Here's a snip from the latest post on Kevin Kelly's Technium blog:

Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can't erase something once its flowed on the internet.

This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports -- that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

Link to "Better Than Free." Can't wait for the book.

Photographer Dave Bullock visited the Navy's SPAWAR site in San Diego (man, I used to drive by the building every day when I lived and worked in that town!). Wired News has published a gallery of pics with a brief account:

The Navy's MDARS-E is an armed robot that can track anything that moves. Told that I was the target, the unmanned vehicle trained its guns on me and ordered, "Stay where you are," in an intimidating robot voice. And yes, it was frightening.

Link. (via Dave's twitter stream)

Lawgeek (who's just quit his job to become a university prof) posts a roundup of students' how-to-cheat YouTube videos. The best one is definitely the guy who scans the label off a Coke bottle, replaces the nutritional information with cheaty stuff, prints it, and glues it around a bottle (presumes that your teacher lets you bring Coke into class -- I suppose this works best in schools where Coke has struck a deal requiring their products to be available at all times and in all places.)

When I was a kid, we were obsessed with figuring out methods for cheating -- far more so than with actual cheating itself. We used binary encoding to sneak in long lists of numbers, stitching them up the outer seams of our jeans or cuffs -- a stitch for 1, no stitch for 0 -- that we could read by fingertip. After we learned the resistor color-coding scheme, we started to shave pencils and then decorate them with colored bands that actually contained the same lists of numbers. We tried -- and failed -- to produce a decent tapping code for interactive cheating, though this is certainly possible. One exciting failure was a light-based semaphore wherein the conspirators would flash reflected discs of light up on the wall over the teacher's head using our watch-faces.

The kids in these videos are awfully sanguine about their teachers' YouTube cluelessness. I'm relatively certain that the adorable little English moppet pictured here has never actually succeeded in using his cheat, as it relies on your teachers allowing you to keep playing cards on your desk during the exam. This is surely a purely theoretical cheat. Link

The Rogue Columnist blog has a thought-provoking entry on reasons that the newspaper industry is reeling and teetering -- it's not just "the Internet exists," but rather a set of things the industry did wrong, continues to do wrong, and should fix if the newspapers are to emerge from the net with still-beating hearts:

The biggest problem, of course, had nothing to do with the newsrooms. It was the collapse of an unsustainable business model. Simply put, the model involved sending miniskirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners. Protecting these profits, whether from national, local or classified ads, became the central focus of newspaper bosses. These areas were the most vulnerable to new competitors. But the condition of the industry by the 1990s – risk averse, promising unrealistic margins, losing its best talent, ignoring ideas outside its preconceived notions – left it unable to meet these threats.

Link (via Making Light)

The "What I Killed Today" blog keeps track of the sick and injured animals a veterinary worker euthanizes each day. The blogger says, "I work with a lot of injured wildlife. Also not wild animals that are just in a lot of pain. Sometimes I have to euthanize them. I decided to record each animal I euthanize here." This is depressing, of course, but moving, too, as with entries like:

a 13-year-old basset hound in kidney failure. she was so kind and licked my face as i carried her in from the car for the owner. he was a sweet old man with tears in his eyes. i fed her an entire bag of treats and she kept eating ferociously even after the injection. her chewing slowed down and then she was gone.

Link (via Warren Ellis)

A group of students at an "Interactive Art Director" course at Hyper Island in Sweden have produced a pitch-perfect "educational film" about their field; the short's a great little homage to the golden age of industrial films. Link (Thanks, Fabio!)

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years, this stroppy "no playing in the churchyard" sign from Seven Sisters in London. Link

Marilyn sez, "A father in Muncie, Indiana was tired of cars that didn't stop at the stop signs at the intersection outside his house, so he asked the city to make a crosswalk. The city refused, so he painted his own, and got arrested for criminal mischief."

"I used spray paint on the outline, and went to Wal-Mart, where they had a sale on ... white paint and rolled it out," he said.

Stump said he didn't hear about the second charge right away, causing him to miss a court appearance. Because he missed his court date, he spent 10 hours in jail.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Finnish scientists at the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine at the University of Tampere have successfully grown a human jawbone in a man's abdomen and the implanted it in his face. The procedure used the man's stem-cells, and took nine months.

