Superthunderstingcar is Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's mid-1960s spoof of Thunderbirds, Supercar, Sting Ray, and the whole lot of "supermarionation" TV shows created by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson. It's absolutely perfect.
Link (Thanks, COOP!)

Marine biologists in south Florida have connected two dolphin research and conservation habitats miles apart with underwater microphones and speakers. They hope the "chat line" will enable a dolphin calf, soon to be born to a deaf mother, to learn to "talk" by communicating with dolphins in the other facility. BB pal Vann Hall's suggested headline for this story? "We're wet, naked, and waiting for your call!" From the Associated Press:

"We asked ourselves `How do we get the calf to speak when we have a deaf mother?'" said Robert Lingenfelser, the conservancy's president...

"Even before it is born, we want the calf to have an idea of what normal dolphin vocalization is," Lingenfelser said.

Link

Microsoft says that it's dropping DRM from some of the catalog in the Zune store. This is the other shoe-drop we've all been waiting for since Apple announced last week that it would sell the entire EMI catalog (albeit at a 30% higher price) without DRM through the iTunes Music Store. Interestingly, Microsoft seems to be implying that it's going to sell DRM-free tracks from labels other than EMI.

"The EMI announcement on Monday was not exclusive to Apple," said Katy Asher, a Microsoft spokeswoman on the Zune team, in an e-mail to the IDG News Service today. She said Microsoft has been talking with EMI and other record labels "for some time now" about offering unprotected music on its Zune players in an effort to meet the needs of its customers.

"Consumers have made it clear that unprotected music is something they want," Asher said. "We plan on offering it to them as soon as our label partners are comfortable with it."

Link (via The Inquirer)

See also: iTunes Store will sell ENTIRE EMI CATALOG DRM-free!!11!1ONE!

Borrowing a page from the Bruce Schneier Facts Database, a UK t-shirt maker has produced this stencil-style tee showing Schneier in a cowboy hat, with the legend, "Bruce Schneier Knows Alice and Bob's Shared Secret." This is pretty obscurely wonderful crypto nerd humor, ar ar ar. I ordered one. Link (via Schneier)

See also Bruce Schneier Facts (in the style of Chuck Norris facts)

Lewis sez, "USC Free Culture hosted a panel, 'Intellectual Property Rights and The Modern University: How to Move Forward in the 21st Century' moderated by the Dean of the School for Communication, Geoffrey Cowan with five high-profile panelists including the Director of the University IP project, the Number Two Dean at the Film School, the Director of the School for Communication, a leading civic figure and an entertainment corporate lawyer." Link, MP3 link to audio (Thanks, Lewis!)

Last week I dropped by Los Angeles's Secret Headquarters, an amazing comic shop in Silver Lake, to see the new Rob Sato art show. Sato is a relatively new comic artist, but his style -- somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Yellow Submarine -- really tickled me, and I wanted to see the art up on the walls (soon to be on my walls, as I ended up getting a really wonderful painted shovel of Sato's).

I also got Sato's new comic, the amazing Burying Sandwiches, a Gaimainesque fable about a little girl whose eating disorder involves tiny, pacmanoid ghosts, shovels, and a genuine aversion to the very act of eating. The story is gorgeous, dark and weird, and the artwork is like nothing I've ever seen in comics, sometimes gross, always witty, and very, very grim. Think Charles Addams by way of The Far Side. Link

See also: Rob Sato and Ako Castuera coming to LA's Secret Headquarters next Friday

Larry sez,

With little to no budget for props and location (flying to Turkey or Greece was out of the question) I was assigned the cover for Prestwick House's public domain title of Homer's The Iliad.

The challenge was to inexpensivley create a cover which high school students could identify with. Although started before the movie 300 hit the screens, the tie-in will definitly help sales of the book to teachers wanting to teach this classic story.

I started with finding a room in my house where the natural light gave me the effect i was looking for. I then researched and molded a Greek spearhead out of Scuptly clay and glued it to a large wooden dowel rod. I located a great Greek era helmet on eBay and used the BUY NOW feature to snag it for a measley $50.00! An old red sheet, plastic sword ($7.99), vinyl arm bands which I cut and adjusted to fit ($3.00) completed my prop requirements.

