The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- ASCAP raising money to fight Free Culture
- Original Pac-Man sketches
- Doctor Who vs Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Viacom v Internet: round one to Internet
- Recent Comments Page
- The amazing—animated—story of the writer who couldn't read
- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev meets Apple CEO Steve Jobs
- WSJ on the clothes of Mad Men
- Now available: Game Seeds, the card game about game design
- Pedal-powered Porsche
- Metal UFO-shaped boxes in Boing Boing Bazaar / Makers Market
- YouTube collaborative ukulele jam with Sophie Madeleine
- Butter vs. margarine argument leads to attack with knife-edged barbecue spatula
- Gallery of cannibal food mascots
- iPhone 4: How does it perform for video recording?
- DIY fusion in Brooklyn
- A Canadian author's perspective on "radical extremism" and copyright
- Century of No Progress
- Gate guarded McMansion suburb in Walt Disney World
- Tom the Dancing Bug: Nate in "Risky Management"
- "I'm allergic to my iPhone"
- Scuba brings peace to a boy who has only known war
- Neatorama Mini Hunt: Made By Hand
- Americans: tell the White House to take a critical look at ACTA!
- China's high-tech underclass
- Canadian Heritage Minister declares war on copyright reformers
| ASCAP raising money to fight Free Culture Posted: 23 Jun 2010 11:13 PM PDT  Fred says: Memehacker, and composer Mike Rugnetta just received a note from the collecting society ASCAP soliciting funds to fight Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the EFF. According to ASCAP, these organizations are mobilizing to undermine ASCAP members' copyrights because they want all music to be free. Which, if you know anything about the kind of nuanced reform work these organizations do, is a pretty gross exaggeration. The letter reads like a McCarty-era scaremongering pitch to solicit funds from composers and musicians bewildered by the current pace of music industry evolution. Read part 1 of the letter here, and part 2 here.ASCAP is trying to raise money to fight Free Culture. No lie. (Thanks, Fred!)
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| Posted: 23 Jun 2010 10:11 PM PDT  Dutch gaming magazine Control has a humbling look at the origins of Pac-Man: Toru Iwatani's initial sketches for the game that arguably launched the arcade era. Iwatani toont originele schetsen voor Pac-Man (via Kottke)   |
| Doctor Who vs Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Posted: 23 Jun 2010 11:21 PM PDT Andrew Orton's "Doctor Who: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Daleks (The Peter Jones-y Edit)" mashes up the BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy classic TV series with a Tom "the best Doctor Who" Baker encounter with the Daleks. Mike Richards adds, "An utterly magnificent addition to the only reference book anyone needs. Animated in the same style as the 1980s BBC TV adaptation with a spookily accurate VoiceOver in the style of the late Peter Jones." The Hitchhiker's Guide Reminds You Not to Panic if You Meet a Dalek (Thanks, Mike!)
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| Viacom v Internet: round one to Internet Posted: 23 Jun 2010 10:03 PM PDT  Google's won the first round of the enormous lawsuit Viacom brought against it. Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion for not having copyright lawyers inspect all the videos that get uploaded to YouTube before they're made live (they're also asking that Google eliminate private videos because these movies -- often of personal moments in YouTubers' lives -- can't be inspected by Viacom's copyright enforcers). The lawsuit has been a circus. Filings in the case reveal that Viacom paid dozens of marketing companies to clandestinely upload its videos to YouTube (sometimes "roughing them up" to make them look like pirate-chic leaks). Viacom uploaded so much of its content to YouTube that it actually lost track of which videos were "really" pirated, and which ones it had put there, and sent legal threats to Google over videos it had placed itself. Other filings reveal profanity-laced email exchanges between different Viacom execs debating who will get to run YouTube when Viacom destroys it with lawsuits, and execs who express their desire to sue YouTube because they can't afford to buy the company and can't replicate its success on their own. