Wednesday, March 17, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Property Outlaws: important scholarly book on how breaking property law improves it

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 03:28 AM PDT

Eduardo Penalver and Sonia Katyal's Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership has been at the top of my discretionary reading pile for months, now ever since the publisher, Yale, sent me a review copy. Unfortunately, it's been months since I've done any substantial discretionary reading and it'll be months still before I get to do so. So yesterday, I just carved out 45 minutes to give it a good, thorough skim, and while I don't have enough of the book in me to do an actual review, I can tell you that my suspicions were confirmed.

Property Outlaws is a great and deep read on how the violation of property rights -- from trespassing to sit-ins to copyright infringement -- have been critical to the evolution of "the law of ownership," establishing the principles that led to anti-discrimination laws (lunch-counter sit-ins), justice for indigenous people (Indian occupation of Alcatraz) and the many shifts and turns in copyright that accommodate speech, privacy, and free expression.

Katyal and Penalver go at the subject with academic thoroughness (both are academic lawyers), but without ever being dry. This is an important book -- important enough that I'm putting it back in the stack so that I get a chance to read it cover to cover someday.

We've featured Katyal's work here before, Copyright, Technology, and The New Surveillance is a great paper on privacy and copyright enforcement that's a must-read.

Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership


Home Taping is Killing Music: funny video about UK record industry's plan to legislate British Internet into oblivion

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 03:00 AM PDT

Phil from Don't Disconnect Us sez, "Commissioned by UK ISP TalkTalk, we've been campaigning against the British Government's anti-filesharing proposals which form part of the Digital Economy Bill. In a nutshell the music industry has been lobbying the UK government saying that filesharing is killing the music industry. That's why we teamed up with Dan Bull, the musician behind Dear Lily and Dear Mandy, to create our very own music video. 'Home Taping is Killing Music' is a tongue-in-cheek video that features 80s legends Madonna, George Michael and Adam Ant (well, actually it's just a trio of look-alikes) lip-synching to the song Top of the Pops style."

This is some extremely funny stuff -- especially by the time we get to the grand finale and all the other industries at risk ("Home sleeping is killing hotels"). Taking the apocalyptic claims of the record industry about the net at face value is so short-sighted and short-memoried. These Chicken Littles have been telling us that the sky is falling and that they must must must have business-friendly laws and enforcement or the world will end since 1908, when the piano roll was invented. Every time, it just turned out that some of the old guard were going to lose out, and a new guard, who saw how to make a living in the new world, were going to come along to take their place.

Yet here we are in Britain, ready to establish a China-style Great Firewall to block sites the record industry doesn't like, ready to shut whole families off from the information society if one member is accused of copyright violations, ready to sacrifice national technological competitiveness to shore up the doddering relics who don't want to make way for the next generation of entrepreneurs and artists who thrive in a networked world. And the dumbest part is that there's no way it will actually reduce infringement: we're just going to further criminalize and alienate young fans and creators.

It's not too late: write to your MP and ask for a full debate on the Digital Economy Bill. The British record industry admits that its legislation will only pass because Parliament isn't holding a debate on it. Demand that your elected representative do her job!

Home Taping is Killing Music (Thanks, Phil!)



Digital: A Love Story, mystery game set "10 minutes in the future of 1988"

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 12:30 AM PDT


Dan Kaminsky sez, "Digital: A Love Story is set 'five minutes into the future of 1988', and is one of the most fascinating games I've played in years. Set entirely within an Amiga Workbench desktop, the concept of the game is that you are just your average BBS user, when you meet someone...interesting."

Just played this for ten minutes and was overwhelmed with nostalgia for my Amiga 1000. Looks like LOADS of fun.

Digital: A Love Story (Thanks, Dan!)



Progress Wars: grinding considered as a game

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 11:26 PM PDT


Progress Wars is a pretty arch and funny critique of the way that video games are often more compelling/engrossing than fun. A variety of random missions are generated, one after another ("Hijack Silk Traders," "Attain warehouse") which you complete by repeatedly clicking a "Perform mission" button, which edges a progress bar toward completion. Once you finish a mission, you get another one. And another, and another. As Fipi Lele says, "The guy at the end is really hard."

