I came across Astonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life when I took my kids to the California Science Center in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and found it in the gift store. It was written by philosopher Roger-Pol Droit, a researcher at the Centre de Recherche Scientifique and, as the title indicates, contains 101 mental and perceptual exercises you can perform on yourself.
In his introduction, Droit says the purpose of the experiments is to "provoke tiny moments of awareness," and to "shake a certainty we had taken for granted: our own identity, say, or the stability of the outside world, or even the meanings of words." Most of the experiments require about 20 minutes to complete, and often involve nothing more than merely thinking about something.
Some of the experiments you'll probably want to try when you are alone at home (like calling your name repeatedly for 20 minutes, or repeating some other word to drain it of its meaning), but others can be performed anywhere (like imagining that the world was "created from nothing, just an instant ago" and will vanish "like a light going out" in 20 minutes).
Some of the experiments you can't really plan in advance; they'll happen by accident, like when you wake up without knowing where you are -- a magical experience I love having, but Droit explains how to make the best use of this five-second-long "delicious lightness of a mystery without menace" the next time it happens: "What you do not know, for a tiny interval of time, is what the place is called, where it is, and you you are doing there. But you're certain that you are somewhere, and will find out very soon... try not to lose hold of this rare moment of perfect suspension between doubt and confidence, certitude and ignorance, anxiety and satisfaction."
One of the things I've learned from doing just a few of the exercises in this book is how hard it to stop being so busy and slow down enough to do the experiments. I don't want to stop sitting in front of my computer, playing games, reading a book, tending to chickens, tidying the house, or a million other things that tug at me, but a few minutes after getting started with one of Droit's exercises, I feel good about taking a break from those habitual behaviors.
BB pal and periodic guestblogger Richard Metzger has an amazing blog post up about the off-Broadway musical Man on the Moon. The play was conceived by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and his third wife, South African actress, Genevieve Waite, as a potential film or stage production originally entitled "Space."
The stage performance was produced by Andy Warhol. Long-lost video footage of the play is embedded above. More video over at Metzger's blog, too, amazing stuff.
The following text was written by Chris Campion and Jeffrey A. Greenberg from the liner notes of the CD release of Andy Warhol Presents Man on the Moon.
I'll post a snip here, but you have to read the whole thing to hear about the part Philips wrote for Elvis, and all the weird little factoids about Warhol's work, and allegations that George Lucas stole the idea for Star Wars from this offbeat project. Snip:
Space was born the day Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Like millions of other people, John watched the 1969 moon landing on TV. He was living, at the time, on the Malibu property rented by British film director Michael Sarne, who was under contract at Fox to direct the adaptation of Gore Vidal's novel, Myra Breckenridge, with Rex Harrison, Raquel Welch and Mae West. Sarne had commissioned John to write songs for the film.
The Apollo 11 moon landing became an obsession. John would watch a recording of the TV transmission made on an early video tape machine over and over. The idea of exploring this new frontier - and particularly Neil Armstrong's scripted aside as he stepped onto the lunar surface that it was, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - fired John's imagination, and he began to piece together ideas for a mythical space opera set to music. "He loved myths," says Genevieve, who was first introduced to John by Sarne that summer. "He liked Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey."
(...) Genevieve bemoaned the fate of the show to her friend, Andy Warhol, who offered to find a backer, and did. Warhol also agreed to serve as a producer, and provided a director in the form of Paul Morrissey, who had made a series of avant-garde exploitation films under Warhol's aegis (Flesh, Trash, Heat, Chelsea Girls, etc.). John expressed his bemusement about Warhol's involvement in the song, "Oh Andy My Assistant": "Oh Andy, my assistant/your mind is so consistently blank/that I'm banking on you now/so please so don't try to comprehend/the reason why I have to send/ you up or else, I'm sure that we, shall have a terrible row/It's either you or I must save the race/ So bye-bye Andy and off you're goin' to Space."
