The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Manifesto Manifesto: a recipe for manifestae
- Insider's guide to the fringe events at London's massive anti-cuts rally tomorrow
- 3D coyote replica "rids an area of disease-carrying Canada geese"
- Elephant photo by Gregory Colbert
- Why Rebecca Black fascinates us, and why the mashups suck
- Kick-ass ad for a muckraking journo
- Everyday Carry triggers youthful action film fantasies
- Man who wants to patent genome gets legal threat for embedding James Joyce quote in artificial lifeform
- Hunter S. Thompson interviews Keith Richards
- LA Event: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
- Douglas Rushkoff's new social media conference
- Lee Price's paintings of herself with junk food
- Electronics kit in a mint tin
- "The Wire" as a Dickens serial
- HOWTO make a pixelated trash can
- Matt Ridley's talk at Long Now: "The story of history is of more for less."
- Gallery of screw-propelled vehicles
- James Gleick's tour-de-force: The Information, a natural history of information theory
- Dorothy Young, most long-lived of Houdini's assistants, RIP (and happy birthday Houdini!)
- Ann Coulter on radiation: Wrong in a really interesting way
- Low serotonin levels make mice more bisexual
- Japan Crisis: What's next for nuclear energy in the U.S.?
- Cory speaking on technology regulation next Wednesday in Claremont near LA
- NYT paywall sub is $100 more expensive than WSJ, Economist and Daily combined
- Vitamin D's anti-cancer benefits not yet proven
- Poison frogs, male strippers, and other hazards of nature photography
- Bent fork egg-cup
| Manifesto Manifesto: a recipe for manifestae Posted: 25 Mar 2011 12:37 AM PDT  The Manifesto Manifesto is a recipe for writing manifesti. I tried to follow it for "bananas," but it just didn't sing. Can you do better? THE MANIFESTO MANIFESTO (via Futurismic)
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| Insider's guide to the fringe events at London's massive anti-cuts rally tomorrow Posted: 24 Mar 2011 07:46 AM PDT  [The below is from Tim Hardy, an activist and writer from London interested in the role of technology in driving social and political change, editor of Beyond Clicktivism and member of Sukey.] This Saturday, hundreds of thousands will gather in the UK capital to demonstrate against shock doctrine tactics from a Conservative-led government. Not only has the finance industry walked away scott free after destroying the economy but the damage they caused is being used by the party they fund to push back the hard-won gains of a century in society's care for its most vulnerable. They claim there is no alternative. We are demonstrating because that is not true. A giant wooden horse will appear at Camberwell in south London in the morning. A critical mass of cyclists will form in the east. Slowly from all points of the compass, weird and wonderful groups of protesters will begin to coalesce in what promises to be a spectacular day of demonstrations that may go on all night.
The Trade Union Congress who are organising the main event know of more than 600 coaches and nine special trains bringing demonstrators from around the country - and of one person who is walking from Cardiff. A recent protest organised on Facebook in Portugal mobilised nearly half a million people at short notice. It is not unreasonable to imagine that numbers might reach a million.
The itinerary of the official march is to form at Victoria Embankment from 11am then to set off to Hyde Park for a rally starting at around 1:30 and continuing until around 4:30pm. Among the marchers following the official route will be blocs including 6 Billion Ways, Buggy bloc (for people with children), the Green Party, the Quakers, Women's bloc and the Woodcraft Folk.
The unions have been working hard to make access easier but for those who cannot physically make the day, Disabled People Against Cuts are also offering the chance to make your presence felt through a virtual protest map.
There are also several feeder marches starting from different areas of London and ending at Hyde Park, none officially recognised by the TUC. The largest will be the Education Bloc from ULU and the South London feeder march, from Kennington Park. The best sources for information on the feeder marches and blocs are Political Dynamite and Freedom Press.
On the fringes of the march, theatre activists will invite people to take part in alternative reality games using exercises drawn from the Brazilian Theatre of the Oppressed.
