Calling Cory Doctorow! Calling Cory Doctorow! Mister Doctorow, please proceed to a brass courtesy bathysphere.

19th Century Deep-Sea Diving Suit

The Smithsonian Institution has an online collection of seed catalog art. If King Corn ever runs for president, I'll vote for him, because his crown is cool. (Via City Farmer)

A month after we discussed Google's bringing SVG to IE, several readers let us know that Google is expanding the beachhead by offering the Chrome's renderer and speedy Javascript execution in an IE plugin. This effort is in service of allowing IE to participate in Google Wave when that technology's preview is extended in a week's time. The plugin, currently in an early stage of development, is called Google Chrome Frame.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sometimes you have to wonder if certain celebrities even know what they're talking about half the time. A few years back, Elton John went on an anti-internet tirade, where he suggested shutting down the entire internet for five years for the sake of saving music. So, it was a bit of a surprise a few weeks back to see him among the list of big name rockstars coming out against kicking people off the internet for file sharing. Apparently, though, no one told Elton John that he was on that list, because now he's switched positions again and is saying that he's all for Peter Mandelson's proposal to kick people off the internet. Yes, just a couple weeks after his name was on a document against the very same proposal. Perhaps we shouldn't take much of what his opinion is this week seriously, when even he doesn't seem to know what it is.

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Five words: It Happens Without Waiting.

Narrative: Today I wrote a piece about the Berkeley Public Library on InBerkeley.Com. I wanted to find a pointer to the library website, so I switched over to Google. Looked up Berkeley Public Library. My piece, publshed less than a minute earlier. was the first item. Real-time web. (True story.)

Two girls, one uke: Jonathan Coulton's fantasy realized. (Thanks, Michael!)

An anonymous reader sends word that the FDA has approved a phase 1 trial for Neuralstem, a company with a patented stem cell procedure targeting ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and other spinal conditions. The company's CEO said in a press release, "While this trial aims to primarily establish safety and feasibility data in treating ALS patients, we also hope to be able to measure a slowing down of the ALS degenerative process." Results are expected in 2 years. The trial will involve 12 ALS patients who will receive stem cell injections in the lumbar area of the spinal cord. An information site for the disabled community adds hopefully: "If it makes it through all stages of testing, we will see if doctors are willing to [use] it on subjects that have injuries coming from physical injuries like diving accidents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Subway Yearbook project is the latest bit of fun from the joy-sharing pranksters at Improv Everywhere:

[W]e installed a photography studio on a random subway car. We claimed that the MTA had hired us to take photos of every single person who rides the subway and that we'd be producing a yearbook at the end of the year. Most people were happy to pose for us, and the resulting photos show just how diverse New York subway riders can be.

There's almost nothing that makes me as happy as a little Lego entrepreneurship. Remember BrickArms? Well, now there's ChromeBricks, which will custom electroplate Lego elements of your choice, in your choice of gold, chrome, or copper. [via The Brothers Brick]

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Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds writes: "This South African commercial from Allan Gray Investment, with creative by the King James agency, is really a showstopper. What if James Dean had lived?

We already wrote about the somewhat odd class action lawsuit against Scribd, but it turns out it's even more bizarre than we first thought. That's because not only is the lawsuit complaining about authors works appearing on the site without authorization, but, according to Wired, the lawsuit also claims that Scribd's own filtering system infringes. Yes, the very system that it uses to try to prevent works from being uploaded is being called infringing, because it stores a copy to pattern match against uploads. I can't see how it's infringing in any way whatsoever. It's a tool that isn't used for infringement, but to prevent infringement. Perhaps I'm missing the point on how Scribd's filter works, but most filtering tools work on the principle of someone complaining about the unauthorized work being on the site, thus alerting the service provider of the need to filter. That seems like an authorization. But, more importantly, it's difficult to see how such a filter could be seen as infringing even absent such an authorization.

Copyright law grants five different exclusive rights to the copyright holder: the right to reproduce, to prepare derivative works, to distribute, to perform and to display. A filter doesn't really do any of those things. You could somehow try to interpret "reproducing" in such a way to claim that Scribd does that with its filter, but even that seems like a stretch. The only reason that the work is being reproduced is to stop any distribution or display of the work. No one actually gets to see it.

Still, it's quite a bizarre lawsuit that not only sues Scribd for failing to block an uploaded book, but at the very same time also sues the company -- under the same law -- for trying to block an uploaded book. Hopefully this one gets tossed out quickly.

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coondoggie writes "Too many online scammers get away with what amounts to a wrist-slap, but a case if Las Vegas this week seems to be heading the right direction. According to the Federal Trade Commission, a business opportunity scammer has been held in contempt for the second time by a federal court and ordered to turn over the title of his home in Las Vegas or face jail time. The court found that the operator of the scam, Richard Neiswonger, failed to deliver marketable title to his home, in violation of a previous court order entering a $3.2 million judgment against him, the FTC stated. The FTC charged that the defendant deceived consumers with false promises that they could make a six-figure income by selling his 'asset protection services' to those seeking to hide their assets from potential lawsuits or creditors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've written about the Sparky Jr. DIY telepresence robot before, however Marque Cornblatt has just launched a new websited dedicated to the project. If you've ever considered building your own telepresence robot, this would be a great place to start. Build instructions and open source software are available on the website.

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Mark Helprin, the well-known American author of many popular novels which are reasonably beloved, has painted himself into something of a corner, and now he seems to be lashing out at, well, everyone. You may recall that he wrote a silly, uninformed and downright ignorant op-ed piece calling for infinite copyright, a couple years ago. Of course, now he claims he wasn't calling for any such thing, but the original piece shows otherwise. He was so upset that tons of people showed up to prove him wrong, that he ended up writing an entire book on the subject. Yet, his real complaint in the book wasn't so much to push for infinite copyright (which, again, he insists everyone misread in his original column), but to smack around some silly commenters on blogs that made fun of him. He actually spends a lot of time dissecting anonymous comments right here on Techdirt in his book -- carefully selecting some of the more idiotic ones, while taking others completely out of context. He used that to support his thesis that those calling for weaker copyright laws were idiotic digital barbarians. Yet, of course, anyone could pick and choose some idiotic comments from copyright supporters and make the same silly argument.

Besides, there were many other problems with Helprin's book. It came across much worse than many of the commenters he attacked. It was filled with ad hominem attacks against these "digital barbarians" and repeatedly got basic facts wrong. Amusingly, considering he spends so much time mocking people for not understanding what he really was saying, the most incredible thing is that he does the exact same thing to almost everyone he criticizes. But, in the end, the biggest problem with Helprin's book was that it just wasn't very good. He gets so focused on his own use of language, that he fails to make a very strong point. And... nearly every single review of the book found exactly that.

But, Helprin is apparently not one to back down. Rather than respond to any of the complaints against his book -- including the massive factual errors -- Helprin has written up a 2,400 word screed slamming everyone for the poor reviews of his book. You see, it wasn't that the book was bad, but that, once again, no one actually understood what he was writing. And why? Well, according to Helprin, because every publisher assigned the book to the very "barbarians" he was trying to insult with the book. And, since we're all so clueless and inbred, of course we couldn't understand it:

Nearly every publication, left, right, and center, assigned the book, with digital in its title, to a resident digeratus, a member of the very tribe I provoke, and thus it was that I came to sell rosaries in Mecca.

Again, he fails to respond to a single point raised by any of the reviews. Instead, he just whines that people thought he was clueless, but he insists he's not. How could he be clueless? He quoted famous people!

It is why in making my argument I cite, and count as allies, Churchill, Thomas Hardy, Flannery O'Connor, Shakespeare, Yeats, Montaigne, and even Charles de Gaulle, among others.

But, the most ridiculous part of Helprin's whiny defense of how every single reviewer got his book wrong is his reference to one particular passage that many reviewers pointed to:

It would be one thing if such a revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels, but it doesn't. It produces mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom see daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world doesn't end; women who have lizard tattoos winding from the navel to the nape of the neck; beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch; and an entire race of females, now entering middle age, that speaks in North American chipmunk and seldom makes a statement without, like, a question mark at the end?

