Max Knight built this working, rideable "Walking Bike" for a magazine shoot -- don't miss the video of the bike in action. Link (via Make)

After hinting that the new Dungeons and Dragons license would be aimed at phasing out the older open licenses, Wizards of the Coast have published more details suggesting that this won't be embodied in the license itself (though they haven't published the license or its terms of use yet):

Q. Do I have to give up my right to publish 3.5 OGL products in order to publish 4e compatible products?

A. No. Publishers are free to print product lines under either the OGL or 4E GSL. We would love to see our industry colleagues convert their entire product offerings to 4E, as we are doing, but we do not expect or require entire companies to convert to the new edition.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

See also: Sleazy proposed new Dungeons and Dragons license seeks to poison open gaming systems

Marilyn sends us this, "photo gallery of bizarre playground equipment mostly from Russia includes a happily impaled Baba Yaga, ghouls, a climbing turnip, decapitated monkeys decorating a swing set, and a stationary merry-go-round." Link (Thanks, Marilyn!)

(Image: Olga Shvetz)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Two days, go Boing Boing ran a story on the deteriorating relations in the fight to free the supposedly copyrighted laws of the great State of Oregon. Well, the situation is definitely at an impasse and June 2 has been set as the date by which this situation is either resolved or we post the full text of all 2005 and 2007 statutes.

Karl Olson of the firm Levy, Ram & Olson LLP, Attorneys, delivered the news on behalf of Justia and Public.Resource.Org when he said:

"My clients respectfully cannot agree to the Public License. First, and most fundamentally, it would require them to acknowledge that portions of the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) are protected by copyright, and they respectfully but vigorously disagree that portions of the ORS are protected by copyright."

So there!

Link (Thanks, Carl!) See also: Oregon continues to insist that its laws are copyrighted and can't be published

Adam Savage is at Maker Faire this year and he brought some of his incredible creations, including a Maltese Falcon, an Indiana Jones whip, and this beautiful recreation of a Dodo bird skeleton.

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

Today on BoingBoing Gadgets, we reviewed a 3G USB modem that works great on Macs and high-end canine gear; listened to The Harmonium; drank a strictly-conforming European pint; watched Belkin try to bring novelty to the world of mouse pads; built an ornithopter and a difference engine; guzzled yoghurt with a specially-shaped spoon; and listened to a beautiful boombox in a double-bass fiddle.

Most of the afternoon, however, was spent setting up a server so y'all can play Team Fortress 2 over the weekend.

You are cordially invited to an orgy of cartoon mayhem: Valve's superb Team Fortress 2 is free to play this weekend to celebrate a new update, and we've got a 26-player server set up and ready to roll. And we're playing now!

All you need is the Steam client, a half-decent PC and and a good internet connection: download what you need at the TF2: Gold Rush Update site. Don't worry if you can't make it just this second: the server should be up all night.

Here's how to find us. Open up Team Fortress 2, click Find Servers and then check the "Custom" tab. Our server name is Boing Boing Team Fortress 2. Our direct ip, if you need it, is 208.167.248.53:27015. The password is "jackhammerjill" without the quotes. That should bring you in!

The server's up and running now! We're looking forward to being stabbed in the back, immolated, uber-charged and exploded by all of you!

Weekend Schedule: (The server's up 24/7, but it's good to set gathering times)

Friday 4 p.m.-late

Saturday, 4-7 p.m. EST

Sunday, 4-7 p.m. EST

From the police blotter in Federal Way, Washington: •

At 4:02 p.m. April 10, two women went into the Federal Way police station claiming that over the past two years, a paranormal person has been placing sensors on their bodies and visiting them in their house at 28600 block of 25th Place South. They said that the ghost has been having sexual intercourse with them. One woman said that these incidents started in Kent and continued when she moved here. The other woman said that this just started now.

Link to Federal Way Mirror, Link to more at Damn Data

In the 1990s, a Colorado man named Larry Proctor purchased some beans at a market in Mexico.
He selectively bred them for a few years and claimed to have invented "a new field bean variety that produces distinctly colored yellow seed which remains relatively unchanged by season." He called it the "Enola bean," and was granted a "20-year patent that covered any beans and hybrids derived from crosses with even one of his seeds."
His claim of 60 cents per pound of beans sold in the US "caused a steep decline in exports of such beans from Mexico to the USA, according to Mexican government sources."

