Today is Bridge day over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Steve Leckart found this laser-cut gingerbread bridge, still under construction.

1sockchuck writes "Apple is planning a major East Coast data center to boost the capacity of its online operations, and may invest more than $1 billion in building and operating the huge server farm. That's nearly twice what Google and Microsoft typically invest in their massive cloud computing centers. The scope of the project raises interesting questions about Apple's plans, and has politicians in North Carolina jumping through hoops to pass incentives to win the project. The proposed NC incentives build on a package for Google that later proved controversial."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Your U.S.A. cellular phone bill, since the early 1990s, has had a fee levied on it by governments for E911 services. The fee differed from state to state, and was ostensibly to fund the upgrade of 911 call centers. The public safety call centers were to be readied to receive location information from cell phones, and to use that information to instruct emergency crews. The cellular carriers were required to collect this tax for the government, but were also separately required to design, create, and deploy the (much more expensive) systems that can determine where the caller is. The government basically required the carriers to fund a public safety system (which you may or may not agree with). One thing with which none of us could agree was that the E911 taxes on our phone bills were promptly squandered by governments, for years, on just about everything except 911 call center upgrades. Money was mis-spent on ballpoint pens, conference attendance, dry cleaning, and boots.

Most of that is history; much of the US is now ugraded. (Please don't rely on E911, as it only works when you have a good cell signal, battery power, and a few other things. Don't use it as a crutch or as a "safety device"!) So what do you think will happen to those monthly taxes that were collected for so many years? Time to cancel them, right? Not so fast, says the State of Hawaii, which gets 66 cents of E911 fees from every monthly bill. This article in the Honolulu Advertiser shows how various government agencies are trying to get their hands on the "windfall." A few examples of this include: the Honolulu PD wants a new dispatch system for $20m, the Board that manages the fund wants their mandate extended to spend on other tech like VoIP location, the State hired a new Executive Director of the E911 fund for $294,421/yr, the legislature is taking $16M from the fund to help balance the budget, and some are trying to build new cell towers with the money. The article predicts future raids on the funds, and given what we've seen nationwide, we would agree.

What is it about this country that we can't just call a tax a tax. We seem to have an addiction to tucking and hiding fees into a wide range of services, where over time the fees have little to do with the services. Dear government: If you're going to tax me, please just do it up front, talk to me honestly, and say it's a tax. I want to feel you reaching into my pocket, instead of having you just skim the till behind my back.

Derek Kerton is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Derek Kerton and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Plants vs. Zombies continues to fascinate three out of the four members of our household. To share the love, I'm giving away this Plants vs. Zombies gift card. I won't send you the actual card, though. Instead I'll send you another photo of this card without the dry roasted edamame beans that cover up the code you need to enter to unlock the game for unlimited play.

How do you win? By writing the best zombie-themed haiku in the comments. Deadline is 2am Pacific Time.

You can download a one-hour trial of the game here.

"Globally, half of the overall bloggers are from Spain, being Argentina, Mexico and Chile the following most active countries in number of bloggers in the Hispanic world."

David Alayon, Community Manager at Bitacoras.com sent me a link to the English version of this report on the Hispanic Blogosphere.

Since its huge emergence in the late XX century and the beginning of the XXI century, many have been the studies that have attempted to approach to the blog phenomenon in Spanish.

Most of these researches have been based on surveys of bloggers or experts in the field, using indirect data and small sized samples.

Now for the first time in history, Bitacoras.com publishes the results of a study based on the platform’s internal data, with the intention of offering a broader perspective about the reality of the blogosphere in Spanish.

A first report that extends and supports previous studies and tries to promote and spread the phenomenon of blogs beyond their own borders.

State of the Hispanic Blogosphere report 2009

An anonymous reader sends word that a trial has opened in Paris that could shut down Scientology in France. The organization stands accused of targeting vulnerable people for commercial gain. Scientology does not have the status of a religion there, as it does in the US, and anti-cult groups have pursued it vigorously over more than 30 years. The current case is based on complaints filed by two women in December 1998 and July 1999. Three other former members who had initially joined the complaint have withdrawn after "reaching a financial arrangement with church officials." If convicted, the seven top Scientologists in France face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of €1M. The Church of Scientology-Celebrity Centre and its Scientology Freedom Space bookshop not only face a much larger fine but also run the risk of being shut down completely.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Warren Dotz let me know about a new book he co-wrote called AD BOY: Vintage Advertising with Character. I haven't see the book yet, but I've enjoyed Warren's other books.

More than 450 American ad characters, industry icons, and product personalities hailing from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s pack the pages of this vibrant, vintage collection.

"The postwar economic boom launched a generation of charming, cheeky, and relentlessly cheerful critters and characters that found their way into our homes--and our hearts--in print, on television, and on packaging. Some took detours that reflected the times (Elsie the Cow was sent into outer space in 1958). Some were fashion victims who survived (remember hippy Hush Puppies, circa 1969?). And some are no longer with us (the Frito Bandito was finally brought to justice in 1971). These endearingly offbeat characters are as fresh and entertaining today as they were creatively inspired in decades past.

AD BOY: Vintage Advertising with Character

We've talked in the past about how those complaining about the supposed "loss" of investigative journalism, if newspapers go away, are wrong. First, investigative journalism of the kind that people think about (i.e., Woodward and Bernstein breaking Watergate) is a relatively new phenomenon, and was not a common part of newspaper journalism until just a few decades ago. Second, very few newspapers put that much in the way of resources towards investigative reporting anyway. Third, there's nothing stopping other organizations from doing investigative reporting -- and we've been seeing a growing range of new online publications that focus on investigative reporting and do a great job of it. But a separate point is that it's often really not the investigative reporters who uncover the story, but the folks involved in the news themselves -- and those folks rarely get credit for providing the info that makes the journalistic effort possible.

Over the weekend, the news came out that the NY Times actually had the Watergate story before Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post. The acting director of the FBI leaked it to the Times just before Mark Felt, the associate director of the FBI, leaked it to the Washington Post (and became immortalized as "Deep Throat"). As Jay Rosen points out, this really means the FBI "broke" the story just as much as Woodward and Bernstein did. If there's a story that needs to get out there, never underestimate the folks on the inside for leaking it to get it out there -- and then there will be no shortage of folks to help spread the news. Again (so people don't misinterpret this), I'm not saying investigative reporters aren't needed -- but that not all of the story comes from the reporters themselves. And, on top of that, there are a growing number of publications willing to pick up the slack.

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Hugh Pickens writes "Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts has introduced legislation that would roll back a ban on Internet gambling enacted when Republicans led Congress. The legislation would allow the Treasury Department to license and regulate online gambling companies that serve American customers. Frank's bill has roughly two dozen co-sponsors and the backing of the The Poker Players Alliance, with over a million members. But opponents are mobilizing to defeat the bill including social conservatives and professional and amateur sports organizations, which say more gambling opportunities could threaten the integrity of their competition. 'Illegal offshore Internet gambling sites are a criminal enterprise, and allowing them to operate unfettered in the United States would present a clear danger to our youth, who are subject to becoming addicted to gambling at an early age,' says Representative Spencer Bachus, Republican of Alabama and the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee. Another powerful roadblock could be the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada. 'Gaming is an important industry to the state, and anything that affects it will be reviewed carefully,' says Reid's spokesman."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in April, we wrote about how a student at Boston College had his computer seized for supposedly sending a hoax email. The evidence used to allow the seizure was incredibly questionable, including (among a few other things) the fact that the student in question: "uses two different operating systems to hide his illegal activities. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on." Yes, that damn command line prompt is a sign of suspicious activities. Luckily, a judge has now ruled the search and the seizure illegal, noting that there didn't seem to be any clear violation of the law, and that the reasons behind allowing the search did not establish probable cause. So, feel free to go back to using an operating system via a command line prompt in Massachussetts again. Apparently, you're no longer an automatic suspect for hacking.

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Al writes "Researchers at Harvard and Tufts University have developed a way to send coded messages without using electricity. David Walt, professor of chemistry at Tufts, and Harvard's George Whitesides have developed 'infofuses' that can transmit information simply by burning. The fuses — metallic salts depositing on a nitrocellulose strand — emit pulses of infrared and visible light of different colors whose sequence encodes information. They were developed in response to a call from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for technologies to allow soldiers stranded without a power source to communicate. In the first demonstration of the idea, they used the infofuses to transmit the message look mom no electricity." Currently the researchers are "trying to figure out a way to dynamically encode a message on the fly in the field without specialized equipment."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Designer Jonathan Baldwin created a very limited edition board game based on Hunter S. Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. The package looks fantastic. "Pill bottle contents mimic look of real substances." Fear And Loathing: The Board Game (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

(I'm traveling and blogging from Guatemala right now, so expect a number of posts from me specific to this region. - XJ).

The excellent work of Guatemala-based photojournalist James Rodriguez has been featured on BB a number of times before. The most recent photo-essay on his blog documents a protest march that took place a few days ago in the capital here, carried out by indigenous people from San Miguel Ixtahuacan, where the Canadian mining giant Goldcorp operates the Marlin Gold Mine. Background here on the mine, and Goldcorp's campaign of harassment and intimidation of indigenous residents. Snip:

The movement, made up almost in its entirety by indigenous local Mam Mayans, reiterated their intention to pursue a peaceful dialogue so as to bring to a close Montana's mining activities in the region. As of now, three people have died due to the toxic contamination in the local water sources and other natural resources.

Gregoria Crisanta Perez, one of the 8 women accused by Goldcorp of sabotaging their electric supply (read more about the case here), declares: "We demand our rights because we do not want to be killed by the mining company. We ask the government to please listen to our demands, as we are the legitimate owners of the territories. We are indigenous people, we were born there, and we should die there. But our death should be decided by God, not by the mining company."

A few meters down the road from the Canadian Embassy, one of the many Goldcorp billboards that can be found in Guatemala City read: "We invest in the dreams of a developing country."

Some residents of San Miguel Ixtahuacan identified the billboard and felt it was inappropriate due to the damage they have suffered from the mine's presence in their communities. Gradually, protestors began tearing little pieces as an expression of discontent with the mining company that has incited grave social conflicts. Dozens of people suddenly charged the billboard euphorically in a festive mood.

San Miguel Ixtahuacan is Waking Up: Guatemala City, Guatemala. (mimundo.org)

Today a California court upheld a ban on marriages between persons of the same gender, because nothing harms society (and kids) like two people who love each other committing to a lifelong relationship based on care, compassion, and mutual responsibility.

