Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Thursday, June 8, 2006

Old Bollywood cover of I Wanna Hold Your Hand video

In this youtube, a band identified as the "Indian Beatles" performs a totally rockin' version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" in Hindi. I'm pretty sure I have this song as an MP3 somewhere, but with the video added in, it's a hundred times more awesome.

Commenters on the YouTube page add more details. The song is "Tumse Hai Dil Ko" from the film "Jaanwar" -- and this: "The camera work is exceptional, the singing great, and the fact that this was just 1 year after the Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show makes this work of adaptive plagiarism all the more impressive." Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:33:03 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

Put an iPod in a vintage radio

Craftbits has a simple and fun project for mounting your iPod inside a vintage transistor radio. Link (Thanks, Vikram!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:29 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Bread in a can stays fresh for three years

A Japanese occupational therapy center has devised a canned bread product that stays fresh for three years without preservatives:

The group devised three flavorful recipes--chocolate chip; raisin and fruit; and a coffee, fruit and nut concoction. To ensure high quality, the bakers have the pH levels and level of moisture in cans checked monthly. Currently, the bakery produces only 500 cans a day, but it hopes soon to double that output.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:28:49 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Jon Stewart tears open Bill Bennett on gay marriage

Jon Steward made mincemeat of out neanderthal pundit Bill Bennett in a debate on gay marriage; Crooks and Liars has the video:

Bennett: Well I think if gay..gay people are already members of families...
Stewart: What? (almost spitting out his drink)
Bennett: They're sons and they're daughters..
Stewart: So that's where the buck stops, that's the gay ceiling.
Bennett Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.
Stewart:I disagree, I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

Link (via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:11:18 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Fewer Americans think phone-on-toilet is cool

Cellphone etiquette in the USA is changing, with fewer Americans believing that it is acceptable to talk while on the crapper, and almost no Americans thinking it's OK to talk in a movie theater.

Americans still have some way to go to catch the Germans, but apparently nearly 4 out of 10 people think it's okay to talk on a cell phone in the bathroom. While that may seem like a lot, it's actually down from 62% in 2003, the last time the company did this survey. Surprising as well is that 11% of people thought it was okay to talk on the phone in a movie theater in 2000, but just 2% find the behavior acceptable today.

Link (via Futurismic)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:10:05 PM permalink | blogs' comments

HOWTO fix a laptop hinge with a cookie tin

Kikuyumoja, a blogger, recounts an ingenious means by which he fixed his Dell laptop hinge with a bit of sheet metal from a cookie tin:

The next piece of (ma)bati I sighted in the kitchen was an old cookie box - for some ppl that's just rubbish but for me it equals a source of clean, thin sheet metal that I could use for the repair.
I cut out the desired size, double-layered it (to improve stability)....
...and used flat pliers to mold it around the remaining parts of the hinge.
After some small adjustments, the "new" hinge just fit in perfectly well:

Link (via Afrigadget)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:05:25 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Baen's Universe: new sf e-zine with no DRM and top writers

Baen's Universe is a new science fiction PDF magazine that sells for $30/6 issues -- it's delivered with no DRM in pure electronic form. Lots of sf writers have already sold stories to the magazine (my own story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth will appear there) from Charlie Stross to Gene Wolfe, from Sarah Zettel to Catherine Asaro, plus David Brin, Greg Benford, and many, many others. Each issue is as long as a long novel -- 150,000 words, about twice as long as a typical sf magazine. The first issue launches this month. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:39:39 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Questionnaire on privacy and surveillance in MMOs

Christo of Selectparks.net asks us to pass on news of his questionnaire, "The questionnaire is being used to garner experiences and opinions of game administrators (and other players) monitoring game play. With the growth of games as a social interaction tool (aka SecondLife) issues of avatar privacy and digital persona rights are gaining more attention." Link (Thanks, Christo!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:32:40 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Podcasting channel for "social innovation"

Doug sez, "The non-profit Conversations Network has just launched a new channel about businesses that want to make the world a better place. It's a collaboration with the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Pittsburgh Social Enterprise Accelerator, associated with Carnegie Mellon University. Free MP3s of conferences from Stanford and interviews with folks like Ethan Zuckerman and David Bornstein." Link (Thanks, Doug!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:02:40 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Recording industry: Search-by-artist is "too interactive"

Tiscali is a European ISP that had a deal with IFPI, the ~~paramilitary~~ international wing of the RIAA, to offer legal, paid for, licensed streaming music to its customers. IFPI made them remove the feature that allowed paying customers to search for the music they wanted to hear by artist (!) saying that this was too much "interactivity."

Meanwhile, if you want to download non-DRM music for free or cheap, there's always eDonkey, ThePirateBay.org and AllOfMP3.com.

Amazing that the only folks who've managed to offer a usable, decent music service are the ones who are ripping off the music industry. If I was a musician hoping to earn a royalty or two, I'd be plenty pissed at how my label (through IFPI) keeps chasing off the paying customers.

It took the move after it was told to remove the service's search by artist...
"Consumers were allowed a high degree of interactivity that breached these rules in many ways - for example, streaming individual tracks on demand," it said.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:01:43 PM permalink | blogs' comments

HOWTO build a homebrew Haunted Mansion Singing Bust

The blogger at Panocamera works at a studio with a bunch of Haunted Mansion nuts who've made "Hitchhiking Ghosts" Hallowe'en costumes and changing-paintings like those in Disneyland's wonderful ride. Now he's made a singing bust like the ones in the graveyard: a sculpted blank head on which a face is projected. Unfortunately, there aren't many photos, but the build notes are intriguing:

The ingredients finally came together today. I started with a $29 PS2 joystick that had an embedded fold-out LCD. After some butchering, I removed the backlight and created the world's cheapest video projector. After rummaging through some old slide projector gear, I found a good lens to throw the image and (for testing) used my bike light as a projector bulb.
To feed the projector, I'm using an old Lyra video jukebox. It's amazing how gadgets age so quickly, iPod is just so much easier to convert video that the Lyra has obsolesced. The hard part was getting the Thurl Ravenscroft video from the mansion. 'Turns out if you ride a few times, you will sooner or later find the doombuggies in the ride stop so that people who need extra help can board. If one is quick with a camcorder, the whole performance can be captured in under minute. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Some Photoshop transformations were needed to orient the video for projection.

