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The true value of an invention is its usefulness to the public. Patents themselves have become products. They're instruments of investment traded on a separate market, often by speculators motivated by the highest financial return on their investment....It's an interesting comparison and one that does seem apt the more you think about it. In separating out the "security" from the underlying asset, we tend to distort things. It was that distortion that resulted in the financial crisis, as it enabled those who wanted to sell risky things to obscure the actual risks and pretend that their securities were safer than they were. With patents, the system has been distorted to present the patent itself as being valuable, rather than the ability to execute and implement an idea in a manner that the market appreciates. It's definitely an area that could stand further thought and scrutiny.
The patent product brings financial derivatives to mind. Derivatives have a complex relationship with an underlying asset. While there's nothing wrong with them in principle, their unfettered use has damaged the financial services industry and possibly the entire economy.
Do these patent instruments put us on a similar road? I fear our patent system increasingly serves those who invest in the patent products... It may be time to use Jefferson's principle as a test and ask if we meet it.
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State Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein says the bill she sponsored was intended to protect vulnerable populations from sexual predators, but some disability advocates and law buffs have criticized the amendments as restricting the sexual freedom of seniors and people with disabilities.It's idiotic for two reasons -- first, for making it a crime to take a nude photo of a consenting adult (I'm talking about people over the age of 60 who are mentally competent), and second, taking away the ability of people over the age of 60 to do whatever the heck they want to do without interference from the government. Let's hope this bill dies a slow quick, agonizing death.If Mass. HB 1668 is passed, a person violating the new provisions of the law would receive a mandatory minimum sentence of at least ten years in prison or a fine of at least $10,000. This would include spouses photographing one another with "lascivious intent."
* Revisiting TechShop, as Portland Site Launches (Download MP4). TechShop is an open-access public workshop that's kind of like a health club with heavy machinery and sparks instead of treadmills. They've just opened a new branch in Oregon, so we're revisiting a classic Boing Boing episode we shot on a visit to their flagship location in Silicon Valley.
Top Chair? Joel Reviews The Herman Miller Embody and Steelcase Leap (Download MP4). Our Joel from Boing Boing Gadgets test-drive -- literally! -- two office chairs.
Tricaster, and the Future of Live Video Online (Download MP4). We review the Tricaster, a compact device that facilitates high-quality live internet video broadcast production for a lot less dough than the equivalent amount of traditional TV production gear. A number of web video productions are now using the Tricaster, including Leo Laporte's TWIT.tv, and Mahalo's newly launched Kevin Pollak chat show.
"Manifestations," An Animated Love Story, by Giles Timms (Download MP4). An animated short in which a cartoon critter named Mr. Chip who seeks anime love in a psychedelic, ever-morphing virtual world. The music is by Welsh composer Ceri Frost.
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).
I'm not entirely sure what this terrific Dan Clowes cover for the May 11, 2009 issue of The New Yorker is supposed to be about, but I would like to think it's making the point that makers are going to leapfrog traditional industries that can't seem to get out of a rut that has helped cause the recession. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!
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Currently in beta, the OP-1 from Teenage Engineering, is an ultra-portable synthesizer and USB controller with an acute attention to detail. In addition to the gorgeous design, it packs a motion sensor and FM radio for increased mixability. Check out the interface, which has been described to "inspire not to control."
OP-1 [via Digital Tools]
Max Flebus, a MAKE subscriber from Milan, sent us a link to this wonderful video of musician Paolo Angeli (who's worked with Fred Frith) playing a guitar that has motors inside the sound hole whacking away on the strings and robot-finger-like strikers, powered by foot pedals, that Paolo controls while playing the guitar with a bow, creating a sort of cobot guitar.
Paolo Angeli (site is in Italian)
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(Author Douglas Rushkoff is a Boing Boing guestblogger.)
I'm going to be posting most or perhaps all of my upcoming book, Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back, over the next two weeks. I'll put the beginning of each excerpt here, along with a link to where you can read or download the rest. So, let's start at the beginning.
Life Inc (Amazon)
Your Money or Your Life: A Lesson on the Front Stoop
I got mugged on Christmas Eve.
I was in front of my Brooklyn apartment house taking out the trash
when a man pulled a gun and told me to empty my pockets. I gave him
my money, wallet, and cell phone. But then--remembering something I'd seen in a movie about a hostage negotiator--I begged him to
let me keep my medical insurance card. If I could humanize myself in
his perception, I ?gured, he'd be less likely to kill me.
He accepted my argument about how hard it would be for me to get
"care" without it, and handed me back the card. Now it was us two
against the establishment, and we made something of a deal: in exchange for his mercy, I wasn't to report him--even though I had
plainly seen his face. I agreed, and he ran off down the street. I foolishly but steadfastly stood by my side of the bargain, however coerced
it may have been, for a few hours. As if I could have actually entered
into a binding contract at gunpoint.
In the meantime, I posted a note about my strange and frightening
experience to the Park Slope Parents list--a rather crunchy Internet
community of moms, food co-op members, and other leftie types ded-
icated to the health and well- being of their families and their decidedly progressive, gentrifying neighborhood. It seemed the responsible
thing to do, and I suppose I also expected some expression of sympathy and support.
Amazingly, the very ?rst two emails I received were from people
angry that I had posted the name of the street on which the crime had
occurred. Didn't I realize that this publicity could adversely affect all
of our property values? The "sellers' market" was already dif?cult
enough! With a famous actor reportedly leaving the area for Manhattan, does Brooklyn's real estate market need more bad press? And this
was beforethe real estate crash.
I was stunned. Had it really come to this? Did people care more
about the market value of their neighborhood than what was actually
taking place within it? Besides, it didn't even make good business
sense to bury the issue. In the long run, an open and honest conversation about crime and how to prevent it should make the neighborhood
safer. Property values would go up in the end, not down. So these
homeowners were more concerned about the immediate liquidity of
their town houses than their long-term asset value -- not to mention
the actual experience of living in them. And these were among the
wealthiest people in New York, who shouldn't have to be worrying
about such things. What had happened to make them behave this way?
(...post continues after the jump) It stopped me cold, and forced me to reassess my own long-held desire to elevate myself from renter to owner. I stopped to think-- which, in the midst of an irrational real-estate craze, may not have been the safest thing to do. Why, I wondered aloud on my blog, was I struggling to make $4,500-per-month rent on a two- bedroom, fourth- ?oor walk-up in this supposedly "hip" section of Brooklyn, when I could just as easily get mugged somewhere else for a lot less per month? Was my willingness to participate in this runaway market part of the problem?
