his announcement on Cool Tools:

"...in a kind of lopsided circle, we've gone from Whole Earth, to bOING bOING on paper, to Wired, to Cool Tools, to Boing Boing blog, to Cool Tools blog, and now back to Boing Boing and Cool Tools... At its simplest Cool Tools is a venue for fans to rave about their favorite tools, tips, and gadgets (in the broadest sense of utility). We only run -- and will only run -- great reviews about great stuff (why waste your time on anything else?). The items we run have been used by real folks with real experience, vetted by editors, and presented in an easy-to-digest one item per day. This formula has worked for ten years. I think it can go another ten years."

Here's to ten more years of cool stuff!

Bare feet barely covered

Posted: 22 Sep 2010 11:37 AM PDT

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Shoes are bad for you. Thus sayeth the science. A study published in the journal Foot entitled "Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?" concluded that Zulus, who often go barefoot, have healthier feet than shoe-wearing Europeans. So did pre-shoe wearing people 2000 years ago, as their skeletal feet attest. But what about the consequence of stepping in... whatever? Paperfeet, a "Mesh" company that makes one-of-a-kind, signed and numbered, minimalist shoes from recycled billboards, offers one step forward -- if taken for the right reasons. One post on their site reads, "Are people just lonely animals with fancy shoes? I hope that's not why you buy paperfeet."



Mur Lafferty's latest podcast/novel: "Marco and the Red Granny"

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 08:01 AM PDT


Podcast sf doyenne Mur Lafferty has recently launched her latest novel/podcast serial: "Marco and the Red Granny." It's part of a larger cycle of stories about Mollywood that I had the real pleasure of workshopping with Mur at the Viable Paradise workshop some years ago. Here's Mur's synopsis:
By bringing back the patronage system, a new alien species has transformed the moon into the new artistic center of the universe, and Sally Ride Lunar Base soon gains the nickname "Mollywood." These aliens can do amazing things with art and the senses, allowing a painting, for example, to stimulate other senses than simply sight. When someone asks a starlet, "Who are you wearing?" she could as easily say "J.K. Rowling" as she could "Gucci."

Every creative person in the world wishes for a patronage. It's quite competitive.

Marco wanted one, once. But then his girlfriend got one and shuttled off to Mollywood for fame and fortune, and Marco stayed home, waiting for his own patron. After several years, he gave up entirely. His career faltered. His agent dumped him. It's only in despair, when he's hit bottom, he gets the call. At last he has a patron; at last the aliens want him. But he's about to find out that an artistic patronage isn't what it was in the good old days, and that the only friend he's made, a tiny old woman who's the star of a blood sports reality series called The Most Dangerous Game, has secrets of her own.

Marco and the Red Granny, Part 1 (podcast)

(Thanks, Mur!)



Simon & Kirby Superheroes anthology preview -- a Boing Boing exclusive

Posted: 22 Sep 2010 01:57 PM PDT

Titan books has published a new collection of Joe Simon & Jack Kirby golden age comic book stories called Simon & Kirby Superheroes, which features an introduction by Neil Gaiman. Titan Publishing has kindly allowed us to present a complete story from the book.
Skfinalcover 1-1 In 1950, the Korean War whipped up fears of atomic warfare and communist infiltration. Publishers geared up for the expected superhero rebirth, as did Simon and Kirby. For Harvey Publications they produced Captain 3-D, an experiment in multi-dimensional storytelling that rode the coattails of a few adventurous movie studios. In order to read these comics, readers wore special glasses with green and red lenses that gave the effect of characters virtually leaping off the pages.

For this book, Captain 3-D has been restored for the first time ever to its original art and in full-color, with the team's dynamic art figuratively jumping off the page -- no special glasses required, thank you. But it was a short-lived movie craze, and 3-D comics faded quickly. Captain 3-D is also notable for some of the very first work a young Steve Ditko produced in comics.


178Captain3D-1



178Captain3D-2


178Captain3D-3


178Captain3D-4


178Captain3D-5


178Captain3D-6


178Captain3D-7


178Captain3D-8


178Captain3D-9


178Captain3D-10


178Captain3D-11



Simon & Kirby Superheroes

Full-scale, fetishistically detailed driveable replica 1966 Batmobiles

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 11:37 AM PDT


Mark Racop works out of a shop in small-town Indiana, turning out incredibly accurate, driveable 1966 Batmobile replicas. The bodies are modified castings from an old Futura and all the fittings and parts are functional and styled to match the prop Batmobile from the series (you can also buy these individual fittings -- "Bat Parts" -- for your modern car). The sell for $150,000, and you can choose between a rebuilt Ford 460 motor, or a new GM 350 crate engine.


Fiberglass Freaks Officially Licensed 1966 BATMOBILE Replicas (Thanks, Larry!)



Reddit user flames Flickr photographer; Flickr photographer threatens copyright lawsuit

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 06:34 AM PDT

A Reddit user who posted meanspirited remarks about a Flickr user's photo was called a jerk by the photographer. To get back, the critic posted a tiny thumbnail of the Flickr image (which is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) to Reddit along with a complaint about his treatment. Now the Flickr photographer has upped the ante by sending a threatening legal notice to the Reddit user, in which he claims to be a lawyer and says that linking to the photo and reproducing its likeness in thumbnail is a copyright violation. The photographer goes on to threaten the Reddit user with $150,000 in damages if the thumbnail isn't removed. I'm not sure if the photographer is really a lawyer (lawyers can be as petty and immature as anyone -- even people who trawl Flickr looking for creative works to piss on), but if he is, I don't think he understands US copyright law very well. (Thanks, Kandinski, via Submitterator!)

American atheists and agnostics know more about religion than professed believers

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 06:25 AM PDT

A new Pew survey on religion in America finds that atheists and agnostics are more likely to be well-versed about different religions' beliefs and practices than people who profess a belief in those religions. For example, atheists and agnostics are more likely to know that during Communion (Catholicism's central rite), the wafer and wine are meant to transubstantiate into the literal flesh and blood of Christ -- they aren't merely symbolic, as 40% of Catholics believe. Atheists and agnostics are also more likely than Protestants to know that Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation (the majority of Protestants could not identify him).

Interestingly, Mormons are, on average, better versed on the traditional New Testament Bible than evangelical Christians and mainstream Christians, many of whom consider Mormonism to be apostasy.

American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.

"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."

Atheists and agnostics also tend to be relatively well educated, and the survey found, not surprisingly, that the most knowledgeable people were also the best educated. However, it said that atheists and agnostics also outperformed believers who had a similar level of education.

The groups at the top of the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey were followed, in order, by white evangelical Protestants, white Catholics, white mainline Protestants, people who were unaffiliated with any faith (but not atheist or agnostic), black Protestants and Latino Catholics.

Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says (Thanks, Quercus, via Submitterator!)



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