My friend Ehrich Blackhound says, "I've replaced the header on the Prop 8 website with this graphic, using @shiftspace. download the plugin to see it in situ."

And Meadhbh Siobhan says,

mi amiga riven will be liveblogging the santa cruz prop 8 protests this evening. she encourages people to follow her twitter feed at @rivensharp and asks that if you're going to be live blogging the protest in your area that you send her a direct message with your twitter id. i think the idea here is that peeps at the protests can communicate with each other via twitter. or.. if you're just interested in watching the feed, you can see that here.

If you'd like to share news of other PropHate-related actions taking place today, please pile on in the comments.

StikyPad was one of several readers letting us know that Psystar has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. We've discussed the Mac clone maker's battles with Apple extensively. The company apparently has over $250,000US in debt, and states that it cannot turn a profit in the current economy. "The Chapter 11 filing will temporarily suspend Apple's copyright infringement suit against Psystar, which is currently before the US District Court of Northern California. But once the bankruptcy protection is sorted out, the copyright case will resume." And PC Mag is reporting that, on the other side of the Atlantic, two new clone companies are just getting started. Like PsyStar, FreedomPC and RussianMac promise to deliver PCs with OS X preloaded.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

Six weeks ago, I interviewed Stephen Wolfram about his intriguing new online tool Wolfram|Alpha. And now Wolfram|Alpha is live. Give it a try...it's not exactly a browser, it computes facts and images based on the browser data that it retrieves, and presents the new info on web pages it designs on the fly.

If a word isn't in the Wolfram|Alpha database---like the word "Boing"---the answer you get may be a bit of a surprise. But the expectation is that over time Wolfram|Alpha's abilities will grow.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

I've always admired the work of great street photographers like Gary Winogrand.

This is a photo I happened to take myself a few months ago. To see quite a few more (by other people) just search Flickr for "street photography".

Looking online, I've found endless discussion about the techniques and ethics of street photography. This discussion thread on Photo.net is interesting. And this PDF book by Chris Weeks, Street Photography for the Purist is quite rich, with illustrated intros by several other street photographers. I found both these links, by the way, in the Wikipedia article on Street Photography.

As I've said before, we are big Little Lulu fans around my house. I read the comic anthologies to my kids all the time. Even though the stories are 50 years old, they're fun and fresh and the characters -- Lulu, Tubby, and Alvin -- behave like real kids.

(Dark Horse has published the complete run of John Stanley's Little Lulu series as reasonably priced paperback anthologies. Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4, Vol 5, Vol 6, Vol 7, Vol 8, Vol 9, Vol 10, Vol 11, Vol 12, Vol 13, Vol 14, Vol 15, Vol 16, Vol 17, Vol 18)

The main writer of Little Lulu was John Stanley. He also wrote a number of other comics, but I've seen just a few, because they're hard to come by. Drawn & Quarterly has corrected that problem by launching the John Stanley Library. The second book in the series is Nancy, Volume One.

Created by Ernie Bushmiller, the beloved Brillo-headed Nancy starred in her own comic book series for years, written by arguably the greatest children’s comics writer of all time, John Stanley. Most famous for scripting the adventures of Marjorie Henderson Buell’s Little Lulu, John Stanley is one of comics’ secret geniuses. He provided a visual rough draft for all the comics he wrote and then handed off these “scripts” for someone else to render the finished art. No matter what comic he was writing, he breathed life into his characters. In Stanley’s comics, Nancy is no longer a crabby cipher but a hilarious, brilliant, scheming, duplicitous, honest, and loyal little kid—a real little kid. Her adventures with her best friend, the comically destitute Sluggo, involve moneymaking schemes to afford ice-cream sodas, botched trips to the corner store for Nancy’s Aunt Fritzi, and comically raucous attempts to remove loose teeth.

Drawn & Quarterly is launching several kid-friendly volumes of Nancy and Nancy and Sluggo as companion volumes to Melvin Monster and Dark Horse’s Little Lulu volumes. The books are designed by Seth (The Complete Peanuts; Melvin Monster; Clyde Fans; It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken).

Nancy, Volume One

A week and a half ago, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton made some news for saying that nothing good had come from the internet, period. Plenty of online sites (including ours) took him to task for that, wondering how one gets to be the CEO of a major content company without understanding the internet. Today, Lynton hit back at critics -- not by saying he was quoted out of context or misunderstood, but by standing behind the statement and adding some gems to it as well. Let's take a look...

In March, an unfinished copy of 20th Century Fox's film X-Men Origins: Wolverine was stolen from a film lab and uploaded to the Internet, more than a month before its theatrical release. The studio investigated the crime, and efforts were made to limit its availability online. Still, it was illegally downloaded more than four million times.

And, as was widely noted, the movie still opened to a massive box office take, despite pretty dreadful reviews all over. In fact, the movie had a lot more buzz leading up to it because of all the talk about the leak. Funny that Lynton seems to ignore that part. Could it really be that the CEO of a major motion picture studio doesn't understand that people go to the movies for the experience, and not just the content?

I actually welcome the Sturm und Drang I've stirred, because it gives me an opportunity to make a larger point (one which I also made during that panel discussion, though it was not nearly as viral as the sentence above). And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.

This is like saying "the major transportation companies and the most talented creators of transportation devices -- horse carriages, buggy whips, blacksmiths -- have all been seriously harmed by the automobile." Markets change. They may cause trouble for dinosaurs unable or unwilling to adapt, but they have not harmed content creation or the content business. And it's not "the internet" that has harmed the "most talented creators of that content." It's folks like Michael Lynton who seem to be funnelling them towards bad business models.

Some of that damage has been caused by changing business models (the FTC just announced an inquiry into the impact of new media on the newspaper industry). But the primary culprit is piracy. The Internet has brought people with no regard for the intellectual property of others together with a technology that allows them to easily steal that property and sell or give it away to everyone, with little fear of being caught or prosecuted.

Wow! At least he's able to admit that business models play a role, but he's flat out wrong about blaming piracy. He claims that it's "people with no regard for the intellectual property of others," which is hilarious coming from Hollywood -- a town built on showing no regard for the intellectual property of Thomas Edison. You know what comes out of showing no regard for artificial scarcity? Amazing new industries. Lynton is a product of piracy... and yet now that he's in charge, it's evil? Funny stuff...

To be clear, my concern about piracy does not obscure my understanding that the Internet has had a transformative impact on our culture and holds enormous potential to improve the prospects of humanity, and in many instances already has. I am no Luddite. I am not an analogue guy living in a digital world. I ran an Internet company and my studio actively uses the web to market and sell our movies and television shows. We create original content for new media.

If you think that "using the web to sell and market our movies and television" or "creating original content for new media" represents what the internet has to offer, you really need to educate yourself on the internet. It's not about selling and marketing. It's about interactivity. Hire someone who doesn't hate the internet, please.

And yes, new talents have emerged thanks to the democratic and viral impact of the web. Yes, the rise of new distribution platforms for existing content is exciting and rich with promise.

But at the same time, I cannot subscribe to the views of those online critics who insist that I "just don't get it," and claim the world has so fundamentally changed because of the web that conventional practices concerning property rights no longer apply; that the Internet should be left to develop entirely unfettered and unregulated.

It's not that "conventional practices concerning property rights no longer apply," it's that content isn't property. You've been blinded by the phrase "intellectual property" into believing it's something that it is not. The internet is neither unfettered nor unregulated. What you're really complaining about is that technology has put a crimp on your old business model, and rather than adjust, you want new laws to force things back to the way they were before -- back before we had the rise of new distribution platforms and the ability to share content that we like with one another.

Back when automobiles were first introduced, laws were passed requiring people to walk in front of every automobile waving red flags. Officially this was for safety, but it was really an attempt to limit the automobile and keep things the way they used to be for carriage makers. You're not asking for reasonable rules and regulations. You're asking for red flags and a speed limit of 5 mph when cars can easily go 120mph.

In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.

There are guidelines. You don't like the ones that are there, and the market has decided that many of them don't make sense. Let history be a lesson to you: when the majority of people think that "guidelines" don't make sense, making them even more stringent isn't going to fix things. Instead, it's time to look for opportunities within what people are doing.

I'm not talking here about censorship, taxation or burdensome government restrictions.

Yes, you are. You'll just call them something different.

I'm talking about reasonable boundaries, "rules of the road," that can help promote the many positive attributes of Internet technology while curtailing its hugely damaging effects.

Right, just as reasonable as the guys waving flags in front of cars. Those were designed to promote the many positive attributes of the automobile while curtailing its hugely damaging effects. The problem then, as now, is that people looked at the automobile through the prism of the horse carriage (that's why they were originally called horseless carriages). So the idea that they could travel much faster was seen as a bad thing (ooh, dangerous!) rather than a good thing. The same thing is true today. The fact that people can share content and help promote and distribute it for you is seen by you as a bad thing (oooh, dangerous!), but once things shake out, those who don't hate the internet will realize it's actually a huge opportunity for new businesses to grow and thrive. It's 1904. Do you want to be the CEO of the Durant-Dort Carriage Company or do you want to run Buick? William Durant made the right choice. You're making the wrong one.

And this becomes even more critical as governments around the world are subsidizing and promoting the ubiquity of high speed broadband to make their economies more efficient and competitive. With this increase in speed, content will travel that much more easily on the Internet. But without restraints, much of that content will be contraband.

Yes, as nations around the world are subsidizing national highways, this becomes ever more important. With this increase in speed, automobiles will be able to travel that much more easily. Without restraints, much of that travel will break the speed limit.

I've already seen it happen in South Korea, which has one of the most highly developed broadband networks in the world. But piracy has also become so highly developed there that we and virtually every other studio has recently had to curtail or close down our home entertainment businesses. It's hard to sell a legal DVD when it can be stolen without any repercussions.

And yet, there are new businesses springing up every day to take advantage of this wonderful abundance. JY Park is building a massive entertainment empire in South Korea by embracing the fact that everything he does will be "pirated" in some manner. But he's still bringing in a ton of money. That's because he's not focused on how to sell horse drawn carriages any more, but how to make automobiles go faster and faster.