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
A group of tinkerers and security researchers announced findings that prove it is possible to bypass the controls of "e-meter" parking meters -- which means it's possible to park for free where such meters are in use. The group announced their findings last week at the 2009 Black Hat Briefings in Las Vegas. Snip:
Throughout the United States, cities are deploying "smart" electronic fare collection infrastructures. In 2003, San Francisco launched a $35 million pilot program to replace approximately 23,000 mechanical parking meters with electronic units that boasted tamper resistance, payment via smart card, auditing capabilities, and an estimated $30 million annually in fare collection revenue. Other major cities, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Diego, have made similar moves. This presentation details our evaluation of electronic parking meters, including hardware disassembly, smart card protocol emulation, and silicon die analysis.
An underground Hungarian stem-cell clinic offering unspecified "therapies" to desperate members of the public has been the subject of a police raid. Reportedly, some 100 "stem cell tourists" have visited the clinic, paying "as much as $25,000 per person."
Stem cell therapy is promising, but there are major hurdles to overcome, not least the risk of the cells causing cancer.
"There's no proven benefit of any of the treatments on offer at commercial clinics, and there's risks of infection, not getting the stem cells at all, or them growing into something you don't want," says Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who runs the Quackwatch website. "So to go for treatment is a very foolish thing to do."
Defense technology reporter Noah Shachtman has been covering conflicts over the use of social media within the US military ranks for years. This past week, he's been on top of the most recent news that the Pentagon may impose a very wide ban on Twitter and Facebook for security reasons.
Military Times says discussions on what to do about the social media sites involve U.S. Strategic Command, "the Pentagon's chief information officer and its public affairs organization, and are being guided by Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn."
Opinions range across the "full spectrum" from an all-out blockade to doing nothing at all, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman tells the paper.
"The answer is somewhere between," he said. We're working through this challenge of how do we operate in this environment -- because these are important communication tools -- and at the same time, provide the necessary protection to our systems [and] ensure the necessary operational security and private security concerns that any organization would have."
Emma announced during a guitar lesson one day that she felt like writing a song. I started playing some chords, and this is what she came up with. Amazing. The Jam's a chance for Heartwood Guitar Instruction students to showcase their talents. Enjoy!
I'm pretty nuts about the original punk/hardcore/deathmetal jams written and performed by 9-year-old Connor, too -- 'specially DEATH NIGHTMARE. WTF with all these rockin' kids, Seattle, is it something in the water up there?
A jury has decided that 25-year-old Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum must pay $675,000 to four record labels for downloading and sharing 30 digital music files. He admitted to having downloaded hundreds of songs, but the labels and the court nailed him for 30 specific tracks he dowloaded via Kazaa.
This past June, a federal jury in Minneapolis ordered Jamie Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year old Native American mother of four, to pay $1.92 million for copyright violations involving 24 downloaded songs.
[He] testified Thursday in federal district court in Boston that he had downloaded and shared hundreds of songs by artists including Nirvana, Green Day and the Smashing Pumpkins, and said he had lied in pretrial depositions when he said friends or siblings may have downloaded the songs to his computer. (...) Under federal law they were entitled to $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, but the jury was permitted to raise that to as much as $150,000 a track if it found the infringements were willful.
AmLaw Litigation Daily, a legal trade publication, had an interesting piece up about the arguments in this case around fair use -- and about some of the courtroom drama, including defense attorney Charles Nesson posting an internet video of his wife calling one of the members of the defense team a "schmuck." Snip:
On Monday, with jury selection about to begin, the judge knocked out one of Nesson's key legal theories, granting partial summary judgement to the five record companies suing Tenebaum on the question of Tenenbaum's fair use of the copyrighted songs. Though the judge said she will issue a full opinion later, her minute order is pretty stinging: "Tenebaum proposes a fair use defense so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created," she wrote.
