The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Galileo's controversial moon drawings
• DDoS versus human rights organizations
• DHS relied on bizarre legal reasoning and crappy evidence to seize "pirate" domains
• Laser-cut stop-motion animation
• Lego Technic Idea books
• Seaquence: "An experimental musical petri-dish"
• Temple of Dawn: visit inside a Brazilian UFO cult
• HOWTO grow your own snowflakes
• Sant-a-Matic (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
• Update on "inchvesting" in Detroit
• The Man with the Electronic Brain
• Garter belt for saggy pants
• Footstickers
• Neurosexism examined: Delusions of Gender
• Is barefoot better? There's not enough evidence to say.
• Man builds egg-shaped home on Beijing sidewalk
• Notes from a professional knife sharpener
• Lunar Eclipse
• Lighthouse frozen in ice
• Qur'an written in Saddam's blood
• Happy Holidays From Redandjonny
• Pink sheep (BoingBoing Flickr Pool)
• Internet "road rules" near FCC vote
• Good Faith Collaboration: How Wikipedia works
• The underwater sculpture of Jason de Caires Taylor
• Dance
• Ebola tattoo

Galileo's controversial moon drawings Posted: 20 Dec 2010 07:11 PM PST I'll be honest, I bailed on the historic Solstice lunar eclipse last night. I have a good excuse. It was cloudy in Minneapolis when I went to bed, and likely to remain that way. Getting up in the middle of the night to stare at cloud cover is not exactly thrilling. Sure, a winter Solstice lunar eclipse hadn't happened in the Northern Hemisphere since 1638. Ah, well. Come the Singularity, I'll hit the next one. Speaking of the 1600s, though, check out these beautiful drawings of the phases of the moon. They're thought to be the handiwork of Galileo, himself. And, while they look pretty basic, these pictures actually represent some big, scary risk-taking. According to Thomas Christensen—author of an upcoming book on the 17th-century beginnings of modern science—these simple, detailed sketches were seen as an affront to the Catholic Church. It was a shock and an affront to suggest that God's heavenly objects were not perfect but pocked and roughened with craters and protuberances like some ordinary rock of the earthly realm. This would all come to a head when Galileo visited the pope in 1616 . Thanks to cairosam for Submitterating!

DDoS versus human rights organizations Posted: 20 Dec 2010 10:34 PM PST Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law and Society has released a new report on the use of Distributed Denial of Service attacks by censors and oppressive governments against human rights organizations. It's pretty grim. Our research suggests that: • DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites have been common in the past year, even outside of elections, protests, and military operations. With recent highly publicized DDoS attacks on Wikileaks, and "Operation Payback" attacks by "Anonymous" on sites perceived to oppose Wikileaks, we expect these attacks to become more common. • Independent media and human rights sites suffer from a variety of different types of cyber attacks, including filtering, intrusions, and defacements in addition to DDoS attacks, and those attacks interact with each other in complex ways. • Independent media and human rights sites suffer from both application DDoS attacks, which exhaust local server resources and can usually be mitigated by a skilled system administrator; and network DDoS attacks, which exhaust network bandwidth and can usually only be mitigated with the help of a hosting provider at considerable expense. • Mitigating DDoS attacks against independent media and human rights sites will likely require moving those sites closer to the core of the Internet: inside the small number of major ISPs, websites, and content distribution networks* (CDNs) that have the experience and resources to defend against these attacks, particularly network DDoS attack 2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