A 65-year-old Finnish man received a new upper jaw that was grown in his abdomen using his own stem cells. Scientists had isolated stem cells from the patient's fat, and sorted out the type of cells that could grow into bone tissue. The cells were applied to a custom jaw-shaped scaffold and implanted in his abdomen for nine months. Tissues grew around the scaffolding, which was removed and attached to the man's skull to replace his upper jaw, which had been removed due to a tumor.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Chris writes in with his Triple Stuf Deluxe Superbowl snacks, which contain Oreos, pepperoni and cheese (topped with a sprig of parsley), artfully arranged. He promises that they're "actually really tasty in a perverse way." He's documented the creation with a spiffy photocomic. Link

Jim sez, "The cover story of this month's California Lawyer Magazine is a pretty nice story on the Electronic Frontier Foundation, its history and the current fight against AT&T for its role in the NSA's domestic spying program:"

One sunny day in San Francisco two winters ago, a retired telecommunications technician with an understandable distrust of telephones stepped off a BART train after a short but fateful ride. His name was Mark Klein, and his destination was a red brick office building in an untouristed part of the city dominated by low-rise warehouses. There he met with a small group of maverick, tech-savvy lawyers called the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

For Klein, then 60, this trip was a long time coming. As a veteran telecommunications technician and computer network associate at AT&T, he had in recent years obtained several company documents that described in specific, technical terms a secret room he says the National Security Agency (NSA) had set up on the sixth floor of an AT&T building downtown. Klein entered the room itself only once, and that was just for a couple of minutes. (Generally, people needed a security clearance to gain access.) However, just one floor above, he managed the Internet-traffic room to which it was electronically connected.

Through that work, the documents he gathered, and conversations he had with other employees, Klein came to understand that his employer was colluding with the federal government to siphon a copy of billions of domestic Internet communications into that secret room, every second of every day. And all without a warrant. "Even Nixon didn't go that far," Klein thought. As he later told MSNBC, the situation made him think of George Orwell's classic 1984. "Here I was, being forced to connect the Big Brother machine." However, after complaining to a supervisor, with no result, he did not pursue the matter. He retired in 2004.

Then, in December 2005, the New York Times outed the Bush administration's warrantless domestic-surveillance program, which the administration subsequently defended as an effort to monitor no more than a handful of phone calls to the Middle East. This convinced Klein that the time was finally right to share his inside information.

His timing was better than he imagined: When he knocked on EFF's door that day in January 2006, the lawyers inside were already working feverishly to craft a class action against the nation's largest telecommunications company.

Link

Clayton sez, "This awesome game company is releasing their second title using a blissfully elegant DRM free system. The game installs from the DVD, then you play the game. No DVD required in the tray, no internet connection. The Code Key that comes with the games allows you access to updates, patches, extra content, and the free ability to simply download the game to any computer should you lose your disc. Considering the crappy DRM on BioShock last summer, this is a huge step forward. The link containts their no nonsense understanding that to truly avert piracy, you must make your product worth buying, not loaded up with non user friendly DRM. These guys really deserve some credit. The game, a Turn Based, RTS strategy hybrid set in space, looks fantastic too."

With Galactic Civilizations II, we put no copy protection on the CD. But to get updates, users had to use their unique serial # in the box. That’s because our system is backed by TotalGaming.net’s unique SSD service (secure software delivery) which forgoes DRM and copy protection as we know it to take a more common sense (I think so anyway as a gamer) approach of just making sure you are delivering your game to the actual customer.

Any system out there will get cracked and distributed. But if you provide reasonable after-release support in the form of free updates that add new content and features that are painless for customers to get, you create a real incentive to be a customer.

Link, Link to buy Galactic Civilizations II

Mascots Unlimited is a manufacturer of custom hood ornaments. There's an amazing variety here (almost makes me wish I still owned my horrible used Hyundai!), but then, Mascots does supply the British Royal family with their blingy hood-candy. Link (Thanks, AJ!)