Sukey will be doing its best to keep people safe, mobile and informed on the day with live map updates showing kettles and blocked roads, a smartphone app and free SMS service. If the police do use the controversial technique of kettling, then SOAS University students will be maintaining a Kettle Cafe to provide people with food and water within the containment zones.
Indy Media London will be providing their news service with rss access to updates. VisionOn.TV will be offering a platform for video journalists to share their reports. Dissident Island and Resonance 104.4 FM will be providing radio coverage of the day.
At most festivals, the most interesting things occur at the fringe and the same is true for the 26 March.
At 2.00pm the crowds will begin to quieten, shushing one another until an eerie silence is achieved. Then at 2.10pm from the distance the sounds of World War 2 air raid sirens will begin, growing louder until 2.11pm when everybody is encouraged to make as much noise as they possibly can as hundreds, maybe thousands split off for a range of direct actions around London.
These include UK Uncut who will Occupy for the Alternative, targeting tax dodging banks and shops on Oxford Street whose legal exemptions, if stopped, would pay for the services being destroyed. Many other actions will become apparent on the day.
Don't think that when the speeches end at 4.30pm it's time to go home.
Battle of Britain themed parties with bunting, tea and cakes will be served from 5pm at key points on the map. As night falls, activists will seek to turn Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square and Occupy Hyde Park for 24 hours. Mass sleep outs to protest at Westminster Council's planned criminalisation of homelessness will also be occurring.
Make your voice heard, stay safe, bring your sleeping bag - and don't forget to keep your eye out for the pirate cinema! |
| 3D coyote replica "rids an area of disease-carrying Canada geese" Posted: 24 Mar 2011 04:16 PM PDT  If you ask me, Sam's Club found the old copywriter for the Johnson Smith Catalog and hired him/her to write the description: A life-like, full-size menacing predator, the 3-D coyote decoy rids an area of disease-carrying Canada geese. Safe, humane and effective, it works without the use of dangerous chemicals. The life-like furry tail changes positions in the slightest breeze. It provides 360° coverage and is visible from any angle - far superior to flat silhouette cutouts. It covers approximately 1/4 acre and rids the area of pests like geese, squirrels, ducks, rabbits, skunks and rodents. Use this coyote decoy for golf courses, businesses, homes, parks and any other grass/turf area.I'll bet it doesn't work. 3-D Coyote Replica $32.32 (Thanks, Mister Jalopy!) |
| Elephant photo by Gregory Colbert Posted: 24 Mar 2011 01:41 PM PDT  I just saw this magnificent photograph hanging at Sausalito's Cavallo Point Lodge. It's a piece from Canadian artist Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow collection of photographs, films, and novel consisting of a fictional character's 365 letters to his wife written during a year-long journey. The photographs, including the one that mesmerized me, are approximately 11.5 x 8.25 feet and printed on handmade Japanese paper using an encaustic process. Ashes and Snow traveled around the world in the mid-2000s for display in the Nomadic Museum, a temporary structure assembled (and often redesigned) at each port that hosts it. According to Wikipedia, Ashes and Snow was "the most attended exhibition by a living artist in history," counting more than 10 million people who experienced it. I wish I would have been one of them! "Ashes and Snow" |
| Why Rebecca Black fascinates us, and why the mashups suck Posted: 24 Mar 2011 01:31 AM PDT Adina Goldman's analysis of Rebecca Black's popularity, the lameness of the parodies and mashups it's engendered, and her own relationship to the vision in Black's video is revelatory and incisive, and points to the existence of a new relationship with irony: Why we will never see a good Rebecca Black parody video |
| Kick-ass ad for a muckraking journo Posted: 24 Mar 2011 01:01 PM PDT This amazing job-posting from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune advertises for a journalist who's willing to make trouble, go crazy, chase the story, and fight the good fight -- in Florida! Sarasota Herald-Tribune (via Making Light) |