DHS relied on bizarre legal reasoning and crappy evidence to seize "pirate" domains Posted: 20 Dec 2010 10:31 PM PST Techdirt's Mike Masnick enumerates the litany of crappy law, evidence, and assumptions behind the Department of Homeland Security's decision to seize a group of music-blog and search-engine domains. The seizures were backed copyright industry lobbyists. The story should scare all of us: if you have a .com or .net domain, the US government is prepared to censor you on the evidence-free say-so of a corporate lobbyist from the copyright cartel. It looks like the four blog/forum sites (RapGodFathers, OnSmash, Dajaz1 and RMX4U) and Torrent-Finder were all lumped together into a single warrant and affidavit. The affidavit was written by a Special Agent with ICE, named Andrew Reynolds, who indicates in the affidavit that he only recently graduated from college (he notes that he's only been on the job for one year, but before that he was a "student trainee with the group"). Much of the affidavit relies heavily on the MPAA. This fits with what ICE assistant deputy director Erik Barnett said soon after the seizures, admitting that they basically just took what sites Hollywood said were a problem and seized them... ...In other words, the "support" that Agent Reynolds provides for why Torrent-Finder's domain should be seized is that he claims that Torrent-Finder's admin linked directly to infringing material. But that's not true. Instead, the admin was simply pointing to a bunch of different news stories. Even worse, some of those news stories highlight why the claims of the MPAA, which Agent Reynolds relies upon, are simply made up -- such as TorrentFreak's story about comic artist Steve Lieber (which was actually based on a Techdirt story about how Steve Lieber embraced the so-called "pirates" and ended up making a lot more money -- we later interviewed Steve about his experiences). The CNET article is all about the COICA law -- which is about the legality of seizures like this one. How is that evidence of probable cause? Even going beyond the fact that Agent Reynolds can't seem to figure out that a search engine is different than a torrent tracker or a torrent hosting site, he also seems to think that linking to blog posts like the ones we write here is probable cause for criminal behavior. Holy crap! That's just downright scary. Homeland Security Presents 'Evidence' For Domain Seizures; Proves It Knows Little About The Internet - Or The Law (via /.)   EFF on US domain copyright seizures - Boing Boing Official "This website seized by feds" graphic - Boing Boing

Laser-cut stop-motion animation Posted: 20 Dec 2010 10:23 PM PST Adam Rosenberg's "Paper Man" is a student video made by laser-cutting 265 frames out of paper and stop-motion animating them, synching them to a poem. Paper Man (Thanks, Pete!)

Lego Technic Idea books Posted: 20 Dec 2010 05:38 PM PST No Starch Press sent me three neat-looking books. They are part of the Lego Technic Idea Book series. The first is called Simple Machines, the second is called Wheeled Wonders, and the third is called Fantastic Contraptions. All three were written by Yoshihito Isogawa. The three books are wordless. The clear, colorful photos are arranged in a step-by-step fashion to show you how to make (as the titles suggest) fun little mechanisms using Lego parts. When I got these books, I went to Amazon to buy an assortment of Technic parts (gears, axles, chain links, worm gears, racks and pinions, drive bands, etc). But as far as I can tell the only way to get Lego Technic parts is by buying a model kit for a vehicle or robot of some kind. It doesn't seem like you can buy a box of assorted components for the purpose of building anything you feel like building. I looked around a little more online and found some sites that sell individual Technic components, but the process of ordering the parts is complicated and kind of expensive. Does anyone know a good way to buy Lego Technic components without having to purchase a model kit? It really seems like Lego is missing an opportunity here. In any case, if you already have a bunch of loose Lego Technic components, these books look fantastic. Lego Technic Idea Book series: Simple Machines | Wheeled Wonders | Fantastic Contraptions

