Thursday, November 4, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Imagining an augmented reality future that's not an advertising hell

Posted: 04 Nov 2010 03:10 AM PDT

London design firm Berg and advertising agency Dentsu produced this short video, "Media Surfaces: Incidental Media," demonstrating a vision for a future in which media surfaces are everywhere, but are used to be playful, informative and to better connect you to your friends and family:
Each of the ideas in the film treat the surface as a focus, rather than the channel or the content delivered. Here, media includes messages from friends and social services, like foursquare or Twitter, and also more functional messages from companies or services like banks or airlines alongside large traditional big 'M' Media (like broadcast or news publishing).

All surfaces have access to connectivity. All surfaces are displays responsive to people, context, and timing. If any surface could show anything, would the loudest or the most polite win? Surfaces which show the smartest most relevant material in any given context will be the most warmly received.

Media Surfaces: Incidental Media (via Beyond the Beyond)


Idolatry coupon for Black Friday

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 11:25 PM PDT


From the Boing Boing Flickr pool, This is My Name's anti-consumerist holiday graphic from 2009, which is also apparently available in sticker form.

idolcoupon



Synergon, a business LARP: escape into drudgery!

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 11:21 PM PDT


Synergon is a BLARP: a business live-action role-playing game. Players create fantasy characters who start out as low-level corporate drones and then perform boring, soul-destroying repetitive tasks set by a game-master (called "The Boss") until they level up. Players also fight one another for the chance to do more boring, soul-destroying tasks.
Ambition Points (AP): Analogous to mana points; employees draw on AP when using abilities. Base AP = Creativity. Maximum AP = Creativity with all positive and negative modifiers applied. AP cannot exceed max AP.

Assignment: Basic tasks such as retrieving items or confronting a specific frenemy; assigned by The Boss. Each employee that contributed to completing an assignment receives 200XP.

Attack Ability: An ability used specifically to attack frenemies in hopes of draining MP and giving negative statuses. An attack roll is determined by rolling the specified dice and adding any attack modifiers.

Critical Hit: If an ability roll naturally results in the maximum number (i.e. 20 for a d20, 10 for a d10), the roll result is doubled. Modifiers are not doubled, just the dice roll. For rolls involving multiple dice, all the dice must show the maximum result (i.e. rolling double 4s for a 2d4 or double 10s for a 2d10).

Day: Made up of 8 soul-sucking hours. A night of prime-time TV is able to put employees into torpor deep enough that it basically hits the "reset button" in the brain. Each employee chooses 1 status to eliminate at EOD regardless of how many hours or days of the effect are left. At EOD, employees regenerate 10% of maximum MP and 15% of maximum AP.

Synergon (via MeFi)


Phone books: Facebook 0.01

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 11:14 PM PDT

From Reason.com, a review of Ammon Shea's The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, which explores some of the remarkable technologies that were prefigured by the idea of publishing a whole city's contact information in one universally available directory.
The phone itself was a pretty big deal, of course, helping intimacy transcend proximity. But phone books provided a crucial element to the system: intrusiveness. In the beginning of 1880, Shea writes, there were 30,000 telephone subscribers in the U.S. At the end of the year, that number had grown to 50,000, and because of phone books, each one of them was exposed to the others as never before. While many American cities had been compiling databases of their inhabitants well before the phone was invented, listing names, occupations, and addresses, individuals remained fairly insulated from each other. Contacting someone might require a letter of introduction, a facility for charming butlers or secretaries, a long walk.

Phone books eroded these barriers. They were the first step in our long journey toward the pandemic self-surveillance of Facebook. "Hey strangers!" anyone who appeared in their pages ordained. "Here's how to reach me whenever you feel like it, even though I have no idea who you are."

By the Book (via Kottke)


Banksy stencil-art Hallowe'en costume

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 11:09 PM PDT

Declining Indian owl population blamed on Harry Potter fans

Posted: 04 Nov 2010 03:11 AM PDT

Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh blames India's declining owl populations on the wealthy parents of young Harry Potter fans who want their own pet owls to carry messages for them. However, there is also the little matter of the traditional what wildlife group Traffic says is a trend to Diwali owl sacrifice.
"Following Harry Potter, there seems to be a strange fascination even among the urban middle classes for presenting their children with owls," Ramesh said Wednesday, according to comments reported by the BBC.