This bit of luddism provoked a bunch of responses, suggesting that Helprin was reaching the "get off my lawn, kids!" stage of life. However, the real problem wasn't just Helprin being an old fuddy-duddy, but the fact that he's flat out wrong. Mozart, Einstein and Raphael did what they did without copyright for the most part. Mozart's best works were actually highly derivative and he created his music at a time when copyright did not cover musical works. Raphael lived in a time before copyright. And Einstein's works had nothing to do with copyright at all.

Perhaps there's a simpler explanation for why no one liked your book, Mr. Helprin: it's just no damn good.

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dotancohen writes "Google plans to make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site. No official announcement appears to have been made, just a short blog post on the subject by a Google employee in a help forum. (One comment on the ghacks.net post linked above says that email was sent to the admins of Google Apps accounts.) There does not seem to be any way to make an individual document not crawlable; you can only un-publish it, at which point Web links to it will not work any more." The move makes sense from one point of view — Google is just making crawlable a document linked from another crawlable document — but it's likely to catch a lot of people by surprise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This doo-dad is a telescoping PVC fitting sold as a "Qwik Fix" or "Slip Fix." It's intended to be used to repair broken sections of pipe, but Chuck Rice has posted a venerable tutorial on converting one for use as a pneumatic piston in a haunted-house prop. Chuck's design both lifts and turns with a single stroke. Clever!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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While other religious and political leaders around the world are busy creating moral panics around violent video games, it appears that one Buddhist leader feels quite differently about them. The third ranking Buddhist, Ogyen Trinley Dorje (and, according to the article, the only Buddhist leader recognized by China, Tibet and India), apparently sees video games as therapeutic and a way to let out aggression:

Well, I view video games as something of an emotional therapy, a mundane level of emotional therapy for me. We all have emotions whether we're Buddhist practitioners or not, all of us have emotions, happy emotions, sad emotions, displeased emotions and we need to figure out a way to deal with them when they arise.

So, for me sometimes it can be a relief, a kind of decompression to just play some video games. If I'm having some negative thoughts or negative feelings, video games are one way in which I can release that energy in the context of the illusion of the game. I feel better afterwards.

The aggression that comes out in the video game satiates whatever desire I might have to express that feeling. For me, that's very skillful because when I do that I don't have to go and hit anyone over the head.

In response, the interviewer asks "shouldn't meditation take care of that?" to which he replies: "No, video games are just a skillful method." So, kids, next time some politician says that violent video games are bad, why not point out that one of the most peaceful men in the world uses them to let out some aggression in ways that meditation cannot provide.

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An anonymous reader points out a story in Wired introducing us to the Doomsday Machine built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s — and that remains active to this day. It was called "Perimeter." The article explains why the device was built, and why the Soviets considered it to be something that kept the peace, even though they never told the US about it. "[Reagan's] strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. ... A few months later, Reagan... announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. ... To Moscow it was the Death Star — and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. ... By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, [an informant] says, was 'to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader points out a story in Wired introducing us to the Doomsday Machine built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s — and that remains active to this day. It was called "Perimeter." The article explains why the device was built, and why the Soviets considered it to be something that kept the peace, even though they never told the US about it. "[Reagan's] strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. ... A few months later, Reagan... announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. ... To Moscow it was the Death Star — and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. ... By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, [an informant] says, was 'to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader points out a story in Wired introducing us to the Doomsday Machine built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s — and that remains active to this day. It was called "Perimeter." The article explains why the device was built, and why the Soviets considered it to be something that kept the peace, even though they never told the US about it. "[Reagan's] strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. ... A few months later, Reagan... announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. ... To Moscow it was the Death Star — and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. ... By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, [an informant] says, was 'to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader points out a story in Wired introducing us to the the Doomsday Machine built by the Soviet Union in the 1980s — and that remains active to this day. It was called "Perimeter." The article explains why the device was built, and why the Soviets considered it to be something that kept the peace, even though they never told the US about it. "[Reagan's] strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. ... A few months later, Reagan... announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. ... To Moscow it was the Death Star — and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. ... By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, [an informant] says, was 'to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Set your DVRs for this awesome segment on the Travel Channel, filmed at Maker Faire Bay Area 2009.

Extreme Conventions, Travel Channel, "This ain't no Dental Convention!"

Wednesday, September 23rd at 8PM Eastern time (check local listings for your area)

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Mark Argo give a terrific little five-minute talk on the history of DIY gadgetry and what we can learn from past as we try to forge a more personalized, DIY future.

Ignite

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This week's most wonderful posts from Treehugger:

5 Places Riding Your Bike is Banned or Illegal (You'll Be Surprised)
So many places exist in the world where it is actually illegal to ride a bike. Perhaps the funniest example is Baldwin Park, California, where it is prohibited to ride a bike in a swimming poo. The saddest is the injunction against Saudi Arabian women bikers: read on for wild and crazy rules, keeping bikers from their bikes.

Researchers Say 'Good To Pee On Tomato Plants' - Just Don't Let The Neighbors See
If you want bigger, better tomato plants with bigger, better tomatoes that are actually better for you, one option is to mix in some of your own pee. No, seriously. Research has proved it.

First Living Building Successfully 'Grown'
Living walls are great--they can reduce pollution, better insulate buildings, and lower the need for maintenance--but it's time to expand the concept. Introducing the 'living building', where trees are grown into the structure of a building and melded with cables and metal supports. Talk about 'green buildings!'

Joules, the Tandem Bike Robot that Pedals for You (Video)
If you have a tandem bike but no one to ride it with you, perhaps Joules could be your partner. He'll do all the pedaling!

sertsa writes "Earlier this year a group of researchers at the University of Washington came up with a scheme to use peer-to-peer networks to store and, ultimately, to forget the keys for encrypted messages, causing them to 'Vanish.' Now a group from researchers from UT Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan has come up with a way to break this approach, by making a single computer appear to be many nodes on the p2p network. 'In our experiments with Unvanish, we have shown that it is possible to make Vanish messages reappear long after they should have disappeared nearly 100 percent of the time...'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems that a few folks misunderstood the point of my post yesterday in joking about Lily Allen's double standard in ranting against unfair copying while copying blog posts from other sites. And Lily herself appears to be among those people. She's posted an apology, though, a bit petulantly, starting in all capital letters:

I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM . Apologies to Michael Masnick

While I appreciate the "apology," that's really missing the point. First, the reason TorrentFreak and I both brought it up wasn't because I was upset about her using the post. As I clearly said in my response, I thought it was great that she wanted to use our post, and I encouraged her to do so. The point, though, was that it was a bit hypocritical of her to be going on and on about how evil it is to copy another's work without their permission, when she went and did the same thing. Furthermore, the point is that when it's natural and easy for people to copy like that, it's time to learn to accept it and use it to your advantage. So, no apology is necessary to me. My post wasn't about you trying to pass off my words as your own, but recognizing that even you, Lily Allen copy other people's work all the time, even without realizing it.

And, yet, in the very same breath, you want to kick people off the internet for doing the same thing?

If anyone deserves an apology, it's all the people you've been blasting with this complaint that it's "piracy" that's somehow harming artists, when the actual evidence shows no such thing. Plenty of artists have learned to embrace file sharing and used it to their advantage, suggesting it's not piracy that's the problem -- it's artists unwillingness to adapt and put in place smarter business models. Running to the gov't and asking them to kick your fans off the internet isn't a new business model. So, don't apologize to me. We're happy for you to use Techdirt posts however you want. We just thought it was worth calling your attention to the fact that even you seem to have no problem copying stuff when convenient, so maybe you should think twice about blasting everyone else for doing the same thing.

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Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast. I'm on the bill tonight (along with wino Kathryn Borel Jr. and others) at HEEB Magazine's Toronto installment of their popular Storytelling event. It's at the Drake- come check it out!

Details here (link).

(Flash video above. Alternate viewing options: Download MP4 or watch on YouTube)

Boing Boing Video presents a remix of "Synesthesia," a documentary directed by Jonathan Fowler, about people whose senses blend, or mix. For instance: a synesthete might see colors when listening to music, or taste flavors when hearing a spoken word.