The detectives who took my report drove the point home. One of them drew a circle on a map of Brooklyn. "Inside this circle is where the rich white people from Manhattan are moving. That's the target area. Hunting ground. Think about it from your mugger's point of view: quiet, tree-lined streets of row houses, each worth a million or two, and inhabited by the rich people who displaced your family. Now, you live in or around the projects just outside the circle. Where would you go to mug someone?"
Back on the World Wide Web, a friend of mine--another Park Slope writer--made an open appeal for my family to stay in Brooklyn. He saw "the Slope" as a mixed-use neighborhood now reaching the "peak of livability" that the legendary urban anthropologist Jane Jacobs idealized. He explained how all great neighborhoods go through the same basic process: Some artists move into the only area they can afford--a poor area with nothing to speak of. Eventually, there are enough of them to open a gallery. People start coming to the gallery in the evenings, creating demand for a coffeehouse nearby, and so on. Slowly but surely, an artsy store or two and a clique of hipsters "pioneer" the neighborhood until there's signi?cant sidewalk activity late into the night, making it safer for successive waves of incoming businesses and residents.
Of course, after the city's newspaper "discovers" the new trendy neighborhood, the artists are joined and eventually replaced by increasingly wealthy but decidedly less hip young professionals, lawyers, and businesspeople--but hopefully not so many that the district completely loses its "?avor." Investment increases, the district grows bigger, and everyone is happier and wealthier.
Still, what happens to the people who lived there from the beginning--the ones whom the police detective was talking about? The "natives"? This process of gentri?cation does not occur ex nihilo.
No, when property values go up, so do the rents, displacing anyone whose monthly living charges aren't regulated by the government. The residents of the neighborhood do not actually participate in the renaissance, because they are not owners. They move to outlying areas. Sure, their kids still go to John Jay High School in the middle of Park Slope. But none of Park Slope's own wealthy residents send their kids there.
Our online conversation was picked up by New York magazine in a column entitled "Are the Writers Leaving Brooklyn?" The article fo- cused entirely on the way a crime against an author could threaten the Brooklyn real- estate bubble. National Public Radio called to interview me about the story--not the mugging itself, but whether I would leave Brooklyn over it, and if doing so publicly might not be irresponsibly hurting other people's property values. A week or two of blog insanity later, a second New York piece asked why we should even care about whether the writers are leaving Brooklyn--seemingly oblivious of the fact that this was the very same column space that told us to care in the ?rst place.
It was an interesting ?fteen minutes. What was going on had less to do with crime or authors, though, than it did with a market in its ?nal, most vaporous phase. I simply couldn't afford to buy in--and getting mugged freed me from the hype treadmill for long enough to accept it.
Or, more accurately, it's not that I couldn't afford it so much as that I wouldn't afford it. There were mortgage brokers willing to lend me the other 90 percent of the money I'd need to purchase a home on the block where I was renting. "We can get you in," they'd say. And at that moment in real estate history, putting even 10 percent down would have made me a very quali?ed buyer. "What about when the mortgage readjusts?" I remember asking. "Then you re?nance at a better rate," they assured me. Of course, that would be happening just about the same time Park Slope's arti?cially low property- tax rate (an exemption secured by real- estate developers) would be raised to the levels of the poorer areas of the borough. "Don't worry. Everyone with your ?nancials is doing it," one broker explained with a wink. "And the banks aren't going to just let everyone lose their homes, now, are they?"
As long as people refused to look at the real social and ?nancial costs, the market could keep going up--buoyed in part by the bonuses paid to investment bankers whose job it was to promote all this asset in?ation in the ?rst place. Heck, we were restoring a historic borough to its former glory. All we had to do was avoid the uncomfortable truth that we were busy converting what were being used as multifamily dwellings by poor black and Hispanic people back into stately town houses for use by rich white ones. And we had to overlook that this frenzy of real- estate activity was operating on borrowed time and, more signi?cantly, borrowed money.
In such a climate, calling attention to any of this was the real crime, and the reason that the ?rst reaction of those participating in a speculative bubble was to silence the messenger. It's just business. The reality was that we were pushing an increasingly hostile population from their homes, colonizing their neighborhoods, and then justifying it all with metrics such as increased business activity, reduced (reported) crime rates, and--most important--higher real- estate prices. How can one argue against making a neighborhood, well, better?
As my writer friend eloquently explained on his blog, the neighborhood was now, by most measures, safer. It was once again possible to sit on one's stoop with the kids and eat frozen Italian ices on a balmy summer night. One could walk through Prospect Park on any Sunday afternoon and see a black family barbecuing here, a Puerto Rican group there, and an Irish group over there. Compared with most parts of the world, that's pretty civil, no?
Romantic as it sounds, that's not integration at all, but co-location. Epcot- style détente. The Brooklyn being described here has almost nothing to do with the one our grandparents might have inhabited. It is rather an expensive and painstakingly re-created simulation of a "brownstone Brooklyn" that never actually existed. If people once sat on their stoops eating ices on summer nights it was because they had no other choice--there was no air- conditioning and no TV. Everyone could afford to sit around, so everyone did. And the fact that the denizens of neighboring communities complete the illusion of multiculturalism by using the same park only means that these folks are willing to barbecue next to each other--not with each other. They all still go home to different corners of the borough. My writer friend's kids go off the next morning to their private school, those other kids to public. Not exactly neighbors.
Besides, the rows of brownstones in the Slope aren't really made of brown stone. They've been covered with a substance more akin to stucco--a thick paint used to create the illusion of brown stones set atop one another. A façade's façade. As any brownstone owner soon learns, the underlying cinder blocks can be hidden for only so long be- fore a costly "renovation" must be undertaken to cover them up again.
Likewise, wealth, media, and metrics can insulate colonizers from the reality of their situation for only so long. Eventually, parents who push their toddlers around in thousand- dollar strollers, whose lifestyles and values have been reinforced by a multibillion-dollar industry dedicated to hip child- rearing, get pelted with stones by kids from the "projects." (Rest assured--the person who reported this recurring episode at a gentri?ed Brooklyn playground met with his share of on- line derision, as well.)
Like Californians surprised when a wild?re or coyote disrupts the "natural" lifestyle they imagined they'd enjoy out in the country, we "pioneer," "colonize," and "gentrify" at our peril, utterly oblivious to the social costs of our expansion until one comes back to bite us in the ass--or mug us on the stoop. And while it's easy to blame the larger institutions and social trends leading us into these traps, our own choices and behaviors--however in?uenced--are ultimately responsible for whatever befalls us.
Park Slope, Brooklyn, is just a microcosm of the slippery slope upon which so many of us are ?nding ourselves these days. We live in a landscape tilted toward a set of behaviors and a way of making choices that go against our own better judgment, as well as our collective self- interest. Instead of collaborating with each other to ensure the best prospects for us all, we pursue short- term advantages over seemingly ?xed resources through which we can compete more effectively against one another. In short, instead of acting like people, we act like corporations. When faced with a local mugging, the community of Park Slope ?rst thought to protect its brand instead of its people.