Contrast the expansion of the Internet with what happened a half century ago. In the 1950's, the Eisenhower Administration undertook one of the most massive infrastructure projects in our nation's history -- the creation of the Interstate Highway System. It completely transformed how we did business, traveled, and conducted our daily lives. But unlike the Internet, the highways were built and operated with a set of rational guidelines. Guard rails went along dangerous sections of the road. Speed and weight limits saved lives and maintenance costs. And officers of the law made sure that these rules were obeyed. As a result, as interstates flourished, so did the economy. According to one study, over the course of its first four decades of existence, the Interstate Highway System was responsible for fully one-quarter of America's productivity growth.

But that highway is already built. You're not asking for reasonable guidelines. You're asking people to walk in front of automobiles waving red flags, while everyone else is already zipping around in their automobiles.

We can replicate that kind of success with the Internet more easily if we do more to encourage the productivity of the creative engines of our society -- the artists, actors, writers, directors, singers and other holders of intellectual property rights -- yes, including the movie studios, which help produce and distribute entertainment to billions of people worldwide.

We're already replicating that kind of success. Your problem is that it's happening without you. But, without standards of commerce and more action against piracy, the intellectual property of humankind will be subject to infinite exploitation on the Internet. Imagine a resource that is infinitely exploitable? Imagine that wonderful abundance? Who could possibly complain about that? Oh right, those who benefited from the previous scarcity. Still, it's quite amazing to see someone actually complain about abundance.

How many people will be as motivated to write a book or a song, or make a movie if they know it is going to be immediately stolen from them and offered to the world with no compensation whatsoever?

Well, considering how many people create content today already, I'd say plenty. And, of course, this statement has an implicit fallacy embedded in it: that because content can be shared (not "stolen") that it means there's "no compensation whatsoever." Need we remind you that despite Wolverine being "stolen," compensation came in at about $90 million in its first weekend? If that's the kind of "no compensation whatsoever" we can expect when content gets "stolen," sign me up.

And how many people whose work is connected with those creative industries -- the carpenters, drivers, food service workers, and thousands of others -- will lose their jobs as piracy robs their business of resources?

Oh, right. The poor carpenters, drivers and food service workers. Well, since we've already pointed out that there's still plenty of compensation, they'll continue to be just fine. They don't get paid based on some obsolete business model. They get paid by the hour. That continues.

Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible.

You say that as if you mean it, while the entire rest of your article is about how you don't want to meet that demand, and how you want that efficiency walled off and blocked via gov't fiat.

But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.

No one is "stealing" anything. What are you missing? No windows are broken. And, part of your problem is the fact that you think the shop "closes." If you can't recognize that the shop doesn't close any more, you shouldn't be running a major content company.

Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.

I don't know which culture you're looking at, but it seems to be me that entertainment, literature, art and scholarship are all thriving like they never have before. Where's the problem, other than your own inability to adapt?

In my own household I know it is my responsibility, along with my wife, to monitor how my family uses the Internet for school work and enjoyment. And I know the web can play a big role in our daughters' future. But I also want their future to be filled with the kind of music and books and films and other creative sparks that have enlivened my life and our culture through the years.

And, thankfully, she'll be able to experience a lot more of such culture thanks to the internet and the efficiency it allows. Many authors, musicians and filmmakers today are purposely putting their works of art for free online. Would you like some pointers to help with your daughters' cultural education? We're more than willing to help.

Because actually I'm a guy who wants to see lots of good things come from the Internet. But it's not going to happen the way it should if we do not act now to safeguard the fruit of our world's most imaginative and talented minds. Period.

The only "safeguarding" you've suggested is your own obsolete business model. It's got nothing to do with culture and content creation. It has nothing to do with the internet. It has everything to do with the fact that you're viewing all content creation through the distorted prism of the movie making industry, where content creation comes from a big corporation and is then mass marketed and sold to the people. You need to step out from behind that prism, put down the red flags you're waving in front of automobiles, jump onto a passing car, and look at all the wonderful things the internet allows in terms of creativity and new business models. Don't let Sony Pictures be the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, clinging to the past.

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Rob Wood, of Western Warship Combat Club (WWCC), sent us this series of pics of the boat pond going up at Maker Faire. Thanks, Rob!

Robotic Warship Combat

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Mike writes "Swiss auto company Green GT recently released the first details on a svelte all-electric supercar that is being heralded as the most powerful electric race car ever built. Designed with the 2011 Le Mans race in mind, the Twenty-4 will boast a sleek carbon fiber chassis and twin 100-kw electric motors totaling 400 hp — enough to push the vehicle from 0-60 mph in 4 seconds flat, and to a top speed of 171 mph. GreenGT's head engineer Christophe Schwartz has stated that 'The GreenGT Twenty-4 design study could become our 2011 Le Mans Prototype electric racer, or it could even become an electric road-going supercar. There is a possibility to do both!'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you spend much time online reading about weird and wacky news, you're probably already quite familiar with Jonathan Lee Riches, a guy who's in prison for wire fraud, but whose real claim to fame is filing a ton of wacky pro se lawsuits. In fact, via Mathew Ingram, we find out that the Guinness Book of World Records has given JLR the world record for "most lawsuits filed," which he celebrated by promptly filling a lawsuit against Guinness. He's claiming that they're going to print false info about the number of lawsuits he's filed, though in the lawsuit itself, he seems quite proud of all the lawsuits he's filed, stating:

"I've filed so many lawsuits with my pen and right hand that I got arthritis in my fingers, numbness in my wrists, crooked fingers... I flush out more lawsuits than a sewer."

So you would think he'd be proud of getting the world record...

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Jaime Leifer writes "The cover of the June 1, 2009, issue of The New Yorker, entitled 'Finger Painting,' was drawn by Jorge Colombo entirely on his iPhone — a first for the magazine. Colombo, a New York-based artist and illustrator, uses the iPhone's Brushes application to vibrantly depict New York street scenes." There's a video recapitulating the creation of the piece, omitting all of the undos.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As we've mentioned here before, Maker Faire Africa is an unofficial Maker Faire (that we've given our blessing to). It's taking place on August 13-15 at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT in Accra, Ghana. Our pals over at Afrigadget and Afromusing are trying to get people to spread the word on the event and they're looking for donations to help make it happen. Check it out and support however you can.

Support Maker Faire Africa

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James sez, "In the coming European Parliament Elections voters have a chance to influence the wider use and the development of free software across Europe by lobbying potential candidates. Already about 90 MEP candidates are supporting this."

The Free Software Pact is a simple document with which candidates can inform the voting public that they favor the development and use of Free Software, and will protect it from possible threatening EU legislation. The Free Software Pact is also a tool for citizens who value Free Software to educate candidates about the importance of Free Software and why they should, if elected, protect the European Free Software community.

Free Software Pact

The Conference Board of Canada -- a supposedly independent think tank that took Canadian tax-money to produce a report on the "Digital Economy" that plagiarized press-materials from the US copyright lobby -- ignored conflicting evidence that an independent legal expert produced after they paid him to investigate the subject.

In other words, they went into this project knowing what conclusions they wanted to draw, and ignored everyone -- even their own researchers -- who had anything different to say.

What the Conference Board does not mention in its defence (nor in the report) is that it actually commissioned a study on the copyright issues from an independent Canadian legal expert. That report was completed by Professor Jeremy deBeer, a colleague at the University of Ottawa and frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail on copyright matters.

Professor deBeer has just revealed his involvement and posted a working paper based on his report submitted to the Conference Board of Canada. It turns out the deBeer was precluded from using the work for 12 months, a period that concluded today. It is immediately apparent that the deBeer paper arrived at very different conclusions from the IIPA and the Conference Board.

Conference Board Ignored Independent Study Commissioned For Digital Economy Report

I like the look of the ITZBEEN: a four-way baby-care timer that helps sleep-depped parents remember exactly when the little pisher last had a little pish:

ITZBEEN Baby Care Timer was invented by a new mom and dad who found themselves sleep-deprived and needing help to remember baby care details like when their baby last ate or napped. They tried charts and journals but thought there had to be a better way, so they invented one. And alas, ITZBEEN was born. The ITZBEEN Baby Care Timer is a multi-purpose tool that helps you remember the basic details of baby care. It has four timers for changing, feeding, napping and more that count up with the touch of a button! The ITZBEEN has several other helpful features including a nursing reminder switch that easily reminds mom which side baby nursed from last, a soft-glow nightlight to help parents find their way in the dark without waking the baby and a backlit display so parents can read the times and the clock in the dark.

Itzbeen Baby Care Timer (Thanks, William!)

Diesel's new "Freak of Nature" frankenwatch fuses "a steel oval case with a gold square surrounding a split-faced multi-colored chronograph dial" -- it's even got two different watch-band halves!

Diesel DZ4160 -Freak of Nature

Here's a recap of recent episodes of our daily original video program, Boing Boing Video.

* (Embedded Above) - Diving into Space: Miles O'Brien in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab (Download / YouTube). Our esteemed guest space correspondent brings us this special report on the same day NASA astronauts complete their final space walk -- and zero-g repair job -- on the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission #4.

* Miles O'Brien Reports: An Astronaut Climbs Everest (Download / YouTube). Guest contributor Miles O'Brien, the veteran space and science reporter formerly with CNN, speaks with astronaut Scott Parazynski as he attempts to summit Mt. Everest.

* BB Video: This Week in Space, with Miles O'Brien (Download / YouTube) A recap of this week in space news. The former CNN anchor and reporter is exploring what independent online journalism is all about. In this episode, we learn what life is like for a 26-year broadcast veteran who has become a freewheeling freelancer. The short answer? Pretty good.

* Guatemala Protests: Eyewitness Cellphone Video from Twitterers (Download / YouTube). In recent weeks, Guatemalan citizens have been gathering to protest the assassination of an attorney who blamed president Álvaro Colom for his imminent murder in a posthumously-released YouTube Video. Boing Boing Video viewer (and BB blog reader) Maria Figueroa (@thevenemousone on Twitter) participated in the demonstrations with friends, and she sent us this eyewitness report captured on her cellphone.

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Where to Find Boing Boing Video: RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic).