Progress Wars (Thanks, Fipi!)



19th century manly slang

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 11:18 PM PDT

From The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man, an absolutely delightful "Dictionary of Manly 19th Century Vernacular." Some of my faves:
Anointing: A good beating. A case for the application of salve.

Blind Monkeys: An imaginary collection at the Zoological Gardens, which are supposed to receive care and attention from persons fitted by nature for such office and for little else. An idle and useless person is often told that he is only fit to lead the Blind Monkeys to evacuate. Another form this elegant conversation takes, is for one man to tell another that he knows of a suitable situation for him. "How much a week? and what to do?" are natural questions, and then comes the scathing and sarcastic reply, "Five bob a week at the doctor's-- you're to stand behind the door and make the patients sick. They won't want no physic when they sees your mug."

Cupboard Love. Pretended love to the cook, or any other person, for the sake of a meal. My guts cry cupboard; i.e. I am hungry.

Earth Bath. A grave.

Fimble-Famble. A lame, prevaricating excuse.

Gentleman of Four Outs. When a vulgar, blustering fellow asserts that he is a gentleman, the retort generally is, " Yes, a Gentleman Of Four Outs"--that is, without wit, without money, without credit, and without manners.

O'clock. "Like One O'clock," a favorite comparison with the lower orders, implying briskness; otherwise "like winkin'." "To know what's O'clock" is to be wide-awake, sharp, and experienced.

Rumbumptious. Haughty, pugilistic.

Snotter, or Wipe-hauler. A pickpocket whose chief fancy is for gentlemen's pocket-handkerchiefs.

Tune the Old Cow Died of. An epithet for any ill-played or discordant piece of music.

The Art of Manliness Dictionary of Manly 19th Century Vernacular

Downloadable 3D cover for MAKERS is now also an article of commerce

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 11:11 PM PDT

The folks at Shapeways surprised me in January with a 3D-printed version of the UK cover for my novel Makers, which had been designed by Shapeways community member Dmitry Kobzar. Mr Kobzar was good enough to release his 3D files under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license.

Now Shapeways is selling 3D prints of the cover for your delectation in a variety of materials (just in case you don't have a 3D printer of your own with which to run off a copy!). For the record, I don't get any of the proceeds from it -- I just think it's way cool.

Cory Doctorow Makers cover 3D print



Hot Chip, "I Feel Better," directed by Peter Serafinowicz

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 10:31 PM PDT

hotchip.jpg

Peter Serafinowicz (Look Around You, The Peter Serafinowicz Show, and Paul McCartney in the upcoming Robert Zemeckis CGI remake of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine) directed this new music video for the British electropop band Hot Chip. Just went live a few minutes ago. Stay with it. Brilliant creepy hilarity. LAZERS.

Watch video on MySpace.

(I hate linking to MySpace but they have an exclusive on the video for the first few days, and I can't embed stuff from their crap platform. Sorry. I hate linking to "The Sun," too, but their review is hilarious).

Now hiring: One astronaut

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 08:04 PM PDT

Is this "help wanted" ad for an astronaut the most awesome job post ever, or sad reminder that even the incredibly far-freakin-out can become sort of mundane under the right context? (Thanks, Andrew Grant!)



Whistling Speech

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 09:37 PM PDT

I really love the research that they're doing over at Yale's Haskins Laboratories: instead of studying speech perception and production in terms of faithfully replicating alllll of the sounds we make with our mouths, (like the minute clicks, pops, and hisses of consonants), the team is proposing that all we need to understand speech is to track and re-create a few select resonances of the vocal tract. I like to think of speech production in this context as a series of bottles with varying levels of water in them--the mouth is one bottle that changes pitch resonance when you move it to open it or close it, the nasal cavity another, and so on throughout the vocal tract. It ends up sounding like a bunch of complicated melodies that are then combined into a complex micro-tonal harmony, a.k.a., we're all better at perceiving and making music than we think we are!

