Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Tom the Dancing Bug: Billy Dare - The Full Story

Posted: 09 Jun 2010 03:01 AM PDT

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Gallery: Digitizing the past and present at the Library of Congress

Posted: 09 Jun 2010 02:36 AM PDT

The Library of Congress has nearly 150 million items in its collection, including at least 21 million books, 5 million maps, 12.5 million photos and 100,000 posters. The largest library in the world, it pioneers both preservation of the oldest artifacts and digitization of the most recent--so that all of it remains available to future generations.

I recently took a tour of two LoC departments that exemplify this mission: the Preservation Research and Testing Division in Washington, D.C., and the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va.


The library's preservation specialists use the latest technology to study and scan ancient books, maps and other historical artifacts.

One process, called scanning electron microscopy, allows them to create elemental maps of manuscripts, identifying the chemical nature of inks and pigments, or the paper itself. Imperceptible changes made by artists appear plain as day when viewed using x-rays.

X-rays, however, aren't easy to work around. One new technique, hyperspectral imaging, offers similarly revelatory results in the darkroom: ultra-high resolution scans of documents, imaged under sharply restricted wavelengths of light, show details denied to the naked eye. Viewed at sharp angles, old documents even reveal data about the woodblocks used to impress them onto the page.

It's not all about moldy maps and tomes, either: thanks to the poor quality of consumer media, techniques are already being developed to recover information from damaged examples. Researchers already understand, for example, why using sticky labels increases the likelihood of failure in CDs and DVDs. (LightScribe etching has no apparent negative effects). So when the work of today's unheralded geniuses end up as priceless, rotting museum pieces, the preservers will be ready.


An ancient book presents the typical problem for archivists: how to better understand something that may be destroyed simply by the act of examining it? Researchers have adopted policies which forbid sacrificing part of an item in the hope of learning more about it.

"We can't afford any damage to anything," said Eric Hansen, chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division. "Never take a sample; be completely nondestructive. ... We know there will be advances in technology and that current techniques will become outmoded."


The LoC's Jennifer Wade scans a centuries-old but well-preserved copy of Platina's The Lives of the Popes. "We can map the elements, the chemical components," Wade said. "We can simulate changes in heat, cold, and humidity. [But] all we do is provide information about treatment. Others make the restoration decisions."

Fenella France, a research chemist with the Preservation Research and Testing Division, uses a 39 megapixel camera to take high-resolution images of documents ranging from renaissance-era maps to American state papers.

"We don't filter at the camera, we illuminate with small wavelengths," Fenella said. "We're creating a reference set of samples. We can't take samples of the documents themselves--it's just not going to happen"

This technique creates a set of images like a 'stack of cards,' all identically framed but revealing a different spectral face of the subject.

On the plan for the city of Washington designed in 1791 by Pierre L'Enfant, a hidden street plan emerges under IR light. A design for a circle emerges on 16th and K.



It's incredible, it's humbling. It might be 6 p.m. and I'll be exhausted but I think, 'I can't complain--I'm working with the Gettysburg Address!'"

The Gettysburg Address exists on her computer as 8 different documents, each representing a different waveband in the visible spectrum. But only some show the mysterious fingerprint residue that may be Lincoln's own.

"In the next 5-10 years, I wouldn't be surprised if they could pull residual genetic information from the documents. [This is why] one of our foci is making sure that we don't interfere with future research."


One machine used to examine the book is an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer. "The clasp's corroding, degrading, so we're trying to figure out exactly what the corrosion material is," said Wade. "What is it caused by? What could stop it? Interpretation is important."



 


Among the finds: tracings of an earlier document on a Marco Polo map that dates to 1480. Lost text, revealing the cartographer, on 1516's Carta Marina. James Madison's debate papers, it turns out, contain hidden revisions.

"If it's fragile, even researchers have trouble with it," France said."I want to make it acessible."




Hansen stands by a collection of badly-damaged audio recordings that may yet be recoverable using new technology: "You can learn about a culture from how it builds and stores things."



A visitor stands before the Waldseemüller world map.




Fenella France stands beside the unique, 400-liter environmental chamber used to publicly house the map. Hurricane-proof glass and a high-tech aluminum enclosure ensure that it is kept at the perfect temperature and humidity; tests had to be performed to ensure the weight would not pose a structural problem for the Library.