Link (Thanks, Wil!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 09:48:03 PM permalink | blogs' comments

HOWTO submit suggestions for BB

Just a friendly reminder that the only way to suggest an item for Boing Boing is by following the directions here. We really appreciate your submissions, but we can't accept them via email sent to our personal addresses. Also, please don't add us to any email lists or PR blasts without our permission. Thanks so much! Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:34:11 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Ball lightning created in the lab

Researchers in Germany have generated beautiful examples of ball lightning in vitro. Sometimes seen hovering over the ground during thunderstorms (and occasionally confused with a UFO), ball lightning is a mysterious spherical, glowing, ball of energy that scientists believe could be plasma. The plasma clouds that these scientists created were around 20 centimeters across and lasted for half a second. From New Scientist:

Earlier this year, Israeli scientists created plasma balls by using microwaves to vaporise various materials, but Gerd Fussmann and his colleagues (at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Humboldt University in Berlin) used a different approach that they believe comes closer to the natural phenomenon.

“It is likely that lightning flashes and water interact to produce ball lightning,” says Fussmann. “We therefore use a short, high-voltage discharge of 5000 volts to vaporise some of the water in a glass tank and create the plasma ball.”

The tank contains two electrodes, one of which is insulated from the surrounding water by a clay tube. The high voltage causes enormous currents of up to 60 amps – over 200 times those needed to cause death – to flow through the water for a fraction of a second. These enter the clay tube, causing the water there to evaporate and a luminous plasma ball - consisting of ionised water molecules - to rise from the surface.

Link to New Scientist article, Link to previous BB post about making "ball lightning" in your kitchen

posted by David Pescovitz at 09:00:53 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Batwings for special forces

The Daily Mail reports on a wearable rigid wing system developed by ESG Elektroniksystem designed so that military parachutists can glide up to 200 kilometers before pulling the ripcord. The next rev of the outfit will integrate turbo jets in the wings. It sounds a lot like the jet-powered BirdMan suit that Visa Parviainen flies around in over Finland. (I profiled Visa in the latest issue of MAKE:.) From the Daily Mail article describing the ESG gear:

Fitted with oxygen supply, stabilisation and navigation aides, troops wearing the wings will jump from a high-altitude transport aircraft which can stay far away from enemy territory - or on secret peacetime missions could avoid detection or suspicion by staying close to commercial airliner flight paths.

The manufacturers claim the ESG wing is '100 per cent silent' and 'extremely difficult' to track using radar.

Once close to their target landing zone, the troops pull their parachute rip cord to open their canopy and then land normally.

Link to Daily Mail article, Link to ESG press release (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

UPDATE: BB reader Thomas Beckett points out that flying suits appeared in the film Lara Croft Tom Raider: The Cradle of Life. From IMDB:

In the scene where Lara Croft and partner jump off a building with "flying suits" on, the stunt was performed by the two men who invented the suits. No CGI, wires, nets, or other SFX were involved. This suit was invented by Patrick de Gayardon who was killed in parachute accident in April 1998 during testing of a new parachute type in Hawaii. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:29:34 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Universal video convertor for Mac puts 18 hours on a DVD

From the maker of the free iSquint (an application I use all the time to convert videos to iPod format) comes VisualHub, a $23.32 application that does everything iSquint does and more, including fitting "up to 18 hours of video on one DVD" that you can play on "any standalone DVD player." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:25:44 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Bigfoot In Texas? exhibition

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman posts some random notes from his visit to the "Bigfoot In Texas?" exhibit in San Antonio. Running until July 30 at the University of Texas San Antonio's Institute of Texan Cultures, the exhibition and lecture series is a collaboration with the Texas Bigfoot Research Center. From Loren's post:

Going into the main hall of the Bigfoot exhibition, one is immediately struck by how, well, “museum-quality” it appears. There are display cases filled with replica skulls of Gigantopithecus and gorilla, the famed British Columbian carved stone head and foot bowl of Sasquatch, a Chehalis First Nations Sasquatch mask from British Columbia, and descriptive panels all around discussing hairy hominoids.

Link to Cryptomundo post, Link to Bigfoot In Texas?

posted by David Pescovitz at 08:16:08 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Photographer retakes portraits of small town citizens 20 years later

Incredible and beautiful photos from an online Smithsonian magazine article: "In 1984, Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every last person in Oxford, Iowa. Two decades later, he's doing it again, creating a unique portrait of heartland America." Link

Check out Feldstein's gallery of more photos, too!

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:54:00 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Short interview with cartoonist Peter Bagge

The new issue of Vice magazine (guest edited by Johnny Ryan) is all about comics. Here's an interview Johnny had with Peter Bagge, creator of Neat Stuff and Hate and the editor of Weirdo, all three of which are among my most treasured comics.

Ryan: Is it true that one of those old ZAP guys wanted to beat you up?
Bagge: Spain Rodriguez gave Crumb some strips that he had done for Screw magazine that Crumb had passed on to me, suggesting I reprint them. I didn’t think they were all that great—they were these sexy female spy stories—so I didn’t. As a result he told some people he was going to beat me up over it, but when I met him years later he didn’t even mention it. I think he was annoyed because he knew Crumb would have reprinted them in a heartbeat.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:36:27 PM permalink | blogs' comments

"Fuck" costs $325,000 to utter over the airwaves

The Federal Government just increased the price for saying "fuck" on TV or radio from $32,500 to $325,000. That's because Congress passed the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act (BDEA). I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to a sharp drop in criminal behavior as a result of this new law to keep our minds squeaky clean. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:28:17 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Cool looking tiny flower in my yard

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) Reason #986 why it's fun to have kids: They point out things you'd overlook, like these amazing little flowers growing in our front yard.

Thank you to the many readers who told me that this flower is a lantana.

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 07:18:25 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Reporter bullied by eunuchs in India

LA Times has a funny article about an American reporter's run-in with aggressive transvestite eunuchs who try to get him to fork over some money.