Synesthesia was once thought of as a disease or disorder, but many who experience this alternate form of perception think of their anomaly as an advantage -- or, for them, simply what is normal. In this piece, Dr. David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine explains this condition, and four synesthetes explain how they perceive the world.

The full-length version of this film was produced with support from The Research Channel, and is available for viewing on their website.

CREDITS: Directed & Produced by Jonathan Fowler. Cinematography by Rex Jones & Jonathan Fowler. Music by Moby & Olis.

SPEAKERS:
* David Eagleman, Ph.D., neuroscientist, Baylor College of Medicine
* Marilynn Masten, synesthete
* Julia Cochran, synesthete
* Tiffany Gill, synesthete
* Sean Day, synesthete

Fiorenzo 'Fio' Omenetto, a physicist turned bioengineer at Tufts University, takes a few minutes to explain his fascination with silk. Not your typical fiber artist, Fio is actually using the silk proteins as a material for building bio-compatible sensors that could be safely implanted in humans. Silk may seem like a strange material to use, however it has properties that allow biochemical components that are mixed into it to remain active. As a bonus, it can also be produced using a green, non-toxic and neutral pH process.

Fio's interview is the latest installment in our Fascination series of interviews with notable scientists and technologists.

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With the launch of Retro Remakes on Offworld, we started a straw poll to ask: what's the one remake you'd most like to see appear on consoles or handhelds, with the results to be tabulated and published at the end of the week. We also read the latest official response on the disappearance of an Xbox Live Arcade version of N64 classic Goldeneye 007, and celebrated the 25th anniversary of UK space-exploration legend Elite (above) with developer Frontier. Elsewhere we put together a high-res gallery documenting Indies Invading Austin -- the two days of the inaugural Indie Games Summit at GDC Austin -- and began rounding up the reasons why you should be attending LA's Oct. 1-4 Indiecade conference/exhibition, with appearances by Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, former MIT games head Henry Jenkins, and flOw/Flower creator Jenova Chen. Finally, we saw the horrific visage of the Teletubbies invading Left 4 Dead, watched an epic fan-made video of game characters invading Earth, Cloverfield-style, and our 'one shot's: Spacesick's awesomely designed Game Buddy, and the cranio-facial reconstruction of what your head looks like after too much Tetris.

bossanovalithium writes "Gary McKinnon, whose tribulations we have followed for several years now, is the UK hacker trying to escape extradition to the US. It appears he is expected to foot the bill for the US Government patching holes his breaching uncovered — to the tune of $700,000. It's not really the norm for someone to pay for exploits to be patched — damages fixed, yes, but this is a very different thing." The article paraphrases Eugene Spafford as saying that the victim of a cybercrime should not take the blame. "If someone broke a door to rob a store, he said, it was usual to charge them the cost of the door." Isn't the McKinnon case more like charging him to buy the lock that had been missing when he walked in?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, is an online marketplace connecting radio producers with radio programmers. But it's also a massive library of searchable content- some of it very good- that you can get lost in for hours.

You'll need an account to listen, but sign-up is free. Go nuts! (link)

In August, we wrote about the latest in the long saga of the heirs of one of Superman's creators trying to regain the rights to Superman. Copyright law, among its many complexities, includes a provision for terminating the assignment of copyrights, such that the original creator can get them back over time. Getting into exactly how it works and the reasoning behind it isn't worth mentioning here. But it's created the mess with Superman, and now the lawyer who helped win that case is helping the heirs of Jack Kirby, a comic book artist who worked on a bunch of comic books, to send out 45 letters warning pretty much everyone in Hollywood that they intend to take back the copyrights on a bunch of works, including the X-Men. Of course, the earliest they can actually do this is in 2014... so why announce it now? Well, one guess is that with Disney in the process of buying Marvel Comics, the studio might not want to have to deal with the complication and may be willing to pay off the heirs now. While some may find it amusing to see the Hollywood studios suddenly on the "wrong" side of copyright law, the whole situation is pretty ridiculous. It's nothing more than a pure money grab on the part of heirs -- people who had nothing at all to do with the creation of a work.

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John Mathot says, "Insane Clown Posse has a track on their new album called, 'Boing Boing.' It is not a reference to the site, but a brag rap track about copulation, done in their inimitably foul style. Here's a listen (NSFW)."

MP3: Boing Boing, by Insane Clown Posse (Amazon).

If you're an Oregono or otherwise planning to be in Portland environs on September 26th, you should consider stopping by the Portland TechShop at 3:00PM to participate in their shendig. Bring a dish and a project for show-and-tell. There'll be an egg-drop and prizes. Sponsored by MAKE:PDX.

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leonbenjamin writes "Britain's Telegraph reports on a five-year research programme, called Project Indect, which aims to develop computer programmes which act as 'agents' to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers. Its main objectives include the 'automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence.' Shami Chakrabarti, head of the UK's Liberty human-rights NGO, said: 'Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. ... It's dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BB reader Taylor says,

Some friends of mine who were working at a call center at the Minnesota Dept. of Human Services told me they were working on a "throwback" system that hasn't really been overhauled for a few years.

Here's how "throwback" it looks.

But you know what? I bet it works perfectly.

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest bloggger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Yesterday I posted the prelude to 500 Pound Planet, the cartoon I spent a few years making with my buddy Josh Dolgin when I was younger. Here's chapter one, wherein we meet our "heroes", Spencer and Blue, voiced by me and Josh.

Josh and I were your typical college film geeks at the time; we had just been exposed to Italian Neo-Realist cinema, Film Noir, Cassavetes- all that stuff. But we were also comic book/animation geeks.

We were curious about how much of these styles and techniques could be applied to animation. We came up with rigid "naturalist" rules for 500 Pound Planet: all music had to come from actual sources in the scene. Characters would talk like normal people talk- stepping over each other, mumbling... The camera would be a fly on the wall, intruding as little as possible. We played with Orson Welles' "deep focus" technique. In our minds we were visionaries, auteurs, pioneers! In reality, we were pretentious nerds.

Previously: 500 Pound Planet: prelude (link).

Verve alerts us to the news that one of the many drivers who have been chronicled following their GPS over their own common sense has discovered that "following my GPS" is not an acceptable defense in court. In this case, the guy followed the GPS's commands down a "narrow cliffside path" until the car got stuck against a fence, overlooking a sharp drop. He's now been convicted of "driving without due care and attention." The prosecutor wasn't exactly kind, but apparently the following was convincing to the judges:

The path was not designed for motor vehicles yet Mr Jones slavishly continued to follow the satnav system to the point where his eyes and his brain must have been telling him otherwise to such a degree he was not exercising proper control of the vehicle

For his part, the guy admitted he was an "idiot," but said he was just following instructions:

I might have been an idiot for taking the wrong road or carrying on but I have not driven without due care or attention.

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maclizard writes "After much waiting, ASCIIpOrtal has now been released. Joe Larson, the man behind the game, has made sure to provide numerous mirrors so as to avoid the Slashdot effect that killed his site several months ago. An interview with Larson (part two here) is available as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

miller60 writes "In their efforts at uptime, are data centers relying too much on infrastructure and not enough on best practices? That question is at the heart of an ongoing industry debate about the merits of the tier system, a four-level classification of data center reliability developed by The Uptime Institute. Critics assert that the historic focus on Uptime tiers prompts companies to default to Tier III or Tier IV designs that emphasize investment in redundant UPSes and generators. Uptime says that many industries continue to require mission-critical data centers with high levels of redundancy, which are needed to perform maintenance without taking a data center offline. Given the recent series of data center outages and the current focus on corporate cost control, the debate reflects the industry focus on how to get the most uptime for the data center dollar."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jérémie Zimmermann from the French digital liberties org La Quadrature du Net sez,

The French Parliament has adopted HADOPI 2, a law aimed at establishing a so-called "three-strikes" policy in order to fight file-sharing. The Constitutional Council made groundbreaking decision on June 10th 2009 that recognized access to the Internet as essential to the full exercise of free speech, and invalidated the sanctioning power of HADOPI 1. The law HADOPI 2, despite the internet cutoff now being handled in an expedient form of judicial justice, it is as flawed and dangerous as its predecessor, for it was only designed to circumvent the Constitutional Council's decision. The war on sharing continues its way as HADOPI 2 will go through the constitutional test again. ***

After an expedient democratic debate, in which valid alternatives to the war on sharing and possible futures for the cultural economy were systematically ignored by the bill's proponents, the "three strikes" policy might become law. It has already been a long process, after the Members of the European Parliament expressed on three occasions their strong criticisms of the French government's plan. After a first rejection of the law and a second vote in France, the Constitutional Council eventually followed the European Parliament in stating that Internet has become a vital component of the freedom of expression and communication, thus invalidating punitive provisions of the HADOPI 1 law.