The examples below break it down into isolated sine-wave patterns that you can combine yourself to build a sentence. What do you think? How easily can you hear words emerge?


Tone combinations

If you like this, you can go here for more interactive demonstrations, or check out this great sine-wave-synthesized Robert Frost poem.

Thanks to Robert E. Remez, as well as Phillip Rubin and Jennifer Pardo at Haskins Labs for allowing me to embed their work here.

Coming up, I'll be writing about a cool ethnographic example of a language that actually uses something like this in practice!

Vinyl record groove under electron microscope, at 1000x

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 07:32 PM PDT

groove.jpg Here's a wonderful gallery at Reckon of high-magnification images of the grooves on a vinyl record, captured with an electron microscope. (via Farai Chideya)

Mysterious 4,000-year-old mummies found in desert north of Tibet

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 07:24 PM PDT

A cache of particularly mysterious mummies has been discovered in a desert north of Tibet. The remains are of persons who died some 4,000 years ago. They lie beneath a forest of bare, phallic wooden poles. "The cemetery lies in what is now China's northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses."

Docs FOIA'd by EFF show law enforcement use social networking sites to spy

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 07:18 PM PDT

The Electronic Frontier Foundation today released documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which discuss law enforcement agencies' use of social networking sites to gather data in investigations. "One of the most interesting files is a 2009 training course that describes how IRS employees may use various Internet tools—including social networking sites and Google Street View—to investigate taxpayers." Here's a related AP item on how feds used a fake Facebook profile to nab a suspect.

Guatemala: In memory of Comalapa

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 07:10 PM PDT

Picture 8.jpg

Photo by James Rodriguez, from this multimedia image gallery documenting the inauguration of a memorial monument by the National Coordination of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA) in the former military garrison of San Juan Comalapa in Guatemala. This photo essay includes a multimedia presentation with images and sound recorded during the event. Between 2003 and 2004, the remains of 179 wartime victims were exhumed near this site.

The Complete Milt Gross Comic Books and Life Story

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 03:23 PM PDT

3D Pic Lr Big

Cartoonist and comic book historian extraordinaire Craig Yoe sent me a copy of his latest book, Milt Gross: Comic Books and Life Story. Most people probably don't know who Milt Gross is, but in the 1920s and 1930s he was a cartoonist beloved by millions for his zany, frenetic comic strips and was hailed as "America's Great Yiddish Humorist." It's safe to say that without Milt Gross, Harvey Kurtzman and Robert Crumb would have turned out to be very different kinds of artists.

The 354-page monster of a book includes a 38-page biography, which tells the story of how Gross went to work with Charlie Chaplin and Joan Crawford, and how he created his famous (at the time) characters and comic strips such as Nize Baby, Izzy Human, Babbling Brooks, Frenchy, Kinney B. Alive, Amateur Night, Sportograms, In the Movies They Do It, Dave's Delicatessen, Looy Dot Dope, Count Screwloose of Tooloose, Joe Runt, Banana Oil, Otto & Blotto, That's My Pop!, and Then the Fun Began.

The remaining 300-plus pages are devoted to full color reprints from extremely rare 1940s Gross comic book stories, which are still funny in the same way that I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and The Flintstones are. Here's an excerpt from Yoe's biography of Gross:

Gross perfected a unique comic Yinglish, a linguistic marriage of Yiddish and English. It permeated his work, particularly in his written and illustrated newspaper column Gross Exaggerations and its resulting compilation book, Nize Baby. Gross explained that this slanguage was "a literal translation of the Anglicized Russian Jew. At least I try and make it so. It is the language of the people--conveyed at times in somewhat ludicrous character. But, so far as I know, it is never false, never out of register. I am too much of a nut on getting things right for that. Its only departure from the actual might, as I've said, lie at times in its ludicrous element. That's necessary, of course, in the work itself."