Something between male and female, they are shunned by Indian society as unclean. Many make a rough living through prostitution or by crashing weddings, birthday parties and other festive occasions, threatening to disrupt the celebrations with vulgar behavior and to bring bad luck unless they are paid off.
And now they were in my living room.

They should move to the United States. I'll bet a lot of people would pay them to behave in a vulgar manner as party entertainment. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:59:08 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Man lives on monkey chow for less than $1 per meal

This gentleman plans to eat only monkey chow for a week and keep a journal about it.

Imagine going to the grocery store only once every 6 months. Imagine paying less than a dollar per meal. Imagine never washing dishes, chopping vegetables or setting the table ever again. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
But can a human subsist on a constant diet of pelletized, nutritionally complete food like puppies and monkeys do? For the good of human kind, I’m about to find out. On June 3, 2006, I began my week of eating nothing but monkey chow: "a complete and balanced diet for the nutrition of primates, including the great apes."
Maybe I’ll lose weight. Maybe I’ll gain superhuman monkey strength. Maybe I’ll go crazy. Maybe it’s too late. Check back here every day to follow along with the Monkey Chow Diaries.

Link (via Neatorama)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 06:49:51 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Major League Baseball: watching your TV on your laptop is theft

Major League Baseball, a sports organization that backed the Broadcast Flag, has publicly denounced technologies like Slingbox that let you watch your TV on your laptop over the net. Slingbox lets you retransmit the programs being received on your home set wherever you are in the world. An MLB spokesman called this theft. Industry watchers predict that MLB will start suing the companies that make these soon -- but what will they do about open source PVRs like Mythtv that do the same thing without having a formal organization that they can haul into court?

[A] cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city.
But we're not talking Napster here, argues Buchanan. The cable subscriber in such a scenario already purchased the content from a programmer back home and under the law can watch it wherever he or she chooses, he said.
"Your interpretation of the (cable and satellite user agreement) is wrong," Kliavkoff told Buchanan as the two spoke before some 200 conference attendees. Sling Media users "are violating the scope of their user agreements."

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:08:01 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Homestar Runner sends up theme parks, savages the Jungle Boats

This week's Homestar Runner podcast was a rerun of last January's episode, "Theme Park" -- I'd never seen it before, and it had me laughing really, really hard. The premise is Strongbad describing the theme park he'd build with an unlimited budget -- it's funny enough, especially if you're a fan of the series. The best part, though, comes after the first time "The End" appears: a completely dead-pan, dead-on parody of the narration on the Disneyland Jungle Boat Cruise. This is so completely perfect in its savage lampooning that I wanted to watch it again and again. Which I'm about to do. Bye. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 01:33:16 PM permalink | blogs' comments

US branch of "Pirate Party" launches

Brent Allison, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia, has founded an American branch of Sweden's "Pirate Party," a political party dedicated to copyright reform:

All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.
The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.
We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers' legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.

Link (Thanks, Gwax!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:52:03 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Private Infringer: fanfic based on Captain Copyright

"The Continuing Adventures of Private Infringer" is a fan-fiction serial based on Captain Copyright, the comic-book character created by Access Canada as a brainwashing tool to use in classrooms. Captain Copyright promotes a one-sided view of copyright, but Private Infringer, his unfortunate sidekick, promotes the other:

Every time he tries to rip his CDs to put them on his MP3 player, that guy Captain Copyright in spandex pajamas, is in his face telling him it's wrong. Yesterday he downloaded a copy of DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album. When CC showed up to lecture him in his usual condescending way, Infringer tried explaining that DJ Dangermouse put it on the web for free himself. But Copyright said that didn't matter. Paul McCartney did not approve, and that is all that really did matter.
How was it, Infringer wondered, that a society which judges itself to be so enlightened could find it so easy to suppress art. He then thought about all the other lost art which he had either heard of, or in some cases, even seen parts of himself. "The Cat NOT in the Hat", "Eyes on the Prize", and another new book. What was it again? Oh yeah, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got in".

Link (Thanks, David!)

Update: David Lynch, who manages a fanfic archive, is offering free hosting to any and all Captain Copyright fanfic, even "slash" (gay erotica), "Just be sure to mark fics NC-17 when the Captain is showing how he'd *really* like to treat consumers!"

Update 2: This Captain Copyright parody comic is superb. (Thanks, Philipp!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:50:59 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Weight loss tips from a geek

Chris Pirillo, another geek who lost 30 lbs, has posted his top 50 weight-loss tips:

# Remember that the fork is not a shovel. I eat fast (I swear I can't help it). Even if I'm not hungry, I want to shovel everything into my mouth in less than a minute. But my brain doesn't know that my stomach is full until twenty minutes after it actually is. As such, I could stuff myself silly before realizing I didn't need to consume as much as I did. Try eating half of what's on your plate, wait ten minutes, then continue to eat if you're still hungry. You never want to feel full - ever. That's when you know you've eaten too much. If you want a real hunger-stopper, try an Omega 3 and Omega 6 supplement (EFAs) twenty minutes before a meal
. # Become your own snack fairy. It's okay to snack between meals, really. Small meals throughout the day are enough to keep you satisfied, as (much like the sensation of being full) you never want to feel hungry. Let your body know it's going to get a regular regimen of calories. Plus, if you starve yourself for the regular meals, you're probably going to eat more before your brain tells your mouth to stop. Think about it: breakfast, lunch, and dinner are social constructs at their very core.

Link (via Health Hacker)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:46:04 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Vacuum tube based autonomous robots from the 1950s

I have W. Grey Walter's 1950 book, The Living Brain, but haven't read it (It's out of print, but you can buy a copy for as little as $1.60 on Amazon).

He was an interesting fellow. Kaden told me he was "the guy who postulated that the Old Testament 'tree of knowledge' was a veiled allusion to the psychogenic impact of flicker effects caused by the sun through palm leaves. Turns out that besides being a physiologist, ol' W Grey (the W. stands for William) was a pioneer in autonomous robotics with tube circuitry A.I.s."