The ?nancial meltdown may not be punishment for our sins, but it is at least in part the result of our widespread obsession with ?nancial value over values of any other sort. We disconnected ourselves from what matters to us, and grew dependent on a business scheme that was never intended to serve us as people. But by adopting the ethos of this speculative, abstract economic model as our own, we have disabled the mechanisms through which we might address and correct the collapse of the real economy operating alongside it.
Even now, as we attempt to dig ourselves out of a ?nancial mess caused in large part by this very mentality and behavior, we turn to the corporate sphere, its central banks, and shortsighted metrics to gauge our progress back to health. It's as if we believe we'll ?nd the answer in the stream of trades and futures on one of the cable- TV ?nance channels instead of out in the physical world. Our real investment in the fabric of our neighborhoods and our quality of life takes a backseat to asking prices for houses like our own in the newspaper's misnamed "real estate" section. We look to the Dow Jones average as if it were the one true vital sign of our society's health, and the exchange rate of our currency as a measure of our wealth as a nation or worth as a people.
This, in turn, only distracts us further from the real- world ideas and activities through which we might actually re-create some value ourselves. Instead of ?xing the problem, and reclaiming our ability to generate wealth directly with one another, we seek to prop up institutions whose very purpose remains to usurp this ability from us. We try to repair our economy by bolstering the same institutions that sapped it. In the very best years, corporatism worked by extracting value from the periphery and redirecting it to the center--away from people and toward corporate monopolies. Now, even though that wellspring of prosperity has run dry, we continue to dig deeper into the ground for resources to keep the errant system running.
So as our corporations crumble, taking our jobs with them, we bail them out to preserve our prospects for employment--knowing full well that their business models are unsustainable. As banks' credit schemes fail, we authorize our treasuries to print more money on their behalf, at our own expense and that of our children. We then get to borrow this money back from them, at interest. We know of no other way. Having for too long outsourced our own savings and investing to Wall Street, we are clueless about how to invest in the real world of people and things. We identify with the plight of abstract corporations more than that of ?esh-and-blood human beings. We engage with corporations as role models and saviors, while we engage with our fellow humans as competitors to be beaten or resources to be exploited.
Indeed, the now- stalled gentri?cation of Brooklyn had a good deal in common with colonial exploitation. Of course, the whole thing was done with more circumspection, with more tact. The borough's gentri?ers steered away from explicitly racist justi?cations for their actions, but nevertheless demonstrated the colonizer's underlying agenda: instead of "chartered corporations" pioneering and subjugating an uncharted region of the world, it was hipsters, entrepreneurs, and real- estate speculators subjugating an undesirable neighborhood.
The local economy--at least as measured in gross product--boomed, but the indigenous population simply became servants (grocery cashiers and nannies) to the new residents.
And like the expansion of colonial empires, this pursuit of home ownership was perpetuated by a pioneer spirit of progress and personal freedom. The ideal of home ownership was the fruit of a public- relations strategy crafted after World War II--corporate and government leaders alike believed that home owners would have more of a stake in an expanding economy and greater allegiance to free- market values than renters. Functionally, though, it led to a self- perpetuating cycle: The more that wealthier white people retreated to the enclaves prepared for them, the poorer the areas they were leaving became, and the more justi?ed they felt in leaving. While the ?rst real wave of "white ?ight" was from the cities to the suburbs, the more recent, camou?aged version has been from the suburbs back into the expensive cities.
Of course, these upper- middle- class migrants were themselves the targets of the mortgage industry, whose clever lending instruments mirror World Bank policies for their exploitative potential. The World Bank's loans come with "open markets" policies attached that ultimately surrender indebted nations and their resources to the con- trol of distant corporations. The mortgage banker, likewise, kindly provides instruments that get a person into a home, then disappears when the rates rise through the roof, having packaged and sold off the borrower's ballooning obligation to the highest bidder.
The bene?ts to society are pure mythology. Whether it's Brooklynites convinced they are promoting multiculturalism or corporations intent on extending the bene?ts of the free market to all the world's souls, neither activity leads to broader participation in the expansion of wealth--even when they're working as they're supposed to. Contrary to most economists' expectations, both local and global speculation only exacerbate wealth divisions. Wealthy parents send their kids to private schools and let the public ones decay, while wealthy nations export their environmental waste to the Third World or, better, simply keep their factories there to begin with--and keep their image at home as green as AstroTurf.
People I respect--my own mentors and teachers--tell me that this is just the way things are. This is the real world of adults--not so very far removed, we must remember, from the days when a neighboring tribe might just wipe you out--killing your men with clubs and taking your women. Be thankful for the civility we've got, keep your head down, and try not to think too much about it. These cycles are built into the economy; eventually, the markets will recover and things will get back to normal--and normal isn't so bad, really, if you look around the world at the way other people are living. And you shouldn't even feel so guilty about that--after all, Google is doing some good things and Bill Gates is giving a lot of money to kids in Africa.
Somehow, though, for many of us, that's not enough. We are fast approaching a societal norm where we--as nations, organizations, and individuals--engage in behaviors that are destructive to our own and everyone else's welfare. The only corporate violations worth punish- ing anymore are those against the shareholders. The "criminal mind" is now de?ned as anyone who breaks laws for a reason other than money. The status quo is sel?shness, and the toxically wealthy are our new heroes because only they seem capable of fully insulating them- selves from the effects of their own actions.
Every day, we negotiate the slope to the best of our ability. Still, we fail to measure up to the people we'd like to be, and succumb to the tilt of the landscape.
Jennifer has lived in the same town in central Minnesota her whole life. This year, diagnosed with a form of lupus, she began purchasing medication through Wal-Mart instead of through Marcus, her local druggist--who also happens to be her neighbor. Prescription drugs aren't on her health plan, and this is just an economic necessity.
Why can't the druggist cut his neighbor a break? He's trying, but he's selling at a mere hair above cost as it is. He just took out a loan against the business to make expenses and his increased rent. The downtown area he's located in has been slated for redevelopment, and only corporate chain stores appear to have deep enough pockets to pay for storefront leases. It sounded like a good idea when Marcus supported it at the public hearing--but the description in the pamphlet prepared by the real estate developer (complete with a section on how to compete more effectively with "big box" stores like Wal- Mart) hasn't conformed to reality.
Marcus's landlord doesn't really have any choice in the matter. He underwent costly renovations to conform to the new downtown building code, and needs to pass those on to the businesses renting from him. He took out a mortgage, too, which is slated to reset in just a couple of months. If he doesn't collect higher rents, he won't make payments.
Jennifer stopped going to PTA meetings because she's embarrassed to look Marcus in the face. As their friendship declines, so does her guilt about helping put him out of business.