Seaquence: "An experimental musical petri-dish" Posted: 20 Dec 2010 02:56 PM PST [Video Link] Why not take the idea of generative sound literally? John Conway certainly set the standard during the early 1970s for taking the programming-as-organism metaphor at its word with his Rules of Life. That was his game-like system in which small cellular automaton expand into a pulsing pixelfield of what resemble living, if not breathing, digital beings, especially as they get more and more complex. Conway's mix of visual play and algorithmic ingenuity informs Seaquence.org, which may just be the coolest non-iOS interactive audio-game (or sound toy) to appear in 2010. Seaquence is a browser-based sequencer that looks like a petri dish. Or, the more you play with it, a petri dish that acts like a sequencer. You develop your own set of paramecium-ish creatures, each of which acts like a so-called "step sequencer." That means that it plays a sequence of notes that are notated in a grid-like pattern. Make one creature, toy with its musical DNA (affecting "waveform, octave, scale, melody, envelope, and volume," as the instruction explain), and then add others to see how they interact. Seaquence is an original project from Gray Area Labs, created by the artist-developers Gabriel Dunne, Daniel Massey, and Ryan Alexander, with support from Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, an arts organization based in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. There's going to be a special GAFFTA event on New Year's Eve in San Francisco that will provide new members of the organization access to a special gaffta.org edition of Seaquence, as a kind of financial support mechanism for digital artists. Seaquence will, however, its developers assured me, always be free. I've been interviewing one of the Seaquence developers for a series of articles about interactive sound apps. Asked about upcoming Seaquence improvements, Dunne provided a glimpse of what's next: "Some of the more obvious additions will be the ability to control the tempo and effects. We also plan to introduce user accounts with the ability to save your work under your name and favorite seaquences you like. We're building up to a larger concept of an explorable ecosystem, and consider the project perpetually in progress."