His remarks came as wildlife group Traffic presented a report called "Imperilled Custodians of the Night" which warned about the declining owl population in India.

Researchers found that a growing number of owls were being trapped, traded or killed in black magic rituals.

Harry Potter blamed for India's owl crisis (via /.)

(Image: Eagle Owl (Explored), a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jingleslenobel's photostream)



The Troll Under the Bridge, social justice edition

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 11:01 PM PDT

Robbo Mills sends in this episode of his Rufus the Dog kids' show, a social justice-oriented retelling of "The Troll Under the Bridge." He says,

Social justice and kids TV puppet shows don't seem a likely mix but we managed to make it work for a bunch of our episodes before it got cancelled. We made these shows for YTV Canada and after recently getting the rights back we started putting them online - under a CC share-alike license - where they'll have a home and reach kids.

We're also making new shows with the same characters - and the first one out of the gate is our own daft version of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Funding for this is being raised through IndieGoGo and we're hell bent on getting it done and online before the holidays. And yes - there WILL be Tiny Tim and there WILL be a Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The Troll Under The Bridge - Ruffus The Dog (Thanks, Robbo!)


Things to Make (from the Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 09:50 PM PDT

5050364025_2f838347cc_b.jpg

"Things to Make," a digital composition/"found image" mashup contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by BB reader Flamenco Sun.

US embassy commissioned illegal surveillance of Norwegian citizens

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 09:42 PM PDT

Via the BB Submitterator, Boing Boing reader Bergjylt says, "News broke in Norway a couple of hours ago: former police officials formed an intelligence group employed by the US embassy to illegally carry out surveillance and gather intelligence on Norwegian citizens. Google translate link to Dagbladet, a major Norwegian newspaper."

Tanzania, where albino people are persecuted, elects first albino MP

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 09:38 PM PDT

For the first time in history, Tanzanian voters have elected an albino to Parliament. "Albinos have suffered widespread persecution in Tanzania, where witch doctors say magic potions made with albino body parts can bring good luck." (via Submitterator, thanks, Marilyn Terrell!)

US law does not forbid rendition of terror suspects to countries that torture, says CIA lawyer

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 02:32 PM PDT

"U.S. law does not ... preclude the United States from rendering individuals to a third country in instances where the third country may subject the rendered individual to torture. The only restrictions that do exist under U.S. law preclude U.S. officials from themselves torturing or inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on individuals during rendition operations, or rendering individuals from a place of actual armed conflict or occupation -- all of which prove to be narrow limitations indeed." —Daniel Pines, assistant general counsel at the CIA.

Huge underground drug tunnel with subterranean rail system discovered at US/Mexico border

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 02:20 PM PDT

Mexican army troops have discovered a massive drug tunnel beneath the San Diego-Tijuana border: a 1,800-foot passageway in an Otay Mesa warehouse, where U.S. authorities seized more than 20 tons of pot. "The passageway, equipped with lighting, ventilation and a rail system, is one of the few unearthed in recent years that appears to have been fully operational."

Science fiction tells us all laws are local -- just like the Web

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 02:09 PM PDT

My latest Locus column, "A Cosmopolitan Literature for the Cosmopolitan Web," is up: it's a piece on the way that science fiction's insistence that all laws are local prefigures the web's weird and wonderful diversity:
One of science fiction's greatest tricks is playing ''vast, cool intelligence'' and peering through a Martian telescope aimed Earthwards and noticing just how weird and irrational we all are. At its best, science fiction is a literature that can use the safe distance of an alien world or a distant future as a buffer-zone in which all mores can be called into question - think, for example, of Theodore Sturgeon's story of the planet of enthusiastic incest-practitioners, ''If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?'' published in Dangerous Visions in 1967.