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Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing Video is brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

Maximum Prophet nods a NY Times piece on a Dutch group living the retro dream: they are trying to bring back Polaroid film. This group has the machinery to make the film packs, but needs to recreate the chemicals. Polaroid Inc. stopping making the specialized chemicals years ago, after having stockpiled what they would need for their last production runs. "They want to recast an outdated production process in an abandoned Polaroid factory for an age that has fallen for digital pictures because they think people still have room in their hearts for retro photography that eschews airbrushing or Photoshop. 'This project is about building a very interesting business to last for at least another decade,' said Florian Kaps, the Austrian entrepreneur behind the effort [in Enschede, The Netherlands]. 'It is about the importance of analog aspects in a more and more digital world. ... If everyone runs in one direction [i.e. digital photography], it creates a niche market in the other.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's no secret that some entertainment companies have had trouble recognizing that fan sites help promote a show and add value to the show for free. In spite of these benefits, they still seem to have trouble with fan sites, sometimes threatening them over intellectual property violations or simply trying to shut them down. Now Blake points us to the news that someone in Fox's publicity department is apparently trying to exert editorial control over the fan site Dollverse, which helps promote the TV show Dollhouse. From the details, it really does look like a single person in the publicity department writing a too-sternly-worded letter demanding: "Moving forward do not make any further announcements on your site regarding network scheduling unless you receive notification from the network that scheduling is confirmed." It sounds like, otherwise, the network had been supportive of the site (and this didn't come backed up with any specific legal threat). However, it's still quite an amazing move for a "publicity" department to first demand that a site no longer write about stuff without confirmation, and then to later claim: "Clearing up your misperceptions of the show has become very time consuming and frankly takes away valuable time that could be spent actively marketing the series in the proper way." That's not exactly embracing the fan community.

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Al writes "Technology Review has an article about a company hoping to expand the clinical use of electroencephalography. Thanks to better sensor technologies, data-processing techniques, and more detailed knowledge of the brain, EEG is expanding into completely new areas. A startup called ElMindA, is developing an EEG system to help doctors diagnose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Scientists have also used ElMindA's system to characterize brain-activity patterns in patients with ADHD, identifying statistical parameters that differ between normal people and those with ADHD." If "normal people" can sit through high-school classes without being distracted and grumpy, count me out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like many of you, I'm sure, I've had the "pleasure" of going through airport security in one of those newer "puffer" devices that shoot little puffs of air up and down your body. I was told that these were sophisticated new machines that are much better at finding traces of explosives on people. Except... it turns out... not so much. Apparently the machines are incredibly expensive, prone to breaking down when exposed to dirt and humidity (none of that around airports) and difficult to repair. So, the government is no longer going to roll out any more such machines. This reminds me that, just last year, we were wondering whatever happened to the predicted boom in new airport security technology, that everyone insisted was on the way following the attacks of September 11th. These machines were about the only visual example of any new technology... and they don't seem to work.

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(Douglas Rushkoff is a recent Boing Boing guest blogger -- below, a previously-planned excerpt from his new book, the last in a series of excerpts which ran during his guest-blogging period.)
Experiencing all this through the sensationalist lens of Big Media only reduces our connection to the real world in which all this stuff is supposedly occurring. We seek to take on our institutional enemies vicariously through our late- night comedians, or "directly" through our laptops. We get to enter contests through which we can compete to create the most effective video ad for an issue or a candidate. We can make viral documentaries that no matter how painstakingly researched they are end up indistinguishable from paranoid videos about how preset explosives took down the World Trade Center.

The problem with fighting "Big Blank" [Big Agra, Big Pharma, etc.] on its own turf and terms is that it has more money, more access to the government and media through which the battle takes place, better command of the symbols and semantics that sway public sentiment, and much more time to spend waiting for the results it wants. Real people working against it, on the other hand, need to keep alive, employed, and motivated. We need to steer clear of actionable copyright violation and libel, shield ourselves from the emotional damage caused by Internet "trolls" paid to insult or lie about us online, and still manage to maintain an audience willing to listen to what we have to say and then to actually do something about it instead of just nodding, passing on a link, and closing the computer for the night.

We cannot market our way out of corporatism. While joining a big cause or a national political campaign may feel good for a moment, it can easily turn immediate, local, and actionable problems into great big abstract ones. The pollution leaching out of the local factory is hard to confront directly, and easier to address instead as part of a bigger environmental movement. Racism downtown can be addressed more painlessly by donating to a black candidate or a scholarship fund online. Carbon offsets, through which a person can pay an online company to counteract the effects of his air travel or air-conditioning, provide a virtual path to personal virtue--and a way for frequent fliers to recontextualize their actions right on their blogs for all to see.

This activity may be well intentioned, but it is chiefly concerned with finding ways to maintain our disconnection while still doing the right thing. Brands were invented to substitute for the real connections we had to people, places, and value. The brand was meant to disconnect, so branded movements and ideologies by their very nature tend toward polarization and extremism. Antiabortion and pro- choice constituencies are pushed to the edges by their highly branded, hotly worded campaigns, and thus less likely to rally around their common cause--reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. While Saatchi & Saatchi's "loyalty beyond reason" might be great for a cereal's "consumer tribe," it's the surest path away from a reasonable engagement with real life's pressing issues. Activists on MySpace compete for numbers of "friends" willing to become associated with a particular cause, but fail to realize that signing on to a social cause is accomplished with the same mouse click as signing on to be a friend of the Nike Swoosh.

Employing the techniques of marketing to repair the ravages of corporatism is a losing proposition; branding only disconnects us further from the means to rebuild what we have lost. The medium becomes the message as Big Activism becomes just another Big Blank. By attempting to beat them at their own game, we become part of the very thing we should be dismantling.

From Chapter 9
Here and Now: The Opportunity to Reconnect

Having grown so absolutely dependent on corporations and their debt for our daily functioning and sense of continuity, it's not surprising that our first reaction to Wall Street's implosion is to fund the companies in trouble. So, the public borrows more money from the central banks in order to feed the private sector's credit- vanquished corporations. Instead of merely having value extracted from us in the present, we volunteer our future earnings to keep the system running. Either that, or let the other shoe drop and expose the credit- based, artificial economy and its faulty premise of infinite expansion.

The debate on whether or not to refund the corporate sphere has so far fallen along familiar battle lines. Conservatives see themselves as free- market advocates, and adopt a posture of nonintervention. Regulation and impediments to free trade are what hampered corporations' ability to stay profitable in the first place, they argue. Those arguing for government bailouts and federally sponsored work programs, on the other hand, see this crisis as the opportunity to return corporations to public control, offer funds in return for more socially beneficial products, keep people employed, and restore the corporate sphere to health. They believe the free market has finally been "disproved."

But the distinctions are false. The free market is itself already sloped--highly regulated, in a sense--toward the interests of corporations and away from labor, small businesses, and local activity. If conservatives got their open marketplace and maintained a truly hands- off approach, most of the corporations they seek to liberate from government control would cease to exist. They couldn't survive on a level playing field, because corporations are themselves a byproduct of government regulation. Meanwhile, liberals who promote government investment in corporate debt might as well be arguing for privatizing Social Security. Bailouts, even in the form of recoupable investments, just tie us further to the fortunes of the corporate sphere. We end up with a stake in restoring their future ability to extract value from our society while providing as little as possible in return. These supposedly polarized policy positions are mirror images of the very same corporatism.

The alternative is to let government and business continue their debate about how to mitigate the most painful effects of the speculative economy's cyclical nature. In the meantime, we use the financial stalemate--however long it lasts--as an opportunity to identify the disconnections inherent in our overcorporatized society and try out some new strategies for rebuilding it from the bottom up. The corporate sphere ill serves human needs even when it's working as it's designed to. As corporate insolvency, home foreclosure, and unemployment increase, our financial system may prove incapable of providing us the essentials we need at prices we can afford. Through what mechanisms might we do this for one another, instead of depending on the distant companies who took this responsibility away from us before failing themselves?

We don't all need to move to communes or planned communities; we needn't stake out turf in the mountains for a dream chalet with solar panels. Extreme shifts like that only produce more consumption, waste, and trauma. Nor can we all suddenly quit our jobs working for corporations, sell all the depressed stock in our 401(k) plans, or completely stop using the existing fiscal system to conduct our business. We are dependent on corporations right now, and--however much influence they may lose in the short term--they're not going away anytime soon. We may not even want them to.

But we can't ask corporatized institutions from the private or public sectors to fix this mess for us, either. Just as Malcolm X rejected the help of white liberal groups, understanding that his community needed to learn to help itself, we humans cannot depend on entities biased toward repressing us to assist us in our quest to regain agency. Corporations can't save us, and we have more important business to attend to right now than obsessing over how to save them.

Instead, we can look to those who are reclaiming territory, creating value, and reconnecting with others in ways that we might actually be able to try ourselves. Small is the new big, and the surest path to global change in a highly networked world is to make an extremely local impact that works so well it spreads. This may amount to a new form of activism, but it is one without slogans, heroes, or glory. The efforts, and the rewards, are scaled to human beings.

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Instead of fighting corporations with corporations of our own, or working through corporations to reduce their negative impact on our society, we're better off reinventing ourselves as humans. We live on a terrain and in a dimension they can pollute but to which they will never belong. By working on this human- scaled landscape instead, we can create the changes in our own lives and communities that stand a chance, in aggregate, of trickling up and changing how the big world operates as well.

We can't look for those kinds of changes overnight. The grand expectations we have for ourselves and our achievements are really just the false promises of consumerism, brand culture, and the politics of revolutionary change. This is the ideological heritage of the Renaissance, and what brought us into the cycle of utopian hopes and alienated cynicism we're churning through today.

We'd each like to launch a national movement, create the website that teaches the world how to build community from the bottom up, develop the curriculum that saves public schools, or devise the clever antimarketing media campaign that breaks the spell of advertising once and for all. But these ego trips are the artifacts of the strident individualism we were taught to embrace. The temptation to save the whole world--and get the credit--comes at the expense of steps we might better take to make our immediate world a more fruitful, engaging, sustainable, and satisfying place. A successful movement depends on getting attention from media and institutions that are dead set against recognizing our ability to create value ourselves, and for its own sake. The minute they find out what we're up to, it's their job to dash our hopes and return our attention to the false idols they're selling us.

We'll run into obstacles soon enough. A friend of mine--from the genuinely activist culture fighting to stay in Park Slope--is building bicycle lanes throughout Brooklyn and has fought with enough legislators for zoning changes that he now knows his way around City Hall. A collective in the Midwest outfitting their homes with solar panels is in a battle with the utility company to be permitted to sell the electricity they create back through the power grid. Parents in Pennsylvania got themselves elected to the school board so that they could give themselves permission to teach computer skills to their own public-school teachers, whose union originally resisted teachers' being forced to get online. Once we start reinvesting in our local reality and reaping the returns, the corporatized institutions accustomed to extracting this value at our expense--be they private or public--will do their best to stall our progress.