Early on a sun-lit winter morning when no one was home, I set up my camera on a tripod in my southern-facing bedroom and used the 10 second timer feature on the digital camera to begin snapping away roughly 30 images in various poses. I then transfered 2 or 3 of these into Photoshop and combined them with selected images from my extensive personal collection of stock photos. Adding a few public domain greek god images of statues I then assembeled all the photos into a number of compositions to use on the front and back covers, frontispiece and chapter headings.

The cover was well received and is currently at the printer with a release date of May 2007.

Link (Thanks, Larry!)

Update: Shelby sez, "Stanley Lombardo, a classics professor at the University of Kansas, published a translation of the Iliad, and the company put on the cover this way awesome, genius and bizarre picture of the D-Day invasion at Normandy."

Disney will now allow gay weddings at Disneyland and Walt Disney World:

Disney previously allowed gay couples to organize their own weddings or commitment ceremonies at rented meeting rooms at the resorts, but had barred them from purchasing its Fairy Tale Wedding package and holding the event at locations at Disneyland and Walt Disney World set aside specifically for weddings.

"We are updating our Fairy Tale Wedding guidelines to include commitment ceremonies," Disney Parks and Resorts spokesman Donn Walker said. "This is consistent with our policy of creating a welcoming, respectful and inclusive environment for all of our guests."

Link (via Salon)

Today's Wired News has a stunning pictorial history of TVs from 1928 to YouTube. Link

EFF is going to bust a bogus Voice Over IP patent that threatens the entire world of net telephony, but they need your help. They're seeking examples of prior art to help invalidate a patent by a company called Acceris:

Specifically, the claims describe a system that connects two parties where the receiving party does not need to have a computer or an Internet connection, but the call is routed in part through the Internet or any other “public computer network”. The calls must also be “full duplex”, meaning that both parties can listen and talk at the same time, like in an ordinary phone call.

We would like to prove that the method and system described in the patents are not novel. To bust these overly broad claims, we need “prior art” — any publication, article, patent or other public writing that describes the same or similar ideas being implemented before September 20, 1995.

Link

Wagner James Au sez, "A programming student created this ultracool video demonstrating his ant colony simulation in Second Life; he's programmed his ants to have different behavior states, so they can coordinate their food gathering. 'The behavior is arguably emergent,' he says, 'because the ants only interact locally and follow local state-based rules, yet they end up working together to harvest food.'"

Ant colony simulations are incredibly useful and deeply weird. I wrote an entire novella about them, called Human Readable.

"You can also teleport to Elon University [island] (direct portal at this link), where I did most of this work, and test out two demos that I have. One demo shows clustering, which is a computer science algorithm that detects groups of things, and the other demo shows emergent synchronization, in which a bunch of entities start out flashing at random phases and end up synchronizing. This is much like what some species of fireflies do: there are firefly species in Africa that synchronize their flashing such that entire trees end up flashing in sync. I imagine it's quite spectacular."

He's even transformed that technology into commercial weaponry. "One of my other inventions, which I sell, is called PODS: Plasma Orb Defense System, and is a system of networked orbs that orbit the user and defend them," he says. "The PODS communicate, but nowhere near at [the ants'] complexity. The PODS coordinate to cage an enemy: the cage broadcasts when someone escapes, and the PODS then attempt to re-cage. It's pretty primitive, but works OK."

Link (Thanks, James!)

Chris sez, "Stanford has put online a Copyright Renewal Database, making it much easier to find out what books published in the U.S. between 1923 and 1963 are now in the public domain."

A live, searchable renewal database makes saving out of print books vastly cheaper, because now you can figure out whether you're allowed to rescue that old book and put it online without a costly Library of Congress search. Well done, Stanford!