Max Shulman, the creator of the Dobie Gillis stories and television show, said of Gross, "He is far and away the best Yiddish dialect humorist that ever practiced. His ear is tuned with radar-like delicacy to the locutions of first-generation American Jews. He captures not only the mispronunciations, but also the misconstructions--the subjects scorning predicates, the gerunds peering around corners, the tenses blithely commingling, the participles without visible means of support. The effect in his skilled hands is not caricature, but hilarious accuracy." Shulman added, "You will find a warming absence of spikes, barbs, and jagged edges. Only good nature is here, and light heart. You get a feeling that Mr. Gross wants you to laugh because he likes you. It's a nice feeling."

Buy Complete Milt Gross Comic Book Stories on Amazon



Beware, the Antarctic Methane Fart of Doom!

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 03:21 PM PDT

Scientists from the University of Bristol in England believe that microbes living under ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland could be emitting large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane. "It could mean that as ice sheets melt under warmer temperatures, they would release large amounts of heat-trapping methane gas." Oh no! Not the dreaded giant Antarcti-fart!

Reporting in Iraq: personal notes from Omar Chatriwala of Al Jazeera English

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 03:24 PM PDT

Omar Chatriwala, a correspondent based out of Doha, Qatar, with Al Jazeera English, has an interesting post up detailing the daily drudgery and detail of reporting in Iraq. Snip from the section about his entry into the country:
20100307-IMG_3621-1.jpgIt was another hour and a half before a US military administrator called me in. She proceeded to take photos of me from five angles and scan my fingerprints - first my thumbs, then four fingers on one hand, then four fingers on the other, then all five digits individually rolled across the scanner, then forefingers and thumbs again on another scanner. After that, it was retinal scans.
Basically, Omar's account sounds like a lot of waiting, ambient danger, and everything is a huge pain in the ass. Lots of boring slow parts, then the fast parts when things blow up. Literally. He continues:
So here again is why I have to say, credit is due to those who report in the country, day in and day out, despite these obstacles.
Reporting In Iraq (Photo by Omar Chatriwala)

China proposes trans-Eurasian rail system from London to Beijing

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 02:45 PM PDT

The Chinese government is offering to subsidize the creation of a trans-Eurasian rail system that would have direct, high-speed links between Beijing and London. It would be the largest infrastructure project ever attempted. Trains would also run to India, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.

Wang said Beijing was already in negotiations with 17 countries over the rail lines, which would also allow China to transport raw materials more efficiently.

"It was not China that pushed the idea to start with," said Wang. "It was the other countries that came to us, especially India. These countries cannot fully implement the construction of a high-speed rail network and they hoped to draw on our experience and technology."

New high-speed rail network could trump air travel (via Futurismic)

NASA finds friends in low places

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 02:37 PM PDT

In December, NASA researchers drilled a 600-foot-deep hole through the Antarctic ice sheet and stuck a video camera down it. They'd assumed that nothing but microbes could live in such a cold, dark place. So they were surprised when a friendly little shrimp swam up and clung onto the video camera cable.



IRS sends out two agents to collect $0.04 in back-taxes from car-wash

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 03:41 PM PDT

Two grim IRS agents travelled to Harv's Metro Car Wash in Sacramento to hand him a demand-letter for his taxes owing in arrears: $0.04 worth.

Update: To be clear: it was $0.04 in unpaid tax that had accrued over $200 in penalties.