Behind every torturer's mask, behind every terrible crusade, behind every book-burning and war-drum is someone who has forgotten (or never learned) that all laws are local. Forgetting that all laws are local is the ultimate in hubris, and it is the province of yokels and bumpkins who assume that just because they do something in a particular way, all right-thinking people always have and always will. For a mild contemporary example, consider the TV executive who blithely asserts that her industry is safe, because no matter what happens in the future, the majority of us will want to come home, flop down on the sofa, and turn on the goggle-box - despite the fact that TV has existed for less than a century, a flashing eyeblink in the long history of hominids, most of whom have gotten by just fine without anesthetizing themselves with a sitcom at the end of a long day.

Which is not to say that cosmopolitans don't believe in anything. To be cosmopolitan is to know that all laws are local, and to use that intellectual liberty to decide for yourself what moral code you'll subscribe to. It is the freedom to invent your own ethics from the ground up, knowing that the larger social code you're rejecting is no more or less right than your own - at least from the point of view of a Martian peering through a notional telescope at us piddling Earthlings.

Cory Doctorow: A Cosmopolitan Literature for the Cosmopolitan Web

Interactive documentary set in highrises around the world

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 02:06 PM PDT


Helen sez,
HIGHRISE/Out My Window is a brand-new interactive documentary. It features first-person stories from 13 cities internationally, with an eclectic soundtrack, exploring the experience of life in the concrete highrise - the most common built form of the last century.

Designed to be experienced online, the project launches the viewer inside a 360-degree panorama, into an almost game-like environment. Toronto-based documentary maker Katerina Cizek directed the project largely via Skype, Facebook and email, in a collaborative process with photographers, journalists, architects, researchers, activists, digital developers and artists from around the world. The credit list rivals a feature film.

The stories of Out My Window span the globe: from Latin America's largest squat in Sao Paolo to a hugely renovated post-soviet concrete suburb in the south of Prague. Durdane in Istanbul describes how her squatter highrise community came about in the eighties, as people moved from the countryside and built towers one floor at a time. John from Johannesburg talks about the phenomenon of 'highjacked buildings,' where tenants are forced to pay rent to illegal landlords even as their buildings fall to ruin. Amchok from Toronto, who escaped Chinese-controlled Tibet by walking to India, talks about how his work as music teacher and performer brought him to Canada and helps make a home in his building in Toronto.

Out My Window (Thanks, Helen!)

San Francisco issues fatwa on Happy Meals

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 01:53 PM PDT

HAPPYMEAL.jpg

The US elections last night brought many changes to America, but few so surprising as a new San Francisco law that will require fast food meals to meet certain nutritional guidelines before they can be packaged with toys and marketed to children. A veritable fatwa on Happy Meals!

My colleague Rob Beschizza did some photoshopping—I mean, investigation, and shares the image above, which more clearly explains the danger they represent.

I give CafePress maybe, say, 24 hours before someone whips up FREE THE HAPPY MEAL t-shirts. Hey, I'm all for kale, and I would never feed my kid this stuff. But I wonder if laws like this (and the trans-fat prohibition movement) are the best way to address obesity and the disease-causing nature of crap food? Your thoughts welcome in the comments.

Self-portrait with sea (an image from the Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 01:02 PM PDT

4917932099_56382d29a4_b.jpg
Boing Boing reader Joseph Leonardo contributed this untitled self-portrait to the Boing Boing Flickr pool. The image was taken in August, in Akumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico.

Tom the Dancing Bug: The Poor Little Duck Who's Rich In Luck

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 12:25 PM PDT

Self-driving cars mean business ... finally!

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 11:46 AM PDT

In October, 1967, Popular Science promised us self-driving cars ... by 1985 "or perhaps sooner." The Urbmobile, developed with a $100,000 grant from the U.S. government, was to revolutionize mass transit by guiding cars using 'power rails' embedded in the road.

popsci_selfdrivingcar.jpg "You gulp the last of your coffee, wipe the egg off your chin, and dash for the door. In the driveway sits a vehicle about the size and shape of a Volkswagen. Beside the door on the driver's side is a handleless hatch. Beneath the car, unseen, are four flanged wheels of smaller diameter than the car's tires.