Shown here is Elsie, a three-wheeled robot that had "a light sensor, touch sensor, propulsion motor, steering motor, and a two vacuum tube analog computer. Even with this simple design, Grey demonstrated that his turtles exhibited complex behaviors. He called his turtles Machina Speculatrix after their speculative tendency to explore their environment." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:56:39 AM permalink | blogs' comments

World Cup rightsholder CEO exaggerates Harvard Business School claim

Kevin Kelleher says: "I saw your post this morning about the bizarre 'pre-emptive nastygram' sent to BoingBoing [by Baker & McKenzie LLP]. Just for fun, I decided to check out the client, Infront Sports & Media. The company's site says the CEO Oscar Frei (who eerily resembles Geraldo Rivera) 'attended Harvard Business School.'

"I called Harvard to fact check this and found that, while technically true, that statement is sleazily misleading. Frei attended an executive education course called 'Advanced Management' that lasted a mere month and a half. Not the same as a two-year MBA program, which is what you'd assume reading Frei's bio. To get into the exec ed course, you don't need to take the GMAT, you don't even need to have attended undergrad school. The main admission requirement is whether your company will pony up the $55,000 program fee. But you do get to brag that you 'attended Harvard Business School.'

"I Googled the phrase 'attended Harvard Business School' and it looks like when people use that phrase it's clear they were in the MBA program. It also pulled up a few bios of people who went to the exec program, but they tended to be forthright about it.

"Here's a link to the admissions page of Frei's program."

(Image courtesy Eric of The Grooveblog.)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:40:47 AM permalink | blogs' comments

How Zawodny lost 50 lbs with a spreadsheet's help

Jeremy Zawodny has started to document the process by which he lost 50 lbs last year. In a nutshell, he paid a lot of attention to what he was eating, thoroughly logged his food intake, weight and exercise, and used small changes, compounded over time, to shed the pounds. The first entry is already fascinating and inspirational, and he's promised a whole series on the subject.

After thinking about why I always ate a bit too much, I finally realized it was a problem with my physiological empty/full gauge. If I eat until I feel "full" I've probably eaten too much. And, worse yet, I end up feeling sluggish for an hour or so after eating. You know, the "food coma."
Habit #3 is about resetting your notion of when to eat (or stop eating). The easiest way to say it is "eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not." Notice that this says nothing about feeling full.
This is the single most difficult thing to do. If you're like me, it means breaking 30 years worth of training your body. But after the first few weeks, you'll start to find that the "not hungry and not full" feeling starts to seem normal. If you keep a running tally of your food intake during the day (habit #1), that'll make it a lot easier to know when you should stop.

Link (via Megnut)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 07:31:25 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Pranksters give fake McDonald's anti-global-warming presentation

A hoax presentation from "McDonald's Interactive" brought the house down yesterday at the UK Serious Games Summit, where game developers met to discuss games that are intended to have positive social outcomes. The pranksters -- widely believed to have been the notorious Yes Men -- gave an increasingly provocative, funny and weird deadpan PowerPoint presentation (Coral Cache mirror) on McDonald's putative interactive strategy. The presentation focused on the way that corporate practices contribute to global climate change.

Thomas sez, "Ian Bogost has a thorough write-up at Water Cooler Games, as does Gamasutra. I filed a story with InformationWeek, which may not go live until Wednesday." (Thanks, Thomas and everyone else who submitted this!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:52:33 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Cory's "Visit the Sins" - new podcasted story

I've just posted the first part of a two-part podcast of my story Visit the Sins, which was originally published in Asimov's in 1999 and reprinted in Hartwell's Year's Best SF volume 5. This story deals with attention deficit disorder, the effect that cognitive problems have on families, and how your mental state and your technology are intimately related.

Link, Podcast feed

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:15:36 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: 1811 slang dictionary

The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is a reprint of "the Lexicon balatronicum; a dictionary of buckish slang, university wit, and pickpocket eloquence (and now considerably altered and enlarged, with the modern changes and improvements, by a member of the whip club.)" It is available in full for free on Project Gutenberg, and it's mind-croggling, with definitions like:

CHOAK PEAR. Figuratively, an unanswerable objection: also a machine formerly used in Holland by robbers; it was of iron, shaped like a pear; this they forced into the mouths of persons from whom they intended to extort money; and on turning a key, certain interior springs thrust forth a number of points, in all directions, which so enlarged it, that it could not be taken out of the mouth: and the iron, being case-hardened, could not be filed: the only methods of getting rid of it, were either by cutting the mouth, or advertizing a reward for the key, These pears were also called pears of agony.

Link (Thanks, Kip!)

Update: David reports that Smartfilter, the censorware jerks who block Boing Boing also target this ebook as "pornography."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:35:17 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Ex-RIAA head Hilary Rosen rethinks lawsuits and DRM

Hilary Rosen, the former head of the RIAA, who oversaw the lawsuits against Napster, Audiogalaxy and MP3.com, has published an editorial questioning the idea of suing music fans as a way of building a sustainable music business. She's also questioned the usefulness of DRM, noting that it's time to "rethink that strategy."

"I am sure there are lots of other things that I've done that people have opinions about. But most successful executives I know have made controversial decisions and have been second-guessed and scrutinized both favorable and unfavorably. It comes with the priviledge [sic] of the work and that's ok. I can also assure you that I don't intend to start using this site as a review of the RIAA or my work there but I certainly can't stop others from doing so."
As well as sharing a concern about the usefulness, or otherwise, of the lawsuits, Risen thinks the labels, "need to work harder to implemnt [sic] a strategy that legitimizes more p2p sites and expands the download and subscription pool by working harder with the tech community to get devices and music services to work better together. That is how their business will expand most quickly.
"The iPod is still too small a part of the overall potential of the market and its propietary [sic] DRM just bugs me. Speaking of DRM, it is time to rethink that strategy as well......... At some point, I will write more comprehensively about those years and these issues....then again, maybe not."