Today, the United States Patent and Trademark Office revoked Proctor's patent claims

The bean was erroneously granted patent protection in 1999, as US Patent Number 5,894,079, in a move that raised profound concerns about biopiracy and the potential abuse of intellectual property (IP) claims on plant materials that originate in the developing world and remain as important dietary staples, particularly among the poor.

CIAT was able to dispute the inventor's claims to a unique color by providing published evidence of 260 yellow beans among the almost 28,000 samples of Phaseolus in its crop "genebank." At least six of the CIAT varieties were, to most observers, identical to the bean described in Proctor's patent documents on the basis of color and genetic markers. CIAT also put forward publications to show that the claims in the patent application took credit for research already widely available in scientific literature and thus claims made regarding the breeding of the bean in his patent also failed to meet the patent office's statutory requirements for "non-obviousness and novelty."

Link

Droog Design's Do Hit Chair is a cube made from .04" steel. It's shipped with a sledgehammer for you to customize it's shape yourself. Created by Marjin van der Poll, it's available from Unica Home for $6718 for one that he pre-hammered. A smash-your-own model is $5924.
Link (via Paper Magazine)

UPDATE: Here is a video of the chair being customized. Link

Parker sez, "All day I sit around and dream of ways to combine bb posts... Anyway, I took the liberty of adding the four committees that the EFF suggests calling about border control's unchecked laptop searching authority to Fred Benenson's new Cause Caller. Now if you have a few minutes, Cause Caller can do the heavy lifting and you can do your country proud and defend your rights to a few senators and congressmen. And because it's a wiki, you can add or edit the list of people to call or the script. As Cause Caller's website says, have fun getting in touch with democracy!" Link (Thanks, Parker!)

See also:
CauseCaller -- one-click to create a virtual phone-bank
EFF and security experts to Congress: We need hearings on Customs laptop seizures and snooping

Today on Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits TechShop, an open-access public workshop that's kind of like a health club with heavy machinery and sparks instead of treadmills. Tinkerers, inventors, and hackers pay a membership fee, and in turn receive access to professionally-maintained gear, workshops, mentors, and a community of like-minded makers.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode, with discussion and downloadable video.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Currently there is only one TechShop site in Silicon Valley, and it opened in 2006. But founder Jim Newton (a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster) plans to open a number of locations around the US -- and eventually, the rest of the world.

John Todd, who you'll meet in this episode, wrote this article about the membership-based machine and fabrication shop in a recent edition of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools zine. Snip:

I've been a member since before TechShop really even started, back when it was just some guys passing out flyers trying to gauge interest. For $100 a month, members can use any tool in the shop on which they've received training. MUCH cheaper than buying your own gear. The list of equipment is pretty extensive, too, and new items are arriving frequently (like a new hot-wire foam cutter).

John shares an additional note with BBtv about the company's business model:

TechShop is unusual in the way it's funded - community members are the financial backers. To date, TechShop has been funded by taking loans from members and repaying them at a nominal rate. Typically backers contribute $25k and up, and are then paid back over several years. There is an "A" round being raised now to fund the nationwide expansion, and the first funding source again is going to be the community instead of focusing on traditional VC sources. It's an unusual way to keep members excited about what they do at TechShop, and to keep them focused on making the whole experience better. Jim Newton (CEO) and Mark Hatch (COO) are looking for additional interested people who want to become members and funders - contact TechShop for details.

In part two of today's episode, we take a joyride in a three-wheeled electric car.

I don't often post about cats, but I'm impressed that Gato Island managed to find five (not one, but five) cats that bear a striking resemblance to Wilford Brimley. Link (via Digg)

Joi Ito tells Boing Boing about an online game by human rights organization Breakthrough, called ICED ("I Can End Deportation"). The object of the game is to become a US Citizen. Joi says,

It's a game for kids teaching them about their rights and trying to stop abusive anti-due-process stuff the INS is doing. It's a amazing story and a great site.

From the website...

ICED puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights. These laws affect all immigrants: legal residents, those fleeing persecution, students and undocumented people.