Yet, this new law is still as dangerous and flawed as the previous one. First of all, HADOPI 2 fails to guarantee the right to a due process. Instead of giving sanction powers to an executive agency, as HADOPI 1 did, it makes possible to judge copyright infringements and order Internet cutoff through a "simplified judicial procedure". This procedure does not include any contradictory debate or public hearing, and all kind of prior judicial investigation will be left out. Moreover, the Internet cutoff can be ordered as a complement for a standard fine for "negligence" in securing one's Internet access.

Second, alleged infringers would still be convicted on the sole basis of IP addresses that cannot be considered as valid evidence, and which are collected by private actors. And since one has no material way of opposing the validity of these "evidences", this new version of the graduated response still clearly violates the presumption of innocence. It is now up to the Constitutional Council to examine the law, and draw the necessary conclusions.

Yet another adoption of liberty killer "three strikes" law in France. (Thanks, Jérémie!)

Bassam Tariq resides in New York City. He is the co-author of the blog 30 Mosques which celebrated the NYC mosques during the blessed Islamic month of Ramadan.

Bronx Princess follows a young girl from the Bronx, Rocky Otoo, as she leaves her mother to reunite with her chief father in Ghana. I saw the documentary last December at a small viewing and loved it! Musa Syeed and Yoni Brook, the co-directors of the film, have crafted a powerful and intimate story a young girl transitioning from high school to college all with the pressures of an immigrant family. The generational gap issues raised in this film are ones that many immigrant kids, like myself, can relate to. There is a trailer on their site, but it doesn't give justice to how good the movie really is. It's hot off the international film festival circuits and is having its nationwide premiere tonight on PBS at 10PM EST. Please catch it if you can.

Randy at Instructables writes:

I am thrilled to announce that Instructables Build Nights have returned with a vengeance. And our amazing new friends at The reMake Lounge are going to help host them and a host of upcoming Instructables workshops.

We invite one and all to come and bring whatever it is you are working on or would like to swap. If you're not working on anything there will be a YUDU (silkscreen machine) there for people to experiment with and a host of materials and tools like soldering irons and craft supplies. I will also be bringing an Arduino to play around with and would happily give anyone a crash course on how to use one for the upcoming Arduino Contest.

Meet and mingle with local makers. Learn, share, explore and have fun! It will be just like the internet, but in real life!

Instructables build night
Today! September 22nd, 5:30pm
ReMake Lounge
Crocker Galleria
50 Post St. Suite 9
San Francisco, CA 94104
(Ground level near Sutter St. Entrance!)

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I'm headed to Canada for some speaking gigs in the coming week, in PEI, Ottawa, and Waterloo:

Waterloo: Sat, Sept 26, 2:30-4PM, University of Waterloo, Arts Lecture Hall. Free, open to the public. Sponsored by the Independent Studies Programme, where I'm a Scholar in Virtual Residence.

Ottawa: Mon, Sept 28, 7PM, Ottawa Writer's Festival, Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities, 314 Saint Patrick Street (at the corner of Cumberland). $15/$10 Student or Senior (Free for Festival Members and Carleton Students)

Charlottetown, PEI: Tues, 30 Sept, Hackfest, $30 for conference registration.

Charlottetown, PEI: Wed, 1 Oct, 8:30-9:30AM, Access 2009, "Copyright vs Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: The State of Play in the Global Copyfight"

I love coming home to Canada, and it's a delight to be getting out of the usual Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver rut. I'm looking forward to seeing you!

Wired has the odd story of a government intelligence analyst who has been charged with unauthorized access to a protected gov't computer involved in an investigation he was not authorized to access. But the problem is that the whole reason he logged in was because he had the login information emailed to him -- and he claims it went to a bunch of other intelligence analysts as well. Given that the login info was widely emailed around, due to what appears to be a breach in security protocol, it seems rather silly to then charge him with any kind of unauthorized access, and have him facing criminal charges. The real question should be why the guy was emailed the login info in the first place.

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eldavojohn writes "First stated by al-Karaji about a thousand years ago, the congruent number problem is simplified to finding positive whole numbers that are the area of a right triangle with rational number sides. Today the limitations of discovering these congruent numbers is limited only by the size of a computer's hard drive. An international team of mathematicians recently decided to push the limits on finding congruent numbers and came up with the first trillion. Their two approaches are outlined in detail (with pseudo-code) in their paper as well as details on their hardware. For those of you familiar with this sort of work, the article provides links to solving this problem — from multiplying very large numbers to identifying square-free congruent numbers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water: the BEARSHARKTOPUS!

Bearsharktopus (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Update: From the comments --

Dean Putney, September 22, 2009 7:01 AM

Bearsharktopus is from this thread over at Reddit. The second top level comment has the original poster's octopus arm addition.

I'm a pretty slow learner. I've been playing around with electronics for about 9 years and I'm just now learning how awesome transistors are! I could go on and on about the cool stuff you can do with these little guys. The latest cool application I've found for the is making touch sensors. The project pictured above is a modified Speak&Spell. I burned a circuit board with the Speak&Spell logo and a few touch pads to the right of it. Touching the word "Speak" turns the unit on. "Spell" triggers a random letter. "&" triggers a random glitch sound. The touch pads to the right trigger a really crazy hold/distortion effect. This is one of the most interesting effects I've found in a Speak&Spell in years. The strip below changes the pitch. This doesn't actually utilize a transistor. I simply wired the pad to the pitch base on the circuit.

The schematic is shown below. It's simple! and it will work on lots of other circuits!

!!A word of warning!!
Only install touch sensors on circuits that are battery powered or run off of very low current. Touching high current lines can kill you!

The performance of the touch points will be effected by what you are touching with your other hand. I found that touching my wooden work bench worked really well. You might want to put an additional touch point (to ground if you are using PNP resistors and to power if you are using NPNs) that you can touch with your "off" hand. This will help the touch points work more predictably.

From the pages of MAKE:

Printed Circuit Boards. Step-by-step instructions for making your own PCBs at home. MAKE 02 - Page 164. Subscribers--read this article now in your digital edition!

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Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast

This week on my podcast, Beijing journalist Jennifer Pak delivers a chilling report on China's Internet addiction "rehab" centers, where one youth was recently beaten to death. I also look at last week's 9/11 hoax in Germany and compare it to a media/web hoax I pulled 11 years ago, in which I convinced the local news that I had 6-month old babies around the world surfing the web. The question: is the press actually dumber about the Internet today then than it was back then?

MP3 link

Subscribe to Search Engine:

via XML (link)

on iTunes (link)

Psychophrenes writes "A number of French deputies are proposing to pass a law requiring all published photos that were modified by means of an image manipulation program to include a statement indicating that 'the photo was altered in order to modify the appearance of a person.' This indication is to be mandatory on all ads, packaging images, political posters and even art photos, and is considered a matter of public health, aimed at fighting anorexia." The related article is in French, but Google Translate does a pretty good job.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Tetris tiles from Tetris-Tiles.com are Tetris tiles.

I mentioned Tetris, right? And tiles? OK good.