Temple of Dawn: visit inside a Brazilian UFO cult Posted: 20 Dec 2010 02:20 PM PST Don't trifle with spirits, said my American friend as we enter this weird syncretic Brazilian sanctuary in the outskirts of Brasilia, called the Temple of Dawn. I am wearing my white Brazilian dress with big black Brazilian ants on it, and I cover my bare shoulders with a colorful silk shawl with tiny celebrity faces: from Hitler to Jesus. It is about to rain outside, one of those tropical storms is coming. But inside the barn-like temple, it is stuffy and misty with incense, like a science fiction movie-set from the 1930s. My eyes are burning, my nose is running, but I am glimpsing incredible figures and paintings on the walls, on the brick labyrinths, numerous thrones, veil like fabrics.... The Temple of Dawn worships UFOs, Tutankhamen, Jesus, the disembodied spirit of an Indian chief named White Feather... name it. "Aunt Neiva," the cult's prophet and founder, created the church in a trance some 50 years ago. Neiva used to be a truck driver married with four kids, before her spiritual gift descended on her and she became a prophet. She founded this cult community, and, advised by spirits of the dead, she dictated the cult's highly elaborate costumes and rituals. Our spiritual guide is a very warm pleasant church functionary in a complicated black, white and orange uniform, with a sash and a white surcoat adorned with crosses, badges and stars. He is telling us this elaborated story, without much philosophical or religious consistency. Every logical question makes him wriggle. They don't need to seek answers, says my American friend, they have their dogma and faith. I guess that goes for all religions. As I try hard to understand the incomprehensible, it strikes me that, in this gaudy, rambling UFO temple, I feel exactly as I feel in a Catholic cathedral or an Orthodox church. It's the same situation, only with less transparency. So I decide to surrender and go with the spiritual flow. A procession of cult women of all ages, dressed as Disney queens with hooded capes and billowing skirts in cartoon-bright colors, is chanting and marching though the brick labyrinths. They smile at us and ask us to stand aside. This ritual marching and toneless singing goes on for hours every day, while two other religious orders, costumed differently but just as strangely, carry out other tasks, such as washing in trough-sized baptismal fonts and hailing shrouded idols with stiff-armed salutes. This ruckus seems agitated and messy at first, but some firm military structure underlies it. They are calm, focused and persistent, like hospital orderlies. The high priests of two orders, doctrinaires and mediums, perform the purification of souls of the patients (as they call us, the non-believers). The cult doesn't lack for clients. Many common people are there in the temple, sitting on painted cement benches to watch the cultists meditate on colored thrones and fly into trances. Some are poor, simple local people, some are on crutches or in wheelchairs. Of all ages and races. Rich ambassadors come over from Brasilia sometimes, I am told. Tourists come to gawk. Culturologues film them and study them. Every day, the cult offers spiritual guidance to those who have not yet realized that they are incarnated from other planets. Our guide is a former general who has been reincarnated nineteen times, and he confesses shyly that he needs to help people because of the large numbers he slaughtered in his former military career. People, says our guide, are continually pestered by ghosts, whether they know it or not. His general keeps coming back to him, asking for this and that, and struggling to find a new order where he can purify himself through good works. The spirit of the dead man is doing that now, in the body of the priest. It's not fun, it's demanding and suffocating work. But it is rewarding: these kind people don't ask for money. They even refuse donations. It's unclear how they manage to eat, much less built their private lake, cement pyramids and giant plywood Jesus effigies. One never sees them doing anything but performing their sacred duties. The mediums sometimes writhe, moan and gasp in woe as the spirits of the dead take direct hold of them. This elite group seem to have life especially hard. There are 670 temples all over the world, they tell us, and about 36 000 believers here in Brasilia. Even though a woman founded the cult, only men become the priestly "doctrinaires," who go out among the public to preach and proselytize. The spirits have never called another woman to be adequate to that job, I am told. The temple is full of dreamlike imagery: of the Sun and the Moon, in the middle an arrow, framed faces of ghostlike creatures and big-eyed spirit guides, six-sided stars pasted all over with mirrors, crosses draped in cloth, pillars, veils, and painted flames. It reminds me of my grandmother' s stories from inner Serbia, when the dead used to come back and ask for justice, or their earned reward, or sometimes even for peace. Although I feel uneasy, I don't feel endangered. I look at a young, very thin boy with a bandanna on his head: obviously he's come here in some pitiful hope to get well again. Will faith healing help him in his plight, or just speed him to the grave? All these New Age cults have some vague aura of criminality. When Radovan Karadzic, the Serbian war criminal was hiding as a guru of alternative medicine, disguised in a weird costume, I met sick people who believed his cover stories. He never cured them. Although we are in rather good health, when our guide presses the issue, we volunteer to get a diagnosis by trance mediums. My personal medium has a hard time with me. We have no language in common, and four different spirits take over her body and then run away as she tries to give me good advice. My Brazilian friend has a different problem, his medium is speaking ancient Portuguese to him, through a spirit who is several centuries old. Nobody can get his true meaning, as he urges my Brazilian friend to drink plenty of water and bang on the earth with a cane. Outside it is storming and getting cold in the summer: the women are chanting on the cult's private lake. Other women sit in specific cement thrones inside the temple, in immobilized silence, gathering spiritual power. We're warned not to touch them, or even the barriers and chains that surround them. When fully charged, they rise unblinking in their starry cartoon costumes and go sit in another chair somewhere else. Nothing much happens. The droning songs, endless marches and reeking incense are leaving us tired, empty and badly in need of a drink. The calm chaos has come to seem normal; it's the everyday Brazilians, in their summer shorts, Tshirts and rubber zories, who seem exotic now. We are urged to purify ourselves though long ritual procedures in brightly-painted antechambers, but we don't feel up to the challenge. We'll try that next time, we promise gratefully. Kindly they salute us, with good wishes for the foreign wanderers. Many have come before us from all over the world, they confide. Some have come back to the Temple of the Dawn. Some join us and stay. This prospect gratifies our eccentricities. It makes us feel humble and grateful for the wonders of our life as it is. Religion can be soaringly inspirational as it becomes impossible to describe. More: jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com (photographs: Jasmina Tesanovic)

HOWTO grow your own snowflakes Posted: 20 Dec 2010 12:41 PM PST Caltech physicist Ken Libbrecht wrote the book on snowflakes. Actually, several of them. The author of the Field Guide to Snwoflakes and The Secret Life of a Snowflake posted a HOWTO guide for growing your own snow crystals. (No, they probably won't look like the "hollow column snowflake" or "triangular crystal snowflake" above that Libbrecht photographed with a custom snowflake photomicroscope. For more of those incredible natural flakes, see this gallery at New Scientist.) From Libbrecht's Web site: The parts list for this experiment is as follows: >One used 20-oz plastic Coke bottle >Three large-diameter styrofoam cups (or something similar; see below) >A small kitchen sponge (1/2 inch thick) >A short length of nylon fishing line (thinner is better; 1-pound test is good) >A strong sewing needle >Four straight pins >One paper clip >Some paper towels "Grow Your Own Snowflakes" (via Science Friday)

Sant-a-Matic (Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 20 Dec 2010 03:02 PM PST Sant-a-Matic, an image contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by BB reader Blazel (who's on Twitter here).