The period from 1923-1963 is of special interest for US copyrights, as works published after January 1, 1964 had their copyrights automatically renewed by the 1976 Copyright Act, and works published before 1923 have generally fallen into the public domain. Between those dates, a renewal registration was required to prevent the expiration of copyright, however determining whether a work's registration has been renewed is a challenge. Renewals received by the Copyright Office after 1977 are searchable in an online database, but renewals received between 1950 and 1977 were announced and distributed only in a semi-annual print publication. The Copyright Office does not have a machine-searchable source for this renewal information, and the only public access is through the card catalog in their DC offices.

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

While traveling in China, my brother Mark Pescovitz and his son Ari spotted this pair of bins, one for recycling and one for, er, the opposite of recycling. Click image for a larger version.


UPDATE:This photo taken in Xian by BB reader Blake Stone-Banks reveals that the unrecycling bins are sometimes emblazoned with a perfectly bizarro unrecycling logo. Click image for the whole picture.

Laura Levine is showing a selection of her profoundly beautiful photographs of rock artists at L.A.'s Musician Photo Gallery through May 5. From 1980 to 1995, Laura cast her eye and camera on such diverse subjects as Henry Rollins, R.E.M., Grandmaster Flash, Prince, Siouxsie Sioux, Lou Reed, and John Cale. This is Laura's first solo show in a decade. The images are also available on her Web site. At left, Joey Ramone (1982, NYC). At right, Bjork (1991, Woodstock.)
Link to Musician Photo Gallery, Link to Laura's site with the images

K.I.T.T., the tricked-out Trans Am that David Hasslehoff drove in Knight Rider, is for sale at Kassabian Motors in Dublin, California. Asking price is $149,995. Apparently, this is one of four "picture" or "hero" cars used in the show. From the Sydney Morning herald:

Although it cannot achieve the 300 mph speeds that KITT reached, soar 50 feet in the air or throw smoke bombs, key features of the star car are intact.

Perhaps most important, the red scanner light on the nose glows and makes a humming noise.

The car has two working video screens on the dashboard, and the cockpit features buttons that light up in green, yellow and red: ski mode, rocket boost, micro jam, silent mode, oil slick and eject.

Link to Sydney Morning Herald article, Link to Kassabian Motors

• KITT for sale in 2004 (same one?) Link

According to news reports, a really nasty individual posted an ad on Craigslist inviting people to go to an unlocked home in Tacoma, Washington and help themselves. Apparently, that's just what happened. Homeowner Laurie Raye, who had recently evicted a tenant, says that everything from the front door to the hot water heater to the kitchen sink was snatched and the house was trashed. From King 5 News:

Raye believes the unknown person who posted the ad carries a personal grudge against her, but that person also conned unsuspecting people into taking part.

"The instigator who published this ad invited the public to come in and vandalize me," said Raye. Link

From the Associated Press:

On Thursday, Jim Buckmaster, chief executive officer at craigslist, said officials "have released all the information we have" about the ad.

It was posted last Friday and was on the site for less than two hours before it was flagged down by users, Buckmaster said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. Link

Link (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Smithsonian has posted an interesting short slideshow of images and artifacts celebrating the life of Harry Houdini. From the description of this vintage show poster:

In the 1920s, after many years entertaining crowds as an escape artist, Houdini changed his show to expose the methods and motivations of the Spiritualists, a group who claimed they could contact the dead through séances. Testifying against them in Congress, he also exposed their tricks while on stage, an act he turned into a Broadway show. Soon, Houdini received death threats from the group.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Houdini may be brought back from the grave Link
• Miracle Mongers and Their Methods Link

When the Associated Press thinks that a photo may have been manipulated, they sometimes call Hany Farid, a Dartmouth College computer scientist. As previously reported on BB, Farid has spent several years developing a suite of software that helps automate the detection of manipulation in digital photos. For example, it looks for pixel repetitions, analyzes shadows, and examines the pupils of people in photos to determine if they were composited into the image. From Science News:

"The eyes are a partial mirror into the world in which you're photographed," Farid says. If there are two white dots in each eye, there had to have been two separate light sources. So, if a photo shows two dots in one person's eyes and only one dot in another person's eyes, it must have been spliced together from two different originals.

Also, the color of the light determines the dots' precise shade of white. A composite image from different photographs may have shades that vary from person to person...