"We're pretty much know that the Vinland Map contains titanium dioxide in a form that didn't exist until modern times."
- Eric Hansen




Printed by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, the Universalis Cosmographia was the first world map to use the name "America" to identify the new world. The only copy of it is at the Library of Congress.


Far fom the bustle and majesty of Capitol Hill, a former nuclear bunker has become home to an unprecedented effort to catalog the nation's creative works. And while the media is more recent than that dealt with in D.C's basement labs, plenty of technical challenges remain.

The National Audio Visual Conservation Center, near Culpeper, Virginia, once contained billions in cash, squirrelled away to kickstart the economy in the event of an atomic apocalypse. Beautifully renovated, it now has 175,000 square feet of offices and laboratories, 135,000 square feet of collections storage, and 55,000 square feet dedicated to storing dangerous nitrate film in optimal conditions. There are more than a million films, television shows, DVDs and games already in its collection.

And it grows, day in, day out. Delivered to loading docks, thousands of items make their way through processing areas until finding a permanent home in the vaults.

Gregory Lukow, chief of the motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound division at the campus, said that it was staffed by about 100 techs, engineers and other workers. Many items are digitized to ensure their preservation, and to allow researchers to view them remotely in D.C reading rooms. They also host public screenings of classic movies at the in-house cinema.


As the copyright office did not register celluloid prints until 1912, early movie makers created prints of the entire reel on opaque photographic paper. "It's an iconic image in America cinema, that cowboy shooting his gun at the camera, at the audience, at the end of the Great Train Robbery," said Gregory Lukow. "The quality of prints recovered from the paper is shockingly good."


Most of the collections arrive via the copyright registration process. Though works receive copyright protection at the moment of creation, registration provides more legal options in court disputes, ensuring what Lukow called "a tidal wave of material" for the campus to process. But a lot of the material is old -- and not all of it is in good nick.




"The late 1970s is one of the worst times for video longevity," Lukow said. "Magnetic tape is our largest preservation problem."



Gregory Lukow of the Library of Congress shows off the intake bins at their audiovisual campus in Culpeper, VA., packed with the cultural output of a nation. Millions of items are added every year to LoC collections. Highly sensitive items, such as digital prints of movies playing in theaters, often arrive under assumed titles to reduce the likelihood of interception.




The distinctive round-rect casing of RCA Selectavision disks was briefly commonplace in the U.S. Now, the analog video format is a rarity.




There is an entire room at the campus dedicated to rewinding things. Almost every room, however, has cutting facilities of one kind or another.




"We don't want videotape coming in in 5 or 10 years time. Magnetic media is a losing proposition"
- Gregory Lukow


Into the Nitrate Film Storage Vaults: maintained at 39° at 30 percent relative humidity, nitrate film is divided into 124 individually fireproofed chambers, each able to hold about 1,000 cans. Each is designed so that even if a particular reel goes up in flames, it can only damage those in the same insulated cubbyhole. Total capacity: 145,056 cans. Films removed from the vaults must first go through an acclimation chamber before being exposed to normal temperatures and humidity.


The Tony Schwartz collection has an astounding number of field recordings of commercials and other publicly-broadcast media. Passed to the Library after Schwartz's death in 2008, the archive currently fills several large walls. "It's immense," said the Library's Matt Barton. "Thousands of reels of tape, film, video. And I don't know how much correspondence." Schwartz is famous to many as the creator of the Daisy Cutter campaign ad.






Gregory Lukow describes RCA Selectavision, a video format so homely it is denied even the ironic contemporary cachet enjoyed by LaserDisc and 8-track.




Matt Barton of the Library of Congress's National Audio Visual Conservation Center.




Not everything that the Library of Congress uses to examine its collections is high-tech.

Gregory Lukow explains the workings of one of the Library's basic tools: a flatbed film viewer designed to let staff play fragile films without the use of projectors and potentially damaging bulbs.




IRENE--image, reconstruct, erase noise, etcetera--is a system that creates a high-resolution digital map of a record's surface without touching it. Recordings on warped and damaged vinyl can be recovered and restored, then played back by a computer program that emulates the movements of a stylus passing over the modeled grooves. Some records, however, are too badly damaged even for IRENE.