Update on "inchvesting" in Detroit Posted: 20 Dec 2010 12:27 PM PST TURNING INTO GODS - 'Concept Teaser' from Jason Silva, a resident of the Imagination Age in Loveland, who believes that it's possible for life in our hybrid community to go on forever, and ever, and ever... If you saw a tiny inch-tall horse standing among thoroughbreds, would you bet on it? You might if you suspected it could grow during the race and at some point, before the finish line, turn into a flying dragon. That's what I thought about when Jerry Paffendorf first told me about his plans for the Loveland project in Detroit. I bought one thousand square inches (for $1 each) in Loveland's first microhood, Plymouth. This neighborhood is called the Imagination Age. There are 588 residents of Plymouth including Jane McGonigal, Christian Renaud and Stephen McGee and dozens more in the Imagination Age, among them Grady Booch, Frank Rose and Jason Silva Some "inchvestors" have been letting Loveland unfold before hatching development plans, but others have been ignited by the pace set by the project's directors. Loveland recently applied for support from the Knight Foundation to support development. Check the project out if you're interested in the future of news and creative approaches to making Detroit the city of the future once again. Amanda Peterson, an Urban Planning Masters student at the University of Michigan recently reached out to me with her housemate Erin Guido to collaborate on the Imagination Age's urban augmented architecture project: Inchvisible Houses. "Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement, has been a great inspiration on the path to Inchvisible Houses. The rise of the small but beautifully designed home is just beginning, and so is the rise of young people creating their own futures. Buy an inch of land in Detroit Investing in Detroit by the square inch Invest in one square inch of Detroit for $1

The Man with the Electronic Brain Posted: 20 Dec 2010 11:31 AM PST An old comic book science fiction story titled "The Man with the Electronic Brain." Electronic Brain

Garter belt for saggy pants Posted: 20 Dec 2010 11:18 AM PST This garter belt type device is used to keep saggy pants falling to the ground. It was invented by 43-year-old Andrew Lewis. You can buy the contraption for $30. I will be surprised if he sells even one, except possibly as a gag gift. Harlem inventor has an unbelievable answer to a 'sagging' problem

Footstickers Posted: 20 Dec 2010 11:10 AM PST Apropos of Maggie's post earlier this morning about barefoot running, here are some foot stickers you can wear to give you the benefits of barefoot running along with the protection of shoes. These aren't commercially available, they're just concept designs. Footstickers

Neurosexism examined: Delusions of Gender Posted: 20 Dec 2010 11:03 AM PST Stanford neurobiologist Ben Barres has a great review of Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. Dr. Fine outlines some of the methodological problems and biases that creep into work by behavioral scientists who study sexual differentiation. Dr. Barres has been on the front lines of the battle against neurosexism for years, because he has first-hand experiences with how this bias gets reified through science and social expectations. He made a name for himself in the field before transition from female to male. He has a number of all-too-common stories about how he's been treated with more deference and respect by peers now that he lives as male. From his review "Neuro Nonsense": Based on my experiences as a neurobiologist and as a transgendered person, I have previously argued that innate sex differences in the brain are not relevant to real-world accomplishments. Without question, male and female brains have different circuits that help to control their different reproductive behaviors. So it has long seemed an easy step to believe that such anatomic changes also underlie supposed gender differences in cognitive abilities. Rather, in a theme that Fine elegantly expands on, it is the idea itself that women are innately less capable that may be the primary cause of differences in accomplishment. This idea Fine appropriately dubs "neurosexism." This idea was long ago powerfully encapsulated in the concept of "stereotype threat," the phenomenon in which members of a sex or race perform substantially worse on a test--and perhaps in real-world environments--when they are led to believe before the test that they are innately less capable. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Is barefoot better? There's not enough evidence to say. Posted: 19 Dec 2010 09:39 AM PST I've been wondering about the scientific evidence behind the barefoot running trend, and the Skeptoid podcast delivers. Turns out, while running barefoot is a perfectly viable option that many people enjoy, there's not much evidence to back up the claims that it's better than running shod. Although, to be fair, there's also not much evidence to back up the opposite claim, either. Basically, there's been very little research done on whether barefoot is better than shoes, or vice versa. Most of what you've heard are marketing claims, not science.