This 32-story condominium in Fort Myers, Florida has 200 units and only one is occupied. The Vangelakos purchased their unit four years ago and nobody else has ever moved in. The scene sounds like something from a JG Ballard novel, which is appropriate considering I heard about it from Simon Sellars's @Ballardian Twitter stream. From the Associated Press:
Most of the other tenants in the 200-unit condo didn't close on their contracts, and the few that did have transferred to an adjacent building owned by the same company because more people live there.
The Vangelakos' mortgage lender will not allow them to do the same.
That leaves them as the sole residents of the Oasis Tower One.
"It's a beautiful building," said their attorney, John Ewing, who is representing 27 others who made deposits on units. "The problem is, it's a very lonely building."
When the Vangelakos' travel from Weehawken, N.J., to spend a week or a few days in their Florida home, they have exclusive use of the pool, game room and gym, but they miss having a few tenants around.
"Being from the city, it's very eerie," Vangelakos said. "It's almost like a scary movie."
A large, circular fountain in front of the building is dry. The automatic glass doors that lead to the front lobby are locked. On the front desk is a guest sign-in sheet. The last entry: Feb. 13, 2009.
"It's like time froze here six months ago," Ewing said.
If America comes to a catastrophic end, what will the causes be? Josh Levin of Slate wants to know. He's created a "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" web-based application that lets you select five causes from a collection of "144 potential causes of America's future death." Based on your choices, Slate will tell you what kind of a doomsayer you are. People who take the poll are also asked to supply age, gender, zip code. On Friday, Slate will publish the results.
I picked Peak Oil, China Unloads U.S. Treasuries, Deficit Spending, Peak Water, and Megadrought, which makes me a "humanitarian internationalist." Compared to the average Slate reader, I believe more people will survive and that the disaster is more man's fault than nature's.
If and when America expires, we probably won't agree on the cause of death. For proof that autopsies of empires are inconclusive, consider the case of Alexander Demandt, the German historian who set out in the 1980s to collect every theory ever given for why Rome fell. The final tally: 210, including attacks by nomads on horseback, blood poisoning, decline of Nordic character, homosexuality, outflow of gold, and vaingloriousness.
In tribute to Demandt, I've gone looking for every possible reason why America could fall. I've paged through the work of scholars who have studied the characteristics of declining and failed societies. I also collected theories from futurists, doomsayers, separatists, economists, political scientists, national security experts, climatologists, geologists, astronomers, and a few miscellaneous crazy people. The result: a collection of 144 potential causes of America's future death.
This summer, two research expeditions are headed to the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii. Twice the size of Texas, the Garbage Patch is a massive dump of discarded plastic, much of which has deteriorated into tiny bits. Fish and birds eat the material, and die. With 70 percent of the Garbage Patch's plastic sunk under the surface, cleaning it up isn't a matter of skimming the surface of the vortex. From National Geographic:
"We need to do the chemistry and see how much plastic is reaching the water and the ocean sediments, how much is being broken into [these] tiny particles and ingested by marine life at rates we can't imagine," said (Jim Dufour of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego).
The project will also explore clean up options, which aren't as easy as simply scooping up waste.
"It's a tough job. [Open-ocean] fish live under things like Styrofoam cups. If you simply drag a net you'll end up killing off a lot of the resources that you want to protect," Dufour said.
Birthers, who refuse to accept Obama's actual Hawaiian birth certificate as proof that he was born in the United States, are holding up a copy of a laughably shoddy, error-filled, forged Kenyan birth certificate as incontrovertible proof that Obama was born in Kenya.
Daily Kos and other sites are having fun debunking this poorly-executed forgery.
First, the hospital is Coast Provincial General Hospital (sometimes said to be Coast Province General Hospital), not Coast General Hospital.
Second, Kenya was a Dominion the date this certificate was allegedly issued and would not become a republic for 8 months. Third, Mombasa belonged to Zanzibar when Obama was born, not Kenya.
Fourth, Obama's father's village would be nearer to Nairobi, not Mombasa.