| Everyday Carry triggers youthful action film fantasies Posted: 24 Mar 2011 02:23 PM PDT  We've linked many times to the Everyday Carry (EDC) blog, essentially an annotated photogallery of the gadgetry that folks carry with them. Every day. I do enjoy the site but some of the images remind me of when I was 12 and would neatly lay out my shuriken, balisong, Maglite, carabiner, sunglasses, Swiss Army knife, and other "weapons" to act out my own 1980s action film "gear up" scene. In fact, as our Rob points out, the audio in this clip should be the official soundtrack for the EDC blog. From EDC's mission statement: Everyday Carry, or EDC, generally refers to small items or gadgets worn, carried, or made available in pockets, holsters, or bags on a daily basis to manage common tasks or for use in unexpected situations or emergencies. In a broader sense, it is a lifestyle, discipline, or philosophy of preparedness.EDC |
| Posted: 24 Mar 2011 10:15 PM PDT Craig Ventner created an artificial lifeform, and in order to tag it, he encoded some literary quotes in its DNA -- a misquotation (as it turns out) of Feynman, and a line from James Joyce. Now he's attracted a legal threat from the famously litigious Joyce estate (an estate that, in my opinion, epitomizes loony, censorious, vindictiveness exercised against living readers and writers on behalf of a dead man). The irony is ripe -- after all, Ventner's the man who wants to patent the human genome. After announcing their work, Ventner explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce's estate, saying that he'd used the Irish writer's work without permission. "We thought it fell under fair use," said Ventner.The funniest thing is that Joyce isn't "written" in the genome, he's encoded in it by a code of Ventner's design. Ventner could "erase" Joyce by declaring a different set of mappings for the code. Indeed, you could declare any genetic sequence to be a one-time pad coding for any literary quote (or other text) of the same length and it would, in some sense, be true. Craig Venter's Genetic Typo (via Tor)
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| Hunter S. Thompson interviews Keith Richards Posted: 24 Mar 2011 11:56 AM PDT Hunter S. Thompson interviews Keith Richards in 1993. Do you speak mumble? Part 2 after the jump. (via Dose Nation) |
| LA Event: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything Posted: 24 Mar 2011 11:22 AM PDT Machine Project in Los Angeles is hosting a lecture and book launch event with author Joshua Foer on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 8pm. It sounds great! Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything -- A lecture and book release with author Joshua Foer |
| Douglas Rushkoff's new social media conference Posted: 24 Mar 2011 11:19 AM PDT BB pal Douglas Rushkoff has launched a new one-day conference to explore alternatives futures of social media outside the context of marketing and what he sees as the overwhelming corporate influence on today's Web. The event takes place October 20 at the Angel Orensanz Center in New York City. From Doug's site: "Party Like It's 1992" (rushkoff.com) Contact 2011 (contactcon.com) |
| Lee Price's paintings of herself with junk food Posted: 24 Mar 2011 10:52 AM PDT   Lee Price creates photorealistic oil paintings that are mostly self-portraits of herself, binging on junk food. In the new print issue of Bust magazine, Price talks about how her work explores body image, feminism, and our cultural relationship to food. You can see more of Price's work at her own site or at Santa Fe's EVOKE Contemporary Gallery where she is showing in May. |
| Posted: 24 Mar 2011 10:41 AM PDT  Maker Shed (the kit and project store owned by the publisher of Make magazine) has recently introduced its Mintronics kit, a $20 electronics prototyping platform that fits in a mint tin. The Mintronics: Survival Pack from the Maker Shed contains over 60 useful components for making, hacking, and modifying electronic circuits and repairs on the go.Mintronics: Survival Pack |