Evoke is an art project that paints the face of the gothic cathedral York Minster with light in response to the voices of the audience who watch it. It's a sweet blend of the psychedelic and the gothic. Link (via IO9)

ARMSFLOW.org is a data visualization project that shows international arms transactions between 1950 and 2006. The site (a big ole Java applet) was created by Jeffrey Warren of Vestal Design, based on data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Link, via monochrom blog.

Authorities in Afghanistan have sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for having downloaded and shared copies of a report criticizing the oppressive treatment of women in some Islamic societies. Snip from Wired News Threat Level blog:

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh (at right), who is a journalism student at Balkh University and a writer for Jahan-e Naw, was sentenced last October after downloading a report from a Farsi website that criticized Islamic fundamentalists who misrepresent statements in the Koran to justify the oppression of women. Kambaksh was arrested after someone filed a complaint against him. He is accused of blasphemy for distributing the report to other students and teachers at his school.

He was tried by a sharia court (which overseas Islamic religious law) and was not allowed legal representation, according to news reports. The Afghan Senate passed a motion this week supporting the sentence, according to the British newspaper The Independent.

Link.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF.org) has a statement on the case here, and a petition for Kambaksh's release here.

Weird Weekends was a BBC2 show (1998-2000) about weird people and weird movements in America: UFO hunters, survivalists, white supremacists, habitual Vegas gamblers, porn actors, swingers, and so on.

It was hosted by Louis Theroux, son of writer Paul Theroux. A few days ago I downloaded a bunch of episodes of Weird Weekends from Google Video, and I have been enjoying them as much as any television I've ever seen. Even the ones I didn't think I'd be interested in (infomercial inventors) were fascinating.

Theroux is funny without being obnoxious, and his sense of curiosity is strong enough to make him ask potentially embarrassing but profoundly revealing questions of his subjects. The people Theroux interviews immediately feel comfortable around him because he is so friendly and non-threatening, which makes them open right up to him. (The only time I've seen anyone get mad at him was when he was interviewing a white racist skinhead family and he refused to tell them if he was Jewish or not.)

He also wrote a book in 2005 called The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures, where he goes back and visits the people he interviewed on his program. I just bought it but I'm going to hold off reading it until I've finished watching all the episodes.

Here are the videos I found (some are from later shows called When Louis Met... and another show called Louis and...). Each one is about an hour long, and you can download them to your iPhone or computer if you want to watch them offline: Survivalists, Neo-Nazis, Westboro Baptist Church, Porn Industry, Black Supremacists, Swingers, Body Builders, UFO Hunters, Apertheid Diehards in South Africa, Legal Nevada Brothels, Thai Brides, Gangsta' Rap, Hypnosis, Televangelists, Demolition Derby, Off-Off Broadway, Wrestling, Vegas, Enlightenment, San Quentin State Prison

UPDATE: Jesse Thorne of Maximum Fun interviewed Louis for The Sound of Young America last year. Here's the interview.

A farmer in the Green Belt outside London secretly built an elaborate castle without planning permission, hiding the work behind a wall of hay-bales. Now that the word has gotten out, they're going to knock it down:

A British farmer named Robert Fidler is fighting to keep the city from bulldozing his castle that he built by hiding the construction with hay bales. Officials were unaware of the elaborate castle because hundreds of bails of straw concealed it for four years, the UK Daily Telegraph reported Friday. After Fidler, 59 unveiled his home to neighbors in 2006 he was served a planning contravention notice the following March, which ordered demolition of the structure.

Link (Thanks, Dan!)

Beloit College has just published its 10th annual "Mindset List," detailing a list of significant things that have been true for the whole lives of the 1990-born Class of 2011. Here's my favorite skiffy/Christ-I'm-old bits:

1. The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union.
3. For most of their lives, major U.S. airlines have been bankrupt.
12. Smoking has never been permitted on U.S. airlines.
23. Bar codes have always been on everything, from library cards and snail mail to retail items.
33. They have no idea why we needed to ask "...can we all get along?"

Link (via Charlie!)