Finally, we must fight the notion that redirecting our concerns in this fashion represents a retreat into provincial self- interest. The efforts may be local, but the effects are global. Every gallon of gas we don't burn is a few bucks less going to exploit someone in the Middle East. Every student we educate properly has more potential to create value for us all. Every plate of chard we grow is another patch of topsoil saved, another square foot of room on a truck, and another nail in the coffin of Big Agra. Every Little League game we coach is an assault on the obesity epidemic, every illiterate adult we teach to read may become one fewer welfare case to fund, and every hour we spend with friends is that many eyeballs fewer glued to the TV. The little things we do are big, all by themselves.

The best reason to begin reconnecting with real people, places, and value is that it feels good. Happiness doesn't come from the top down, but from the bottom up. The moment we think of ourselves as part of a movement, instead of real people, will be the moment we are much more susceptible to being disheartened or sidetracked by the business page, the terror alert, and the never-ending call to self- interest.

But real people doing real things for one another--without expectations--is the very activity that has been systematically extracted from our society over the past four hundred years through the spectacular triumph of corporatism. And this local, day- to- day, mundane pleasure is what makes us human in the first place.

Life Incorporated

On BBG: the amazing story of how color images of Mars emerged in crayon:

The people at the JPL were so excited to receive the images that they couldn't wait for them to be processed by the lab's imager. As the first picture was beamed down as a stream of 8-bit numbers--each point indicating a brightness point--they thought of a quick way to get an image straight away: Print the numbers indicating brightness in paper strips, put them together, and color them with pastel crayons.

Mars in Crayon

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

COOP's first solo show in three years opens this Friday, May 29, at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, California. The exhibition features an original soundtrack composed by Mark Mothersbaugh! Pegged on the exhibition, Juxtapoz posted the first in a two-part interview with COOP. From Juxtapoz:

What can we expect from your new show?

A progression in what I have been doing since 2004, large-scale Pop Art. I’m a lot more interested in texture and color these days, as a result the paintings are becoming less purely figurative and representational, and moving towards abstraction. I’m also incorporating techniques and materials that I haven’t used previously, like stencils and spray paint, along with hand-painted replication of mechanical printing techniques like halftones.

"Exclusive Interview with COOP, Part 1" (art may be NSFW)

Depression 2.0: Creative Strategies for Tough Economic Times is part of the same series of Process books that includes The Urban Homestead, Preparedness Now! An Emergency Survival Guide for Civilians and Their Families, and Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America.

By most economic indicators, America is inching toward financial collapse. The familiar signposts are all too visible: profligate spending, a debased currency, bank failures, record foreclosures, and the looming threat of a crippling energy crisis. We have grown accustomed to living in a stable, prosperous society, and many of us may not be prepared for a shock of this magnitude.

Depression 2.0 is a practical, empowering, hands-on guide to persevering and even thriving in the event of an economic crisis. Placing particular emphasis on self-sufficiency and personal resilience, this timely, informative book offers a hopeful way forward in a time of great uncertainty. Bankruptcy, barter, and survival investing are just a few of the important topics explored.

Chapters include:

* When Economies Fail: A Look Ahead
* Sounds of Distant Thunder: Preparing for Collapse
* Clearing the Slate: The Bankruptcy Option
* Trapped Inside: Urban Survival
* Return to Simplicity: Rural Retreat Options
* Powering Down: Surviving Gridcrash
* Between the Cracks: When You Have No Shelter
* Beyond Currency: Barter and the Black Market
* Survival Finances: Investments for Uncertain Future

Depression 2.0 is the fourth title in Process’ celebrated Self-Reliance Series, created to help urbanites make smart choices to live sustainably and self-sufficiently in the twenty-first century.

Depression 2.0: Creative Strategies for Tough Economic Times

theodp writes "What do you get when you combine IBM contributors with the Dojo Foundation? A patent for Real-Time Validation of Text Input Fields Using Regular Expression Evaluation During Text Entry, assuming the newly-disclosed Big Blue patent application passes muster with the USPTO. IBM explains that the invention of four IBMers addresses a 'persistent problem that plagues Web form fields' — e.g., 'a social security number can be entered with or without dashes.' A non-legalese description of IBM's patent-pending invention can be found in The Official Dojo Documentation. While IBM has formed a Strategic Partnership With the Dojo Foundation which may protect one from a patent infringement lawsuit over validating phone numbers, concerns have been voiced over an exception clause in IBM's open source pledge."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

English Russia has some photos of a home made railroad system.

Martin sez, "D&D this ain't: Mouse Guard is a different kind of RPG, offering an overt play structure and focusing on intense roleplaying -- plus, you get to play a mouse with a sword! Gnome Stew's 5,000-word review dishes on why this game is such a gem -- and is ideal for teaching kids to roleplay, as well as for new gamers and first-time GMs."

What Mouse Guard is all about: fighting for -- and challenging -- the characters' Beliefs. Beliefs are a stat in Mouse Guard, and with good reason: they're at the heart of the game.

Beliefs do several things. They give you an easy roleplaying hook -- Mouse Guard mice have a code, and upholding that code in each mouse's own personal way is a core element of the game. Your character's Belief also signals to the other players -- and the GM -- what you're interesting in exploring during play. For the GM, challenging Beliefs is a great way to get a player involved (and part of your job). And Beliefs are one way to earn rewards (XP, essentially), in the form of Fate and Persona Points.

Beliefs need to be general without being too general, and strongly expressed -- they're about getting you to make interesting decisions. Here's a sample belief from p. 43 (for Saxon, a character from the comic):

"The best solution is always found at the point of my sword."

That's excellent roleplaying shorthand -- even if that's the only thing you know about Saxon, it tells you a lot. As the player, you can and should fall back on your Belief when deciding what to do in-game; you'll be rewarded for playing it, as well as for playing against it when the circumstances warrant. As the GM, you should challenge the PCs' Beliefs in play.

Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game on Amazon

Mouse Guard RPG Review: Want to Play a Mouse with a Sword?} (Thanks, Martin!)

Here is the inimitable Steve Martin playing Dueling Banjos with Emmet Otter's Jug Band Lubbock Lou and His Jughuggers on the Muppet Show , 1977.

Crohn's disease is a painful immune disorder that causes people's intestines to swell. Some researchers say that the intestines of Crohn sufferers reject the bacteria normally needed for proper functioning. The prescribed treatments have horrible side effects, including cancer and brain infections.

Some people with Crohn's are electing to be infected with parasitic hookworms instead.

In order to live as a parasite inside the human, the parasite must convince the host's immune system to chill and not try to reject it. With hookworms, they secrete a chemical that distracts the immune system, dampening down its response. Hookworms are common in undeveloped countries, places where inflammatory bowel disease is rare.

In the United States, thanks to advances in modern sanitation techniques, hookworms are rare but immune disorders on the rise.

Is there a connection? There could be. "As we have made things more hygienic," Dr. Terdiman explained, "we may in fact be precipitating an outbreak or an increase in the frequency of these immune disorders."

Worm Therapy is a company that uses hookworms and tapeworms to modulate the immune system. A single dose of hookworms costs $2,399 and tapeworms (used for weight loss, asthma and allergy) cost $1,299.

Patients On Hookworm Therapy Swear By Treatment (Via Seth's Blog)

Curiosity dealer Blackman Cruz is selling a pair of stately arm sconces carved from wood. (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Repurpose is a documentary about people who take old electronics and turn them into something cool.

A look into the hardware hacking community in Montreal, including the Foulab collective. Why are more and more hobbyists experimenting with hacks and circuit bends? What relationship does this imply about consumer society and technological advancement? Is this a real-world analog of 'user generated content'?

(Via Laughing Squid)

Chris pushed the 'optical theremin' idea to the next level using 6 photocells, each controlling their own oscillator -

Don't worry, It's meant it go dark in the middle! Here's something fairly obvious to try with a hex schmitt trigger inverter chip. Wire up all six sections as optical theremins with 3 in each channel for some weird stereo atonal action.

[via Matrixsynth]

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stevel writes "The owner of games site GamesByEmail.com created Dice-O-Matic, 'a machine that can belch a continuous river of dice down a spiraling ramp, then elevate, photograph, process and upload almost a million and a half rolls to the server a day. ... The Dice-O-Matic is 7 feet tall, 18 inches wide and 18 inches deep. It has an aluminum frame covered with Plexiglas panels. A 6x4 inch square Plexiglas tube runs vertically up the middle almost the entire height. Inside this tube a bucket elevator carries dice from a hopper at the bottom, past a camera, and tosses them onto a ramp at the top. The ramp spirals down between the tube and the outer walls. The camera and synchronizing disk are near the top, the computer, relay board, elevator motor and power supplies are at the bottom.' While not called out in the article, the pictures clearly show a Dell Mini 9 running the show (and performing the optical recognition of the dice values.) No, it's not running Linux."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Five years ago, if there was a show called Britain's Got Talent (it only showed up two years ago), and it had a sensation like Susan Boyle, it would have had a hard time putting it online. It could have signed up with an expensive hosting service to stream the video, but also would have needed to make a choice about what technology to use (RealMedia? Quicktime?), which would have made it difficult for many people to actually watch it. The bandwidth costs of having people download or stream the video would have been quite high as well. Chances are, they wouldn't have bothered. It just would be way too expensive, with too little a response. Yet, now, thanks to YouTube, they can do it entirely for free. That's amazing. Susan Boyle is an international sensation thanks to YouTube. Without YouTube, she would have been a local UK sensation at best.

But, you have folks at the NY Times who seem to think that it's a bad thing, because the producers of the TV show aren't making any advertising revenue from the clip being on YouTube. No, but they've created a huge singing sensation that is getting attention from millions of people. If they can't figure out how to make money off of that in the long run, they don't deserve to be in business. However, it still amazes me that anyone thinks that because a video is up on YouTube but not making money, it's somehow a bad thing. The producers of the show are getting free technology, a free community of watchers, free bandwidth and free promotions that wouldn't have been possible just a few years ago. And this isn't enough?

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(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

My new SF novel Hylozoic starts shipping today. Hylozoic continues the story of my previous novel Postsingular, although it's self-contained enough that you can read it on its own.