Across the country in New Jersey, Carla, a telephone associate for one of the top three HMO plans in the United States, talks to people like Jennifer every day. Carla is paid a salary as well as a monthly bonus based on the number of claims she can "retire" without payment. Without resorting to fraud, Carla is supposed to discourage false claims by making all claims harder to register, in general. That's how Carla's supervisor explained it to her when she asked, point- blank, if she was supposed to mislead customers. She feels bad about it, but Carla is now the principal breadwinner in her family, her husband having lost a lot of his contracting work to the stalled market for new homes. And, in the end, she is preventing fraud. How does Carla sleep at night, knowing that she has spent her day persuading people to pay for services for which they are actually covered? After seeing a commercial on TV, she switched from Ambien to Lunesta.
One of the guys working on that very ad campaign, an old co-worker of mine, ended up specializing in health- care advertising because nobody was hiring in the environmental area back in the '90s. Besides, he told me, only half kidding, "at least medical advertising puts the consumer in charge of her own health care." He's con?icted about pushing drugs on TV because he knows full well that these ads encourage patients to pressure doctors to write prescriptions that go against their better judgment. Still, Tom makes up for any compromise of his values at work with a staunch advocacy of good values at home. He recycles paper, glass, and metal, brought his kids to see An Inconvenient Truth, and even uses a compost heap in the backyard for household waste. Last year, though, he ?nally broke down and bought an SUV. Why? "Everybody else on the highway is driving them," he explained. "It's an automotive arms race." If he stayed in his Civic, he'd be putting them all at risk. "You see the way those people drive? I'm scared for my family." As penance, at least until gas prices went up, he began purchasing a few "carbon offsets"--a way of donating money to environmental companies in compensation for one's own excess carbon emissions.
In a similar balancing act, a self- described "holistic" parent in Manhattan spares her son the risks she associates with vaccinations for childhood diseases. "We still don't know what's in them," she says, "and if everyone else is vaccinated he won't catch these things, any- way." She understands that the vaccines required for incoming school pupils are really meant to quell epidemics; they are more for the health of the "herd" than for any individual child. She also believes that mandatory vaccinations are more a result of pharmaceutical in- dustry lobbying than any comprehensive medical studies. In order to meet the "philosophical exemption" requirements demanded by the state, she managed to extract a letter from her rabbi. Meanwhile, in an unacknowledged quid pro quo, she installed a phone line in the rabbi's name in the basement of her town house; he uses the bill to falsify res- idence records and send his sons to the well- rated public elementary school in her high- rent district instead of the 90 percent minority school in his own. At least he can say he's kept them in "the public system."
Incapable of securing a legal or illegal zoning variance of this sort, a college friend of mine, now a state school administrator in Brighton, En gland, just made what he calls "the hardest decision of my life," to send his own kids to a private Catholic day school. He doesn't even particularly want his kids to be indoctrinated into Catholicism, but it's the only alternative to the eroding government school he can af- ford. He knows his withdrawal from public education only removes three more "good kids" and one potentially active parent from the system, but doesn't want his children to be "sacri?ced on the altar" of his good intentions.
So it's not just a case of hip, hypergentri?ed Brooklynites succumb- ing to market psychology, but people of all social classes making choices that go against their better judgment because they believe it's really the only sensible way to act under the circumstances. It's as if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self- interested, short- term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate share- holders than members of a society. The more decisions we make in this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this awfully sloped landscape. In a dehumanizing and self-denying cycle, we make too many choices that--all things being equal--we'd prefer not to make.
But all things are not equal. These choices are not even occur- ring in the real world. They are the false choices of an arti?cial landscape--one in which our decision-making is as coerced as that of a person getting mugged. Only we've forgotten that our choices are being made under painstakingly manufactured duress. We think this is just the way things are. The price of doing business. Since when is life determined by that axiom?
Unquestionably but seemingly inexplicably, we have come to oper- ate in a world where the market and its logic have insinuated them- selves into every area of our lives. From erection to conception, school admission to ?nding a spouse, there are products and professionals to ?ll in where family and community have failed us. Commercials en- treat us to think and care for ourselves, but to do so by choosing a corporation through which to exercise all this autonomy. Sometimes it feels as if there's just not enough air in the room--as if there were a corporate agenda guiding all human activity. At a moment's notice, any dinner party can slide invisibly into a stock pro- motion, a networking event, or an impromptu consultation--let me pick your brain. Is this why I was invited in the ?rst place? Through sponsored word- of-mouth known as "buzz marketing," our personal social interactions become the promotional opportunities through which brands strive to be cults and religions strive to become brands.
It goes deeper than that second Starbucks opening on the same town's Main Street or the radio ads for McDonald's playing through what used to be emergency speakers in our public school buses. It's not a matter of how early Christmas ads start each year, how many people get trampled at Black Friday sales, or even the news report blaming the fate of the entire economy on consumers' slow holiday spending. It's more a matter of not being able to tell the difference between the ads and the content at all. It's as if both were designed to be that way. The line between ?ction and reality, friend and marketer, community and shopping center, has gotten blurred. Was that a news report, reality TV, or a sponsored segment?
This fundamental blurring of real life with its commercial counterpart is not a mere question of aesthetics, however much we may dislike mini- malls and superstores. It's more of a nagging sense that something has gone awry--something even more fundamentally wrong than the credit crisis and its aftermath--yet we're too immersed in its effects to do anything about it, or even to see it. We are deep in the thrall of a system that no one really likes, no one remembers asking for, yet no one can escape. It just is. And as it begins to collapse around us, we work to prop it up by any means necessary, so incapable are we of imagining an alternative. The minute it seems as if we can put our ?nger on what's happening to us or how it came to be this way, the insight disappears, drowned out by the more immediately pressing demands by everyone and everything on our attention.
What did they just say? What does that mean for my retirement account? Wait--my phone is vibrating.
Can the hermetically sealed food court in which we now subsist even be beheld from within? Perhaps not in its totality--but its development can be chronicled, and its effects can be parsed and understood. Just as we once evolved from subjects into citizens, we have now devolved from citizens into consumers. Our communities have been reduced to af?nity groups, and any vestige of civic engagement or neighborly goodwill has been replaced by self- interested goals manufactured for us by our corporations and their PR ?rms. We've surrendered true participation for the myth of consumer choice or, even more pathetically, that of shareholder rights.
That's why it has become fashionable, cathartic, and to some extent useful for the defenders of civil society to rail against the corporations that seem to have conquered our civilization. As searing new books and documentaries about the crimes of corporations show us, the corporation is itself a sociopathic entity, created for the purpose of generating wealth and expanding its reach by any means necessary. A corporation has no use for ethics, except for their potential impact on public relations and brand image. In fact, as many on the side of the environment, labor, and the Left like to point out, corporate managers can be sued for taking any action, however ethical, if it compromises their ultimate ?duciary responsibility to share price.