(Photo: teen requisite, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Vidrio's Flickr stream)

Octopus Studios' tropical/freshwater fish-tanks assembles into a kind of fishy habitrail, wherein bulbous spheres of water are connected by diagonal tubes. Link (via Geekologie)

New Zealand's Catherine David Designs sells these "cowhide rugs" made by cutting vintage carpets into the shape of a cowhide. They also do sheepskins. Link (via Cribcandy)

Social Science & Medicine is publishing a study by the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College that found that the risk of becoming depressed peaks at age 44. The study used data from two million people in 80 countries.

Professor Oswald said for the average person, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year.

Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period.

"But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old.

Link (Via Mind Hacks)

ThinkGeek is selling a nifty $200 synthesizer with a touchpad interface, called the Kaossilator. I wonder if it's as easy to use as this video makes it out to be. Link

Kitblog has a nice piece about Windsor-EF Elongated, the typeface Woody Allen uses in the titles of nearly all his movies. It includes screengrabs of lots of Allen movies that use white Windsor on black.

How did Woody Allen chose this typeface? In a previous iteration of this post, the mystery of Woody Allen’s typeface of choice was solved by this amazing story posted by Randy J. Hunt in the comments (thank you, Randy):

"I’m currently taking a typeface design course with Ed Benguiat, and just last night he described a time when he would have breakfast at the same New Jersey diner every morning. Among the other that would dine there was Woody Allen. On one occasion [between 1975 and 1977], referring to Benguiat as a 'printer,' Allen asked him what a good typeface was. Benguiat had an affinity for WINDSOR and suggested it to him that morning. He’s used it in every film since."

Link (Via Yesbutnobutyes)

Ward says:

Just Between Us..., a booklet for girls about menstration; published by Beltix Corporation, copyright 1950, 1955, 1961.

To me, it's amazing that the editors of this little booklet allowed the spokesgirl to have freaky swirly eyes -- usually a sign of craziness or dizziness! This is either a stroke of genius or incredibly inappropriate -- I'm not too sure.

Link

Mark Boyle of Bristol is walking from Bristol, England to India without bringing or touching any money.

On his 9,000-mile trek to Gandhi's birthplace, he will have to pick his way through war-ravaged Afghanistan.

Mr Boyle, 28, said: "I will be offering my skills to people. If I get food in return, it's a bonus"

He says he is part of the freeconomy movement - a group which began in the US and aims to bring about a moneyless society.

He said: "My interest started five or six years ago when I was studying economics.

"The more we accumulate wealth, the more it leads to a breakdown of community."

Mr Boyle aims to walk between 15 and 45 miles a day, with the goal of getting to Porbandar on India's west coast.

The BBC plans to follow Mr. Boyle's walk. Link

Early Visual Media Archeology is an incredible site filled with examples and history of vintage visual media: photography, early film, TV, conjuring arts, magic lanterns, pre-cinema projected animations, peepshows, and other fantastic optical experiences of yesteryear. Seen here is a stereo autochrome, c. 1912, by Paul Sano. Link (via Morbid Anatomy)

Here's the fifth installment of the hilarious (and educational!) tutorial series, You Suck at Photoshop. Link | Previous installments

Information Architects Japan created this 2008 Web Trend Map that positions "300 of the most influential and successful websites" on a Tokyo train map. Link (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

Dean "Segway" Kamen's prosthetic "Luke" arm (as in Luke Skywalker) is ready for clinical trials. It's now up to DARPA, who funded the project through the Revolutionizing Prosthetics contract, to determine whether to foot the bill for human testing, and the FDA to approve the trials. The new issue of IEEE Spectrum has a feature on the ready-to-wear Luke arm. From the article:

When DARPA director Tony Tether and Revolutionizing Prosthetics program manager Colonel Geoffrey Ling approached him in 2005, Kamen says he thought they were crazy—“in the good kind of way,” he says. There was no financial incentive to create a next-generation prosthetic arm. The research and development costs were enormous. Unless funded by DARPA, no private company would take such a risk for such a comparatively small market (in the Americas, about 6000 people require arm prostheses each year). Kamen spent a few weeks traveling around the country interviewing patients, doctors, and researchers to get an idea of the current technology—and soon saw the deficit in available arm prosthetics. He was swayed by the discrepancy between the current state of leg prostheses and that of arm prostheses. “Prosthetic legs are in the 21st century,” he says. “With prosthetic arms, we’re in the Flintstones.”