| "The Wire" as a Dickens serial Posted: 24 Mar 2011 10:31 AM PDT  It's one of those ideas that sounds less nuts the more you think about it: "The Wire" imagined as a 19th-century serialized novel. After all, David Simon's great multi-season drama had all the muckraking moral outrage of Charles Dickens (Google the reviews and try to count the number of times you see the word "Dickensian"), and its shifting viewpoint over five seasons gave it a similar historical sweep and reportorial authority. The real kick of "When It's Not Your Turn," though, is its obsessive attention to detail. You have to admire the dedication of creators Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson, who seemingly cram every arcane bit of the show's rich mythology into a fake lit-crit essay. The illustrations, ostensibly by Baxter "Bubz" Black, just add to the goofy verisimilitude of the thing. It's a fabulous fraud. |
| HOWTO make a pixelated trash can Posted: 24 Mar 2011 12:32 AM PDT  Instructables user BrittLiv has a fairly intense HOWTO for making a pixelated home trash can made from hand-painted woodblocks and plywood. It's a lot of work, but you can't argue with the results! Pixel Trash Can (via IZ Reloaded)
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| Matt Ridley's talk at Long Now: "The story of history is of more for less." Posted: 24 Mar 2011 09:40 AM PDT Here's Stewart Brand's recap of science author Matt Ridley's (The Rational Optimist, Genome, The Red Queen) talk at the Long Now's Seminar About Long-term Thinking in San Francisco on Tuesday. Matt Ridley on "Deep Optimism" |
| Gallery of screw-propelled vehicles Posted: 24 Mar 2011 12:28 AM PDT Dark Roasted Blend's gallery of "Radical Screw-propelled Vehicles" is a tour through the screw-tipped evolutionary dead-end of vehicle design. Screw-propelled vehicle makers have played in the snow and mud, dabbled with amphibious and military designs, hauled lumber -- but ultimately, it's a design that never seemed to catch hold. Radical Screw-propelled Vehicles (Thanks, Marilyn, via Submitterator!) (Image: amphibiousvehicle.net) |
| James Gleick's tour-de-force: The Information, a natural history of information theory Posted: 24 Mar 2011 02:48 PM PDT  I've just finished reading The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick's tour-de-force history of information theory. I read Freeman Dyson's early review of The Information with interest earlier in the month, and fell upon the book and read it nonstop when it arrived. I lie. I stopped reading it a lot. I stopped to stare into space and go "huh" and "wow" and "huh" again. I stopped to try to explain the connections Gleick was making for me to my wife (with varying degrees of success), including an epic bedtime conversation that kept us up for an hour longer than we'd intended. Gleick is one of the great science writers of all time, and that is, in part, because he is a science biographer. Not a biographer of scientists (although there is much biographical insight to scientists, mathematicians, lexicographers, writers and thinkers in The Information), but a biographer of the idea itself, and the way that it ricochets off disciplines, institutions and people, knocking them into new, higher orbits, setting them on collision courses. I've been fascinated with information theory since a friend of a friend explained "Shannon limits" to me in the late 1990s. I remember the conversation, mostly because the description was tantalizingly frustrating and incomplete, this being a hallmark of really interesting ideas. This friend of a friend explained that there were theoretical limits to how much information any channel could carry, and that these limits included rigorous definitions for "channel" and "information." I've read up on Claude Shannon rather a lot since (I've got a short story called Shannon's Law in an upcoming Borderlands book, about a hacker named Shannon Klod who tries to violate the barrier between faerie and the human realm by routing a single packet using TCP-over-magic) and every time I do, it's a revelation, because some new facet of information theory reveals itself to me. But nothing has presented these ideas half so well as The Information, and that's a tribute to Gleick's storytelling mastery, his ability to pick out the threads of history that trace back and forward from the discipline's central thesis. Gleick begins with early lexicographers, the primitive dictionaries, the phrasebooks that translated between the talking drum and western speech. He moves onto Babbage and Lovelace (and presents an account of their