Link (via Digg)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:31:23 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Norwegian ombudsman says Apple's iTunes DRM is illegal

The Norwegian ombudsman has come out in support of the Norwegian Consumer Council's complaints against iTunes and other DRM-based entertainment services. The Consumer Council complained that the iTunes pricing was discriminatory, its terms were unreasonable and its DRM was too restrictive. This is moving Norway closer to regulatory limits on the way that Apple and other DRM companies can do use the legal protections that DRM enjoys to lock users into unfair, one-sided transactions. Norway's Thomas Rieber-Mohn says that similar decisions are expected soon in Sweden and Denmark. With France and the UK coming to similar conclusions recently, Europe seems to be moving to rein in DRM companies.

"We are very satisfied with the decision. There is a general tendency for consumers to meet grossly unreasonable agreements when they download files with cultural content. It is therefore positive that the Ombudsman gets a grip on this so that consumer interests are also protected when such material is downloaded," senior advisor Torgeir Waterhouse says.
Among other things, the decision clearly states that the terms of agreement demanded by iTunes are unreasonable with respect to Section 9a of the Norwegian Marketing Control Act. Moreover, it is unreasonable that the agreement the consumer must give consent to is regulated by English law. That iTunes disclaims all liability for possible damage the software may cause and that it may alter the rights to the music, are also considered unreasonable. iTunes must now alter their terms and conditions to comply with Norwegian law by the 21.of June.

Link (Thanks, Thomas!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:02:13 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Implanting a magnet in your fingertip adds a sixth sense

This morning's Wired News has a fascinating article on the practice of implanting small, strong rare-earth magnets in one's ring-finger. The result is a kind of "magnet sense" -- people who've had the implant report that they can tell when a wire is live and when they're going through a magnet security-scanner at a store, even when their laptops' hard drives are spinning up.

Quinn Norton of Wired News has had the operation and writes in detail about how it felt, what the problems were, and what she was able to do once it was in place. The most amazing part is that months after the magnet implant fragmented and Quinn lost her "sixth sense," it reassembled itself (magnets tend to draw towards one another) and the sense returned.

What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch...
According to Huffman, the magnet works by moving very slightly, or with a noticeable oscillation, in response to EM fields. This stimulates the somatosensory receptors in the fingertip, the same nerves that are responsible for perceiving pressure, temperature and pain. Huffman and other recipients found they could locate electric stovetops and motors, and pick out live electrical cables. Appliance cords in the United States give off a 60-Hz field, a sensation with which Huffman has become intimately familiar. "It is a light, rapid buzz," he says.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 03:58:40 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Tuesday, June 6, 2006

Soldier's post-WWII pix of Hiroshima, India, Hong Kong, etc

Lemony sends us this "poignant and fascinating collection of photos taken in 1945-7 mixing heart-rending captures of the destruction of post-war Japan (including the ruins of Hiroshima) with more personal and more touristy snaps."

Arrived at Kure, Japan on the 11th of April 1946. Whilst in Japan was stationed at Kure, Okayama and Karuga and Hiroshima and Miyajima. Left Japan on the "TS Devonshire" on the 18th of October 1947.
On the voyage home, visited Hong Kong, Singapore, Colombo, Aden, Port Suez and Malta. Arrived back at Liverpool on the 3rd of December 1947.
These are the photographs my late grandfather, Desmond, took in this time.

Link (Thanks, Lemony!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:56:44 PM permalink | blogs' comments

In-game art-show asks for CC remixes that interact

An upcoming event in the virtual world Second Life combines mashups, Creative Commons and multiplayer online worlds. Artists are invited to remix art from two Creative Commons-licensed shows at Harvard and NYU and the results will be "hung" in a virtual gallery in Second Life at an event on June 15th. The remixes can include elements from Second Life's scripting language, so they can be animated, act on viewers, change the landscape and so on. Link (Thanks, James!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:45:05 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Cop (?) duffs up photographer for shooting San Fran building

Thomas Hawk -- Flickr-shooter, Boing Boing pal and photographers' rights shit-disturber -- got harassed and duffed-up by security guards at San Francisco's 45 Fremont Street. The guy shown here actually manhandled him off the sidewalk and into the street, all the while claiming to be a cop, but refusing to show his badge. I smell BS -- this guy is probably a private security guard who likes to pretend to be on the job. This is the second time Thomas has had trouble taking pictures of 45 Fremont, and the PR people from the building have assured him he's allowed to take its picture (I mean, of course he is -- by law!), and tell him that the security guards who harassed him are working for their tenants, not for the building itself.

People have been taking pictures of impressive buildings for as long as there have been cameras. Before that, they painted pictures of impressive buildings. And public transit. And street scenes. It's thanks to these images that we retain any sense of the history of our cities and ancestors. They're also some of the most striking art ever produced. "Security" is a bogus reason to discontinue this ages-old practice -- terrorists can readily take photos with hidden cameras, or rely on the existing stock of photos, or wait until no one is around, or memorize features of the buildings they plan on attacking. All that this sort of ad-hoc ban accomplishes is to punish non-hostile, private individuals doing something that's as old as buildings themselves: documenting the way we live. Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:36:11 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Farecast predicts when plane tickets will be cheapest

John Batelle has a great writeup of a new service called "Farecast" that uses historical pricing data from the airlines to predict what the best time will be to buy a given plane-ticket. The service is in private Beta right now and only works for Seattle and Boston, but they're promising a full launch later this year with all cities covered. Man, I so need this -- I fly all the time and I get royally screwed by the airlines.