Link

Previously on BB:
• Sense of touch restored to amputees Link
• Open source prosthetics movement Link
• Bionic arm Link

Stephen sez, "The Sony 'Connect' DRM-tastic music store is closing shop on March 31, 2008. Another failed experiment in DRM is leaving its paying customers out in the cold with soon-to-be unusable content (unless you violate the DMCA) in the form of audio files DRM locked to Sony's ATRAC media players. Yet another in a seemingly endless stream of examples of how media companies are punishing their paying, legitimate customers for the RIAA's own infuriating technological shortsightedness."

What will happen to my library (content I own)? You will continue to be able to play, manage, and transfer the music in your SonicStage library and on your ATRAC player. For music purchased via CONNECT, this means you may continue to enjoy it as usual in your current PC configuration in accordance with our terms of use.

To ensure continued access to your content, we strongly recommend that customers archive their library to audio CDs and/or make a backup using SonicStage.

Translation: You can continue to "enjoy" "your" music until you get a new PC or a new music player. And really, why would you want a new PC or a new music player ever again? Surely your three-year-old ATRAC player will never be truly obsolete! Link (Thanks, Stephen!)

BibliOdyssey has a post about exquisite examples of ornamental typography from the 18th century. These letters-as-art "are elaborated with scrolls and flourishes and then inhabited by satyrs, mermaids, Medusa heads, birds, cats, dogs, snakes, and other creatures." Stunning.
Link

This kick-ass "DRM: Don't Restrict Me" was apparently given to Amazon employees to coincide with the launch of the DRM-free Amazon MP3 store. Link (Thanks, Terence!)

See also: Amazon buys Audible, promises to kill DRM if we complain

The Guardian has a silly article about George Bush's favorite painting, a 1916 cowboy scene by WHD Koerner. The painting hangs in his office, and he tells people that it's a "beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us."

The painting first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916 "to illustrate a story about a horse thief, and captioned as a picture of his flight from the law. Only later did it illustrate a story about Methodism."

The paper showed the painting to four people: a professor of gender studies, a psychoanalyst, a military historian, and a "psychotherapist and ex-Labour spin doctor," and asked them to analyze the President based on the painting and his story about it.

Derek Draper, psychotherapist and ex-Labour spin doctor: "Most revealing, though, is the simple fact that a healthy mind would look at this image and not be certain what it depicted. Bush, though, as he once told Senator Joe Biden, doesn't "do nuance". Instead he invariably replaces "not-knowing" with prejudiced certainty. A foolish psychological mindset when it comes to art or life; a catastrophic one in politics."

It's interesting that these analysts are taking Bush to task for inventing a story about the painting, instead of having ambiguous feelings about it. As the article states, it has been used at least twice to illustrate two very different stories. What's wrong with coming up with your own interpretation of what a painting means? This is probably the first time in my life that I'm on the President's side. (Also, it's a wonderful painting.) Go, Bush! Link (Thanks, Jane!)

Inside Terrorism: The X-Ray Project is an art exhibition of X-rays and CT-scans from Jerusalem hospitals depicting civilian injuries from terrorist attacks. The full text accompanying the piece shown here reads, "I was in college then, riding the bus to campus. When he exploded, his watch blasted into my neck. Some of the shrapnel tore through my cartoid artery, which carries blood to my brain." The following is from artist Diane Covert's statement about the project:

The idea for Inside Terrorism began to coalesce in my mind in 2002 as a personal response to terrorism and to my discomfort with the way terrorism has been justified in some circles. This is a documentary of survivors of terrorism. Much like photographer Mathew Brady documented the Civil War, people in emergency rooms today are documenting the effects of terrorism. The exhibit is another form of "straight" photography - that is photographs made with an unaltered spectrum of light. With that technology, we are able to look inside terrorism.

Link (Thanks, Mark Pescovitz!)