The Latest from Boing Boing

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• iCufflink: throbbing, illuminated open-source hardware cufflinks
• She looks great in Goa'uld
• Airbus imagines transparent airplane
• Harvard's collection of scientists' field notes
• Lulzsec scalps CIA
• Monument fire, Cochise County, Arizona (photo from Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
• Cool pinstriping work done by hand
• Battle for the electromagnetic spectrum: "The Secret History of Iraq's Invisible War"
• Cracker Barrel waitress reunited with dead ancestor through photo hanging on Cracker Barrel wall
• French proposal: any URL to be arbitrarily blacklisted without due process
• Duke Nukem publicists publicly threaten journalists whose reviews contain "venom"
• Last-minute signing tomorrow in Pittsburgh at CMU bookstore, 2-5PM
• "Marijuana": A 1968 government film starring a spaced-out Sonny Bono
• TOM THE DANCING BUG: Hollingsworth Hound in "Brave New Third World"
• I would love to see the literature on Wiley Coyote
• White blood cell chases bacteria to the tune of Yakety Sax
• Volcanic ash on Lake Nahuel Huapi, Argentina
• Room made of recycled PC parts -- panorama
• Map of undersea cables from 1901
• From bOING bOING Issue 13: Kevin Kelly interview
• Rotters: YA horror novel about grave-robbing chills, thrills, delights
• Scroll bookshelf: holding books in place with tensioned metal rolls
• Head of UN copyright agency says fair use is a "negative agenda," wants to get rid of discussions on rights for blind people and go back to giving privileges to giant companies

iCufflink: throbbing, illuminated open-source hardware cufflinks Posted: 16 Jun 2011 02:44 AM PDT Phil from Adafruit Industries announces the iCufflink: "Open source electronic cufflinks, pulsate like Apple Macs - a very last minute ultimate geek gift for Father's day. I co-designed these little cufflinks; I wanted something that was futuristic but still classy enough to wear for special events when I need to get dressed up. There will be a necklace version too, of course." I played with a pre-production prototype last week at a dinner in NYC, and boy-howdy, were they awesome. iCufflinks - v1.0 (Thanks, PT!)

She looks great in Goa'uld Posted: 15 Jun 2011 05:31 PM PDT

Airbus imagines transparent airplane Posted: 15 Jun 2011 03:56 PM PDT Airbus' airplane of 2050 is translucent, has "experience zones" instead of old-fashioned classes, and is filled with biomorphic seats that suck the energy from your body and adapt to the shape of your buttocks. [Video Link: Daily Telegraph. Thanks, Jess!]

Harvard's collection of scientists' field notes Posted: 15 Jun 2011 03:22 PM PDT Ever wonder what naturalists, geologists, and other scientists who do observational work in the field are writing down in those ubiquitous, little notebooks? Harvard has published a collection called Field Notes on Science and Nature, that compiles the drawings, notes, and even specimens that fill the pages of scientists' field books—along with essays where the scientists who took the notes discuss their approach to note-taking and the "whys" behind the things that captured their attention.

Lulzsec scalps CIA Posted: 15 Jun 2011 02:52 PM PDT Srsly.

Monument fire, Cochise County, Arizona (photo from Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 15 Jun 2011 02:30 PM PDT Photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Threaded Thoughts.

Cool pinstriping work done by hand Posted: 15 Jun 2011 01:50 PM PDT A friend says: "Watch this cat stripe this Royal Enfield tank. Nice and smooth, as Ray Davies would say. The beauty and nobility of doing things by hand -- there's too little of it left in the world these days. He's dressed pretty spiffy, too." Royal Enfield tank pinstriping

Battle for the electromagnetic spectrum: "The Secret History of Iraq's Invisible War" Posted: 15 Jun 2011 12:53 PM PDT Noah Shachtman writes, In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. military developed a technology so secret that reporters mentioning the gear were promptly escorted out of the country. That equipment - a radio-frequency jammer - eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb. But the dark veil surrounding the jammers remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion. Recently, however, I got a chance to go inside this invisible battle for the airwaves. I went inside the lab where they're building what could amount to the ultimate weapon of this electromagnetic war. And I saw how the high-tech tools developed to win that fight have been largely neutered by Afghanistan. And here's the resulting story: The Secret History of Iraq's Invisible War (Wired.com)