As you slide away from the curb, the sound of the electric drive motor hardly rises above a whisper. A few blocks from home, you steer the car into a special lane, and pull a lever under the dash. The front wheels lock in straight-ahead position. Simultaneously the side-hatch door slides back and an electric third-rail folds out. It makes contact with a power rail, the flanged wheels roll onto the rails of a track, and your car accelerates at a controlled rate of 0.3g. You twirls a dial until you see "5th Street" appear in a small window. Seconds later, as your car enters a main guideway at exactly 60 m.p.h., you open the paper and scan the news.

Righty-o. The hare-brainedness of third-rails on the highway is now readily apparent to us, if not to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's beancounters.



Come 2010, however, we're finally getting there. Darpa's self-driven "grand challenge," served as proof of concept for the 'in-car AI' approach (as opposed to Urbmobile's infrastructural one) that surely seemed hopelessly science-fictional until the day it became a reality. But that approach also embodies the steps car manufacturers have been taking for years to assist drivers: lane drift warning systems, automatic parking, stop sign spotters and drowsiness detectors have long been in the luxury automaker's arsenal of safety features.


All these measures center on computing power. Given that, it's no wonder that Google won headlines recently with its follow-on from the DARPA research: a secret fleet of self-driving cars. Each equipped with a human driver, just in case, they were developed with business in mind: the company is now among the most highly invested in mapping systems, and it knows more about the nooks and crannies of America's roads than just about anyone.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They've driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to "see" other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google's data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

Google points to traffic death statistics, and when these technologies enter the auto industry in earnest, that'll doubtless be the marketing angle of choice. But they can't get out of the press release without at least a nod to bygone fictions, promising the "highway trains of tomorrow" in what can only be a reference to the 'third rail' promised nearly half a century ago.

Of course, the "unseen wheels" concept remains a pervasive metaphor in the self-driven dream: "It's 2010 for goodness sake!" writes CNET's Antuan Goodwin. "Where the hell are the self-driving cars?"

SCD_i-robot-audi-rs_610x458.jpg

Cooking for Geeks: an interview with Adam Savage

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 10:55 AM PDT

201011031016 For my book, Cooking for Geeks (O'Reilly Media, 2010), I interviewed food scientists, researchers, and chefs; but one of my favorite interviews was the one I did with Adam Savage, co-host of Discovery Channel's MythBusters. And yes, Adam is just as much fun and as animated in real life as you'd suspect from watching the show.

Jeff: How do you go about testing a myth?

Adam: One of the earliest things we realized on the show is that you always have to have something to compare to. We would try to come up with an answer like: is this guy dead, is this car destroyed, is this an injury? And we would be trying to compare it to an absolute value, like X number of feet fallen equals dead. The problem is the world is very spongy and nonuniform, and trying to nail down a value like that can be really difficult. So we always end up doing relative tests. We end up doing a control under regular circumstances and then we test the myth under identical circumstances, and we compare the two things. In that comparison, we get to see our results.

We did one where we were testing whether or not you could tenderize steaks with explosives. We had to figure out what tenderness is. The problem is you can give two different people each a piece of steak from the same cut compared to a piece of steak from a different cut, and they might come up with two different assessments of which one is more tender. We actually did a whole day of testing that didn't end up on film because we realized we were using the wrong parameters for assessing steak tenderness. The USDA actually has a machine for testing the tenderness of steak that measures the pounds of force it takes to punch a hole through a steak. We replicated that machine and to our great surprise, it worked exactly as it was supposed to. Coming up with something for $50 that equals the USDA testing equipment: that was thrilling!


Jeff: How can testing a myth translate into learning more about cooking?

Adam: Changing one variable is probably the single hardest thing for people to understand. Change only one variable. It's not like changing only a small number of variables; it's really changing one variable at a time, because only then do you know what caused the change between your first test and your second test. You get so much clarity from the process that way.