Banks of reel-to-reel tape machines stand in one of the conservation center's digitization rooms. Nearby, a robot-operated VCR works through dozens of tapes automatically.




Scott Rife, senior system administrator, explains the library's digital storage system in this video clip: a tape library with 37,500 slots, each able to store 1TB of data. "That's 37 petabytes. As far as we know, this is the largest digital preservation operation in the world." Even so, they remain committed to preserving film as film: "We wouldn't preserve 35mm as digital right now."

James Snyder, senior systems administor, explains the challenges involved in capturing hundreds of channels of archivable broadcast material. When completed, the Packard Campus's "Live Capture" room will grab 120 video streams from satellite and FM television, 90 DirectTV channels and 20 DISH Network channels. 72 Mac Minis will capture the output of 42 internet radio stations, 10 FM radio stations, and much of what's played on the XM/Sirius satellite radio service. Each machine is able to capture two sources at once: if an individual capture station fails, another picks up the load. Playlists, as cultural snapshots, are themselves important artifacts


A small museum is set aside at the campus for the most beautiful film and broadcasting equipment in its stores. But it's not just for show: old media often needs old equipment to play it. The LoC has little interest in DRM, due to the inherent likelihood that decryption methods will fail or fade away as time passes. "We don't wan't to have to hack anything," Lukow said.

Welcome to the Critical Listening Room. James Smetanick describes the work of an audio engineer tasked with preserving sound recordings. The environment is perfect: non-parallel walls and deeply-pocked paneling kill standing waves and reflections. A custom-made Simon Yorke turntable is good enough for government work: maple knobs not required. "I can't complain about coming in each day," Smetanick said.




Michael Hinton, a staffer at the Library of Congress' NAVCS, works in a spartan room housing an enormous film-processing machine.

The Packard campus contains a huge variety of old and obsolete machines used to view, cut or otherwise manipulate media. It's not just for show, either: obscure formats will become unreadable if the vintage tech used to play them isn't maintained.


RSS Feed Pillow

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 10:25 PM PDT

Rsspillllll Justin of Chicago's Craftsquatch handmakes these bold RSS Feed Icon Pillows. They're $20 at the Boing Boing Bazaar in the Makers Market. As Justin says, "It will certainly aggregate all your thoughts and dreams into order, giving you real simple sleep." RSS Feed Icon Pillow

New podcast story: "The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening"

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 09:57 PM PDT


After a long hiatus, I'm back to my podcast. I've just posted part one of "The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening", originally published on Shareable.net.

MP3 Link

Podcast feed

(Image: Tilt and shift - Leicester Square at night, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from rthakrar's photostream)

Wikileaks/Manning: "Are America's foreign policy secrets about to go online?"

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 10:01 PM PDT

Following up on an earlier post about the uncloaking and arrest of Army Specialist Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is believed to have leaked the "Collateral Murder" video to Wikileaks, Philip Shenon reports in the Daily Beast about anxiety over more sensitive material Manning may have downloaded and stored. At issue are some 260,000 diplomatic cables from government computer networks that, by some reports, he has admitted to have accessed and was planning to make public. Snip:
wlus.jpg "If he really had access to these cables, we've got a terrible situation on our hands," said an American diplomat. "We're still trying to figure out what he had access to. A lot of my colleagues overseas are sweating this out, given what those cables may contain."

He said Manning apparently had special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders. The cables, which date back over several years, went out over interagency computer networks available to the Army and contained information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomat said.

He added that the State Department and law-enforcement agencies are trying to determine whether, and how, to approach Wikileaks to urge the site not to publish the cables, given the damage they could do to diplomatic efforts involving the United States and its allies.

The State Department's Worst Nightmare (Daily Beast)

Wired News reporters Kim Zetter and Kevin Poulsen (who first broke the story that Manning had been outed by hacker Adrian Lamo and was now jailed in Kuwait) have posted an update story with more details on the State Department's concerns.

Newlyweds discover their paths crossed in Walt Disney World when they were toddlers

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 09:07 PM PDT

A pair of newlyweds was looking through their childhood photos when husband spotted himself as a toddler, being pushed in a stroller by his dad, in the background of one of wife's photos from a Walt Disney World trip when they were both tiny, decades before they met and fell in love. At the time, he lived in Canada and she lived in Florida. Kismet!