Fifth, the number 47O44-- 47 is Obama's age when he became president, followed by the letter O (not a zero) followed by 44--he is the 44th president.
Sixth, EF Lavender is a laundry detergent. Seventh, would a nation with a large number of Muslims actually say "Christian name" (as opposed to name) on the birth certificate?
Eighth, his father (born in 1961) would have been 24 or 25 when he was born and not 26.
Ninth, it was called the "Central Nyanza District," not Nyanza Province. The regions were changed to provinces in 1970.
Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."
When the American Academy in Rome appointed me a scholar in residence for two weeks this summer, an evil gleam kindled in my eye. I knew exactly what I wanted to do: worship Italian cooking in its birthplace like some foodie penitent, a gastro-fundamentalist version of those frighteningly devout pilgrims who earn plenary indulgences by ascending, on their knees, the steep marble stairs of the Piazza di Porta San Giovanni in Rome. (Pontius Pilate's staircase, allegedly, lugged all the way to from the Holy Land to the Holy City in the year 326. A wood casing protects the venerated steps; strategically cut openings reveal what are purported to be Christ's bloodstains. Believer beware...)
That was my first, albeit covert, order of business.
My Official Reason for Being in Italy was to research my book-in-progress, The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation of the paradox of awful beauty---beheld things whose retinal seductions are irresistible yet whose content is morally horrific, politically incorrect, or at the very least, viscerally repulsive. (About which, more shortly, in my next post.)
The second item on my hidden agenda was to convince the editors of Boing Boing to let me blog my Grand Tour, which I hoped would be of interest to like-minded Mutants. With the editors' blessing, I would chronicle my encounters with Wonderful Things&trade in a style that, in my dreams, crossed the scholarly fastidiousness of Charles Willson Peale with the deadpan urbanity Rod Serling, whose brand of suave always hit that sweet spot between Mad Men and the mortician's prep table.
I'm not being glib, here. In his famous natural-history museum, Peale was one of the first to embrace the logic of the Linnean taxonomy, a paradigm-shift away from the jumbled cabinets of curiosity, or "wonder closets," of the 17th century, whose intent was not to rationalize and secularize/de-sacralize the world, but to inspire wonder and horror at wild nature and exotic cultures in a time when fact and fable were conjoined twins. Boing Boing's insistence that it is a "directory" implies a certain Enlightenment epistemology, an ordering impulse, the same desire to Explain the Mystery of It All that flickers through the pop sociology and scientific edutainment of TED videos, WIRED articles, and Gladwell lectures. At the same time, Boing Boing is all about "wonderful" things---tagged by category, to be sure, yet experienced by the reader as a free-associated stream of images and ideas and events. The site is a wunderkammer of the Web, where a post about Jack Kirby's comic-book retellings of readers' dreams might follow an item about a summer camp for atheist kids or a link to a photo that does (or does not) bear an uncanny resemblance to the famous image of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. The implicit logic, here, is less that of the diligently taxonomized archive than that of the madcap cabinet of curiosities, where the prehistoric insect embedded in a piece of amber sits next to the bona fide unicorn's horn, the anencephalic fetus in a vitrine full of brandy keeps company with the mummified mermaid on the shelf beside it.