As corporations gain ever more control over our economy, government, and culture, it is only natural for us to blame them for the helplessness we now feel over the direction of our personal and collective destinies. But it is both too easy and utterly futile to point the ?nger of blame at corporations or the robber barons at their helms--not even those handcuffed CEOs gracing the cover of the business section. Not even mortgage brokers, credit- card executives, or the Fed. This state of affairs isn't being entirely orchestrated from the top of a glass building by an élite group of bankers and businessmen, however much everyone would like to think so--themselves included. And while the growth of corporations and a preponderance of corporate activity have allowed them to permeate most every aspect of our awareness and activity, these entities are not solely responsible for the predicament in which we have found ourselves.
Rather, it is corporatism itself: a logic we have internalized into our very being, a lens through which we view the world around us, and an ethos with which we justify our behaviors. Making matters worse, we accept its dominance over us as preexisting--as a given circumstance of the human condition. It just is.
But it isn't.
Corporatism didn't evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living--the operating system on which we are now running our social software--was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self- sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.
Its basic laws were set in motion as far back as the Renaissance; it was accelerated by the Industrial Age; and it was sold to us as a better way of life by a determined generation of corporate leaders who believed they had our best interests at heart and who ultimately succeeded in their dream of controlling the masses from above.
We have succumbed to an ideology that has the same intellectual underpinnings and assumptions about human nature as--dare we say it--mid- twentieth-century fascism. Given how the word has been misapplied to everyone from police of?cers to communists, we might best refrain from resorting to what has become a feature of cheap polemic. But in this case it's accurate, and that we're forced to dance around this "F word" today would certainly have pleased Goebbels greatly.
The current situation resembles the managed capitalism of Mussolini's Italy, in particular. It shares a common intellectual heritage (in disappointed progressives who wanted to order society on a scienti?c understanding of human nature), the same political alliance (the collaboration of the state and the corporate sector), and some of the same techniques for securing consent (through public relations and propaganda). Above all, it shares with fascism the same deep suspicion of free humans.
And, as with any absolutist narrative, calling attention to the inherent injustice and destructiveness of the system is understood as an attempt to undermine our collective welfare. The whistleblower is worse than just a spoilsport; he is an enemy of the people.
Unlike Europe's fascist dictatorships, this state of affairs came about rather bloodlessly--at least on the domestic front. Indeed, the real lesson of the twentieth century is that the battle for total social control would be waged and won not through war and overt repression, but through culture and commerce. Instead of depending on a paternal dictator or nationalist ideology, today's system of control depends on a society fastidiously cultivated to see the corporation and its logic as central to its welfare, value, and very identity.
That's why it's no longer Big Brother who should frighten us-- however much corporate lobbies still seek to vilify anything to do with government beyond their own bailouts. Sure, democracy may be the quaint artifact of an earlier era, but what has taken its place? Suspension of habeas corpus, surveillance of citizens, and the occasional repression of voting notwithstanding, this mess is not the fault of a particular administration or political party, but of a culture, economy, and belief system that places market priorities above life itself. It's not the fault of a government or a corporation, the news media or the entertainment industry, but the merging of all these entities into a single, highly centralized authority with the ability to write laws, issue money, and promote its expansion into our world.
Then, in a last cynical surrender to the logic of corporatism, we assume the posture and behaviors of corporations in the hope of restoring our lost agency and security. But the vehicles to which we gain access in this way are always just retail facsimiles of the real ones. Instead of becoming true landowners we become mortgage holders. Instead of guiding corporate activity we become shareholders. Instead of directing the shape of public discourse we pay to blog. We can't compete against corporations on a playing ?eld that was created for their bene?t alone.
This is the landscape of corporatism: a world not merely dominated by corporations, but one inhabited by people who have internalized corporate values as our own. And even now that corporations appear to be waning in their power, they are dragging us down with them; we seem utterly incapable of lifting ourselves out of their de- pression.
We need to understand how this happened--how we came to live for and through a business scheme. We must recount the story of how life itself became corporatized, and ?gure out what --if anything-- we are to do about it.
While we will ?nd characters to blame for one thing or another, most of corporatism's architects have long since left the building-- and even they were usually acting with only their immediate, short-term pro?ts in mind. Our object instead should be to understand the process by which we were disconnected from the real world and why we remain disconnected from it. This is our best hope of regaining some relationship with terra ?rma again. Like recovering cult victims, we have less to gain from blaming our seducers than from understanding our own participation in building and maintaining a corporatist society. Only then can we begin dismantling and replacing it with something more livable and sustainable.
Fire Down Below: Centralia (Thanks, Sumana!)
There was no mining to be done after that, though there was plenty of fire fighting going on. The mines were flushed with water. Chunks of flaming coal were excavated. Shafts were backfilled and redrilled, but the fire refused to be tamed. In 1983, as the fire continued to spread, an engineering study was released that stated the fire could very well be burning for another hundred years or more and consume an underground area of roughly 3,700 acres. This spelled pretty dire news for the town of Centralia. Living on top of a raging mine fire was generally considered to be bad for the locals. Smoke, steam, and toxic fumes crept up through the soil. Water became contaminated. Trees died in droves and sat in barren patches of blackened, smoking soil that made the whole town look like it ought to be criss-crossed with trenches full of German and British troops locked in a Western Front stalemate. And then the sinkholes and fissures began opening. One nearly swallowed a young boy whole, and people started thinking that maybe Centralia was a lost cause.
RIP RemixIt's been a peculiar road to get to the point where we could release the film as a download, because obviously this is something we wanted to do right from the get go. But since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be rewarded, that we wouldn't undercut their efforts to promote and recoup on the film by giving it away. So we waited a while before launching the various online permutations. The National Film Board [of Canada] put up a chaptered version during our U.S. premiere at South by Southwest in March, and we embedded calls to action into each chapter.
Around SXSW, we partnered with two American partners -- Disinformation for our DVD release, and BSide for the theatrical side of things. And at the first meeting I had with them, it became clear that we needed to go down this road. We knew the film would appear on file-sharing networks immediately and we knew the audience for the film wanted and expected it to be online. So knowing that, we wanted there to be a method for those who wanted to pay to do so.
Update: Director Brett Gaylor adds, "Anyone anywhere in the world can watch it for free at www.nfb.ca/rip, and also at opensourcecinema.org it can be watched and remixed.
