I love themeparks, but I don't care for thrill rides -- I'm a Haunted Mansion guy, not an upside-down vomitcoaster 3000 guy. I don't have the stomach for it. Besides, people get hurt on those things.

A girl's feet were cut off Thursday when a free-fall thrill ride malfunctioned at the Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom Amusement Park in Louisville, Kentucky, police said.

A cord wrapped around the 16-year-old's feet and severed them at her ankles while she was on the "Superman Tower of Power," a police dispatcher said. The girl was taken to a local hospital.

Link

My friend Sandra Kasturi is an award-winning science fiction poet, and she's just published her first major poetry collection. The book features an introduction by Neil Gaiman, and many of Sandra's major works. I'm not a huge poetry guy, but I make an exception for these poems. Be sure to check out the online samples.

The Unbinding of Spirits

What frail spectres can we begin to conceive
out of darkened bedrooms and glass-blown pride?
Conjuring tongues and gin-chilled fingers relieve
us of our private hauntings, turn them inside
out upon the carpet. Can we not inspire
peace—not this hag-ridden, ghost-hackled perturb
of an existence? Give one thought to what dire
sorrows may come forth, what we may disturb?
Yet here is grief. I have been waylaid.
I am gone to frantic clutching, a raving
of words, braiSitting, steadying the tilting world; smoking, obscuring the truthsding together things unsaid,
things imagined. Mourning’s bright weaving.
From my drowning bed, dragged by tides’ rebound,
my spectral words, pulled to depths where they unsound.

Link,

Ron says: "Bruce Schneier ran a contest to come up with a plausible movie plot about bringing down a commercial jet in a manner that would force the TSA to ban something innocuous and/or ubiquitous. I have boingboing to thank for winning this contest: I found out about it on your site. When my script wins an Oscar, I'll be sure to mention you guys in the acceptance speech, if the orchestra hasn't played me off the stage yet :)"

On June 5, I posted three semi-finalists out of the 334 comments:

* Butterflies and beverages; water must be banned.
* Dimethylmercury; security checkpoints must be banned, but of course they can't be. Oh, what to do!
* Oxy-hydrogen bomb; wires -- earphones, power cables, etc. -- must be banned.

Well, we have a winner. I can't divulge the exact formula -- because you'll all hack the system next year -- but it was a combination of my opinion, popular acclaim in blog comments, and the opinion of Tom Grant (the previous year's winner).

I present to you: Butterflies and Beverages, posted by Ron.

Link

John says: "Charming arrangement of toy cars etc depicting riots, murders etc." Link

The Magus says:

It's called the sitting cage, a cage made in the mold of the human body. Once inside the thing you can't move. Totally insane and not one for claustrophobics.

The site is semi-safe for work. No nudity or anything.

Link

Patrick Kovacich made this steampunky "Problem" light that you can switch on when your life is giving you problems; he lavishly documented the build in a Flickr set so you can make your own. Link (Thanks, Cn!)

The North American Broadcasters' Association has broken its own by-laws and trampled the position of NPR and PBS, endorsing a controversial policy at the United Nations.

This week, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization is holding a critical debate on the "Broadcast Treaty." This treaty would establish a new copyright-like right, but whereas copyright goes to people who make creative works, Broadcast Rights go to companies that broadcast other people's copyrighted works. The Broadcast Right isn't subject to the same fair use limits as copyright, which means that even if copyright lets you record a broadcast for criticism or parody, you will need to separately get an exemption under the Broadcast Right. More gravely, if means that if you license your work under Creative Commons, the people who distribute the files or air the program can overrule your generosity and insist that your fans not copy your work.

This treaty threatens the Internet as we know it. Novel services like YouTube and novel practice like podcasting would not exist today if this treaty was already implemented.

The General Assembly of WIPO has ordered Jukka Liedes, the chairman of the relevant committee to cut this out, instructing him to oversee a much narrower treaty that will block "theft of signals" (hacking free cable or satellite), while leaving all this other business off. The chairman has gone rogue, ignoring the direction of the Assembly and producing a draft that's even worse than the previous draft.

The Chairman isn't the only one who's gone rogue, though: the National Association of Broadcasters of America has been lobbying hard all week for the treaty. One problem: PBS and NPR -- members of NABA -- oppose the treaty and have not authorized the association to lobby for this measure.

"National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service do not support a Diplomatic Conference to adopt a treaty based on the April 20, 2007 non-paper because they do not believe the treaty provides adequate protection for the fair use of broadcast and cablecast matter for newsgathering and other purposes. Bell ExpressVu does not support a Diplomatic Conference because it believes the proposed exclusive retransmission right exceeds what is necessary to prevent signal piracy or protect investment and does not contain a reservation that would permit a signatory to limit or not apply the application of the retransmission right."

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Link to gigglesugar, where someone astutely pointed out the resemblance. (thanks, Barbara!).