Cracker Barrel waitress reunited with dead ancestor through photo hanging on Cracker Barrel wall Posted: 15 Jun 2011 12:50 PM PDT Sandra, a server at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Owensboro Kentucky, shared a chilling tale with a local country music and news radio station. This waitress found a photo of her ancestor on the wall of the restaurant where she works. Stephen Lenz, who shared the article with us, says: "CREEPY PHOTO ALERT because the portrait looks like an old-timey version of her." Snip from the news story, which I have no way of fact-checking: [W]hat happened one day while she was working at Cracker Barrel must have felt like a huge ray of hope straight through her soul. Sandra was having a bad day and thinking about her niece, Cammi Jo, who had recently passed away. They were very close. She was sweeping an aisle in the back dining room when she looked up and said, "Oh my lands, it's Cammi Jo." Hanging on the wall above a large round table was an old framed photograph of a young woman and her daughter. Sandra took a picture of that photo and sent it to her sister-in-law, Cammi Jo's mother. As it turns out, the baby in the photograph is Sandra's great-great-great grandmother, and the baby's mother is the one who is identical to Cammi Jo. This picture is the picture that hung above the piano in Sandra's great-grandmother's home. Sandra's mother has since called the folks at Cracker Barrel and arrangements are being made to get the photo back to the family. More: WBKR.com.

French proposal: any URL to be arbitrarily blacklisted without due process Posted: 15 Jun 2011 11:27 AM PDT Sarkozy's latest plan for "civilizing" the Internet: a Great Firewall of France that government agencies to add URLs to without judicial oversight or public scrutiny on the basis of broad, nebulous criteria. Information website PC INpact revealed today a draft executive order which would give the French government the power to arbitrarily censor any content or service on the Net. The French government is furthering its policy to control the Internet, in complete disregard of citizens' rights and freedoms. To implement article 18 of the law for the Digital Economy of June 21th, 2004, the French government is proposing to give to several of its ministries the power to order the censorship of online content that harms or otherwise puts at risk public order and security, the protection of minors, of public health, national defence, or physical persons1. Clearly, the definition of these categories of content are both vague and overreaching. Such censorship measures - whether they consist in the removal or filtering of content - would be directly undertaken by the government, without any decision by a judicial authority. In practice, they would apply to all kinds of websites or online news services2. The Entire Internet Under Governmental Censorship In France?

Duke Nukem publicists publicly threaten journalists whose reviews contain "venom" Posted: 15 Jun 2011 01:41 PM PDT Duke Nukem Forever, a long-overdue sequel in the Duke Nukem video-game franchise, finally shipped this week to scathing reviews. The Redner Group, who were handling publicity for the launch, tweeted a message that warned reviewers that "we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn't based on today's venom" -- in other words, if game journalists say nasty things about our client, they won't get review titles in the future. They've since apologized, but this is not the sort of subtext one usually sees brought to the surface in publicist/journalist relations. Duke Nukem's PR threatens to punish sites that run negative reviews (via The Awl)

Last-minute signing tomorrow in Pittsburgh at CMU bookstore, 2-5PM Posted: 15 Jun 2011 11:14 AM PDT I'm coming through Pittsburgh tomorrow for a private event and I'm going to drop in to the CMU bookstore from 2-5 for a signing. This is all very last minute and there hasn't been much public notice, so please let your friends know!

"Marijuana": A 1968 government film starring a spaced-out Sonny Bono Posted: 15 Jun 2011 10:46 AM PDT Richard Metzger says: "Sonny Bono seems more than a little stoned in this US government anti-marijuana film from 1968. It includes an hilarious final piece to camera (which looks edited to best comic effect) where Bono trips over his words, as he tells the audience." Well now, you've heard from both sides of the question, but what you do with your life is up to you. If you become a pothead you risk blowing the most important time of your life: your teen age. That unrepeatable time for you to grow up and to prepare for being an adult that can handle problems, and make something meaningful out of life. Or, you have the choice to have the courage to see and deal with the world for what it really is - far, far from perfect but for you and for me the only one there is. While it's true that some of you will actually go to the moon and perhaps other planets, it's also true that in a few short years, this world will be your establishment, and you will be the Establishment and what you do or don't do about it will be your scene. Your the generation with the brain power and the opportunity to do more for the human needs of this world than any other generation in history. Let's hope your teenage children don't have too much criticism of what you did or didn't do because you were on pot." Corniness aside, this seems like a fairly well-balanced and enlightening film about drug use. "Marijuana": A 1968 government film starring a spaced-out Sonny Bono

TOM THE DANCING BUG: Hollingsworth Hound in "Brave New Third World" Posted: 14 Jun 2011 06:12 PM PDT