What I was after in these two books was to tackle the notion that our world is going to (or already has) changed in a very extreme way, due to the presence of increasingly powerful computers---this notion is what people often term "the Singularity," a usage introduced by SF writer Vernor Vinge in a classic 1993 talk.

A few SF writers were worried that we wouldn't be able to write about the future after a technological singularity, but Charles Stross's 1995 novel, Accelerando, blew the doors off this fear. Charlie just up and does it, brings on the singularity before our eyes.

Emboldened, I wrote my own version of a world after the singularity, that is, Postsingular. In my take, computation migrates out of man-made devices and into natural processes. Everyone has something like a web browser in their heads, telepathy becomes real, and even teleportation becomes possible. And then a universal memory upgrade takes hold...and everything wakes up.

And that's where Hylozoic starts.

The story is (kind of) represented in a triptych of three paintings that I did while I was working on it. In the left panel, we see our heroine Thuy Nguyen noticing that there some nasty little beings in the subdimensions. In the central panel, a flying alien manta ray is about to rescue Thuy and her boyfriend Jayjay Jiminez---the background patterns indicate that the air itself is alive. In the right panel, Thuy and Jayjay fly up to a higher level of reality in order to fix things up.

[The Hylozoic Triptych. Click on the image to see a larger version.]

If you want to know a little more about the book, you can access my Hylozoic Writing Notes, online as a book-length PDF document containing the working notes for the book. I have numerous images in the document, and internal and external links as well. (If the file fails to open for you, this could mean that someone else is currently opening it, and the server is overloaded---try again another time and mabye save the file to your local drive so you can peruse it at leisure.)

And finally, here's a picture from the Hylozoic Writing Notes, of a plot diagram that I made on the sand at Big Sur. You can see an evil alien Peng bird on the left, the Magic Harp in the middle, and a Hrull flying manta ray on the right. The letters indicate the chapters' point of view, which alternates among Jayjay, Thuy, and Chu.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

My new SF novel Hylozoic starts shipping today. Hylozoic continues the story of my previous novel Postsingular, although it's self-contained enough that you can read it on its own.

What I was after in these two books was to tackle the notion that our world is going to (or already has) changed in a very extreme way, due to the presence of increasingly powerful computers---this notion is what people often term "the Singularity," a usage introduced by SF writer Vernor Vinge in a classic 1993 talk.

A few SF writers were worried that we wouldn't be able to write about the future after a technological singularity, but Charles Stross's 1995 novel, Accelerando, blew the doors off this fear. Charlie just up and does it, brings on the singularity before our eyes.

Emboldened, I wrote my own version of a world after the singularity, that is, Postsingular. In my take, computation migrates out of man-made devices and into natural processes. Everyone has something like a web browser in their heads, telepathy becomes real, and even teleportation becomes possible. And then a universal memory upgrade takes hold...and everything wakes up.

And that's where Hylozoic starts.

The story is (kind of) represented in a triptych of three paintings that I did while I was working on it. In the left panel, we see our heroine Thuy Nguyen noticing that there some nasty little beings in the subdimensions. In the central panel, a flying alien manta ray is about to rescue Thuy and her boyfriend Jayjay Jiminez---the background patterns indicate that the air itself is alive. In the right panel, Thuy and Jayjay fly up to a higher level of reality in order to fix things up.

[The Hylozoic Triptych. Click on the image to see a larger version.]

If you want to know a little more about the book, you can access my Hylozoic Writing Notes, online as a book-length PDF document containing the working notes for the book. I have numerous images in the document, and internal and external links as well. (If the file fails to open for you, this could mean that someone else is currently opening it, and the server is overloaded---try again another time and mabye save the file to your local drive so you can peruse it at leisure.)

And finally, here's a picture from the Hylozoic Writing Notes, of a plot diagram that I made on the sand at Big Sur. You can see an evil alien Peng bird on the left, the Magic Harp in the middle, and a Hrull flying manta ray on the right. The letters indicate the chapters' point of view, which alternates among Jayjay, Thuy, and Chu.

Recently on Offworld we saw Kelly 'kellbot' Farrell's latest game-hack creation: a 'life-size' Katamari Damacy trackball controller (above) that lets you play the game it really probably always should have been played. We also heard that all three of Retro Studios' Metroid Prime games for both GameCube and Wii will be remade with full Wii controls and repackaged on a single Wii disc in August, looked at the 1-bit Mac OS 1 aesthetic of upcoming indie game Beard Snatchers, 1954, the fantastic 50s comic book style aesthetic of upcoming iPhone rhythm game Young Villain Academy, and the first iPhone video of node-hacking shooter Circuit Strike.One. Finally, we traded our latest TV/movie picks for the best of Xbox 360-streaming Netflix, found a new blog devoted to video game typography, read a book with 22 essays on Bioshock, Ico, Mario, Portal, Zelda and more, and had a slew of wonderful 'one shot's: Subversion's neo-future laserlight pyramids, Lauren Gregg's arcade-addicted nerdimal, the soulless gaze of the NES R.O.B. Army, and Ashley Wood's Metal Gear Solid comic art.

An anonymous reader writes "There is a storm brewing in Canada as the prestigious Conference Board of Canada has been caught plagiarizing US copyright lobby group documents in a report on copyright reform. The report was funded by the Canadian copyright lobby as well as by the Ontario government. The Conference Board has acknowledged some errors, but stands by the report, while the Ontario government admits spending thousands of dollars and it now wants some answers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a recap of recent episodes of our daily original video program, Boing Boing Video.

* (Embedded Above) - Diving into Space: Miles O'Brien in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab (Download / YouTube). Our esteemed guest space correspondent brings us this special report on the same day NASA astronauts complete their final space walk -- and zero-g repair job -- on the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission #4.

* Miles O'Brien Reports: An Astronaut Climbs Everest (Download / YouTube). Guest contributor Miles O'Brien, the veteran space and science reporter formerly with CNN, speaks with astronaut Scott Parazynski as he attempts to summit Mt. Everest.

* BB Video: This Week in Space, with Miles O'Brien (Download / YouTube) A recap of this week in space news. The former CNN anchor and reporter is exploring what independent online journalism is all about. In this episode, we learn what life is like for a 26-year broadcast veteran who has become a freewheeling freelancer. The short answer? Pretty good.

* Guatemala Protests: Eyewitness Cellphone Video from Twitterers (Download / YouTube). In recent weeks, Guatemalan citizens have been gathering to protest the assassination of an attorney who blamed president Álvaro Colom for his imminent murder in a posthumously-released YouTube Video. Boing Boing Video viewer (and BB blog reader) Maria Figueroa (@thevenemousone on Twitter) participated in the demonstrations with friends, and she sent us this eyewitness report captured on her cellphone.

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Where to Find Boing Boing Video: RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic).

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Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing Video is brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

Matt Mechtley is gearing up for Maker Faire, where he'll be showing his updated Nintendo Power Glove (with Arduino and Bluetooth, or course). He writes:

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on some improvements and extensions to my Power Glove 20th Anniversary Edition. On the tech side of things, I replaced the ugly 9V battery I was using with a low-profile, rechargeable Lithium-Polymer battery. I’ve updated the steps in the Instructable with new pictures and instructions.

As a bonus for Maker Faire attendees, I’ve finished adding Power Glove support to our most popular Blurst game, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari! I recorded a demo video to show it off.

More:

Updated Power Glove with Bluetooth and Arduino

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[warning: volume spike around 1m35s]

After running into some trouble assembling a Gorf sequencer kit, Larsby decided to design his own -

I wanted a bigger display, so that I could fiddle around with different setups and functions. I wanted rotary encoders (endless) so that I would need fewer then 1 per step. I wanted MIDI-out, to you know, control stuff.
Luckily for me I have a interaction-designer-musician friend that I can discuss with. So we iterated the idea back and forth. He's suggestions where all great, but I didn't take them all. Had this been a mass-market product I where going to try to sell I'd probably taken them all, right now I only took the ones that I wanted!

Relevant code plus links to the resources he used for the project can be found on his site.

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Elan sez, "I'm an Eisner Nominee for Best Digital Comic, and I just wanted to share with you my newest project: 'God' (the abridged title): Some day the intellectual property of God will be owned by a media, entertainment, and theme park corporation that rhymes with 'Malt Crispy'. The Apocalypse is looming and its up to Reverend Joeb Kim, an ordained minister in the Sacred Order of Accounting, to stop it."

God (Thanks, Elan)

Update: Ethan sez, "I wanted to point out to you that his first words ever, Let There Be Light, are also a registered trademark. This one belonging to SAP."

Susan Hughes and Willow Dawson's graphic novel No Girls Allowed: Tales of Daring Women Dressed as Men for Love, Freedom and Adventure tells the story of six real-life historical woman heroes who defied the limits society put on them because of their gender, dressing as men and kicking ass (there are seven stories in total, but one of them, Mu-Lan, is likely mythological).

It's a great and inspiring read intended for young adults, and it runs from 1470BCE (the Egyptian Pharoah Hatshepsut) to the mid-1800s, and the stories will appeal to anyone who revels in tales of people who overcome the unfair limits others place on them. No Girls Allowed ties the quest for gender equality in with stories of racial and economic injustice, as with the amazing story of James Barry, a woman who lived her whole life as a man, becoming a young army surgeon who went on to lead controversial reform movements in South Africa and Canada, standing up for what was right in the face of punishment and even though she had so much to lose.

This is a great companion volume for Dignifying Science, a great graphic novel collecting the true-life stories of pioneering woman scientists. I'm putting it away to read to my daughter in a couple of years.

No Girls Allowed: Tales of Daring Women Dressed as Men for Love, Freedom and Adventure

Update: Tate sez, "Just saw you posted No Girls Allowed! Great book, thought you might be interested in the YouTube video we did on it--posted just last week as part of Whazamo--part of the same thing as the TCAF 2009 video."

Miles "Intergalactic Space Badass" O'Brien, whose work we've been featuring as a guest contributor on Boing Boing Video, has a must-read piece at True Slant about the recent end of NASA's mission to repair/upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Hubble Repair Missions. After all, I cut my teeth on the space beat covering the legendary STS-61 mission in December 1993 - the first, the most dramatic - and certainly the most important - of the five astronaut telescope calls now inscribed in the space history books.

So I must confess I am a bit wistful - even a little misty - now that it is all over. We will no longer have the good fortune to witness the live drama of human beings pushing the envelope of impossibility to improve a machine that pushes the boundaries of our understanding of the universe.