What Farecast does is shift the power of information back into the consumer's hands, and that's why I like it. I remember when the web was young and the first car buying sites were up and running. Dealers scrambled for that early business, and I bought two cars off the web by forcing dealers in the Bay Area to compete for my business. It really felt like the web was going to change the dynamic of who was in charge in a car buying transaction - because I could force dealers to their best price, I was always going to get the best price. It felt like this would be the model in most large transactions, like travel, loans, etc. Price would stabilize, and folks would differentiate on service, relationship, and approach.
But something funny happened on our way to internet mediated bliss: the big companies figured out how to game our demand. Dealers realized they can make more profit if they cooperate and withhold pricing information from the aggregators, and the aggregators got into bed with the supply side of the equation (if you think AutoByTel or Expedia is on your side, you're kidding yourself). Nowhere is this more true that in how an airline prices its tickets.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:26:06 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Disney World Pirates of the Caribbean papercraft model

Here's a free papercraft model of the "Torre de Cielo" -- the tower that stands outside of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Walt Disney World. It runs about 8" high. Link (Thanks, Ray!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 11:21:38 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Fantastic gallery of the fantastic

Cornell University Library created this utterly mind-blowing image-bank of the fantastic and supernatural in art and fiction. The material, several hundred images from the Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections, is themed by such delightful categories as Angels & Demons, Danse Macabre, Weird Science, Possession & Insanity, and Fantastic Space. Absolutely marvelous. (Seen here, an illustration by M.L. Breton from the 1863 text "Dictionnaire Infernal." Apparently this is "a destructive demon....which, according to some, is the ancient serpent that seduced Eve.") From the site description:

In the context of western literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Fantastic involves dread, fear and anxiety in the face of phenomena that escape rational explanation, or that reveal the notion of reality to be no more than a construct. A fantastic experience can therefore be likened to the breaking or shattering of a frame. While the literary fantastic is limited to the last 200 years, the Fantastic in art can be construed more broadly. This elasticity allowed us to choose images from works spanning a period from medieval manuscripts and printed incunabulae, to the early twentieth century.

Link (via The Seven Deadly Sinners)

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:16:17 PM permalink | blogs' comments

DIY Ark of the Covenant

Fortean Times has posted an interesting article considering whether the biblical Ark of the Covenant, famed for wreaking havoc on the Nazis in Raiders of the Los Ark, could have been a kind of massive battery. The writers make the case that the Ark may have been the ancient equivalent of a Leyden Jar, a prototypical capacitor invented in the 18th century. From the article, titled "Re-Engineering The Ark":

Using the example of the 500gm-coffee jar-sized Leyden Jar, and assuming that this could store a charge of approximately 200 volts, the Ark would have held the equivalent of 125 such jars, giving it a comparable, if not greater, potential voltage, as well as, more importantly, allowing for a much longer discharge time. Such a level of voltage goes a long way to explaining the reasons for the Arks more evolved design.

The most obvious difference is the use of twin terminals on the Ark. There are no problems with this configuration, other than ensuring good connection and isolation of each terminal, but there are some very good reasons for it. Because of its size, and the relation of capacity to charge, it would not be possible to touch the Ark by hand or with any form of implement to discharge it. The Ark would have carried a charge of thousands of volts, and because the human body is a better conductor than air, it would have killed anyone who got too close to it. Sound familiar?

...If the Ark was placed inside the Temple (in effect a large conductive box) and discharged, the result would be disappointing. There would be no spectacular effects, just the barely discernible glow of a few sparks and a loud crack. Why go to all this trouble to create the Temple if this was the end result? There must be some other, less obvious factor involved. The natural assumption to make is that the entire interior structure, and everything in it, would become live if the Ark put several thousand volts into the walls. But the Ark is the only crucial part of the Temple that is earthed, so it would operate normally if it were charged – any discharge would occur between the two cherubim, not the walls or pillars.

The answer to this problem is in the opposite principle – the Ark is not the source of the charge, the Temple is.

Link

UPDATE: BB reader Pawel Szymczykowski points out that the Mythbusters explored this concept a bit on TV. Link And there were other before them too. Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 05:03:58 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Oldest portrait

This 27,000-year-old cave drawing may be the oldest human portrait on record. It was found on the wall of a cave near Angoulême, France. From The Times:

Drawn with calcium carbonate, and using the bumps in the wall to give form to the face, it features two horizontal lines for the eyes, another for the mouth and a vertical line for the nose. “The portrait of this face is unique,” said Jean Airvaux, a researcher at the French Directorate of Cultural Affairs. “We have other drawings, but they are more recent. Here, it could be the oldest representation of a human face.”

Link

posted by David Pescovitz at 04:34:05 PM permalink | blogs' comments

RU Sirius interviews author of new Timothy Leary biography

I haven't read the new biography of Timothy Leary, and I'm not sure I want to, because from what I've heard about it, author Robert Greenfield takes every opportunity to make Leary look bad.

On the RU Sirius Show this week, R.U. plays brain tennis with Greenfield about his very negative biography.

RU Sirius: “… so now they have two guns. Tim picks up the gun and he folds it up into a newspaper and he hands it back to the Sheriff. The plan is off. So he goes off to talk to Joanna, and his explanation is, ‘we couldn’t have pulled it off. If we shot these two guys, then we’d have to shoot two other guys.” And this is Joanna’s explanation. And you just leave that hanging as sort of the final…
Robert Greenfield: But that’s not my take. He…
RU: It still sits in the book as the judgment of Leary’s character that he would have shot these two people. That’s what she says, that he would have had no qualms about shooting them.
Greenfield: That’s what she says. But you have to separate the narrator. You have to look at the quality of the story that’s told in terms of the person who is telling you the story. Listen…
RU: …Yeah but Joanna is a major source here…
Greenfield: Sooner or later you’re gonna have to let me say something. The point of that story is that Tim was completely non-violent. He never would have used that gun!
RU: That doesn’t come across.
Greenfield: Well, I’m sorry.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 04:07:38 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Hugo Award ballot is online

The Hugo Award ballot is online and due in by July 31. If you are attending this year's World Science Fiction convention in Los Angeles or if you bought a "supporting membership," you're eligible to vote in this, the most prestigious of science fiction's popular awards. Regrettably, only a small fraction of eligible voters cast votes for the Hugos -- it's a real pity. Link

HOWTO turn a $60 Linksys router into a $600 super-router

An open-source replacement firmware for a $60 Linksys router can give it the functionality of a $600 enterprise device. That's because Linksys/Cisco got caught using GNU/Linux in their routers without abiding by the GPL licensing terms and were forced to publish the details of their firmware, opening the door to open source hackers who added all kinds of improvements to the router. With the instructions in this HOWTO, you can turn your Linksys into a super-router that runs your phone network using the open-source phone-switcher Asterisk, boost your signal strength and perform many other cool tricks. Link (via Gizmodo)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:30:14 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Wikia (commercial Wikipedia alternative) gets a new CEO