Later today, and over the next two weeks, I hope you'll join me on a guided tour of some of Italy's most spectacular manifestations of the Pathological Sublime (with occasional corner-of-the-mouth asides inspired by more conventional tourist destinations, as well). In Rome, we'll prowl the Museo Storico Nazionale dell'Arte Sanitaria in Rome, and of course the Crypt of the Capuchin Monks, and we'll contemplate the sanctified eroticism of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, too. In Florence, we'll succumb to the uncanny seductions of the 18th-century wax medical models, especially the obstetric mannequins known as "Anatomical Venuses," in the stunning museum La Specola. In the same city, we'll visit the by-invitation-only museums at the Careggi hospital, where we'll marvel at the bizarre, Dr. Phibes-ian anatomical preparations of Girolamo Segato (1792-1836), whose exact nature remains a mystery to this day, and at the breathtakingly hyperrealistic wax models of pathological conditions, and at the unforgettable teratological specimens preserved in formalin. In Ozzano Emilia, outside Bologna, we'll wander the Museum of Veterinary Pathology and Teratology, also by invitation only, a surrealist bestiary of congenital mash-ups, most of them stillborn; back in Bologna, we'll pay homage to the exquisite medical waxes of the incomparable Ercole Lelli, in the Palazzo Poggi, nor will we neglect the dimly lit, unloved Museum of Zoology of the University of Bologna, an unintentional monument to the Taxidermic Grotesque, its stuffed animals in their final, melancholy stages of decay.
I'm thrilled by the prospect of submitting these sights, and my insights, for your sharp-witted consideration. In my experience as a reader and a writer, the bb multitudes are smarter by an order of magnitude than nearly any avant-pop, mass/cult audience I've encountered. As important, you've earned your weirdness stripes through frequent exposure to the unkillable GOATSE meme. Over breakfast.
As I go, I'll be test-driving arguments for my book-in-progress; any Mutant whose comments sharpen my analysis or inspire previously unconsidered angles of intellectual attack will of course be cited in my acknowledgements.
Is all of this a bit much for a Monday morning? If so, my apologies. But I never promised you a unicorn chaser.
Image: "The Artist in His Museum," Charles Willson Peale, self-portrait, 1822. Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George W. Elkins Collection. Used under the Fair Use provision.
I'm delighted to welcome Mark Dery as our guestblogger for the next two weeks. Mark is a cultural critic and author whose work I've enjoyed for almost twenty years. In my library, his books share a shelf with the best nonfiction by Ballard, Burroughs, and Eco. As I've written on BB before, "Mark and I have overlapping interests in subjects that, as once defined by Mark Frauenfelder's young daughter Sarina, are 'creepy, interesting, and real.' Mark Dery's take on such matters is often filled with wonderfully obscure references to history, culture, and philosophy that, more often than not, are news to me. That's one of the reasons I like reading his essays and books so much. When I finish one, I always have a great list of links and juxtapositions to follow up on." Here's Mark's "official" bio:
Mark Dery is a cultural critic. Way back in the day, he edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994), an academic anthology that kick-started scholarly interest in techno-feminism and black technoculture (through Dery's trailblazing essay "Black to the Future," in which he coined the term "Afrofuturism"). His 1993 pamphlet "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the term "culture jamming" and helped launch the movement of the same name. In 1996, Dery established himself, with Suck essays such as "Bit Rot," his point-by-point obliteration of Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, and his book Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, as a passionate, progressive critic of libertarian cyberdrool. In 1999, he published The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, an analysis of the cultural psyche of millennial America as refracted through media figures such as the Unabomber, the Heaven's Gate cult, and right-wing survivalists like Timothy McVeigh, and emerging trends such as gated communities, "safe rooms," and Jerry Springer-style freaktalk---a zeitgeist whose economic instability, social pathologies, and media-fueled weirdness seem to be back with a bang. Until fall 2009, he taught media criticism and narrative nonfiction in the Department of Journalism at New York University. Since leaving NYU, he has been a freelance journalist, book author, and lecturer. In summer 2009, he was appointed visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, where he researched his book-in-progress, The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical inquiry into the paradox of awful beauty (images whose retinal seductions are irresistible yet whose content is viscerally repulsive or morally obscene), an aesthetic conundrum that is particularly relevant to our Age of Unreason, with its viral videos, tabloid media, and gorenography.
Dr Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA), says his agency's recent study of 800 oil fields around the world (representing three quarter's of the world's oil reserves) reveal that we are facing a global energy catastrophe even sooner than researchers thought.
The IEA estimates that the decline in oil production in existing fields is now running at 6.7 per cent a year compared to the 3.7 per cent decline it had estimated in 2007, which it now acknowledges to be wrong.