Over the years, sixteen Mr. Starwrenches finessed, improvised - and sometimes used brute force - to fix what ailed Hubble - or make it better. It was Reality TV for the Space Cadet Nation.

The Hubble Constant: High Interest (True Slant)

Image: "The Ten Billion Dollar Man - Last Shuttle-eye view of Hubble."

We've entered the last week of our "Book-a-Day in May" contest to give away five free Maker's Notebooks and an Arduino MEGA to people who sign up on @make to follow us. This past week's Notebook winners were:

@jakekooser @davidparmet @MpressMarcy @paperbullet @lilredv1

Winner of the Arduino MEGA is:

@informative

Congrats to the winners. Direct message us your mailing address (if you haven't already) to claim your booty.

Follow us at @make for your chance to win stuff.

Tweets at the Faire
Remember, if you want to track what's going on at Maker Faire, sign up for the @makerfaire Twitter channel. If you're going to the Faire and want to stay abreast of traffic and parking conditions to and from the fairgrounds, sign up for @FaireTraffic before you head out. And please feed us intel as you make your way to and from the Faire -- if you see traffic snags, accidents, experience parking problems, etc.

The "official" hash tag for the Faire is #mf09. If you tweet about the Faire, please add this tag to your post so that others can scoop up your musings.

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Hugh Pickens writes "Digital storage devices have become ubiquitous in our lives but the move to digital storage has raised concerns about the lifetime of the storage media. Now Alex Zettl and his group at the University of California, Berkeley report that they have developed an experimental memory device consisting of a crystalline iron nanoparticle enclosed in a multiwalled carbon nanotube that could have a storage capacity as high as 1 terabyte per square inch and temperature-stability in excess of one billion years. The nanoparticle can be moved through the nanotube by applying a low voltage, writing the device to a binary state represented by the position of the nanoparticle. The state of the device can then be subsequently read by a simple resistance measurement while reversing the nanoparticle's motion allows a memory 'bit' to be rewritten. This creates a programmable memory system that, like a silicon chip, can record digital information and play it back using conventional computer hardware storing data at a high density with a very long lifetime. Details of the process are available at the American Chemical Society for $30."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Once again, we're seeing a report or person pushing for stronger IP laws that seems to feel that it's fine if they cut some corners. Michael Geist has the story of a report from The Conference Board of Canada, which describes itself as "the foremost, independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada. Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests." Except... when the money's good. It's latest report, backed by a bunch of copyright lobbyists and the gov't of Ontatio (taxpayer money!) isn't just deceptive but appears to plagiarize widely from other already debunked reports, without a hint of skepticism or independent thought. Instead, it appears to have simply cut & pasted certain sections. While plagiarism and copyright are two separate issues, they are related in some ways -- and it's rather stunning that a report complaining about mass piracy in Canada would plagiarize large sections. But, even worse, of course, is the claim that this is from an independent group with no lobbying interests, when the plagiarized sections were written by lobbyists. Whatever credibility The Conference Board of Canada had (and apparently it's a well-respected organization), it just lost a bunch of it. Meanwhile, The Conference Board insists that it's standing by the report and only made a minor mistake in how it cited the info used in its report. Of course, that's not quite true. It didn't clearly quote the sections it copied, nor did it do any work to confirm whether that information was correct or simply repeated what the lobbyists who hired the company had already written elsewhere.

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Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post generates sound and an array of scrolling text from net-based conversation -

Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.
Listening Post cycles through a series of six movements, each a different arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements, each with it's own data processing logic.
Dissociating the communication from its conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is a visual and sonic response to the content, magnitude, and immediacy of virtual communication.

More on the projects page. [via Synthtopia]

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Jorge Colombo created the cover artwork for the June 1st issue of The New Yorker using an app called Brushes on his iPhone. The image was produced in about an hour outside Madame Tussuad's Wax Museum in Times Square.

"I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself," says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. "Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner's hat, I could not draw in the dark." (When the sun is up, it's a bit harder, "because of the glare on the phone," he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he's checking his e-mail.

The video below, captured using the Brushes Viewer app, shows the technique Colombo used to produce the June 1st cover. He's also selling limited edition prints of his iPhone-produced work online.

Finger Painting [via iPhoneSavior]

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An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports that President Obama is set to appoint a 'Cybersecurity czar with a broad mandate': 'The adviser will have the most comprehensive mandate granted to such an official to date and will probably be a member of the National Security Council but will report to the national security adviser as well as the senior White House economic adviser, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations are not final. The announcement will coincide with the long-anticipated release of a 40-page report that evaluates the government's cybersecurity initiatives and policies. The report is intended to outline a "strategic vision" and the range of issues the new adviser must handle, but it will not delve into details, administration officials told reporters last month.' Cynics are expecting the appointee to be a lawyer for the RIAA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

testadicazzo writes "Micheal Lynton, the guy who said 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.' has posted an editorial at the Huffington Post titled Guardrails for the Internet, in which he defends his comment, and suggests that just as the interstate system needs guardrails, so too does the information superhighway. The following is pretty indicative of the article: 'Internet users have become used to getting things when they want it and how they want it, and those of us in the entertainment business want to meet that kind of demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want. Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UVA Microbiologist Martin A. Schwartz has a wonderful article in the Journal of Cell Science about the importance of what he calls "productive stupidity:"

I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid - that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

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A few folks have sent in various version of this story about how the judge assigned to review whether or not the original judge in The Pirate Bay trial was biased, by belonging to two separate groups in favor of stronger copyright laws, has herself been removed from the case because she belonged to the same two groups. This raises all sorts of questions -- including how the hell she was put in charge of the review in the first place. Did no one think to ask if she was in the same groups? Or did she not volunteer the info when handed the case? In the meantime, how difficult is it to find an unbiased judge in Sweden?

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vik writes "The latest 3-year, pan-government deal that Microsoft has been establishing with the New Zealand government since 2000 has collapsed, opening the doors to the wider use of open source software in government. The NZ State Services Commission (already a prize-winning user of open source) says in a statement that it '...became apparent during discussions that a formal agreement with Microsoft is no longer appropriate.' Having lost their discount, individual government departments will now have to put their IT requirements out to tender individually."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm a huge fan of business cards that DO stuff, that you can punch out, fold into usable tools or make into monitor pets, desktop siege weapons, cards that you can use in a circuit, cards that contain data. So, I'm over the moon about ladyada's new card, a laser-cut, punch-out "spirograph" art-machine. Maybe if I'm real nice to her, she'll give me one at Maker Faire. I think this post is kinda nice, don't you? Did I mention how cool I think they are? Damn, that's a fine card.

Adafruit business cards - Laser cut SPIROGRAPH cards!

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You may recall that L'Oreal has been on an incredibly misguided legal campaign against eBay, blaming the company for the fact that some of its users are selling fake L'Oreal products on the site. Rather than go after the actual counterfeiters, L'Oreal insists that eBay's at fault. After losing its lawsuit in Belgium last summer, the company filed nearly identical lawsuits in the UK, France, Germany and Spain, hoping that somewhere one of those courts would side with it. So far, it's not looking good. Two weeks back, even France sided with eBay, even though it had ruled otherwise in similar cases. And now comes the news that late last week, the UK sided with eBay as well. At some point, will L'Oreal finally realize that maybe it's barking up the wrong tree?

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caffiend666 writes "On Wednesday the USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg is to be sunk in 140 feet of water off of Key West to become the world's second largest artificial reef. (The largest was created by sinking the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany off of Pensacola, Florida, in 2006.) The Vandenberg was built in 1943 (chronology) and commissioned the USS Gen. Harry Taylor. In 1963 the Air Force took it over and recommissioned it, naming it after the Air Force general. For decades the ship served as a missile tracker and space relay. It was used in NASA's Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects and the Shuttle program. The Vandenberg was the set for some of the scenes in the 90s movie Virus as the Russian MIR relay station. Soon it will become one of the world's most awesome diving spots."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panasonic has released a firmware update for its Lumix G Vario 14-45mm F3.5-5.6 lens. Version 1.1 improves auto-focusing ability of the lens in Continuous AF mode. It also improves auto-focus and image stabilization performance in movie mode on the GH1 and makes the aperture quieter.

There were a bunch of stories this weekend talking about how Facebook appeared to be blocked in Iran, with many assuming that it was due to upcoming elections, where some reformist candidates have been using the social networking site to build support. Current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is apparently claiming that he has nothing to do with it, and that he "believe[s] in maximum freedom of expression," and that he'll "look into" the block. Meanwhile, others are claiming the ban is for moral, rather than political reasons. The reality is probably a bit of both -- with the government being able to use the cover of "morality" to block an effective organizing technique for an opposition candidate. Either way, this action only seems to be calling more attention to the opposition candidate, so if the goal was to stifle his campaign, it might just have backfired.

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Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that for the past two years, the Defense Department has been collaborating with critical industries to stem the loss of important defense industry data — by some estimates at least $100 billion worth over that time. The Pentagon is considering ways to share its threat data with other industries including telecommunications and Internet service providers, led by the DoD's Cyber Crime Center, the clearinghouse for threat data from the NSA, military agencies, the DHS, and industry. The Pentagon's trial program with industry illuminates the promise and the pitfalls of such partnerships: a reluctance of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to release threat data they consider classified, and the companies' fear of losing control over personal or proprietary information. 'This isn't just about national security,' says Barbara Fast, vice president of Boeing Cyber Solutions. 'It's about the economic well-being of the United States.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Murilee sez, "It was hot as hell in the Nevada desert for the 24 Hours Of LeMons Goin' For Broken race (in which all cars must be built for $500 or less and twisted themes are strongly encouraged), but that didn't stop these crazy bastards on the ZZ Uber Das team (which ran a pair of matching VW GTIs, one black and one white) from rockin' these great Spy Versus Spy costumes all weekend. Everywhere you turned, one of these guys would be popping his snout around the corner and brandishing a highway-flare 'dynamite bomb' at you. There was also a Ford Capri-based team called 'Dungeons And Dragsters,' which featured fuzzy 20-sided dice hanging from the rearview."

Cheaters Busted, Awesome Themes Admired: Tomorrow, We Race! (Thanks, Murilee!)