Disney World Destiny for Married Couple

US Border Patrol union rep: It's okay to shoot Mexican kids who throw stones

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 06:02 PM PDT

mxb.jpgAfter listening to this NPR News piece on a Border Patrol agent shooting a 14-year-old Mexican child near the Juarez/El Paso border, Boing Boing pal Drew Carey noted on Twitter, "I agree the Border Patrol has a tough job, but shooting rock-throwers should be a no-go. Find a non-lethal way to handle it."

Couldn't agree more, and I say that as someone who's aware of what a dangerous and chaotic place that part of the border is. I've spent a lot of time around the border, and on both sides of it, in California/Baja.

According to the NPR News piece, the union rep for Border Patrol agents says it is alright for agents to shoot Mexican children who throw rocks at them.

"There are so many non-lethal weapons available to law enforcement." Drew tweeted, "Has the Border Patrol even considered them?"

The child's body was found on the Ciudad Juarez side of the fence. By all accounts available at the time of this blog post, he never crossed over on to the US side, and was not attempting to do so. He was unarmed, and he was shot in the head. Sergio Adrian Hernández was his name. Related reports at CNN, WSJ, BBC en Español, and El Diario Digital / Juarez (graphic content warning: contains image of Mexican police standing by the dead body).

Thumbnail: that's the slain kid's mom.

(Photo: Jesus Alcazar/AFP/Getty Images)

The leftover pictures from WWDC

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 05:20 PM PDT

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I'm a total tech conference noob. Despite my best efforts to fight dying batteries and slow Internet connections I still didn't manage to get some of my better photos up on the post from yesterday.

Here's my Flickr set from after my laptop croaked, chock full of Steve and close ups of the new iPhone.

Architectural criticism of couch-cushion forts

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 01:38 PM PDT

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We greatly admire the use of coffee table as lateral moment-frame in this application. The solution is both formal and fun, offering the users a sequence of experiences beginning with the entry, to vaulted ceiling, to raised deck. Grade A-

Adorable! Also, it's nice to see that most of these budding young architects have avoided the energy-sucking pitfalls of the all-glass facade.

Build LLC: Couch Cushion Architecture: A Critical Analysis

Fingerstache temporary tattoos and photo contest

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 01:22 PM PDT

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BB pals Gama-Go have just released their ingenious Fingerstache package of mustache-shaped temporary tattoos. They're just $5 for a pack of 19 mustaches in a variety of handsome styles. To support the wider fingerstache phenomenon, Gama-Go is also holding a Fingerstache Photo Contest on Flickr. Prizes include a $50 gift certificate, packs of the Fingerstache temporary tattoos, and their kooky Mt Stachemore Floati Pen. All of this fingerstache hoopla makes me want to shave my real facial hair and go with the faux. Fingerstache Photo Contest

Apple WWDC keynote Wi-Fi fail: Glenn Fleishman explains what happened

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 12:51 PM PDT

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Wireless technology writer Glenn Fleishman has a good, technically precise, but very readable (for non-engineers) explanation of exactly what went wrong with the wireless internet connectivity in the room during Steve Jobs' keynote yesterday at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference.

Our Dean Putney and Rob Beschizza were live-photoblogging the event, and as they reported, that connectivity problem caused conspicuous glitches during Mr. Jobs' on-stage presentation.

Apple apparently did offer a public Wi-Fi network at the WWDC launch, according to media and attendees I've polled. And those who tried it said that network did work initially. But with so much media in the audience, and the history of conference/event Wi-Fi networks having glitches at peak times--with many people liveblogging and uploading photos from the event--those who had MiFis chose to use those instead.

Wi-Fi can cope with a lot of so-called interference, but the protocol wasn't designed to handle hundreds of overlapping networks in a small space. (Interference is really the limits of a radio to distinguish signals out of noise, not a physical property of radio waves.)