Arriving at Harv's Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. "They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending," says Harv's owner, Aaron Zeff.... "It's hilarious," he says, "that two people hopped in a car and came down here for just 4 cents. I think (the IRS) may have a problem with priorities."
Bob Shallit: IRS visits Sacramento carwash in pursuit of 4 cents (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(Image: wealth of pennies, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from r-z's photostream)

A scientific paper you will never forget ... no matter how hard you try

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 02:20 PM PDT

brntreesnake.jpg

In 1993, The Journal of Chemical Ecology published a study concerning chemosensory investigation in snakes, which the crew from NCBI ROFL believes you will find interesting. If you have a delicate disposition, please pretend the post ends here.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Response of brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) to human blood

David Chiszar, Thomas M. Dunn, and Hobart M. Smith

Abstract Ten specimens of Boiga irregularis were presented with clean or bloody tampons. The latter were used by women during menses. Trial duration was 60 sec, intertrial interval was 24 hr, and the dependent variable was rate of tongue flicking (a measure of chemosensory investigation). Bloody tampons elicited significantly more tongue flicking than did control tampons. An additional snake is shown attacking and ingesting a soiled tampon, confirming that chemosensory interest was associated with predatory behavior.

All the authors, as you can see, are men. But NCBI ROFL commenter Josh points out that the acknowledgments of this paper enigmatically thank "J. Chiszar and E. Goldberg for help with various aspects of our work with brown tree snakes..."

Image courtesy Flickr user teejaybee, via CC



FCC wants Congress to make it easy for American TV to live online

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 02:14 PM PDT

Here's a couple of genuinely tasty morsels from the FCC's new broadband plan: Rec. 15.7: Congress should considered amending the Copyright Act to provide for copyright exemptions to public broadcasting organizations for online broadcasting organizations for online broadcast and distribution of public media; Rec. 15.9: Congress should consider amending the Copyright Act to enable public and broadcast media to more easily contribute their archival content to a digital national archive and grant reasonable noncommercial downstream usage rights for this content to the American people. (Thanks, James!)

Florida Family Policy Council "mistakenly" uses wrong photo of lesbian parents

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 01:59 PM PDT

 Albums Pp297 Gwensharp Soc-Images Chuds

From Sociological Images:

The Florida Family Policy Council [a conservative Christian organization] sent out a message about a judge's ruling to allow a lesbian couple to adopt a relative's child they had been fostering. The FFPC, which opposes gay adoption, sent out an alert to its members and including an image of the couple... well, in theory. On the left is the photo included with the alert; on the right is a photo of the actual couple.

It's very obvious use of a stereotype what lesbians look like as a scare tactic. The actual couple doesn't fit the ideal of the androgynous-looking, angry, mannish lesbian couple. They look like nice middle or upper-middle class professional women who can raise a child perfectly well. They're attractive by mainstream heterosexual norms of femininity. They look happy and non-threatening.They are simply not sufficiently menacing.

As Nicole points out, the couple on the left isn't just a stereotype of lesbians, it's associated with a particular working-class aesthetic, especially the mullets. They aren't thin and conventionally attractive like the couple on the right.

The FFPC says the use of the wrong image was a mistake. Though it seems they've made similar errors before when alerting members about gays and lesbians trying to adopt children.

Florida Family Policy Council "accidentally" uses wrong photo of lesbian parents

Mark McDonnell's sketchbook

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 01:38 PM PDT


Animator Mark McDonnell flips through his sketchbook filled with incredibly good drawings. This both inspires me and makes me want to throw in the towel.

CNN's Glenn Beck replacement wingnut possibly more gross than Glenn Beck

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 01:16 PM PDT

"CNN has hired a commentator who thinks that feminists should get back into the kitchen, are too ugly to get dates, and all have castration shears hanging from their belts." Actually, he calls 'em feminazis, dear. Meet Eric Erickson. (via @Random_Tangent)

Therapeutic ringtones sweep the nation, or at least a nation

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 01:12 PM PDT

The best part of this story from TimesOnline, about the "therapeutic ringtone" craze currently seizing Japan, isn't the fact that there are ringtones that allege to adrenalize you, ringtones that allege to improve your skin tone ("through the power of alpha waves") or ringtones that allege to "cause pollen lodged [in the sinuses] to fall from the nasal cavity." The best part isn't even that the guy behind the concept is the same guy who came up with a synthetic mosquito drone which is inaudible to people over 60 but useful for discouraging teenagers from "congregating in parks at midnight." These are just gravy. The really beautiful part of the story is the awesomely disingenuous endorsement offered by a spokesperson for Index, the mobile phone company that peddles the wonder tones: While it's true that there's a scarcely a shred of research to indicate any basis for the claims that the sounds do anything, "The number of downloads suggests the ringtones must be working to a certain extent." This is exactly the kind of logic that suggests Shake Shack must have the best burgers in New York because the lines are so long, and it needs to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame for Business Doublespeak.