Man builds egg-shaped home on Beijing sidewalk Posted: 20 Dec 2010 10:30 AM PST A 24-year-old architect from Beijing built an egg-style home on a sidewalk. It's made out of bamboo, wood chippings, and grass. The materials cost about $1000 and it contains a bed, a water tank, and a lamp. Hatching a cheap way to live in Beijing (Via Blame It On The Voices)

Notes from a professional knife sharpener Posted: 20 Dec 2010 10:01 AM PST Eric E. Weiss is a professional knife sharpener who, unlike most others in his field, does it all by hand. He either tackles the blade freehand or clamps it in a jig that he modified. When he's working, Weiss sharpens around 40 knives a day. The San Francisco Chronicle invited Weiss tell his own story: I started sharpening knives when I was 5. By the age of 10, I was making money from it. My friends in the Scouts paid me 5 cents to sharpen their knives! But I never thought I would have a knife, scissors and gardening-tool sharpening business when I grew up.... You should definitely be using a sharpening steel - the tool that comes with any knife set - every time you're done with your knife. Hold it straight up and down on your table. Start from the heal or the guard, depending on your knife, and draw it straight down at a 25-degree angle. Two or three times either side is all you need. More than that, you start removing your edge. Dishwashers are my No. 1 nemesis. People seem to think that any knife can be put in a dishwasher. But in fact it's like sandblasting your car in order to clean it. The knife is banging against the basket, getting chips, nicks, dents, dings. And if the knife has any sort of quality steel to it, the dishwasher can remove the edge in two, three washings. Some people think dull knives are better than sharp knives because they're safer. Wrong! You're pushing and exerting much more pressure on a dull knife. So when you finally break loose, in most cases, your fingers are in the way. "Knife sharpener Eric E. Weiss gets to the point"