Five Hundred Wi-Fi Networks Walk into a Bar (Future Tense)

Photo: Dean Putney

Sculptures made out of Rolodex cards

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 12:49 PM PDT

Carte-Blanch-2.jpg From the designer's web site:
In Carte Blanche, masses of blank rolodex cards are composed into precarious structures that are reminiscent of cliff dwellings. In our digital age, rolodex cards hint at obsolescence and outdated systems of communication. The white surface reads as information erased, no longer needed, and inaccessible. Carte Blanche is an elaborate construction where each card is dependent on the next, mirroring the network of social contacts within our fragile existence.
I like it because it's pretty.

Jean Shin [via NotCot]

Why, no, I am not one bit afraid of these swarming, flying robotic drones

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 12:38 PM PDT

Robotics developers at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control have built autonomous robots that drive, dock with their peers on the ground, then fly into the air in coordinated swarms....all of this without human direction. In fact, the vehicles can drive around on the ground as individual, autonomous units, but "it is not until they assemble that they are able to fly," according to the researchers:

These modules are organized as distributed computational units with minimal sensory input. This is a complex system that is rich in dynamics with much room to explore various strategies of distributed estimation and control.
More about the little buggers here, on the researchers' project website.

Video: Distributed Flight Array (YouTube video from The Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control)

Report on the project here, at Wired Danger Room.

How it all works, in an infographic that follows...

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Deepwater Horizon: When the well breaks ...

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 11:40 AM PDT

Senator Bill Nelson of Florida—a man who's informed enough on the oil spill to know what he's talking about—says he's received reports that the Macondo well is structurally unsound and leaking. If this game of telephone is spreading accurate information, it means capping the well is off the table as a workable solution for stopping the flow of oil and it's now totally up to relief wells. (Via mrgunn)

How a big oil spill turns good cleanup plans upside down

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 12:20 PM PDT

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Two weeks ago, BP CEO Tony "I'd like my life back" Hayward tried to deny independent scientists' findings that oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill wasn't confined to the surface of the water. Today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sided with the independent reports—with the head of NOAA adding, "We have always known there is oil under the surface."

As Mother Jones points out, it's pretty inevitable that there would be oil underwater, given that the whole point of using chemical dispersants is to break the oil down into droplets and allow those droplets to sink, so they can be more easily eaten by the hydrocarbon-guzzling microbes that live in the water—a strategy that works quite well in smaller oil spills, using the smaller doses of dispersants approved by the EPA.

But dose makes the poison—both with dispersants and oil droplets, themselves. The plumes, in this case, are so large that, as microbes devour them, that process depletes all the oxygen in the surrounding water. Essentially, it's the same thing that happens in the Gulf Dead Zone.

Likewise, oil sunk by dispersants doesn't wash up on the beach—again, a good thing in smaller spills. Here, though, it ends up creating a threat to underwater ecosystems, especially coral reefs.

(PHOTO: Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite on June 7, 2010. "At least part of the oil slick is pale gray. A large area of oil is southeast of the Mississippi Delta, at the site of the leaking British Petroleum well. Traces of thick oil are also visible farther north.")

Plastic Century: a taste of the polluted oceans

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 11:47 AM PDT

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Would you drink from a cooler of water littered (literally) with old toothbrushes, candy wrappers, film, drinking straws, and other plastic detritus? What if that cooler represents our oceans, circa 2030? Plastic Century is a simple-but-provocative art installation that demands you to consider, in a visceral way, how plastic is impacting our environment. On display this week at the California Academy of Sciences, Plastic Century was created in honor of Jacques Cousteau's 100th birthday by my pal and Institute for the Future colleague Jake Dunagan, futurist Stuart Candy, artist Sarah Kornfeld, and oceanographer Wallace J. Nichols. From Fast Company:
Plastic Century asks onlookers to drink water from four different coolers, each filled with bunches of plastic. But there's a catch--the four coolers are labeled by year, extending from 1910 all the way through 2030. And, unsurprisingly, the amount of plastic in each cooler rises along with the date.

The creators of Plastic Century came together a month and a half ago when CAS commissioned their piece. "We wanted to see what would it look like if we figured out a way to make artifact, an installation, where people could engage with this difficult topic but where they had options that came out of it," Kornfeld explains. "This is something that people can look at and feel on a visceral level." The emotions that come from drinking trash-filled water--disgust, revulsion, sadness--are offset by the knowledge that 2030 hasn't arrived yet. There is still time to fix things.
"Plastic Pollution in the Water? Drink Up!"