"This is an arms race," Farid says. "I can already tell you how it's going to end: We're going to lose..."

Link

Previously on BB: • F is for Photoshopped Link • Time makes Reagan cry with Photoshop Link

Pink Tentacle posts about Itasha, art cars for otaku. The cars are the subject of a new Japanese mook called Itasha Road 2007.

From Pink Tentacle:

Itasha are cars decorated with decals and paint jobs depicting anime, game and manga characters. The word itasha, which literally means “painful car,” is derived from the kanji for itai (”painful”) and sha (”car”). The word also appears to be a reference to the Italian sportscar, also known as itasha (although the ita for Italian is spelled with katakana instead of kanji), a conventional sort of chick magnet driven by a different sort of guy.

Link (Thanks, Coop!)

A woman in Nanjing, China fell off a sixth floor balcony and survived thanks to a pile of poop on the ground below. From Sky News:

"She landed in a 20cm thick heap of excrement," the Kuaibao tabloid newspaper gleefully reported.

"Workers happened to be emptying the building's septic tank, which had not been tended for a long time, and had regularly blocked sewage pipes.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Previously on BB:
• Sewer sprays blood on maintenance worker Link

Looks like the future is grimmer than I imagined. Photo snapped by Nicholas Humphrey in downtown Berkeley. Thanks to John Brockman for sharing it.

Now this is incredibly clever: using an old CD spindle as a bagel-sandwich protector for your packed lunch. Link (via Cribcandy)

At MacTribe, Jess Hemerly interviewed the incredible painter Audrey Kawasaki. Thanks to Kirsten Anderson at Roq La Rue Gallery, I'm fortunate enough to have one of Ms. Kawasaki's pencil drawings, seen here at right, hanging in my living room.

From the interview:

MacTribe: What was your concentration (while studying at Pratt), fine arts or illustration?

AK: My concentration was fine arts painting, but since I was there for only 2 years I never had the chance to really dive into my work. So all the painting I did there were of nude models, oil on large canvas. I once brought my painted girls on wood (similar to what I do now) and both professors who I very much admire told me to stop, and never to work like that again.

MacTribe: And that’s why you left before graduating?

AK: That’s not the reason I left early. I would have agreed with them, if I wanted to pursue ‘fine art’ in New York art standards: very conceptual, and to me, inaccessible and too high class. I think the west coast is much more accepting of young artists...

MacTribe: Are there any contemporary artists you really admire?

AK: I admire many. James Jean, Sam Weber, Esao Andrews, Jonathan Weiner. Soma Japanese artists, too, like Aya Kato, Hideaki Kawashima, Fuko Ueda, and Katsuya Terada.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Audrey Kawasaki at Roq La Rue Link

Derek sez, "Legendary guitarist Dick Dale provides some free advice to up-and-coming artists in this video interview." In a nutshell, Dale says, "Don't sign with a label, they'll get every penny, screw you over and you won't see anything -- in fact, if you make them $14,000,000, you'll end up owing them $2,000,000 more." He advises artists to go indie, make their own CDs, sell them out of the trunks of their cars, stop trying to make the cover of Rolling Stone, be a business person instead. Link (Thanks, Derek!)

UC Berkeley researchers are designing a millimeter-long robotic flea that uses a tiny rubber band to launches itself into the air. The current prototype is seven millimeters long and tests have shown that it could jump 20 centimeters off the ground. The graduate student who led the research, Sarah Bergbreiter, is part of UC Berkeley's effort to build Smart Dust, tiny wireless sensors that form ad hoc networks. Several years ago, I wrote an article for Lab Notes about Sarah's previous work adding legs to Smart Dust to transform the sensors into miniscule mobile robots. This latest approach involves a rubber band two millimeters long and just nine microns thick, one tenth the diameter of a human hair. From Technology Review:

Bergbreiter, in collaboration with the Smart Dust Project, created the rubber band by cutting a circular strip measuring... out of a thin sheet of silicone using a very fine infrared laser. It was then hooked onto the robot's stretching mechanism using nothing more than a pair of ultraprecision tweezers, a stereoscopic microscope, and a steady hand. This was a bit like playing the children's game Operation, only harder, says Bergbreiter.