Want a Remix Manifesto? Name Your Price, Says RiP Director
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Draw-A-Thon Theater is figure drawing meets performance art, a monthly New York happening where models are posed in surreal theatrical scenes and attendees are encouraged to draw what they see and experience. Hosted by Michael Alan, Draw-a-Thon Theater was the subject of a recent photo essay in the New York Times. Formerly a graffiti writer, Alan is a pretty amazing artist in his own right, working in mixed media, music, sculpture, and drawing. Seen here is one of my favorite pieces from his site, an etching titled "The Riders." Michael Alan Art (Thanks, Kelly Sparks!)
There is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished.Some people are toxic. Avoid them.
Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women's rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property. The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged and if necessary, broken up or put out of business. It would not be missed.It goes on along those lines. It's quite a read. There's just one problem: Buiter doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about. First of all, it's hard to believe the statement that if Google went out of business "it would not be missed." If that were the case, why do so many people use it so often? I would suggest plenty of people would miss Google and Buiter presents no evidence to suggest otherwise, other than the fact that he, personally, really dislikes Google. But, he seems to do so solely because he doesn't understand how Google works.
In a nutshell, Google promotes copyright theft and voyeurism and lays the foundations for corporate or even official Big Brotherism.
Google has been making available copyrighted material for download on its websites for years (books through Google Books, music through YouTube, newspaper material through Google News), often without obtaining prior consent of the copyright holder and generally without making any payments to the copyright holders. There is a word for that kind of behaviour: theft. Just because you steal using internet technology does not make it anything other than theft. As an author, this naturally concerns me.Where to start? First, the three services named are all entirely different. His strongest case might be against Google Books, but even that's a stretch. Google (contrary to Buiter's claim) never "made [books] available for download." That's simply not true. What Google did was index books by scanning them. You could never download them. You could view snippets of those books, limited to just a few pages, based on a search. Basically, all the company did was create a much more effective card catalog. So, Buiter has his facts wrong on Google Books.
Google Street View, an addition to Google Maps provides panorama images visible from street level in cities around the world. The cameras record details of residents' lives, including pictures of drunk people throwing up, people in intimate clinches with persons with whom they are not officially affiliated, small children playing in a yard, with or without adult supervision, etc. etc. A wonderful database for voyeurs, peeping toms and would-be child molesters.Again, Buiter appears to be confused and/or misinformed. All of the photos in Google Street View are taken on public streets. It's not a privacy issue at all. And he misses the fact that any questionable or problematic pictures can be (and are) quickly removed by Google. Finally, the ridiculous claim that it's a service for "voyeurs, peeping toms and would-be child molesters" is supported by absolutely nothing. Considering the fact that the content is often weeks or months old, and hardly real time, it's hard to see how it's useful for such purposes at all. Peeping toms and voyeurs are people who view people in private through windows and such. Google Street View does no such thing.
Another way that Google (along with others, including Microsoft and Yahoo) invades our privacy is through the use of tracking cookies or 'third-party persistent cookies' to implement interest-based advertising (a.k.a behavioural targeting).Really? In 2009? Still complaining about the threat of cookies to privacy? That argument has been out of fashion for nearly a decade, and every browser has pretty clear and easy controls if it's really a problem for Buiter. For most of us, though, we recognize that the cookies are hardly a problem.
It is time for people to take a stand, as individual consumers and internet users, and collectively through laws and regulations, to tame this new Leviathan. When I get back from this trip, I will do my best to remove every trace of Google from my computers, even the tracking cookies (if I can!).The good news is that in the comments to his article on the FT.com site, people take him to task on pretty much every point he raised. One hopes that he actually bothers to read the comments, because he seems to have based his opinions on factually inaccurate information, and that makes his conclusions quite troubling. For a respected economist, you would expect better.
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Their answer, given in patent filing US 2009/0095729, is a simple one: make all free-standing gadgets like kettles, toasters, juicers and food mixers in the shape of tall cuboids that can easily be pushed together on a worktop, with no wasted space between them. As the controls could be recessed in their flat lids or on the front panels, no space-wasting side access is required. The patent also suggests connecting the appliances together - presumably using a common power supply.Cubist kitchen could stem gadget invasion
"It wasn't intended to be malicious, but educational," said Schmidt. "The big shock came when I got fired."
Prison officer zaps children with 50,000-volt stun gun "to show them what a day at work is like" (Via Arbroath)
Lebow Clothing Factory (Thanks, Chris!)
Even though "Big Beat" was going to be a more stripped down album with more guitars and fewer of Ron's keyboards Russell Mael was going to do a lush, orchestral duet version of Lennonn & MacCartney's "I Want To Hold Your Hand" with Marianne Faithfull. Producer Rupert Holmes did syrupy score for the song, yet Marianne Faithfull dropped out of the project at the last minute leaving Rupert Holmes, Jeffrey Lesser and The Maels with a score and no one to sing it. Russell Mael ended up singing the song, yet it seemed so incongruous even for Sparks, that this execrable orchestral assault produced by Jeffrey Lesser never appeared on an album. Link
We've reviewed nin: access and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it contains objectionable content which is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:Except... it's not at all clear what the actual problem is. As Reznor notes, the album "The Downward Spiral" (one of NIN's most popular albums) is not available on the app itself, though the song "The Downward Spiral" is apparently found somewhere in a podcast that can be streamed from the app. But, as Reznor later points out, the same song can be easily bought on iTunes, so it's difficult to see what possible objection Apple could have.
"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."
The objectionable content referenced in this email is "The Downward Spiral". Since the app is live on the App store, please make the necessary changes to the application as soon as possible, and resubmit your binary to iTunes Connect. Thank you
I'll voice the same issue I had with Wal-Mart years ago, which is a matter of consistency and hypocrisy. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and "clean" versions be made for them to carry. Bands (including Nirvana) tripped over themselves editing out words, changing album art, etc to meet Wal-Mart's standards of decency - because Wal-Mart sells a lot of records. NIN refused, and you'll notice a pretty empty NIN section at any Wal-Mart. My reasoning was this: I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any "indecent" material for sale - but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film "Scarface" completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?
You can buy The Downward Fucking Spiral on iTunes, but you can't allow an iPhone app that may have a song with a bad word somewhere in it. Geez, what if someone in the forum in our app says FUCK or CUNT? I suppose that also falls into indecent material. Hey Apple, I just got some SPAM about fucking hot asian teens THROUGH YOUR MAIL PROGRAM. I just saw two guys having explicit anal sex right there in Safari! On my iPhone!
Come on Apple, think your policies through and for fuck's sake get your app approval scenario together.
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Becky Stern of Craft wrote about these accident-explanatory slings.
I really could have used one of these after my knee surgery, except it would have had to play video of what the doctor found inside my knee! This would make a great screen printing project if you know someone with a broken arm, or if you're adept at one-armed screen printing. Perhaps these accident-explanatory slings will be an option at hospitals in the future. I'd like to see the "shark attack" or "you should see the other guy" editions; those were my two most common fallback stories while on crutches.