I would love to see the literature on Wiley Coyote Posted: 15 Jun 2011 07:51 AM PDT "Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books" — Title of a peer-reviewed research paper published in the journal Acta Neurochirurgica, June 2011

White blood cell chases bacteria to the tune of Yakety Sax Posted: 15 Jun 2011 07:45 AM PDT YouTube Doubler This, alone, is a good reason for YouTube Doubler to exist. Also: No, I am never going to get over the Yakety Sax meme. You know how your parents held on to some piece of clothing or a hairstyle well past its prime? Fifteen years from now, that's going to be me and Yakety Sax. Video Link Via Daniel Keogh

Volcanic ash on Lake Nahuel Huapi, Argentina Posted: 15 Jun 2011 07:34 AM PDT Puyehue volcano in Chile has been erupting since the 4th of June, sending up columns of ash that have shut down air traffic as far away as Australia. This footage was taken more than 100 miles from the volcano, at Argentina's Lake Nahuel Huapi, where the normally clear water has been turned into something resembling a giant pit of quicksand. No word on how this natural disaster has affected Nahuelito, the Lake's resident monster, though I'd imagine this can't be good for most wildlife. I get a little shiver just watching that diver go down at the end of the video. Hopefully, he or she came back up again. Video Link Via Steve Silberman

Room made of recycled PC parts -- panorama Posted: 15 Jun 2011 05:24 AM PDT Polish artist Marek Tomasik built this remarkable 16' x 14' x 15' out of the components he salvaged from discarded PCs. The resulting panorama is so fantastic -- a metallic, glittering fairyland -- that it feels like a virtual rendering, but it's a real, built environment. Wizualiazja - panoramyfirm.pl (360' panorama) The amazing house where old PCs get a new spark of life (DVICE)

Map of undersea cables from 1901 Posted: 15 Jun 2011 07:18 AM PDT I don't have any context for this 1901 map of undersea cables for the Eastern Telegraph Company System, but it sure is a tantalizing look at telcoms history and the way that the world used to talk to itself. sc-tech: A Map of Undersea Cables from ...1901 ! (via Super Punch!)

From bOING bOING Issue 13: Kevin Kelly interview Posted: 15 Jun 2011 07:27 AM PDT bOING bOING was a zine that my wife Carla and I launched in 1988 to cover comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, consciousness technology, curious phenomena, and whatever else surprised and delighted us. That zine, which ran for 15 issues until 1997, evolved into the very website you're reading right now. We've made available a free anthology of some of our favorite interviews from bOING bOING, the zine. You can access it for free with Microsoft's Office Web Apps on SkyDrive, whose sponsorship has made this project possible. The anthology, called bOING bOING: History of the Future! is a collection of interviews with and articles by some of our favorite writers and thinkers - Robert Anton Wilson, Rudy Rucker, William Gibson, Kevin Kelly, Marc Laidlaw, and Bruce Sterling. For the last several weeks, we've been running posts about the articles included in the bOING bOING: History of the Future anthology. Last week, I wrote about bOING bOING's interview with Bruce Sterling. This week, I'd like to introduce the interview that my wife Carla and I conducted with writer and Wired co-founder Keven Kelly. It appeared in bOING bOING #13 (64 pages) and was published in 1994 in San Francisco. (Pesco wrote the cover story on Dark Wave and the resurgence of goth!) We asked Kevin about his book on chaos, machine evolution, and emergent behavior, called Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World. The document is in Microsoft Word format and you can view it for free with Office Web Apps on SkyDrive whether you have Word on your computer or not. And if you'd like to download it for local perusal or printing and don't have a recent version of Microsoft Word or one of the many other applications that can open the document, you can use the free Word Viewer for Windows or Quick Look built into Mac OS X. The History of the Future! A free anthology of articles from the bOING bOING print 'zine 1989-1997 (SkyDrive) Previously: bOING bOING's interview with author William Gibson. bOING bOING's interview with Robert Anton Wilson. bOING bOING's interview with Rudy Rucker bOING bOING: free collection from the print zine, 1989-1997