Wikia -- the commercial venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales -- has just hired a new CEO. Gil Penchina is late of eBay, where I knew him as a super-sharp guy who really got that what made eBay work was its passionate users. Wikia recruits users to create open, copylefted wikis on subjects that don't fit into an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, such as big wikis for fans of the TV show "Lost." Link (Thanks, Suzy!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:25:29 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Fingertip mouse for cramped quarters

This Japanese finger-mouse straps onto your index finger and uses an optical sensor to track your pointing -- a thumb-wheel acts as a clicker as well. The mouse is super-compact and intended for use in cramped circumstances -- you can even use your thigh as a mousing surface. Link (via Shiny Shiny)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:21:44 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Hundreds of Cdn artists call for balance in copyright

Michael Geist sez, "More than 500 Canadian art professionals have formed a new coalition to call on the government to take a balanced approach to copyright reform. Appropriation Art: A Coalition of Arts Professionals, includes arts organizations from Alberta, BC, Quebec, Ontario, and Saskatchewan along with hundreds of artists from across Canada. The remarkable list features the President of CARFAC and winners of numerous art awards including eight Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. The group identifies three issues in their letter to Ministers Oda and Bernier: fair access, certainty of access for creative purposes through a fair use provision, and no support for anti-circumvention legislation." Link (Thanks, Michael!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:18:24 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Arf Lover's blog interviews Coop

Craig Yoe of the Arf Lover's blog has a short but nice interview with Coop.

My first exposure to Kirby (other than the cruder Golden Age stuff in Feiffer's book) was in an issue of Kamandi. My first reaction to his art was something like "THIS IS WRONG!!" My tiny kid brain couldn't process the crazed concepts and gonzo unconscious pop-culture pilfering of Kirby's writing, and his art (at his peak then, just before the beginning of his "Baroque Era" return to Marvel) curdled my brain like cottage cheese. I don't know if I'm allowed to count him as an influence, but I definitely see him as a Picasso of comics, a Colossus who invented whole genres single handedly, moved through several significant stylistic periods, each influencing countless artists, and was such a unnatural creative force that it is almost impossible to find someone else as significant in the history of comics.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 01:35:18 PM permalink | blogs' comments

666-6666 telephone number gets a lot of calls from babies

Bruce Stewart has a good story about the time he worked as a technician for a Jesuit university in San Francisco. When the university upgraded to a new phone system, the phone company gave them the 666 prefix, which upset some of he higher ups. It was too expensive to get a different prefix, so they accepted it. Bruce's boss gave himself 666-6666, and Bruce got 666-6667.

As you can likely imagine, there were many jokes and good times to be had with these numbers. And some weird lunatic prank calls, though not a lot. But what drove my boss crazy most of all about having that fateful number was the amazing number of “googoo gaagaa” calls he received. You know, those calls you get when an infant has gotten a phone off the hook and has inadvertently dialed you up and is cooing and babbling into the phone? Well, maybe you don’t, but trust me, if you ever get a phone number with all of the same digits, you will. Apparently pounding repeatedly on the 6 button is a fairly easy thing for a baby to do.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 11:30:44 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Mobile shredder devours an automobile

Watch this video of a shredding machine violently chew up and swallow a BMV. Link (via Finkbuilt)

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:54:54 AM permalink | blogs' comments

World Cup played by ants

Now I know why the FIFA World Cup is such a big deal. It turns out that it's played by ants with a ball stolen from a dung beetle. That is exciting!

In the wild, the ants recognize enemies by their pheromones. The organizers of the game used this natural ability to make the ants "ant-agonize" each other, by feeding the Japanese team with Kagoshima pork and the Brazilian team with spare ribs in order to alter the ants' pheromones.

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:31:14 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Sad fate of the last tree in Ténéré wastelands of northeastern Niger

Athanasius Kircher posted a short but heartbreaking story about the last tree of Ténéré, in northeastern Niger. The single remaining tree of what had once been a forest was knocked over by a drunk driver in 1972. A creepy metal sculpture was erected in its place. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 10:18:53 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Everything about Victorian London

The Victorian London site compiles tons of scanned and digitized public domain images and varied texts in one place, loosely organized by category. It's all a bit of a jumble, but then so was Victorian London -- and there's so much to love here. Don't miss the sections on "Criminal Slang!"

TRADES IN LONDON. The last population returns (1841) exhibit the following tradespeople, &c., residing in London
168,701 domestic servants.
29,780 dressmakers and milliners.
28,574 boot and shoemakers.
21,517 tailors and breechesmakers.
20,417 commercial clerks.
18,321 carpenters and joiners.
16,220 laundrykeepers, washers, and manglers.
13,103 private messengers and errand boys.
11,507 painters, plumbers, and glaziers.
9,110 bakers.
7,973 cabinetmakers and upholsterers.
7,151 silk manufacturers, (all branches).
7,002 seamen.
6,741 bricklayers.
6,716 blacksmiths.
6,618 printers.
6,450 butchers.
5,499 booksellers, bookbinders, and publishers.
4,980 grocers and teadealers.
4,861 tavernkeepers, publicans, and victuallers.
4,290 clock and watchmakers.

Link (Thanks, Lee!)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:35:05 AM permalink | blogs' comments

Monday, June 5, 2006

24h to stop new copyright law: call now!

In 24 hours, the music industry may succeed at getting the obscure SIRA bill changed in committee in Congress. At issue is their plan to change copyright so that you're going to need separate licenses for "incidental" copies of digital music: copies in RAM, copies in browser caches, and so on. Changing the act this way paves the way for a ban on digital radio recording devices, and what's worse, the companies that presently sell digital music are supporting this!

Companies like Apple and Real AOL and Yahoo have signed onto these changes as a way of clearing the licenses on the music they presently sell -- even though this proposal will hurt the ability of new companies to enter the digital music market in the future.

You can stop it by contacting your Congresscritter. EFF's Action Center has information on which lawmakers are on the relevant committee, as well as some suggested things to say to your representative's office when you speak to them.