(Above, trailer for upcoming movie, "Leslie, My Name Is Evil")
Here's Part 1 of a 5-part excerpt from John Waters' forthcoming book, Role Models (2010) running in the The Huffington Post. Waters writes about his friendship with Leslie Van Houten, the Manson Family member who is serving a life sentence for murdering Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in 1969.
I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969 cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would like her as much as I do. She was one of those notorious "Manson girls" who shaved their heads, carved X's in their foreheads and laughed, joked, and sang their way through the courthouse straight to death row without the slightest trace of remorse forty years ago. Leslie is hardly a "Manson girl" today. Sixty years old, she looks back from prison on her involvement in the La Bianca murders (the night after the Tate massacre) in utter horror, shame, and guilt and takes full responsibility for her part in the crimes. I think it's time to parole her.
I am guilty, too. Guilty of using the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way in my earlier films without the slightest feeling for the victims' families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case. I became obsessed by the Sharon Tate murders from the day I read about them on the front page of the New York Times in 1969 as I worked behind the counter of the Provincetown Book Shop. Later, when the cops finally caught the hippy killers and I actually saw their photos ("Arrest Weirdo in Tate Murders", screamed the New York Daily News headlines) I almost went into cardiac arrest. God! The Manson Family looked just like my friends at the time!
I'm looking forward to reading the other four parts of this excerpt, though I seriously doubt it'll change my opinion that Van Houten should spend the rest of her life in prison.
Gareth Branwyn conjured up this fun 1970 documentary on the Church of Satan and its founder Anton Szandor LaVey. According to many friends of mine who knew LaVey, the "black pope" was, er, wicked smart, insightful, witty, and had the charisma of a great showman. Which of course he was. He also played a mean organ. I wish I'd met him! Satanis: The Devil's Mass
The Architects Journal compiled a top 10 list of "the greatest illustrated urban spaces" from comic books. Above, panels from Moebius' The Long Tomorrow and Herge's Tintin. Also featured: Radiant City, Metropolis, Ubicand, Gotham City, Daredevil's New York, From Hell's London, Chris Ware's Chicago, and Mega City One. Top 10 Comic Book Cities(via Drawn!)
Researchers are developing a new nanotech process to create a self-healing material that repairs itself if damaged The scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute and Duisburg-Essen University peppered a layer of electroplating with fluid-filled nanocapsules. If the electroplating is scratched, the nanocapsules burst open to fill the damage. From Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft:
Mechanical bearings are one example of possible applications – the materials of the bearings usually have a electroplated coating, in which the capsules can be embedded. If there is a temporary shortage of lubricant, part of the bearing's coating is lost, the capsules at the top of the layer burst and release lubricant. The bearing is not therefore damaged if it temporarily runs dry. The researchers have produced the first copper, nickel and zinc coatings with the new capsules, although surface coverage does not extend beyond the centimeter scale. Experts estimate that it will be another one and a half to two years before whole components can be coated. In a further step the team worked on more complex systems – involving differently filled capsules, for example, whose fluids react with one another like a two component adhesive.
This Grey Gardens Coloring Book is the best curious collectible for the day. There are three volumes, signed by the artist, in the $30 set. Grey Gardens Collectibles Coloring Books(via Bust)
Tony from the StarShipSofa podcast sez, "The Sofanauts is a weekly SF news related show. Joining me each week are a variety of guests from science fiction literature, SF blogs and publishing to bring you the latest news and gossip from the world of SF. Guests have ranged from science fiction writers, including Jeff VanderMeer, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jeremiah Tolbert and Gord Sellar (nominated for this year''s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer) to editors and publishers, like the anthologist John Joseph Adams and Pablo Defendini (mover and shaker over at Tor.com). And one day I hope to snag young Mr Doctorow!