Rotters: YA horror novel about grave-robbing chills, thrills, delights Posted: 15 Jun 2011 06:29 AM PDT Daniel Kraus's young adult novel Rotters tells the unlikely story of Joey Crouch, a 16 year old boy from Chicago whose mother is killed by a bus; Joey is sent to live with his mysterious father in small-town Iowa, and that's when things get weird. Joey's father is taciturn, he smells bad, he lives in a shack, and he doesn't seem interested in being any sort of father (or even roommate) with his long-lost son. Joey is an instant pariah at high-school, subjected to tortures and humiliations thanks in part to his father's reputation as the town weirdo, and in part to the fact that Joey's home has no facility for washing clothes and its unique smell clings to him and all his possessions. Thus far, it sounds like a story about a kid who's dad is mentally unbalanced, or neglectful, or sadistic, but when Joey stows away in the bed of his father's truck to see where the old man goes on his long absences, he learns the truth: his father is a grave robber. Joey's intrusion into his father's secret life opens a floodgate in the old man, and before long, Joey has become his somewhat unwilling apprentice, though his reluctance turns to enthusiasm as he is inducted into the many mysteries and traditions of the ancient brethren of grave-robbers. Kraus takes us on a narrative tour of the science of putrefaction and decay, the economics of the funeral industry, the history of the Resurrection Men who plundered English and Scottish graves to fill the dissection rooms of hungry medical colleges. But most of all, Joey learns about his mother's secret past, the strange circumstance that brought her and his father together and the tragedy that drove them apart, and as he unlocks his own history, Joey begins to master his bullies at school and the relationships in his life. Rotters is an epic, 450 pages long, and it is as suspenseful and masterfully told as it is gruesome and terrifying. Kraus conveys the full horror and beauty of our bodies' inevitable return to the soil without playing for cheap thrills or easy gross-outs. You'd be hard pressed to find a coming-of-age story as satisfying as this in any YA novel. That Kraus manages this tour-de-force in the midst of liquefying corpses and maggoty dirt is a marvel itself, and marks him out as a writer whose future books I'll anticipate with impatient pleasure. Rotters (Thanks, Scott!)

Scroll bookshelf: holding books in place with tensioned metal rolls Posted: 15 Jun 2011 05:16 AM PDT The Scroll Bookshelf appears to be a design prototype for a new kind of shelf that uses a curled, tensioned metal shelf overlaid with plastic to hold the books in place: "Unfurl the sheet and stack em books! And look! The ends have secret chambers to hold pens and other trinkets. Cute!" Book Wrap

Head of UN copyright agency says fair use is a "negative agenda," wants to get rid of discussions on rights for blind people and go back to giving privileges to giant companies Posted: 15 Jun 2011 05:54 AM PDT In this (non-embeddable, natch) video interview from the World Copyright Summit on June 8, Francis Gurry, the Director General of WIPO, the UN agency that creates and oversees global copyright policy, laments the current state of WIPO, saying that the copyright agenda there: "... tends to be a negative one. It tends to be looking at the exceptions, the limitations, and the other ways of not having intellectual property. I'm very keen to see us coming back with a positive agenda for intellectual property." Translation: our job isn't to figure out how to balance out freedom of speech and access with exclusive rights for authors and investors; more copyright is always good. And the subtext is, "All those public interest groups that have got us looking at rights for blind and disabled people, exemptions for poor countries, rights for educators and archivists, and Creative Commons-style 'some rights reserved' issues are distracting us from the real business of WIPO: maximizing copyright's benefit for a handful of corporate giants." Several of the public interest groups at WIPO have objected in writing and asked for clarification: In response to requests from Member States, exceptions and limitations have been placed on the agenda of SCCR. As a result, a very useful series of studies for the visually impaired, libraries and education has been published, followed by surveys of exceptions and limitations in Member States. We welcomed these studies and were happy to advise in their preparation upon WIPO's request. In our view WIPO, as the core UN agency for copyright, has a responsibility and a crucial role to be the neutral field for all stakeholders, respecting decisions made by Member States while setting the work agenda, and providing support with technical expertise for achieving Member State objectives. Your statement suggests a bias against balance and in favour of more protection; and your use of "us," given the audience you were addressing, could imply that the WIPO Secretariat is aligning itself with a specific set of rights holder interests. In this context, the library community and the World Blind Union would like to express its concern that the message to be taken from your remarks must be that copyright exceptions are negative for the welfare of copyright rather than being a positive and beneficial tool to sustain learning, support the exchange of scholarly information and promote creativity. Meanwhile, WIPO continues to stumble forward with more Internet regulation proposals, including a proposal to make ISPs and domain registrars adjudicate and police trademark claims, "three strikes" Internet disconnection rules, and generally increased liability for "intermediaries" such as hosting companies, YouTube, WordPress, and ISPs, which would encourage them to censor and surveil their users. WIPO is uniquely unqualified to regulate the Internet. Gossip has it that 'a Director-level staffer recently asked a group of Internet intermediaries the question "What does Web 2.0 mean?"' (Thanks, Secret Informant!)

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