Previously: Dramatic Chipmunk (video)

Mitchell Silverman, an attorney in Florida, noticed in a recent news-story that GW Bush's twin daughters presented him with a mix CD of exercise music for Father's Day. Since the record industry maintains that making and distributing mix CDs is a copyright infringement, Silverman sent their legal offices a letter on letterhead asking them to sue the first twins for "stealing music."

As you will see from the attached article from today’s The Miami Herald, President George W. Bush’s daughters made him a presumably illegal compilation CD, a so-called “mix CD,” as a Father’s Day present. As the article, at http://www.miamiherald.com/692/story/142726.html states, “[President] Bush's twin daughters, gave him [as a Father’s Day present] a CD they had made for him to listen to while exercising.”

This is a serious violation of copyright. As you know, whichever of your member organizations that are right-holders for the copied musical works may be entitled to statutory damages of $150,000.00 per musical work copied.

I hope and expect that you at the RIAA will display the same vigor in prosecuting this matter and protecting the rights of your rights-holders that it has displayed in enforcing those rights against other alleged violators.

Link (Thanks, Mitch!)

Lars says

When I viewed the new iPhone site something struck me: did Apple change the dimensions of the unit?

A quick comparison of the official Apple photos revealed they've just changed handsize.

(Wikipedia has an interesting page on forced perspective by the way)

Link

Here's a collection of 20 videos produced by amateur magicians showing you how to do some wonderful tricks with cards and other small props. Shown here: The Snap Vanish Link

BoingBoing reader Destiny Land says,

YouTube joined CNN for a bold experiment -- letting YouTube users upload questions for the 2008 candidates for President. But one week in, how's it working out?

The Washington Post rounds up the best videos they could find: Link.

...but 10 Zen Monkeys found the WORST! Link.

I loved the hard-hitting questions from the audience during the Kerry/Bush debates -- but what happens if YouTube can't deliver enough good questions? In the end, couldn't this trivialize the primary process -- and the role of "citizen video-bloggers" -- rather than expand it?

Snip from the 10ZenMonkeys post by Lou Cabron:

What if my President was selected by MySpace? It’s the nagging concern raised when young video bloggers lob questions at the Presidential candidates. In July when the Democrats gather in Charleston, they’ll find CNN has swapped in questions that were uploaded as videos to YouTube.

At least that was the hope when the CNN/YouTube “debate” was announced. Unfortunately, no one cared about the announcement (except the commenter who added “omg the youtube guy is fucking HAWTT!!!”). Nearly a week later, YouTube has barely managed to assemble more than 50 questions to choose from. And five of them are the dogs below.

The Juice Bag is a beach tote with an integrated solar panel that will charge your phone, camera, laptop and MP3 player while you manufacture vitamin D. Link (via Gizmodo)

On the Encyclopedia Britannica's blog, Clay Shirky is debating techno-skeptic Michael Gorman. Gorman's hypothesis is that the net is to blame for quack medicine, Biblical literalism, and other evils that come from valuing individual participation over credentials and training.

This has become a motif among net-critics, whose vanguard is Andrew Keen, who wrote a sloppy, intellectually dishonest book called The Cult of the Amateur that damns the Internet for much the same reasons (Clay Shirky wrote a great response to Keen). Shirky has made a little cottage industry out of taking these people apart, writing articulate, snappy essays debunking their claims and explaining the real way that the net and expertise interact. This is highly recommended reading.

These two theories cannot both be true, so it’s odd to find them side by side, but Gorman does not seem to be comfortable with either of them as a general case. This leads to a certain schizophrenic quality to the writing. We’re told that print does not necessarily bestow authenticity and that some digital material does, but we’re also told that he consulted “authoritative printed sources” on Goya. If authenticity is an option for both printed and digital material, why does printedness matter? Would the same words on the screen be less scholarly somehow?

Gorman is adopting a historically contingent view: Revolution then was good, revolution now is bad. As a result, according to Gorman, the shift to digital and networked reproduction of information will fail unless it recapitulates the institutions and habits that have grown up around print.

Gorman’s theory about print — its capabilities ushered in an age very different from manuscript culture — is correct, and the same kind of shift is at work today. As with the transition from manuscripts to print, the new technologies offer virtues that did not previously exist, but are now an assumed and permanent part of our intellectual environment. When reproduction, distribution, and findability were all hard, as they were for the last five hundred years, we needed specialists to undertake those jobs, and we properly venerated them for the service they performed. Now those tasks are simpler, and the earlier roles have instead become obstacles to direct access.

Digital and networked production vastly increase three kinds of freedom: freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly. This perforce increases the freedom of anyone to say anything at any time. This freedom has led to an explosion in novel content, much of it mediocre, but freedom is like that. Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline. Experts the world over have been shocked to discover that they were consulted not as a direct result of their expertise, but often as a secondary effect — the apparatus of credentialing made finding experts easier than finding amateurs, even when the amateurs knew the same things as the experts.

All posts, “Old Revolutions, Good; New Revolutions, Bad”, The Siren Song of Luddism