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ruled that YouTube was protected from liability for copyright infringement by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA has a "safe harbor" provision that exempts service providers from copyright liability if they expeditiously remove material on notice that it is infringing. Viacom's unique interpretation of this statute held that online service providers should review all material before it went live. If they're right, you can kiss every message-board, Twitter-feed, photo-hosting service, and blogging platform goodbye -- even if it was worth someone's time to pay a lawyer $500/hour to look at Twitter and approve tweets before they went live, there just aren't enough lawyers in the universe to scratch the surface of these surfaces. For example, YouTube alone gets over 29 hours' worth of video per minute. Viacom has vowed to appeal. In dismissing the lawsuit before a trial, Stanton noted that Viacom had spent several months accumulating about 100,000 videos violating its copyright and then sent a mass takedown notice on Feb. 2, 2007. By the next business day, Stanton said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them.Judge sides with Google in $1B Viacom lawsuit (Thanks, Mike P!) (Image: Viacom, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from mag3737's photostream -- used with permission)
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| Posted: 23 Jun 2010 08:13 PM PDT Like to stay abreast of the chatter at BB? Keep up with the 100 most recent comments. The page refreshes itself periodically, so you can just leave it up and passively absorb it until you realize it's 4:30 p.m. and you haven't got enough done.   |
| The amazing—animated—story of the writer who couldn't read Posted: 23 Jun 2010 06:53 PM PDT One morning, novelist Howard Engel went to get the paper and found that the English language suddenly looked like gibberish to him. Letters no longer had meaning—they were just incomprehensible marks on a page. And, yet, he could still write. There's a fascinating (and beautifully animated) video that explains what happened, and how Engel has managed to re-teach himself to read. I'd post it here, but the code provided keeps giving me an embeded audio interview, instead. It is very much worth following the link. Naturally, this is an Oliver Sacks joint, along with NPR and artist Lev Yilmaz. (Via Steve Silberman)   |
| Russian President Dmitry Medvedev meets Apple CEO Steve Jobs Posted: 23 Jun 2010 04:48 PM PDT  "В офисе Apple." This happened today. How'd I learn about it? Why, from the Kremlin's new official Twitter account. Medvedev also visited Twitter, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley companies. Medvedev works on a MacBook, and recently began using an iPad. In Soviet Russia, Twitter Tweets You. |
| Posted: 23 Jun 2010 03:32 PM PDT The Wall Street Journal has an article about Janie Bryant, the "costume czarina" of Mad Men. She also designed the costumes for Deadwood. What a talent! |
| Now available: Game Seeds, the card game about game design Posted: 23 Jun 2010 03:03 PM PDT A few months back, I mentioned Game Seeds, the card game created by Utrecht School of the Arts, Monobanda and Metagama to help game designers brainstorm both character design and entire games, by playfully combining their specific mechanics. The post quite happily got far more attention than I would've imagined, and (especially after I'd posted that Monobanda had sent me an early deck of the cards) I was a bit deluged with people wondering how they might also get their hands on the Seeds. So I'm happy to report, then, that as of today the decks are now available for worldwide purchase at €10 a deck. The team have also put together the ridiculously adorable video above to explain how the system works, and have created a new official Game Seeds site for more information on the project. Let us know if and when you create anything with it! Game Seeds [Monobanda]   |
| Posted: 23 Jun 2010 02:50 PM PDT This ultra-lightweight pedal powered Porsche is a fancier version of the car featured in one of my all-time favorite videos: a pedal powered car that got pulled over by a perplexed policeman: |
| Metal UFO-shaped boxes in Boing Boing Bazaar / Makers Market Posted: 23 Jun 2010 02:35 PM PDT  24 Carati makes these neat UFO-shaped boxes. They are $60 in the Boing Boing Bazaar / Makers Market. |
| YouTube collaborative ukulele jam with Sophie Madeleine Posted: 23 Jun 2010 02:24 PM PDT Scott pointed me to this video compendium of people around the world singing one of Sophie Madeleine's songs.