I'm an avid cook. My wife and I both cook a lot of elaborate things, and we really do love playing around with single variables, changing things and learning how things work. We were reading Thomas Keller, and he talked about how salt is a flavor enhancer, and he mentioned that vinegar does a similar thing. It doesn't add a new taste, but it often alters the taste that's there. My wife was making a cauliflower soup, and it was kind of bland. I didn't want to put any more salt in it, because I could tell it was about to go in the wrong direction. We tossed in a little bit of vinegar and the whole thing just woke up. It was thrilling! I love that.

Jeff: Have you done other myths related to food?

Adam: We have --- certainly a whole bunch of drinking myths. We did poppy seed bagels to see if eating a poppy seed bagel causes you to test positive for heroin, which is absolutely true. In fact, parolees are completely forbidden from eating poppy seed bagels. They're told if you test positive for drugs, we are not going to wonder why. You are just going to go back to jail, so make it easy, don't eat poppy seeds.

I had a whole episode written called "The Surreal Gourmet," which ended with tenderizing steak with dynamite, but it had all those other things like poaching fish on your catalytic converter or cooking eggs in your dishwasher. Jamie loves the idea of tenderizing meat in the dryer.

Jeff: I thought of roasting almonds in a dryer, but not tenderizing meat.

Adam: Also, the idea of "is it safe to eat fresh road kill?" We think that would be just hilarious and gross.

It's hard to fight a fire you can't see

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 10:37 AM PDT

This is not a metaphor. It is, in fact, rather difficult to fight invisible fires—as demonstrated by this clip from the 1981 Indianapolis 500, where fuel accidentally sprayed on a hot engine ignited an invisible, smoke-less fire on the car ... and on the racer and his crew. Everybody in this video survived, but it made me curious about what fuel they were using. Also: Why, if it's this difficult to put out invisible flames, would you use a fuel that produced invisible flames to begin with?

You might expect this was just the result of a bad decision. You'd be wrong. From 1965 until 2006, Indy cars ran on methanol, a fuel that's still used in a lot of other car racing categories, as well as in Monster Trucks. (And by the Chinese, who make it from coal.) Mostly made from the methane in natural gas, methanol was actually chosen as a racing fuel because it was safer than gasoline.

In 1964, two racers died and several others were injured when two gasoline-powered cars crashed, and the blinding smoke from the resulting fireball caused a seven-car pileup. Methanol was a solution to that problem. It burned clear, so when cars did wreck, everyone else on the track would be able to see what was going on. Bonus: You can put out a methanol fire with water alone, while spraying a petroleum fire with water will just give the petroleum something to float on, potentially spreading the fire further.

Turns out, the fire you can't see is actually safer—big picture—than the one you can. Which, I suppose, could be a metaphor for something.

(Video via Deadspin, Submitterated by shoelessjoakim)

The Nagoya Protocol: the first step towards saving the endangered Unicorn?

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 10:35 AM PDT

If a Society for the Preservation of Unicorns1 were to put out commentary or a press release about important but largely unreported UN biodiversity meetings, I'd imagine it would go a little like this:
unicornhabitatbb.jpg(Public domain image adapted from NOAA photo library. Slide available here).
Well, it's been a few days since the Nagoya COP102 conference has wrapped up, and by all accounts, people have deemed it relatively successful. That is, the conference that was meant to set some goals in the preservation of global biodiversity has (largely due to the admirable persistence of Japanese officials) managed to get government types to agree to a strategic plan with a number of environmentally friendly targets (nicknamed the 2020 Aichi Targets3 for those of you who like to keep track of such things). Although the word "rainbow" did not make a single appearance in the text, the targets did nevertheless include obvious things like percentages of land and ocean to set aside for preservation (17% and 10%), and overarching statements that promised, "to at least halve and where feasible bring close to zero the rate of loss of natural habitats including forests (by 2020)."

This was no mean feat, since many of the poorer developing countries argued (and rightly so) that such targets would cost their already strained economies a lot of money, both in terms of getting the actual preservation work done, and also in terms of "I'm losing a lot of revenue if you rather I don't cut my trees, fish my waters, make biofuels, saddle my unicorns, etc." As a result, an agreement for the developed countries (who in principle have already historically benefited from the degradation of their own biodiversity) to provide funding for developing nations had to be worked out. However, the details (and as you all know, unicorns are all about the details) are still basically vague, and in fact have been set for further discussion bearing in mind the dates of future UN meetings.