Brett from the independent sf publisher ChiZine sez,

While many other publishers, big and small, have been firing people and putting acquisition freezes on their lists, we at ChiZine Publications have been trying to push our business to the wall and make a real go of it. To that end, we're launching four books at WorldCon in August:

Daniel Rabuzzi's 'The Choir Boats'
Claude Lalumiere's 'Objects of Worship' (with a foreword by James Morrow)
David Nickle's 'Monstrous Affections' (with a foreword by Michael Rowe)
Robert J. Wiersema's 'The World More Full of Weeping'

However, until then--and to partly finance this big-ass launch--I need to try to sell as many pre-order copies of our third title, 'The Tel Aviv Dossier' by Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yaniv, through the CZP website as I can, so I was hoping you could help spread the word. We're offering 15% off until June 30th.

A potent mixture of biblical allusions, Lovecraftian echoes, and contemporary culture, The Tel Aviv Dossier is part supernatural thriller, part meditation on the nature of belief--an original and involving novel painted on a vast canvas in which, beneath the despair, humour is never absent. Experience the last days of Tel Aviv...

The Tel Aviv Dossier TPB pre-order info! (Thanks, Brett!)

Philip writes "Three years ago I was appointed as a network manager to a barely functioning MS-based network. Since then I've managed to get it up and running — even thriving — but have been guilty of being too busy with the doing of it to document the changes and systems that were put in place. Now as I look back, I'm worried that I am the only one who will ever know how this network works. If I get hit by a bus or throw in the towel for any reason, I'd be leaving behind a network that requires some significant expertise to run. Ultimately, this won't be a good reference for me if they are trying to work out technical details for years to come. It looks like I'm going to have to document the network with all sorts of details that outside consultants could understand too (no, I don't want to be the outside consultant), especially since it's likely that my replacement will have less technical expertise (read 'cheaper'). Are there any good templates out there for documenting networks? Is anyone who has done it before willing to share some experiences? What did you wish your predecessor had written down about a network that you inherited?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elise Matthesen, conference chair for the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, writes,

From 1986 to 1995, Steven Brust and his friends put on a deep, intelligent, and intimate convention on the literature of the fantastic. Its return in 2008 was so much fun that we couldn't resist bringing it back again in 2009

Fourth Street is a small convention for people who are serious about good fantasy and good books- serious about reading them, serious about writing them, serious about appreciating them in all their various forms. It's also for people who are serious about having a good time. It's a weekend of high-quality, high-intensity, mind-stretching fun, focused on books- there's a single track of programming that is at the heart of it all. When everyone sees the same panels, it leads to fascinating conversations in the consuite, hotel bar, and corridors.

Come and hang out with Catherynne Valente, Jo Walton, Pamela Dean, Steven Brust, Sharyn November, Beth Meacham, Jon Singer, and many other interesting folks. If you show up on Thursday evening, bring a copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, because we'll be having playreading that night at the hotel, in between folding programs and prepping for the convention.

On-line registration will be open through tomorrow, Tuesday May 26.

Come and be part of the conversation. It will be better if you're there -- you know it will.

Fourth Street Fantasy Convention (Thanks, Elise!)

On Wired Science, DeAnne Musolf writes about the neurological basis for staring at facial deformities or irregularities:

When someone unfamiliar approaches you in the aisle of a grocery store, a glance at his face and its expression helps your brain to sort that person into one of two broad categories: safe or potentially unsafe. The amygdala (the brain area associated with judgment) depends upon the emotion conveyed by the person's facial features to make that crucial call. Is he happy? Angry? Irritated?

To decide, your eyes sweep over the person's face, retrieving only parts, mainly just his nose and eyes. Your brain will then try to assemble those pieces into a configuration that you know something about.

When the pieces you supply match nothing in the gallery of known facial expressions, when you encounter a person whose nose, mouth or eyes are distorted in a way you have never encountered before, you instinctively lock on. Your gaze remains riveted, and your brain stays tuned for further information.

Why We Stare, Even When We Don't Want To

The Conference Board of Canada, who were caught plagiarising in a report on the Digital Economy, produced the at Ontario tax-payers' expense, have responded. They claim it's not plagiarism or intellectual dishonesty that led them to copy-and-paste from an American entertainment lobby group's materials, it's just that the corporate mouthpieces of the record, film and software industries happened to have published the best, most balanced account of copyright in the digital age. As Michael Geist points out, their definition of plagiarism wouldn't pass muster at any university, and the report they copied is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Leaving aside the fact that all the most relevant arguments just happen to come from a U.S. lobby group with direct links to the funders of the Digital Economy report, the Conference Board of Canada has failed to understand the rules associated with plagiarism as a sprinkling of citations is simply not good enough. As the University of Ottawa's plagiarism guidelines (which are mirrored in academic institutions around the world) note "if you use someone else's words, data, etc., use quotation marks and give a complete reference." The Digital Economy report repeatedly used the same or very similar wording to the IIPA document and does not use quotations. Moreover, my posting cited to factual errors contained within the report and the press release. For example, the Conference Board claimed that the OECD concluded that Canada is the world's file sharing capital on a per capita basis. This is simply false as anyone who reads the OECD report will find that it did not reach that conclusion. Nevertheless, the Conference Board has chosen not to respond to this issue.

Admitting an error is never easy, but I would submit that the Conference Board of Canada has compounded its mistake by standing by its report. In doing so, it has done little more than further undermine its credibility. Particularly given that public dollars helped fund this report, Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson should provide his views on whether his government regards this as appropriate use of taxpayer money.

Conference Board of Canada Responds, Stands By Its Report

This astounding mechanical Lego pirate theater, controlled by Mindstorm/Nextstorm robot Lego, marries the Victorian dramatic clockwork automaton with 21st century cheap computation and precision brick-making. And it's got pirates! Seriously, this one had me scraping my jaw off the keyboard as wave after wave of awesomeness emanated from my browser.

The Pirates and the NXTfied Theater (via Geekdad)

* Oh, I do love calling them "Legos." Legos, Legos, Legos!

Garth Johnson recently got to attend the Kinetic Grand Championship, a human-powered art vehicle race across road, land, and water between Arcata and Ferndale, California. He took a lot of nice video and included some anecdotes of the more eccentric aspects of the competition over at Extreme Craft.

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destinyland writes "Peter Singer, author of the new book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, says 'You can build your own version of the Raven drone, which is a widely used military drone, for about $1,000.' Singer argues that 'just like software, warfare is going open source.' He warns that, ultimately, robot warfare may even expand beyond the military using more DIY and off-the-shelf systems. In addition to 43 countries now working on military robots, there are 'non-state actors ranging from Hezbollah to this militia group in Arizona to a bunch of college kids at Swarthmore... One person's hobby — such as the hobbyist who flew a homemade drone from North America to Great Britain — can be another person's terrorist strike option.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iPhone snapshot of a painting that hangs in a traumatologist's waiting room in Guatemala. Story + sizes here. Hi to the home blog from the road (and I am fine, I'm not the patient, thanks).

Update: At left, BB commenter Florsie sends along this equally excellent "Baby Doctor Jesus" image in the same popular theme, also of Latin American provenance. Haz click aquí!

[Photo from MIT Sea Perch on Flickr]

Want to build a quick and functional underwater vehicle, but don't want to spend a pile of money? The Sea Perch may be just the project for you and your students. Based on Build Your own Underwater Robot, you can get the up to date text online. There is a wealth of info on their site to use for curriculum resources.

The Sea Perch is a simple remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) made from PVC pipe and other inexpensive, easily available materials. The Sea Perch Program trains educators around the world to build Sea Perch and use them as an interactive platform to ignite student's enthusiasm for science, technology, and engineering.

[Photo from MIT Sea Perch on Flickr]

Two of my students are using the Sea Perch documentation to make their own ROV. We are finding that the information in the manual is very easy to follow, concisely written and a great guide to getting into the water quickly. If you are looking for the fastest way to get kids excited about building underwater vehicles, you should check out the Sea Perch project. The build guide gives a basic instruction, and from there, you can modify and hack it to your own needs.

Check out the list to see who else is coming to Maker Faire this year!

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simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, there's a massive new interview with Epic (Mega)Games founder Tim Sweeney, the guy who's still a key technical figure at the Unreal Engine/Gears Of War developer. He discusses his early programming days, the story behind classic shareware game/tool ZZT, the origins of Epic, the '90s shareware business, and even a bit about the future as well. Particularly neat is his revelation that you can still order ZZT via mail, with orders fulfilled by his dad: 'My father still lives at the address where Potomac Computer Systems started up, so he still gets an order every few weeks... he's retired now, so he doesn't have much to do. Every week, he'll just take a stack of a few orders, put disks in them, and mail them out.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

I can't put my finger on a really good link to the word "subdimension" in Golden Age SF and comics, maybe some readers can come up with it. It's basically a place-holder word, a liguistic MacGuffin, used to fill in for any type of weird science that happens to be needed. But I've always wanted to visit the subdimensions.

Experientially, I think of going into the subdimensions as being something like SCUBA diving...here's a photo of a guide, my big brother Embry and me diving near Yap Island in Micronesia.

In recent years I decided to retrofit the word "subdimensional" and use it to apply to a hypothetical cosmos that lies "inside the Planck length," in a sense that I'll explain at the end of this post. I introduced this SFictional usage three yeares ago in a story with Paul DiFilippo, "Elves of the Subdimensions," which is still online in issue #1 of my webzine Flurb.

And I used it again in my novel Postsingular. You can either buy the paperback or download a free Creative Commons PDF release from my site for Postsingular. Here's a drawing from my online working notes for the novel (these notes are also online my Postsingular site).

The beings who live in the subdimensions are called "subbies," and generally speaking, you're better off not having any dealings with them!

It's always nice have some kind of scientific justification for what I write about, and, by way of justifying the reality of the subdimensions, I found the following passage in Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds, where he discusses a 1984 theory of “string duality” ascribed to Keiji Kikkawa and Masami Yamasaki. String duality allows for interesting physics below the Planck length (which is roughly a quadrillionth of the diameter of a proton). The Planck length becomes something like an interface between two worlds. As Kaku puts it:

Let's say we take a string theory and wrap up one dimension into a circle of radius R. Then we take another string and wrap up one dimension into a circle of radius 1/R. By comparing these two quite different theories, we find that they are exactly the same. Now let R become extremely small, much smaller than the Planck length. This means that the physics within the Planck length is identical to the physics outside the Planck length. At the Planck length, spacetime may become lumpy and foamy, but the physics inside the Planck length and the physics at very large distances can be smooth and are in fact identical.