"We are now in the 14th week of the show's conception and it seems to be going from strength to strength. You can always tell how popular a show becomes as guests now ask to be on the show. This week will see the Sofanauts blast full throttle into Worldcon 2009, bringing you all the daily gossip and titbits of what is going on at this year's convention."
From Carrie: Many thanks Boing Boing and goodbye everyone. I've had loads of fun. If you're ever in Brooklyn, come on down to our useless lectures series, Adult Education. The next show, on September 8, will focus on beer.
From Jason: This was a blast. Thanks very much to Mark F. for letting us do this, and for everyone for reading, commenting, and silently eye rolling when you didn't think I could see. And, if you don't mind, why not buy our book, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture! We appreciate it.
The Associated Press -- which thinks you owe it a license fee if you quote more than four words from one of its articles -- doesn't even care if the words actually came from its article. They'll charge you anyway, even if you're quoting from the public domain.
I picked a random AP article and went to their "reuse options" site. Then, when they asked what I wanted to quote, I punched in Thomas Jefferson's famous argument against copyright. Their license fee: $12 for an educational 26-word quote. FROM THE PUBLIC FREAKING DOMAIN, and obviously, obviously not from the AP article. But the AP is too busy trying to squeeze the last few cents out of a dying business model to care about little things like free speech or the law.
They tell me I have to use the sentence "exactly as written" and heaven help me if I don't include the complete footer with their copyright boilerplate. Along the way, their terms of use insisted that I'm not allowed to use Jefferson's words in connection with "political Content." Also, I can't use use his words in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory" to the AP. As if. Jefferson's thoughts on copyright are inherently political, and inherently derogatory towards the the AP's insane position on copyright. I require no license to quote Jefferson. The AP has no right to stop me, no right to demand money from me. All their application does is count words to calculate a fee. It doesn't even check that the words come from the story being "quoted."
I really dig this new "Yeti Kong" t-shirt by our pals at GAMA-GO! Order it along with a Boing Boing t-shirt (or anything else to make your total over $25) and shipping is free!
Berlin anti-gentrification car-arsonists use slow-burning fuses to torch an average of one luxury car per day -- and they also hit police cars:
THEY occur at a rate of nearly one a night, without warning or fanfare. By the time the police arrive, all that remains are smoking wrecks. Even the identifying badges -- Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, VW -- are often obliterated by fire...
During the past six months, more than 170 cars have been destroyed by fire in Berlin and police confirm conservatively that 93 were politically motivated attacks.
A mysterious, single page website, brennende-autos.de (Burning Cars of Berlin), shows the number of cars set alight and where the crimes occurred, revealing clusters in ''richer'' areas, or in suburbs where gentrification and redevelopment are changing the demographic of local neighbourhoods...
Police cars, too, are being targeted. The favoured method is to use the slow-burn barbecue fire starters, which take time to smoulder and provide plenty of get-away time for the perpetrators.
''It is very difficult to get evidence. The fire can be started underneath a car but the person that did it can be many streets away when it is alight,'' Mr Millert said.
I've been fascinated by these for quite a while, and I'm gathering information on them for a future book project: "These" and "them" are Thai Edan trucks-- possibly the only cottage-industry motor vehicles in the world.
These are farmer's trucks, made in rural workshops in Thailand to order for local farmers. Though there are many small village factories making them, they do appear to have some standardization of design; for example, they all seem to be built around the same 14 (or so) hp diesel Kutoba generator motors. They're all wonderfully and elaborately decorated and painted, and, while undeniably crude, seem very capable of doing their job.
I love the ingenuity of these, but I'm afraid they're not going to be around much longer; more advanced, cheap, and modern used Isuzu and Toyota pickups are starting to become competitive with the locally-built Edan trucks, so it's likely just a matter of time before these little workshops shut down. It's understandable, but a shame.
Information about them online is a bit scant, but this blog entry (also where I snagged that picture) has some excellent information from a man who had one built. I'm hoping to produce a nice, big coffe table type book about these, full of good pictures, since I think I'm not the only one who finds these lovely brutes fascinating.