To test the robot prototype, Bergbreiter hooked it up so that rather than the bot actually jumping, its leg was positioned to kick an object. This allowed her to calculate the energy being released. So far Bergbreiter has only tried partially stretching the rubber band, which would achieve a jump of about 12 millimeters for the 10-milligram robot. However, she says that based on the results of this test, a full stretch would be capable of producing jumps as high as 200 millimeters, and they would cover roughly twice as much ground horizontally.

Link to Technology Review, Link to "Robugs: Smart Dust Has Legs"

My friend Mike Love and I saw this print hanging on the wall of an Indian restaurant in Palo Alto. The composition makes it look like that woman is about to smash the guy's head with a sledgehammer. (Apologies for the lousy Treo cam photo.)

UPDATE: I am aware that the scene depicts blacksmithing. But the composition makes it look like the guy is about to get hammered.

UPDATE: Sepia Mutini has a fun thread where people are submitting their interpretations of the painting. Link (Thanks, Apul Patel!)

Blood spurted out of a Minneapolis sewer last month, spraying a city worker who was cleaning the pipes. Apparently, it was a mix of human and animal blood dumped legally by a nearby medical laboratory. The Public Works department now requires their workers to wear goggles or a face mask when near that particular manhole. From WCCO:

"Blood just all over my face, in my mouth, I could taste it. It was terrible. I had it in my mouth and I kept spitting and I couldn't get rid of it," said (Sewer Maintenance Worker Ron) Huebner...

When asked if it's safe to have blood in the sewers, the (Metropolitan) Council said it is no more harmful than most other wastes in the sewer.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

My Institute for the Future colleague Marina Gorbis snapped a photo of this vintage Chinese copy of a BMW R-71 motorcycle, and accompanying plaque, on display at the Ramada Inn in Pudong, China.
Link

UPDATE: BB reader John Young says, "Far be it from me to quibble, but if you're going to call it a 'Chinese copy of a' BMW R71, you should go the whole way and call it a 'Chinese copy of a Russian knockoff of a' BMW R71 motorcycle. Hey, that way you get the whole triumvirate of despots in there."

Part II of the interview that Jess Hemerly did with me for MacTribe is now online. In this part, I discuss my history in tech culture and the creation myth of BB. I hope you find it interesting! From the interview:

For me, Boing Boing is like a cabinet of curiosities. Those were the predecessors to modern day museums. In the Victorian era, people would have these cabinets or even entire rooms devoted to unusual, natural, and man-made artifacts that they collected—strange coral formations, two-headed animals in jars, exotic weapons, weird plants, scientific specimens, that sort of thing. I love that whole mindset because it's really about appreciating the wonder of the world. So Boing Boing is like a cabinet of curiosity for me...

We just have our own interests that we pursue and you can watch them change over time by looking at what we post. Of course, there are some obvious themes that are ongoing like Cory's copyfight activism and Disney, Mark's interest in mid-century illustration and animation, Xeni's interest in technology in developing nations and alternative sex practices, and I'm obviously deep into weird science and strange phenomenon. And, um, Bigfoot. What I think is amazing is that there are so many people who share at least some of those interests with us. Not very long ago, it was tough if you didn't live in a huge metropolitan city to find people who shared some of the strange or obscure interests that you might have. A journalist once asked Timothy Leary what people should do after they "turn on." Tim said, "Find the others." Boing Boing helps me do that.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Jess Hemerly interview with Pesco on MacTribe Link

Yikes!
Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

UPDATE: Paul Karpenko kindly started a SomethingAwful thread about this and there's already been some great photoshoppery around the image, like this one by Snowblind. Link

Hugo nominee Ben Rosenbaum sez, "My friend Ethan Ham (a CUNY art professor) and I were hired by the Present Group ('like a mutual-fund that produces art instead of profits') to do Internet-based art. We created a limited-edition series of art books containing a set of interlinked stories based on images found by a facial-recognition algorithm trolling Flickr for Ethan's face. The images we chose are false-positive faces -- ghost faces the robot saw where there aren't any. We've put the content of the books online under a CC license."