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Ever wonder why futuristic vehicles in science fiction movies have loud whirring/buzzing noises? Perhaps it's because of people worried about pedestrians getting hit by silent vehicles. You may recall that there has been some effort underway to push the makers of hybrid or electric vehicles to add engine noises to their cars, because the electric engines are "too quiet" and unsuspecting pedestrians who fail to look both ways are getting hit. Or so we're told. I've yet to see much actual evidence of the rash of pedestrians-hit-by-Priuses, but the story has gained some legs. In fact, some politicians are even pushing for government mandates to require such cars to be noisier. In an effort to live up to any such requirements, while still making its all electric vehicle still feel futuristic, apparently Nissan is looking to add those Blade Runner-style vehicle noises to the upcoming Nissan Leaf. There's no functional reason for it, other than that they want to make the car noisier, and fake engine noises didn't seem as fun (or, one would imagine, marketable).

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theodp writes "While the Administration is counting on new Federal CIO Vivek Kundra to simplify and speed the federal IT procurement process, it's doubtful he'll be able to reduce red tape to the extent that a former minion of his did at the scandal-rocked D.C. Office of the CTO. Exhibiting some truly out-of-the-box thinking, project manager Tawanna Sellmon not only processed phony invoices for the contractor at the center of the D.C. bribery and kickback scandal, she also gave him the password to the city's computerized database used to track purchase orders. Sellmon pleaded guilty last week for her role in the scam, which netted her an envelope containing $2,000 in cash, as well as an undisclosed number of $25-$100 gift cards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a previous post, I covered several of the available SPARK computing systems, so I won't revisit SPARK hardware too extensively in this series. I will share any interesting discoveries I make working with the Create, iRobot's very simple yet comprehensive robot base. In addition, I'll try to include useful technical details. Of course, as much as the mechanical engineer in me loves to spend time designing and building robot parts, the Create is a nicely developed and well documented platform, so this project is primarily focused on software.

I don't have to worry or think about how the parts I machined might or might not fit together, or whether the motor control board I built will overheat and turn into a pile of smoldering mosfets. The Create takes that worry away, and gives me a mobile platform which I can control via a standard RS-232 serial port.

There is a small catch. iRobot designed the Create with an 8-pin mini-din connector and 0-5v serial port voltages. To connect my Create to my iCop computer, I require an adapter. Fortunately, one can be purchased from iRobot at a reasonable price, or you can make your own.

So now I have the cabling to talk to my Create, but I need to know how to configure messages and what to send in order to control the robot.

Continue on to read the full post here.

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mjasay writes "Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, made a somewhat surprising comment at LinuxCon in Portland, Ore., on Monday: 'Linux is bloated.' While the open-source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft's Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux 'huge and scary now,' according to Torvalds." TuxRadar provides a small capsule of his remarks as well, as does The Register.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SUL is Twitter's Suggested Users List.

It's a group of approximately 500 Twitter users who are "suggested" to new users when they create an account. The stated purpose is to provide people to watch when you're starting out. But are there other purposes? Could it be used to reward positive coverage and punish negative coverage? I think we now have some data on that.

There's no doubt that Twitter has received a lot of help from the press, and much of it is genuine enthusiasm for a communication tool that at least hints at the future of news.

Many of the suggested users are news organizations, reporters, columnists, marketers, and as a result, most have over a million followers. Almost all of the top tech news organizations are on the list. And TechCrunch was one of them until something happened in July as is evident in this TwitterCounter graph.



Compare this to the graph for Mashable, over the same period.



And plotted on the same graph.



It's pretty clear something happened in July.

We know this much -- TechCrunch was dropped from the Suggested User List, right around the time their follower count started heading down. As to why, we can only speculate that it was because they ran a piece that Twitter didn't like.

7/16/09: Twitter's Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be "The Pulse Of The Planet."

People have always questioned whether there was a connection between being on the list and not being too critical of Twitter. At this point, there isn't much doubt that the connection is there.

Johannes writes in with the news of this year's sex/tech Arse Electronika conference in San Francisco:

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that's why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" -- you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century. Don't you think, replicants?

Arse Elektronika 2009 (Thanks, Johannes!)

A year ago, we were surprised to hear that Kentucky's governor was trying to seize the domain names of a long list of over 100 sites that had something to do with gambling. The governor was basing this on a Kentucky law that let the government seize "devices" used for gambling, even though none of the sites in question were based in Kentucky. The governor -- who many say did this to protect local Kentucky gambling operations -- compared these website to "a virtual home invasion." While a judge originally was going to allow the seizure, the state appeals court overturned the ruling, saying that it was clear that a domain name is not a gambling device.

Rather than back down, the governor pushed ahead and is using taxpayer money to appeal the ruling. Ragaboo alerts us to the news that the Kentucky Supreme Court is getting set to hear the case. It's difficult to see how the governor has much of a leg to stand on here. He's trying to seize the domain names of businesses operated entirely outside the state. Allowing such a seizure of domain names would set a horrendous precedent and create all sorts of problems. Hopefully the Kentucky Supreme Court sees this, and Governor Steven Beshear realizes it's best to give up this dangerous crusade.

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A year ago, we were surprised to hear that Kentucky's governor was trying to seize the domain names of a long list of over 100 sites that had something to do with gambling. The governor was basing this on a Kentucky law that let the government seize "devices" used for gambling, even though none of the sites in question were based in Kentucky. The governor -- who many say did this to protect local Kentucky gambling operations -- compared these website to "a virtual home invasion." While a judge originally was going to allow the seizure, the state appeals court overturned the ruling, saying that it was clear that a domain name is not a gambling device.

Rather than back down, the governor pushed ahead and is using taxpayer money to appeal the ruling. Ragaboo alerts us to the news that the Kentucky Supreme Court is getting set to hear the case. It's difficult to see how the governor has much of a leg to stand on here. He's trying to seize the domain names of businesses operated entirely outside the state. Allowing such a seizure of domain names would set a horrendous precedent and create all sorts of problems. Hopefully the Kentucky Supreme Court sees this, and Governor Steven Beshear realizes it's best to give up this dangerous crusade.

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newscloud writes "Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab sounds off on micropayments for news content, on the side of the argument that says they are a dangerous delusion: 'What does it mean for journalism? It could mean charging for different platforms, for early alerts, for special members-only access to certain premium or value-added content. But I'm pretty sure of one thing: It doesn't mean charging people fractions of a cent to read a news story, no matter how sophisticated the process.' The article provides good context on the debate over micropayments from a 2003 piece by Clay Shirky, to recent analysis and opinion by Masnick, Outing, Graham, and Reifman. Google's micropayment plans were recently discussed here."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Travis Chen wrote in to let us know he just finished making his own Monome clone using full-sized arcade buttons. Each of the 64 hand wired Happ arcade buttons is lit with a super bright green LED. The internals utilize the midibox platform which translates midi into Monome compatible OSC.

[via defcon6]

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Not since the WiFi sniffer built to look like a sniper rifle has there been a project with "Bad idea" stamped so many times over it. Matt from NYC Resistor cased a Sansa 2GB MP3 player inside of a decommissioned training hand grenade.

(There was already something of a bomb scare at NYC Resistor when a box was opened with four grenades in it. Yikes. A discovery like that'll sure starch your shorts. It was finally figured out that Matt had ordered them.)

MP3 Gr3nade! [via Hack a Day]

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SGI -- formerly the titanic Silicon Graphics company -- has released a "personal supercomputer" that can handle up to 80 cores and up to a terabyte of RAM. I used to do work for an SGI VAR and we had a running joke about the merged SGI-Cray unit shipping a water-cooled laptop. This isn't that far off.

Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance...

Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.

SGI Unveils Octane III Personal Supercomputer (via The Inquirer)

Creatrope has posted an interesting discussion on the use of Phil Jergensen's reusable grid beam elements for Halloween props. I dunno how much I can get behind the whole gridbeamer thing just yet, but for seasonal stuff it does make a certain sense: If you like it a whole bunch, store it complete, and if you don't, take it apart and reuse the elements.

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The NYC Resistor hackers have installed an MP3 player in a decommissioned training hand-grenade, because they could, and because it is the kind of deliciously bad idea that is hard to resist. Receipt of the grenade in its shipping box occasioned something of a stir at NYC Resistor, it appears.