Dutch court rules that discussing piracy is the same as committing piracy

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 10:40 AM PDT

A Dutch court has ruled that disclosing the general location of files that infringe copyright is the same thing as infringing copyright itself. The website FTD has a forum where users discuss which Usenet newsgroups contain infringing movies. They do this in plain language, the Dutch equivalent of, "Hey, the group $FOO has the movie $BAR in it." The discussions don't include links. The Dutch court has ruled that hosting a discussion that includes conversational descriptions of infringing files is the same as publishing links to those files is the same as hosting the files yourself. This is a major overturning of Dutch jurisprudence, and a disaster for free speech; the potential chilling effect for anyone who might host a forum or comment section is enormous.

Tomorrow is the Dutch election. The Dutch Pirate Party is campaigning on this issue: "When reaching landmark decisions that overturn years of jurisprudence, neither the judge nor the issue is served when it turns out that the judge in question is in business with the copyright-lawyer from the party benefiting from this shocking verdict. The fact that this joint enterprise mainly offers courses on 'counter-piracy' at €900 per day, makes the situation appear even muddier still. If the Netherlands wants to avoid looking like a banana-republic where the law is for sale to the highest bidder, it is urgent that parliament takes control of the debate on copyright-reform, and brings it back into the public arena where this discussion belongs."

Publishing Locations Of Pirate Movies Is The Same As Hosting Them



Kiwi preservationists unearth "time capsule" of long-lost US silent films

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 10:38 AM PDT

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(Image: Clara Bow (left) and Ethel Shannon in 1923's "Maytime," directed by Louis J. Gasnier / courtesy National Film Preservation Foundation )

Some 75 American movies previously believed to have been lost forever, including a 1927 John Ford film, another by an early female director, and others dating back as far as 1898, have been uncovered in New Zealand. The New Zealand Film Archive and the National Film Preservation Foundation will work to preserve the films over the next few years in partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, George Eastman House, Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art and UCLA Film and Television Archive. Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox are also helping to restore titles from their libraries. Snip from Variety story:

The NFPF called the collection "a time capsule of American film production in the 1910s and 1920s" and said that about 70% of the nitrate prints were complete. The pics were found in a remote storage vault held by the New Zealand Film Archive.

The Ford pic is "Upstream," described as a backstage romance between an aspiring actor and a girl from a knife-throwing act. It was released in early 1927 by Fox. According to the NFPF, only about 15% of the helmer's silent films are believed to have survived. Also uncovered in the collection is a trailer for another lost Ford feature, 1929's "Strong Boy" starring Victor McLaglen.

Other titles in the collection include the 1923 Clara Bow feature "Maytime"; "Won in a Closet," directed by and starring Mabel Normand; plus numerous Westerns, shorts, docus and newsreels. There's even an industrial film about the making of Stetson hats.

Here's a related story in the New York Times.

(Thanks, Andrea James!)

Die Antwoord: "What's in my bag" video at Amoeba Records, Hollywood

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 11:21 AM PDT

yola.jpg A few months back, the kind folks at Amoeba Music in Hollywood invited me to come in and do a "What's in My Bag" video where I pick stuff I love that I find in their store. Well, Die Antwoord recently breezed through town, and Amoeba kidnapped them briefly to shoot this very funny and revealing "What's in My Bag." It's a great video. The dystopian rap-rave crew start out with South Park, meander through PJ Harvey, Eminem, Aphex Twin, Autechre, and David Lynch oddities, with many surprises in their crates, throughout. Good times.

Die Antwoord: What's in My Bag? (Amoeba Music, thanks Rachael McGovern!)

Deepwater Horizon survivors: "Are you fckng happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen!"

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 09:57 AM PDT

Mother Jones continues its excellent coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and its aftermath with a piece by Josh Harkinson about eyewitness accounts from workers who were there when the rig blew up:
burning-rig300x200.jpgA prominent Houston attorney with a long record of winning settlements from oil companies says he has new evidence suggesting that the Deepwater Horizon's top managers knew of problems with the rig before it exploded last month, causing the worst oil spill in US history. Tony Buzbee, a lawyer representing 15 rig workers and dozens of shrimpers, seafood restaurants, and dock workers, says he has obtained a three-page signed statement from a crew member on the boat that rescued the burning rig's workers. The sailor, who Buzbee refuses to name for fear of costing him his job, was on the ship's bridge when Deepwater Horizon installation manager Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, was speaking with someone in Houston via satellite phone. Buzbee told Mother Jones that, according to this witness account, Harrell was screaming, "Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen."