The entertainment industry has sneaked language into an obscure copyright bill that could smash Internet fair use. The law implies that licenses from copyright holders are needed for every digital copy made in the transmission of digital media -- including cached copies on servers or on your hard drive, and even temporary copies in RAM. The wording is being debated in a House Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday. Don't let the music industry turn your cache into their cash. Check below to see if your representative is on the right committee, and call them now!

Link

Update: ~~Danny from EFF sez, "Hey, our action center is down for 'scheduled maintenance'." Here's the IPAction link instead.~~ -- It's back now!

posted by Cory Doctorow at 10:15:58 PM permalink | blogs' comments

The Demon Fish of South Atlanta

Dr. Paul J. Camp at Spelman College's Department of Physics in Atlanta, wrote about a Fortean-style mystery involving fish that seemingly teleport in his ponds.

THE DEMON FISH OF SOUTH ATLANTA
By Paul J. Camp

So we bought this 105 year old Victorian in Grant Park, and moved in December 2.5 years ago. It is a pretty awesome house, and the guys that owned it before were inveterate gardeners so the back yard is full of flowers. It also has two ponds, connected by a recirculating pump and a short creek-like thingy.

When we moved in, the pump had been broken for years and the owners had let the upper pond silt up to make a bog garden. To me, bog = mosquitos, and mosquitos can piss off so one of the first things I did was drain the upper pond, scoop out all the gross awful smelly nasty crap, scrub and patch the liner, refill, and repair the pump.

Waterfalls are cool. Even stumpy ones.

The upper pond was a bog. The lower pond is a fish pond. It came with about a half dozen koi, some orange, some white, some half orange and half white. Fish used to be cool, but here's where they start to get spooky.

Last year, about this same time of year, I discovered two NEW fish . . . in the UPPER POND!

OK, let's review. We know that there were no living things at all in the upper pond as of January of that year because I scrubbed it down to bare rubber. WTF? Where did those damn fish come from?

There are a number of possibilities, and being a scientist I have methodically considered them all until I have landed on the most likely explanation. Were they pumped up from the lower pond? Not bloody likely (or to be more precise, not likely without blood). After all, there are still the same half dozen fish in the lower pond, and in any case, leaving aside the fact that the pump impellor would have turned them into fish giblets, they are just too broad of beam to fit through the hose pipe between the ponds. Were they transported in on the feet of birds from a land far, far away? Unlikely, since they were about 3-4 inches long when I discovered them, and I haven't seen any flamingos or similar sized fowl strolling through the yard. It is unlikely they were carried in by house finches.

Perhaps the lower pond fish laid eggs and the eggs were pumped up to the upper pond where they hatched. They WERE smaller, by a couple of inches, therefore younger, than the lower pond fish. But this seems to me to violate the rules of genetics since the LP fish have only orange and white coloration, whereas the upper pond fish are orange and black. Unless there was some funny business with a traveling fisherman, this just doesn't scan. Besides, why didn't I see them before? OK, I am oblivious, but I am not a lobotomy patient. I was working pretty diligently on that pond to cure its many leaks, and I think I would have seen something bright orange. I'm not a Republican. And in any case, the first time they ever got an official feeding was when they were three inches long, last year, and the upper pond, having been denuded of all life, just doesn't have an awful lot of land to live off of, let alone grow from egg to three inch long fish.

I did buy some plants for the upper pond, a couple cattails, some star sedge, some floating clover -- maybe eggs came in on that stuff. But then again, what have they been eating while they grew up? And anyway, I went back to Home Depot to observe the scene of the plants, and there were no fish there.

So what about evolution? We did have a fierce drought for a number of years. Maybe some of our local fish evolved the ability to locomote between pools in search of better pickins, like a Chinese lungfish. I've been known to do that when the beer runs out. Anybody seen any goldfish waiting at a crosswalk?

Maybe they really are demon fish, come up from hell to suck our eyeballs. But it seems like demon fish would have red eyes and sulfurous emanations bubbling from their tailpipes. That sometimes is an adequate description of the dogs, but not the fish. I don't think that's very likely.

Applying Sherlock's razor, the only theory I am left with is that they are Space Fish, crossed over from an alternate universe. I'm having a little trouble working out why they aren't made out of angles and speak pidgin English like Bizarro Superman, but I think this is a soluble problem.

Anyway, given their evident powers, I'm betting they are responsible for the number spam. Did you ever get 30312? If it wasn't them, I'm blaming it on El Nino.

Reader comment: Amit says: "The most likely explanation is that the fish in the upper pond are from eggs that went through the water pump. The colors of the fish are not hereditary, but environmental. Young koi can be darker than their parents, and the biology of the upper pond may be different, leading to different coloration. See also here."

Reader comment: Joe says: "To bring out the colour in koi.... Strong red and yellow pigments develop well in waters rich in green phytoplankton. ... it helps to feed a diet that will enhance the red pigmentation. Black pigment is enriched in hard water with a pH level of 7.5-8.5." Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:50:56 PM permalink | blogs' comments

New Monkey Love painting by Amy Crehore

"The Teaser" is the name of Amy Crehore's latest painting in her wonderful Monkey Love series. Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:45:28 PM permalink | blogs' comments

Felt Club crafts fair at Meltdown in LA: June 10

I went to the first Felt Club craft fair last month and was very impressed with the quality of the stuff for sale. I bought one of Jordan Crane's incredible silkscreen prints (The one titled "I am Secretly Lost") and a bunch of knick knacks.

Jenny and Hazel, the co-producers of Felt Club say:

Just wanted y’all to know that FELT CLUB, Hollywood’s new monthly mini-craft fair, is returning to Meltdown Comics for our second show on JUNE 10.
We’ve got a new bunch of vendors who will knock your socks off (or knit you some new ones). Meltdown will be providing ATM service inside the store, and BUST magazine will be distributing free magazines at the event. The details:
FELT CLUB: Crafts That Kick Ass!
SATURDAY, JUNE 10, 11am-6pm
@ Meltdown Comics
7522 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles CA 90046
ph: 323-851-7223
Hope to see you at one of our events soon! FELT CLUB happens the second Sat of each month. Future show dates are:
JULY 8
AUGUST 12
SEPTEMBER 9
OCTOBER 14
NOVEMBER 11

Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 05:12:07 PM permalink | blogs' comments