invention, rivalries, victories and failings that is as heartbreaking as it is informative), and then into telegraphy. Telegraphy leads to codes, and codes to compression, and compression to logic, and logic to the first inklings of theories, and now you've got Einstein and Godel and Shannon and Turing meeting, debating, fighting and rubbishing each other in learned journals, arguing furiously with Margaret Mead at interdisciplinary conferences -- a pellmell debate in full swing. On Gleick marches, to the double helix and Dawkins and memes, to a section on randomness that is so transcendently exciting that I couldn't put the book down and read it while walking, so distracted I got lost twice within blocks of my office. Gleick takes us through Wikipedia and the meaning of information, the debates about it, the helpelessness of information overload, the collisions in namespaces -- even through his beloved chaos math -- until he has spun out his skeins so that they wrap around the world and the universe, information theory at the heart of legal debates over trademark, physics feuds over Hawking radiation, epistemology and cryptography, even fights over Pokemon characters and their disambiguation. The Information isn't just a natural history of a powerful idea; it embodies and transmits that idea, it is a vector for its memes (as Dawkins has it), and it is a toolkit for disassembling the world. It is a book that vibrates with excitement, and it transmits that excited vibration with very little signal loss. It is a wonder. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood |
| Dorothy Young, most long-lived of Houdini's assistants, RIP (and happy birthday Houdini!) Posted: 24 Mar 2011 12:47 PM PDT Dorothy Young, the most long-lived of Harry Houdini's assistants, died on Sunday at 103. As a teenager, Young worked with Houdini from 1925 to 1926. Young went on to dance on Broadway, studied painting, and wrote several books, including Diary Without Dates, Dancing on a Dime, and a booklet titled Touring With Houdini. Later in life, Young became a major benefactor of Drew University whose $13 million gift led to the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts. From Drew University (Wikimedia Commons image): In related news, today is Houdini's 137th birthday, a fact that Google reminds us of with today's Google Doodle homepage logo. |
| Ann Coulter on radiation: Wrong in a really interesting way Posted: 24 Mar 2011 08:38 AM PDT  Last week, Ann Coulter told America that exposure to low levels of radiation might actually be a good thing. And most of America went, "What?" But, while Coulter seems to have overstated the case, there is, apparently, a not-widely-accepted scientific theory behind what she said. PolitiFact ended up rating Coulter's claim as "Barely True" because of hormesis—a controversial idea based on some early studies in the United States which seemed to show that regions with higher natural levels of background radiation had a lower incidence of cancer. The trouble (for Coulter) is that hormesis is far from being a proven concept.
PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter on Ann Coulter's radiation claims Via Roobina Image: Some rights reserved by Nomad Tales |
| Low serotonin levels make mice more bisexual Posted: 24 Mar 2011 07:13 AM PDT  There's a new peer-reviewed research paper out this week that purports to show a link between an animal's levels of serotonin—a brain chemical probably best known for its association with happy feelings—and who that animal chooses to be its sex partners. You're going to see this study in the news, and you're going to hear about it anecdotally for years to come. I can almost guarantee it. Why? Because, in mice, serotonin appears to affect how bisexual a male mouse is willing to be. Specifically, the male mice in this study demonstrated more bisexual tendencies when their serotonin levels were low. The other thing I can almost guarantee: The results of this study are going to be widely misinterpreted and misused. Luckily, we have Ed Yong—science blogger extraordinaire. On his site, Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed offers a clear, understandable, and fascinating explanation of what this study is really about, what it proves and doesn't prove, and why the results of this study can't be automatically extrapolated to apply to humans.