New Freddy Krueger movie promo seems to take notes from War on Terror

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 09:12 PM PDT

"Caffeine pills, self mutilation, a cold shower - what will you do to keep her awake? www.KeepHerAwake.com." That was the entirety of a promotional email I received from Warner Brothers this morning. Interactive marketing, in this case, means a Flash website where you get to make a young woman cut or burn herself. It's like the studio marketing team is either trying to make Freddy Krueger more Saw or more Xe. Maybe they picked up tips from American black ops torturers, waterboarding detainees and forcing "stress positions" to "keep them awake" in the name of liberty. It's odd that some producers of material intended to ring this particular psychological bell get federal obsenity charges, while others get theatrical distribution. The intersection of porn, torture, and horrorshow: this is America. / Update: Susannah Breslin's take on this is here, at True/Slant. / Update 2: The site doesn't seem to have any age-verification. (thanks, @propylae) / Update 3, 9pm PT: The interactive game is gone, replaced by the Nightmare on Elm Street movie trailer.

Guy (Ben Folds?) plays piano and sings about the people he's chatrouletting with

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 01:05 PM PDT


I could watch Piano Chat Improv all day!

Bea Arthur Mountains Pizza!

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 11:49 AM PDT

bea.jpg

Bea Arthur Mountains Pizza: Another tumblog of greatness (in the tradition of Selleck Waterfall Sandwich) spotted on Dangerous Minds.

Police seize copies of Steampunk magazine and kombucha in raid

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 06:16 PM PDT

I'm a kombucha homebrewer and a user of nettles (for hay fever). So I was interested in this Common Dreams article about a police / Secret Service raid on a pair middle-aged housemates who were using Twitter to communicate with G20 summit protestors in Philadelphia Pittsburgh. Here's the choice bit:
Court records show the FBI seized hundreds of items, including computers, hard drives, cameras, a World War I-era gas mask, "anarchy books," even an antique needlepoint of Lenin made by Madison's wife's grandmother. Several issues of Steampunk Magazine, where Madison writes under the pen name Professor Calamity, were also seized, as was a guide on poisons (which he says he uses in the writing of mystery novels), a Mao Tse-tung refrigerator magnet, and several Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. A poster in the living room of anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin was left alone; "I guess they didn't know who he was," says Madison. At one point a hazmat team in full protective gear was brought in to investigate a jar of kombucha tea fermenting in the basement. Madison claims a JTTF agent shook his head and said, "You guys are just a bunch of hippies!"

The raid seemed to have an aimless quality. Madison was handed a ticket for a packet of fireworks, and an agent who put his hand into a suspected bag of marijuana discovered, painfully, that it was dried stinging nettles, used in homeopathy. "It was almost as if they thought, 'If we take enough stuff, we'll find something to charge them with,'" Madison says. When he was finally shown the cover sheet to the search warrant, it provided for the seizure of any items "designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws."

How Your Twitter Account Could Land You in Jail (Via Seth's Blog)

US Congress Holds Hearings on Unobtainium

Posted: 16 Mar 2010 11:33 AM PDT

Life imitates Avatar. Danger Room reports, "The House Committee on Science and Technology’s investigations and oversight panel is holding a hearing today on rare-earth metal supplies, focusing on China’s near-monopoly on the stuff. As we’ve reported here before, China has raised concerns by threatening to limit exports. And to make matters more complicated, U.S. mining companies are dependent on China for processing."

No comments:

Post a Comment

CrunchyTech

Blog Archive