Lockpicking legends Marc Weber Tobias, Toby Bluzmanis and Matt Fiddler demo'ed a series of ingenious hacks for opening "unpickable" locks at Defcon last weekend. Included is a hack that opens the expensive electronic/mechanical CLIQ lock, which requires an electronic handshake between the key and the lock, and which logs every open/shut event) by simply vibrating the key:
Bluzmanis demonstrated an attack by taking an Interactive CLIQ electro-mechanical lock made by Mul-T-Lock and inserting a mechanical-only key cut to the same keyway. After inserting the key, he does something to vibrate the key for a few seconds until the mechanical motor in the cylinder turns and lifts the locking element to release the lock. He asked Threat Level not to disclose the precise method, other than to say it involves no special tool or skill.
"There's no audit trail that the lock has been opened," Tobias says, "because there are no electronics [involved]." If the attacker entered the room to steal documents or sabotage the facility, the last person who entered before him and who showed up in the audit log, would presumably get the blame if the thief wasn't caught on surveillance camera or the video surveillance was also sabotaged.
My tour of blogging duty is wrapping up here, but I wanted to put up some photos I had set aside here for possible blogging use. Here we go:
This squirrel got himself stuck in our homemade squirrel feeder. Ha ha ha! Idiot! (I got him out okay; he's fine.)
No one here is interested in getting into any Apple vs. Microsoft crap, but I saw this Zune wall-outlet-to-5V-USB adapter, and compared it to the one that came with my iPhone, and was a bit confused. Microsoft is a colossal company, with more money than God's dad's boss. Why is their AC adapter about four times the size of the Apple one? Couldn't they have called, say, anyone in China and asked for an AC adapter as small as the Apple one? I can't imagine the cost is that much more, in volume. Baffling.
Murillee Martin at Jalopnik has a really wonderful set of junkyard pictures. You can never have too many.
There's a fair number of sites on the web that mock these sorts of improvised solutions. I love them-- This guy had a dead van, a working truck, and a dream. Way to go, improviser!
This happened a while ago, but it's so much fun to talk about. One morning, I pulled back my desk chair in my office, and found this possum.
Fender has had a program where they're finding up-and-coming artists to paint guitars; my friend Lysa Provincio has done a few of these, and they look pretty great. In addition to this one, there's more on her site. Enjoy!
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Most of the other tenants in the 200-unit condo didn't close on their contracts, and the few that did have transferred to an adjacent building owned by the same company because more people live there. 
Mark Dery is a cultural critic. Way back in the day, he edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994), an academic anthology that kick-started scholarly interest in techno-feminism and black technoculture (through Dery's trailblazing essay "Black to the Future," in which he coined the term "Afrofuturism"). His 1993 pamphlet "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the term "culture jamming" and helped launch the movement of the same name. In 1996, Dery established himself, with Suck essays such as "
I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969 cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would like her as much as I do. She was one of those notorious "Manson girls" who shaved their heads, carved X's in their foreheads and laughed, joked, and sang their way through the courthouse straight to death row without the slightest trace of remorse forty years ago. Leslie is hardly a "Manson girl" today. Sixty years old, she looks back from prison on her involvement in the La Bianca murders (the night after the Tate massacre) in utter horror, shame, and guilt and takes full responsibility for her part in the crimes. I think it's time to parole her. 
Tony from the StarShipSofa podcast sez, "The Sofanauts is a weekly SF news related show. Joining me each week are a variety of guests from science fiction literature, SF blogs and publishing to bring you the latest news and gossip from the world of SF. Guests have ranged from science fiction writers, including Jeff VanderMeer, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jeremiah Tolbert and Gord Sellar (nominated for this year''s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer) to editors and publishers, like the anthologist John Joseph Adams and Pablo Defendini (mover and shaker over at Tor.com). And one day I hope to snag young Mr Doctorow! 
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