Regular Boing Boing denizens may recall Gabe Delahaye from a Boing Boing tv episode or two in which he and Max Silvestri lampooned late-night infomercials about "how to achieve the dream life of your dreams using the internet." Gabe is now producing internet funnynuggets for videogum, and in this episode, he takes on the dance-war/vlog-vs-vlog/troll-vs-troll activity that clogs so much of YouTube. I LOLled. Video Link. To fully appreciate the scope of this work, I recommend that you first watch Sexman's My Jumper Review. Warning, though, spoilers ahead!

Previously on Bing Bong:

Gabe and Max answer Bing Boing readers.

Internet Cookies/Internet... Thing

Stefan Jones says: "In an interview on the Trinity Broadcasting System, Expelled star and game show host Ben Stein lets it all out."

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

Stefan continues: "This rhetoric should be familiar to anyone who has read the 'The Wedge Strategy', a product of the Intelligent Design-advocating think tank The Discovery Institute. Yeah, sure thing Ben. Before The Origin of Species was published, there weren't any massacres, pogroms, slavery, forced conversions or torture. Especially by people with religious beliefs." Link

Who knew eBay was such a repository of avant garde art criticism? Steven (known to previous fine art collectors, or, bidders, whatever as an "A+++ Ebayer") writes about his, erm, nut:

I don't know why I stopped at this particular cashew as I was eating my Trader Joe's sweet, savory & tart trail mix, but as an artist the unexplainable happens often. My body is a vessel of creation and expression in tune with everything around me, including what you would see as "just another cashew"

No, something about the shape of this particular cashew reflects the shape of our society. As the artist, I have split and re-glued the cashew as an expression of the “cracks” that have been “glued” in modern life. It is a complete work of art in every way. Famed art critic Richard Barokavov had this to say about the piece:

“Steven’s ‘Trader Joe’s Cashew #4’ is such a complete and absolute brutally dissecting view of the industrial conflict between capitalism and modernism that is is hard for even the most verbose of critics to add too. Regardless of Steven’s relation to me as a colleague and studiomate, the intense complexity I feel for this work is also complete and absolute.”

Again, I don’t expect most to fully understand the complexity of the form but as you can see it is quite powerful.

Link, he wants like half a mil for it. (via Sean Bonner)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rebecca Jeschke sez, "EFF's Jennifer Granick outlines how you should protect yourself while traveling with private data. Bad news: it's not easy."

If you encrypt your hard drive with strong crypto, it will be prohibitively expensive for CBP to access your confidential information. This answer is imperfect for two reasons—one is practical, the other is technological.

Practically, the government has not disclosed CBP's laptop search practices, despite our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for these documents. We don't know what a border patrol agent will do when confronted with an encrypted machine. One possibility is that the agent will simply give up and let the traveler pass with her belongings. Other possibilities are that the agent will turn the traveler and her machine away at the border, or that he will seize the laptop and allow the traveler to continue on. I suspect that on most occasions, CBP agents confronted with encrypted or password-protected data tell the owner to enter the password or get turned away, and the owner, eager to continue her voyage or to return home, simply complies.

If you don't want to comply, CBP cannot force you to decrypt your data or give over your password. Only a judge can force you to answer questions, and then only if the Fifth Amendment does not apply. While no Fifth Amendment right protects the data on your laptop or phone, one federal court has held that even a judge cannot force you to divulge your password when the act of revealing the password shows that you are the person with access to or control over potentially incriminating files. See In re Boucher, 2007 WL 4246473 (D. Vt. November 29, 2007).

Link (Thanks, Rebecca!)

See also: EFF and security experts to Congress: We need hearings on Customs laptop seizures and snooping

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we boarded a binary kite and did turn-based battle with the world's first clamshell Blackberry. Japan got a steam-powered newspaper, nostril filters and pastel Eee PCs; China got a $12,000 CD player; and Kenya a domestic renewable energy business; Rob recorded it all on a DIY tape delay machine, while John ducked boomerangs in space.

In Sri Lanka, a mongoose unset us up the bomb; Pittsburgh plays with flesh-healing pixie dust; and here at home, hard drive crushers crushed drives hard.

International adventures done with, we announced the winners of the 1 kilobyte competition. Amazing stuff!