Lunar Eclipse Posted: 20 Dec 2010 10:01 AM PST (images via Wikipedia) For the past two weeks, as we've followed the moon nearly halfway around the sky, I've talked about the relative positions of the earth and the moon and the sun using a simple system clock-based system to point to everything. As we've been doing it, we're looking down from above the north pole of the earth, which you can draw as a clock face. The sun is off in the distance in the 6 o'clock position. Almost two weeks ago, when we first saw the little sliver of a moon and the remainder of the disk full of earthshine, the moon was around the 5 o'clock position. When it flew past Jupiter almost a week ago it had moved up to 3 o'clock, and now, as it is coming around to full, it is nearly to 12 o'clock. Often when you present this way of looking at positions of the sun and the earth and the moon to kids for the first time (and it work even better if you use a lamp for the sun, your head for the earth, and a Styrofoam ball for the moon), you will be asked "but wait, how come we can ever see the full moon?" It's true that in this simple view every time the moon moves to the 12 o'clock position it should fall into the earth's shadow and disappear. We should never see a full moon. The only reason we do is because the orbit of the moon is tilted by just a little bit, so most of the time when the moon reaches the 12 o'clock position it is a little above or a little below the long shadow of the earth. That's the same reason, of course, that we don't get eclipses of the sun every time the moon is at the 6 o'clock position. It's too bad, really, because if eclipses of the sun actually happened every month maybe I would finally get a chance to see one. Which I still haven't. Which makes me bitter. Every once in a while, though, the sun, earth, and moon do line up just right, and at the precise moment when the moon should be completely full, it instead really does disappear into a lunar eclipse. One of those times when this happens is tonight. Starting at 9:30pm here in southern California (where, incidentally, we received record rainfall yesterday and the probability of clear skies for tonight hovers in the low zeros), or 5:30am GMT, the moon first touches the earth's shadow. I like to think of it from the perspective of someone on the moon watching. First the limb of the earth touches the sun, then slowly the earth slides across, making the lunar landscape darker and darker, until finally the entire sun is extinguished and it is almost as dark as a frigid lunar nighttime. The full eclipse starts at 11:41pm PST for me, when I will be looking up at the clouds in wonder, or 7:41am GMT, and lasts a little longer than an hour before the moon slowly reappears. If you're lucky enough to have clear skies and be awake for that hour of total eclipse, one of the most interesting things that you will notice is that the moon doesn't actually disappear, but instead can turn a dim spooky red. What is going on? Let's think about standing on the surface of the moon again. From the moon's perspective, the earth is new - totally unilluminated - and though you could see some of the brighter lights of cities and fishing fleets it is not enough to light your landscape. But with the sun directly behind the earth, all parts of the earth's atmosphere would glow with a 360 degree ring of sunset, so all around you would not be night, but an eerie twilight. It's a sight no one has ever seen. No pictures exist anywhere of the view from the moon of the earth, with its full atmosphere aglow, yet I still know that it must be one of the most wondrous sights in the solar system. I wish I could be up there on the moon tonight staring back towards home, but I'll just have to imagine - as you should too - that moment, standing on the edge of some crater, looking out across the desolate lunar landscape. You're looking up at the earth but you can't see too much yet other than the glare from the quickly shrinking sliver of sun. Suddenly the entire sun is covered, your eyes adjust and you look up to see the red glow all the way around, the tiny outer cover of earth that makes it home. You watch for an hour as the glow changes with the clouds and with the slow rotation of the earth until suddenly a little sliver of sun appears from the western side of the earth and you're quickly blinded again as lunar day time slowly reappears across your landscape, lighting your footprints in the dust showing you the way to begin the long walk home.

Lighthouse frozen in ice Posted: 20 Dec 2010 12:47 PM PST Above is a lighthouse in Cleveland, Ohio. The spray from Lake Erie froze layer by layer until the structure was encased in ice. WKYC.com has a gallery of photos by George Payamgis. "Frozen Cleveland lighthouse draws visitors"

Qur'an written in Saddam's blood Posted: 20 Dec 2010 09:43 AM PST The perfect Eid gift for someone with an extraordinarily dark sense of humor: a Qur'an written in Saddam Hussein's blood. [Guardian via Gawker]

Happy Holidays From Redandjonny Posted: 20 Dec 2010 09:32 AM PST Redandjonny are just a couple of stormtroopers with a camera and a blog. They are currently celebrating the holidays, just like us.

Pink sheep (BoingBoing Flickr Pool) Posted: 19 Dec 2010 09:29 AM PST Last week, I got a hankering for some pink animals and you all helpfully pointed me towards lots of great, pink beasties—from snakes and an adorable baby octopus, to deep-sea jellyfish and a significantly less-cute cyanide-excreting millipede*. And, the very same day, I also ran across this photo on the BoingBoing Flickr Pool. Despite being artificially pink, these sheep still made me smile. Thanks to photographer Geof Wilson for a wonderfully ridiculous pastoral scene. *Thanks to snakepunk, treacle, beroe and Anonymous!

Internet "road rules" near FCC vote Posted: 20 Dec 2010 09:05 AM PST Jorge says: "A controversial proposal for Internet traffic rules that would allow providers to ration access to their networks is scheduled to come before communications regulators for a vote on Tuesday." Internet providers say they should be free to manage their networks for the benefit of all users, but content providers fear disruption of access and anti-competitive behavior. The rules could help cable companies battling competitors who deliver competing video content over the same Internet lines the cable companies hook up to customers' homes. Level 3 Communications, a company that helps Netflix Inc stream videos online, has accused Comcast of charging it unfair fees to deliver content to Comcast subscribers. The FCC's ability to regulate the Internet has been in doubt since an appeals court in April said the agency lacked the authority to stop Comcast from blocking bandwidth-hogging applications. Reuters: Internet Road Rules Near FCC Vote See also: Al Franken -- "This Tuesday is an important day in the fight to save the Internet."