There was much fear and freak out. But cooler heads prevailed and a phone call was made. "Hey Matt, did you order metal objects of a dubious nature?" "Yes, yes I did." There was a great deal of internal strife over this particular event as ordering munitions to the space is strictly forbidden. Upon review and discussion it was decided that while purchasing decommissioned training grenades was not in fact illegal in NYC (as far as we know), it was not something we would ever do again. That being said. I immediately set forth on a childhood dream project. I put an 1/8th inch jack into the pin hole for the gr3nade. It looked GOOD. Totally flush... very pretty. So I decided to run with it. I ran the cabling into the gr3nade... hacksawed it open. Inserted a Sansa 2 GB mp3 player. And then tried to SMD rework it. This ended poorly as the first sansa basically got burned by the rework station and died. The second I avoided using the rework station and instead recruited bre and his arms for a session of intense soldering onto very tiny solder points.

mp3 grenade in it's final design glory (via Make)

The NY Times has what feels like a warmed over press release talking up the rise of patent auctions and makes some very one-sided and weakly supported assertions that this is somehow good for the market of innovation. It's not. In any way. There have been a bunch of companies trying to "trade" in patents or patent auctions, and all they've done is help make innovation harder by separating the idea from the implementation, and encouraging more lawsuits or extortionary techniques. Patents are no longer being used for innovation or to distribute knowledge. They're used to create a tax on anyone who actually innovates, and comes up with the same concept that others have come up with. Amazingly, the NY Times notes none of this. Instead, it makes the following statement:

And patents, after all, are ideas. Any market mechanisms that speed up the process of figuring out what a patent is worth should hasten the flow of ideas into the economy, accelerating the pace of innovation, policy experts say.

That's wrong. Flat out, bizarrely, backwards and wrong. Ideas don't need a market. You want a market for scarce goods. You don't need a market for goods that are not scarce. This is fundamental stuff and has been obvious for ages. Hell, Thomas Jefferson famously noted that very issue ages ago:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Markets are for property exchange and the more efficient allocation of property. Ideas are not property, and making a market for them and holding them back doesn't accelerate the pace of innovation, it retards it. Greatly. And, more and more studies have been showing this.

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jerryjamesstone writes "Researchers have found that E. coli can be used to recover uranium from tainted waters and can even be used to clean up nuclear waste. Using the bacteria along with inositol phosphate, the bacteria breaks down the phosphate — also called phytic acid — to free the phosphate molecules. The phosphate then binds to the uranium forming a uranium-phosphate precipitate on the cells of the bacteria. Those cells can then be harvested to recover the uranium." What has made this 14-year-old process economically feasible is the use of inositol phosphate, which is a cheap waste material from the production feedstock from plant material.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We have covered making a bamboo bike once or twice before. OK, maybe more like 3 or 4 times! What can I say, we <3 bicycles! Here is yet another DIY bamboo bike frame, however the construction of this one is a bit different. What really caught my attention on this build was the use of paper templates for cutting all the miters. It's a really cool technique that allows the bamboo to hide almost all the structural metal parts, making this the ultimate Gilligan's Island ride. Very cool!

In the Maker Shed:


MAKE: Volume 11 includes a special "DIY Wheels" section, with plans for making a mobile drive-in movie theater, a cool chopper out of an old bicycle, and a pedal powered iPod charger.

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Captured on Bellamack, the perfect headline for Britain's perfectly awful sensationalist rag The Daily Mail.

What a Daily Mail orgasm looks like (via Wonderland!)

We were just writing about courts requiring jurors to sign statements saying they would not Google details of cases they were hearing, and just like clockwork, we hear of a jury verdict that was overturned due to a Googling juror. The case is actually from a few years ago, and is only popping up now, because a higher court has said that the decision to overturn the jury verdict was reasonable. There was one other oddity in the case as well: the reason the juror Googled the information was because he was told ahead of time the names of parties involved in cases he might hear. Why? I have no clue... I would think that any court that does that would likely have a situation where almost everyone on the jury did at least a little searching and poking around.

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Etsy seller Curious Goods Curios has a nice wrinkle on the now-traditional steampunk clockwork ring; these ones spin around and around. I'd buy one, but there's no UK shipping.

Curious Goods Curios (Thanks, Chris!)

Raph sez, "There's been a lot of debate in the Spanish-speaking community about the removal of several books by prominent Puerto Rican authors from the 11th grade curriculum in Puerto Rico, and a bunch of authors are protesting in blogs and in person in protests. Global Voices covered the story today (it's been ongoing for a week)."

The Department of Education of the government of Puerto Rico recently eliminated five books from the eleventh grade curriculum of the public school system: Antología personal, by José Luis González; El entierro de Cortijo, by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá; Mejor te lo cuento: antología personal, by Juan Antonio Ramos; Reunión de espejos, an anthology of essays edited by José Luis Vega (all Puerto Rican authors); and Aura, by Carlos Fuentes from Mexico. The public agency justified its action by saying that the books "contain unacceptable language and vocabulary, which is extremely coarse and vulgar."

The governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuño, supported the decision: "I think I have been very clear, and that all of the mothers and fathers out there understand perfectly that the books that an 18-year-old can read should not be read by a 12-year-old." Numerous writers and artists in Puerto Rico publicly voiced their concerns and described the government's action as censorship. The Federation of Teachers also condemned the decision and stated that it "reflects ignorance about the social reality that our students live in, and a backward-looking vision of modern literature as part of the academic curriculum." After such public pressure, the Department of Education said they had only permanently eliminated one book, but were still evaluating the rest.

Puerto Rico: Debate on Censorship (Thanks, Raph!)

Ant Army wall-stickers come in packs of 105 and are well-suited to staging your own home insect invasion.

Ant Army (via Crib Candy)

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski addressed The Brookings Institution in DC yesterday and laid down the Commission's vision of the future of networking and telecommunications, and it's good stuff: Net neutrality is in, sleazy mobile phone company tricks are out.

This means they cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks, or pick winners by favoring some content or applications over others in the connection to subscribers' homes. Nor can they disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider. The Internet must continue to allow users to decide what content and applications succeed.

This principle will not prevent broadband providers from reasonably managing their networks. During periods of network congestion, for example, it may be appropriate for providers to ensure that very heavy users do not crowd out everyone else. And this principle will not constrain efforts to ensure a safe, secure, and spam-free Internet experience, or to enforce the law. It is vital that illegal conduct be curtailed on the Internet. As I said in my Senate confirmation hearing, open Internet principles apply only to lawful content, services and applications -- not to activities like unlawful distribution of copyrighted works, which has serious economic consequences. The enforcement of copyright and other laws and the obligations of network openness can and must co-exist.

Uh-oh. Sounds like he's saying, "You can have a neutral net, but only if you agree to let ISPs and the entertainment industry spy on every click and every byte, and then degrade the connections of anything they don't like the look of."

Well, we knew that the entertainment industry had the Dems in their pocket. Clinton gave us the DMCA. But it's a start.

Read the Speech (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

The heirs of Jack Kirby -- the comics legend who made Marvel what it is today -- are seeking to employ a little-used copyright rule that lets them wrest Kirby's creations away from Marvel (soon to be Disney-Marvel) and put them back under the estate's control. If they succeed, it will be awfully weird and deadlocked, though, as there will be trademarks covering the characters that still belong to Disney-Marvel; and the collectively created characters, stories, art and situations will be jointly held by two hostile parties: Disney-Marvel and the Kirbys.

My guess is that the Kirbys will end up with the economic right to the characters -- a share of the profits -- but not the moral right -- the right to veto various uses and licenses.

The legal notices expressed an intent to regain copyrights to some creations as early as 2014, according to a statement from Toberoff & Associates, a Los Angeles firm that helped win a court ruling last year returning a share of the copyright in Superman to heirs of the character's co-creator, Jerome Siegel.

Reached by telephone on Sunday, Mr. Toberoff declined to elaborate on the statement. A spokeswoman for Marvel had no immediate comment. Disney said in a statement, "The notices involved are an attempt to terminate rights seven to 10 years from now, and involve claims that were fully considered in the acquisition." Fox, Sony, Paramount and Universal had no comment...