Whoever was on the other end of the line was apparently trying to calm Harrell down. "I am fucking calm," he went on, according to Buzbee. "You realize the rig is burning?"

At that point, the boat's captain asked Harrell to leave the bridge. It wasn't clear whether Harrell had been talking to Transocean, BP, or someone else.

"The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen!"

(Image: US Coast Guard/ZUMApress.com, via Mother Jones)



Free access to five Safari Books Online, and the Boing Boing Game Dev Challenge!

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 12:05 PM PDT

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We're thrilled that our sponsor Safari Books Online is offering Boing Boing readers 30 days of free online access to the five books shown above. If you don't know Safari Books Online, it's a joint venture between our pals at O'Reilly Media and Pearson Education who built a massive online library of technical and business books and videos from several dozen publishers. So why these five books? And why now? Well, we're teaming up with Safari Books Online to launch a fun game development challenge here at Boing Boing. We'll reveal the specifics, including the big prizes, next Monday, June 14. Suffice it to say though that if you read and grok these five books, you'll probably be in pretty good shape to enter:
• Real World Flash Game Development by Christopher Griffith (Focal Press)
• Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams (New Riders)
• Game Programming with Silverlight by Michael Snow (Course Technology PTR)
• iPhone Game Development by Paul Zirkle, Joe Hogue (O'Reilly Media)
• Learning iPhone Programming by Michael Daley (Addison Wesley Professional)
Free access to five Safari Books Online game development books

Crime in San Francisco displayed as elevation

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 09:12 AM PDT

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Doug McCune has created a series of topographical maps showing crime centers in San Francisco using government data from 2009.

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If San Francisco crime were elevation

Children of lesbians do better in school

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 09:08 AM PDT

A new study by the San Francisco-based National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study research team has found that children of lesbians do much better overall on academic and social tests than their peers with straight parents.

List of weird US laws

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 09:13 AM PDT

DivineCaroline.com has a list of 50 weird US laws, including the following:
Alabama: It's illegal to wear a fake mustache that causes laughter in church.
Alaska: Whispering in someone's ear while he's moose hunting is prohibited.
Arkansas: It's illegal to mispronounce the name of the state of Arkansas.
California: You may not eat an orange in your bathtub.
Florida: If you tie an elephant to a parking meter, you must pay the same parking fee as you would for a vehicle.
Any lawyers out there who can confirm that these are all true? Am I really not allowed to eat an orange in my bathtub in San Francisco?

Get this game: Japan's first and best indie darling, Cave Story

Posted: 06 Jun 2010 03:32 PM PDT

Cave Story [Nicalis, WiiWare] Japan has always had its own version of an "indie game" scene, but one that's carried a certain amount of "books read right-to-left" unfamiliarity. Speaking very generally, it's never had quite the same amount of experimental flair that's taken root in the West, sticking largely to traditionalist takes on top-down shooters (see especially: Kenta 'ABA' Cho), fighters, and visual novels, distributed as hobbyist/amateur boxed goods. Which is maybe what made Cave Story such a surprise on its initial late-2004 release. Daisuke 'Pixel' Amaya's five-year, spare-time one-man-show was, like its Western kin, a spot-on mix of platforming, shooting and exploring -- a love story to the early 8- and 16-bit games that laid the groundwork for so many indies over the past however-many years (and would itself do the same, with 'Cave Story clone' now a meme of biting dismissal among first-time creators).

Flash forward six years, and to basically no-one's surprise, its long-awaited arrival on WiiWare via upstart publisher Nicalis (after various freeware ports to the PSP, DS, and basically any system that would receive it) sees it no more dated now than it was then, entirely by design. As it turns out, that magic exporatory-platformer mix persists because it's one of 2D gaming's most satisfying tropes: perfect for easing players into a world before ramping up the difficulty of certain challenges just as they get comfortable with the last.