These two happy indiviuals are featured in the Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls from 1819. Pink Tentacle has more on the scrolls, painted by a physician named Yasukazu Minagaki. Link

On a recent visit to the International Space Station, Japanese astronaut Takao Doi brought paper boomerangs with him. They were given to him by world boomerang champion Yashuhiro Togai, who wondered whether the flying objects would work in low gravity. Turns out they worked perfectly. The Japan Aereospace Exploration Agency just posted the video.
Link to video, Link to more info at New Scientist

These extraterrestials are making frequent appearances at the Calgary, Canada home of Karen Henuset. As the aliens seem to vanish on cloudy days, a neighbor dismisses them as reflections. BB readers know better though. From WCAU:

"I looked out and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I've lost my mind,'" resident Karen Henuset said of the first time she saw the specters. "So I asked our nanny to come and take a look at this, and the hair on her arms just stood straight up."

It's as "clear as day. You see two eyes on each of them, they both have this little thing over their head. It's a little weird," said resident Reid Henuset.

Link (via Fortean Times)

Researchers built a wind tunnel for flies with scenes projected on the interior walls. The fly's motion is tracked with a 3D camera and the images change in response. By changing the patterns on the tunnel's walls, the scientists can control the untethered fly's movements. According to an article and video at New Scientist, understanding the complexities of insect flight could inform the development of new microrobotic aircraft. From New Scientist:

Previous setups have presented flies with changing images but involved tethering the fly and could not change the images in response to its movements. "That is very unnatural and it becomes very difficult to interpret the data because of the strong interference by the experimenter," explains (lead researcher Steven Fry from the Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zurich, Switzerland)...

"This programme defines how the world reacts to the fly's behaviour," says Fry. "You gain access to information you just wouldn't get without the tools, because you can control a fly that is immersed in a virtual environment."

In future, the team plans to project more naturalistic patterns on the walls of the tunnel, to gain more detailed insights into how flies react to their environment.

Link

Here's a video of Gary Panter (wiki), the artist who created the character Jimbo and was the designer of the set for Pee Wee's Playhouse, talking about his new art monograph. Link (Thanks, Coop!)

Muslims in the Indian town of Solapur line up to drop their babies off a 15 meter tower, catching them in a white sheet. The ritual, which has taken place for more than half a millennium, is believed to make the children grow up healthy and strong. The faithful claim there have never been any injuries. Reuters has amazing video of the ritual.
Link

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section. Many of us grew up in an era before the young adult section -- when the kids' section in the store was just picture books and some 400-volume sharecropped series like Sweet Valley High. No longer -- practically every bookstore now sports a large (and growing) YA section filled with some of the most amazing work being done in any literary genre today.

Indeed, a quick browse through Boing Boing's archives turned up this (incomplete) set of links to my YA section, the young adult books I've loved and blogged here -- most of them are not available on the science fiction shelves of your local store, only in the YA section:

Scott Westerfeld: Pretties/Uglies; Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm: Good As Lilly; Daniel Pinkwater, Scott Westerfeld, Peeps, Jonathan Strahan (ed), The Starry Rift; John Varley: Rolling Thunder, John Varley: Red Thunder; John Varley: Red Thunder; Scott Westerfeld: Uglies, Michael de Larrabeiti: The Borribles; Justine Larbalastier: Magic's Child; Justine Larbalastier: Magic or Madness; Ragnar: Got Your Nose!; Philip Pullman: Northern Lights trilogy; Scott Westerfeld: So Yesterday; Scott Westerfeld: Midnighters trilogy; Kathe Koja: Going Under; Ellen Klages: Portable Childhoods; Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Jane Yolen (eds): The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens; Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York (Delia Sherman);

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

So while there's a personal motive to this post -- letting you know where to find Little Brother at your bookstore -- there's also a general tip for living the happy mutant life: check out the YA section at the bookstore and see what's been going on under your nose!

Here's a little more on the subject from Patrick:

We've all been neglecting to include a very important piece of information: *if you want to buy a printed copy, you're going to have to go into the YA section.*

Some copies may wind up shelved in regular SF or general-fiction sections, but most bookstores are pretty rigorous these days: if it's published as YA, it goes into the YA section. As you know, Bob, we made a deliberate decision to publish it into the YA channel, not least because it's the kind of book we know *we* would have loved when we were 15. But it suddenly occurs to me that there are probably a lot of people who now have it in their heads to keep an eye out for *Little Brother* the next time they go into a bookstore...but that doesn't mean they're going to actually go into the section with all the chapter books, Narnia displays, Percy Jackson endcaps, and so forth.