Sony has the film rights to Spider-Man in perpetuity, for instance, while Fox has the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Paramount has a distribution agreement for Marvel's next few self-produced movies, including a second "Iron Man" film. Meanwhile, Hasbro has certain toy rights and Universal holds the Florida theme park rights to Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, among other characters.

After Disney-Marvel Deal, Cartoonist's Heirs Seek to Reclaim Rights (via Making Light)

Jason Kottke has assembled a nice little list of odd economic indicators, from the number of classified romance ads placed by married people looking for affairs to the number of filming permits filed for the LA 2nd Street Tunnel to the reinstatement of a blouse-and-underwear allowance at a swank lawfirm in London:

Inevitably dubbed the "90 nicker knicker allowance", this may or may not be the most reliable indicator yet that the credit crunch is over. (Business is apparently so hectic that the firm has also installed sleeping pods.)

The baked bean index and other economic indicators

This happens every so often, but in the last week or so, there's been a spate of "VCs are bad" types of discussions happening on various blogs. It kicked off with a blog post from Jason Fried at 37Signals, blaming VCs for pushing Mint.com to sell to Intuit. VC Fred Wilson did a nice job responding to that charge by pointing out the usual calculus in figuring out when to sell. Amusingly, very few people seem to notice what Fred was basically saying in his post. The undercurrent was that Mint.com likely wasn't doing nearly as well as its cheerleaders have assumed -- and thus, selling out made a lot of sense, not from a VC perspective, but from the founders' perspective.

Still, it's pretty popular in Silicon Valley to knock VCs, and TechCrunch has a post from Vivek Wadhwa pouring on the VC bashing, complaining about VCs taking way too much credit for innovation. Now, I'm a big fan of Wadhwa and his research on startups and innovation, and I'm among the first to bash VCs when it's warranted (and, yes, there are plenty of times when it's very, very warranted), but I think Wadhwa's piece goes too far. He's right that it's a little silly that the the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) seems to be taking credit for all of the revenue and jobs created from any startup that has ever taken any venture money, but that doesn't mean that venture capital is meaningless in innovation.

While I'm actually a huge fan of building companies without venture capital (and am doing that myself), I think what people need to realize is that venture money is quite useful in enabling certain types of businesses. The problem is when people (very often Silicon Valley people) get into the mindset that raising venture capital is an end goal in itself, rather than looking at the overall business and seeing if it even needs venture money. During the dot com bubble, there was a time when people looked at venture capital like revenue -- the more you raised, the better you were doing, rather than recognizing that it really meant you just had a bigger hole to dig yourself out of. However, in some cases, where a company really does need investment capital to take a business to the next level, smart venture money can be a great help.

The nice thing today is that more and more businesses can be started, built and can scale without that need. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with venture capital. In fact, it's better if it's easier to build businesses. But that also doesn't mean that VC is somehow bad or isn't really a key part in accelerating certain innovative businesses. Venture capital is a part of the ecosystem, and that's a good thing. There are times when people give it too much credit, and there are other times when it doesn't get enough credit, but the real trick is just in understanding where and when it makes sense.

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eldavojohn writes "As we discussed at the time, there was a strange development at the end of Netflix's competition in which The Ensemble passed BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos by 0.01% a mere twenty minutes after BellKor had submitted results past the ten percent mark required to win the million dollars. Unfortunately for The Ensemble, BellKor was declared the victor this morning because of that twenty-minute margin. For those of you following the story, The New York Times reports on how teams merged to form Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos and take the lead, which sparked an arms race of teams conjoining to merge their algorithms to produce better results. Now the Netflix Prize 2 competition has been announced." The Times blog quotes Greg McAlpin, a software consultant and a leader of the Ensemble: "Having these big collaborations may be great for innovation, but it's very, very difficult. Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded. The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don't work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ignite is an event where folks give 5-minute talks. Get your dose of distilled awesomeness on Wednesday in NYC:

IgniteNYC partners with the New York Television Festival on September 23rd for a night of speedy presentations with FREE Stella Artois & yummy Chipotle tacos.

Speakers include:

   * Charlie Todd of ImprovEverywhere.com

   * Andrew Baron of Rocketboom + Mag.ma

   * TED's Film + Video Director and co-creator Jason Wishnow

   * Dina Kaplan & Justin Day of Blip.tv

   * Ian Spector of chucknorrisfacts.com

More speakers to be announced soon. Follow @ignitenyc on Twitter to hear the announcements! Free tickets available now. RSVP now on Facebook or Eventbrite.

Ignite NYC

Wednesday, September 23, 7pm

New World Stages

340 West 50th Street, NYC

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Last week, in discussing my debate about newspaper online business models with the NY Times' David Carr, one of our commenters wanted more actual examples of what newspapers should do. Luckily, an anonymous commenter put up some ideas and some suggestions on how to structure a news business. Meanwhile, over the weekend, Steve Yelvington posted a nice list of seven keys to building healthy online community, which newspapers should mostly follow (my one quibble: I think he's wrong to deny anonymous commenting). But most of the other stuff in there makes a lot of sense, and includes things that newspapers rarely do, such as giving the users more power, participating in the community, and even just recognizing that the community is a priority.

Then, Mathew Ingram points us to a list from Dan Gillmor about things he would do if he ran a news organization, most of which focus (also) on involving the community a lot more. The whole list is worth reading, but one thing I really liked was the idea of including a box with each article that includes "Things We Don't Know" with an invitation for readers to fill in some of the blanks. So, along those lines, we certainly don't know "the answer" to news business models (as if there is a single answer), but would love to hear more ideas in the comments.

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Lose/lose is computer game that destroys your files, reminds me of a few operating systems...

lose/lose is a game about choice and consequence, and by extension what it means to succeed (fail). You play the role of a space captain on a seemingly endless quest to destroy attacking aliens. You receive one point for each alien you kill. You have one life, and if an alien touches you, you will explode. If you manage to kill all of the aliens without dying, you will win the game. There is an online scoreboard which is viewable below. Although lose/lose is a video-game, everything that happens while you play is real. Each alien is procedurally generated out of a file on your computer. When you kill an alien, the file it was created from is destroyed. On the other hand, if you are killed, the application itself will be destroyed.

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Eugen notes an article up at Ars reporting that Microsoft, besides copying Apple's retail formula, is now going after Apple's retail employees. "Microsoft is reportedly trying to hire away Apple's retail employees by bribing them with... wait for it, better wages. 'People that have spoken to The Loop on condition of anonymity confirm that Microsoft has contacted a number of Apple's retail store managers to work in their stores. In addition to "significant raises," the managers have also been offered moving expenses in some cases.' It doesn't end there: once the ex-Apple managers have jumped ship, they are asked to contact their top sales employees at their old workplaces and offer them similar positions at Microsoft's retail stores, also with higher pay. ... If you work in an Apple store near a soon-to-be-opened Microsoft store, apparently the software giant is giving you a free pass; no looking through job postings necessary!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bassam Tariq resides in New York City. He is the co-author of the blog 30 Mosques which celebrated the NYC mosques during the blessed Islamic month of Ramadan. He is also an ad writer at Saatchi. Don't worry, if he were you, he'd also change the channel when his ads come on.


Eid Mubarak everyone! (Happy Eid) The Islamic month of Ramadan ended on Saturday evening. The new month in the Islamic calendar starts with the sighting of the new moon. I remember being a kid in Pakistan and climbing our rooftop to see if the new moon was out. If we didn't see it on the 29th day of Ramadan, we'd fast for another day and declare the first of Shawwal (the name of the next month) the day after. Kind of confusing at first, but its more so based on a communal decision than an 8 year old Bassam's sighting. The sighting of the new moon marks the beginning of the next Islamic month, Shawwal, and the Eid-ul Fitr celebration.

Eid means festivity in Arabic and Fitr means breaking of the fast and so the holiday symbolizes the breaking of the fasting period. In fact, the first day of Eid is the only day it is forbidden to fast. As the myth I heard growing up went, "the devil fasts on Eid! Do you want to fast with the devil?"