The robot watches the pictures we take.
The robot is simple.
The robot is simple.
The robot is with us.
The robot watches the pictures we take.
The robot is looking.
The robot is with us.
The robot is looking for faces.
The robot watches.
The robot watches the pictures we take.

Link (Thanks, Ben!)

SpeculativeBubble have turned American housing prices from 1890 to the present day into a rollercoaster design using RollerCoaster Tycoon. Watching the video made me feel poor. Link (via Kottke)

Michael Schmitz's paper, "Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies" is a visual, thematic tour through the ways that people talk to computers (and vice-versa) in movies and TV shows, from Metropolis to Futurama. There's some really insightful analysis here -- and there's plenty to be learned just by looking at the side-by-side screenshots.

The probably most important aspect is the availability of special effects technologies - including the budget of a production to use those. Some movies that will be shown are made at a time where digital editing was not yet existent, whereas other recent motion pictures (e.g. Star Wars Episode II) don’t even contain a single scene without computerized backgrounds or animations. Moreover the commercial success of the movie industry increased a lot during the past 10 years, such that higher budgets became more and more feasible.

Link (via We Make Money, Not Art)

Food hackers at the Sentimental Objects in Attempts to Befriend a Virus have created a jar of gourmet chocolates shaped like the Hepatitis C virus:

A model of the virus was printed as a rapid prototype from a 3D algorithmic illustration of the virus from the Protein Data Bank. The chocolates were then cast into the molecular form. Part of the Sentimental Objects in Attempts to Befriend a Virus series, the truffles do not carry hepatitis C. Desire to eat them is mixed with a repulsion for the virus, a dialectic which has proved to be an exciting and approachable way to ignite discussion and create awareness about an extremely prevalent and underrepresented disease.

Link

In Sweden, Ikea has built little housing develpments composed of its BoKlok prefab apartment blocks -- now they're moving the idea to the UK.

BoKlok homes don't exactly come in flatpacks, but they're not far off. The timber-framed buildings are almost entirely prefabricated. They are usually brought to the site on the back of trucks as pre-assembled units, like Portakabins, with the interiors already fitted out. Each apartment is made up of two of these units, which are simply moved into position by crane. Put on the roof and exterior wall cladding, plumb and wire it in, and it's ready to live in. The typical BoKlok arrangement is an L-shaped, two-storey block with three apartments on each floor. One such block can be put up in a day...

The bestselling BoKlok design in Sweden has an exterior of blood-red weatherboard, square white windows and a pitched roof; it wouldn't look out of place in a typical Swedish town. There is a limited choice of colour and cladding types, plus national variations. Danish ones are dressed more fashionably, for example, with black cladding and steel balconies, and they have found it easier to build straight blocks rather than L-shaped ones on Norway's hilly terrain. The one in Malmo that Magnusson takes me to, though, looks anonymously modern, with plain white walls, tall windows, wooden balconies and walkways. Typically, it is situated among other housing types in a suburb of the city.

Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Wired has a great story about a meshing wireless network that's been deployed in a grim San Francisco housing project, giving residents and their kids access to the Internet. It's a really heartwarming story of community-initiated sustainable development:

Last month, volunteers turned on a novel broadband network in this 135-unit block, throwing a digital lifeline to Emma Casey and other tenants. Using a refurbished PC she picked up for $100, the 47-year-old mother of two adult children is now going online to help her son find a job, get health information and, she says, pay tribute to neighbors who've met with violent or untimely deaths.

"I want to get more literate," says Casey, who receives disability payments, and subsists on just over $1,000 a month. "I see other people working on computers, and little kids pecking on the things, and I thought to myself: 'I've got to learn.'"

Link

This $41 cannon fires rose petals -- no word on how long the petals keep for without wilting while in the ammo chamber. It'd kind of suck to be showered with dessicated rose-petal powder while stepping down off the altar.

This ROSE PARTY SURPRISE is a handheld cannon popper filled with fragrant rose petals, and will shoot the rose petals up to 10 meter, and fall down smoothly.

Link (via Gizmodo)