When they pulled into the Walmart parking lot, Bruener says Davis approached their car."Senior Citizen Arrested For Assault" (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)
"I said get away from here you s.o.b. like that and when I did that he punched me in the jaw," said Bruener.
The 67-year-old says that's when he reached for his Derringer pistol which he has a concealed carry permit but Davis he says was unphased.
"He told me to shoot him! He pointed it right at his chest and he said shoot me! I said mister I will shoot you if you don't get away from me." said Bruener. "I said get away from me you s.o.b nut you know like that and then I get hit again in the chin! He hit me again in the chin..."
According to the police report, officers asked Davis why instead of calling police he approached Bruener's car. Davis told officers he doesn't take being called a s.o.b off of anybody.
Davis later told the officer, "If you call me a s.o.b., I'll slug you, too."
Bebeacua has said the church is aimed at encouraging people to worship the orgasm as God. "The orgasm is God, the orgasm should be worshiped," Bebeacua said. "The orgasm is the ultimate feeling of lust, it shouldn't be limited to ejaculation. You can reach it through art or by looking at a landscape and thinking 'Wow!'"Freedom of Religion Suffers Terrible Blow in Sweden
In Lincoln Park, Calif. Michigan, a 17-year-old called 911 when her father (recovering at home from brain surgery) had a seizure. Her first call didn't go through, so the panicked girl hung up and tried again. While the phone was still ringing, the girl said "what the fuck." Apparently 911 calls are recorded even while the phone is ringing, so the police officer heard her say it. When the officer answered the call, he was only interested in the fact that the girl said "fuck" and wouldn't help the girl. Instead, he swears at her and hangs up.
After the girl places several more calls to 911 trying to explain that her father was about to die, the officer finally called the fire department with a fabricated version of what happened.
Eventually, the girl gets arrested and jailed by the police for a crime that isn't on the books. (via The Agitator)
We have Schadenfreudian Therapy to thank for digitizing this LP of Christian pirate music for children.
This album is chock-full of piping childen’s voices singing about being Christian pirates and long-winded sermons about not spending all your money at the proverbial circus and missing the train to Heavenville and such. The best part is a surly puppet sidekick "Sharkey" who likes to refer to the good Cap’n as “fatso” and is guilty of the eighth and ninth deadly sins of interrupting and backtalking.
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Oliver Bishop Young has been converting dumpsters in the UK into more interesting things like a ping pong table, a marsh, and my favorite, this swimming pool. (Thanks, Matt!)
More:
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Baino shares this tutorial for creating a banjo-style ukulele from a tambourine plus parts from an inexpensive ukulele kit. I don't recall hearing one of these, but I'm guessing the sound must be pretty interesting considering the original instruments. See the instructable for all the how-to deets.
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From the MAKE Flickr pool
Macetech built this dazzling RGB coffee table -
IKEA Granas side table (over 2x2 feet, big enough for coffee table) with 9x9 array of 81 ShiftBrite RGB LED modules. Currently running a simple sine plasma into HSV/RGB conversion on an Arduino (Seeeduino).Wow - more than a conversation piece, I'm guessing guests may fall into a hypnotic state! See more of the display piece in his photoset.
In the Maker Shed:
Seeeduino v1.1
Recently on Offworld, guest blogger Tom Armitage counters developer claims that X-Men Origins: Wolverine is "the movie game that finally, does not suck" with a lengthy look at 2004 Xbox hit The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, freshly revamped for the Xbox 360, and his weekend game of choice.
Elsewhere we saw more Spore for the iPhone, this time a free, open-source third-party creature browser built on top of Maxis' Spore API, the latest 'feelgood' trailer for Brütal Legend, Double Fine's Jack-Black-starring 3D adventure through the Age of Rock, and the first video of Gaijin's latest retro-futurist WiiWare game, the more rotely rhythmic Bit.Trip: Core.
We also saw Sony adding more demoscene legends to its PlayStation Network downloadables, as .produkkt, creators of 96k first-person-shooter .kkreiger, unveil their elephant-headed, glistening dolphin, faux-Domo-kun starring .deTuned (above). Indie auteur Cactus also showed off the first geometric platforming of his "game about killing everything you love," and Earthbound got its first custom vinyl toys.
Finally, the day's quick-hit 'one shot's: seeing Super Mario from Mario's perspective, a peek and poke into the aged sketchbook and design documents of an Atari 800XL/LE programmer, Katamari Damacy meets Shadow of the Colossus, and Princess Peach falls down the Dig Dug hole.
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We're having loads of fun dreaming up creative ways that Maker Media can use Twitter (like our new daily Make_Tips and Craft_Tips features). We want to grow our Twitter network. And we want YOU to sign up. So, here's the deal. We're calling this month "Book-a-Day in May." We'll be giving away a Maker's Notebook every weekday to one of our randomly-selected followers on Twitter. At the end of the week, we're also going to be giving away an Arduino MEGA to a randomly-selected Twitter-person. So start following us @Make to be eligible. We'll announce the first week's winners on Monday, May 11th.
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It's with joy, trepidation, love and paranoia that I return to BoingBoing for two weeks of happy mutantdom.
Blogging at BoingBoing is truly one of the most rewarding and overwhelming experiences I've ever had as a writer. It's an extended feeling, where each thought shared in a seemingly quiet, casual, and social space is actually broadcast to a universe of many different kinds of people. Some kind, some interested, some intrigued - others acerbic, quick to judge, and already possessing pretty established perspectives on the way things are. And four million of them, each coming to BoingBoing for his or her own reasons - some for knowledge, some for entertainment, some for connection, and some for a good fight.
I return to BoingBoing a changed man - indeed, changed from the experience of being here. I used the platform both as a way of propagandizing my own opinions about our culture and economy, as well as to get honest feedback on what I should spend my time and energy on. As a result of the conversations here, I started a radio show on WFMU, began working on an alternative currency project, wrote a very different book than I would have otherwise, sponsored a short film about the book for those who don't read, began a column for the new online-only version of Arthur, started a new Frontline documentary about digital culture, and - in an effort to practice some 'new' media rather than just write about it, I even signed up to write some back story and graphic novels for a new video game. I decided to teach at the New School, where you don't have to be matriculated as a full-time student to take a class. And I'm gardening vegetables on what used to be a suburban lawn.
While I may have done a couple of those things, anyway, I certainly wouldn't be doing them the way I am - and the feedback and comments I got through my experiences at BoingBoing catalyzed and informed each of these decisions. I still hear the voices in my head.