Most of my family is in Houston and I wanted to spend the last days of Ramadan, as well as Eid ul Fitr with them. So I packed my bags and left New York on Thursday night.


Most families get up early on Eid to catch the morning prayer. It's not an obligatory prayer, but more of a way for the community to come together in celebration. In Houston, the Islamic Society of Greater Houston rents out the George R. Brown Convention Center and convenes the largest gathering of Muslims in Texas. Somewhere in Houston, Tom Delay is cringing. 

We blocked a whole road as we entered and exited the convention center.


We pray towards Makkah and that's why we're all heading in that direction. Notice the rolls of paper laid out for the prayer. 


Yes, more of us. Since I was in the men's section I couldn't get many photos of the women. Plus, it'd be a little awkward for an young Muslim man to barge into the women's area and start taking photos. There is a certain distance that the genders tend to keep with each other. Or, well, at least in these gatherings. 

After the prayer ends, the Eid hugs begin. The Eid hugs are pretty distinct from normal hugs, you huge on the right side, then the left, and then the right again. Yes, we're so happy to eat again we hug not once, twice, but three times. 

The rest of the day is spent visiting family and friends. We had a lot of guests over our small house. Being the youngest in my family, 22, I am responsible for entertaining all the kids that come. I thought of talking to them about the importance of keeping a good GPA and taking the SATs. But I hadn't touched my X-Box in over a year and wanted to kick some ass in Marvel v Capcom 2, their education could wait. 

 

Lately, we've been seeing a lot more copyright lawsuits coupled with trademark lawsuits. Quite often, the idea is to use the trademark claim to get around any DMCA safe harbor that's been claimed, but some may be doing it to try to increase damages. It looks like at least one court has stopped one attempt to do just that. Michael Scott points us to a ruling in NY, where a software developer charged someone else with both copyright and trademark infringement. The accused never responded to the lawsuit, so the original developer won a default judgment. However, on requesting separate statutor claims for infringing on copyrights and trademarks, as well as on violating the DMCA, the court said no, pointing out that it was really only one copy, not three, and thus the end result only "produced one harm."

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Over at the synthesizer blog synthtube, a list of notable performances on youtube "by average, acoustic artists who decided to cover Michael Jackson as a tribute to his death." Alex Ringis from synthtube says, "most of these renditions are notable not for their synthesizer content, but for the fact that when you lay most of Michael Jacksons' songs bare, down to something as simple as a voice and a guitar, you are left with the original songwriting that really he should be remembered for - pure, simple and brilliant, even at a very young age."

Above, "She's Out of My Life", a touching minimalist performance on Ukelele, by "seeso".

Break with Tradition : MJ Tribute (synthtube)

An interesting story of evolving software.

In 2002, my company shipped a product called Radio UserLand. It was a very popular blogging tool, but it was also the most popular RSS reading tool of the day. And because it was both things, we could do integration that no other product had ever done before, or since.

Adjacent to every item in the aggregator was a button that said POST. When you click it, you flip to the blog post entry screen with the text of the item in the big box. You could add your own words, shorten it, whatever you like. When you were done, hit Submit and you'd have a post that pointed to the original article with your comments.

As an aside, this is where the RSS <source> element came from. We'd embed that, invisibly, in your post so tools could find their way back to the original. This was in response to an outcry from bloggers that we were helping people steal content. Seems like a foreign idea today, doesn't it?

Anyway...

Fast-forward to 2009, and I'm back at work in AggregatorLand, and like it or not, Twitter is where we push links to these days. So now instead of a POST button look what's there in its place.



Now, it is very much more clever than the POST button was back in 2002. Just how much clever -- you'll have to wait to find out, because I'm still working. But when you see my links to test.teamrss.com on Twitter you'll know that I'm testing the new stuff. Murphy-willing it should be released to River2 users tomorrow.

(Ed. Note: The Boing Boing Video site includes a guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. We'll post roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

iPhone snapshot: an array of vertical lights, Louis Vuitton window display, Macy's San Francisco Union Square, September, 2009. stills | video (embedded after the jump).

LEGO artist Nathan Sawaya built this awesome functional cello out of LEGO bricks.

Watching his build progress reminded me of how the 3d printing process looks. I hadn't really made the connection before, but if home printing really does become ubiquitous, will it obsolete our coveted LEGOs and erector sets? I can almost imagine some distant future where I explain to my grandchildren about these archaic pieces that we used to have to snap together in order to make our inventions. Strange.

[via neatorama]

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Barence writes "It might be reliable enough to power their device, but it seems some companies are still a bit reluctant to use the 'L word' when talking about their products. Speaking at the launch of the touchscreen Pure Sensia digital radio, director of marketing Colin Crawford was pressed for specifics of the new device's software. But after his CEO reminded him that the new radio was based on a Linux OS, Crawford remarked: 'I don't like the using the word "Linux" on a radio.'" Of course the presence of (possibly embedded) Linux may not have any relevance to consumers in some products; but does the word itself carry a commercial stigma?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There have been all sorts of questions about unfair bias in the Swedish trial against The Pirate Bay and its founders, and the latest claim is that one of the "lay judges" on the appeal is employed by Spotify, currently a music industry darling trying to set up a licensed, authorized online music streaming system. Given that Spotify could reasonably see sites like The Pirate Bay as somewhat competitive, and that it counts major record labels among its ownership, it's hard to see how allowing an employee to be on the lay judge panel (sort of, but not really, the equivalent of a jury) is even close to fair.

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These are the shoes that go with the Death Valley-inspired Rodarte collection I blogged about last week. Susannah Breslin pointed me to both. I am rendered textless by the awesomeness of these shoes. More images here. (jakandjil.com)

Happy birthday to H.G. Wells, born September 21, 1866. It would be hard to quantify the impact that ol' Herbert George had on science fiction, science and technology, and even politics and culture. As with many sci-fi writers, I'm certain that countless scientists and engineers decided to go into their field inspired by his fantastic tales which often seemed just out of reach, somewhere on the horizon.

I still remember the wonder and palpable sense of "this has GOT to be possible" I got while reading The Time Machine, The First Men in the Moon, The Invisible Man, and others of his books as a kid. He shared that gift with Verne (though Verne was perhaps more rigorous with his sci-tech speculations). They also share the title of "Father of Science Fiction."

H.G. Wells Wikipedia entry

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The Innovation Movement is an important effort to help make sure that innovation in the US is not stifled through bad regulations. In this discussion, we're looking for insights into how to make sure trade policy for things such as "Buy American" aren't used in a way that causes much larger amounts of harm to American innovation.

We all know that the economy is in tough shape these days, and (as always happens in such situations) there's often a misguided push to put up trade barriers to try to force people to "Buy American." Of course, time and time again, such trade barriers have proven to actually do tremendous harm to Americans, rather than help them. We're already seeing this with friendly trading partners like Canada threatening to retaliate. That retaliation harms American jobs much more than any jobs "gained" from such protectionist barriers (as pointed out by the non-partisan and highly respected Peterson Institute). On top of that, by adding barriers on goods that Americans want, the end result is only that Americans end up paying *more* for their goods -- not exactly an outcome consumers are likely to appreciate during an economic downturn.

Granted, it's quite easy to understand the patriotic feeling behind a "Buy American" clause -- and we all want to support our country. But the problem is that in not paying attention to the actual impact, and pretending that there are no "unintended consequences," a Buy American clause can be detrimental to America in the long run. That doesn't seem particularly patriotic.

The Innovation Movement is an effort by the Consumer Electronics Association to make more people aware of important policy issues, and to make sure that Congress actually takes relevant data into account, rather than just focusing on the patriotic headline while ignoring the unpatriotic results.

In this Insight Community Conversation, we're looking for thoughtful and well-written discussions on the pros and cons of a "Buy American" clause for US policies. The best results will be used as posts on the Innovation Movement website.

This is a case from the Insight Community, a powerful new marketplace that connects companies with intelligent communities like Techdirt. Click here to learn more.

• Earn up to $100 for Insights on this case.
• Insights Due: 23 Sep 2009, 11:59PMPT

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