Of course, if they do actually venture over that threshold, they may well discover a whole bunch of outstanding SF and fantasy that's been published onto those shelves in the last decade or so. Powerful SF novels like *Uglies* and *Peeps* by Scott Westerfeld, who John Scalzi calls "the most important contemporary SF author that most of the SF field has never heard of." Fantasy like Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy, or sui-generis novels of science and human character like Ellen Klages' *The Green Glass Sea*. It's almost as if there's an entire alternate world of good reading over there.

Today on Boing Boing tv, a sneak peek inside TOKYOLOGY, a new documentary exploring contemporary Japanese pop-culture hosted by Carrie Ann Inaba. Oh, what adventures await: sneak behind the scenes at a Japanese Rock TV show that pretends it's shot in Los Angeles, cruise Harajuku, go clubbing with goth girls in Shinjuku, shop for shoes with Lolitas, experience the madness of the Tokyo Anime Fair, visit a video game company, browse the streets of Akihabara, and meet anime creator Yoshitoshi Abe.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

DVDs are available in retail stores and online, tokyology.tv has details. (Special thanks to Tokyology co-producers Felix and Julian Mack of Nightjar.)

Tim sez, "According to this article in the Washington Times, some air marshals are being forbidden entry to the airplanes they are supposed to protect, as they have similar names to people on the no-fly list. Another nugget from the article- Chertoff says just one airline is seeing some 9,000 false positives EVERY DAY from this list."

Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) familiar with the situation say the mix-ups, in which marshals are mistaken for terrorism suspects who share the same names, have gone on for years — just as they have for thousands of members of the traveling public.

One air marshal said it has been "a major problem, where guys are denied boarding by the airline."

"In some cases, planes have departed without any coverage because the airline employees were adamant they would not fly," said the air marshal, who asked not to be named because the job requires anonymity. "I've seen guys actually being denied boarding."

A second air marshal said one agent "has been getting harassed for six years because his exact name is on the no-fly list."

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its ongoing series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of a teen underground that uses technology to fight back against surveillance and control.

This week's HOWTO is "Avoiding Camera Noise Signatures" -- AKA, anonymizing your photos before you post them online:

If you take enough images with your digital camera, they can all be compared together and a unique signature can be determined. This means that even when you think that you are posting a photo anonymously to the internet, you are actually providing clues for the government to better tell who you are. The larger the sample size of images they have, the easier it is them to track down images coming from the same camera. Once they know all the images are coming from the same camera, all they then have to do is find that camera and take a picture to confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt.

It is important to remove this noise signature so that you cannot be tracked down. I cannot guarantee any of these methods will work beyond the shadow of a doubt because the woman doing research for the government on how to find the signature is very good. I can only promise that this will make their work more difficult.

Link, Link to feed of Little Brother Instructables

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rebecca Jeschke sez, "Bruce Schneier and Whitfield Diffie join EFF and and others in calling for oversight hearings on the Department of Homeland Security's search and seizure of electronic devices at American borders."

"Our computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices hold a vast amount of personal information like financial data, health histories, and personal emails and letters," said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "In a free country, the government cannot have unlimited power to read, seize, and store this information without any oversight."

So far, the Department of Homeland Security has refused to release its policies and procedures for conducting these intrusive searches. EFF and the Asian Law Caucus have filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security to obtain the information through the Freedom of Information Act.

"Your privacy could be at risk even if you don't travel yourself. Your financial institution, your insurer, and other enterprises hold extensive personal data about you and your family," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "If agents of those groups travel internationally, your information could be exposed to officials at the border or potentially copied and stored in government databases. Americans should know how and why electronic data is seized and kept by the government, and who is able to access it at the border and in the years afterwards."

Link (Thanks, Rebecca!)

Last month, I mentioned Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's Steampunk anthology in passing, but the book deserves better than that. I've just spent several highly entertaining hours with my advance review copy and I'm knocked out. What a great piece of work this is, from the fascinating triumvirate of essays that recount the history of steampunk in literature and describe its contemporary appeal to the top-notch works of fiction inside, from forgotten proto-steampunk gems by Michael Moorcock and James Blaylock to contemporary pieces from Neal Stephenson, Jay Lake, Ted Chiang and Paul Di Filippo (among many others). Summer's almost here -- time to do some leisure reading, and what better place to start than here? Link