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| Butter vs. margarine argument leads to attack with knife-edged barbecue spatula Posted: 23 Jun 2010 02:14 PM PDT "A culinary argument between a brother and sister about whether to use butter or margarine turned violent, resulting in an attack with a knife-edged barbecue spatula, police say." (Thanks, Alan!)   |
| Gallery of cannibal food mascots Posted: 23 Jun 2010 12:47 PM PDT Autophagy on parade! |
| iPhone 4: How does it perform for video recording? Posted: 23 Jun 2010 01:23 PM PDT Watch Video: YouTube, or download MP4. I took the new iPhone 4 out for a Venice Beach bike ride, to test the smartphone's new high-res video recording capabilities. All footage in this video shot with iPhone 4. You can see the difference, but the verdict in short form is this: iPhone 4 outperforms other smartphones and handheld ultra-mobile digital video camcorders, and I've tried nearly all of 'em for web video production while on the road. When it comes to video recording in a smartphone (and in "Flip" class devices), iPhone 4 is the one to beat. Again you do have to be mindful of that camera orientation switch option noted above: when you shoot video out of one side of the device, you get lower-resolution 640 x 480 footage, and when you shoot out of the other side, you get far higher-res 1280 x 720. You can tap an area to focus in and balance exposure and hue, even while you are shooting. Video is saved and exported as h.264 QuickTime, and you can email, MMS, or publish to YouTube right from the iPhone. Editing on the device is possible with iMovie for iPhone ($5 in the Apple App store). See also: • IPHONE 4 FIRST HANDS-ON REVIEW (Special thanks to Eric Mittleman, to Q-Burns Abstract Message whose music appears in this video, and to all the awesome skaters at the Venice Skate Park, particularly Kiko and Drew!) |
| Posted: 23 Jun 2010 03:34 PM PDT Quinn Norton visits with Mark Suppes, Ruby-on-Rails developer by day and DIY polywell reactor researcher by night: No Sleep 'Til Fusion (Thanks, Quinn!)   |
| A Canadian author's perspective on "radical extremism" and copyright Posted: 23 Jun 2010 12:25 PM PDT As the Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore has declared war on copyright reformers who object to his plan to bring US-style "digital locks" rules to Canada, I think it's worth spelling out what my objections, as a Canadian author, are to his plan (my books are distributed across Canada by the excellent HB Fenn; last year I won the Ontario White Pine Award for best book; as I write this, my novel For the Win is on the Canadian bestseller lists). Minister Moore has proposed a law that would give near-absolute protection to "digital locks" that control use, access and copying of works stored on a computer, mobile device, set-top box, etc. This is nearly the same policy that the US has had since 1998, when it brought down the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (actually, the American version is slightly better, since they've built in a regular review of the policy). In the intervening 12 years, we've learned two things about digital locks: 1. They don't work. Even the most sophisticated digital locks are usually broken in a matter of hours or days. And where they're not broken, it's mainly because you can get the same works by another means -- rather than breaking the iTunes lock, you break the easier Zune lock (or vice-versa), because you can get the same songs either way. So digital locks don't stop piracy. All they do is weaken the case for buying music, movies and books instead of ripping them off -- after all, no one woke up this morning wishing there was a way to do less with her music. So how could adding a digital lock make a paid product more attractive than the free version? 2. They transfer power to technology firms at the expense of copyright holders. The proposed Canadian rules on digital locks mirror the US version in that they ban breaking a digital lock for virtually any reason. So even if you're trying to do something legal (say, ripping a CD to put it on your MP3 player), you're still on the wrong side of the law if you break a digital lock to do it. Here's what that means for creators: if Apple, or Microsoft, or Google, or TiVo, or any other tech company happens to sell my works with a digital lock, only they can give you permission to take the digital lock off. The person who created the work and the company that published it have no say in the matter. So if you buy $1,000 worth of digitally locked books for your Kindle or iPad, the author and the publisher can't give you the right to move those to another device. That means that not only are you locked into the Kindle -- so is the copyright holder. Authors and publishers who decide to stop selling via a digitally locked platform have to take the risk that their readers will abandon their investment in proprietary books in order to follow them to the next device. So that's Minister Moore's version of "author's rights" -- any tech company that happens to load my books on their device or in their software ends up usurping my copyrights. I may have written the book, sweated over it, poured my heart into it -- but all my rights are as nothing alongside the rights that Apple, Microsoft, Sony and the other DRM tech-giants get merely by assembling some electronics in a Chinese sweatshop. That's the "creativity" that the new Canadian copyright law rewards: writing an ebook reader, designing a tablet, building a phone. Those "creators" get more say in the destiny of Canadian artists' copyrights than the artists themselves. It doesn't have to be this way. If Minister Moore is serious about protecting actual creators -- the Canadians who write books, who design games, who perform music, who produce films and TV shows -- then all he has to do is insert a simple exception to his digital locks rule: A copyright proprietor may authorize the public to remove a digital lock in order to gain access and to use of his copyrighted worksGet that? People who create stuff should have the right to let their audiences move copyrighted works to other platforms. I challenge Minister Moore to climb down from his nasty smears about copyright reformers and address this and other legitimate concerns over digital locks rules. Thousands and thousands of Canadians spoke out against this kind of rule in the Canadian copyright proceedings. James Moore has tabled a bill that ignores the results of his own consultation, and then had the bad grace to smear the creators and audiences who, in good faith, came forward to participate in the debate over the future of Canadian copyright. He owes us an apology. And an explanation.