The story of Cave Story is as cheerfully incomprehensible -- even for as memorable and iconic as its characters have gone on to become -- as it is adorable, but its story is also entirely secondary to what's made it an enduring indie hit. More important are its finely tuned mechanics: an upgradable weapon system that takes damage as your character does, the classic structure of a roped-in but eventually surmountable world.

But most important, Cave Story is what all the best indie creations were and are: a shining example of an auteur-driven work -- a game that could have come from no one but Amaya himself, and managed to retain its coherent vision undiluted by outside interference.

Take or leave the value-adds included by Nicalis for the its commercial debut (which, to be sure, do give the game better approachability and replayability), Cave Story is and was a creation that simply "got it right" then, gets it right now, and is one of the Wii's truly essential works.

Canada's DMCA: understanding the "digital locks" provision

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 06:11 AM PDT

Canada's version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been introduced, and while it offers a host of promises about consumer rights (such as the right to record a TV show with a PVR or rip a CD and put the music on your computer), it also allows rightsholders to confiscate those rights merely by adding a "digital lock" (also known as DRM) to the work. Breaking these locks is illegal in itself, so you don't get any rights if a rightsholder chooses to use one.

Michael Geist sez, "The digital lock provisions have quickly emerged as the most contentious part of Bill C-32, the new Canadian DMCA. This comes as little surprise, given the decision to bring back the digital lock approach from C-61 virtually unchanged. The mounting public concern with the digital lock provisions (many supporters of the bill have expressed serious misgivings about the digital lock component) has led to many questions as well as attempts to characterize public concerns as myths. In effort to set the record straight, I have compiled 32 questions and answers about the digital lock provisions found in C-32. The result is quite lengthy, so I will divide the issues into five separate posts over the next five days: (1) general questions about the C-32 approach; (2) the exceptions in C-32; (3) the missing exceptions; (4) the consumer provisions; and (5) the business provisions. For those that want it all in a single package, I've posted the full series as a PDF download."

Setting the Record Straight: 32 Questions and Answers on C-32's Digital Lock Provisions, Part One



Mark on Colbert Report tonight (June 8) to talk about Made by Hand

Posted: 03 Jun 2010 04:51 PM PDT

Colbert I'm going to be Stephen Colbert's guest tonight on The Colbert Report to talk about my new book, Made By Hand. Check your local listings for the airtime.

(This photo from my March 2007 appearance, when I talked about MAKE. I hope he goes easy on me this time like he did back then!)

Legendary typographer John Berry's dot-font, a free download

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 10:41 AM PDT

Typography legend John D Berry sez, "Inspired by Cory's success in giving away the texts of his books in every conceivable electronic form, and yet ending up selling more copies of the printed books than his publishers would otherwise expect, I have put together a digital version of Dot-font: talking about design, which you can download for free. It's a collection of essays on design, both graphic and otherwise, published in paper-space by Mark Batty Publisher in 2006. "We all live in the midst of design every day; we might as well pay attention to it, and turn an observant and critical eye on what's around us.""

I remember going to the WorldCon in Yokohama with John and watching him get mobbed by Japanese type-nerds. He designed the interiors for my book Content and my forthcoming With a Little Help. This is a stellar work from a great talent.

dot-font by John D. Berry (Download)

Buy dot-font (Thanks, John!)



Potemkin insurgency: US paying Afghan security firms to bribe Taliban leaders

Posted: 07 Jun 2010 11:30 PM PDT

Millions of US tax-dollars are being funnelled into Afghan private security forces, who, in turn, use the money to bribe the Taliban commanders. The Taliban and the security forces then stage fake battles to make it look like the money needs to continue flowing. But don't worry: now that President Karzai's stolen the election, his brother is going to take over all the private forces and amalgamate them under his control, so they're bound to get a lot less corrupt.
Although the investigation is not complete, the officials suspect that at least some of these security companies -- many of which have ties to top Afghan officials -- are using American money to bribe the Taliban. The officials suspect that the security companies may also engage in fake fighting to increase the sense of risk on the roads, and that they may sometimes stage attacks against competitors.
Convoy Guards in Afghanistan Face an Inquiry (via Jon Taplin)

Massive packing-tape spider-web

Posted: 08 Jun 2010 07:15 AM PDT


100 lbs of packing tape went into this 530-roll spider-web, created by capital-letter-averse artists numen/for use.

Packing tape spiderweb

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