This postponing, of course, is an old trick, and we are fully aware that similar tactics were what made the Kyoto Protocol an ultimately laughable experience. As well, members of our community, like others, will continue to examine the benefits (or lack thereof) of setting such conservative preservation numbers, since many environmental groups had hoped for numbers between 20% and 30%.

We do, however, applaud the target that enacts a moratorium of large-scale geoengineering projects. For our younger unicorn readers, this is where science based but essentially high-risk ventures were put forth (usually as a last resort) to "alter" atmospheric conditions in an attempt to halt climate change. Examples included the pumping of sulphur dioxide into the upper levels of the atmosphere4, as well as our now defunct but still highly contested "albedo5 due to tons of glitter in the air" proposal. Today, many of our unicorn scientists are in agreement that it would be irresponsible to enact such dramatic mitigation without further analysis on its effect on biodiversity.

Perhaps the most striking and important outcome of the entire meeting was a consensus on ABS, or Access and Benefit Sharing of Genetic Resources6. Briefly, the primary purpose of this is to provide protection of traditional biodiversity knowledge by allowing a mechanism for profit sharing. For example, this might entail a pharmaceutical company sharing an agreed portion of its revenues, if such revenues partially resulted from specimens and traditional knowledge derived from a specific (and usually developing/poorer) nation.

This document, known as the Nagoya Protocol7, is crucial as it paves the way for setting up policies which "put value on biodiversity" particularly for accounting purposes. In other words, this lays the groundwork for recognizing that unicorns have inherent worth due to their roles in tourism, publishing, water cycles (rainbow production), alternative energy (carbon neutral unicorn power), and productivity (via promotion of warm fuzzy feelings of awesomeness or WFFOAs8). Furthermore, if governments and businesses honor the Nagoya Protocol, such values would be systematically calculated and internalized into policy decision. This is a significant step forward for those who feel that biodiversity preservation is best served by introducing economic measures, and at the very least provides yet another rubric for biodiversity book-keeping9.

Although this shift towards a fiscal view of biodiversity is another point of debate, we at the Society for the Preservation of Unicorns admittedly have no official stance on this matter, given the widely known axiom that unicorns are categorically ignorant of economics as a discipline. However, despite this, it has been discussed that all unicorns will henceforth be asked to boycott Canadian visits given Canada's poor conduct at Nagoya: this relates specifically to the country's forceful (and in our view shameful) removal of all mention of the UN Declaration of Rights for Indigenous Peoples in the ABS agreement10.

As a final thought, our community has been troubled by the overall lack of media coverage of this meeting. Given its importance and scope, we were especially disappointed by the lack of western media coverage. Perhaps, the disconnect between humans and nature11 is so complete that even the threat of unicorn extinction is not enough to rally society. Indeed, we wonder, perhaps cynically, if in this world of celebrity and consumerism, the general public would have paid more attention if the loss of a beloved fictional beast12 was at stake.


FOOTNOTES:

1. FYI, there is actually a Unicorn Preservation Society in existence, although it is all about the preservation of an historic boat, the HM Frigate Unicorn

2. See Nagoya conference primer here.

3. "Aichi Targets": downloadable pdf of press release here (accessed November 2, 2010).

4. See references at Wikipedia entry on Stratospheric sulfate aerosols (accessed November 2, 2010)

5. See Wikipedia entry on albedo - link (accessed November 2, 2010)

6. Description as defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity (accessed November 2, 2010)

7. Word document of draft text can be found here (accessed November 2, 2010).

8. Pronounced: wuh-fo-ah

9. As summarized by The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) - website

10. Also noted by the CBD Alliance - link (accessed November 2, 2010)

11. As exemplified by this.

12. Like this one?

Plushie mutant artwork of Zoe Williams

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 10:13 AM PDT


Zoe Williams's extraordinary textile artworks blend tentacles, felted bunnies, and miscellaneous anatomical bits and pieces to makes something that looks like Hellraiser crossed with the plushie aisle at Toys R Us. I like it. A lot.