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| Posted: 23 Jun 2010 12:20 PM PDT Soon we will be living in a magical future, a world without wires, in which all of our energy and information needs will be met invisibly, pulsing in the air around us, not causing cancer at all. And only a century too late to save poor Nikola Tesla. Tesla (1856-1943) was sort of the sad sack of the scientific genius world, brilliant and only a little insane, who nevertheless failed in most of his endeavors due to a lack of fiscal acumen and the conniving of douchebags like Thomas Edison. His AC was far superior to Edison's DC, but Edison proved better at publicity stunts. Arguably Tesla invented the radio, but Elmo Marconi beat him at the patent office, with the financial and political backing of the asshole Edison. In 1898, Tesla began working on a project that would show them all, dwarfing the meager accomplishments of Marconi and Edison and making him as rich as Kubla Khan, a reference not dated at the time. He had rather big ambitions: "As soon as it is completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place ..." In 1901, Tesla began construction of the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, Long Island.
The nearly 200-foot tower was intended as the first hub of a "world system of intelligence transmission." Tesla promised J. Pierpont Morgan, his financier, "When wireless is fully applied the earth will be converted into a huge brain, capable of response in every one of its parts." But Wardenclyffe had a second, secret purpose, which Tesla only admitted to Morgan when he needed more money: to send electrical power through the air. Tesla had been experimenting with "electrostatic induction," probably most familiar to fans of James Whale's Frankenstein pictures (designer Kenneth Strickfaden used an induction coil built by Tesla himself.)
"If I had told you such as this before, you would have fired me out of your office," Tesla wrote Morgan in 1903, sounding a bit like Victor Frankenstein, "Will you help me or let my great work--almost complete--go to pots?" "I should not feel disposed at present to make any further advances," Morgan replied. Tesla hobbled along, laying off the crew and selling off equipment to pay outstanding lumber and water bills. Foreclosure followed, and Tesla abandoned the facility in 1911. Critics jumped on him, calling Wardenclyffe his "million dollar folly." Tesla response was emblematic of his maturing into a full-blown mad scientist. "It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive--blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence--by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed--only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle." "But has Tesla had the last laugh after all?" The Economist asked recently, citing the various companies -- Fulton Innovation, eCoupled, WiTricity and Powercast - pursing wireless electricity today. Likely not. If Tesla were still alive - and he might have figured that out, too - he would not be laughing, but suing, which he did for much of the latter part of life, growing crazier, until he died poor at the age of 86. Eight months later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he was the true inventor of the radio. (There was an excellent PBS documentary on Tesla last year, which has an informative website. In Go, Mutants!, the PLEX, or Pneumatic Light and Energy eXchange, is based on Tesla's unrequited genius.) |
| Gate guarded McMansion suburb in Walt Disney World Posted: 23 Jun 2010 09:37 AM PDT  Disney is building a bunch of multi-million-dollar McMansions in a gate-guarded suburb on the grounds of Walt Disney World. It's the latest in a series of urbanist experiments stretching back to the original vision Walt had for the Florida property -- the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. For absolutely the best-ever writing on the subject of urbanism and Disney, see FoxxFur's brilliant The Lake Buena Vista Story: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four The Golf Resort Disney unveils Golden Oak luxury homes, offering a chance to live in the Walt Disney World resort (Thanks, Ricky!)