Image: Some rights reserved by [rom] |
| Japan Crisis: What's next for nuclear energy in the U.S.? Posted: 24 Mar 2011 09:56 PM PDT [Video Link] On PBS NewsHour, Miles O'Brien reports on new questions around the future of nuclear development and nuclear energy policy in the US, as Japan continues struggling to get the badly damaged Fukushima plant under control. The reactors there were designed in the 1960s, just like many of the plants operating in the US. But new technology, new reactor designs, and new safety mechanisms available today might have prevented the disaster now unfolding at Fukushima, say some of the engineers interviewed for the story. "There's nothing particularly safe about releasing a billion watts of energy in a modest-sized concrete building, so you force it to be safe by engineering." James Mahaffey, author of Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power Link to video and transcript. You can download audio (MP3) here. Also in last night's edition of NewsHour, this report on new radiation fears in Japan, now that radioactive iodine has been found in Tokyo tap water, the same day black smoke no-one could explain was rising anew from the Fukushima plant. Transcript here. |
| Cory speaking on technology regulation next Wednesday in Claremont near LA Posted: 24 Mar 2011 06:18 AM PDT  I'm coming to Southern California next week and I'll be speaking at Claremont McKenna College's Atheneum series. It's next Wednesday, 30 March, at 1845h, and it's free and open to the public. I'll be reprising and expanding on the "Little Bit Pregnant" talk on technology regulation that I gave earlier this month at the University of Toronto iSchool conference -- it's a topic I'm developing, but one that I find really interesting. The idea is to look at all the different groups, interests and individuals who might call for restrictions on general-purpose computers and networks to prevent some real or imagined harm, ranging from printed weapons to malicious software to libel to copyright infringement, and what we might do to mitigate the real harms and tell them apart from the imaginary ones. I hope to see you! |
| NYT paywall sub is $100 more expensive than WSJ, Economist and Daily combined Posted: 24 Mar 2011 06:07 AM PDT Here's an interesting price-comparison between the forthcoming NYT paywall and other subscription services from the Economist to Dropbox. The NYT offering (in its most expensive guise) is extremely expensive relative to the competition, which leads some to conclude that this is primarily about making paid print subscriptions a good deal, rather than pursuing any kind of digital strategy from people who don't read news on paper, or who live outside the areas where a print NYT is readily available: Digital Subscription Prices Visualized (aka The New York Times Is Delusional) (via O'Reilly Radar) |
| Vitamin D's anti-cancer benefits not yet proven Posted: 23 Mar 2011 06:03 PM PDT Why didn't the United States Institute of Medicine take into account Vitamin D's cancer-preventing powers when they wrote up their latest nutrition recommendations? Because those powers haven't really been proven yet. A nice look at how plausible medical claims can end up overstated. (Via Helen Branswell) |
| Poison frogs, male strippers, and other hazards of nature photography Posted: 24 Mar 2011 06:39 AM PDT All National Geographic photographer Mark Moffett wanted to do was travel peacefully to Colombia and photograph the world's most poisonous frog. Instead, he ended up on a road trip through the rain forest with a male stripper from Miami. They get horribly drunk, develop open sores, are run out of a village, and become pariahs in another town when they show up with a basket full of said poison frogs. But they did get the photos. World Science Festival: Do Not Touch the Frog |
| Posted: 24 Mar 2011 12:22 AM PDT  Scott Bedford bent and twisted a fork to make a snaggletoothed egg-cup. I have a friend who has a mild phobia of bent fork-tines, this would drive him crazy (and I have to admit, there is something somehow unwholesome about such a grotesquely distorted bit of cutlery!). Egg cup from a bent fork (Thanks, Sally599, via Submitterator!) |
We're left with a fascination with our fascination over something so banal. We are amazed by how quickly something we don't enjoy looking at is suddenly something everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) is looking at. It's not the viral item of the moment as much as it's our behavior around it that has us yapping. It's the virtual equivalent of "eeeyuch, does this milk smell bad to you, too?" 
We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: "I can't believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer." As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you're the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble... well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you're our kind of sicko. 
Social media offer us an opportunity more spectacular than purchasing video greetings from American Idol contestants for our Facebook friends. They offer us the ability to play an active, conscious role in the development of our networked human future: from distributed communications networks impervious to the censorship of corporate or government regimes to new modes of value creation and exchange, or new open source democratic participation to collective consciousness and expression.
One of the most amazing uses of screw propulsion has to be Joseph Jean de Bakker's. In the 1960s the Dutch inventor created the Amphirol, a machine designed to take anyone pretty much anywhere. What made Joseph Jean de Bakker machine better than other versions of "screwing yourself across the landscape" was its performance. 
says in the piece. "Every complication in a nuclear plant is to make it so it won't kill you."
As Frédéric Filloux and others have pointed out, The New York Times pricing seems designed not to get people to subscribe digitally, but rather to discourage existing subscribers from cancelling their print subscriptions. I think the chart above validates that view: they apparently have no interest in competing for digital-only dollars. | You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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