X03/ZOE WILLIAMS (via Geisha Asobi)

Mound of glistening starch topped with processed meat-ite

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 09:59 AM PDT


This 1940s ad for a revolting, glistening mound of goop topped with process meat-ite is an entry in the LiveJournal Vintage Ads gross food contest. It's certainly stiff competition!

A Vitality Meat!

Soviet proto-Photoshop ca. 1987

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 09:57 AM PDT

Via the BB Submitterator, Boing Boing reader Yenisei says,

Three years before Photoshop 1.0, Soviet computer engineers were already retouching old, damaged images using this amazing piece of technology. Rotary scanner! Magnetic tape! Trackball! "Z for zoom"! And, of course, Didier Marouani, the hippest electronic music available in the USSR at the time.
Video Link: Советский фотошоп - круче!

Brian Eno's new album Small Craft on a Milk Sea

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 01:44 PM PDT


You can listen to Brian Eno's new album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea, on Grooveshark. It's also available on a platter of mirrored plastic, if that's the way you like to get your bits. (Happy Anniversary, Steve Silberman!)

UK Lord claims mysterious Foundation wants to give Britain £17B, no strings attached

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 11:46 AM PDT

Charlie Stross links to an official transcript of the Nov 1 debate in the UK's House of Lords in which the Tory life-peer Lord James of Blackheath (a respected industry magnate and financier) claims to have been contacted by a secret foundation with more gold on hand than all the world's bullion reserves combined. This group, "Foundation X," apparently has offered to give the UK £5 billion right away, no strings attached, with another £17 billion to follow before Christmas for works on hospitals, schools and London's crossrail project. Lord James seems to be totally serious about this, and he claims to have brought other respected Lords to meet with these shadowy goldbugs.

So: who's trying to buy Britain?

Lord James of Blackheath: At this point, I am going to have to make a very big apology to my noble friend Lord Sassoon [Treasury Minister], because I am about to raise a subject that I should not raise and which is going to be one which I think is now time to put on a higher awareness, and to explain to the House as a whole, as I do not think your Lordships have any knowledge of it. I am sorry that my noble friend Lord Strathclyde [Leader of the House] is not with us at the moment, because this deeply concerns him also.

For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, "We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate". I had the biggest put-down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, "Why you? You're not important enough to have the answer to a question like that". He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, "You haven't got the experience for it". Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money...

The point is that when I was in the course of doing this strange activity, I had an interesting set of phone numbers and references that I could go to for help when I needed it. So people in the City have known that if they want to check out anything that looks at all odd, they can come to me and I can press a few phone numbers to obtain a reference. The City firm came to me and asked whether I could get a reference and a clearance on foundation X. For 20 weeks, I have been endeavouring to do that. I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.

Did somebody just try to buy the British government?

(Image: NBP Gold, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 11139043@N00's photostream)

Awful elevator panel design

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 09:31 AM PDT

Elevator-Panel-Sucks

Robyn Miller took this photo of a poorly designed elevator control panel.

Backyard video of epic hailstorm

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 09:25 AM PDT


Giant-size hailstones rip apart a backyard in Georgia. (Via Doobybrain)

The McGurk Effect

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 08:53 AM PDT


This video demonstrates how looking at someone's mouth movements affects the way we hear what they are saying. The man in the video is saying "bah, bah, bah," but when the same audio recording is played while he mouths out "fah, fah, fah," it sounds like he is saying "fah, fah, fah."

The McGurk Effect

Surfer Andy Irons dead at 32

Posted: 03 Nov 2010 08:55 AM PDT

If you're not a surfer, or into surfing culture, the name probably won't be familiar. But those who do recognize him as one of the greats. Andy Irons died this week at 32. His family said he was battling Dengue fever, a disease carried by mosquitoes and endemic to countries in the tropics including Puerto Rico, where Irons was scheduled to compete. But today, reports are circulating of an investigation of Iron's death as a possible methadone overdose. This and other medications were reportedly found in the hotel room where he died.
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