Good Faith Collaboration: How Wikipedia works Posted: 20 Dec 2010 09:42 PM PST Joseph Reagle Jr's Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is exactly what a popular, scholarly work should be: serious but not slow, intelligent but not dull, and esoteric but not obscure. It's practically a textbook example on how to adapt a dissertation as a trade book -- dropping the literature review, moderating the stuff that's meant to prove you've done your homework, and diving straight into the argument. Reagle, an avid wikipedian himself, nevertheless takes up an objective distance and tries to suss out how it is that Wikipedia works as well as it does (I'm always amazed by critics who characterize Wikipedia as a hopeless quagmire of argument -- there's certainly a lot of argument there, but hopeless? If it's so hopeless, how did those millions of articles get written and edited?). His thesis: Wikipedia works because it has a distinctive culture of assumed good faith; that is, there is a powerful (though not universal) norm of assuming that the person on the other side of the argument is every bit as committed as you are to getting high quality, accurate encyclopedic entries written and maintained. Reagle makes an excellent case that this assumption of good faith is particularly powerful when it comes to dealing with those who lack good faith -- it creates positive outcomes for arguments with everyone from neo-Nazis to political hacks who're whitewashing their boss's entries. It's also the force counteracts the natural contentiousness of assembling an encyclopedia (let alone one that the public may edit!) and keeps the project from flying apart into millions of angry pieces. Reagle offers fascinating evidence for this hypothesis starting with the founding of Wikipedia as an offshoot of the defunct Nupedia project, on through the many challenges and growing pains suffered by the site, and uses it to carefully counter Wikipedia's detractors who, by turns, accuse it of being too elitist, too populist, unserious, too serious, collectivist and marred by individualism. Ultimately, Reagle offers a compelling case that Wikipedia's most fascinating and unprecedented aspect isn't the encyclopedia itself -- rather, it's the collaborative culture that underpins it: brawling, self-reflexive, funny, serious, and full-tilt committed to the project, even if it means setting aside personal differences. Reagle's position as a scholar and a member of the community makes him uniquely situated to describe this culture. Reagle is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, whose fellows have produced such notable Internet books as Lessig's Code, Zittrain's The Future of the Internet, Benkler's Wealth of Networks and David Weinberger's Small Pieces, Loosely Joined -- Reagle's book is a worthy addition to that canon. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (Amazon) Official book site   Wikipedia's first 10000 edits - Boing Boing Top ten most viewed pages on Wikipedia and Conservapedia - Boing Boing Who scrubbed Wikipedia's entry for Sarah Palin just before nom ... Biggest image on Wikipedia? - Boing Boing Wikipedia list of every landing mankind has ever made on other ... Map of Wikipedia article-density by nation Boing Boing

The underwater sculpture of Jason de Caires Taylor Posted: 19 Dec 2010 08:59 PM PST "The Silent Evolution," by British artist Jason de Caires Taylor, lies between Cancun and Isla Mujeres off the coast of Mexico. Taylor used 'life casts' made from materials that encourage coral growth to build the installation on the sea bed, forming a new home for aquatic creatures. — REUTERS/Jorge Silva

Dance Posted: 19 Dec 2010 08:40 PM PST More.

Ebola tattoo Posted: 19 Dec 2010 08:25 PM PST Wow. Reader Brandon Elkins recently became the proud owner of an amazing tattoo, based on a scanning electron microscope image of the Ebola virus—specifically the Zaire virus (aka ZEBOV), which was the first species of Ebola to be identified and is still the most deadly. Outbreaks of ZEBOV have recorded fatality rates as high as 90%, so I really shouldn't be surprised that it makes for such a hardcore-lookin' tattoo. But, yeah. Turns out, ZEBOV is more metal than I would have guessed.

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