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| Tom the Dancing Bug: Nate in "Risky Management" Posted: 23 Jun 2010 09:20 AM PDT  Enjoy this week's Tom the Dancing Bug! The full strip follows after the jump.  |
| Posted: 22 Jun 2010 10:30 PM PDT My friend Jake is allergic to his iPhone. When he came to visit from Tokyo last week, I wondered why he was wearing biker gloves and why his iPhone and laptop were fully encased in rubber. When I asked him about it, this is what he said: It's likely that Jake has mobile phone dermatitis or metal contact dermatitis, allergic reactions supposedly developed after long contact to the nickel in modern gadgets. A report published this month in the Dermatology Online Journal concludes that "cell phone allergic contact dermatitis is an emerging problem and should be considered in the differential diagnosis for unilateral ear and/or face dermatitis."   |
| Scuba brings peace to a boy who has only known war Posted: 23 Jun 2010 07:49 AM PDT  Khalil Al Jadeily floats quietly in the aquamarine swimming pool in his neoprene wetsuit and a full rack of scuba equipment. His hazel eyes are excited, pumped with adrenaline. For a 16-year old who has never known peace, this is like a trip to another planet. Read Scuba brings peace to a boy who has only known war, a BB special feature.  |
| Neatorama Mini Hunt: Made By Hand Posted: 23 Jun 2010 07:49 AM PDT  Our friends at Neatorama are holding a "Mini Hunt" to win an autographed copy of my book, Made by Hand. Visit the site to learn what the Mini Hunt challenge is. The'll pick 6 random winners: 3 will win free autographed copies of Made by Hand, and another 3 will win neat items ($50 or less) from the NeatoShop. |
| Americans: tell the White House to take a critical look at ACTA! Posted: 23 Jun 2010 06:58 AM PDT Sherwin Sly from Public Knowledge writes in about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secretive copyright treaty being negotiated without participation from public interest groups, poor countries, or the press: There's a lot of anger and frustration about ACTA, among users, legislators and policymakers, and even in the tech industry. The problem now, though, is that Congress isn't directly involved in the process, and the White House isn't paying sufficient attention to the issue to see all of the problems that lie in the details of the agreement. That's why we're encouraging people to write to the President and key members of administration staff to let them know what the stakes are for the Internet in passing an agreement that can introduce bad laws overseas and lock in bad ones here. Right now, it seems that higher-ups feel that ACTA is an easily popular thing to do--since no one likes fraudulent goods. But we need them paying more attention if we don't want ACTA so closely resembling a US entertainment industry wishlist.ACTION ALERT: Tell the Obama Administration What You Think of ACTA (Thanks, Sherwin!)   |
| Posted: 23 Jun 2010 06:19 AM PDT  Mike sez, "Newsweek posted a gallery portraying the growing hordes of college educated Chinese young people forced to cram into slums near the IT districts in Shanghai and Beijing. Here's an excerpt from the intro: The new aspiring professionals are known as "ants" because of both their eagerness to work and a willingness to cram together in poor living conditions. China's new white-collar underclass is developing an intimate connections as they share struggles and seek to adapt to their nation's changing society." (Image: Mark Leong / Redux for Newsweek)
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| Canadian Heritage Minister declares war on copyright reformers Posted: 23 Jun 2010 06:13 AM PDT Michael Geist sez, "There was considerable attention yesterday on a media report stating that Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore warned against 'radical extremists' opposing C-32. A video of part of his remarks has now been posted online. The comments, which come after the prepared speech, feature a no-holds-barred attack against those arguing for fair copyright. According to Moore, some proposed amendments to C-32 are not genuine but rather part of an attempt to oppose copyright and copyright reform, to drum up fear, and to mislead. Moore encourages confrontation, urging the audience to confront on Facebook, Twitter, talk shows and in the media until 'they are defeated.'" James Moore's Attack on Fair Copyright
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[Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner:] "Because Janie grew up in Tennessee, she is very attuned to formality and the way that things stay pretty much the same the further you get from Los Angeles or New York. People don't always change with the times. Part of the story that we are trying to tell is about the loosening of all this stuff—the crudening of manners and style as the period changes. Janie and I talk about that all the time and try to signal it in little ways, like with a character taking off his hat in the elevator. It's unusual for a costume designer to stay on this long, and that means so much since here continuity really matters." 
Remember that the iPhone allows you to tap an icon on-screen to switch the camera orientation from one face to another. For some portions (while riding my bike), the iPhone was strapped on to my left hand with rubber bands (I call this The Rubber Band Steadicam™), and the iPhone camera was facing out one direction with medium-res video recording. In other sections of this video (skaters skating, orchids, ocean, and interview with skater Kiko, age 8) the iPhone camera was activated in the other direction and captured high-resolution video. 
Suppes has built his first test magrid out of Teflon and copper, though he hasn't run it yet. He's started designing a 3D printable magrid with space for superconducting magnets, which potentially could take less energy to run and get the reaction closer to self-sustaining. He's using a high temperature superconducting magnetic tape, but even high temperature means liquid nitrogen cooled, instead of liquid helium. It has to sit next to plasma. 
It started one weekend in the middle of January. I had been writing on my 17-inch Macbook Pro for about three hours straight when I noticed my palms started to sting. They were bright red, and and a rash had developed from my palms down to parts of my wrist; the webs between my fingers were also swelling up. It didn't itch — it just felt strange, sort of numb, stung a little, and I actually thought I'd gotten a third-degree, low-heat burn from the laptop. 
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