I'm back for the same sorts of reasons I came before: to promote bottom-up, cyberpunk, mutant culture, and to extend these approaches into the economy. I think we are in one of those rare moments of opportunity where the bank-based speculative economy is imperiled and ineffective enough to make alternative currencies and collaborations seem more reasonable. The more we experience putting food on the table and smiles on our faces by exchanging something other than bank-issued cash, the more we will begin to believe in our own ability to create value for ourselves and one another, without intermediary institutions.
I am here to promote the hacking of the economy, one step at a time. Not crashing the economy that exists, or even negating its usefulness for certain kinds of exchanges and efforts - just building something else from the bottom up that addresses the myriad needs ignored or repressed by the one-sided system we have today.
An economy that actually worked would be a wonderful thing - and I believe we can make it right here.
mutant but not mute,
Douglas Rushkoff
---
Douglas Rushkoff - author of the book Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back - is a guest blogger.
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From the MAKE Flickr pool
Roywanglu shares pics of his automated egg writer - the EggDrawer. Not a lot of info available for this one, but those are some great results from what looks to be a relatively simple setup. Check out more results in his Flickr photostream.
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From the MAKE Flickr pool
Roywanglu shares pics of his automated egg writer - the EggDrawer. Not a lot of info available for this one, but those are some great results from what looks to be a relatively simple setup. Check out more results in his Flickr photostream.
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In this video, Limor shows off her build of the Turbulence microcontroller-based demo. She accomplished this by going retro (hey, it's demoscene, man), adding VGA and stereo audio output to her Parallax Propeller-based Ybox2 kit (which has NTSC out). To add VGA/stereo out, she created a mini-shield plug-in for the YBox. Pretty nifty! And as she says, it's really impressive that the Propeller MCU can process decent VGA and stereo audio. It's funny to see her drag out her old VGA monitor, too. Hey, where can I get one of those Techno-Goth stickers!?
VGA out on a Ybox2 and Turbulence!
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From the MAKE Flickr pool
The MAKE Flickr pool hit 5,000 members this week! (Thanks to Mark of Spikenzie Labs for spotting the milestone) It's great to see all the projects pouring in from both new and longtime members - keep 'em coming. A big thanks goes out to all contributors for making the pool such a great resource for DIY documentation!
The Morning Monster by Nick Hardeman is an interactive plush alarm clock with a few interesting features. First of all, you set the time and alarm by pressing buttons that are hidden inside the teeth. Also, when the alarm goes off, the blinds are automatically opened via a wireless link. The alarm system is based on an Arduino and the blinds are controlled by an h-bridge and stepper motor. I really like this alarm clock a lot!
The Morning Monster is a plush electronic alarm clock. He has all of the normal alarm functions, set time, set alarm, snooze, etc. However, what makes him a monster is his ability to shine the sun on your face when the alarm goes off by opening the blinds, unfortunately in the video, it is night time and pitch black outside. The blinds are also manually controlled my moving his left arm (our right) up and down. Don't worry, he knows where the blinds are, so if you hold his arm in one direction, he will never over-crank the blinds. GRR--.
More about the Morning Monster by Nick Hardeman
In the Maker Shed:
More about the Arduino Mega in the Maker Shed
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Jeremie Zimmerman sez,
Threats to citizens' basic rights and freedoms and to the neutrality of Internet could be voted without any safeguard in the EU legislation regarding electronic communication networks (Telecoms Package). EU citizens have two days to call all Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to ask them to vote for the "Citizens' Rights Amendments", in the second reading of the Telecoms Package. These amendments include all the safeguards that were removed in the "compromise amendments", as well as provisions protecting against "net discrimination" practices and filtering of content...URGENT: Ask MEPs to adopt Citizens' Rights Amendments on May the 6th.
Information on contacting your MEP
(Thanks, JZ!)
Art student's car vanishing act (via Bioephemera)
Sara Watson, who is studying drawing at the University of Central Lancashire (Uclan), took three weeks to transform the car's appearance.She created the illusion in the car park outside her studio at Uclan's Hanover Building in Preston.
The car is now being used for advertising by the local recycling firm that donated the vehicle.
Sire Records (Thanks, Stephen!)
Over on the Sire Records web site, they have a big page full of music videos from all their artists... Except that if you actually click on any of them to play, they've *all* been taken down for copyright infringment... by Warner Music Group, Sire's parent company.Their long arm of the law has stretched all the way around the internet to spank themselves in the ass.
Hilarious!
Coincidentally(?), if you go to Warner Music Group's YouTube channel, the first many pages of comments are just angry users lashing out about deleted videos.
You'd think Warner'd be more receptive to people sharing and spreading advertisements for their artists. But they're in such a panic about infringment they've gone so far as to ban even the official videos. Amazing.
Stop worrying about your children!David Finkelhor, the head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, has discovered pedophiles don't want to waste their time just flipping through MySpace pages or Facebook pages. It's as futile as trying to call up random numbers from the phonebook and trying to get a date. It's just a waste of time.
They would rather go for the low-hanging fruit: young people hanging out in sexually suggestive chat rooms presenting themselves in a sexual way -- "Oh, I wonder what that's like" or, "If only somebody would buy me an iPod and a lollipop, I would be a very happy girl or boy."
If your kid is just texting his friends, or posting pictures on Facebook or AIM'ing, it's no more dangerous than them talking to each other as they walk down the sidewalk, or at the mall.
Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry
SugarStacks.com has photos of different kinds of food (both processed and natural) showing how much sugar is in the the food by displaying a stack of 4 gram sugar cubes next to the item. (Via Presurfer)
Phil Ross says:
Please come to the first annual CRITTER Kimchi Contest!All are welcome to submit their favorite version of this spicy pickled delicacy and taste the competition. The people’s choice will win $100, second wins $75, and third will get $50. Bring 1 quart of your best Kimchi to CRITTER on Saturday May 9th at 1 PM. Tasting opens at 2PM.
All varieties accepted! There will be ongoing demonstration of how Kimchi is made, and plenty of palette-cleansing white rice available. So even if you don’t have a favorite recipe for Kim Chee, or you’ve never tried it before—here’s a chance to try the best Kimchi at CRITTER.
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Maggie Koerth-Baker was a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.
Today is my last day guest blogging, and I just wanted to drop a quick note to say thank you and let you all know how much fun I've had over the past couple of weeks. Y'all have been a great, thought-provoking crowd to share my book and my random ramblings with--almost like having coworkers again!
Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and may your Monday be less than hellish. Until the nude animal revolution comes, I leave you with these adorable photos of a hairless rat, and a hairless cat.
Cat pick from The Pug Father, via CC. Rat pic from jurvetson, also CC.
P.S., a couple people have asked how to keep up with me post Boing Boing. Best way is via Twitter, where I will point you toward various writing projects occasionally and try to be entertaining and informative (within a limited word count) in the in-between time. Thank you again. I hope to return to Boing Boing in the future.
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